I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.
Really? The lack of control? If I had successfully transported 300,000 people per flight every day for a year without an accident, using a new fleet of super-giant airplanes, and then I built an airplane even bigger that could hold 2,000,000 people, would you take a flight on that new super-super-giant airplane? Or would you stand back and tell everyone getting on that plane that they are morons while you go get on a smaller plane?
It's not any scarier dying on a plane than it is dying in a car, at least for the individual The difference is how many other people are dying simultaneously, all of whom were relying on the pilot not to be flying drunk, or relying on a small team of maintenance guys to put back all the nuts they took off the engine during the last tune-up. Lack of control actually ends up getting people dead or injured in many situations in the real world.
These cloud services are developed and run by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. That in itself is a perfectly valid reason to be uncomfortable with hosted services.
Or maybe that old saying about not putting all of one's eggs in one basket actually had a point. Maybe the laws of the universe we are currently inhabiting declare that if an entire country grows crops of the exact same strain of potatoes, a blight could come along and wipe out all those crops at the same time, causing a million people to starve to death. This is one of the basic mathematical laws of the universe. Diversity and decentralization equals greater safety for the system as a whole. The "system" can be any set of things that are interconnected, whether it's people, plants, animals, cities, or an entire planet's ecosystem.
Mass hosted solutions like Gmail will never be as safe as local solutions for the simple fact that they are essentially monolithic organisms. They may be more reliable in terms of total up-time versus a local solution, but having an entire country, or an entire planet of businesses and individuals relying on a single solution that could EVER fail for ANY amount of time is idiotic, because eventually it will fail. No matter how robust their backups and redundancy strategies are, they are still consolidating the failure points from a million different individual failure points that can only take down a local system to a few failure points which can each take down a huge swath of subsystems.
Worse still, the software behind it all is the same, so the system as a whole becomes the equivalent of an entire country growing the same crop strain, despite any redundancies built into the network. One major problem in the software can take down every node in the system, creating a universal failure. This doesn't need to be proven, it just happened! The fact that this specific failure only lasted an hour or two is irrelevant and ignores the big picture. The failure itself proves that the entire system is vulnerable. It may be safe for a subset of the population to rely on such a solution, but it is very unsafe for the entire population to blithely ignore such problems and continue jumping on the bandwagon. The higher the percentage of people who are using a hosted solution, the worse it will be when the cloud eventually goes down.
In case my point isn't clear enough, what I'm trying to point out is that it is not dangerous for an individual business to rely on cloud-hosted solutions. What is dangerous is the attitude that it will be fine if ALL businesses rely on the same cloud-hosted service. That is the attitude that seems to be promoted here by everyone who doesn't think a Gmail outage is a big deal, just because it isn't a (relatively) big deal for their own company versus a local solution that used to cost a lot more.
BTW, Your comments and assumptions about the Slashdot audience make you just as idiotic if not more so than the folks you are trying to belittle. While there are people on every forum on the web who seem to think they know everything, I don't believe that is the root of most of the comments here, or anywhere else for that matter. In this particular instance there are very valid reasons that I've just explained for continuing to distrust hosted services for now and far into the future. Until someone creates a set of hosted services that operate just like a natural ecological system, with various different population strains of software widely scattered through the physical world, doing the same jobs but each local variant uniquely resistant to different attacks or configuration problems because of their differences, and each segment able to effect repairs on itself, there will never be a reason for the entire world as a whole to collectively put complete trust in hosted solutions.
Oddly enough, we have a situation right now which closely matches what I've just described. It's called "local hosting". Each node is largely unique (except for the large monoculture of Microsoft-based software, which often causes problems where multiple nodes can infect each other). Local nodes can fail and then repair themselves without really affecting other nodes. Strange how well this works. Now all we need to do is keep improving quality and interoperability of the individual strains of software that runs on each local node, while continuing to maintain the separation of nodes...
There. Fixed that for ya. That should have been the entirety if your post.
This article/post contains the most ridiculous joke-like conglomeration of pointlessly obscure buzzword phrases that I have ever seen in my ENTIRE LIFE. This includes all of the actual jokes I've heard where someone has purposefully tried to put together as many idiotic buzzwords as possible for comedic effect. This post tops them all and the poster is actually serious and works in an apparently serious section of the computing industry where other people apparently use these terms without being a member of the cast of SNL.
Talk about insanity. There is no possible way that any group of people using this kind of nonsense language could create reliable software. Good LORD, people. Get a GRIP and get back to proper software design and coding. And take an English class.
To parent: If your organization is successfully producing quality software at a decent clip it is only because you have good coders and a workable organizational structure that adapts to long-term needs, like changing the project lead every couple of months and keeping task lists short and manageable. You don't make decent code merely by using this monkey language of nonsense words to describe your process. We have a perfectly good set of millions of words in the English language, many of which are applicable to describing any form of process methodology you care to use. There is no need for the waving of hands and making up of new words out of thin air. Leave that to the flim-flam artists you are in grave danger of becoming confused with.
Let's be clear on this situation: HDD makers, instead of making larger HDDs would rather spin the numbers to make them appear larger instead of actually being larger.
The fact that there are 8 bits to a byte should have been a clue for the creators of computer technology to avoid abusing an established set of standard naming prefixes to mean something they can't possibly mean. The only reason you are mad at hard drive manufacturers is because by converting to the established standard metric system definitions of K/M/G/T/P, they just happen to now be able to sell slightly smaller hard drive capacities at each level. If the original byte was 12 bits instead of 8 bits*, they would be losing ground and would now have to create larger hard drive capacities in order to market using the world-wide standard base-10 meanings of kilo/mega/giga/tera/peta. Sure, they like the fact that they can sell new drives as terabyte drives when they are slightly smaller than tebibyte drives, but that doesn't make them wrong for conforming to the standard base-10 metric definition of "tera".
It isn't some brand new marketing ploy, either. They've all been doing it for years. The time to get mad about this was about a decade ago, or more. If you want them to be forced to market using base-2 notation so you know the 2TiB drive you're formatting is actually going to hold close to 2TiB worth of files, that's different, and maybe that's a good idea. Just don't pretend that you're in the right when you want them to stick with the incorrect meaning of TB just so that you don't end up with a 1.5TiB capacity drive after formatting a 2TB drive.
Conforming to the actual established standard meaning of those base-10 metric prefixes is what every computer device that deals with bits instead of bytes should have been doing for decades, rather than clinging to the ridiculous warping of those standard prefixes into base-2 meanings that never actually made sense in the first place. I dare say that the original problem was created by marketing, the very people you are ranting about, so they could sell computer stuff with simple KB/MB sizes on the tag even though everything was in unfriendly binary sizes. There is no reason whatsoever to allow the computer industry to continue abusing the base-10 prefixes for all time just because it became a standard abuse for a few decades. The reason metric sizing and naming is technically superior to other measurement systems for so many technical purposes is that there is a set-in-stone standard meaning for every size and prefix that ALWAYS means the same thing no matter what you are measuring. Computer science is not special enough to warrant the abuse and confusion of those meanings in the long term.
Mods, please note that, although parent rant is rather disjointed and confusing, it is arguing for keeping the improper definition of the metric prefixes just because it is the common usage. Parent contains nothing that would justify an "insightful" mod. Please re-read parent and mod appropriately.
* Yes, I know a 12-bit byte makes no sense, it's just a thought experiment to illustrate a point.
So lighten up, it wasn't ill-intentioned. And most of the apocrypha are either crazy or pointless (in my own estimation as well as the church's), so meh anyway. Hell, I dunno how most of revelations didn't get thrown out as well, it's pretty whack too.
That's kind of the point, and yes it was absolutely done to consolidate the building power of the early church. They couldn't have things floating around that pointed out how ridiculous the rest of the Bible is, or flat out said that other sections of the Bible were wrong. The church suppressed anything that didn't correspond to what they wanted people to believe. If people could see how crazy and pointless the apocrypha books were they'd start questioning the non-apocrypha books more as well.
Lucinda Bassett, Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. You may have seen her/them advertising a program on late night infomercials called "Attacking Anxiety and Depression". You can find the program on some BitTorrent sites if you don't want to pay to order the course. I have listened to some of their tapes and they have some remarkably down-to-earth and simple methods that could help just about any person suffering from anxiety.
Basically you're taught how to listen to what your inner voice is telling you all day long, weed out the bad things it says and replace them with positive things. We all have an inner voice that is constantly there in the background, influencing our state of mind and our decision-making processes. Normally we don't pay any specific attention to what it's saying. In people who have high anxiety, they soon realize when they pay attention that they are constantly telling themselves stories about how something bad might happen or other negative thoughts that keep them from being able to relax and enjoy life. In people with a positive outlook, the only real difference is that they are always internally telling themselves that something positive will happen, so they make choices to go ahead and do new things even when they aren't certain how it will turn out. If things do go wrong, they tell themselves that things will go better next time. The person with anxiety will instead tell themselves when something goes wrong that the same thing or worse will happen the next time, so they convince themselves to never try doing new things.
It seems simple, and it is. Listen to the tapes and stories of people just like yourself for a few hours and you'll realize that you aren't so unusual and that there is a way to change your own mind from within, without requiring bucketfuls of pills. Lots of people think exactly the way you do and it is completely curable. Seriously, this could help you if you really take the time to go through the simple process they outline. The human mind is an amazingly resilient and pliable thing.
Also, watch Dog Whisperer on National Geographic, and get a dog. If you watch that show for a while you'll realize as I did that dogs are like mirrors, reflecting all of our mental and personality flaws back at us. If you know how to read the signs like Cesar Milan does, your dog can help you become a more mentally balanced person. That guy is about as Zen as Zen gets.
Also, don't feel too bad that you can't connect with a lot of the people you meet. Most people, by definition, aren't really worth connecting with. As the old saying goes, if you have one true friend in life and a thousand "acquaintances", count yourself lucky. The sort of people who would turn their collective backs on you over a rumor are not worth the time it takes to have a passing thought. Once you get some mental balance back you will easily find people with whom you can truly connect. There won't be very many, but you'll find eventually that that's OK.
If it were me, I'd use Macbook Pros running OS X, with VMWare Fusion with unity mode turned on allowing me to run Windows (or Linux, come to that) applications, as though they were native apps. (Don't skimp on RAM). That way the machines can be shared by users who prefer different apps to do what they do, and you can take advantage of either the OS X level stuff or the underlying unix to do backups.
This is exactly what I'm doing for my users and so far it is working out pretty well. The newest MacBook Pros support up to 8GB of RAM and Windows XP or Vista runs great in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine. The nice thing about this kind of setup is that it's so easy to just ship out a new Mac with the standard drive image including the Windows virtual machine and all the necessary production software, so the only thing you need to worry about backing up is user data. If a machine is stolen or goes bad, just ship out a new one and have them restore their documents from a flash drive.
Backing up and restoring email is a major pain, so something that I highly recommend is setting up email services with some place like Mailtrust (now owned by Rackspace) or one of the other email providers that will provide large inboxes, IMAP support, and alternate SMTP ports. Mailtrust provides us with 10GB of space per user, so users don't have to delete mail from the server. On our server I disabled POP3 completely so the only option is IMAP which makes it dead simple to give each user an email account that they can access from webmail, any desktop email client and any portable device that supports IMAP (like the iPhone), all at the same time. Just make sure your users know that if they delete an email on one device it will delete it everywhere. That is, of course, the benefit of using IMAP. The IMAP mail server keeps each accessing device in sync with the others automatically.
The alternate SMTP ports are very helpful as well. A lot of places are starting to block port 25 to stop malware and spammers from using their SMTP servers without having a local ISP account. This breaks typical email clients so you need to use an alternate SMTP port (preferably with SSL encryption turned on) and a non-local SMTP server. Mailtrust provides us with the standard alternate port 587 as well as a couple of other ports to use. If none of them work your users can always fall back to the webmail interface, which happens to be one of the nicest and most functional interfaces I have seen for webmail. It even has drag-n-drop capability right in the browser. Sorry if this sounds like a plug for Mailtrust, I just happen to like their services. There are a few others that provide similar services.
Mailtrust provides a feature called BCC archiving that is capable of silently forwarding a copy of every incoming and/or outgoing email to a separate account. This can be a simple way to restore something after someone inadvertently purges an important email. More severe cases can be restored from the main backups at the email service provider for a nominal fee. Basically you end up with multiple levels of email backups that you don't even have to think about after the initial setup.
For backing up contact lists automatically there is a service called Plaxo that I use for some of my users. Just bypass and turn off all the excessive email notifications in both directions, then install the Plaxo plugin for Outlook, Thunderbird or Mac OS X. It can automatically synchronize your address books between multiple platforms.
Another plug for Mailtrust, they have a plugin that will synchronize your address book with their server as long as you are using either Outlook or an iPhone (the iPhone app is called Noteworthy Sync). Both plugins are based on some open source project called Funambol. Oh, I forgot, the plugin is also available for Blackberries (*gag*). So what your users add to their address books on their computers will show up also in Mailtrust's webmail interface and on their portable devices, and vice versa,
It is fairly well established by now, if one studies psychology and anthropology, that the human brain is not just culturally but neurologically capable of designating any other social group outside of the self as "them", and that anyone who is "them" instead of "us" is automatically NOT HUMAN. There is a reason that so many cultural self-names throughout history all over the world translate literally to "the people". If you are not "us" then you are not human, and obviously you can be not just killed but killed and eaten.
It should then come as no surprise to anyone who really looks at anthropology that cannibalism has been common (under certain circumstances) in nearly all cultures and still occurs to this day (under certain circumstances). It will always happen whenever people allow themselves to get into that neurological state of mind where they designate any other group as "them" instead of "us", because the idea of "them" really means to our brains quite literally "not human like us".
It should therefore be encouraged that all levels of social groups starting with the the self and moving outward should consider all humans in existence as "us" to help keep things like cannibalism from occurring in the future. People who are capable of viewing any other humans as "them" should be looked upon with great suspicion, since they are fully capable of doing anything they feel like. Unfortunately this describes 99.999% of humanity and probably always will. So watch your back. Anytime you do anything that could trigger the "us vs. them" neurological response in another social grouping, you are in grave danger.
None of this is intended as a joke in any way. I am being very literal. Any human being you ever meet is fully capable of picking up a heavy stick and beating you to death without a second thought, given the right set of neurological inputs. It is only through extensive life-long social conditioning that this happens as seldom as it does today. Which is to say, not quite as often as it used to happen.
There is a second neurological function of the human brain that explains why it is always so difficult to obtain evidence to prove atrocities like cannibalism. Our brains basically have two different modes. In one mode, we can go out and kill our neighbor and eat his liver (under the right circumstances), and in the other mode we act like modern, civilized human beings. The two modes never meet, and the more primitive mode knows that the civilized mode thinks things like cannibalism are bad, so we automatically hide things from the civilized mode of our brains (or the civilized mode has coping mechanisms that allow us to clean up evidence of bad things the primitive mode has done, without noticing what we see). The human brain is chock full of this kind of disconnect between what we do or witness and what we remember. Especially when it has to do with something we did ourselves.
This kind of behavior has been witnessed and documented in pretty much every culture. People commit unimaginable atrocities during one time period (like a war) and then when things calm down they all act like they've always been civilized people and never really did anything wrong (or at least find it difficult to comprehend how they committed the atrocities). We only find things like cannibalism "impossible" today because we somehow manage to keep ourselves in civilized brain mode most of the time these days.
We've fooled ourselves into thinking that primitive brain mode has disappeared, but anyone who actually studies human behavior will notice that the primitive brain mode still exists in every single human being alive today and can come out any moment for any reason. Ted Bundy? Charles Manson? Their primitive brain modes were just a little more dominant than in most of us.
Unfortunately it's not going to be so easy to get rid of the primitive brain mode. Throughout history it has been a survival trait that allowed one group to go out and kill off its neighbors and take over their territory, or to su
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot.
For 25 YEARS we knew where things were in the menu system that was in use since 1984. The standard toolbars were nearly identical for a couple of decades also, and they didn't move around so we always knew where the toolbar icons were without thinking about it.
In contrast, the ribbon only shows a small subset of icons at any one time, and we have to keep jumping around between ribbons in order to reach the icons that we need to use, which is a big waste of time compared to the old workflow with toolbars and menus. Worse is the fact that many of the new locations of things don't make any logical sense based on our 25 YEARS of experience with previous versions of Office, so we have to waste a huge amount of time learning the new setup.
Bottom line, the ribbons don't work well unless you happen to think exactly like the designers of the ribbons. Even so, the ribbons would be fine except for the fact that we are not allowed to fallback to the familiar toolbars and menus since the menus have been hidden and reorganized and the old toolbars have been completely stripped out. They took away the tools that made sense to us and gave us new tools that don't make sense to us, without giving any of us a choice.
They took a quarter CENTURY of user experience and threw it out the window. And you blame us for hating the ribbon? Wouldn't you be frustrated if you bought a new car and it had a trackpad instead of a steering wheel, and there was no option to install a traditional steering wheel to use while you learn the new interface?
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
A day? I've spent a YEAR, and so have many other people I know, and we still hate it. You just happen to like it because you can see some sort of logic behind it. Many of us cannot see any usefulness to the way it is set up. We hate the way that it constantly hides things from us. We hate the fact that each set of buttons is different and quite often the set that we need is not the one that is visible. It's really quite annoying.
This is NOT one of those cases where the new way is really significantly better than the old way. It's not nearly better enough to justify forcing EVERYONE to conform to the new interface immediately while completely removing the old interface. A massive and forced interface change is a perfectly good reason to hate a new interface after you've spent as much as two thirds of your life doing things the old way. Doesn't really matter if the new interface is better or not, it will always be frustrating to be FORCED to use it without the appropriate time and training necessary to use it efficiently.
If they had just allowed us to continue using the "classic" interface for at least one version, I don't think anyone would have had any problem with the ribbon at all.
Get a larger payment up front for your next book, and then forget about it.
What content creators need to realize is that, since it is no longer difficult to copy and propagate information, the only things that really hold significant value for most people are physical objects that can't be easily duplicated in digital form. When pitching a book, for instance, you need to ask for a larger initial payment from the publisher to compensate for the fact that once the content is released into the world it can be easily pirated and sales may be reduced compared to a similar book published 30 years ago. Today publishing content is like pouring water from a pitcher into a sieve and expecting the water to stay inside the sieve.
In the past the physical world limited the extent to which people could obtain information easily, like an entire perfect copy of a book. That is no longer the case and never will be again unless the Internet is destroyed or we all become cyborgs with government-controlled copy protection chips in our heads. Society will have to find some other way to adjust to the new highly portable nature of information.
Of course real commercial pirates that are openly selling your book for a profit can always be referred to the proper authorities because they are clearly breaking the law and taking money that is rightfully yours. But casual piracy, the free sharing if information by individuals, is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle without taking extreme measures that would make the world a very unpleasant place to live in.
The other aspect of this is that probably 9 out of 10 of those casual pirates who may be copying an ebook would never have paid for it if they couldn't obtain it for free, so there is really not that much loss of income from anyone but the real commercial pirates.
Simply put, the Internet has changed everything and content creators will have to adjust eventually. I'm sure that will mean we will miss out on a lot of new content that never gets created because the creator can't find a way to profit from it adequately. A new balance will eventually be established by society when/if the general public sees a real problem with missing out on something due to piracy. Perhaps we will eventually subsidize content creators through federal taxes or something.
I think we'll probably have to learn to live without certain things like special effects based movies costing almost half a billion dollars to produce, but I doubt that will be a big loss. They'll just have to find cheaper ways to make movies so they can sell the movies for a fraction of current prices and still make a profit. I have noticed that people really don't mind paying for content as long as they perceive the price as being reasonable, and as long as it is easier to obtain the content legally than it is to pirate it.
Unfortunately the biggest problem that content creators are facing is that they have in most cases made it far too onerous on the user to obtain content legally, and it does end up being not just cheaper but far less of a headache to obtain and use the pirated versions of things. It's really not always about the price.
It's funny how people like you always think that 100% of the "respect" is supposed to come from the victim of authority rather than from the authority figure. The fact that a police officer has to deal with difficult people every day is not my problem. It's their goddamn job to deal with difficult people without losing their professional detachment. They're supposed to be trained for it. If they can't handle it without becoming a troll they should take a vacation or quit law enforcement.
Being physically or orally "belligerent" is one thing (which could actually result in a crime being committed against the officer). But being a mildly impolite smart-ass is so far from illegal that it should never, ever result in an officer going off the deep end and arresting you in handcuffs. That's just unacceptable in a supposedly free society.
Respect is earned, jackass. Authority figures do not deserve automatic fawning and ass-kissing based solely on the fact that they have been put in authority positions. If they require automatic fawning and ass-kissing from you to avoid arrest, that is abuse of their authority over you.
How many times does it have to be said that merely being "difficult" is not against any law? Cooperation isn't even legally required unless an actual crime has been committed and you are obstructing the enforcement of the law. If no crime has been committed then "lack of cooperation" is not an arrestable offense in and of itself. Period.
You obviously don't understand law enforcement mentality at all. Anyone with a badge, even if they are just a mall rent-a-cop, will immediately get the support of any police officer in almost any situation. Calling the cops first was also my thought, and it probably would have made some small difference, but probably not nearly as much as you think. Law enforcement people perceive themselves as being some kind of brotherhood that has to support each other no matter what because they are always getting into situations where they could be injured or killed, and the only people they can turn to for help in those situations are other law enforcement people. They have some valid reasons for thinking this way, they usually just take it way too far and err on the side of extreme caution and overreaction, and abuse of power.
They are most certainly NOT a neutral party, that's for damn sure. I don't know where the hell you got that idea. They are most definitely "on the same team".
I also don't know why you think it's acceptable to have to apologize profusely for doing nothing wrong and being illegally detained by private company security guards. You shouldn't have to suck up to authority just to have your rights protected. Being polite is all that should ever be required.
About 10 years ago, at a local Target, they were refilling the ATM machine. I was also fascinated with the inside of the ATM, but the security guard didn't allow me to go anywhere near to the machine to see the inside. In fact, the security guard politely, but firmly asked me to leave, otherwise, he told me that he would take me away.
So, based upon what I have experienced, it's no surprise that they arrested somebody for taking the photo.
That's exactly what this ATM guard should have done is ask the photographer to stop taking pictures and back off while they worked on the machine. And that's where it should have, and probably would have, ended. But they didn't do anything of the sort. Instead, they thought they had the right to stay quiet and then detain and interrogate a citizen for taking a photo of an activity they were conducting in public view. These guys had no right to do what they did and neither did the police officer who arrested the photographer in the end.
You may not be surprised, but you should still be outraged by this kind of behavior by law enforcement and pseudo law enforcement personnel.
The real problem with situations like this is that it stems directly from the ubiquitous self-righteous attitude of law enforcement types that whatever they do is right, even when it's obviously wrong. When you don't cooperate with them they actually get angry because they are so used to getting what they want. (Just like on TV, which is why I hate most cop shows because they actually seem to celebrate this rampant and pointless emotionalism in law enforcement as if getting angry proves that a cop is dedicated and honorable and helps him do his job.)
That's unfortunately how they are trained from the beginning of their careers and it only gets worse as they associate with other law enforcement personnel. There is no humility, there is no emotional detachment. They perceive themselves as being in charge rather than just being tools to enforce the impartial laws of a society. You dare to assert your rights and suddenly you're a suspicious "DB" and a physical threat and you must be "taught a lesson". Can't let the peasants get out of hand, after all.
This attitude is of course quite common throughout history and throughout the world among law enforcement communities. They do have some legitimate reasons for being so cautious, but they all too often simply go too far in their reactions, and it serves no constructive purpose either for them or for the citizens they are protecting. They react the way they do because it's just part of human nature, but such reactions should always be tempered with restraint based on constant training to counteract that aspect of human nature. Any overreactions should be responded to in kind by higher authorities in order to help law enforcement personnel maintain balance and perspective. It's not healthy, either for the individual or for society as a whole, to allow this kind of behavior to go unquestioned. Law enforcement can't do their jobs effectively if they constantly look down on society and society constantly looks back at them with fear and hatred.
Law enforcement personnel have no restraint, no concept of emotional detachment, no perspective, no insight into what they are doing to a human being... and they get away with it constantly. That is what makes me sick to my stomach. They always get away with it, just like all the schoolyard bullies that never get stopped by the teachers standing just 20 feet away. They never learn a damn thing about their behavior being despicable and unacceptable, until someone forces them to stop.
Rather than simply doing their jobs, they constantly mess with people for no reason, and many people have come to expect it and plan for it by not doing anything to irritate any law enforcement personnel. People think they're being smart by putting themselves and their rights in a box to protect themselves from the overzealous police. That's not smart, that's just cowardice. The whole "u desrv it d00d ur a DB" attitude that so many people always show in these situations is nothing but cowardice. It's the inability to realize that basic human decency and logic are important enough to fight for. It's hiding from the fact that the law enforcement personnel are the ones doing something wrong, and they are the ones who need to be reprimanded and corrected.
In my school years I had constant trouble with bullies. But do you know what really fills me with hatred today? Thinking about all the people who always let them get away with it. All the teachers and administrators who never did a damn thing about the bullying no matter how many times I complained or asked for help. All the people who never took me seriously, who thought it was no big deal getting pounded at recess every day. It isn't the bullies that bother me now, they're just idiots that went on with their lives. Some of them learned to be good people, some didn't. I don't have to deal with them anymore. No, it's the people who should have known better and had the power to do something, to say something, and didn't. Those are the betrayers of trust, the destroyers of justice, and
I haven't heard of the Drobo unit itself having a slow transfer rate. Some people even use them as boot drives. But the DroboShare, the separate unit that turns it into a NAS, has some major issues. I have personally experienced some unbelievably slow transfer rates from a DroboShare unit. We're talking dial-up Internet speeds, kilobytes per second over the local gigabit network from the DroboShare, which is supposed to have a gigabit connection also. No exaggeration. That doesn't work well when you're trying to preview hundreds of 12-megapixel digital photos in a folder, for instance.
Direct connection to the Drobo itself seems to work great and sharing the drive from a computer directly connected to the drive should also work well. I really don't know how they screwed up the DroboShare so badly.
uTorrent is the way to go if you want something that starts up fast and only runs on Windows (unless that's changed). Azureus is the ONLY way to go if you want something that is cross platform, supports dozens of different plugins and gives you complete control over automatically managing dozens of different torrent downloads and uploads. Once you get past just downloading a few torrents here and there it becomes a major pain to manage everything long-term. Yes, it's a little top-heavy but if you turn off the icky new "Vuze" interface it's fine on any decent hardware and there is simply nothing else available that has the kind of options needed to efficiently manage a large number of different torrents.
I've got mine set up to automatically move files into different folders based on whether the download is incomplete, complete (seeding), or removed, so that I know when I can safely move the files to an archive location without interrupting the seeding. There's also a plugin that can put things in different folders based on categories. For a while I had a web interface set up, so that I could start a new torrent downloading on my home server which was always running, and I didn't need to run Azureus at all on my laptop which was going to work with me every day.
There really isn't anything else available with the power of Azureus once you learn how to use it. Believe me, I've looked several times for a good replacement but everything else was far too simple to even compare to Azureus. Including uTorrent.
Perhaps they created marriage to stop the spread of STDs. Maybe, back in the days, they tried the free sex approach and discovered that syphilis and others were a bit of a bitch. A free-sex society don't work quite as well if you don't have prevention like condoms available.
Though as you mentioned, could also be that rulers insisted on monogamy from their mates to ensure that any offspring came from the right father. Always hard to confirm parentage if you don't have access to at least a basic lab.
Actually, the way I understand it there have been societies who were very promiscuous and had very little trouble with STDs. That is, until they were forced by Christian morals to become less promiscuous. Because the STD viruses now had much more difficulty propagating to new hosts, they became more virulent and started causing terrible illnesses, whereas before when everyone was doing everyone the viruses never had difficulty finding new hosts and never needed to be particularly virulent in order to propagate to new hosts and survive, so they never caused any noticeable illness.
So no, I don't think that marriage was created to stop the spread of horrible STDs. Social behavior in humans is something that has been going on for millions of years, only recently have modern humans become self-aware enough to "try" new ways of behaving. I believe what you term "free sex", otherwise known as rampant promiscuity, was the norm for a good long while, up until the advent of modern societies and organized religions.
Amusingly, most people forget that in the Old Testament there is plenty of non-monogamous behavior, namely polygamy (multiple wives). It's only in the New Testament era and henceforth that monogamy became the norm.
Don't underestimate aesthetics and ease-of-use. And the fact that you can clone any Mac onto a Firewire or USB hard drive and instantly have a fully bootable backup of your computer. Or server, in this case. Even if there were no other advantages to Apple's hardware or software that would be a strong argument in favor of using a Mac in a home or small office environment where there may not be an IT person available to repair a PC server.
As you've pointed out you can run alternate operating systems if you have some issue with OS X. Even Windows. But if you run Windows in a virtual machine like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, you then have the ability to not only have snapshot backups of the virtual machine, but you can still clone the entire Mac hard drive which of course includes the virtual machine setup.
The value of having a server system that can be backed and, and more importantly _restored_, by someone without an IT degree can be an immeasurable advantage in many situations. Neither Windows nor Linux can hold a candle to how easy it is to back up a Mac. Did I mention you can do the clone while the system is running? Without expensive, complex "enterprise" backup software? Yeah. Anybody can do it. Literally. And by cloning you are preserving not just the user data like files on a file server, you're preserving the entire setup of the system that would take many hours to reproduce on a new system.
Not only that but the clone is bootable not just on the original system but on any Mac. I can clone a Mac Pro to an external drive and then boot a Mac mini from that same hard drive. Or a MacBook Pro. You'll want to make sure your system updates are current before booting a much newer machine, but that's about the only caveat. Think about the implications of that. If you're using a Mac Pro as an office server and it goes down, as long as you have at least one other Mac available and a recent clone, you'll be able to get that "server" back up and running in a matter of minutes, while you send in the real server for repairs. That is not an exaggeration. Minutes. Not hours, not days.
Higher specc'd? Not really. Just bigger with a cheaper desktop hard drive and standard video card. The high-end Mac mini is $799, I said $999. That's not the same price at all. Even if it sold for more than that there is definitely a market of people who are thus far resistant to migrating away from their precious slightly-flexible PCs to very inflexible Mac consumer hardware. All they really want is a real video card (upgradeable), a real hard drive (upgradeable), and the ability to upgrade the RAM without a struggle.
Getting back to aesthetics, even at twice or thrice the height of the Mac mini this imaginary Mac would still be more attractive and compact (for its class) than anything else on the market. Most people find aesthetics and ease-of-use more important than the more technical merits we geeks pay attention to. I've come to realize they have a perfect right to see things that way. The best specs in the world are worthless to someone who can't figure out how to use the device.
Indeed, that's exactly what people want to do is upgrade the RAM and hard drive. Right now you still have a choice between A) a computer with a built-in (i.e. non-replaceable) screen, a desktop-size fast hard drive with plenty of space, easily accessible RAM slots, and a decent graphics card, or B) a tiny computer with a much slower notebook-size hard drive, RAM slots and small hard drive that are a royal pain to upgrade, and not-so-great integrated graphics.
What a large swath of middle-of-the-road customers and long-time PC owners really want is a Mac with a decent video card (possibly upgradeable), a desktop-size fast hard drive (easily upgradeable), and RAM slots that are also easy to get to. To be quite realistic they would only have to about double the height of the Mac mini in order to fit in a full upgradeable graphics card, desktop-size hard drive and easily accessible RAM slots, and it would still be an amazingly compact but much more powerful and flexible computer.
They could even stick in one or two ExpressCard slots at that size for additional expandability of function without adding substantially to the size. Imagine a desktop machine that could share the same ExpressCards that you use with your mobile MacBook Pro system. A system like that would satisfy almost everyone who doesn't like the Mac mini's lack of expansion options and the iMac's built-in screen, and could be sold for a price in between the two, like $999 and up. It would rock the world and probably be more popular than either the iMac or Mac mini combined.
The form factor I've described would be a mind-bogglingly excellent little headless server for many homes and small businesses. It would also be a great media center, or basic gaming machine, or damn near anything that doesn't require the massive power of the Mac Pro.
For the life of me I can't fathom why they continue to ignore the mid-range consumer that wants flexibility without having to buy a Mac Pro. It would really be a hit and there really is a market for it. I think they just don't want to deal with supporting the technical problems that might arise from people expanding their systems. They want their more popular "consumer" items to be confined to a small number of configurations that are easier for AppleCare technicians to support.
I've never owned a laptop without buying spare batteries for it sooner or later. With a battery in the docking bay, you can swap the main battery without shutting down. (Too bad they don't build in a capacitor to run the laptop for 30 seconds while swapping batteries).
They don't need to do that anymore. They've implemented something called "Safe Sleep", i.e. hibernation. When the laptop goes to sleep it writes out the contents of RAM to the hard drive. If it loses power completely while it's asleep, like during a battery replacement, it will boot up just fine and reload the RAM contents from disk. And it actually works reliably.
You can download a preference pane called Hibernate to choose whether the system will just do sleep, sleep + safe sleep (hibernate), or just hibernate.
Plus, the batteries go bad after a couple years.
There will certainly be replacements available from third parties before that time arrives. Although these are supposed to last longer. Or is it just more cycles?
I would understand if there something to gain by not having a removable battery. But really, does it save any space at all? Usually the bottom of the battery is the exterior of the laptop, so it doesn't have to fit "inside."
I don't think it was about saving space as much as increasing the capacity of the battery. If I'm not mistaken the best the previous removable batteries could do was about 6 hours. By removing the thin but not negligible casing that the removable battery needs they were able to make the battery slightly larger without compromising the overall size of the laptop.
I don't usually make this kind of argument, but honestly if you have a need to own one of these and use it for an extended length of time while away from a power outlet I'd think you'd also be sitting in business class or first class where you'd have access to the airline power plug, and on land you'd be the kind of person who would have access to some sort of off-the-grid power generation capability under most circumstances. This doesn't seem like the machine to take backpacking down the Appalachians, for instance. So from a practical perspective it's fairly unlikely that anyone will ever need to use multiple batteries.
Why? Because there are just 13 screws to remove and they're all on the outside! Sounds like a lot but it's dead simple compared to every model that came before!
All previous generations of MacBook Pros, PowerBooks and iBooks required major surgery internally and the removal of dozens of different screws from different areas just to do something simple like a hard drive upgrade. MacBooks and the newest 15" MacBook Pro models have FINALLY changed that and made the hard drive accessible just by removing the battery. I was afraid that this new unibody 17" model was the last holdout and would still be a major pain to upgrade, but this changes everything.
Now I'm going to go buy one, whereas before seeing this I would have bought the 15" model just for the ability to easily upgrade the hard drive. This is truly major news, but it should have been all about the hard drive, not the battery that almost nobody will ever need to replace. The hard drive is something that almost everyone will eventually want to upgrade on this machine.
Simply awesome news. This really makes my day. I can't believe it's so easy to get inside it and upgrade everything. It's amazing how few items are in the breakout photo at the top of the page. A child could put it back together.
It's just like my father has always said to me. Every 20-30 years any particular bit of knowledge is "discovered" and it's almost never the first time. Many examples can be found of knowledge being repeatedly discovered and forgotten periodically sometimes dozens of times over decades or centuries. The only reason we've gotten this far now is because we've learned to record and reference information accurately.
I would also venture to point out that scientists did not just "discover" why the mako shark can swim so fast. They discovered that mako sharks can raise their scales to create the surface divots that _explain_ why they can swim so fast. We already knew decades ago why the pitted surface of a golf ball allows it to go so much further than a smooth surfaced ball of the same size and mass.
What gets me is how many boats today are still made with smooth hulls when we've technically known for so long that it isn't the ideal surface to minimize drag. A guy I know locally used to teach a class at the community college on how to make a kayak out of a light wooden frame covered by a rough linen/cotton cloth sealed with boiled linseed oil or something. He said those boats were faster in the water than any commercial plastic or fiberglass kayak. There had to be a reason for that.
Billions of gallons of fuel has been and is being wasted just battling surface tension. The same goes for airplanes and cars. It will take them another 20 years to "discover" that a bumpy-surface airplane or car is faster and/or more fuel efficient and actually start putting it into practical use.
You must be new to Michael Crichton's work. See also Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park, etc. All of them have a major deus ex machina component to their endings. (Technically, in Sphere, they remove themselves from relevance to the problem.)
The man knew how to write towards a climax damned well but has no idea how to resolve the story afterwards. Andromeda Strain is just one of the most jarring in that regard.
I think the point with most of the subject matter Crichton was writing about was that there isn't necessarily a nice pat ending to every story in the real world. There's a whole lot of creepy not-knowing or not having any control over how things progress. The future is nebulous and his endings seemed to follow that theme. It's up to the reader to ponder the sometimes infinite potential paths the story could take after that point.
I honestly don't know why they keep leaving the keyboard on the less useful default. That option has been there since at least Jaguar (10.2) as far as I know.
Hardware-wise I even recommend Macs these days to people who only intend to run Windows on it. The best part is that all the necessary drivers for all Boot Camp compatible Mac models are provided in each new Boot Camp driver CD. There is no PC hardware vendor that makes it easier to do an actual clean install of just Windows plus drivers. OEM restore disks leave most systems full of crappy OEM software that just fouls things up.
Whirlwind in a factory is a very apropos description of Microsoft's current design process. XP is beautiful compared to Vista. And have you seen the early screenshots of Windows 7? It's sad. Looks like a crappy knock-off of OS X, including the Dock! So, better get used to OS X even if you're sticking with Windows. LOL.
The fact that you even had that conversation is insane. The fact that until now, the majority of the electorate was on the side of those people is even more insane.
I am an American and I agree completely. It is really frightening that anyone ever thought in a modern day society that torture could be an acceptable practice, although I'm even more upset about the fact that people are ignorant enough to still believe it actually produces any valid, reliable results in terms of military intelligence. Profound ignorance makes baby Jesus cry.
But, I don't think America can claim a monopoly on people who think that way. Everywhere you go such people exist in various percentages throughout any society and rear their ugly heads in times of conflict. People in some parts of Africa, the Baltic states and various other parts of the world have been routinely massacring each other from time to time for thousands of years on up to the present day. A lot of different kinds of people have gone around massacring specific cultural groups like the Jews every now and then for thousands of years. It has been a fairly common practice everywhere on this planet if you look through the time line of history.
It varies by culture but there is something in the human brain that allows us to treat the group of people "over there" as if they aren't even human beings, unlike the group of people "over here". I'm sure any evolutionary anthropologist would quickly point out that it is probably a strong survival trait that has let many groups win out over others. It's only the interconnectedness of modern societies and the mixing of cultural influences that has slightly reduced the occurrence of this behavior in modern times.
There is definitely a culture of acceptance of stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, racism and religious fanaticism that has permeated this country from the beginning. That's nothing new. It just happened to gain the upper hand for a while this past decade. First there was the mild backlash against Democrats because Clinton was not well-liked at the end of his presidency, then there was 9/11. That single day froze the thinking processes of millions of not-quite-idiots, turning them into full-fledged la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you idiots who just wanted to feel safe again and helped the Republican party run rampant.
Fortunately the Republicans got so extreme with their stupidity that even most of the scared idiots seem to have noticed that something is really wrong with the way things have been done the last 8 years. The estimate now is that Obama, despite being black in a country that's still full of millions of racist idiots and staunch Republican supporters (funny how many isolated rural areas of the country, the strongholds of ignorance and religion, voted Republican), has won the popular vote by about 6%. Almost 53% of this country was smart enough to realize that voting for the Republican would not help the country. The Democrats were also given solid majorities in both the Senate and the House.
There is a chance, a small chance mind you, that good things will actually come of this and the next generation will be slightly less ignorant.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.
Really? The lack of control? If I had successfully transported 300,000 people per flight every day for a year without an accident, using a new fleet of super-giant airplanes, and then I built an airplane even bigger that could hold 2,000,000 people, would you take a flight on that new super-super-giant airplane? Or would you stand back and tell everyone getting on that plane that they are morons while you go get on a smaller plane?
It's not any scarier dying on a plane than it is dying in a car, at least for the individual The difference is how many other people are dying simultaneously, all of whom were relying on the pilot not to be flying drunk, or relying on a small team of maintenance guys to put back all the nuts they took off the engine during the last tune-up. Lack of control actually ends up getting people dead or injured in many situations in the real world.
These cloud services are developed and run by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. That in itself is a perfectly valid reason to be uncomfortable with hosted services.
Or maybe that old saying about not putting all of one's eggs in one basket actually had a point. Maybe the laws of the universe we are currently inhabiting declare that if an entire country grows crops of the exact same strain of potatoes, a blight could come along and wipe out all those crops at the same time, causing a million people to starve to death. This is one of the basic mathematical laws of the universe. Diversity and decentralization equals greater safety for the system as a whole. The "system" can be any set of things that are interconnected, whether it's people, plants, animals, cities, or an entire planet's ecosystem.
Mass hosted solutions like Gmail will never be as safe as local solutions for the simple fact that they are essentially monolithic organisms. They may be more reliable in terms of total up-time versus a local solution, but having an entire country, or an entire planet of businesses and individuals relying on a single solution that could EVER fail for ANY amount of time is idiotic, because eventually it will fail. No matter how robust their backups and redundancy strategies are, they are still consolidating the failure points from a million different individual failure points that can only take down a local system to a few failure points which can each take down a huge swath of subsystems.
Worse still, the software behind it all is the same, so the system as a whole becomes the equivalent of an entire country growing the same crop strain, despite any redundancies built into the network. One major problem in the software can take down every node in the system, creating a universal failure. This doesn't need to be proven, it just happened! The fact that this specific failure only lasted an hour or two is irrelevant and ignores the big picture. The failure itself proves that the entire system is vulnerable. It may be safe for a subset of the population to rely on such a solution, but it is very unsafe for the entire population to blithely ignore such problems and continue jumping on the bandwagon. The higher the percentage of people who are using a hosted solution, the worse it will be when the cloud eventually goes down.
In case my point isn't clear enough, what I'm trying to point out is that it is not dangerous for an individual business to rely on cloud-hosted solutions. What is dangerous is the attitude that it will be fine if ALL businesses rely on the same cloud-hosted service. That is the attitude that seems to be promoted here by everyone who doesn't think a Gmail outage is a big deal, just because it isn't a (relatively) big deal for their own company versus a local solution that used to cost a lot more.
BTW, Your comments and assumptions about the Slashdot audience make you just as idiotic if not more so than the folks you are trying to belittle. While there are people on every forum on the web who seem to think they know everything, I don't believe that is the root of most of the comments here, or anywhere else for that matter. In this particular instance there are very valid reasons that I've just explained for continuing to distrust hosted services for now and far into the future. Until someone creates a set of hosted services that operate just like a natural ecological system, with various different population strains of software widely scattered through the physical world, doing the same jobs but each local variant uniquely resistant to different attacks or configuration problems because of their differences, and each segment able to effect repairs on itself, there will never be a reason for the entire world as a whole to collectively put complete trust in hosted solutions.
Oddly enough, we have a situation right now which closely matches what I've just described. It's called "local hosting". Each node is largely unique (except for the large monoculture of Microsoft-based software, which often causes problems where multiple nodes can infect each other). Local nodes can fail and then repair themselves without really affecting other nodes. Strange how well this works. Now all we need to do is keep improving quality and interoperability of the individual strains of software that runs on each local node, while continuing to maintain the separation of nodes...
[T]his post is crazy off the wall nuts.
There. Fixed that for ya. That should have been the entirety if your post.
This article/post contains the most ridiculous joke-like conglomeration of pointlessly obscure buzzword phrases that I have ever seen in my ENTIRE LIFE. This includes all of the actual jokes I've heard where someone has purposefully tried to put together as many idiotic buzzwords as possible for comedic effect. This post tops them all and the poster is actually serious and works in an apparently serious section of the computing industry where other people apparently use these terms without being a member of the cast of SNL.
Talk about insanity. There is no possible way that any group of people using this kind of nonsense language could create reliable software. Good LORD, people. Get a GRIP and get back to proper software design and coding. And take an English class.
To parent: If your organization is successfully producing quality software at a decent clip it is only because you have good coders and a workable organizational structure that adapts to long-term needs, like changing the project lead every couple of months and keeping task lists short and manageable. You don't make decent code merely by using this monkey language of nonsense words to describe your process. We have a perfectly good set of millions of words in the English language, many of which are applicable to describing any form of process methodology you care to use. There is no need for the waving of hands and making up of new words out of thin air. Leave that to the flim-flam artists you are in grave danger of becoming confused with.
Let's be clear on this situation: HDD makers, instead of making larger HDDs would rather spin the numbers to make them appear larger instead of actually being larger.
The fact that there are 8 bits to a byte should have been a clue for the creators of computer technology to avoid abusing an established set of standard naming prefixes to mean something they can't possibly mean. The only reason you are mad at hard drive manufacturers is because by converting to the established standard metric system definitions of K/M/G/T/P, they just happen to now be able to sell slightly smaller hard drive capacities at each level. If the original byte was 12 bits instead of 8 bits*, they would be losing ground and would now have to create larger hard drive capacities in order to market using the world-wide standard base-10 meanings of kilo/mega/giga/tera/peta. Sure, they like the fact that they can sell new drives as terabyte drives when they are slightly smaller than tebibyte drives, but that doesn't make them wrong for conforming to the standard base-10 metric definition of "tera".
It isn't some brand new marketing ploy, either. They've all been doing it for years. The time to get mad about this was about a decade ago, or more. If you want them to be forced to market using base-2 notation so you know the 2TiB drive you're formatting is actually going to hold close to 2TiB worth of files, that's different, and maybe that's a good idea. Just don't pretend that you're in the right when you want them to stick with the incorrect meaning of TB just so that you don't end up with a 1.5TiB capacity drive after formatting a 2TB drive.
Conforming to the actual established standard meaning of those base-10 metric prefixes is what every computer device that deals with bits instead of bytes should have been doing for decades, rather than clinging to the ridiculous warping of those standard prefixes into base-2 meanings that never actually made sense in the first place. I dare say that the original problem was created by marketing, the very people you are ranting about, so they could sell computer stuff with simple KB/MB sizes on the tag even though everything was in unfriendly binary sizes. There is no reason whatsoever to allow the computer industry to continue abusing the base-10 prefixes for all time just because it became a standard abuse for a few decades. The reason metric sizing and naming is technically superior to other measurement systems for so many technical purposes is that there is a set-in-stone standard meaning for every size and prefix that ALWAYS means the same thing no matter what you are measuring. Computer science is not special enough to warrant the abuse and confusion of those meanings in the long term.
Mods, please note that, although parent rant is rather disjointed and confusing, it is arguing for keeping the improper definition of the metric prefixes just because it is the common usage. Parent contains nothing that would justify an "insightful" mod. Please re-read parent and mod appropriately.
* Yes, I know a 12-bit byte makes no sense, it's just a thought experiment to illustrate a point.
So lighten up, it wasn't ill-intentioned. And most of the apocrypha are either crazy or pointless (in my own estimation as well as the church's), so meh anyway. Hell, I dunno how most of revelations didn't get thrown out as well, it's pretty whack too.
That's kind of the point, and yes it was absolutely done to consolidate the building power of the early church. They couldn't have things floating around that pointed out how ridiculous the rest of the Bible is, or flat out said that other sections of the Bible were wrong. The church suppressed anything that didn't correspond to what they wanted people to believe. If people could see how crazy and pointless the apocrypha books were they'd start questioning the non-apocrypha books more as well.
Lucinda Bassett, Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. You may have seen her/them advertising a program on late night infomercials called "Attacking Anxiety and Depression". You can find the program on some BitTorrent sites if you don't want to pay to order the course. I have listened to some of their tapes and they have some remarkably down-to-earth and simple methods that could help just about any person suffering from anxiety.
Basically you're taught how to listen to what your inner voice is telling you all day long, weed out the bad things it says and replace them with positive things. We all have an inner voice that is constantly there in the background, influencing our state of mind and our decision-making processes. Normally we don't pay any specific attention to what it's saying. In people who have high anxiety, they soon realize when they pay attention that they are constantly telling themselves stories about how something bad might happen or other negative thoughts that keep them from being able to relax and enjoy life. In people with a positive outlook, the only real difference is that they are always internally telling themselves that something positive will happen, so they make choices to go ahead and do new things even when they aren't certain how it will turn out. If things do go wrong, they tell themselves that things will go better next time. The person with anxiety will instead tell themselves when something goes wrong that the same thing or worse will happen the next time, so they convince themselves to never try doing new things.
It seems simple, and it is. Listen to the tapes and stories of people just like yourself for a few hours and you'll realize that you aren't so unusual and that there is a way to change your own mind from within, without requiring bucketfuls of pills. Lots of people think exactly the way you do and it is completely curable. Seriously, this could help you if you really take the time to go through the simple process they outline. The human mind is an amazingly resilient and pliable thing.
Also, watch Dog Whisperer on National Geographic, and get a dog. If you watch that show for a while you'll realize as I did that dogs are like mirrors, reflecting all of our mental and personality flaws back at us. If you know how to read the signs like Cesar Milan does, your dog can help you become a more mentally balanced person. That guy is about as Zen as Zen gets.
Also, don't feel too bad that you can't connect with a lot of the people you meet. Most people, by definition, aren't really worth connecting with. As the old saying goes, if you have one true friend in life and a thousand "acquaintances", count yourself lucky. The sort of people who would turn their collective backs on you over a rumor are not worth the time it takes to have a passing thought. Once you get some mental balance back you will easily find people with whom you can truly connect. There won't be very many, but you'll find eventually that that's OK.
If it were me, I'd use Macbook Pros running OS X, with VMWare Fusion with unity mode turned on allowing me to run Windows (or Linux, come to that) applications, as though they were native apps. (Don't skimp on RAM). That way the machines can be shared by users who prefer different apps to do what they do, and you can take advantage of either the OS X level stuff or the underlying unix to do backups.
This is exactly what I'm doing for my users and so far it is working out pretty well. The newest MacBook Pros support up to 8GB of RAM and Windows XP or Vista runs great in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine. The nice thing about this kind of setup is that it's so easy to just ship out a new Mac with the standard drive image including the Windows virtual machine and all the necessary production software, so the only thing you need to worry about backing up is user data. If a machine is stolen or goes bad, just ship out a new one and have them restore their documents from a flash drive.
Backing up and restoring email is a major pain, so something that I highly recommend is setting up email services with some place like Mailtrust (now owned by Rackspace) or one of the other email providers that will provide large inboxes, IMAP support, and alternate SMTP ports. Mailtrust provides us with 10GB of space per user, so users don't have to delete mail from the server. On our server I disabled POP3 completely so the only option is IMAP which makes it dead simple to give each user an email account that they can access from webmail, any desktop email client and any portable device that supports IMAP (like the iPhone), all at the same time. Just make sure your users know that if they delete an email on one device it will delete it everywhere. That is, of course, the benefit of using IMAP. The IMAP mail server keeps each accessing device in sync with the others automatically.
The alternate SMTP ports are very helpful as well. A lot of places are starting to block port 25 to stop malware and spammers from using their SMTP servers without having a local ISP account. This breaks typical email clients so you need to use an alternate SMTP port (preferably with SSL encryption turned on) and a non-local SMTP server. Mailtrust provides us with the standard alternate port 587 as well as a couple of other ports to use. If none of them work your users can always fall back to the webmail interface, which happens to be one of the nicest and most functional interfaces I have seen for webmail. It even has drag-n-drop capability right in the browser. Sorry if this sounds like a plug for Mailtrust, I just happen to like their services. There are a few others that provide similar services.
Mailtrust provides a feature called BCC archiving that is capable of silently forwarding a copy of every incoming and/or outgoing email to a separate account. This can be a simple way to restore something after someone inadvertently purges an important email. More severe cases can be restored from the main backups at the email service provider for a nominal fee. Basically you end up with multiple levels of email backups that you don't even have to think about after the initial setup.
For backing up contact lists automatically there is a service called Plaxo that I use for some of my users. Just bypass and turn off all the excessive email notifications in both directions, then install the Plaxo plugin for Outlook, Thunderbird or Mac OS X. It can automatically synchronize your address books between multiple platforms.
Another plug for Mailtrust, they have a plugin that will synchronize your address book with their server as long as you are using either Outlook or an iPhone (the iPhone app is called Noteworthy Sync). Both plugins are based on some open source project called Funambol. Oh, I forgot, the plugin is also available for Blackberries (*gag*). So what your users add to their address books on their computers will show up also in Mailtrust's webmail interface and on their portable devices, and vice versa,
It is fairly well established by now, if one studies psychology and anthropology, that the human brain is not just culturally but neurologically capable of designating any other social group outside of the self as "them", and that anyone who is "them" instead of "us" is automatically NOT HUMAN. There is a reason that so many cultural self-names throughout history all over the world translate literally to "the people". If you are not "us" then you are not human, and obviously you can be not just killed but killed and eaten.
It should then come as no surprise to anyone who really looks at anthropology that cannibalism has been common (under certain circumstances) in nearly all cultures and still occurs to this day (under certain circumstances). It will always happen whenever people allow themselves to get into that neurological state of mind where they designate any other group as "them" instead of "us", because the idea of "them" really means to our brains quite literally "not human like us".
It should therefore be encouraged that all levels of social groups starting with the the self and moving outward should consider all humans in existence as "us" to help keep things like cannibalism from occurring in the future. People who are capable of viewing any other humans as "them" should be looked upon with great suspicion, since they are fully capable of doing anything they feel like. Unfortunately this describes 99.999% of humanity and probably always will. So watch your back. Anytime you do anything that could trigger the "us vs. them" neurological response in another social grouping, you are in grave danger.
None of this is intended as a joke in any way. I am being very literal. Any human being you ever meet is fully capable of picking up a heavy stick and beating you to death without a second thought, given the right set of neurological inputs. It is only through extensive life-long social conditioning that this happens as seldom as it does today. Which is to say, not quite as often as it used to happen.
There is a second neurological function of the human brain that explains why it is always so difficult to obtain evidence to prove atrocities like cannibalism. Our brains basically have two different modes. In one mode, we can go out and kill our neighbor and eat his liver (under the right circumstances), and in the other mode we act like modern, civilized human beings. The two modes never meet, and the more primitive mode knows that the civilized mode thinks things like cannibalism are bad, so we automatically hide things from the civilized mode of our brains (or the civilized mode has coping mechanisms that allow us to clean up evidence of bad things the primitive mode has done, without noticing what we see). The human brain is chock full of this kind of disconnect between what we do or witness and what we remember. Especially when it has to do with something we did ourselves.
This kind of behavior has been witnessed and documented in pretty much every culture. People commit unimaginable atrocities during one time period (like a war) and then when things calm down they all act like they've always been civilized people and never really did anything wrong (or at least find it difficult to comprehend how they committed the atrocities). We only find things like cannibalism "impossible" today because we somehow manage to keep ourselves in civilized brain mode most of the time these days.
We've fooled ourselves into thinking that primitive brain mode has disappeared, but anyone who actually studies human behavior will notice that the primitive brain mode still exists in every single human being alive today and can come out any moment for any reason. Ted Bundy? Charles Manson? Their primitive brain modes were just a little more dominant than in most of us.
Unfortunately it's not going to be so easy to get rid of the primitive brain mode. Throughout history it has been a survival trait that allowed one group to go out and kill off its neighbors and take over their territory, or to su
I really can't understand the hate for Ribbon on slashdot.
For 25 YEARS we knew where things were in the menu system that was in use since 1984. The standard toolbars were nearly identical for a couple of decades also, and they didn't move around so we always knew where the toolbar icons were without thinking about it.
In contrast, the ribbon only shows a small subset of icons at any one time, and we have to keep jumping around between ribbons in order to reach the icons that we need to use, which is a big waste of time compared to the old workflow with toolbars and menus. Worse is the fact that many of the new locations of things don't make any logical sense based on our 25 YEARS of experience with previous versions of Office, so we have to waste a huge amount of time learning the new setup.
Bottom line, the ribbons don't work well unless you happen to think exactly like the designers of the ribbons. Even so, the ribbons would be fine except for the fact that we are not allowed to fallback to the familiar toolbars and menus since the menus have been hidden and reorganized and the old toolbars have been completely stripped out. They took away the tools that made sense to us and gave us new tools that don't make sense to us, without giving any of us a choice.
They took a quarter CENTURY of user experience and threw it out the window. And you blame us for hating the ribbon? Wouldn't you be frustrated if you bought a new car and it had a trackpad instead of a steering wheel, and there was no option to install a traditional steering wheel to use while you learn the new interface?
So, if you've not spent much time with Ribbon, do yourself an favour and spend a day playing with it in Excel or Word. You'll learn to love it, and then you'll never want to go back to the 'old' way.
A day? I've spent a YEAR, and so have many other people I know, and we still hate it. You just happen to like it because you can see some sort of logic behind it. Many of us cannot see any usefulness to the way it is set up. We hate the way that it constantly hides things from us. We hate the fact that each set of buttons is different and quite often the set that we need is not the one that is visible. It's really quite annoying.
This is NOT one of those cases where the new way is really significantly better than the old way. It's not nearly better enough to justify forcing EVERYONE to conform to the new interface immediately while completely removing the old interface. A massive and forced interface change is a perfectly good reason to hate a new interface after you've spent as much as two thirds of your life doing things the old way. Doesn't really matter if the new interface is better or not, it will always be frustrating to be FORCED to use it without the appropriate time and training necessary to use it efficiently.
If they had just allowed us to continue using the "classic" interface for at least one version, I don't think anyone would have had any problem with the ribbon at all.
Get a larger payment up front for your next book, and then forget about it.
What content creators need to realize is that, since it is no longer difficult to copy and propagate information, the only things that really hold significant value for most people are physical objects that can't be easily duplicated in digital form. When pitching a book, for instance, you need to ask for a larger initial payment from the publisher to compensate for the fact that once the content is released into the world it can be easily pirated and sales may be reduced compared to a similar book published 30 years ago. Today publishing content is like pouring water from a pitcher into a sieve and expecting the water to stay inside the sieve.
In the past the physical world limited the extent to which people could obtain information easily, like an entire perfect copy of a book. That is no longer the case and never will be again unless the Internet is destroyed or we all become cyborgs with government-controlled copy protection chips in our heads. Society will have to find some other way to adjust to the new highly portable nature of information.
Of course real commercial pirates that are openly selling your book for a profit can always be referred to the proper authorities because they are clearly breaking the law and taking money that is rightfully yours. But casual piracy, the free sharing if information by individuals, is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle without taking extreme measures that would make the world a very unpleasant place to live in.
The other aspect of this is that probably 9 out of 10 of those casual pirates who may be copying an ebook would never have paid for it if they couldn't obtain it for free, so there is really not that much loss of income from anyone but the real commercial pirates.
Simply put, the Internet has changed everything and content creators will have to adjust eventually. I'm sure that will mean we will miss out on a lot of new content that never gets created because the creator can't find a way to profit from it adequately. A new balance will eventually be established by society when/if the general public sees a real problem with missing out on something due to piracy. Perhaps we will eventually subsidize content creators through federal taxes or something.
I think we'll probably have to learn to live without certain things like special effects based movies costing almost half a billion dollars to produce, but I doubt that will be a big loss. They'll just have to find cheaper ways to make movies so they can sell the movies for a fraction of current prices and still make a profit. I have noticed that people really don't mind paying for content as long as they perceive the price as being reasonable, and as long as it is easier to obtain the content legally than it is to pirate it.
Unfortunately the biggest problem that content creators are facing is that they have in most cases made it far too onerous on the user to obtain content legally, and it does end up being not just cheaper but far less of a headache to obtain and use the pirated versions of things. It's really not always about the price.
It's funny how people like you always think that 100% of the "respect" is supposed to come from the victim of authority rather than from the authority figure. The fact that a police officer has to deal with difficult people every day is not my problem. It's their goddamn job to deal with difficult people without losing their professional detachment. They're supposed to be trained for it. If they can't handle it without becoming a troll they should take a vacation or quit law enforcement.
Being physically or orally "belligerent" is one thing (which could actually result in a crime being committed against the officer). But being a mildly impolite smart-ass is so far from illegal that it should never, ever result in an officer going off the deep end and arresting you in handcuffs. That's just unacceptable in a supposedly free society.
Respect is earned, jackass. Authority figures do not deserve automatic fawning and ass-kissing based solely on the fact that they have been put in authority positions. If they require automatic fawning and ass-kissing from you to avoid arrest, that is abuse of their authority over you.
How many times does it have to be said that merely being "difficult" is not against any law? Cooperation isn't even legally required unless an actual crime has been committed and you are obstructing the enforcement of the law. If no crime has been committed then "lack of cooperation" is not an arrestable offense in and of itself. Period.
You obviously don't understand law enforcement mentality at all. Anyone with a badge, even if they are just a mall rent-a-cop, will immediately get the support of any police officer in almost any situation. Calling the cops first was also my thought, and it probably would have made some small difference, but probably not nearly as much as you think. Law enforcement people perceive themselves as being some kind of brotherhood that has to support each other no matter what because they are always getting into situations where they could be injured or killed, and the only people they can turn to for help in those situations are other law enforcement people. They have some valid reasons for thinking this way, they usually just take it way too far and err on the side of extreme caution and overreaction, and abuse of power.
They are most certainly NOT a neutral party, that's for damn sure. I don't know where the hell you got that idea. They are most definitely "on the same team".
I also don't know why you think it's acceptable to have to apologize profusely for doing nothing wrong and being illegally detained by private company security guards. You shouldn't have to suck up to authority just to have your rights protected. Being polite is all that should ever be required.
About 10 years ago, at a local Target, they were refilling the ATM machine. I was also fascinated with the inside of the ATM, but the security guard didn't allow me to go anywhere near to the machine to see the inside. In fact, the security guard politely, but firmly asked me to leave, otherwise, he told me that he would take me away.
So, based upon what I have experienced, it's no surprise that they arrested somebody for taking the photo.
That's exactly what this ATM guard should have done is ask the photographer to stop taking pictures and back off while they worked on the machine. And that's where it should have, and probably would have, ended. But they didn't do anything of the sort. Instead, they thought they had the right to stay quiet and then detain and interrogate a citizen for taking a photo of an activity they were conducting in public view. These guys had no right to do what they did and neither did the police officer who arrested the photographer in the end.
You may not be surprised, but you should still be outraged by this kind of behavior by law enforcement and pseudo law enforcement personnel.
The real problem with situations like this is that it stems directly from the ubiquitous self-righteous attitude of law enforcement types that whatever they do is right, even when it's obviously wrong. When you don't cooperate with them they actually get angry because they are so used to getting what they want. (Just like on TV, which is why I hate most cop shows because they actually seem to celebrate this rampant and pointless emotionalism in law enforcement as if getting angry proves that a cop is dedicated and honorable and helps him do his job.)
That's unfortunately how they are trained from the beginning of their careers and it only gets worse as they associate with other law enforcement personnel. There is no humility, there is no emotional detachment. They perceive themselves as being in charge rather than just being tools to enforce the impartial laws of a society. You dare to assert your rights and suddenly you're a suspicious "DB" and a physical threat and you must be "taught a lesson". Can't let the peasants get out of hand, after all.
This attitude is of course quite common throughout history and throughout the world among law enforcement communities. They do have some legitimate reasons for being so cautious, but they all too often simply go too far in their reactions, and it serves no constructive purpose either for them or for the citizens they are protecting. They react the way they do because it's just part of human nature, but such reactions should always be tempered with restraint based on constant training to counteract that aspect of human nature. Any overreactions should be responded to in kind by higher authorities in order to help law enforcement personnel maintain balance and perspective. It's not healthy, either for the individual or for society as a whole, to allow this kind of behavior to go unquestioned. Law enforcement can't do their jobs effectively if they constantly look down on society and society constantly looks back at them with fear and hatred.
Law enforcement personnel have no restraint, no concept of emotional detachment, no perspective, no insight into what they are doing to a human being... and they get away with it constantly. That is what makes me sick to my stomach. They always get away with it, just like all the schoolyard bullies that never get stopped by the teachers standing just 20 feet away. They never learn a damn thing about their behavior being despicable and unacceptable, until someone forces them to stop.
Rather than simply doing their jobs, they constantly mess with people for no reason, and many people have come to expect it and plan for it by not doing anything to irritate any law enforcement personnel. People think they're being smart by putting themselves and their rights in a box to protect themselves from the overzealous police. That's not smart, that's just cowardice. The whole "u desrv it d00d ur a DB" attitude that so many people always show in these situations is nothing but cowardice. It's the inability to realize that basic human decency and logic are important enough to fight for. It's hiding from the fact that the law enforcement personnel are the ones doing something wrong, and they are the ones who need to be reprimanded and corrected.
In my school years I had constant trouble with bullies. But do you know what really fills me with hatred today? Thinking about all the people who always let them get away with it. All the teachers and administrators who never did a damn thing about the bullying no matter how many times I complained or asked for help. All the people who never took me seriously, who thought it was no big deal getting pounded at recess every day. It isn't the bullies that bother me now, they're just idiots that went on with their lives. Some of them learned to be good people, some didn't. I don't have to deal with them anymore. No, it's the people who should have known better and had the power to do something, to say something, and didn't. Those are the betrayers of trust, the destroyers of justice, and
I haven't heard of the Drobo unit itself having a slow transfer rate. Some people even use them as boot drives. But the DroboShare, the separate unit that turns it into a NAS, has some major issues. I have personally experienced some unbelievably slow transfer rates from a DroboShare unit. We're talking dial-up Internet speeds, kilobytes per second over the local gigabit network from the DroboShare, which is supposed to have a gigabit connection also. No exaggeration. That doesn't work well when you're trying to preview hundreds of 12-megapixel digital photos in a folder, for instance.
Direct connection to the Drobo itself seems to work great and sharing the drive from a computer directly connected to the drive should also work well. I really don't know how they screwed up the DroboShare so badly.
uTorrent is the way to go if you want something that starts up fast and only runs on Windows (unless that's changed). Azureus is the ONLY way to go if you want something that is cross platform, supports dozens of different plugins and gives you complete control over automatically managing dozens of different torrent downloads and uploads. Once you get past just downloading a few torrents here and there it becomes a major pain to manage everything long-term. Yes, it's a little top-heavy but if you turn off the icky new "Vuze" interface it's fine on any decent hardware and there is simply nothing else available that has the kind of options needed to efficiently manage a large number of different torrents.
I've got mine set up to automatically move files into different folders based on whether the download is incomplete, complete (seeding), or removed, so that I know when I can safely move the files to an archive location without interrupting the seeding. There's also a plugin that can put things in different folders based on categories. For a while I had a web interface set up, so that I could start a new torrent downloading on my home server which was always running, and I didn't need to run Azureus at all on my laptop which was going to work with me every day.
There really isn't anything else available with the power of Azureus once you learn how to use it. Believe me, I've looked several times for a good replacement but everything else was far too simple to even compare to Azureus. Including uTorrent.
Perhaps they created marriage to stop the spread of STDs. Maybe, back in the days, they tried the free sex approach and discovered that syphilis and others were a bit of a bitch. A free-sex society don't work quite as well if you don't have prevention like condoms available.
Though as you mentioned, could also be that rulers insisted on monogamy from their mates to ensure that any offspring came from the right father. Always hard to confirm parentage if you don't have access to at least a basic lab.
Actually, the way I understand it there have been societies who were very promiscuous and had very little trouble with STDs. That is, until they were forced by Christian morals to become less promiscuous. Because the STD viruses now had much more difficulty propagating to new hosts, they became more virulent and started causing terrible illnesses, whereas before when everyone was doing everyone the viruses never had difficulty finding new hosts and never needed to be particularly virulent in order to propagate to new hosts and survive, so they never caused any noticeable illness.
So no, I don't think that marriage was created to stop the spread of horrible STDs. Social behavior in humans is something that has been going on for millions of years, only recently have modern humans become self-aware enough to "try" new ways of behaving. I believe what you term "free sex", otherwise known as rampant promiscuity, was the norm for a good long while, up until the advent of modern societies and organized religions.
Amusingly, most people forget that in the Old Testament there is plenty of non-monogamous behavior, namely polygamy (multiple wives). It's only in the New Testament era and henceforth that monogamy became the norm.
Don't underestimate aesthetics and ease-of-use. And the fact that you can clone any Mac onto a Firewire or USB hard drive and instantly have a fully bootable backup of your computer. Or server, in this case. Even if there were no other advantages to Apple's hardware or software that would be a strong argument in favor of using a Mac in a home or small office environment where there may not be an IT person available to repair a PC server.
As you've pointed out you can run alternate operating systems if you have some issue with OS X. Even Windows. But if you run Windows in a virtual machine like VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop, you then have the ability to not only have snapshot backups of the virtual machine, but you can still clone the entire Mac hard drive which of course includes the virtual machine setup.
The value of having a server system that can be backed and, and more importantly _restored_, by someone without an IT degree can be an immeasurable advantage in many situations. Neither Windows nor Linux can hold a candle to how easy it is to back up a Mac. Did I mention you can do the clone while the system is running? Without expensive, complex "enterprise" backup software? Yeah. Anybody can do it. Literally. And by cloning you are preserving not just the user data like files on a file server, you're preserving the entire setup of the system that would take many hours to reproduce on a new system.
Not only that but the clone is bootable not just on the original system but on any Mac. I can clone a Mac Pro to an external drive and then boot a Mac mini from that same hard drive. Or a MacBook Pro. You'll want to make sure your system updates are current before booting a much newer machine, but that's about the only caveat. Think about the implications of that. If you're using a Mac Pro as an office server and it goes down, as long as you have at least one other Mac available and a recent clone, you'll be able to get that "server" back up and running in a matter of minutes, while you send in the real server for repairs. That is not an exaggeration. Minutes. Not hours, not days.
Higher specc'd? Not really. Just bigger with a cheaper desktop hard drive and standard video card. The high-end Mac mini is $799, I said $999. That's not the same price at all. Even if it sold for more than that there is definitely a market of people who are thus far resistant to migrating away from their precious slightly-flexible PCs to very inflexible Mac consumer hardware. All they really want is a real video card (upgradeable), a real hard drive (upgradeable), and the ability to upgrade the RAM without a struggle.
Getting back to aesthetics, even at twice or thrice the height of the Mac mini this imaginary Mac would still be more attractive and compact (for its class) than anything else on the market. Most people find aesthetics and ease-of-use more important than the more technical merits we geeks pay attention to. I've come to realize they have a perfect right to see things that way. The best specs in the world are worthless to someone who can't figure out how to use the device.
Indeed, that's exactly what people want to do is upgrade the RAM and hard drive. Right now you still have a choice between A) a computer with a built-in (i.e. non-replaceable) screen, a desktop-size fast hard drive with plenty of space, easily accessible RAM slots, and a decent graphics card, or B) a tiny computer with a much slower notebook-size hard drive, RAM slots and small hard drive that are a royal pain to upgrade, and not-so-great integrated graphics.
What a large swath of middle-of-the-road customers and long-time PC owners really want is a Mac with a decent video card (possibly upgradeable), a desktop-size fast hard drive (easily upgradeable), and RAM slots that are also easy to get to. To be quite realistic they would only have to about double the height of the Mac mini in order to fit in a full upgradeable graphics card, desktop-size hard drive and easily accessible RAM slots, and it would still be an amazingly compact but much more powerful and flexible computer.
They could even stick in one or two ExpressCard slots at that size for additional expandability of function without adding substantially to the size. Imagine a desktop machine that could share the same ExpressCards that you use with your mobile MacBook Pro system. A system like that would satisfy almost everyone who doesn't like the Mac mini's lack of expansion options and the iMac's built-in screen, and could be sold for a price in between the two, like $999 and up. It would rock the world and probably be more popular than either the iMac or Mac mini combined.
The form factor I've described would be a mind-bogglingly excellent little headless server for many homes and small businesses. It would also be a great media center, or basic gaming machine, or damn near anything that doesn't require the massive power of the Mac Pro.
For the life of me I can't fathom why they continue to ignore the mid-range consumer that wants flexibility without having to buy a Mac Pro. It would really be a hit and there really is a market for it. I think they just don't want to deal with supporting the technical problems that might arise from people expanding their systems. They want their more popular "consumer" items to be confined to a small number of configurations that are easier for AppleCare technicians to support.
I've never owned a laptop without buying spare batteries for it sooner or later. With a battery in the docking bay, you can swap the main battery without shutting down. (Too bad they don't build in a capacitor to run the laptop for 30 seconds while swapping batteries).
They don't need to do that anymore. They've implemented something called "Safe Sleep", i.e. hibernation. When the laptop goes to sleep it writes out the contents of RAM to the hard drive. If it loses power completely while it's asleep, like during a battery replacement, it will boot up just fine and reload the RAM contents from disk. And it actually works reliably.
You can download a preference pane called Hibernate to choose whether the system will just do sleep, sleep + safe sleep (hibernate), or just hibernate.
Plus, the batteries go bad after a couple years.
There will certainly be replacements available from third parties before that time arrives. Although these are supposed to last longer. Or is it just more cycles?
I would understand if there something to gain by not having a removable battery. But really, does it save any space at all? Usually the bottom of the battery is the exterior of the laptop, so it doesn't have to fit "inside."
I don't think it was about saving space as much as increasing the capacity of the battery. If I'm not mistaken the best the previous removable batteries could do was about 6 hours. By removing the thin but not negligible casing that the removable battery needs they were able to make the battery slightly larger without compromising the overall size of the laptop.
I don't usually make this kind of argument, but honestly if you have a need to own one of these and use it for an extended length of time while away from a power outlet I'd think you'd also be sitting in business class or first class where you'd have access to the airline power plug, and on land you'd be the kind of person who would have access to some sort of off-the-grid power generation capability under most circumstances. This doesn't seem like the machine to take backpacking down the Appalachians, for instance. So from a practical perspective it's fairly unlikely that anyone will ever need to use multiple batteries.
Best news ever...
Why? Because there are just 13 screws to remove and they're all on the outside! Sounds like a lot but it's dead simple compared to every model that came before!
All previous generations of MacBook Pros, PowerBooks and iBooks required major surgery internally and the removal of dozens of different screws from different areas just to do something simple like a hard drive upgrade. MacBooks and the newest 15" MacBook Pro models have FINALLY changed that and made the hard drive accessible just by removing the battery. I was afraid that this new unibody 17" model was the last holdout and would still be a major pain to upgrade, but this changes everything.
Now I'm going to go buy one, whereas before seeing this I would have bought the 15" model just for the ability to easily upgrade the hard drive. This is truly major news, but it should have been all about the hard drive, not the battery that almost nobody will ever need to replace. The hard drive is something that almost everyone will eventually want to upgrade on this machine.
Simply awesome news. This really makes my day. I can't believe it's so easy to get inside it and upgrade everything. It's amazing how few items are in the breakout photo at the top of the page. A child could put it back together.
It's just like my father has always said to me. Every 20-30 years any particular bit of knowledge is "discovered" and it's almost never the first time. Many examples can be found of knowledge being repeatedly discovered and forgotten periodically sometimes dozens of times over decades or centuries. The only reason we've gotten this far now is because we've learned to record and reference information accurately.
I would also venture to point out that scientists did not just "discover" why the mako shark can swim so fast. They discovered that mako sharks can raise their scales to create the surface divots that _explain_ why they can swim so fast. We already knew decades ago why the pitted surface of a golf ball allows it to go so much further than a smooth surfaced ball of the same size and mass.
What gets me is how many boats today are still made with smooth hulls when we've technically known for so long that it isn't the ideal surface to minimize drag. A guy I know locally used to teach a class at the community college on how to make a kayak out of a light wooden frame covered by a rough linen/cotton cloth sealed with boiled linseed oil or something. He said those boats were faster in the water than any commercial plastic or fiberglass kayak. There had to be a reason for that.
Billions of gallons of fuel has been and is being wasted just battling surface tension. The same goes for airplanes and cars. It will take them another 20 years to "discover" that a bumpy-surface airplane or car is faster and/or more fuel efficient and actually start putting it into practical use.
You must be new to Michael Crichton's work. See also Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park, etc. All of them have a major deus ex machina component to their endings. (Technically, in Sphere, they remove themselves from relevance to the problem.)
The man knew how to write towards a climax damned well but has no idea how to resolve the story afterwards. Andromeda Strain is just one of the most jarring in that regard.
I think the point with most of the subject matter Crichton was writing about was that there isn't necessarily a nice pat ending to every story in the real world. There's a whole lot of creepy not-knowing or not having any control over how things progress. The future is nebulous and his endings seemed to follow that theme. It's up to the reader to ponder the sometimes infinite potential paths the story could take after that point.
I honestly don't know why they keep leaving the keyboard on the less useful default. That option has been there since at least Jaguar (10.2) as far as I know.
Hardware-wise I even recommend Macs these days to people who only intend to run Windows on it. The best part is that all the necessary drivers for all Boot Camp compatible Mac models are provided in each new Boot Camp driver CD. There is no PC hardware vendor that makes it easier to do an actual clean install of just Windows plus drivers. OEM restore disks leave most systems full of crappy OEM software that just fouls things up.
Whirlwind in a factory is a very apropos description of Microsoft's current design process. XP is beautiful compared to Vista. And have you seen the early screenshots of Windows 7? It's sad. Looks like a crappy knock-off of OS X, including the Dock! So, better get used to OS X even if you're sticking with Windows. LOL.
I'm out.
The fact that you even had that conversation is insane. The fact that until now, the majority of the electorate was on the side of those people is even more insane.
I am an American and I agree completely. It is really frightening that anyone ever thought in a modern day society that torture could be an acceptable practice, although I'm even more upset about the fact that people are ignorant enough to still believe it actually produces any valid, reliable results in terms of military intelligence. Profound ignorance makes baby Jesus cry.
But, I don't think America can claim a monopoly on people who think that way. Everywhere you go such people exist in various percentages throughout any society and rear their ugly heads in times of conflict. People in some parts of Africa, the Baltic states and various other parts of the world have been routinely massacring each other from time to time for thousands of years on up to the present day. A lot of different kinds of people have gone around massacring specific cultural groups like the Jews every now and then for thousands of years. It has been a fairly common practice everywhere on this planet if you look through the time line of history.
It varies by culture but there is something in the human brain that allows us to treat the group of people "over there" as if they aren't even human beings, unlike the group of people "over here". I'm sure any evolutionary anthropologist would quickly point out that it is probably a strong survival trait that has let many groups win out over others. It's only the interconnectedness of modern societies and the mixing of cultural influences that has slightly reduced the occurrence of this behavior in modern times.
There is definitely a culture of acceptance of stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, racism and religious fanaticism that has permeated this country from the beginning. That's nothing new. It just happened to gain the upper hand for a while this past decade. First there was the mild backlash against Democrats because Clinton was not well-liked at the end of his presidency, then there was 9/11. That single day froze the thinking processes of millions of not-quite-idiots, turning them into full-fledged la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you idiots who just wanted to feel safe again and helped the Republican party run rampant.
Fortunately the Republicans got so extreme with their stupidity that even most of the scared idiots seem to have noticed that something is really wrong with the way things have been done the last 8 years. The estimate now is that Obama, despite being black in a country that's still full of millions of racist idiots and staunch Republican supporters (funny how many isolated rural areas of the country, the strongholds of ignorance and religion, voted Republican), has won the popular vote by about 6%. Almost 53% of this country was smart enough to realize that voting for the Republican would not help the country. The Democrats were also given solid majorities in both the Senate and the House.
There is a chance, a small chance mind you, that good things will actually come of this and the next generation will be slightly less ignorant.