It's funny, but let's explorer this before considering even joking with that. 1/8 random fakers AND 1/8 random dice rolls coinciding takes a (( 1/8 ) ^ 2) probability.
If all your friends, daily events, calls and rolls were perfectly random in some ideal world (who trusts truly "random people"? ), we would be statistically right 1.6% of the time your "friend" gets on the phone. it's not worth the drama of the other 98% failures.:) Don't you wish the stats were skewed hugely in favor of lying for once?
A "friend" who is offended by you not friending a Facebook profile is not really a friend.
If they were before, they will probably choose not to, anymore But knowing human nature, you're a little too hopeful. The whole reason we all join any group is peer pressure. Peer pressure's power is that we prefer to avoid being "offensive" to the askers, and the more people are in, the more we fear well offend by staying outside.
It's easier to visualize if you think how many address book contacts we spread out through all semi-active and fully active hotmail, gmail and yahoo accounts.
Since the mainstream only has one Facebook account t hold all potential friendships, now you merge 25 contacts here with 50 there and 10 there, it adds up. Count all those low-maintenance friendships and the fact that Facebook is almost a rolodex to a level that your ephimeral SIM card cannot provide when you switch companies, and 200 starts to make sense. My mother went from 60 friends about 6 months in, knowing nothing about PC's, to 200 in 12 more months, with a light pruning regime.
I do not think that would in any way help the case for a sub $500 android phone. If 3 years of manufacturing entirely out of China has been useless to make it affordable without a 2-year subsidy contract, imagine the percentage increases of bringing production lines back into the US to factor in US-type wages.
Why would Google make a decision to favor a tiny government group (volumewise) and pricewise alienate larger one? Don't they still need the support of the American people, and the people of Europe, and the people of Asia, etc? Too many eggs in one basked is not a popular business motto in these times.
I understand your concern in expressing this lazy coding up to versions rather than using reflexive APIs. That thinking only helps in ideal conditions where everything is perfect. Since we all know and expect bugs in any software release, then deleting version numbers means that now we have absolutely no "legal" and simple way of BLACKLISTING a release of firefox when a bug is found.
Tomorrow this functional equivalent to having a risky firefox nightly at your corporate desks grows a logic bomb affecting all ssl or e-commerce transactions. So we'll all end up using hacks to steal the internal version number, (which we ALL know is never going away for dev sanity's sake). Then IT tries to trigger a downgrade to yesterday's version. But, how does IT do that if OFFICIAL download links no longer show any trackable version number? For the average multi-PC joe at home, how do they know which copies to uninstall, and what installer to replace their bombed version with?
How do you even look it up on the official website when the only other option is going to oldversion.com if your corporation won't laugh at you for using those unofficial builds? Pray that you're NOT downloading some trojan to deploy to hundreds of machines. Anyone disagreeing with those use cases, fails to understand why the corporate world has clung so hard to IE6: even if it's bad for all of us, the identifiability and usability of version number 6 provides a powerful witness about the corporate AND user-land power of the blacklist/whitelist story. IE6 is still number 1 in China. http://www.liveside.net/2011/03/16/as-microsoft-releases-ie9-ie6-still-dominates-in-china-heres-why/
Yeah, the cake is STILL a lie, unless Mozilla revokes their ill policy of disabling Add-ons numerically. They don't believe in a numeric world, right?
After all, ALL addons are user-facing, and nearly all in Windows are user-installed. So it doesn't matter if I cannot see a version in the about box and yet the addon check gives me exact numbers/ Sooner or later forum answers will tell joe User hints that they need to look elsewhere (downgrade to 3.6.4 for example) to run their software without hypocritical versioning statements, forced-checks and even support life-cycles.
Mozilla and Ubuntu's Shuttleworth are far from the same place of trust right now that they had earned half a decade ago.
This! I hadn't considered that in a while... OS X is the only mainstream OS that makes changes subtle. Except for updating the brushed metal pattern every couple releases to some other fill-in, it's almost been a GUI luddite because the Doc keeps the same location, size and main form. When they do something like adding those Download / Recent document stacking thingies, they avoid clashing with the rest of the GUI.
What matters most is that for a full decade they avoided the huge Luna-like buttons, and won't be pulling an Ubuntu left->right tantrum. They've even resisted adding new window buttons and 3D-fying the the buttons, which is a Windows-related perversion to convey "change" and "improvement" in today's GUIs when features don't change that much. Last but not least, you don't need to relearn the Mac control panel every year. Vista to Windows 7 started to staedy the locations and labels a little bit , but I won't hold my breath with the myriad of netbook-imitating changes that a Windows 8 Metro GUI will doubtless bring
About the same on Dell PowerEdge servers (1450 to 1750). It was something like 2 minutes to POST, and then another couple minutes for the OS boot, and I'm glad you mentioned that POST consumes a huge part of the boot process, because desktop-only techs would never believe the two of us separately. All the hardware checks ensure the server is in top shape for the assumed months of uptime, but they take long enough to be cringe-worthy to us operations engineers. I'm sure the field techs from Dell don't mind, since they bill hourly.
Before USB devices even existed, back in the mid nineties, I remember a "Packard Bell" PC that booted windows 95 and kept waiting a long minute or two while 9 to 12 tray applets were loaded. Back then, we didn't even have Quicktime trays, and you're right that between Apple, Java and Adobe we have been reduced to a symphony of "updates are ready!" messages that each loads with a penalty to your resources.
Every developer should use some API to monitor system load or app counts before adding their own (FAT CHANCE!! "GET MORE RAM, SIR"), or perhaps the system should enforce this and give the user an option to nullify new autoruns at installation, instead of making power users fish around msconfig to bring the machine back to respectable performance levels
TFS: "Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster." Not true for many types of "computers." I hope this progress in technology will be felt: in a long 5 to 10 years we WILL see current technology trickle down to fix the slow boot creep that "digital" has brought to your living rooms. The magic curse is "runtime" and sometimes "java," which consumer-wise has died everywhere but in the poorly strengthened embedded world.
If you replaced your 4:3 TV with an LCD TV, you must now wait 2 to 5 seconds for every "boot", bringing back that ol' vacume tube warm-up delays that we had gotten rid of a couple decades ago. If you "upgraded" to a digital cable box, boot times take 5 to 10 minutes. Seriously, and slow channel flip times / software-assisted features are stalled by loading screens while TCP connections fetch unwanted dynamic content, but that's a different topic. Even dumb phones are slow to boot. My PS2 may boot quickly if there is no CD inside, but it always takes a noticeable 3+ second lag to load games released even 9 years ago. What on earth happened to instant on we ALREADY had, and were is the "vote with your feet" reaction that was supposed to stop embedded digital delay devolution on its tracks?
Our current progress just means that eventually, slow embedded hardware could be phased out to solve the problems. What worries me is that there's ALWAYS some new and slow technology of the decade waiting to reverse all boot-time gains.
If they make the OS be the driver and force all manufacturers to standardize their printers to the point that the OS can just say "print" in some MacOS-only way, then you'll at least *need* a Mac to print from the cloud (read, your future iPad 3 or 4 or whatever)
I'm pretty sure the whole point isn't to make it a perfect solution; it's to sell more NEW MacOS copies, which for most of us always means *purchasing* at least one new Mac. The one benefitting the most is Apple, because they want to create a standard that they patent-control and therefore must be paid for the privilege of, um, having convenient "new features" that haven't YET been copied to other OSs, and that will require very volume-heavy licensing from MS as well (read "millions of OS copies sold means potentially millions in commissions for the cloudPrint API bundle.")
Since getting moderation for helping is not guaranteed, Slashdotters do not generally care about our personal problems,
Your question might be better suited for the likes of superuser.com. It's not kosher, but I just went ahead and asked it for you (after a slight cleanup... those guys are good geeks but their standards are a little on the Wikipedian side.)
Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?
I see what happened there...aren't all of these jobs exactly the NON-CODER jobs doomed by the non-fulfillment paradox? The one were we the "analysts" are all asked to fork the projects if we want any solutions those fields, or outright told that the problem does not exist?
Since we're not "coders", then we just cannot, especially in behemoth projects. (See RAM leaks in FF)
I fear that PCs will become something that only a business buys.
Wow! Full circle: mainframe -> minicomputer -> business workstation -> 90's desktop PC -> portable computer -> cellphone -> restricted tablet -> mainframe^Wcloud evolution
The problem is we will NOW miss the days when we had full use of our home computing power. Days of no DRM and a monthly lease of a cellphone paying for access points, tethering, 911, fake GPS and all other features and racking up charges for breaking the myriads of definitions of the fake term "unlimited". And manufacturers continue to make all the money just from updating their carrot-stick paradigm every few years?
Secure VPNs, remote support, outsourced callcenters AND IT services, multi-city phone conferences and training, database records available online, worldwide webex meetings --maybe prerecorded for time-shifting convenience of each employee, ubiquitous blackberry-level ball-and-chaining for all the mandatory on-callness (you had to show up to work in the past every time something broke because things were not AS connected; that meant lost productivity compared to today's "THAT went DOWN? Oh, I'm looking at it remotely...and I know exactly what's wrong!")
Without all of the above happening through IT, it would have taken decades until the outsourcing revolution, because companies would have had no choice but to continue expanding headcount to achieve the same results. We ARE more "productive" only because fewer people need to work now that everybody is connected, not because companies have evolved.
Well, as usual, the study proves that Information Technology progress will ALWAYS be underestimated. If it wasn't for all that internet connectivity we have added starting 15 years ago (which was not very complete at the time of that study: even WORK dumb cellphones were rare,) companies would not necessarily have all the infrastructure today that allowed them to cut or ship 10% the jobs away from all accross the USA, warts and all.
Speaking of "separate parts" such as monitors, nothing beats re-using parts that you already have. Apple knew this with their iMac base bundle lacking everything but the desktop and power cords; this is aimed at prior owners of computers. Because having to dump your entire $500 handheld for another costing $500 two years later (or whenever it cracks) is such a wasteful design feature...
I'm sure the PC market's sinking profit margins due to its flexibility of customizing have noooothing to do with the label "obsolete" meant to drive users to "cooler" expensive devices.
GP has a USB keyboard and other stuff plugged into the tablet. That only raises a risk inherent to small devices: Pulled cables tense up and fall off; they won't drag the 20 pound desktop off its base and crack its screen in the process, killing the entire device and costing you a bundle in cash or time lying to the warranty tech support. PC's also do not need recharging, and excel at ease of productive multi-window work. The screen repairs for laptops and cellphones are costlier than the actual fullsize PCs.
Some people will just choose a side and never be persuaded to switch back. The whole manufacturer strategy of calling technology "obsolete" is to make people believe it is uncool. The reason behind it is that profit margins are lower and perceived coolness drives people to pay full price for new technology with questionable improvements. Compare this to books vs. e-books.
What can your full-size box offer me that I don't already have?
I'm disappointed that a slashdottereven has to ask us. Here is one reason: A built-in, real and honest keyboard. Full stop. Even the fastest typists among us cannot reach their top productivity when reduced to two-fingered typing on keys 1) they cannot feel, 2) with hands that cannot fit on the fake screen keyboard 3) for keys they cannot find anywhere 4) keys that follow NO STANDARD, 5) and to top it off, there's no real shift key. Perl coders beware.
Average teenage joes are unable to type a BBcode or HTML-formatted posts, or use asterisks for wiki page formatting, or *type* emoticons. Takes a while before they notice they'll do it better on their parent's full-sized PC. The speed reduction and *major* retraining every time we buy a new brand of smartphone, laptop and tablet is a major problem, and a non-issue on large PCs.
In the end, all is good as long as we can still purchase them and leave you and your self-inflicted problems alone.
Thanks for mentioning "the most toxic way possible". There are no MACHINES involved at in the disassembling. So... who "absorbs" all the bad stuff? (and guys, there's plenty of metal burning involved)
As usual, even the local authorities frown on getting taped. That usually means trouble is willingly overlooked. One can watch the first 4 minutes of this documentary at engadget (total of 25 minutes) to get an idea of what mass waste looks like in front of people's houses (Play the second one, as their first embedded one seems to fail.)
We forget that other than for "race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age or disability" workers are discriminated against for everything ELSE, which certainly fits nicely with things such as "being in a government watchlist" --especially if it is public information!
When you're a frequent business traveller for a company, no matter how accurate the list is it will have name collisions (just do a facebook search for most people you'd like to hook up with and try to actually find the one hit that is the correct person!). Unlike certain embassies who publish national ID numbers of all people naturalized to their country, public lists in the US cannot include your state ID or Social Security Number.
Your boss would be too lazy to give you the benefit of the doubt, anyway. Employment in most of the US is "at will" by law, and they can discriminate and fire you the second your name is linked to bad publicity, no reasons given --Relevant exhibit #1: Facebook posts.
So it's better to create a new "problem waiting to happen" and instead force it to remain "contained" to your first airport visit. There, you can discretely provide proof to the government that you're NOT the terrorist whose name clashes with yours. That's much better than finding out the hard way just because closed curtains and your boss' lack of due diligence make things easier for negligent action against innocent citizens.
So like... a web license? Totally not retarded at all.
Though I agree with GP that IT employment would be a lot more rewarding for "the few" that would qualify in a world were medicine and IT were equally licensed, web licenses pose a huge problem for the hobbyist.
I spent a couple hours desiging and posting 30 lines of shell code online for unknown guy on a public forum the other day. It's probably someone incompetent at his job who will never learn about shell scripting, loops and anything as long as they're a websearch or forum question away from the answer thanks to "guys like me."
How many laws would I be breaking if my "advice" were as "career confidential" and "lawsuit-prone" as a lawyer's or doctor's advice are? We all know the lines on/. "IANAL", but what if coders were forced to say the same thing? We would be charged with negligence for failing to consider all the possible uses AND misuses of our code (just like medicines have lots of warnings and scenarios similar to "do not iron shirt when being worn.")
How would a web coder hobbyist or beginner learn by example, if all "code" advise potentially a liability? It would be a blessing and a curse if copy-and-paste IT work were so much more respected by the IT community. And hindsight shows that there would still be the same anonymity-promoted "gray areas" and "black markets" of data that the web itself has enabled; I kinda shudder to think about how you'd need to be swear secrecy in some way and be as liable as the builders of bridges and buildings are. But it's a good utopia if we only think about someone else being accountable for the failure, huh?
Of particular notoriety are all those deceitful results where you click on the google cache entry (because it gives you quick visual proof that your search terms are IN the article). You find that the googlecache header says "the following terms only appear on LINKS POINTING TO THIS PAGE". Half of the time, those are the actual "bingo!" terms you'd like to see, but there is not even a backlink so that you can open those pages. I guess that's google's secret sauce and all. Still, it's annoying.
So set your torrent client to require SSL connections to peers, and they can't prove you weren't downloading the latest Ubuntu.
Problem solved.
I know you know this, but let me restate an important fact for everyone else who is new to your suggestion. For torrents of enough value, "unlawful infiltration" by you, the downloader / (lawsuit target) is just as simple as "lawful infiltration" by they, the copyright owners... since everyone can pose as a sharer in this SSL encrypted "anonymous" environment.
The internet is a little weird with this respect: we have the illusion that you don't know the sharers, and they don't know you... unless "they" happen to be an undercover owner with a honeypot, or just a passive watcher in someone else's implementation of the idea that "this property is free for all." Unlike the real world, in the digital world, it's very bullet free to crash illegal parties and take prisoners, or at least indebt them for life.
You're only faking out filenames and data to your passive ISP tools, but they can still see all your peer IPs, since they're the ones hand-delivering the bagged goods to you even if they don't know what's in the bag. All they need is to look at the recent URLs and then they can tell were you clicked. This is already simple enough to secretly automate to let your ISP auto-join all your password-free torrent sites that it makes little sense to have a human sit down and join your torrent by hand... all they need are filenames, and I've seen enough legit traffic-sniffer magic that I know this is doable.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny, but let's explorer this before considering even joking with that. 1/8 random fakers AND 1/8 random dice rolls coinciding takes a (( 1/8 ) ^ 2) probability.
If all your friends, daily events, calls and rolls were perfectly random in some ideal world (who trusts truly "random people"? ), we would be statistically right 1.6% of the time your "friend" gets on the phone. it's not worth the drama of the other 98% failures. :)
Don't you wish the stats were skewed hugely in favor of lying for once?
What an interesting game. The only winning move is not to play.
A "friend" who is offended by you not friending a Facebook profile is not really a friend.
If they were before, they will probably choose not to, anymore
But knowing human nature, you're a little too hopeful. The whole reason we all join any group is peer pressure. Peer pressure's power is that we prefer to avoid being "offensive" to the askers, and the more people are in, the more we fear well offend by staying outside.
It's easier to visualize if you think how many address book contacts we spread out through all semi-active and fully active hotmail, gmail and yahoo accounts.
Since the mainstream only has one Facebook account t hold all potential friendships, now you merge 25 contacts here with 50 there and 10 there, it adds up. Count all those low-maintenance friendships and the fact that Facebook is almost a rolodex to a level that your ephimeral SIM card cannot provide when you switch companies, and 200 starts to make sense. My mother went from 60 friends about 6 months in, knowing nothing about PC's, to 200 in 12 more months, with a light pruning regime.
I do not think that would in any way help the case for a sub $500 android phone. If 3 years of manufacturing entirely out of China has been useless to make it affordable without a 2-year subsidy contract, imagine the percentage increases of bringing production lines back into the US to factor in US-type wages.
Why would Google make a decision to favor a tiny government group (volumewise) and pricewise alienate larger one? Don't they still need the support of the American people, and the people of Europe, and the people of Asia, etc? Too many eggs in one basked is not a popular business motto in these times.
I understand your concern in expressing this lazy coding up to versions rather than using reflexive APIs. That thinking only helps in ideal conditions where everything is perfect. Since we all know and expect bugs in any software release, then deleting version numbers means that now we have absolutely no "legal" and simple way of BLACKLISTING a release of firefox when a bug is found.
Tomorrow this functional equivalent to having a risky firefox nightly at your corporate desks grows a logic bomb affecting all ssl or e-commerce transactions. So we'll all end up using hacks to steal the internal version number, (which we ALL know is never going away for dev sanity's sake). Then IT tries to trigger a downgrade to yesterday's version. But, how does IT do that if OFFICIAL download links no longer show any trackable version number? For the average multi-PC joe at home, how do they know which copies to uninstall, and what installer to replace their bombed version with?
How do you even look it up on the official website when the only other option is going to oldversion.com if your corporation won't laugh at you for using those unofficial builds? Pray that you're NOT downloading some trojan to deploy to hundreds of machines. Anyone disagreeing with those use cases, fails to understand why the corporate world has clung so hard to IE6: even if it's bad for all of us, the identifiability and usability of version number 6 provides a powerful witness about the corporate AND user-land power of the blacklist/whitelist story. IE6 is still number 1 in China. http://www.liveside.net/2011/03/16/as-microsoft-releases-ie9-ie6-still-dominates-in-china-heres-why/
Yeah, the cake is STILL a lie, unless Mozilla revokes their ill policy of disabling Add-ons numerically. They don't believe in a numeric world, right?
After all, ALL addons are user-facing, and nearly all in Windows are user-installed. So it doesn't matter if I cannot see a version in the about box and yet the addon check gives me exact numbers/ Sooner or later forum answers will tell joe User hints that they need to look elsewhere (downgrade to 3.6.4 for example) to run their software without hypocritical versioning statements, forced-checks and even support life-cycles.
Mozilla and Ubuntu's Shuttleworth are far from the same place of trust right now that they had earned half a decade ago.
This!
I hadn't considered that in a while... OS X is the only mainstream OS that makes changes subtle. Except for updating the brushed metal pattern every couple releases to some other fill-in, it's almost been a GUI luddite because the Doc keeps the same location, size and main form. When they do something like adding those Download / Recent document stacking thingies, they avoid clashing with the rest of the GUI.
What matters most is that for a full decade they avoided the huge Luna-like buttons, and won't be pulling an Ubuntu left->right tantrum. They've even resisted adding new window buttons and 3D-fying the the buttons, which is a Windows-related perversion to convey "change" and "improvement" in today's GUIs when features don't change that much. Last but not least, you don't need to relearn the Mac control panel every year. Vista to Windows 7 started to staedy the locations and labels a little bit , but I won't hold my breath with the myriad of netbook-imitating changes that a Windows 8 Metro GUI will doubtless bring
About the same on Dell PowerEdge servers (1450 to 1750). It was something like 2 minutes to POST, and then another couple minutes for the OS boot, and I'm glad you mentioned that POST consumes a huge part of the boot process, because desktop-only techs would never believe the two of us separately. All the hardware checks ensure the server is in top shape for the assumed months of uptime, but they take long enough to be cringe-worthy to us operations engineers. I'm sure the field techs from Dell don't mind, since they bill hourly.
Before USB devices even existed, back in the mid nineties, I remember a "Packard Bell" PC that booted windows 95 and kept waiting a long minute or two while 9 to 12 tray applets were loaded. Back then, we didn't even have Quicktime trays, and you're right that between Apple, Java and Adobe we have been reduced to a symphony of "updates are ready!" messages that each loads with a penalty to your resources.
Every developer should use some API to monitor system load or app counts before adding their own (FAT CHANCE!! "GET MORE RAM, SIR"), or perhaps the system should enforce this and give the user an option to nullify new autoruns at installation, instead of making power users fish around msconfig to bring the machine back to respectable performance levels
TFS: "Computers these days can go from completely off to working within 30 seconds, and in some cases much faster."
Not true for many types of "computers." I hope this progress in technology will be felt: in a long 5 to 10 years we WILL see current technology trickle down to fix the slow boot creep that "digital" has brought to your living rooms. The magic curse is "runtime" and sometimes "java," which consumer-wise has died everywhere but in the poorly strengthened embedded world.
If you replaced your 4:3 TV with an LCD TV, you must now wait 2 to 5 seconds for every "boot", bringing back that ol' vacume tube warm-up delays that we had gotten rid of a couple decades ago. If you "upgraded" to a digital cable box, boot times take 5 to 10 minutes. Seriously, and slow channel flip times / software-assisted features are stalled by loading screens while TCP connections fetch unwanted dynamic content, but that's a different topic. Even dumb phones are slow to boot. My PS2 may boot quickly if there is no CD inside, but it always takes a noticeable 3+ second lag to load games released even 9 years ago. What on earth happened to instant on we ALREADY had, and were is the "vote with your feet" reaction that was supposed to stop embedded digital delay devolution on its tracks?
Our current progress just means that eventually, slow embedded hardware could be phased out to solve the problems. What worries me is that there's ALWAYS some new and slow technology of the decade waiting to reverse all boot-time gains.
If they make the OS be the driver and force all manufacturers to standardize their printers to the point that the OS can just say "print" in some MacOS-only way, then you'll at least *need* a Mac to print from the cloud (read, your future iPad 3 or 4 or whatever)
I'm pretty sure the whole point isn't to make it a perfect solution; it's to sell more NEW MacOS copies, which for most of us always means *purchasing* at least one new Mac. The one benefitting the most is Apple, because they want to create a standard that they patent-control and therefore must be paid for the privilege of, um, having convenient "new features" that haven't YET been copied to other OSs, and that will require very volume-heavy licensing from MS as well (read "millions of OS copies sold means potentially millions in commissions for the cloudPrint API bundle.")
Since getting moderation for helping is not guaranteed, Slashdotters do not generally care about our personal problems,
Your question might be better suited for the likes of superuser.com. It's not kosher, but I just went ahead and asked it for you (after a slight cleanup... those guys are good geeks but their standards are a little on the Wikipedian side.)
Where are the open source ergonomic experts, the usability analysts, the aesthetic artists? Who ever does usability studies, or consistency between apps?
I see what happened there...aren't all of these jobs exactly the NON-CODER jobs doomed by the non-fulfillment paradox? The one were we the "analysts" are all asked to fork the projects if we want any solutions those fields, or outright told that the problem does not exist?
Since we're not "coders", then we just cannot, especially in behemoth projects. (See RAM leaks in FF)
I fear that PCs will become something that only a business buys.
Wow! Full circle:
mainframe -> minicomputer -> business workstation -> 90's desktop PC -> portable computer -> cellphone -> restricted tablet -> mainframe^Wcloud evolution
The problem is we will NOW miss the days when we had full use of our home computing power. Days of no DRM and a monthly lease of a cellphone paying for access points, tethering, 911, fake GPS and all other features and racking up charges for breaking the myriads of definitions of the fake term "unlimited". And manufacturers continue to make all the money just from updating their carrot-stick paradigm every few years?
Secure VPNs, remote support, outsourced callcenters AND IT services, multi-city phone conferences and training, database records available online, worldwide webex meetings --maybe prerecorded for time-shifting convenience of each employee, ubiquitous blackberry-level ball-and-chaining for all the mandatory on-callness (you had to show up to work in the past every time something broke because things were not AS connected; that meant lost productivity compared to today's "THAT went DOWN? Oh, I'm looking at it remotely...and I know exactly what's wrong!")
Without all of the above happening through IT, it would have taken decades until the outsourcing revolution, because companies would have had no choice but to continue expanding headcount to achieve the same results. We ARE more "productive" only because fewer people need to work now that everybody is connected, not because companies have evolved.
Well, as usual, the study proves that Information Technology progress will ALWAYS be underestimated. If it wasn't for all that internet connectivity we have added starting 15 years ago (which was not very complete at the time of that study: even WORK dumb cellphones were rare,) companies would not necessarily have all the infrastructure today that allowed them to cut or ship 10% the jobs away from all accross the USA, warts and all.
Speaking of "separate parts" such as monitors, nothing beats re-using parts that you already have. Apple knew this with their iMac base bundle lacking everything but the desktop and power cords; this is aimed at prior owners of computers. Because having to dump your entire $500 handheld for another costing $500 two years later (or whenever it cracks) is such a wasteful design feature...
I'm sure the PC market's sinking profit margins due to its flexibility of customizing have noooothing to do with the label "obsolete" meant to drive users to "cooler" expensive devices.
GP has a USB keyboard and other stuff plugged into the tablet. That only raises a risk inherent to small devices: Pulled cables tense up and fall off; they won't drag the 20 pound desktop off its base and crack its screen in the process, killing the entire device and costing you a bundle in cash or time lying to the warranty tech support. PC's also do not need recharging, and excel at ease of productive multi-window work. The screen repairs for laptops and cellphones are costlier than the actual fullsize PCs.
Some people will just choose a side and never be persuaded to switch back. The whole manufacturer strategy of calling technology "obsolete" is to make people believe it is uncool. The reason behind it is that profit margins are lower and perceived coolness drives people to pay full price for new technology with questionable improvements. Compare this to books vs. e-books.
What can your full-size box offer me that I don't already have?
I'm disappointed that a slashdotter even has to ask us. Here is one reason:
A built-in, real and honest keyboard. Full stop.
Even the fastest typists among us cannot reach their top productivity when reduced to two-fingered typing on keys
1) they cannot feel,
2) with hands that cannot fit on the fake screen keyboard
3) for keys they cannot find anywhere
4) keys that follow NO STANDARD,
5) and to top it off, there's no real shift key. Perl coders beware.
Average teenage joes are unable to type a BBcode or HTML-formatted posts, or use asterisks for wiki page formatting, or *type* emoticons. Takes a while before they notice they'll do it better on their parent's full-sized PC. The speed reduction and *major* retraining every time we buy a new brand of smartphone, laptop and tablet is a major problem, and a non-issue on large PCs.
In the end, all is good as long as we can still purchase them and leave you and your self-inflicted problems alone.
Thanks for mentioning "the most toxic way possible". There are no MACHINES involved at in the disassembling. So... who "absorbs" all the bad stuff? (and guys, there's plenty of metal burning involved)
As usual, even the local authorities frown on getting taped. That usually means trouble is willingly overlooked. One can watch the first 4 minutes of this documentary at engadget (total of 25 minutes) to get an idea of what mass waste looks like in front of people's houses (Play the second one, as their first embedded one seems to fail.)
Forgot to link to the actual government citation for this for you non-US-ians
Here's the releveant words highlighted in this ephimeral google search
We forget that other than for "race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age or disability" workers are discriminated against for everything ELSE, which certainly fits nicely with things such as "being in a government watchlist" --especially if it is public information!
When you're a frequent business traveller for a company, no matter how accurate the list is it will have name collisions (just do a facebook search for most people you'd like to hook up with and try to actually find the one hit that is the correct person!). Unlike certain embassies who publish national ID numbers of all people naturalized to their country, public lists in the US cannot include your state ID or Social Security Number.
Your boss would be too lazy to give you the benefit of the doubt, anyway. Employment in most of the US is "at will" by law, and they can discriminate and fire you the second your name is linked to bad publicity, no reasons given --Relevant exhibit #1: Facebook posts.
So it's better to create a new "problem waiting to happen" and instead force it to remain "contained" to your first airport visit. There, you can discretely provide proof to the government that you're NOT the terrorist whose name clashes with yours. That's much better than finding out the hard way just because closed curtains and your boss' lack of due diligence make things easier for negligent action against innocent citizens.
So like... a web license? Totally not retarded at all.
Though I agree with GP that IT employment would be a lot more rewarding for "the few" that would qualify in a world were medicine and IT were equally licensed, web licenses pose a huge problem for the hobbyist.
I spent a couple hours desiging and posting 30 lines of shell code online for unknown guy on a public forum the other day. It's probably someone incompetent at his job who will never learn about shell scripting, loops and anything as long as they're a websearch or forum question away from the answer thanks to "guys like me."
How many laws would I be breaking if my "advice" were as "career confidential" and "lawsuit-prone" as a lawyer's or doctor's advice are? We all know the lines on /. "IANAL", but what if coders were forced to say the same thing? We would be charged with negligence for failing to consider all the possible uses AND misuses of our code (just like medicines have lots of warnings and scenarios similar to "do not iron shirt when being worn.")
How would a web coder hobbyist or beginner learn by example, if all "code" advise potentially a liability? It would be a blessing and a curse if copy-and-paste IT work were so much more respected by the IT community. And hindsight shows that there would still be the same anonymity-promoted "gray areas" and "black markets" of data that the web itself has enabled; I kinda shudder to think about how you'd need to be swear secrecy in some way and be as liable as the builders of bridges and buildings are. But it's a good utopia if we only think about someone else being accountable for the failure, huh?
Of particular notoriety are all those deceitful results where you click on the google cache entry (because it gives you quick visual proof that your search terms are IN the article).
You find that the googlecache header says "the following terms only appear on LINKS POINTING TO THIS PAGE". Half of the time, those are the actual "bingo!" terms you'd like to see, but there is not even a backlink so that you can open those pages. I guess that's google's secret sauce and all. Still, it's annoying.
So set your torrent client to require SSL connections to peers, and they can't prove you weren't downloading the latest Ubuntu.
Problem solved.
I know you know this, but let me restate an important fact for everyone else who is new to your suggestion. For torrents of enough value, "unlawful infiltration" by you, the downloader / (lawsuit target) is just as simple as "lawful infiltration" by they, the copyright owners... since everyone can pose as a sharer in this SSL encrypted "anonymous" environment.
The internet is a little weird with this respect: we have the illusion that you don't know the sharers, and they don't know you... unless "they" happen to be an undercover owner with a honeypot, or just a passive watcher in someone else's implementation of the idea that "this property is free for all." Unlike the real world, in the digital world, it's very bullet free to crash illegal parties and take prisoners, or at least indebt them for life.
You're only faking out filenames and data to your passive ISP tools, but they can still see all your peer IPs, since they're the ones hand-delivering the bagged goods to you even if they don't know what's in the bag. All they need is to look at the recent URLs and then they can tell were you clicked. This is already simple enough to secretly automate to let your ISP auto-join all your password-free torrent sites that it makes little sense to have a human sit down and join your torrent by hand... all they need are filenames, and I've seen enough legit traffic-sniffer magic that I know this is doable.