Then you will (roughly) replace one disk due to failure for every 1000 hours (100,000 MTBF / 100 disks), or 40 days. It doesn't try to pretend that a single disk lasts 100,000 hours. That's stupid.
So if you replace one disk every 1000 hours and you have 100 disks, how long must each disk live on average? The MTBF is a half-imaginary number that says that even if you replace your 100 disks each day with new ones, you'll have a disk failure once every 1000 hours. Since nobody actually does that it's a fairly meaningless statistic, in reality your failure rate will go up as the disks age. What you really want is failure rate within first N years of operation, which you can't calculate from the MTBF figures.
The smaller tech has just as much "heavy use" as the larger tech when equal amounts of board area are dedicated to flash chips.
True, but then you also get almost the same price. People usually look at $/GB so if you hold GB constant you get a much cheaper and much less durable disk.
I don't know what you think heavy use means
OS disk with no optimization for SSDs, downloading torrents, running a freenet node 24x7, filled to 90%+ capacity most of the time, I didn't deliberately try breaking it but I gave it all the write heavy jobs because it took them so easily. In theory I must have written almost 2TB/day to my drive to wear it that much, but I know I didn't, more like 20GB (out of 120GB) maybe. I suspect doing things like downloading a torrent with many, many small writes and FS updates has a huge write amplification.
For all the complications you claim, how the hell do you find and manage paper records? Just mapping that 1:1 into an electronic archive with scanned PDFs would be a good start. At least then you have an archive that can be backed up easily and people can access it by opening the PDF rather than requisitioning a paper record which would be extremely much faster and require no manual labor. Then you could start getting fancy with OCR, metadata and such based on cost/benefit. And if it comes down to making a hard copy, then archival grade microfilm is supposed to be good for 500 years which is at least as good as actual paper forms.
The rewrite figures are going to shit as they move to smaller processing tech, 25nm eMLC is already down to 3000 writes/cell, they say you won't get $1/GB at normal prices until we get 19nm which at least some say will be down to 1000 writes. That you're getting 500MB/s write speed is nice, but if you actually start using that regularly you'll burn through the disk in a matter of months. My first SSD - which I admit I abused thoroughly - died after 8-9000 writes average (was rated for 10k) after 1.5 years. My current setup is trying to minimize writes to C:, but I still don't expect it to last nearly as long as a HDD. Using it as a read-heavy cache of static files may be a better way to boost it for those that haven't got hundreds of dollars to spend every time it wears out.
That's assuming, as well, that travel is not restricted once an epidemic is identified ( which of course it would be ). No, there is no reason to believe that the 1918 flu strain would be anywhere near as debilitating today as it was back then.
If your patient zero is coming out of the deep jungle with a prolonged stop at some flight hub for his connection home, you can be pretty screwed long before the epidemic alert is raised. One thing is restrict travel, but if you have infected people on the subway in NYC you're going to have ten kinds of hell trying to contain it.
The regular flu isn't a danger to healthy people. 300 million people / 80 year average means 3.75 million die each year. Of those 0.5% die of the flu, almost all weakened and elderly. New strains of deadly flu can kill healthy people of all ages, that's quite different.
A project that releases source code under an open source license is an open source project.
And any open source project that releases major new versions without source is called a "bait and switch" project. Some of the code some of the time has never been an accepted standard, even if it's Google doing it and they allegedly had good reasons for it. The standard for an open source project is if it's good enough to ship binaries, it's good enough to ship code. If say Oracle released MySQL6 and said "Hey, we're still cleaning up the code but it'll be released for MySQL7 mmmkay?" would you call that open source? No. I don't see why Google should get a free pass at something you'd never accept from another open source project.
You assume a sort of symmetry here between virus and cure, which is probably as flawed as saying publishing an encryption algorithm levels the playing field between crypto users and crypto breakers. Just because the crypto breakers know how it works, doesn't mean they have a way of preventing it from working. We know lots of ways to kill cancer and AIDS and pretty much everything else, the trouble is it also kills the patient. Telling you how to make nerve gas won't give you an easy way of becoming immune to it, nor does teaching you how to make a better IED make it easier to treat massive blunt trauma. What makes you think teaching you to make a superlethal virus will make you any better at stopping it?
And aren't we? I don't do the dishes (my dishwasher does), I don't do the laundry (my washing machine does and my dryer too), my stove turns on at the flip of a button unless I use the microwave and I live in a 500 square feet apartment all by myself. Take a reality check on what kind of housing people lived in during the 1950s, how many they shared it with and how much of their income went to just put food on the table. Try asking your parents or grandparents how often they took vacation, how long and what exotic destinations they went to. And whether they'd get equally expensive toys like game consoles or such, inflation adjusted of course. Ask them how often they'd go to a cafe or restaurant, how many pair of shoes your average teenage girl had then compared to now and so on.
Unless they were of the very privileged sort, I bet they'd tell you it was lots and lots of work and chores with much less leisure time and luxuries than today. Oh, I'm so sorry some college schmuck has to work his way through college and don't feel he got enough time to party and chase college tail. My dad started working full time at 15 and went to evening school just to get an education, before that he was used to being an errand boy and farm hand besides school. Handed down clothes was common and any presents he got was either home made or practical in nature, I recall him talking about being very happy to get a pair of new shoes, his old were falling apart. Most of the people I see claiming they're poor still lead lives that are much, much better than the 1950s. Of course it sucks to not afford what "normal" people do, but if you make any kind of absolute standard of living I think you'd find that yes, they can afford everything a 1950s family could afford and then some.
Being self-taught doesn't suggest you don't know the technology, but *does* suggest you may not know a lot of other things that are critical that come from studying things in school -- process, teamwork, communication, etc...
Well, my impression was that he'd been working with other things for some years with Drupal as a hobby. It's possible this could be covered by past work/education, even if it isn't related to computers at all. If he comes up short there too, yes then it will really be tough. In my experience you can either take on a new role on subject matter you know well or take on new subject matter in a role you know well. If both are new you'll never get it and if both are known it's a slam dunk but they're rare and your skills become very narrow.
Almost all small (<5 employees) businesses I know outsource this to an accounting company, it's a very standardized service provided at a modest price. Really, the only two functions you should care about is making the product and selling the product. Setting prices and controlling costs is of course still your job, but leave the accounting and tax reporting to someone else.
And here I thought Android applications ran in a fully memory-managed, garbage-collecting environment.)
GC only works on things that have no references. There's lots of ways to run out of memory by filing up lists and maps and such with objects, even if they're never used again the garbage collector doesn't know that.
Believing in an omnipotent being doesn't mean fatalism. Just because God decides if you go to heaven or hell and so the decision is out of your hands, doesn't mean that your actions are irrelevant. "If Allah wills it" is invoking the same kind of judgement, if you have been faithful Allah will grant you victory and if he finds you lacking you will be punished by defeat. Now you might argue that the perceived cause and effect is completely imaginary, but to the believer it appears he can influence his own fate.
Fatalism is actually much more common in atheists, shit happens and there's no will or plan or logic behind it, nobody to influence. No matter what you say or think or do, there's illnesses and injuries that could snuff you out of existence just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your life is just a dice throw and you better hope it's a good one. It's just that instead of somebody controlling the dice, there's nobody controlling the dice.
(3) Jobseekers' allowance is paid to people so they look for and improve their prospects for work, not so they tire themselves out doing random chores.
I checked my city's stats and there's roughly 20-30 jobs posted a day. Of those I'd say most people will be unqualified for 90% of those because they require you to be a specific kind of engineer or nurse or lawyer or doctor or some other education or experience you can't just jump into. Getting interviews in other cities on their cost is unlikely and your allowance is mostly not generous enough to go at your own cost. Particularly if you're the kind to fall under this program, which is typically "dime a dozen" people they can find locally. So you prepare your 2-3 applications, if you already have a well written CV and has applied to some similar jobs already this isn't really much work. The less skill required for the job the more applicants, so suddenly there's 100 people applying and maybe 10 get called in for an interview. That's 0.2-0.3 interviews a day or 1-1.5 a week. The rest of the week is mostly waiting, unless you take some real university or other accredited education people will mostly just laugh at any "classes" or "certifications" you take and the real stuff is often expensive. Which is probably not what you want if you're unemployed and have burnt through your nest egg already, which is true for many after 6 months on unemployment benefits.
It's easier to re-rip/download than it is to backup media (movies/music).
No. Handling hundreds of discs or torrents to recreate a collection is a lot more job than hooking up another 2-3TB disk and keeping two copies. That is, if you're insisting on keeping a collection, I know more and more that don't at least for movies. They download, watch and delete and if they want to see it again, they'll download it again. Music is different, there you can play it many many times in playlists but movies you see a handful times tops, most actually just once or twice.
But why do we permit our corporations to get our states to bid against each other? Why do we permit our corporations to get other countries to bid against the United States? The only reason for allowing corporations in the first place is "the public benefit." Is it in the public benefit to allow corporations to pit us against ourselves?
You're heading into an area that is almost as much economic philosophy as empirical evidence. The US philosophy is that it is ultimately to the public benefit if everything is produced as cheaply as possible. If you can lower wages and sell cheaper products or services, that's to the public benefit even though the workers earn less. Competition is supposed to make sure the savings are passed on to the consumers. If workers unionize and retain more of the earnings, they're killing the competitiveness and ultimately working against the public benefit. The same logic is extended to the states, they should compete to provide the services the business needs for the least possible tax burden. If they were to retain more of the corporation's earning in taxes and use them for public services, they're killing the competitiveness and ultimately working against the public benefit.
Outside the US, most think this would only lead to a class with slave labor wages and benefits only for those that can afford it. That it is actually more to the public benefit if workers get a higher share of the profits and can afford to have a higher standard of living as well as contributing more to the economy as consumers. It is far more likely that workers will spend most of their money in the local economy than foreign owners and other investors. That it is more effective to have more taxes and provide public services that the free market is ill suited to deliver, or would lead to extreme degrees of lock-in. That having an educated, healthy workforce, good public infrastructure and transportation, high degree of social security and low crime - those go together - and so on is worth the tax burden.
Are any of these 100% right? Of course not. You can have taxes and unions that choke the business. On the other hand even the US has figured out you need worker safety laws, environmental protection, minimum wage laws and so on. It's kinda hard to sell sweatshops as the ideal public benefit. Working should be a win-win between the employer and the employee, neither side should let itself get exploited. And I'd say it's much easier for the employer to exploit the employee, but in the US is seems they find the cure - unions - worse than the disease. Yet that's the reason your CEO earns 1000x as much as you, they have money but your bargaining isn't effective. Divide and conquer, except they didn't need to do the "divide" part because it was every worker ant for himself already.
If you have elections but it's illegal to criticize the government or the heads of state, is that a democracy? You can vote, but I can't tell you why you should be voting? To me that is a joke election, like the one-party states like to hold to show their 99% approval rate.
Users can be real dicks.. but so can IT guys. Yes it's the IT departments job to keep the system running and secure.. but the whole point of that system is so everyone else can do their work. When IT starts unreasonably hindering that, you see the hostility build.
And if you're hindering the corporation from doing business, that's a legitimate complaint. But very often you're not, you're just hindering that user from doing something the user wants to do or in the way he wants to do it, even if it's non-essential to the business or there's a corporate approved method of doing it. The IT department is hated because computers are masters at enforcing rules and policies to the letter, even when they make no sense or where your manager would normally look the other way. And you can't make ad hoc exceptions because you'd have to make configuration changes that would be logged and audited, unlike the manager's silent/oral approval. So you come across as extremely square and unhelpful, even when you don't have a choice.
As opposed to what, some other language becoming the world language? As little as 20 years ago, knowing English was not that important. "Long distance calls" was something freakishly expensive, air travel fairly exotic and expensive, finding an English-language newspaper was only in specialty shops mostly for foreigners living abroad. Sure, for some limited fields in international trade, science or technology it could be important but in general it was not, which is why nobody speaks Latin anymore. People learned the languages of their bordering countries as that was what would get most use of.
With the Internet, it's become much more useful to know a "world language" and English has a pretty good head start. Granted the Internet is older but WWW didn't arrive until 1990 and it didn't grow big until the dotcom days. Not just for the job opportunities but because you actually can read international news, you can read the English Wikipedia - which is by far the biggest and best, you can talk to people all over the world cheaply and easily. With it, international trade and collaboration has exploded as people can actually work in distributed teams with email, video-conferencing, common source repositories and so on. The advantages are so big it'd happen some way.
In the short run, yes of course removing the language barriers are disadvantageous to some, but in the long run it's a huge benefit to mankind if we can collaborate as one. Languages have been sort of a natural protectionism, shielding us from international competition. What we in the west is really getting a taste of is the free market. And the US got the least reason of all to complain about that.
* make them memorise 100 technical questions/answers
Memorize? Scripts, scripts and more scripts. First line support is like the oral version of the diagnostic scripts for people too lazy to try reading or following them. A lot of the first line callers and first line support staff deserve each other...
Hardly. The first machine I ran Windows 95 on, circa 1996 was a Pentium 200 MMX with a whopping 32 MB of RAM. I have issues of Maximum PC from 2000 where most mid range systems were advertising 128 MB.
Yep. You must remember that RAM for the most part was seriously underspec'd on OEM machines. Even if you had 2-4x as much, the average moved much slower.
One obvious way to cleanly implement introspection without preprocessor hackery would be to have each object's constructor register it's method in an appropriate way with the proposed QObject base class.
The QMetaObject is one static object that all objects of that class point to. Doing it in the constructor of every object? Proof you have no idea what you're talking about.
Yes. It's important in that economics 101 course to know that "perfect competition" means zero profit. Reality is that competitors are typically in a prisoner's dilemma, if all hold high prices they all profit very much, if all hold low prices they profit very little. Even if they don't collude in an illegal way, all sides may know that any attempt to undercut the others will lead to a price war where nobody would gain any market share and the margins would go way down.
Although I don't have the specific knowledge of WDC and Seagate contracts you profess, many/most contracts have "outs" for act-of-god situations, which would apply here.
Yes, but to invoke "force majeure" - as I know it best - you must be truly unable to supply. You can't just bail on your OEM contracts because it'd be more profitable to sell them on the open market, so the open market has to absorb the whole shortage first and only then, if you're still unable to supply the OEM market can you invoke it. The OEMs would probably also have rights to a delayed fulfillment so any backlog must be cleared first before they can supply the rest of the market. So while what you say is true, it doesn't really change anything the GP said. It really only shields the HDD manufacturers from liability due to breach of contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you will (roughly) replace one disk due to failure for every 1000 hours (100,000 MTBF / 100 disks), or 40 days. It doesn't try to pretend that a single disk lasts 100,000 hours. That's stupid.
So if you replace one disk every 1000 hours and you have 100 disks, how long must each disk live on average? The MTBF is a half-imaginary number that says that even if you replace your 100 disks each day with new ones, you'll have a disk failure once every 1000 hours. Since nobody actually does that it's a fairly meaningless statistic, in reality your failure rate will go up as the disks age. What you really want is failure rate within first N years of operation, which you can't calculate from the MTBF figures.
The smaller tech has just as much "heavy use" as the larger tech when equal amounts of board area are dedicated to flash chips.
True, but then you also get almost the same price. People usually look at $/GB so if you hold GB constant you get a much cheaper and much less durable disk.
I don't know what you think heavy use means
OS disk with no optimization for SSDs, downloading torrents, running a freenet node 24x7, filled to 90%+ capacity most of the time, I didn't deliberately try breaking it but I gave it all the write heavy jobs because it took them so easily. In theory I must have written almost 2TB/day to my drive to wear it that much, but I know I didn't, more like 20GB (out of 120GB) maybe. I suspect doing things like downloading a torrent with many, many small writes and FS updates has a huge write amplification.
For all the complications you claim, how the hell do you find and manage paper records? Just mapping that 1:1 into an electronic archive with scanned PDFs would be a good start. At least then you have an archive that can be backed up easily and people can access it by opening the PDF rather than requisitioning a paper record which would be extremely much faster and require no manual labor. Then you could start getting fancy with OCR, metadata and such based on cost/benefit. And if it comes down to making a hard copy, then archival grade microfilm is supposed to be good for 500 years which is at least as good as actual paper forms.
The rewrite figures are going to shit as they move to smaller processing tech, 25nm eMLC is already down to 3000 writes/cell, they say you won't get $1/GB at normal prices until we get 19nm which at least some say will be down to 1000 writes. That you're getting 500MB/s write speed is nice, but if you actually start using that regularly you'll burn through the disk in a matter of months. My first SSD - which I admit I abused thoroughly - died after 8-9000 writes average (was rated for 10k) after 1.5 years. My current setup is trying to minimize writes to C:, but I still don't expect it to last nearly as long as a HDD. Using it as a read-heavy cache of static files may be a better way to boost it for those that haven't got hundreds of dollars to spend every time it wears out.
That's assuming, as well, that travel is not restricted once an epidemic is identified ( which of course it would be ). No, there is no reason to believe that the 1918 flu strain would be anywhere near as debilitating today as it was back then.
If your patient zero is coming out of the deep jungle with a prolonged stop at some flight hub for his connection home, you can be pretty screwed long before the epidemic alert is raised. One thing is restrict travel, but if you have infected people on the subway in NYC you're going to have ten kinds of hell trying to contain it.
It doesn't affect the obese? (runs)
Either that's pointless or they have their car nearby and it's pointless to try outrunning an SUV. And if you're in Texas, you better be Superman....
The regular flu isn't a danger to healthy people. 300 million people / 80 year average means 3.75 million die each year. Of those 0.5% die of the flu, almost all weakened and elderly. New strains of deadly flu can kill healthy people of all ages, that's quite different.
A project that releases source code under an open source license is an open source project.
And any open source project that releases major new versions without source is called a "bait and switch" project. Some of the code some of the time has never been an accepted standard, even if it's Google doing it and they allegedly had good reasons for it. The standard for an open source project is if it's good enough to ship binaries, it's good enough to ship code. If say Oracle released MySQL6 and said "Hey, we're still cleaning up the code but it'll be released for MySQL7 mmmkay?" would you call that open source? No. I don't see why Google should get a free pass at something you'd never accept from another open source project.
You assume a sort of symmetry here between virus and cure, which is probably as flawed as saying publishing an encryption algorithm levels the playing field between crypto users and crypto breakers. Just because the crypto breakers know how it works, doesn't mean they have a way of preventing it from working. We know lots of ways to kill cancer and AIDS and pretty much everything else, the trouble is it also kills the patient. Telling you how to make nerve gas won't give you an easy way of becoming immune to it, nor does teaching you how to make a better IED make it easier to treat massive blunt trauma. What makes you think teaching you to make a superlethal virus will make you any better at stopping it?
And aren't we? I don't do the dishes (my dishwasher does), I don't do the laundry (my washing machine does and my dryer too), my stove turns on at the flip of a button unless I use the microwave and I live in a 500 square feet apartment all by myself. Take a reality check on what kind of housing people lived in during the 1950s, how many they shared it with and how much of their income went to just put food on the table. Try asking your parents or grandparents how often they took vacation, how long and what exotic destinations they went to. And whether they'd get equally expensive toys like game consoles or such, inflation adjusted of course. Ask them how often they'd go to a cafe or restaurant, how many pair of shoes your average teenage girl had then compared to now and so on.
Unless they were of the very privileged sort, I bet they'd tell you it was lots and lots of work and chores with much less leisure time and luxuries than today. Oh, I'm so sorry some college schmuck has to work his way through college and don't feel he got enough time to party and chase college tail. My dad started working full time at 15 and went to evening school just to get an education, before that he was used to being an errand boy and farm hand besides school. Handed down clothes was common and any presents he got was either home made or practical in nature, I recall him talking about being very happy to get a pair of new shoes, his old were falling apart. Most of the people I see claiming they're poor still lead lives that are much, much better than the 1950s. Of course it sucks to not afford what "normal" people do, but if you make any kind of absolute standard of living I think you'd find that yes, they can afford everything a 1950s family could afford and then some.
Being self-taught doesn't suggest you don't know the technology, but *does* suggest you may not know a lot of other things that are critical that come from studying things in school -- process, teamwork, communication, etc ...
Well, my impression was that he'd been working with other things for some years with Drupal as a hobby. It's possible this could be covered by past work/education, even if it isn't related to computers at all. If he comes up short there too, yes then it will really be tough. In my experience you can either take on a new role on subject matter you know well or take on new subject matter in a role you know well. If both are new you'll never get it and if both are known it's a slam dunk but they're rare and your skills become very narrow.
2) Accounting
Almost all small (<5 employees) businesses I know outsource this to an accounting company, it's a very standardized service provided at a modest price. Really, the only two functions you should care about is making the product and selling the product. Setting prices and controlling costs is of course still your job, but leave the accounting and tax reporting to someone else.
And here I thought Android applications ran in a fully memory-managed, garbage-collecting environment.)
GC only works on things that have no references. There's lots of ways to run out of memory by filing up lists and maps and such with objects, even if they're never used again the garbage collector doesn't know that.
Believing in an omnipotent being doesn't mean fatalism. Just because God decides if you go to heaven or hell and so the decision is out of your hands, doesn't mean that your actions are irrelevant. "If Allah wills it" is invoking the same kind of judgement, if you have been faithful Allah will grant you victory and if he finds you lacking you will be punished by defeat. Now you might argue that the perceived cause and effect is completely imaginary, but to the believer it appears he can influence his own fate.
Fatalism is actually much more common in atheists, shit happens and there's no will or plan or logic behind it, nobody to influence. No matter what you say or think or do, there's illnesses and injuries that could snuff you out of existence just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your life is just a dice throw and you better hope it's a good one. It's just that instead of somebody controlling the dice, there's nobody controlling the dice.
(3) Jobseekers' allowance is paid to people so they look for and improve their prospects for work, not so they tire themselves out doing random chores.
I checked my city's stats and there's roughly 20-30 jobs posted a day. Of those I'd say most people will be unqualified for 90% of those because they require you to be a specific kind of engineer or nurse or lawyer or doctor or some other education or experience you can't just jump into. Getting interviews in other cities on their cost is unlikely and your allowance is mostly not generous enough to go at your own cost. Particularly if you're the kind to fall under this program, which is typically "dime a dozen" people they can find locally. So you prepare your 2-3 applications, if you already have a well written CV and has applied to some similar jobs already this isn't really much work. The less skill required for the job the more applicants, so suddenly there's 100 people applying and maybe 10 get called in for an interview. That's 0.2-0.3 interviews a day or 1-1.5 a week. The rest of the week is mostly waiting, unless you take some real university or other accredited education people will mostly just laugh at any "classes" or "certifications" you take and the real stuff is often expensive. Which is probably not what you want if you're unemployed and have burnt through your nest egg already, which is true for many after 6 months on unemployment benefits.
It's easier to re-rip/download than it is to backup media (movies/music).
No. Handling hundreds of discs or torrents to recreate a collection is a lot more job than hooking up another 2-3TB disk and keeping two copies. That is, if you're insisting on keeping a collection, I know more and more that don't at least for movies. They download, watch and delete and if they want to see it again, they'll download it again. Music is different, there you can play it many many times in playlists but movies you see a handful times tops, most actually just once or twice.
But why do we permit our corporations to get our states to bid against each other? Why do we permit our corporations to get other countries to bid against the United States? The only reason for allowing corporations in the first place is "the public benefit." Is it in the public benefit to allow corporations to pit us against ourselves?
You're heading into an area that is almost as much economic philosophy as empirical evidence. The US philosophy is that it is ultimately to the public benefit if everything is produced as cheaply as possible. If you can lower wages and sell cheaper products or services, that's to the public benefit even though the workers earn less. Competition is supposed to make sure the savings are passed on to the consumers. If workers unionize and retain more of the earnings, they're killing the competitiveness and ultimately working against the public benefit. The same logic is extended to the states, they should compete to provide the services the business needs for the least possible tax burden. If they were to retain more of the corporation's earning in taxes and use them for public services, they're killing the competitiveness and ultimately working against the public benefit.
Outside the US, most think this would only lead to a class with slave labor wages and benefits only for those that can afford it. That it is actually more to the public benefit if workers get a higher share of the profits and can afford to have a higher standard of living as well as contributing more to the economy as consumers. It is far more likely that workers will spend most of their money in the local economy than foreign owners and other investors. That it is more effective to have more taxes and provide public services that the free market is ill suited to deliver, or would lead to extreme degrees of lock-in. That having an educated, healthy workforce, good public infrastructure and transportation, high degree of social security and low crime - those go together - and so on is worth the tax burden.
Are any of these 100% right? Of course not. You can have taxes and unions that choke the business. On the other hand even the US has figured out you need worker safety laws, environmental protection, minimum wage laws and so on. It's kinda hard to sell sweatshops as the ideal public benefit. Working should be a win-win between the employer and the employee, neither side should let itself get exploited. And I'd say it's much easier for the employer to exploit the employee, but in the US is seems they find the cure - unions - worse than the disease. Yet that's the reason your CEO earns 1000x as much as you, they have money but your bargaining isn't effective. Divide and conquer, except they didn't need to do the "divide" part because it was every worker ant for himself already.
If you have elections but it's illegal to criticize the government or the heads of state, is that a democracy? You can vote, but I can't tell you why you should be voting? To me that is a joke election, like the one-party states like to hold to show their 99% approval rate.
Users can be real dicks.. but so can IT guys. Yes it's the IT departments job to keep the system running and secure.. but the whole point of that system is so everyone else can do their work. When IT starts unreasonably hindering that, you see the hostility build.
And if you're hindering the corporation from doing business, that's a legitimate complaint. But very often you're not, you're just hindering that user from doing something the user wants to do or in the way he wants to do it, even if it's non-essential to the business or there's a corporate approved method of doing it. The IT department is hated because computers are masters at enforcing rules and policies to the letter, even when they make no sense or where your manager would normally look the other way. And you can't make ad hoc exceptions because you'd have to make configuration changes that would be logged and audited, unlike the manager's silent/oral approval. So you come across as extremely square and unhelpful, even when you don't have a choice.
As opposed to what, some other language becoming the world language? As little as 20 years ago, knowing English was not that important. "Long distance calls" was something freakishly expensive, air travel fairly exotic and expensive, finding an English-language newspaper was only in specialty shops mostly for foreigners living abroad. Sure, for some limited fields in international trade, science or technology it could be important but in general it was not, which is why nobody speaks Latin anymore. People learned the languages of their bordering countries as that was what would get most use of.
With the Internet, it's become much more useful to know a "world language" and English has a pretty good head start. Granted the Internet is older but WWW didn't arrive until 1990 and it didn't grow big until the dotcom days. Not just for the job opportunities but because you actually can read international news, you can read the English Wikipedia - which is by far the biggest and best, you can talk to people all over the world cheaply and easily. With it, international trade and collaboration has exploded as people can actually work in distributed teams with email, video-conferencing, common source repositories and so on. The advantages are so big it'd happen some way.
In the short run, yes of course removing the language barriers are disadvantageous to some, but in the long run it's a huge benefit to mankind if we can collaborate as one. Languages have been sort of a natural protectionism, shielding us from international competition. What we in the west is really getting a taste of is the free market. And the US got the least reason of all to complain about that.
* make them memorise 100 technical questions/answers
Memorize? Scripts, scripts and more scripts. First line support is like the oral version of the diagnostic scripts for people too lazy to try reading or following them. A lot of the first line callers and first line support staff deserve each other...
Hardly. The first machine I ran Windows 95 on, circa 1996 was a Pentium 200 MMX with a whopping 32 MB of RAM. I have issues of Maximum PC from 2000 where most mid range systems were advertising 128 MB.
Yep. You must remember that RAM for the most part was seriously underspec'd on OEM machines. Even if you had 2-4x as much, the average moved much slower.
One obvious way to cleanly implement introspection without preprocessor hackery would be to have each object's constructor register it's method in an appropriate way with the proposed QObject base class.
The QMetaObject is one static object that all objects of that class point to. Doing it in the constructor of every object? Proof you have no idea what you're talking about.
Yes. It's important in that economics 101 course to know that "perfect competition" means zero profit. Reality is that competitors are typically in a prisoner's dilemma, if all hold high prices they all profit very much, if all hold low prices they profit very little. Even if they don't collude in an illegal way, all sides may know that any attempt to undercut the others will lead to a price war where nobody would gain any market share and the margins would go way down.
Although I don't have the specific knowledge of WDC and Seagate contracts you profess, many/most contracts have "outs" for act-of-god situations, which would apply here.
Yes, but to invoke "force majeure" - as I know it best - you must be truly unable to supply. You can't just bail on your OEM contracts because it'd be more profitable to sell them on the open market, so the open market has to absorb the whole shortage first and only then, if you're still unable to supply the OEM market can you invoke it. The OEMs would probably also have rights to a delayed fulfillment so any backlog must be cleared first before they can supply the rest of the market. So while what you say is true, it doesn't really change anything the GP said. It really only shields the HDD manufacturers from liability due to breach of contract.