While you're right, the difference in performance between the more generic compiles and a tuned compile on the particular hardware OP is asking about are so small as to be negligible. While I appreciate Gentoo, in particular in desktop type environments the amount of work required to set it up is just not rewarded by any appreciable improvements in performance or stability, and with Gentoo in particular I have found that you need to stay on top of maintenance and updates pretty religiously or you're going to get behind and get in a very bad place.
I stopped compiling Gentoo a decade ago... when I was using really old hardware (circa 2000-2005) yeah it could make a marked difference but anything with a Core2Duo or newer is really not going to see much if any improvement.
And I have been a Google Voice user for years, which means I can SMS from the desktop Hangouts client quite happily and do so. Bonus; I can do it from any computer with a web browser and don't have to use a Mac for it. It's not just an Apple thing (Android user here)
I'm not sure I get the use case for this app... or indeed why Dell is limiting it to laptops built in 2018 and onward. There's absolutely no technical reason it can't run on older laptops. Plus, software like that has been available for years.
This is true, I have to admit. The operating system you use to get your work done is becoming more and more irrelevant because really less and less work is being done by the operating system, not just because of portable frameworks. But you're right; both of those facts are going to mean Linux is just going to be... there. Windows isn't going away anytime soon but Windows 10 really is probably the end of the road for major product releases of the platform.
Hell, I have a couple of VM's on my homelab that are running open source Windows apps on Ubuntu thanks to Mono... frameworks are more important than operating systems these days.
Yet a solution looking for a problem is exactly how a lot of these projects start, and while most fail there are some that take off.
So using your example of the half-million-dollar microscope; what if OEMs pick up on ReactOS and start using that as their base instead of Windows? They already have the Windows coders which is probably why they never made the investment to switch to Linux to run it. Or they felt the APIs weren't there or whatever. Well, if said OEM instead ports their code to ReactOS then they get to make minimal investment in change in order to run an open source and free operating system. If they're a good OEM they'll then put some money back into the project to ensure further development work.
Right now you're right; the current incarnation is a toy. It needs work, it needs development and it needs time to bake. Most important it needs developers and for a proper "face" to sell it to OEMs first and foremost as a new way to do things that requires minimal work on the OEM's part. That'll get us out of this hell of multi-million dollar CNC machines that run Windows 2000 (yes, it's WAY worse than just XP). ReactOS when a bit more mature might just be able to plug into these old machines and just run.
While there are some OEMs who prefer not to upgrade the OS because they want to sell a new machine, there are many more who actually just don't have the coding resources to port their code to a newer version of Windows that has all new security requirements and has probably dumped several APIs their code relied on. Or drivers... the stability of the driver APIs in Windows has not been good.
So for my theoretical OEM they can turn around and sell a new "'control unit" for the CNC machine running ReactOS for $50K (yes, quite likely) and they don't need to worry about licensing issues with Microsoft or worry too much about future upgrades as ReactOS is based on the idea that the API's will be static.
I pretty much came here to post the same thing. Also gen-X here and I never listen to the radio. There's just zero compelling content that catches my attention. With my car supporting Android Auto in my dash, it's also even easier to consume streaming media like Pandora or stuff on Google Play Music. Hell, my car has a navigation system I think I've used twice since I got it, the rest of the time I use Waze these days.
As others have noted here, the problem isn't radio as a technology; rather it's the fact that many (most?) of the radio channels in the USA are owned by the same company and they make sure to plan their content so it's as generic as you can possibly get. I'll bet I could probably turn on the radio today for the first time in about 5 years and quite likely sing along to many of the songs... not because they're the same old songs (though that's also a problem) but because so many of the more recent songs are generated by an algorithm that's easily predictable and thus I could make a damned good guess as to the next verse even halfway through the previous one. OK, I'm definitely overstating it a bit... but only a bit.
There's just zero compelling content. And it's not that I'm "old"... even the stations ostensibly targeted toward my age ("Best of the 80's, 90's and 2000's!!!!!") are all literally so homogenous that I can't tell them apart when switching channels. They probably all have the same playlist offset by an hour or so interspersed with some random guy talking or (more likely) ads.
I will admit that music discovery is a lot harder these days than it used to be. Maybe I'm just not into the right services but I find that discovering new bands and new styles of music that appeal to me tend to happen pretty randomly. Way back when, it was a matter of discovering a song on the radio and waiting until the song ended for the DJ to tell you who it was... then you would go out and buy an album. Yeah, that model is dead... but I do find it a little sad that I don't have many other "low impact" discovery methods these days... the ones we have all require you to sign up for some account, get some app on your phone that's buggy and crashes often (and probably doesn't work with Android Auto... the one place I most often listen to music being in the car) and then have all your listening habits tracked even if all you're doing is just trying to discover new music. Yeah, Pandora is one that does this and is technically OK for discovery... but many of the stations in Pandora are starting to get pretty generic too and as many others do, I tend to drift back toward the same "comfortable" channels when driving where it feels sometimes like the entire station is on one endless loop with nothing added in years.
As it stands, a few more independent radio stations wouldn't go amiss. You know... real ones that aren't syndicated crap. But the problem of course then becomes advertising, bringing in listeners and so on. We have one or two of them here where I live but their listenership is pretty bad and they frequently go out of business to give their air time to either another independent that'll fail because they can't figure out a business model, or more frequently these days they'll lose their air time to Clear Channel and be replaced with some other generic station.
Thing is; Windows Phone WAS a good platform. I have run WP as my primary work phone for 3 years now, literally just replacing it over the weekend with an Android device because (a) I destroyed the screen at a conference last week and (b) it was just getting long in the tooth and battery was not great after all this time.
I actually had the Lumia 830. It was pretty solid, had a decent and easy to use interface, and took one hell of a beating in the time I owned it even before its shattering experience. Damn thing was a trooper that got me 3 days of battery when I first got it (down to one day, now). I used it for tethering all the time as well.
So I can give you some examples of some things that the WP does better... not vague. They're all about integration with desktop apps. No-one does it better than Microsoft except (perhaps) Apple, but my experience with iPhone which granted is a bit older now was only loose integration between the phone and apps on the desktop. One example I always loved was the fact that OneDrive actually works REALLY well. Files I wanted for work were right there, my emails were right there... and when I wrote a handwritten note in OneNote on my tablet, it was also right there on my phone. I use OneNote daily and the fact that I could write notes in a meeting, then be able to pull up and refer to those notes on my phone without having to pull my tablet out of my bag was an incredibly valuable feature that I appreciated. Yeah, you can do that in Android with OneNote as well, but back 3 years ago OneNote for Android didn't exist. Same went for my photos that were immediately (pretty much) available on my desktop machine.
The phone was also really good and on AT&T (same as my personal Android phone) was able to pick up good DATA signal even when my Pixel wouldn't (and the prior Moto X). I rarely saw a time when I was unable to get signal. Phone calls were crisp and easy... and I was as surprised as anyone when I discovered this older phone actually did support VoLTE while my Pixel that's only a year old still seems to only have spotty support for it... if any.
Yeah, Android has loads of apps for every need and much of the reason I liked the WP at first can now be done just as easily on Android. But it still feels kludgy and less integrated. I had all the apps I ever needed on WP because they were released early... the rest of them are just window dressing I really didn't need. Again I admit my iPhone experience is a few years old at this point so I can't speak to how well integrated it is, but I would note that from everything I'm reading it's integrated great with MacOS but not so much Windows (which is where I primarily "live" these days).
Most of WP's problems the last year or so have been more BECAUSE the platform has languished than any problem with the platform itself or the hardware. I just replaced my 830 with a Galaxy S7 Active. Yeah, it's an older phone but it's still solid with virtually identical specs to my Pixel. You know what? I think the hardware in the 830 is generally better. It felt like a more solid device and was well designed for day to day use. And was a VERY slim phone with a removable back... something virtually no Android devices do. Yeah, I didn't have a spare battery but I could've gotten one. And here's the other part; WP boots incredibly quickly... like power button to login of less than 10 seconds. It always impressed me especially when my Pixel takes more than twice as long.
It is a shame WP languished so badly. It started very well... but given when Microsoft brought it to market they were always going to have a really long uphill struggle to make it work. They needed a killer app or a killer phone to really get the excitement going, but Microsoft's history up to a few years ago meant the geeks were never going to give it a chance, and Apple had pretty much sewn up the average consumer crowd (and the hipsters...). Thing is; Microsoft is not the same company it was under Ballmer and I actually see them doing some pretty cool st
It does, and I honestly wish that it was enabled by default in consumer versions of Windows. As it stands, I set up all my Windows machines to have file history stored on a remote disk on my file server, so if I lose something it's usually only a few clicks away (unless my laptop is outside the house, then I have to wait until I get home to do the restore)
Disk space is a lot cheaper than re-building your work!
The license fee pays for the BBC programming (though a lot of BBC programming also benefits greatly from selling it to US networks). Shows like Doctor Who are paid for by this, and are broadcast commercial-free. It also goes to fund the BBC news.
While I don't live in England any more, I appreciate greatly this "socialized" TV. Thanks to this business model, the BBC produces quality commercial free TV and news without a significant political bias... though they do have a slight lean toward the current governmental makeup but it tends to not be extreme except for certain shows.
So many freaking stupid comments on this question.
The simple answer is either (a) leave it alone or (b) make use of it.
I moved into a house that had at one point been a four-unit. During the conversion to single-family though I left all the coax in place... and there's a LOT of it (since at least one of the tenants had satellite and others had cable). I figured at the time that I could use the cable to pull through cables I did want in walls I didn't demolish.
Well, two years later I decided to just use it. I have cable internet, so the coax is obviously used for that... but did you know you can also bridge gigabit Ethernet across coax?
These are the exact units I bought... I got two of these two-packs. Using the existing coax I was able to hook up to my rack in the basement (my lab) and run Ethernet directly to the two bedrooms on my third floor which are primarily for (a) my son and (b) guest room. Yeah, I have great WiFi as well thanks to also running a pair of Ubiquiti Unifi AP's (one run off my core switch on the second floor of the house and the other run off my switch in my basement rack) but especially with brick houses like mine (130 years old) sometimes the WiFi can be a bit slower than I'd like. As a result, I have hard wires where I want them.
I also have one of these bridges still sitting in a box if and when I need it.
As for the performance... the speeds aren't quite gigabit. I get around 850Mb/s or so pretty consistently to my basement. I haven't tested the performance in the bedrooms but my son never complains about his Internet speeds on his gaming rig and it's plenty fast that I have all my Windows computers set up to do their "File History" to my ZFS-based file server.
Just to name a few server components off the top of my head (and yes, I do this for a living);
* GPU's used for large scale data analysis and AI. Big usage in large datacenters already today, particularly companies where large amounts of data require quick processing (think GIS for example) * Network interfaces. The next generation of networking will bring 25Gbps Ethernet as well as bring greater support for 100Gbps Ethernet. Throw 32Gbps Fiber-Channel in there, too. * FPGA's. Possibly to me more exciting than GPU's because they have a tighter thermal and power envelope and are incredibly flexible at what they can accomplish. We're going to see a lot of this in the datacenter in the next few years. * NVMe drives. Each NVMe drive is basically a PCIe x4 device. A 2U server (the most commonly sold servers in the world, still) can hold 24 hot swap drives. 24 hot swap NVMe drives is 96 channels which is the max a dual-proc Intel can give you without running any other hardware... this requires PCIe switching to make it work which has a performance impact. AMD with it's integrated southbridge can bring those drives directly to the CPU which is really interesting for Hadoop and/or HyperConverged workloads.
Seriously, if people leave and you're not told... then implement a policy whereby if an account isn't logged into for two weeks (for example) it gets disabled. Not deleted; disabled. Then create a one-line Powershell script that scans through the directory nightly and disables all accounts that haven't logged in for two weeks (except service accounts... make sure your directory is properly set up for this!). If you wanna get real fancy then have it email the manager defined in AD that the account has been disabled, then the onus is upon them to call you or your helpdesk in order to get it reenabled.
Worst case? The user gets back from their three week trip to Europe and can't login so calls Helpdesk. Big deal... 5 minute call. It's written in the policy and is not overly draconian.
I wouldn't necessarily have called the end of "Source Code" a cheat. It was stated several times that no-one really know how it works, and therefore there's no "rule" set within the movie's universe that prevents a consciousness from migrating to an alternate reality... though what happens to the original consciousness is a matter of some debate at that point. As a result though, it's somewhat consistent with multiverse theory.
Edge of Tomorrow though... yeah... that one was a cheat that violated its own internal "rules". At least I can't find a way that it works within the narrative... but it was still a good movie:)
I'd say good classic sci-fi movies of recent years should include Ex-Machina and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Well, I do. I was one of the people who bought into the Motorola Atrix and its Lapdock... the latter I still have sitting around here and I'll probably hook up a Raspberry Pi to it soon so I can put it to use.
What I don't get with this these days is why. What's the use case? Let's review why you might want this;
* Having all your data in one place and up-to-date: Hasn't "cloud" stored documents kind of made this irrelevant? I have two cellphones (one for work, one personal... it's a choice thing) and I already have the ability to edit files on my desktop, laptop or tablet and then open or even edit them on my phone. Yeah, there are the odd occasions when a sync takes longer than anticipated but it's rarely more than a few seconds... and I can force a sync.
* Convenience: Nope; if I'm carrying around a clamshell dock then why not carry around a small laptop or a tablet? I use a Dell Venue 11 Pro as my secondary device on the road (with both keyboards for different use cases) and I can pull up any document or note that I have taken on my phone easily. Between DropBox (not used much any more), OwnCloud (primary) and OneDrive I think I'm pretty much covered. In fact I rarely use the commercial solutions these days except OneNote... which is also available on all the phones.
* "Cool Factor": No. Again, I don't see that people are really going to get it. The use cases just aren't there.
Besides there are lots of downsides. Security is a joke in the mobile space, storage and RAM are still small and slow because of the power budgets required for it, and the CPU performance just isn't there... again because of power budgets. Yeah, I can plug my phone into a dock and surf the web or launch Citrix apps... but then why bother? Why not do the same with my full-featured tablet that won't take a shit on a complex web page? And if I need online then I am rarely far away from a WiFi access point in most cities, and when I am not then I can just use my phone as a tether.
You might say I'm not the target market... but I'd say I am exactly the target market. I loved that Atrix and lapdock because at the time they really did fulfill a need that was important; documents and usable applications on-the-go. But the simple fact is that other technologies have really bypassed this concept and made it irrelevant. On my desktop in front of me I have three computers... one Linux and two Windows. Three screens, but only one set of keyboard and mouse... I use Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy) to tie them together for workflow and OwnCloud (https://owncloud.org) to my ZFS-based server at home on all three of them so the same documents are available on all three. I can edit a document on my desktop (primary when I'm at home) and the files are on my laptop and Linux box in seconds. When I'm on the road I can use my laptop to edit these documents (and yes, my OwnCloud is available outside my home as well) and then in a meeting with a client I can pull up most of those documents on my phone for reference if I need to. I say most because simply put the phone is not powerful enough or does not have the application support to open up really complex docs. But that's fine, because if I need more complex there's the laptop or the tablet to pull these documents up.
And the thing is, none of this is that complex. The average person could do the exact same thing with DropBox or OneDrive... no problems. I just happen to use OwnCloud because (a) I'm a geek, (b) I can and (c) I like control of my data. But that's just me. Between OneNote, EverNote, DropBox, OneDrive etc. etc. etc. there's no reason that you need some kludgy Lapdock to actually get any real work done.
Bonus; due to OwnCloud I get multiple backups. Even if my house burned down then statistically one of my devices with my data on it will have been with me... and if not then I have it all backed up to Amazon Glacier anyway... so while slow it CAN all be restored.
I would say the ONLY use-case I see for this is someone who maybe only has enough m
Without that, how can you charge back your time to the customers, versus your employer? How much is coming out of the internal training budget? Pull numbers out randomly, how does your company function?
As I said; measurable deliverables. And those would be deliverables that are averaged over a reasonable period of time. Completion of project milestones or at least good write-ups and reasons as to why those milestones and deadlines are missed. That's less draconian than what you're proposing and works great in companies I've worked at.
If it's any consolation, some of my peers subscribe to the model you proposed... some of their people have ended up on my team and I get consistently good reviews from my people about my management style.
I tend to subscribe to the idea that I should trust my people to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, and to assist them if it's beyond their capabilities or they have good reasons not to perform. I do have the luxury of working for a large enough company with deep enough coffers that we can usually carry some dead wood in a team for quite a while with minimal hit to the bottom line... and that gives me the latitude to average their performance over a 6 month or even a 1 year period. But privately I know pretty quickly who the dead wood is and I will usually find ways to move them off to someone else's team or get them out before they affect the rest of the team.
Being a manager is hard work. What you proposed is management by Excel sheet which is unfortunately rife in Corporate America thanks to MBA's who think they know what'll make a business better but actually only have an academic understanding of what works, not real-world experience.
And I'll admit; when I was a new and freshly minted manager I did do that because that's what my manager taught me. I learned pretty quickly how badly that works from experience and tried a different tack. Yes, my management often asks me for details like you're asking for... but by knowing my team, my deliverables and my targets allows me to speak intelligently to what my team is doing and justify the salaries of everyone on that team consistently year over year. I also have the highest average tenure of a team member of any of my peers.
Generally, the good employees who actually deliver are usually the first to feel that this level of micromanagement is unacceptable, and they will leave for a company that doesn't do it. And the bad employees start actively making shit up or massively inflating their numbers in order to make it look like they're busier than they really are.
And then there are the good smartasses who figure out that they can write a two-point bullet list every week that says "1. Doing what you hired me to do: 39 Hours. 2. Filling out this report: 1 Hour." This ALSO encourages people to work EXACTLY 40 hours and no more. Believe me, I've seen it many times.
The right way to manage a remote team is to have easily defined metrics that are averaged over a month or more... not a week. Coders for example will have some dynamite days or weeks, and other times spent days just spinning on one problem. However, when averaged over a decent period of time they show actual value to the company. And the onus is upon the manager to... you know... manage. Instead of just filling out an Excel spreadsheet once a week for your upper management you can take the time to look at the metrics to identify where someone might be having a problem and actually then approach them to see if they need assistance. This method of management is sorely lacking in much of Corporate America because quite frankly it requires work on the part of the mid-manager... said mid-manager probably just wants to have something once a week that can be copy-pasted into an Excel spreadsheet.
I'll say that I manage a remote team and my team consistently exceeds its target quarter over quarter. My team spans most of the MidWest. If I asked for these kinds of reports then I know of at least two of my team members who would either go to another group or quit the company entirely in a heartbeat... and these two just happen to be two of my highest producers.
If you have to micromanage like you have shown here, then you're a shit manager who doesn't know how to hire properly or manage a team and you should be fired.
This is however really the most demented way to do it, because only those that are good at what they do (and hence have other prospects) will leave. The ones staying will include all that have no prospects. Do this several times and you may as well close down the department and re-start from scratch.
>
You actually nailed it on the head. Once the department is full of the mid-tier and low-tier employees and all the good ones have departed, IBM (or other large company) can turn around to lobby the government for more H1-B's because they "... can't hire good people in the USA". Then at some point they outsource the entire department to India. Rinse and repeat with the next department they want to offshore.
Anyone who was still at HP after Carly Fiorina pretty much deserved what they got because the cancer was already terminal after that. Meg Whitman was pretty much just continuing the same policies.
Not trying to slam... it's just the writing was on the wall after Carly. HP was sick and staggering; the good people had already left or were just working out the rest of their tenure before retirement. The management had no clear direction or even idea how to get the company back on its feet. Meg Whitman came in and pandered to the shareholders and has done little in my opinion that really has a lot of hope of saving the company. The company has split at a time when synergies between the two companies should have been strongest... that step in and of itself speaks volumes to how disconnected they are from business realities today. HPe and what's left of HPeS will continue to stagger along while HPQ will probably do a Lenovo and end up traded off to some Chinese sweat-shop builder.
In fairness I never worked for HP, but did work for a number of MSP's and VARs so I know a LOT of people who were at HP. I know very few people who still are. I saw IBM do the same thing about 10 years ahead of HP... I am not sure why HP thought following IBM's lead was a good idea.
Still, your last comment has some valid points; companies that rest on their laurels do not survive... particularly in IT. They need to be disruptive by their very nature, and few large companies seem to have an ability to do that. Thankfully, there are a few left who look like they might survive the long haul.
Depends how you swing it. I've moved a few times in my career and each time I've retained my property in my previous location as a rental property. Even turning over management of those properties to property management companies still nets me a small net profit every month, and meanwhile someone else is paying my mortgages and I am building equity.
Yes, I have occasional large expenses like the furnace going out in one of my properties last week... but because I put all of my net profit into a single account and retain for just these kinds of expenses I still know I'm making money on the entire portfolio.
No, it's not enough that I can quit my job... but if I were to liquidate all of my properties tomorrow I'd have enough cash to live on for a couple of years and still maintain my current standard of living.
So let me get this straight, in order to show competing platforms they put it up against a 22 core E5-2699A but then hobbled the Xeon with both LESS RAM and SLOWER RAM? Um... that's not really a very fair comparison now, is it?
Don't get me wrong, I like AMD as much as the next guy and I am very interested in probably making my next home-server build a Ryzen with ECC... but at least compete on a level playing field. The E5-2699A supports DDR4-2400 as well but instead they decided to hobble it with DDR4-1866??? Seriously? That's cheating and really sours me on AMD right now.
I just want to add that I agree wholeheartedly with you. I run a Celeron N3150 as a PFSense firewall... seriously overkill for that job, but it runs fanless and just plugs happily away day after day without a hitch. It does get somewhat toasty at times when there's a lot going on (I run Snort and various other services on the box so it can get up there sometimes) but even at high temps it seems to be really stable and usable.
I did put Linux on it at first and had the Ubuntu desktop running on it... very slick and fast with 8GB of RAM. Definitely no slouch of a machine.
I know I'm late to the party, but your statement that Windows has always been an exercise is frustration is most certainly true for you, but not everyone. For me, the last couple of iterations of MacOS before I sold my 15" MBP about a year ago were more of an exercise in frustration than Windows 10 has been.
Yeah, I'd have loved to use Linux as my primary OS but I was limited in what I could accomplish and limited in the hardware I could buy. I had certain things I wanted to accomplish with my new laptop ecosystem and Linux literally didn't have the hardware support at the time to do it. Yeah, it does now... but I would still find Linux intensely limiting due to my use cases today. And quite frankly the hardware support is still lagging far enough behind that it renders itself irrelevant to me pretty quickly.
Privacy concerns? I personally don't care. The metadata collection that Microsoft does is something I don't really give a monkeys about so long as I can get my work done in a simple and effective manner. Yeah, I do some blocking with PFBlocker on my firewall because why the hell not? Just because I don't mind the metadata collection, doesn't mean I'm going to make it easy for Microsoft. And unfortunately that doesn't help when my laptop leaves my house... but that's infrequent enough that I don't care.
I'm not a Microsoft shill, but neither do I care much about the operating system I run any more. I have very little software that's Windows-specific just as I had relatively little software that was Mac specific. I'm more concerned that the hardware I run is capable of working with me and helping me do my work and once I wrote up a list of hardware I wanted in my latest iteration, listed out the capabilities that I wanted and so on neither Mac OS nor Linux were an option for me. Like it or not, leading (or bleeding) edge hardware has never been either Apple's or Linux' strong suits. And there are some people who actually need that hardware.
For the record too, my transition into using Windows 10 was easy, and continues to be easy. My computer is really reliable and has had zero issues even considering I did an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10 (8.1 was the OS of choice when I got my current hardware). Usually I'd expect issues but I had surprisingly few. I had to uninstall a couple of pieces of software due to compatibility issues, but I didn't miss them either.
Slashdot Mirror
https://rebble.io/
Not yet a fully functioning replacement for the PebbleOS, but it's a project that at least has some legs.
While you're right, the difference in performance between the more generic compiles and a tuned compile on the particular hardware OP is asking about are so small as to be negligible. While I appreciate Gentoo, in particular in desktop type environments the amount of work required to set it up is just not rewarded by any appreciable improvements in performance or stability, and with Gentoo in particular I have found that you need to stay on top of maintenance and updates pretty religiously or you're going to get behind and get in a very bad place.
I stopped compiling Gentoo a decade ago... when I was using really old hardware (circa 2000-2005) yeah it could make a marked difference but anything with a Core2Duo or newer is really not going to see much if any improvement.
If you use Google Voice then Hangouts can send/receive SMS messages. It's been this way for years.
And I have been a Google Voice user for years, which means I can SMS from the desktop Hangouts client quite happily and do so. Bonus; I can do it from any computer with a web browser and don't have to use a Mac for it. It's not just an Apple thing (Android user here)
I'm not sure I get the use case for this app... or indeed why Dell is limiting it to laptops built in 2018 and onward. There's absolutely no technical reason it can't run on older laptops. Plus, software like that has been available for years.
This is true, I have to admit. The operating system you use to get your work done is becoming more and more irrelevant because really less and less work is being done by the operating system, not just because of portable frameworks. But you're right; both of those facts are going to mean Linux is just going to be... there. Windows isn't going away anytime soon but Windows 10 really is probably the end of the road for major product releases of the platform.
Hell, I have a couple of VM's on my homelab that are running open source Windows apps on Ubuntu thanks to Mono... frameworks are more important than operating systems these days.
Can you show me on this doll where Bill Gates touched you?
Yet a solution looking for a problem is exactly how a lot of these projects start, and while most fail there are some that take off.
So using your example of the half-million-dollar microscope; what if OEMs pick up on ReactOS and start using that as their base instead of Windows? They already have the Windows coders which is probably why they never made the investment to switch to Linux to run it. Or they felt the APIs weren't there or whatever. Well, if said OEM instead ports their code to ReactOS then they get to make minimal investment in change in order to run an open source and free operating system. If they're a good OEM they'll then put some money back into the project to ensure further development work.
Right now you're right; the current incarnation is a toy. It needs work, it needs development and it needs time to bake. Most important it needs developers and for a proper "face" to sell it to OEMs first and foremost as a new way to do things that requires minimal work on the OEM's part. That'll get us out of this hell of multi-million dollar CNC machines that run Windows 2000 (yes, it's WAY worse than just XP). ReactOS when a bit more mature might just be able to plug into these old machines and just run.
While there are some OEMs who prefer not to upgrade the OS because they want to sell a new machine, there are many more who actually just don't have the coding resources to port their code to a newer version of Windows that has all new security requirements and has probably dumped several APIs their code relied on. Or drivers... the stability of the driver APIs in Windows has not been good.
So for my theoretical OEM they can turn around and sell a new "'control unit" for the CNC machine running ReactOS for $50K (yes, quite likely) and they don't need to worry about licensing issues with Microsoft or worry too much about future upgrades as ReactOS is based on the idea that the API's will be static.
I pretty much came here to post the same thing. Also gen-X here and I never listen to the radio. There's just zero compelling content that catches my attention. With my car supporting Android Auto in my dash, it's also even easier to consume streaming media like Pandora or stuff on Google Play Music. Hell, my car has a navigation system I think I've used twice since I got it, the rest of the time I use Waze these days.
As others have noted here, the problem isn't radio as a technology; rather it's the fact that many (most?) of the radio channels in the USA are owned by the same company and they make sure to plan their content so it's as generic as you can possibly get. I'll bet I could probably turn on the radio today for the first time in about 5 years and quite likely sing along to many of the songs... not because they're the same old songs (though that's also a problem) but because so many of the more recent songs are generated by an algorithm that's easily predictable and thus I could make a damned good guess as to the next verse even halfway through the previous one. OK, I'm definitely overstating it a bit... but only a bit.
There's just zero compelling content. And it's not that I'm "old"... even the stations ostensibly targeted toward my age ("Best of the 80's, 90's and 2000's!!!!!") are all literally so homogenous that I can't tell them apart when switching channels. They probably all have the same playlist offset by an hour or so interspersed with some random guy talking or (more likely) ads.
I will admit that music discovery is a lot harder these days than it used to be. Maybe I'm just not into the right services but I find that discovering new bands and new styles of music that appeal to me tend to happen pretty randomly. Way back when, it was a matter of discovering a song on the radio and waiting until the song ended for the DJ to tell you who it was... then you would go out and buy an album. Yeah, that model is dead... but I do find it a little sad that I don't have many other "low impact" discovery methods these days... the ones we have all require you to sign up for some account, get some app on your phone that's buggy and crashes often (and probably doesn't work with Android Auto... the one place I most often listen to music being in the car) and then have all your listening habits tracked even if all you're doing is just trying to discover new music. Yeah, Pandora is one that does this and is technically OK for discovery... but many of the stations in Pandora are starting to get pretty generic too and as many others do, I tend to drift back toward the same "comfortable" channels when driving where it feels sometimes like the entire station is on one endless loop with nothing added in years.
As it stands, a few more independent radio stations wouldn't go amiss. You know... real ones that aren't syndicated crap. But the problem of course then becomes advertising, bringing in listeners and so on. We have one or two of them here where I live but their listenership is pretty bad and they frequently go out of business to give their air time to either another independent that'll fail because they can't figure out a business model, or more frequently these days they'll lose their air time to Clear Channel and be replaced with some other generic station.
Thing is; Windows Phone WAS a good platform. I have run WP as my primary work phone for 3 years now, literally just replacing it over the weekend with an Android device because (a) I destroyed the screen at a conference last week and (b) it was just getting long in the tooth and battery was not great after all this time.
I actually had the Lumia 830. It was pretty solid, had a decent and easy to use interface, and took one hell of a beating in the time I owned it even before its shattering experience. Damn thing was a trooper that got me 3 days of battery when I first got it (down to one day, now). I used it for tethering all the time as well.
So I can give you some examples of some things that the WP does better... not vague. They're all about integration with desktop apps. No-one does it better than Microsoft except (perhaps) Apple, but my experience with iPhone which granted is a bit older now was only loose integration between the phone and apps on the desktop. One example I always loved was the fact that OneDrive actually works REALLY well. Files I wanted for work were right there, my emails were right there... and when I wrote a handwritten note in OneNote on my tablet, it was also right there on my phone. I use OneNote daily and the fact that I could write notes in a meeting, then be able to pull up and refer to those notes on my phone without having to pull my tablet out of my bag was an incredibly valuable feature that I appreciated. Yeah, you can do that in Android with OneNote as well, but back 3 years ago OneNote for Android didn't exist. Same went for my photos that were immediately (pretty much) available on my desktop machine.
The phone was also really good and on AT&T (same as my personal Android phone) was able to pick up good DATA signal even when my Pixel wouldn't (and the prior Moto X). I rarely saw a time when I was unable to get signal. Phone calls were crisp and easy... and I was as surprised as anyone when I discovered this older phone actually did support VoLTE while my Pixel that's only a year old still seems to only have spotty support for it... if any.
Yeah, Android has loads of apps for every need and much of the reason I liked the WP at first can now be done just as easily on Android. But it still feels kludgy and less integrated. I had all the apps I ever needed on WP because they were released early... the rest of them are just window dressing I really didn't need. Again I admit my iPhone experience is a few years old at this point so I can't speak to how well integrated it is, but I would note that from everything I'm reading it's integrated great with MacOS but not so much Windows (which is where I primarily "live" these days).
Most of WP's problems the last year or so have been more BECAUSE the platform has languished than any problem with the platform itself or the hardware. I just replaced my 830 with a Galaxy S7 Active. Yeah, it's an older phone but it's still solid with virtually identical specs to my Pixel. You know what? I think the hardware in the 830 is generally better. It felt like a more solid device and was well designed for day to day use. And was a VERY slim phone with a removable back... something virtually no Android devices do. Yeah, I didn't have a spare battery but I could've gotten one. And here's the other part; WP boots incredibly quickly... like power button to login of less than 10 seconds. It always impressed me especially when my Pixel takes more than twice as long.
It is a shame WP languished so badly. It started very well... but given when Microsoft brought it to market they were always going to have a really long uphill struggle to make it work. They needed a killer app or a killer phone to really get the excitement going, but Microsoft's history up to a few years ago meant the geeks were never going to give it a chance, and Apple had pretty much sewn up the average consumer crowd (and the hipsters...). Thing is; Microsoft is not the same company it was under Ballmer and I actually see them doing some pretty cool st
It does, and I honestly wish that it was enabled by default in consumer versions of Windows. As it stands, I set up all my Windows machines to have file history stored on a remote disk on my file server, so if I lose something it's usually only a few clicks away (unless my laptop is outside the house, then I have to wait until I get home to do the restore)
Disk space is a lot cheaper than re-building your work!
The license fee pays for the BBC programming (though a lot of BBC programming also benefits greatly from selling it to US networks). Shows like Doctor Who are paid for by this, and are broadcast commercial-free. It also goes to fund the BBC news.
While I don't live in England any more, I appreciate greatly this "socialized" TV. Thanks to this business model, the BBC produces quality commercial free TV and news without a significant political bias... though they do have a slight lean toward the current governmental makeup but it tends to not be extreme except for certain shows.
Correct. The license fee goes to pay for the BBC which is commercial-free.
So many freaking stupid comments on this question.
The simple answer is either (a) leave it alone or (b) make use of it.
I moved into a house that had at one point been a four-unit. During the conversion to single-family though I left all the coax in place... and there's a LOT of it (since at least one of the tenants had satellite and others had cable). I figured at the time that I could use the cable to pull through cables I did want in walls I didn't demolish.
Well, two years later I decided to just use it. I have cable internet, so the coax is obviously used for that... but did you know you can also bridge gigabit Ethernet across coax?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...
These are the exact units I bought... I got two of these two-packs. Using the existing coax I was able to hook up to my rack in the basement (my lab) and run Ethernet directly to the two bedrooms on my third floor which are primarily for (a) my son and (b) guest room. Yeah, I have great WiFi as well thanks to also running a pair of Ubiquiti Unifi AP's (one run off my core switch on the second floor of the house and the other run off my switch in my basement rack) but especially with brick houses like mine (130 years old) sometimes the WiFi can be a bit slower than I'd like. As a result, I have hard wires where I want them.
I also have one of these bridges still sitting in a box if and when I need it.
As for the performance... the speeds aren't quite gigabit. I get around 850Mb/s or so pretty consistently to my basement. I haven't tested the performance in the bedrooms but my son never complains about his Internet speeds on his gaming rig and it's plenty fast that I have all my Windows computers set up to do their "File History" to my ZFS-based file server.
Just to name a few server components off the top of my head (and yes, I do this for a living);
* GPU's used for large scale data analysis and AI. Big usage in large datacenters already today, particularly companies where large amounts of data require quick processing (think GIS for example)
* Network interfaces. The next generation of networking will bring 25Gbps Ethernet as well as bring greater support for 100Gbps Ethernet. Throw 32Gbps Fiber-Channel in there, too.
* FPGA's. Possibly to me more exciting than GPU's because they have a tighter thermal and power envelope and are incredibly flexible at what they can accomplish. We're going to see a lot of this in the datacenter in the next few years.
* NVMe drives. Each NVMe drive is basically a PCIe x4 device. A 2U server (the most commonly sold servers in the world, still) can hold 24 hot swap drives. 24 hot swap NVMe drives is 96 channels which is the max a dual-proc Intel can give you without running any other hardware... this requires PCIe switching to make it work which has a performance impact. AMD with it's integrated southbridge can bring those drives directly to the CPU which is really interesting for Hadoop and/or HyperConverged workloads.
Jeez no shit. The guy's a moron.
Seriously, if people leave and you're not told... then implement a policy whereby if an account isn't logged into for two weeks (for example) it gets disabled. Not deleted; disabled. Then create a one-line Powershell script that scans through the directory nightly and disables all accounts that haven't logged in for two weeks (except service accounts... make sure your directory is properly set up for this!). If you wanna get real fancy then have it email the manager defined in AD that the account has been disabled, then the onus is upon them to call you or your helpdesk in order to get it reenabled.
Worst case? The user gets back from their three week trip to Europe and can't login so calls Helpdesk. Big deal... 5 minute call. It's written in the policy and is not overly draconian.
I wouldn't necessarily have called the end of "Source Code" a cheat. It was stated several times that no-one really know how it works, and therefore there's no "rule" set within the movie's universe that prevents a consciousness from migrating to an alternate reality... though what happens to the original consciousness is a matter of some debate at that point. As a result though, it's somewhat consistent with multiverse theory.
Edge of Tomorrow though... yeah... that one was a cheat that violated its own internal "rules". At least I can't find a way that it works within the narrative... but it was still a good movie :)
I'd say good classic sci-fi movies of recent years should include Ex-Machina and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Well, I do. I was one of the people who bought into the Motorola Atrix and its Lapdock... the latter I still have sitting around here and I'll probably hook up a Raspberry Pi to it soon so I can put it to use.
What I don't get with this these days is why. What's the use case? Let's review why you might want this;
* Having all your data in one place and up-to-date: Hasn't "cloud" stored documents kind of made this irrelevant? I have two cellphones (one for work, one personal... it's a choice thing) and I already have the ability to edit files on my desktop, laptop or tablet and then open or even edit them on my phone. Yeah, there are the odd occasions when a sync takes longer than anticipated but it's rarely more than a few seconds... and I can force a sync.
* Convenience: Nope; if I'm carrying around a clamshell dock then why not carry around a small laptop or a tablet? I use a Dell Venue 11 Pro as my secondary device on the road (with both keyboards for different use cases) and I can pull up any document or note that I have taken on my phone easily. Between DropBox (not used much any more), OwnCloud (primary) and OneDrive I think I'm pretty much covered. In fact I rarely use the commercial solutions these days except OneNote... which is also available on all the phones.
* "Cool Factor": No. Again, I don't see that people are really going to get it. The use cases just aren't there.
Besides there are lots of downsides. Security is a joke in the mobile space, storage and RAM are still small and slow because of the power budgets required for it, and the CPU performance just isn't there... again because of power budgets. Yeah, I can plug my phone into a dock and surf the web or launch Citrix apps... but then why bother? Why not do the same with my full-featured tablet that won't take a shit on a complex web page? And if I need online then I am rarely far away from a WiFi access point in most cities, and when I am not then I can just use my phone as a tether.
You might say I'm not the target market... but I'd say I am exactly the target market. I loved that Atrix and lapdock because at the time they really did fulfill a need that was important; documents and usable applications on-the-go. But the simple fact is that other technologies have really bypassed this concept and made it irrelevant. On my desktop in front of me I have three computers... one Linux and two Windows. Three screens, but only one set of keyboard and mouse... I use Synergy (https://symless.com/synergy) to tie them together for workflow and OwnCloud (https://owncloud.org) to my ZFS-based server at home on all three of them so the same documents are available on all three. I can edit a document on my desktop (primary when I'm at home) and the files are on my laptop and Linux box in seconds. When I'm on the road I can use my laptop to edit these documents (and yes, my OwnCloud is available outside my home as well) and then in a meeting with a client I can pull up most of those documents on my phone for reference if I need to. I say most because simply put the phone is not powerful enough or does not have the application support to open up really complex docs. But that's fine, because if I need more complex there's the laptop or the tablet to pull these documents up.
And the thing is, none of this is that complex. The average person could do the exact same thing with DropBox or OneDrive... no problems. I just happen to use OwnCloud because (a) I'm a geek, (b) I can and (c) I like control of my data. But that's just me. Between OneNote, EverNote, DropBox, OneDrive etc. etc. etc. there's no reason that you need some kludgy Lapdock to actually get any real work done.
Bonus; due to OwnCloud I get multiple backups. Even if my house burned down then statistically one of my devices with my data on it will have been with me... and if not then I have it all backed up to Amazon Glacier anyway... so while slow it CAN all be restored.
I would say the ONLY use-case I see for this is someone who maybe only has enough m
Without that, how can you charge back your time to the customers, versus your employer? How much is coming out of the internal training budget? Pull numbers out randomly, how does your company function?
As I said; measurable deliverables. And those would be deliverables that are averaged over a reasonable period of time. Completion of project milestones or at least good write-ups and reasons as to why those milestones and deadlines are missed. That's less draconian than what you're proposing and works great in companies I've worked at.
If it's any consolation, some of my peers subscribe to the model you proposed... some of their people have ended up on my team and I get consistently good reviews from my people about my management style.
I tend to subscribe to the idea that I should trust my people to do their jobs to the best of their abilities, and to assist them if it's beyond their capabilities or they have good reasons not to perform. I do have the luxury of working for a large enough company with deep enough coffers that we can usually carry some dead wood in a team for quite a while with minimal hit to the bottom line... and that gives me the latitude to average their performance over a 6 month or even a 1 year period. But privately I know pretty quickly who the dead wood is and I will usually find ways to move them off to someone else's team or get them out before they affect the rest of the team.
Being a manager is hard work. What you proposed is management by Excel sheet which is unfortunately rife in Corporate America thanks to MBA's who think they know what'll make a business better but actually only have an academic understanding of what works, not real-world experience.
And I'll admit; when I was a new and freshly minted manager I did do that because that's what my manager taught me. I learned pretty quickly how badly that works from experience and tried a different tack. Yes, my management often asks me for details like you're asking for... but by knowing my team, my deliverables and my targets allows me to speak intelligently to what my team is doing and justify the salaries of everyone on that team consistently year over year. I also have the highest average tenure of a team member of any of my peers.
This doesn't work.
Generally, the good employees who actually deliver are usually the first to feel that this level of micromanagement is unacceptable, and they will leave for a company that doesn't do it. And the bad employees start actively making shit up or massively inflating their numbers in order to make it look like they're busier than they really are.
And then there are the good smartasses who figure out that they can write a two-point bullet list every week that says "1. Doing what you hired me to do: 39 Hours. 2. Filling out this report: 1 Hour." This ALSO encourages people to work EXACTLY 40 hours and no more. Believe me, I've seen it many times.
The right way to manage a remote team is to have easily defined metrics that are averaged over a month or more... not a week. Coders for example will have some dynamite days or weeks, and other times spent days just spinning on one problem. However, when averaged over a decent period of time they show actual value to the company. And the onus is upon the manager to... you know... manage. Instead of just filling out an Excel spreadsheet once a week for your upper management you can take the time to look at the metrics to identify where someone might be having a problem and actually then approach them to see if they need assistance. This method of management is sorely lacking in much of Corporate America because quite frankly it requires work on the part of the mid-manager... said mid-manager probably just wants to have something once a week that can be copy-pasted into an Excel spreadsheet.
I'll say that I manage a remote team and my team consistently exceeds its target quarter over quarter. My team spans most of the MidWest. If I asked for these kinds of reports then I know of at least two of my team members who would either go to another group or quit the company entirely in a heartbeat... and these two just happen to be two of my highest producers.
If you have to micromanage like you have shown here, then you're a shit manager who doesn't know how to hire properly or manage a team and you should be fired.
This is however really the most demented way to do it, because only those that are good at what they do (and hence have other prospects) will leave. The ones staying will include all that have no prospects. Do this several times and you may as well close down the department and re-start from scratch.
>
You actually nailed it on the head. Once the department is full of the mid-tier and low-tier employees and all the good ones have departed, IBM (or other large company) can turn around to lobby the government for more H1-B's because they "... can't hire good people in the USA". Then at some point they outsource the entire department to India. Rinse and repeat with the next department they want to offshore.
Anyone who was still at HP after Carly Fiorina pretty much deserved what they got because the cancer was already terminal after that. Meg Whitman was pretty much just continuing the same policies.
Not trying to slam... it's just the writing was on the wall after Carly. HP was sick and staggering; the good people had already left or were just working out the rest of their tenure before retirement. The management had no clear direction or even idea how to get the company back on its feet. Meg Whitman came in and pandered to the shareholders and has done little in my opinion that really has a lot of hope of saving the company. The company has split at a time when synergies between the two companies should have been strongest... that step in and of itself speaks volumes to how disconnected they are from business realities today. HPe and what's left of HPeS will continue to stagger along while HPQ will probably do a Lenovo and end up traded off to some Chinese sweat-shop builder.
In fairness I never worked for HP, but did work for a number of MSP's and VARs so I know a LOT of people who were at HP. I know very few people who still are. I saw IBM do the same thing about 10 years ahead of HP... I am not sure why HP thought following IBM's lead was a good idea.
Still, your last comment has some valid points; companies that rest on their laurels do not survive... particularly in IT. They need to be disruptive by their very nature, and few large companies seem to have an ability to do that. Thankfully, there are a few left who look like they might survive the long haul.
Depends how you swing it. I've moved a few times in my career and each time I've retained my property in my previous location as a rental property. Even turning over management of those properties to property management companies still nets me a small net profit every month, and meanwhile someone else is paying my mortgages and I am building equity.
Yes, I have occasional large expenses like the furnace going out in one of my properties last week... but because I put all of my net profit into a single account and retain for just these kinds of expenses I still know I'm making money on the entire portfolio.
No, it's not enough that I can quit my job... but if I were to liquidate all of my properties tomorrow I'd have enough cash to live on for a couple of years and still maintain my current standard of living.
A house can be an investment if you're creative.
So let me get this straight, in order to show competing platforms they put it up against a 22 core E5-2699A but then hobbled the Xeon with both LESS RAM and SLOWER RAM? Um... that's not really a very fair comparison now, is it?
Don't get me wrong, I like AMD as much as the next guy and I am very interested in probably making my next home-server build a Ryzen with ECC... but at least compete on a level playing field. The E5-2699A supports DDR4-2400 as well but instead they decided to hobble it with DDR4-1866??? Seriously? That's cheating and really sours me on AMD right now.
I just want to add that I agree wholeheartedly with you. I run a Celeron N3150 as a PFSense firewall... seriously overkill for that job, but it runs fanless and just plugs happily away day after day without a hitch. It does get somewhat toasty at times when there's a lot going on (I run Snort and various other services on the box so it can get up there sometimes) but even at high temps it seems to be really stable and usable.
I did put Linux on it at first and had the Ubuntu desktop running on it... very slick and fast with 8GB of RAM. Definitely no slouch of a machine.
I know I'm late to the party, but your statement that Windows has always been an exercise is frustration is most certainly true for you, but not everyone. For me, the last couple of iterations of MacOS before I sold my 15" MBP about a year ago were more of an exercise in frustration than Windows 10 has been.
Yeah, I'd have loved to use Linux as my primary OS but I was limited in what I could accomplish and limited in the hardware I could buy. I had certain things I wanted to accomplish with my new laptop ecosystem and Linux literally didn't have the hardware support at the time to do it. Yeah, it does now... but I would still find Linux intensely limiting due to my use cases today. And quite frankly the hardware support is still lagging far enough behind that it renders itself irrelevant to me pretty quickly.
Privacy concerns? I personally don't care. The metadata collection that Microsoft does is something I don't really give a monkeys about so long as I can get my work done in a simple and effective manner. Yeah, I do some blocking with PFBlocker on my firewall because why the hell not? Just because I don't mind the metadata collection, doesn't mean I'm going to make it easy for Microsoft. And unfortunately that doesn't help when my laptop leaves my house... but that's infrequent enough that I don't care.
I'm not a Microsoft shill, but neither do I care much about the operating system I run any more. I have very little software that's Windows-specific just as I had relatively little software that was Mac specific. I'm more concerned that the hardware I run is capable of working with me and helping me do my work and once I wrote up a list of hardware I wanted in my latest iteration, listed out the capabilities that I wanted and so on neither Mac OS nor Linux were an option for me. Like it or not, leading (or bleeding) edge hardware has never been either Apple's or Linux' strong suits. And there are some people who actually need that hardware.
For the record too, my transition into using Windows 10 was easy, and continues to be easy. My computer is really reliable and has had zero issues even considering I did an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10 (8.1 was the OS of choice when I got my current hardware). Usually I'd expect issues but I had surprisingly few. I had to uninstall a couple of pieces of software due to compatibility issues, but I didn't miss them either.