Your point is very valid; however, your ending opens the door to more problems.
The word tolerate (and tolerance) is a double edged sword. It's a bit silly to say we should be intolerant of one subgroup due to their opinions, but we should encourage groups with exclusionary principals like the NBSE,SWE and NOW. The Klan has every bit as much right to peaceably assemble and hold their opinions as the aforementioned groups. They have that right and not to be discriminated against for it according to our current society's rules. That doesn't mean that all of this line drawing from every side helps society as a greater whole.
The very concept that women need to be treated a particular way is a large part of our society's gender issues. Currently they are a protected class, both socially and legally, thus making them "more equal." At the same time, the PC crowd wants women treated "equally," and that there is some kind of magical gulf in treatment society has yet to cross.
We can either treat everyone with blind equality or we can accept that people are different for a variety of reasons, and as such, deserving of differing treatment. As long as we continue the masquerade that both propositions are fair and should be observed, we're going to be stuck in this middle ground where people are scared to make up their own minds or exercise their own opinions.
Consider the social stigma regarding infidelity. Here are the two common stereotypes: A married man who commits adultery is a scumbag, his wife should divorce him and take the kids. A woman who commits adultery had a moment of weakness or was driven to it by her husband and should be forgiven. If the man demands a divorce in the latter situation, the woman will in most cases still get custody of children.
Hacker culture is no more misogynistic and rife with sexual harassment than any other industry. The difference is the social skills of many in the hacker culture create a higher profile for the community. Some guy with say, an MBA in finance, is more likely to target an attack to a coworker who isn't going to say anything or might even be flattered by the immaturity, due to their greater breadth of social experience. The hacker is going to spam their childish desires and opinions to anyone in earshot and end up offending someone.
It's similar to the anecdotal, yet frequently true, difference between sexual harassment and flirting: Does the girl find you attractive?
Also, hacker culture is more heavily in favor of libertarian standards of free speech. This means many expect the right to say what they want without consequence.
If anything the largest part of the problem stems from women stereotyping technologically proficient males. Techies are lumped together with construction workers, plumbers, and Don Draper.
Given Java's current direction (Oracle) and all of the hell we (the IT industry) have been put through already with Java's false promises of WORA, shouldn't most of our efforts be towards abandoning Java entirely. Frankly, code translators, like Facebook's PHP to C translator seem like better investments in code performance and portability (I am aware portability is not their goal, but it is an interesting side effect).
Get the industry to rally behind a consistent language which has strong RAD functionality (Python?) and find better ways to translate and optimize the slow chunks of code during interactive compilation and profiling. IDEs and compilers need to move the direction of content creation tools like Dreamweaver, where the developer can see the results interactively and instantly on a variety of platforms via virtualization. How great would it be if following a multi-platform compilation run, a LibreOffice developer could see and interact with the results on Ubuntu, Windows, OSX, and Android all at the same time?
Running crap code on more interesting platforms does not fix the problems already there.
Forget 15cm on a side. Using commodity >$400 27" 2560x1440 LCD panels from Korea, you are looking at 0.23mm resolution at 33cm x 58cm roughly. Still more than 4x the resolution of FDM kit, massively larger workspace, speed (for arbitrary complexity and large format), and scalability for duplicates.
If you wanted to build a commercial grade kit, a 4k projector would make huge parts at excellent resolution or medium sized parts at absurd resolution. Total investment would still be sub $35k. That is double the cost of HP's FDM printer (that makes stuff under 20cm on a side), but less than many large format CNC machines or material removal style 3d printers.
Sorry, but we're about 6 months from near-UV / visible light curable resin destroying the FMD models. If you use an iPad Retina display as the light source, you only have mechanical jitter in the Z-axis (the boom / base you are raising) and a resolution of.078 mm (the best enthusiast FDM stuff is around.5 mm). You only need one stepper motor and mechanical assembly. You also reduce the amount of custom electronics to drive the head assembly and x & y axis stepper motors.
Currently, Junior Veloso is using DLP projectors to get the light intensity needed (and.05 mm resolution), but an LCD panel with closer to UV LEDs under it would be an even cheaper route. With filters removed on an LCD you have (arbitrarily assigned axes) X-axis at the dot pitch, Y-axis at 1/3 dot pitch, and Z-axis at your stepper motor / mechanical limit.
Lithographic techniques with light curable resins are vastly more scalable as well. Within the work area, there is no increase in time except for the Z-axis height. This means making dozens of duplicates in one pass for small objects or one large piece in the same time span. Further, the software process to turn the 3D model into 2D slices is exceptionally trivial compared with CAM type instructions to move 3 axes and run a pump head. Technically you could farm the object render with a LCD panel, laptop LCD, or tablet out to an auto-refresh webpage with black and white image slices with the stepper motor running on a timer synced with the page refresh...
What kind of VPN throughput am I looking at here? I need new technology to replace my aging Palo Alto gateway cluster. I've begged the emissary enough already for better throughput and removal of Pah-wraiths from my network. The Cisco has yet to respond.
Speaking of IPSEC VPN, can we get a portable configuration standard already? It's hard enough getting interoperability from devices from the same vendor (I'm looking vaguely in your direction Juniper)...
Apple tablets are made with the same shoddy parts. Every statistical analysis of the iPod and iPhone has shown equal failure rates due to defect as the rest of the consumer electronics market, excluding HDD based iPods which were significantly higher than other consumer portables. The iPad hasn't been out long enough for the number gathers to have anything significant yet as far as internal parts failures. Several consumer advocacy groups have shown significantly though that poor design decisions until the iPhone 4 and iPad 3 have contributed to a high screen damage rate among iDevices not seen in other portables.
The Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and Nook Color are durable as well. All three take a standing fall vastly better than any model iPad with respect to damage and repairs costs.
$500 + apps + vendor lock in / ecosystem + 3/4G (for many) is a perfectly good price for the upper 25% consumer incomes in the US. I already addressed this.
For the other 50% of the consumer market with a disposable income sufficient to invest in small electronics, it becomes a more significant issue for a device which is for entertainment. For them, $200-300 for a device they will need to replace every 12-24 months (similar cycle required for all iDevices) is significantly more reasonable and leaves room for a better array of apps and services with which to take advantage of the device. Consider the number of people who bought the Kindle Fire for $200 and promptly spent $50-200 on e-books within the first 6 months of ownership. For the bottom 25%, it's not a viable option for those with the wisdom to manage their finances.
I'm thinking about taking some spare cash and putting a ridiculous short option on Apple stock for the next 12-18 months. Only part that makes it high risk is the capricious nature of jurists in Apples' many lawsuits and their currently health cash reserves. Might be 24-36 months until we are looking at the desperate Apple of the 90's again, but it will happen.
Exactly why I picked up a HP Slate 500 for $350 when I got the chance. Few people understand what a killer app OneNote is.
I eagerly await the Surface Pro. It will be THE game changer in the corporate world, if not a significant segment of the consumer one. I can't help but laugh my ass off at every person with a functioning laptop or tablet, who is so woefully ignorant as to buy an ultrabook, Macbook Air, or iPad 3 since the Surface Pro was announced.
Even the cheap Chinese knock-offs aren't really a race to the bottom, though it would be nice if they were more open to updates the way PC OSes are (update issues are really just an Android problem overall). It really comes down to compare the computing power of this tablet against a $500-700 desktop and a $400-600 laptop. The tablet has 1/10 the processing power and capabilities. The tablet further has a slower input system, though touch / multitouch allows unique interaction. Most of that delta is overcome by the portability, battery life, and custom APIs designed to maximize functional value.
All these factors signal to consumer that the devices should in fact be very inexpensive. For each corresponding major component, CPU, RAM, video, LCD, storage, and battery, a tablets parts cost is roughly 1/6-1/2 the same parts in a sub $500 laptop. Again, more signals to informed consumers that the tablet should be a significantly less expensive device.
There has been no race to the bottom in the PC market. It has entirely been a race to provide products which best balance consumer needs. The fact that for 3 out of 5 consumers, price is the highest priority, should only indicate how much consumers desire computing as a commodity market.
Bear in mind that 30 years ago, this was a balance sheet expense few if any were willing to have on their family or individual budget. You can't have wages stagnate for dozens of years at a time and expect consumers to have a pile of cash to spend on new shiny things they got by without just fine a few years ago.
Apple's success has only been in convincing an affluent class with significant disposable income that a limited use consumption toy is worth $500-900 as a status symbol. The fact is we have a large population of people who earn in the upper 25% income range who think they are average everyday middle class. You should hear the stories mortgage lawyers get from people with an income of $200k / yr wanting federal help to refinance their mortgage. There are 28 million homes in the US with incomes over $90k / yr most of whom think they are middle class (upper 25% to which I previously referred). Perhaps in the limited mercantile sense middle class, but they are not the average for the population.
The other issue the other 75% of the US population (and probably what, 90-95% of the world) see with getting into the various tablet ecosystems is the continual pressure to buy various consumption objects. People hate Pay-Per-View on cable, so why would they want it in their tablets. Some products in those ecosystems can be considered semi-durable goods such as e-books, music, and similar. Other are exceptionally limited disposable goods, such as subscriptions to media, and apps which may or may not continue to work and be updated. Unlike the perception surrounding the PC, where most things you put in the storage device are your property (perception, not EULA), the Walled Gardens destroy this retained value. Even on Craigslist, a used laptop with COA and proper licensing for Windows 7, Office 2010 and other software has greater value in the market than one with no software installed. It has been a particular point I have tried to make on several occasions regarding the resale value and lack of first doctrine rights regarding e-books and their pricing relative to physical copies. As I understand it, the EU is working on establishing first doctrine rights across the board for software and downloaded media, consistent with consumer demand for retained value and ownership.
Fierce price competition is not a sign of no market, it is the ultimate sign of informed capitalism.
Odd, I've used Shrewsoft on a few vendor's firewalls and run into all manner of incompatibilities. I suppose once you figure out all the quirks for a given device, you would be solid to deploy elsewhere.
On the small scale, I would probably opt for an OpenVPN setup, perhaps on a VM hosted on the base server for insulation. It's easier to setup a fresh server and client than shrewsoft's client in my experience.
DES has been well known for vulnerabilities for some time. I don't know of many businesses using MS PPTP for remote VPN because it is usually cheaper and easier to just purchase licenses from their firewall / gateway vendor. Certainly no company with strong crypto needs such as HIPAA, PCI, and similar compliance are using anything but dedicated VPN appliances with AES or similar based encryption. Heck, most of those have moved to 2-factor authentication and are using at least TLS 1.0 / SSL 3.0 at layer 4.
Exactly THIS. The way higher levels of math are currently taught and in particular the lack of true relation to practical problem solving is a huge issue.
I have seen a few professors and textbooks which remedy this great problem. Probably at the top of the list is Morris Kline. His Mathematics for Non-mathematicians (or Liberal Arts Majors) textbook, its language, and approach are a perfect template for better broad discourse on mathematics to non-STEM majors. Even his Calculus text better relates the importance of concept and understanding far better than the current popular books by Thomas, Tan, and Stewart (though the latter two books are both mere knockoffs of Thomas' book, made popular to obsolete Thomas' skus). Consider that I am a STEM major, in Physics, and all of my courses within the department manage to relate skills and knowledge in vastly more useful manners and with little abstract ambiguity.
Calculus and Chemistry seem to be the most popular courses Universities use as "weeding" courses. The observed problem every time is teaching in overly abstract terms and with little relation to useful problem solving approaches in the subject matter. Anytime a professor offers an outside of class time "problem solving" session shortly prior to a test, they are letting you know they failed to teach all of the problem solving skills and especially never related practical knowledge. While I can appreciate the dedication it demonstrates on the part of the professor, they should be doing their jobs and putting it in the classroom to begin with.
Indeed, I for a moment thought this was related to a space elevator concept. I recall hearing a couple Formula SAE students discussing the down force being well in excess of vehicle weight at 60 mph, and started thinking about that as well.
Why is it though that the burden of change is on men. Don't we teach our children to ignore name calling and such. Should not the burden be EQUALLY applied such that women must become more tolerant as much as men change their behavior.
I'm lucky, every place I've worked, the women I worked with and female friends I made all enjoyed mock chauvinism and would toss zingers right back. Most found the current state of corporate law and policy insulting to their strength as women. A few even complained regularly of not being able to find men who were educated, successful, and dominant in their dating.
I would love to see TV properly exploited as a medium to explore superheroes, other comic book lore, and similar storytelling. Unfortunately, with the exception of Heroes and Buffy, the TV networks have largely been unwilling to put the money and risk into giving any comic book styled work the necessary support.
Good, long term plot based writing only appeals to the networks when they have a LOT of extra capital to throw around with development. One only needs to look to Joss Whedon's other works such as Dollhouse and Firefly to see plot lines and characters bearing strong parallels to the comic book format to see what I am talking about.
The networks are pretty much a lost cause at this point. It seems TNT, USA, Showtime, and HBO are the only ones willing to incubate a variety of shows in which plot arcs matter as much as the stand alone episode. NBC gets the closest to an honorable mention since they were willing to back Heroes and The West Wing years ago (different genre, but Sorkin's storytelling is very similar to comics / graphic novels in every TV show he touches).
Even SyFy (what a terrible restyling) is dropping it's cache of long development series, Eureka and Warehouse 13 in favor of yet more illiterate programming.
I like the number juggling. They say it has curtailed infringement by 1/2 but still 40% continue to pirate. Ok, let's consider the math for a moment. If 80% of your population is pirating to begin with, than it stands to reason that piracy should be legal as the common law votes tend to be strongly in favor.
If I lived in a sovereign nation where 80% of the people were pirating material regularly, I would certainly try to get the issue tossed onto a ballot or referendum to just get it legalized outright.
You must be kidding. Providing internet service is insanely high margin once the lines are in place. I seriously doubt they are planning to drop new fibre or any other high capital infrastructure investments. I'm sure they will be riding on mostly existing infrastructure, especially the last mile.
These are a bunch of network techs, so they do have some clue what the costs will be.
Not only that, but I'm sure for some of them, they will actually make money on the side from the service. Have a trunk link down, oh well, me and my buddy Jim will fix that right up at our normal contractor rate (without our boss taking a cut!). Not only that, but I am sure they will be buying a lot of second hand hardware that a corporation would never buy just because it is used and donating spares from their various work projects. Their infrastructure will be incredibly cheap. Not to mention, that they will be able to crowdsource a lot of the design and implementation. Usually, I consider crowdsourcing a way of making a crap situation crappier, but it works great when you are working with a group of experts in their field.
What's that? The boss wants to upgrade the ASA 5500's at the South East branch, awesome. Hey guys, I just got a new gateway cluster for the secondary trunk line.
Networking hardware is incredibly cheap if you take the time to shop around. Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 businesses just grab it at over inflated prices from CDW or whatever other rip-off artist they usually deal with.
There are two long term challenges which they will have to face that could come back to destroy everything in about 8-15 years. First is any kind of crowdsourcing turning into politics or committees. Second is letting too many people do their own thing with the network with no documentation or oversight and creating a horrific mess waiting to collapse. Strong, well considered leadership solves both of these issues very easily.
Taco, I respect you, but I think your idea of practical is not the same as the direction these guys are heading.
Also, if Valve wants to include an Android environment and make a Valve section of Android games, guess what, it's easier to run ARM transcoding on x86 by miles than it is to try AAA titles on ARM even with 16 Tegra grade GPUs.
Part of me really hopes Intel will see the light and open source libhoudini and related libraries for ARM transcoding on x86.
Mid 60's cars are the best electrical systems to work on. Though, I do tend to prefer to throw on the one wire HEI distributor and single wire internally regulated alternator from later years for even greater ease. Not to mention, inside all three or so wire connectors you have for lights, what do we have, regular, industry standard size spade terminals. Just so easy.
One of the top issues in the used car market isn't that cars aren't lasting mechanically. Many are mechanically good for 15+ years with minimal maintenance. Most issues I am running into are burned out electrical parts and bad wires. This is especially frustrating because the bad wiring issues are due to poor insulation quality, yet stuff 40 years old are still soft, pliable and without cracks. Same issue since the automotive industry jumped on lead-free solder. It's less the complexity and more the construction quality that has made ECU's a huge cash cow in the 5-8 year old car market. And here is another hint: a hall effect or other inductive pickup (Cam / Crank sensors) which is internally solid state by nature, should be UNBREAKABLE. If a solid hunk of plastic with x number of turns of insulated copper magnet wire wound around a soft ferrite core burns out, somebody either designed or built something WRONG.
Specs are 15 mile range and 21 MPH top speed. So we're not talking about a kit car, but a low end electric go kart. Seriously, the environment would be much better served if you went with an Ariel Atom since you're going to be killing the efficiency of everyone behind you or the inevitable towing when it only goes 13 miles on a charge after 6 months. I assure you, you will be much cooler and have a lot more fun to boot.
I tried to design a system like that once, but during the development I had a dream where I was dressed in a Sun God robe surrounded by naked women chanting and throwing pickles at me. That brought and end to it all.
Let me venture a guess and say that you were disappointed when you couldn't figure out which channel "Ow My Balls," was playing.
Seriously, pressing the device selection button first has been standard operation for universal remotes for over 15-20 years. Get over your spoon feeding self already.
Proclaiming your title engineer lets me know right off what kind of half-wit you must represent. Your kind of engineer is exactly why we don't have nicer things this day and age. It never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to teach concepts of a user interface, interaction, and intuitiveness to a redneck automotive mechanic with barely a GED than it is to teach the same to most Masters or PhD in engineering.
Also, the interface of which you speak already exists. It's called GoogleTV and it was a huge flop in the market because nobody needed another device to control their DVR, TV, and AV receiver. Before that, the Microsoft Homestation prototype was exceptionally intuitive and easy to use and pioneered the ability to record and stream video from the device to other devices over the internet in 2001... long before the slingbox. You could even loan your recordings (!!!) to other users.
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I'm actually trying to speak to a much larger and broader range of social problems and inconsistency from which such behavior stems.
Your point is very valid; however, your ending opens the door to more problems.
The word tolerate (and tolerance) is a double edged sword. It's a bit silly to say we should be intolerant of one subgroup due to their opinions, but we should encourage groups with exclusionary principals like the NBSE, SWE and NOW. The Klan has every bit as much right to peaceably assemble and hold their opinions as the aforementioned groups. They have that right and not to be discriminated against for it according to our current society's rules. That doesn't mean that all of this line drawing from every side helps society as a greater whole.
The very concept that women need to be treated a particular way is a large part of our society's gender issues. Currently they are a protected class, both socially and legally, thus making them "more equal." At the same time, the PC crowd wants women treated "equally," and that there is some kind of magical gulf in treatment society has yet to cross.
We can either treat everyone with blind equality or we can accept that people are different for a variety of reasons, and as such, deserving of differing treatment. As long as we continue the masquerade that both propositions are fair and should be observed, we're going to be stuck in this middle ground where people are scared to make up their own minds or exercise their own opinions.
Consider the social stigma regarding infidelity. Here are the two common stereotypes: A married man who commits adultery is a scumbag, his wife should divorce him and take the kids. A woman who commits adultery had a moment of weakness or was driven to it by her husband and should be forgiven. If the man demands a divorce in the latter situation, the woman will in most cases still get custody of children.
Hacker culture is no more misogynistic and rife with sexual harassment than any other industry. The difference is the social skills of many in the hacker culture create a higher profile for the community. Some guy with say, an MBA in finance, is more likely to target an attack to a coworker who isn't going to say anything or might even be flattered by the immaturity, due to their greater breadth of social experience. The hacker is going to spam their childish desires and opinions to anyone in earshot and end up offending someone.
It's similar to the anecdotal, yet frequently true, difference between sexual harassment and flirting: Does the girl find you attractive?
Also, hacker culture is more heavily in favor of libertarian standards of free speech. This means many expect the right to say what they want without consequence.
If anything the largest part of the problem stems from women stereotyping technologically proficient males. Techies are lumped together with construction workers, plumbers, and Don Draper.
Given Java's current direction (Oracle) and all of the hell we (the IT industry) have been put through already with Java's false promises of WORA, shouldn't most of our efforts be towards abandoning Java entirely. Frankly, code translators, like Facebook's PHP to C translator seem like better investments in code performance and portability (I am aware portability is not their goal, but it is an interesting side effect).
Get the industry to rally behind a consistent language which has strong RAD functionality (Python?) and find better ways to translate and optimize the slow chunks of code during interactive compilation and profiling. IDEs and compilers need to move the direction of content creation tools like Dreamweaver, where the developer can see the results interactively and instantly on a variety of platforms via virtualization. How great would it be if following a multi-platform compilation run, a LibreOffice developer could see and interact with the results on Ubuntu, Windows, OSX, and Android all at the same time?
Running crap code on more interesting platforms does not fix the problems already there.
Forget 15cm on a side. Using commodity >$400 27" 2560x1440 LCD panels from Korea, you are looking at 0.23mm resolution at 33cm x 58cm roughly. Still more than 4x the resolution of FDM kit, massively larger workspace, speed (for arbitrary complexity and large format), and scalability for duplicates.
If you wanted to build a commercial grade kit, a 4k projector would make huge parts at excellent resolution or medium sized parts at absurd resolution. Total investment would still be sub $35k. That is double the cost of HP's FDM printer (that makes stuff under 20cm on a side), but less than many large format CNC machines or material removal style 3d printers.
Sorry, but we're about 6 months from near-UV / visible light curable resin destroying the FMD models. If you use an iPad Retina display as the light source, you only have mechanical jitter in the Z-axis (the boom / base you are raising) and a resolution of .078 mm (the best enthusiast FDM stuff is around .5 mm). You only need one stepper motor and mechanical assembly. You also reduce the amount of custom electronics to drive the head assembly and x & y axis stepper motors.
Currently, Junior Veloso is using DLP projectors to get the light intensity needed (and .05 mm resolution), but an LCD panel with closer to UV LEDs under it would be an even cheaper route. With filters removed on an LCD you have (arbitrarily assigned axes) X-axis at the dot pitch, Y-axis at 1/3 dot pitch, and Z-axis at your stepper motor / mechanical limit.
Lithographic techniques with light curable resins are vastly more scalable as well. Within the work area, there is no increase in time except for the Z-axis height. This means making dozens of duplicates in one pass for small objects or one large piece in the same time span. Further, the software process to turn the 3D model into 2D slices is exceptionally trivial compared with CAM type instructions to move 3 axes and run a pump head. Technically you could farm the object render with a LCD panel, laptop LCD, or tablet out to an auto-refresh webpage with black and white image slices with the stepper motor running on a timer synced with the page refresh...
What kind of VPN throughput am I looking at here? I need new technology to replace my aging Palo Alto gateway cluster. I've begged the emissary enough already for better throughput and removal of Pah-wraiths from my network. The Cisco has yet to respond.
Speaking of IPSEC VPN, can we get a portable configuration standard already? It's hard enough getting interoperability from devices from the same vendor (I'm looking vaguely in your direction Juniper)...
Apple tablets are made with the same shoddy parts. Every statistical analysis of the iPod and iPhone has shown equal failure rates due to defect as the rest of the consumer electronics market, excluding HDD based iPods which were significantly higher than other consumer portables. The iPad hasn't been out long enough for the number gathers to have anything significant yet as far as internal parts failures. Several consumer advocacy groups have shown significantly though that poor design decisions until the iPhone 4 and iPad 3 have contributed to a high screen damage rate among iDevices not seen in other portables.
The Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and Nook Color are durable as well. All three take a standing fall vastly better than any model iPad with respect to damage and repairs costs.
$500 + apps + vendor lock in / ecosystem + 3/4G (for many) is a perfectly good price for the upper 25% consumer incomes in the US. I already addressed this.
For the other 50% of the consumer market with a disposable income sufficient to invest in small electronics, it becomes a more significant issue for a device which is for entertainment. For them, $200-300 for a device they will need to replace every 12-24 months (similar cycle required for all iDevices) is significantly more reasonable and leaves room for a better array of apps and services with which to take advantage of the device. Consider the number of people who bought the Kindle Fire for $200 and promptly spent $50-200 on e-books within the first 6 months of ownership. For the bottom 25%, it's not a viable option for those with the wisdom to manage their finances.
It's called the Apple cycle for a reason....
I'm thinking about taking some spare cash and putting a ridiculous short option on Apple stock for the next 12-18 months. Only part that makes it high risk is the capricious nature of jurists in Apples' many lawsuits and their currently health cash reserves. Might be 24-36 months until we are looking at the desperate Apple of the 90's again, but it will happen.
Exactly why I picked up a HP Slate 500 for $350 when I got the chance. Few people understand what a killer app OneNote is.
I eagerly await the Surface Pro. It will be THE game changer in the corporate world, if not a significant segment of the consumer one. I can't help but laugh my ass off at every person with a functioning laptop or tablet, who is so woefully ignorant as to buy an ultrabook, Macbook Air, or iPad 3 since the Surface Pro was announced.
Even the cheap Chinese knock-offs aren't really a race to the bottom, though it would be nice if they were more open to updates the way PC OSes are (update issues are really just an Android problem overall). It really comes down to compare the computing power of this tablet against a $500-700 desktop and a $400-600 laptop. The tablet has 1/10 the processing power and capabilities. The tablet further has a slower input system, though touch / multitouch allows unique interaction. Most of that delta is overcome by the portability, battery life, and custom APIs designed to maximize functional value.
All these factors signal to consumer that the devices should in fact be very inexpensive. For each corresponding major component, CPU, RAM, video, LCD, storage, and battery, a tablets parts cost is roughly 1/6-1/2 the same parts in a sub $500 laptop. Again, more signals to informed consumers that the tablet should be a significantly less expensive device.
There has been no race to the bottom in the PC market. It has entirely been a race to provide products which best balance consumer needs. The fact that for 3 out of 5 consumers, price is the highest priority, should only indicate how much consumers desire computing as a commodity market.
Bear in mind that 30 years ago, this was a balance sheet expense few if any were willing to have on their family or individual budget. You can't have wages stagnate for dozens of years at a time and expect consumers to have a pile of cash to spend on new shiny things they got by without just fine a few years ago.
Apple's success has only been in convincing an affluent class with significant disposable income that a limited use consumption toy is worth $500-900 as a status symbol. The fact is we have a large population of people who earn in the upper 25% income range who think they are average everyday middle class. You should hear the stories mortgage lawyers get from people with an income of $200k / yr wanting federal help to refinance their mortgage. There are 28 million homes in the US with incomes over $90k / yr most of whom think they are middle class (upper 25% to which I previously referred). Perhaps in the limited mercantile sense middle class, but they are not the average for the population.
The other issue the other 75% of the US population (and probably what, 90-95% of the world) see with getting into the various tablet ecosystems is the continual pressure to buy various consumption objects. People hate Pay-Per-View on cable, so why would they want it in their tablets. Some products in those ecosystems can be considered semi-durable goods such as e-books, music, and similar. Other are exceptionally limited disposable goods, such as subscriptions to media, and apps which may or may not continue to work and be updated. Unlike the perception surrounding the PC, where most things you put in the storage device are your property (perception, not EULA), the Walled Gardens destroy this retained value. Even on Craigslist, a used laptop with COA and proper licensing for Windows 7, Office 2010 and other software has greater value in the market than one with no software installed. It has been a particular point I have tried to make on several occasions regarding the resale value and lack of first doctrine rights regarding e-books and their pricing relative to physical copies. As I understand it, the EU is working on establishing first doctrine rights across the board for software and downloaded media, consistent with consumer demand for retained value and ownership.
Fierce price competition is not a sign of no market, it is the ultimate sign of informed capitalism.
Odd, I've used Shrewsoft on a few vendor's firewalls and run into all manner of incompatibilities. I suppose once you figure out all the quirks for a given device, you would be solid to deploy elsewhere.
On the small scale, I would probably opt for an OpenVPN setup, perhaps on a VM hosted on the base server for insulation. It's easier to setup a fresh server and client than shrewsoft's client in my experience.
DES has been well known for vulnerabilities for some time. I don't know of many businesses using MS PPTP for remote VPN because it is usually cheaper and easier to just purchase licenses from their firewall / gateway vendor. Certainly no company with strong crypto needs such as HIPAA, PCI, and similar compliance are using anything but dedicated VPN appliances with AES or similar based encryption. Heck, most of those have moved to 2-factor authentication and are using at least TLS 1.0 / SSL 3.0 at layer 4.
Exactly THIS. The way higher levels of math are currently taught and in particular the lack of true relation to practical problem solving is a huge issue.
I have seen a few professors and textbooks which remedy this great problem. Probably at the top of the list is Morris Kline. His Mathematics for Non-mathematicians (or Liberal Arts Majors) textbook, its language, and approach are a perfect template for better broad discourse on mathematics to non-STEM majors. Even his Calculus text better relates the importance of concept and understanding far better than the current popular books by Thomas, Tan, and Stewart (though the latter two books are both mere knockoffs of Thomas' book, made popular to obsolete Thomas' skus). Consider that I am a STEM major, in Physics, and all of my courses within the department manage to relate skills and knowledge in vastly more useful manners and with little abstract ambiguity.
Calculus and Chemistry seem to be the most popular courses Universities use as "weeding" courses. The observed problem every time is teaching in overly abstract terms and with little relation to useful problem solving approaches in the subject matter. Anytime a professor offers an outside of class time "problem solving" session shortly prior to a test, they are letting you know they failed to teach all of the problem solving skills and especially never related practical knowledge. While I can appreciate the dedication it demonstrates on the part of the professor, they should be doing their jobs and putting it in the classroom to begin with.
Indeed, I for a moment thought this was related to a space elevator concept. I recall hearing a couple Formula SAE students discussing the down force being well in excess of vehicle weight at 60 mph, and started thinking about that as well.
Why is it though that the burden of change is on men. Don't we teach our children to ignore name calling and such. Should not the burden be EQUALLY applied such that women must become more tolerant as much as men change their behavior.
I'm lucky, every place I've worked, the women I worked with and female friends I made all enjoyed mock chauvinism and would toss zingers right back. Most found the current state of corporate law and policy insulting to their strength as women. A few even complained regularly of not being able to find men who were educated, successful, and dominant in their dating.
I would love to see TV properly exploited as a medium to explore superheroes, other comic book lore, and similar storytelling. Unfortunately, with the exception of Heroes and Buffy, the TV networks have largely been unwilling to put the money and risk into giving any comic book styled work the necessary support.
Good, long term plot based writing only appeals to the networks when they have a LOT of extra capital to throw around with development. One only needs to look to Joss Whedon's other works such as Dollhouse and Firefly to see plot lines and characters bearing strong parallels to the comic book format to see what I am talking about.
The networks are pretty much a lost cause at this point. It seems TNT, USA, Showtime, and HBO are the only ones willing to incubate a variety of shows in which plot arcs matter as much as the stand alone episode. NBC gets the closest to an honorable mention since they were willing to back Heroes and The West Wing years ago (different genre, but Sorkin's storytelling is very similar to comics / graphic novels in every TV show he touches).
Even SyFy (what a terrible restyling) is dropping it's cache of long development series, Eureka and Warehouse 13 in favor of yet more illiterate programming.
I like the number juggling. They say it has curtailed infringement by 1/2 but still 40% continue to pirate. Ok, let's consider the math for a moment. If 80% of your population is pirating to begin with, than it stands to reason that piracy should be legal as the common law votes tend to be strongly in favor.
If I lived in a sovereign nation where 80% of the people were pirating material regularly, I would certainly try to get the issue tossed onto a ballot or referendum to just get it legalized outright.
You must be kidding. Providing internet service is insanely high margin once the lines are in place. I seriously doubt they are planning to drop new fibre or any other high capital infrastructure investments. I'm sure they will be riding on mostly existing infrastructure, especially the last mile.
These are a bunch of network techs, so they do have some clue what the costs will be.
Not only that, but I'm sure for some of them, they will actually make money on the side from the service. Have a trunk link down, oh well, me and my buddy Jim will fix that right up at our normal contractor rate (without our boss taking a cut!). Not only that, but I am sure they will be buying a lot of second hand hardware that a corporation would never buy just because it is used and donating spares from their various work projects. Their infrastructure will be incredibly cheap. Not to mention, that they will be able to crowdsource a lot of the design and implementation. Usually, I consider crowdsourcing a way of making a crap situation crappier, but it works great when you are working with a group of experts in their field.
What's that? The boss wants to upgrade the ASA 5500's at the South East branch, awesome. Hey guys, I just got a new gateway cluster for the secondary trunk line.
Networking hardware is incredibly cheap if you take the time to shop around. Unfortunately, 9 out of 10 businesses just grab it at over inflated prices from CDW or whatever other rip-off artist they usually deal with.
There are two long term challenges which they will have to face that could come back to destroy everything in about 8-15 years. First is any kind of crowdsourcing turning into politics or committees. Second is letting too many people do their own thing with the network with no documentation or oversight and creating a horrific mess waiting to collapse. Strong, well considered leadership solves both of these issues very easily.
Taco, I respect you, but I think your idea of practical is not the same as the direction these guys are heading.
Also, if Valve wants to include an Android environment and make a Valve section of Android games, guess what, it's easier to run ARM transcoding on x86 by miles than it is to try AAA titles on ARM even with 16 Tegra grade GPUs.
Part of me really hopes Intel will see the light and open source libhoudini and related libraries for ARM transcoding on x86.
So much THIS.
Mid 60's cars are the best electrical systems to work on. Though, I do tend to prefer to throw on the one wire HEI distributor and single wire internally regulated alternator from later years for even greater ease. Not to mention, inside all three or so wire connectors you have for lights, what do we have, regular, industry standard size spade terminals. Just so easy.
One of the top issues in the used car market isn't that cars aren't lasting mechanically. Many are mechanically good for 15+ years with minimal maintenance. Most issues I am running into are burned out electrical parts and bad wires. This is especially frustrating because the bad wiring issues are due to poor insulation quality, yet stuff 40 years old are still soft, pliable and without cracks. Same issue since the automotive industry jumped on lead-free solder. It's less the complexity and more the construction quality that has made ECU's a huge cash cow in the 5-8 year old car market. And here is another hint: a hall effect or other inductive pickup (Cam / Crank sensors) which is internally solid state by nature, should be UNBREAKABLE. If a solid hunk of plastic with x number of turns of insulated copper magnet wire wound around a soft ferrite core burns out, somebody either designed or built something WRONG.
Specs are 15 mile range and 21 MPH top speed. So we're not talking about a kit car, but a low end electric go kart. Seriously, the environment would be much better served if you went with an Ariel Atom since you're going to be killing the efficiency of everyone behind you or the inevitable towing when it only goes 13 miles on a charge after 6 months. I assure you, you will be much cooler and have a lot more fun to boot.
I tried to design a system like that once, but during the development I had a dream where I was dressed in a Sun God robe surrounded by naked women chanting and throwing pickles at me. That brought and end to it all.
Let me venture a guess and say that you were disappointed when you couldn't figure out which channel "Ow My Balls," was playing.
Seriously, pressing the device selection button first has been standard operation for universal remotes for over 15-20 years. Get over your spoon feeding self already.
Proclaiming your title engineer lets me know right off what kind of half-wit you must represent. Your kind of engineer is exactly why we don't have nicer things this day and age. It never ceases to amaze me how much easier it is to teach concepts of a user interface, interaction, and intuitiveness to a redneck automotive mechanic with barely a GED than it is to teach the same to most Masters or PhD in engineering.
Also, the interface of which you speak already exists. It's called GoogleTV and it was a huge flop in the market because nobody needed another device to control their DVR, TV, and AV receiver. Before that, the Microsoft Homestation prototype was exceptionally intuitive and easy to use and pioneered the ability to record and stream video from the device to other devices over the internet in 2001... long before the slingbox. You could even loan your recordings (!!!) to other users.