I manage both Macs and PC's and I call bullshit. It's true that I get fewer urgent help desk calls from my Mac users, but that doesn't mean they take less work to keep running. It is much easier to push out configuration changes and software to the PC's, and there are a wealth of mature add-on management utilities that work really well with PC's. The Mac tools are just not as polished.
There are also a bunch of undocumented networking compatibility issues on the Macs that I have to work around, and Apple just doesn't seem to care about. Each iOS update brings new compatibility problems, just like with Windows. Apple won't let me install OSX server in a hvpervisor not hosted on Apple hardware so I can run the management tools on a real server.
I get just as many hardware bugs with the Apple machines as I do with the PC's.
Physically, the PC's I buy are much easier and cheaper to repair. Mac hardware keeps getting harder and harder to repair. One upon a time, I had some G4 iMacs that I could replace hard drives in under 10 minutes. All it took was loosening a few screws, the back popped off, and all components were laid bare. The entire PPC Mac line was beautifully designed for easy repair. The first generation Intel iMacs took me 45 minutes to replace a hard drive, and that was after I was practiced at it. More recently I had to replace a keyboard on a late model Macbook Pro. There were 55 screws holding the keyboard in. Just the keyboard. That's not to include the work involved dismantling the entire laptop first. I have pictures to prove it.
On top of all that supporting the macs takes longer because the user base is so much smaller. Virtually every PC problem I come across has been solved already. All it takes is a simple google search. I can't always do that for Mac problems.
Mac external ports change with every generation, so I have to keep buying new adapters to support each new fleet of laptops.
That brings us to Apple's planned obsolescence. I had an x-serve obsoleted after 3 or 4 years because Apple didn't want to support its boot loader. They did about the same thing in 2014 when they dropped support for some macs that were just 5 years old. On the other hand, Windows 10 supports 10 year old hardware, with no planned obsolescence. I have Mac pros at work that are obsolete for OSX, but they still Windows like a champ.
Costwise, he has a point about the Macs not being much more for base-line configurations. But, that cost delta grows quickly as you start upgrading components, especially considering that I can selectively upgrade prices on PC components, even if I have to go off the reservation and buy after-market. The cheapest macs with discrete graphics as an 27" iMac for $1800 or a Macbook Pro for $2,500.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Mac hater. There are a lot of great things about OSX, and it has Windows beat in a lot of ways. The Mac build quality is the best in the business, and I never get an out-of-the-box failure. But, you could call my an Apple hater. I despise they way Apple segregates their product lines, and I swear they purposefully try to make their products harder to support.
To be fair, 20,000 of those firearm deaths are suicide. That is an epidemic-scale figure, but it's hard to blame the firearms. While Firearms are the instrument for most suicide fatalities in the US, they account for about half of all suicides and far less than half of all suicide attempts.
These numbers are pretty rough, but annually about 60% of US firearm related homicides are suicide. About 3% of gun deaths are accidents. About 80% of non-suicide homicides are ruled as gang-related. Police kill in the neighborhood of 1200 people per year, criminals or otherwise. Mass shooting deaths, defined as "4+ deaths of people selected indiscriminately in a public place", are vary small. The figures I've seen are between 5 and 75 people per year.
That leaves somewhere around 1000 to 2000 murders.
If only America could address its drug habit and figure out how to employ our young men. Then gang and other organized crime violence would be severely curtailed, and this would be a pretty peaceful place to live.
I had a fiber connection installed to a private school. We bought the connection from a local non-profit that was built for providing fast, affordable Internet connections to schools, libraries, and non profits. The non-profit ISP had a fiber corridor running right down the street at the front of the property that took about two years for them to clear all the red tape for installation. The proverbial "last mile" was about 150 yards of driveway between the street to the school. There were existing utility poles running down the drive, owned by the local power company. With only power, one telephone cable, and one CATV cable on those poles and no other customers were served using those cables, there was no justifiable reason for the fiber not to simply be run on those poles. The power company either denied access or asked a ridiculous attachment fee. The ISP had a boring company come in to get the fiber from the street to our front door.
It's a bit of a stretch to call Comcast a natural monopoly. Yes, it's true that the physical wiring installation is a barrier for entry for new competitors, but not an insurmountable one. Many areas of the US have multiple cable offerings. Not my area, but many. A natural monopoly occurs when a single company out-competes all competitors, or where profits are so slim that the remaining entities have to merge just to reduce overhead to survive. For most regions where a single cable company holds local monopoly status, the incumbent gained that status by making deals with the local governments to keep all competitors out.
Now that every region with enough population to support a cable company has an incumbent, the existing cable companies seem to avoid competing with each other. Look at what happened when Comcast and Time Warner were looking to merge a couple years ago years ago. They argued that the merger would not reduce competition because the two barely compete for local markets. (http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/) No, I would not call Comcast a "natural monopoly". It's better described as a cartel member. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cartel)
This is why the NRA really doesn't want the CDC to be able to collect data and do research on gun violence. In fact, they've successfully pushed legislation through a Republican congress that
Why should the Center for Disease control study crime? Wouldn't you rather they spent their money on researching disease? Crime research falls more into the FBI's wheelhouse.
The NRA specifically doesn't want the CDC researching gun violence because the expressed goal of the CDC, in regards to gun violence research, is to justify gun control. No matter where you fall on the 2nd amendment, research by an obviously and unrepentantly biased agency can not be trusted. In comparison, the CDC has done a lot of good work researching automobile accidents and making specific recommendations to make cars safer. But, they haven't repeatedly stated over the past three decades that their research goal is to find reasons to restrict car ownership.
It is the right to keep and bear "arms", not "firearms". "Arms" includes swords, knives, rocks, shivs, and pointy sticks. Many of these items are available for free.
In comparison, look at Austraila where they have made it illegal to carry any knife larger than a pen knife.
I've upgraded several machines voluntarily simply so that I could choose the timing and to do the upgrades in a sane fashion. I clone the hard drives to a new SSD and run the upgrade on that. In case of a failure my roll-back process consists of reinstalling the old hard drive. I have not had an major issues yet.
I got lucky on one of my home computers that I noticed and canceled the automatically scheduled update that MS enabled with the May patches.
I'm familiar with the counterfeit FTDI USB to serial adapters. I have one or two floating around here at work. You can roll back the driver and then, in the Windows update window block that driver update. Or, at least you can do that in Win 10 Pro. I'm not sure about the home version crippleware. I've done the same process to fix Synaptics touchpads, who's version 19 drivers are completely broken in Windows 10.
In theory, you can sue the manufacturer who sold you the USB-serial adapter, if it's worth your time.
Yeah, a journaling file system should protect you from file corruption. But if you yank the drive out in the middle of a write it should roll the file back to the previous version. You can still loose the data that's in flight unless you properly eject your media.
"Presumably you can solve this problem by using full disk encryption..."
No, you can't. If I am reading this correctly, this vulnerability is about the TLS session keys. RSA uses asymmetrical encryption, via the public/private key pair, to negotiate a symmetrical encryption key that is used for the data transfer session. That session key will be exposed in memory. DHE and ECDHE keys have capability called "perfect forward secrecy". If a man-in-the-middle attacker records all traffic between server and client and later obtains or cracks the private RSA key, he can use that to decipher the session keys and decrypt all data. DHE and ECDHE protect against that attack vector. But I don't see how they could protect against an attacker with full control of the virtual host who can manage to read the TLS session keys right out of memory.
NTFS isn't the problem. NTFS supports up to 32k character file paths as well as a number of characters that windows deems illegal. This is a problem with the Windows API's and.Net. I frequently work with long paths in windows (as dictated by necessity, not by choice) by addressing UNC paths at the command line, or by mapping drive letters or creating symbolic links deep into the directory tree.
Use MKLINK to create a symbolic link deeper into the path so that Explorer can work with a shorter path.
If it is a network share use NET USE to map a drive letter deep into the share path.
Use SUBST do do the same for local file systems, that is to mount a folder deep in the file path as a logical drive.
From a command line (cmd.exe) you can address long file paths with "\\?\[Drive Letter]\%File or directory path%". most commands work, but some, like RENAME will have trouble because it interprets the '?' as a wildcard.
At work it happens all the bloody time. We have a very large file share, around 10 TB, of files generated when we do projects for our clients . Frequently our account execs will try to organize one of our larger client folders and end up nesting files and folders so deeply that the data becomes inaccessible. It's pretty easy to do when many documents are generated by mac users, who give zero fucks about file and folder name length.
Also, I will bet that if you fire up powershell and do a "get-childitem * -recurse -force" in your user directory you will get path length errors on files and folders under appdata.
The limitation is also built into.NET for backwards compatibility. As a result, Powershell can't work with long file paths either. My understanding is that there are.NET libraries you can use to add the capability to your applications.
However, cmd.exe can access long paths. You can address UNC paths by using "\\?\[Drive letter]\[path to directory or file]". Most commands work. Rename is a notable exception because it interprets the '?' as a wild card.
Google's official policy is below. They commit to 3 years after the first day of sales or 18 months after the last day of sales on the Play store. My Nexus one stopped getting updates around 2 years after I bought it. I call shenanigans that you have Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow), unless you flashed it manually.
Nexus devices
Nexus devices get the latest version of Android directly from Google. These devices will receive Android version updates for at least two years from when the device first became available on the Google Store. Nexus devices will also receive updates for security issues documented in our Public Nexus Security Bulletins for at least the following periods:
Three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store
Or, 18 months after the device stopped being sold on the Google Store
I agree this is a disgrace, and it is a failure of vision and direction from management. Google should decree that devices take updates as Google publishes them, or else it is not an "Android" phone, and they can't be sold using the Android trade marks and marketing materials.
The other way Google is failing in not securing their installed system base. I'm not talking about new versions. There should be 5 years minimum of security patches for major versions. There is no excuse for Nexus devices being fully patched and riddled with holes.
What BendBroadband is doing is dirty, but it's hard to say if it is illegal.
If a monopoly holder forces a consumer to buy a second product in order to get what they want, in this case buying cable TV service if they want broadband without a data cap that is Unlawful Tying and is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But who knows? The devil is in the details, and those details would have to be worked out in court. I'm guessing the question would hinge on whether or not BendBroadband is the only broadband provider in town. In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the lawsuit.
The 180+ billion dollars we are talking about are corporate profits that have basically never been taxed. Some of this represents profits generated in other countries, but much of it was profits from the US that was moved off shore. Apple sells intellectual property to subsidiaries in tax havens for a low price, then leases the technology back to its US based divisions at high prices. The books for the US based entities therefore show low profit and are barely taxed, even though Apple, as a whole, is raking it in.
But copyright doesn't expire (It's effectively true - go check when Mickey Mouse will slip into public domain). DNA is information, right? Information is speech, legally speaking. Therefore, Monsanto can copyright GMO Crops.
The difference this time around is that Carboniferous period fungi were unable to break down lignin. Lignin adds rigidity to plant cell walls and was what plants needed to grow into tall trees with the capacity to bind trillions of tonnes of carbon into wood. For about 50 millions years, all the tree trunks that fell over from storms, disease, old age, insects, earthquakes, dinosours knocking them over, what have you, did not rot completely. Much of their carbon was sequestered underground and compressed into coal. The Caboniferous period ended as Fungi evolved the means to digest lignin and ended the massive carbon sequestration.
Personally, I rely on table height, moment of inertia, and the air resistance differential between the buttered and buttered sides to ensure my toast lands buttered-side-down. (I don't each much peanutbutter) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
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I manage both Macs and PC's and I call bullshit. It's true that I get fewer urgent help desk calls from my Mac users, but that doesn't mean they take less work to keep running. It is much easier to push out configuration changes and software to the PC's, and there are a wealth of mature add-on management utilities that work really well with PC's. The Mac tools are just not as polished.
There are also a bunch of undocumented networking compatibility issues on the Macs that I have to work around, and Apple just doesn't seem to care about. Each iOS update brings new compatibility problems, just like with Windows. Apple won't let me install OSX server in a hvpervisor not hosted on Apple hardware so I can run the management tools on a real server.
I get just as many hardware bugs with the Apple machines as I do with the PC's.
Physically, the PC's I buy are much easier and cheaper to repair. Mac hardware keeps getting harder and harder to repair. One upon a time, I had some G4 iMacs that I could replace hard drives in under 10 minutes. All it took was loosening a few screws, the back popped off, and all components were laid bare. The entire PPC Mac line was beautifully designed for easy repair. The first generation Intel iMacs took me 45 minutes to replace a hard drive, and that was after I was practiced at it. More recently I had to replace a keyboard on a late model Macbook Pro. There were 55 screws holding the keyboard in. Just the keyboard. That's not to include the work involved dismantling the entire laptop first. I have pictures to prove it.
On top of all that supporting the macs takes longer because the user base is so much smaller. Virtually every PC problem I come across has been solved already. All it takes is a simple google search. I can't always do that for Mac problems.
Mac external ports change with every generation, so I have to keep buying new adapters to support each new fleet of laptops.
That brings us to Apple's planned obsolescence. I had an x-serve obsoleted after 3 or 4 years because Apple didn't want to support its boot loader. They did about the same thing in 2014 when they dropped support for some macs that were just 5 years old. On the other hand, Windows 10 supports 10 year old hardware, with no planned obsolescence. I have Mac pros at work that are obsolete for OSX, but they still Windows like a champ.
Costwise, he has a point about the Macs not being much more for base-line configurations. But, that cost delta grows quickly as you start upgrading components, especially considering that I can selectively upgrade prices on PC components, even if I have to go off the reservation and buy after-market. The cheapest macs with discrete graphics as an 27" iMac for $1800 or a Macbook Pro for $2,500.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Mac hater. There are a lot of great things about OSX, and it has Windows beat in a lot of ways. The Mac build quality is the best in the business, and I never get an out-of-the-box failure. But, you could call my an Apple hater. I despise they way Apple segregates their product lines, and I swear they purposefully try to make their products harder to support.
To be fair, 20,000 of those firearm deaths are suicide. That is an epidemic-scale figure, but it's hard to blame the firearms. While Firearms are the instrument for most suicide fatalities in the US, they account for about half of all suicides and far less than half of all suicide attempts.
These numbers are pretty rough, but annually about 60% of US firearm related homicides are suicide. About 3% of gun deaths are accidents. About 80% of non-suicide homicides are ruled as gang-related. Police kill in the neighborhood of 1200 people per year, criminals or otherwise. Mass shooting deaths, defined as "4+ deaths of people selected indiscriminately in a public place", are vary small. The figures I've seen are between 5 and 75 people per year.
That leaves somewhere around 1000 to 2000 murders.
If only America could address its drug habit and figure out how to employ our young men. Then gang and other organized crime violence would be severely curtailed, and this would be a pretty peaceful place to live.
I had a fiber connection installed to a private school. We bought the connection from a local non-profit that was built for providing fast, affordable Internet connections to schools, libraries, and non profits. The non-profit ISP had a fiber corridor running right down the street at the front of the property that took about two years for them to clear all the red tape for installation. The proverbial "last mile" was about 150 yards of driveway between the street to the school. There were existing utility poles running down the drive, owned by the local power company. With only power, one telephone cable, and one CATV cable on those poles and no other customers were served using those cables, there was no justifiable reason for the fiber not to simply be run on those poles. The power company either denied access or asked a ridiculous attachment fee. The ISP had a boring company come in to get the fiber from the street to our front door.
It's a bit of a stretch to call Comcast a natural monopoly. Yes, it's true that the physical wiring installation is a barrier for entry for new competitors, but not an insurmountable one. Many areas of the US have multiple cable offerings. Not my area, but many. A natural monopoly occurs when a single company out-competes all competitors, or where profits are so slim that the remaining entities have to merge just to reduce overhead to survive. For most regions where a single cable company holds local monopoly status, the incumbent gained that status by making deals with the local governments to keep all competitors out.
Now that every region with enough population to support a cable company has an incumbent, the existing cable companies seem to avoid competing with each other. Look at what happened when Comcast and Time Warner were looking to merge a couple years ago years ago. They argued that the merger would not reduce competition because the two barely compete for local markets. (http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/13/technology/comcast-time-warner-antitrust/) No, I would not call Comcast a "natural monopoly". It's better described as a cartel member. (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cartel)
This is why the NRA really doesn't want the CDC to be able to collect data and do research on gun violence. In fact, they've successfully pushed legislation through a Republican congress that
Why should the Center for Disease control study crime? Wouldn't you rather they spent their money on researching disease? Crime research falls more into the FBI's wheelhouse.
The NRA specifically doesn't want the CDC researching gun violence because the expressed goal of the CDC, in regards to gun violence research, is to justify gun control. No matter where you fall on the 2nd amendment, research by an obviously and unrepentantly biased agency can not be trusted. In comparison, the CDC has done a lot of good work researching automobile accidents and making specific recommendations to make cars safer. But, they haven't repeatedly stated over the past three decades that their research goal is to find reasons to restrict car ownership.
It is the right to keep and bear "arms", not "firearms". "Arms" includes swords, knives, rocks, shivs, and pointy sticks. Many of these items are available for free.
In comparison, look at Austraila where they have made it illegal to carry any knife larger than a pen knife.
iFixit gives the Nexus 5X a 7 of 10 for repairability
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...
They give the 6P an abysmal 2 of 10 rating.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow...
I've upgraded several machines voluntarily simply so that I could choose the timing and to do the upgrades in a sane fashion. I clone the hard drives to a new SSD and run the upgrade on that. In case of a failure my roll-back process consists of reinstalling the old hard drive. I have not had an major issues yet.
I got lucky on one of my home computers that I noticed and canceled the automatically scheduled update that MS enabled with the May patches.
I'm familiar with the counterfeit FTDI USB to serial adapters. I have one or two floating around here at work. You can roll back the driver and then, in the Windows update window block that driver update. Or, at least you can do that in Win 10 Pro. I'm not sure about the home version crippleware. I've done the same process to fix Synaptics touchpads, who's version 19 drivers are completely broken in Windows 10.
In theory, you can sue the manufacturer who sold you the USB-serial adapter, if it's worth your time.
Yeah, a journaling file system should protect you from file corruption. But if you yank the drive out in the middle of a write it should roll the file back to the previous version. You can still loose the data that's in flight unless you properly eject your media.
"Presumably you can solve this problem by using full disk encryption..."
No, you can't. If I am reading this correctly, this vulnerability is about the TLS session keys. RSA uses asymmetrical encryption, via the public/private key pair, to negotiate a symmetrical encryption key that is used for the data transfer session. That session key will be exposed in memory. DHE and ECDHE keys have capability called "perfect forward secrecy". If a man-in-the-middle attacker records all traffic between server and client and later obtains or cracks the private RSA key, he can use that to decipher the session keys and decrypt all data. DHE and ECDHE protect against that attack vector. But I don't see how they could protect against an attacker with full control of the virtual host who can manage to read the TLS session keys right out of memory.
NTFS isn't the problem. NTFS supports up to 32k character file paths as well as a number of characters that windows deems illegal. This is a problem with the Windows API's and .Net. I frequently work with long paths in windows (as dictated by necessity, not by choice) by addressing UNC paths at the command line, or by mapping drive letters or creating symbolic links deep into the directory tree.
There are easier ways.
Use MKLINK to create a symbolic link deeper into the path so that Explorer can work with a shorter path.
If it is a network share use NET USE to map a drive letter deep into the share path.
Use SUBST do do the same for local file systems, that is to mount a folder deep in the file path as a logical drive.
From a command line (cmd.exe) you can address long file paths with "\\?\[Drive Letter]\%File or directory path%". most commands work, but some, like RENAME will have trouble because it interprets the '?' as a wildcard.
At work it happens all the bloody time. We have a very large file share, around 10 TB, of files generated when we do projects for our clients . Frequently our account execs will try to organize one of our larger client folders and end up nesting files and folders so deeply that the data becomes inaccessible. It's pretty easy to do when many documents are generated by mac users, who give zero fucks about file and folder name length.
Also, I will bet that if you fire up powershell and do a "get-childitem * -recurse -force" in your user directory you will get path length errors on files and folders under appdata.
The limitation is also built into .NET for backwards compatibility. As a result, Powershell can't work with long file paths either. My understanding is that there are .NET libraries you can use to add the capability to your applications.
However, cmd.exe can access long paths. You can address UNC paths by using "\\?\[Drive letter]\[path to directory or file]". Most commands work. Rename is a notable exception because it interprets the '?' as a wild card.
Google's official policy is below. They commit to 3 years after the first day of sales or 18 months after the last day of sales on the Play store. My Nexus one stopped getting updates around 2 years after I bought it. I call shenanigans that you have Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow), unless you flashed it manually.
Nexus devices
Nexus devices get the latest version of Android directly from Google. These devices will receive Android version updates for at least two years from when the device first became available on the Google Store. Nexus devices will also receive updates for security issues documented in our Public Nexus Security Bulletins for at least the following periods:
Three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store
Or, 18 months after the device stopped being sold on the Google Store
I agree this is a disgrace, and it is a failure of vision and direction from management. Google should decree that devices take updates as Google publishes them, or else it is not an "Android" phone, and they can't be sold using the Android trade marks and marketing materials.
The other way Google is failing in not securing their installed system base. I'm not talking about new versions. There should be 5 years minimum of security patches for major versions. There is no excuse for Nexus devices being fully patched and riddled with holes.
What BendBroadband is doing is dirty, but it's hard to say if it is illegal.
If a monopoly holder forces a consumer to buy a second product in order to get what they want, in this case buying cable TV service if they want broadband without a data cap that is Unlawful Tying and is a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But who knows? The devil is in the details, and those details would have to be worked out in court. I'm guessing the question would hinge on whether or not BendBroadband is the only broadband provider in town. In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the lawsuit.
http://www.americanbar.org/gro...
The 180+ billion dollars we are talking about are corporate profits that have basically never been taxed. Some of this represents profits generated in other countries, but much of it was profits from the US that was moved off shore. Apple sells intellectual property to subsidiaries in tax havens for a low price, then leases the technology back to its US based divisions at high prices. The books for the US based entities therefore show low profit and are barely taxed, even though Apple, as a whole, is raking it in.
Huh? The top individual tax rate in the 50's was 91%, not corporate. The top corporate rate was around 50%.
But copyright doesn't expire (It's effectively true - go check when Mickey Mouse will slip into public domain). DNA is information, right? Information is speech, legally speaking. Therefore, Monsanto can copyright GMO Crops.
The difference this time around is that Carboniferous period fungi were unable to break down lignin. Lignin adds rigidity to plant cell walls and was what plants needed to grow into tall trees with the capacity to bind trillions of tonnes of carbon into wood. For about 50 millions years, all the tree trunks that fell over from storms, disease, old age, insects, earthquakes, dinosours knocking them over, what have you, did not rot completely. Much of their carbon was sequestered underground and compressed into coal. The Caboniferous period ended as Fungi evolved the means to digest lignin and ended the massive carbon sequestration.
http://www.mining.com/coal-sto...
So yeah, plant growth will spike, but don't expect that to mean much for reducing global C02 levels.
You misspelled "Slurm"
Personally, I rely on table height, moment of inertia, and the air resistance differential between the buttered and buttered sides to ensure my toast lands buttered-side-down. (I don't each much peanutbutter)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...