Back when throwing in my CPU cycles added a small to moderate increase to power consumption, I was happy to run these clients. But, the last time I checked, my gaming rig's power draw nearly tripled going from as low as I could get it (drives spun down, video idle, CPU clocked way down, etc.) to having all 4 cores and both graphics cards maxed. Nevermind the heat that comes pouring out and the noise when all the fans ramp up. It's not like the old days when loading up your Pentium 3 added an extra 20 watts.
You haven't seen many comments about it because there aren't enough morally perfect IT people to go around. Even some priests blab about what they've heard in confessionals and that's like an express ticket to Hell. Obviously, the IT people shouldn't be blabbing but they're human beings so they'll blab eventually. Maybe only amongst themselves but someone will overhear and then the grapevine takes over. I worked for a company where the HR person was a horrible gossip. She eventually got fired for it but she was there for a couple of years before the hammer finally came down.
No shit. I swear some people can be amazingly stupid. I once had a guy call me when he had trouble sending an email. "Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: I wuv my snookums." "Body: I can't wait to see you again..." (That's where I tuned out and flipped on the blinders.) Now if this had been Mrs. VP, that's no big deal, tho still the kind of thing that shouldn't go in the corporate email archive. But the address was not Mrs. VP. It was Mr. VP's former assistant. And the guy KNEW it was going in the archive because one of his requirements for the email archiving system was that it be impossible for messages to be removed from the archive. And instead of just deleting the message, he called for help, GUARANTEEING that it would be noticed.
Looking back, maybe he wanted to be caught. But don't drag the IT department into your divorce, dude! Not cool.
Yeah, some kids are going to be bored but they have to learn the basics. All these years later, I remember being in college taking some 3rd-level programming course (had ComSci prerequisites with ComSci prerequisites) and one of my fellow students was totally befuddled by a floppy disk. No idea what to do with it, no idea how to copy files onto it. The whole concept was new to this person. This had to be the person's second year (minimum) as a Computer Science major and they'd never copied a file from one computer to another. And, no, floppy disks had not just been invented the previous winter. They'd been in the consumer marketplace for over a decade. How did they get this far in this line of education without learning how to do something so basic?
Kids need to learn that boring stuff like file management, word processors, spreadsheets, email, etc. because those are fundamental tasks that they will need to master for ANY job that doesn't involve salting fried potato slices. If they can test out of that and move on to more advanced stuff, great. But not requiring them to learn the basics would be like not requiring them to learn how to manage a household budget or not require them to learn how to read and write.
Why not do both in separate product lines? Kinda like what they're already going right this very moment. If I want a lot of stuff in one place, I buy hard drives. If I want a small amount of stuff accessed very quickly, I buy SSDs. One division increasing capacity doesn't stop an entirely different division from increasing performance. And those SSDs are increasing in size pretty quickly. The Vertex 2 Pro is up to 240 gigs for under $700. Wasn't long ago that the tiniest, crappiest-performing SSD cost that much. Now that's the price of the biggest and fastest. In another year, the $/gig ratio will be even better along with performance.
So I think fast storage is coming along just fine and I'm happy to have the slow spinning stuff for my "access occasionally" data like audio, video, backups, etc.
If being a dickhead is a crime, I'm in serious trouble. Can someone please provide a list of countries that won't extradite to the US? Soonish, please.
I'm glad somebody said it. The money you'd save on electricity in a year would probably pay for a little NAS appliance that barely takes up more space than the drive(s).
I won't be happy until my browser updates every time I launch it and at least once an hour while I'm browsing. And the updates should force an automatic restart.
Well, that's part of it but there are other factors. At one time, some carriers (t-mobile, for one) would either give discounts on service or let people get month-to-month contracts if they brought their own phones so there was some incentive to spend the money up front. Either you recovered the money through lower monthly costs or you were free to jump carriers at any time. Currently, I don't think any carriers will do that. A few years ago, I switched to t-mobile and explained that I had an unlocked phone that I liked better than anything they were offering. "So what?" "Can I get any kind of a discount?" "No. You don't have to take one of our phones but you may as well since you're paying for it. And 2 years is our minimum contract length."
So, with the Nexus, you weren't just paying or one $500 phone, you were also paying for the $200 "free" phone from the carrier.
Also, the market for the Nexus is the same group that knows better than to buy Rev A. Always wait for the second generation.
Go try the same thing with every other computer manufacturer on the planet and tell me how many of them will replace a screen for less than 70% of the MSRP of the laptop. If you find even one, I'll be shocked. That's an industry thing, not an Apple thing.
And I can top your story. I once broke the LCD on a new Sony digital camera. While it was a poor design (no protective shield over the LCD of a device intended to be carried in a pocket), it was entirely my fault that it broke. I called and asked what it would cost to replace the screen. Out of warranty repair would be $$$ but that model was just released a month ago so it should still be under warranty. After I explained that it wasn't a warranty failure but user damage, the price went to $$$+50. Fuck you, Sony! And I couldn't buy a screen on ebay because it was such a new model that nobody was parting them out yet.
The moral of the story: Take care of your stuff!
And, if you don't think you'll be able to take care of your stuff, insure it. (And Applecare is not insurance.)
Did you miss the part where they're talking about docking stations with video cards built in, USB3, network, etc.?
"The first applications, which will start sampling next year, will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor."
I don't know how your company works but, around here, we expect people to show up at roughly the same time every day and...erm...work. Like simultaneously. And, yes, many of our laptop users prefer docking stations to plugging and unplugging power/network/video/keyboard/mouse/monitor every time they come and go. And, yes, quite a few people use their laptops exclusively. In fact, very few people have both a laptop and a desktop. What would be the point?
So, yeah, the scenario described as the first application of this new technology that we can expect to see involves people pushing lots of data across the connection for long periods of time.
Let's say I've got even a little building with 50 people who want to use this. Will I be able to pack 50 of these point-to-point units into a building and have all of these systems perform at peak capacity without stepping all over each other? That would be amazing.
And, aside from the technical issues of getting it to work well in a dense environment, there's still one cord that needs to be connected to the laptop. Power. If I have to plug that in, I may as well snap the laptop into a docking station and skip the wireless connection entirely. One connection is one connection and I won't have to worry about interference, security, bandwidth, etc.
I'm 99.44% sure that my check card info was compromised in a data theft incident but I have no proof. One day, I got a call from my bank saying that my current check card was susceptible to fraud and that a new card had been sent to my mailing address. Please call if you have not received this card.
That set off a couple WTF questions in my head. First of all, it was implied that my replacement card should have arrived which means they'd sent it at least 2-3 days earlier. If fraudulent activity had been detected, they should have notified me immediately and blocked the Visa number. But I'd used the card the day before and that call was the first I heard about fraud.
I took a closer look at my account activity for the previous few months and every payment and credit was legit. I called my bank and spent almost an hour talking to several different people to get an explanation. The best I got was, "Well, they want to upgrade the gold check card holders to platinum." I asked if there would be a new Visa number and expiration date on the card because I had to update some autopayments if that was changing. "Nope. The number won't change." If that was the case, why couldn't they just wait another 6 months until my gold card expired? And why follow up the early mailing with a phone call talking about fraud?
So I went home and checked the mail. There was my new platinum check card with a new Visa number and expiration date. Why the new number? I'd had the old one for 12 years and it was burned into my brain.
So all I can figure is the details of my old card were lost in a security breach but hadn't been used yet. Why else would I get bumped to a new card 6 months early and a new Visa account number for the first time in over a decade? I'm sure if I pressed hard enough, I could get an answer but their first and second tier people are doing a good Sargent Schultz imitation and I'd wasted enough time on it.
But I shouldn't have to dig and probe. I should have received a letter with my new card explaining EXACTLY why the new card and account were necessary. The name of the processor that lost the data, the date/time the data was compromised, and the action taken against the company that lost the data.
Well, I've been doing the more brains than money thing for quite a while and I'd like to try it the other way around just to see what all the hype is about. There are so many of those people out there I figure they must be on to something.
I assume you're going on vacation or you'd just use whatever system your IT department has set up. If I'm right and this is a vacation, then freakin' GO ON VACATION. If you get all shaky and twitchy if you go more than a couple hours with a direct neural feed, you need to address your addiction before you leave. You can access everything you'll need while on vacation. You don't NEED to look up "subversive" things while you're on vacation.
If you want to see what the Great Firewall blocks, go to websitepulse (or one of the many other test sites) and use a "test behind the great firewall" tool to see if your favorite sites are being blocked or modified.
If you absolutely must have unfiltered access, get a router that runs dd-WRT and set yourself up the VPN. In fact, get several friends to do the same. Then you can connect to those routers via VPN and surf through those connections. Unless China cuts off your VPN service. As others have noted, this happens regularly.
Bottom line: When you're on vacation, part of being on vacation is immersing yourself in the local culture. In this case, part of the culture involves filtering and sanitizing information. Go with it. I think you'll be surprised at how little the Great Firewall impacts your trip.
You can get a refund. But don't sit through the entire move and then go demand a refund. That would be like eating an entire meal then saying you don't want to pay because it wasn't good enough. How bad could it have been if you finished the whole thing? Leave in the first 20 minutes or so (you'll know if it's bad by then) and go find a manager to demand a refund.
I almost did that with Battlefield Earth but it was like watching a slow-motion pileup on an icy road. I just couldn't stop watching. They should have given out "I survived" t-shirts after that movie.
I had someone send a document in MS Works format a few months ago. Not joking at all. Apparently Microsoft is still selling this product. Which makes absolutely no sense considering you need to install compatibility packs on both ends to exchange files with Office users.
Yeah, "One platform to rule them all" is absolute bullshit. None of the platforms that were around when I was in school are still in use today. I didn't see my first windowed (not Windows(tm)) environment until college. In my programming classes, we used a number of different environments ranging from IBM XT (yes, 8088) computers to MacOS to VMS. And not one of those environments is directly relevant to the operating systems I use today other than the very basic core concepts of How Computers Work.
Cramming these kids into a homogeneous environment is not going to prepare them for the real world. Not at all. Many of them will memorize processes and procedures by rote with no understanding of what they're doing. I work with people like that every day and I don't know how they manage to dress themselves in he morning and obtain food.
In my ideal world, these kids would be getting Macs not because they're shiny but because they can run the greatest number of mainstream operating systems. Load those puppies up with OSX, Linux, and Windows. Each with a different set of tools that all do the same job. (Say, iWork, OpenOffice, and Office for productivity apps.) When the kid turns it on, the OS is randomly selected for the day and that's what they use. Make them learn how to use computers in the general sense, not the specific sense.
Because whatever they learn now, the real world is going to be WAY different by the time they get out there in 8, 9, 10 years. If they've only learned one way to do things, they'll be screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when throwing in my CPU cycles added a small to moderate increase to power consumption, I was happy to run these clients. But, the last time I checked, my gaming rig's power draw nearly tripled going from as low as I could get it (drives spun down, video idle, CPU clocked way down, etc.) to having all 4 cores and both graphics cards maxed. Nevermind the heat that comes pouring out and the noise when all the fans ramp up. It's not like the old days when loading up your Pentium 3 added an extra 20 watts.
It set my pacemaker to hummingbird!!!
Am I the only one who read that as "Polar Bears To Be Visible Tonight" and thought, "Holy crap, they're usually invisible?!?"
You haven't seen many comments about it because there aren't enough morally perfect IT people to go around. Even some priests blab about what they've heard in confessionals and that's like an express ticket to Hell. Obviously, the IT people shouldn't be blabbing but they're human beings so they'll blab eventually. Maybe only amongst themselves but someone will overhear and then the grapevine takes over. I worked for a company where the HR person was a horrible gossip. She eventually got fired for it but she was there for a couple of years before the hammer finally came down.
No shit. I swear some people can be amazingly stupid. I once had a guy call me when he had trouble sending an email. "Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: I wuv my snookums." "Body: I can't wait to see you again..." (That's where I tuned out and flipped on the blinders.) Now if this had been Mrs. VP, that's no big deal, tho still the kind of thing that shouldn't go in the corporate email archive. But the address was not Mrs. VP. It was Mr. VP's former assistant. And the guy KNEW it was going in the archive because one of his requirements for the email archiving system was that it be impossible for messages to be removed from the archive. And instead of just deleting the message, he called for help, GUARANTEEING that it would be noticed.
Looking back, maybe he wanted to be caught. But don't drag the IT department into your divorce, dude! Not cool.
Yeah, some kids are going to be bored but they have to learn the basics. All these years later, I remember being in college taking some 3rd-level programming course (had ComSci prerequisites with ComSci prerequisites) and one of my fellow students was totally befuddled by a floppy disk. No idea what to do with it, no idea how to copy files onto it. The whole concept was new to this person. This had to be the person's second year (minimum) as a Computer Science major and they'd never copied a file from one computer to another. And, no, floppy disks had not just been invented the previous winter. They'd been in the consumer marketplace for over a decade. How did they get this far in this line of education without learning how to do something so basic?
Kids need to learn that boring stuff like file management, word processors, spreadsheets, email, etc. because those are fundamental tasks that they will need to master for ANY job that doesn't involve salting fried potato slices. If they can test out of that and move on to more advanced stuff, great. But not requiring them to learn the basics would be like not requiring them to learn how to manage a household budget or not require them to learn how to read and write.
There are. Two. Spaces! /Picard
Why not do both in separate product lines? Kinda like what they're already going right this very moment. If I want a lot of stuff in one place, I buy hard drives. If I want a small amount of stuff accessed very quickly, I buy SSDs. One division increasing capacity doesn't stop an entirely different division from increasing performance. And those SSDs are increasing in size pretty quickly. The Vertex 2 Pro is up to 240 gigs for under $700. Wasn't long ago that the tiniest, crappiest-performing SSD cost that much. Now that's the price of the biggest and fastest. In another year, the $/gig ratio will be even better along with performance.
So I think fast storage is coming along just fine and I'm happy to have the slow spinning stuff for my "access occasionally" data like audio, video, backups, etc.
If being a dickhead is a crime, I'm in serious trouble. Can someone please provide a list of countries that won't extradite to the US? Soonish, please.
I'm glad somebody said it. The money you'd save on electricity in a year would probably pay for a little NAS appliance that barely takes up more space than the drive(s).
I won't be happy until my browser updates every time I launch it and at least once an hour while I'm browsing. And the updates should force an automatic restart.
I thought the headline said morton-salt.
Well, that's part of it but there are other factors. At one time, some carriers (t-mobile, for one) would either give discounts on service or let people get month-to-month contracts if they brought their own phones so there was some incentive to spend the money up front. Either you recovered the money through lower monthly costs or you were free to jump carriers at any time. Currently, I don't think any carriers will do that. A few years ago, I switched to t-mobile and explained that I had an unlocked phone that I liked better than anything they were offering. "So what?" "Can I get any kind of a discount?" "No. You don't have to take one of our phones but you may as well since you're paying for it. And 2 years is our minimum contract length."
So, with the Nexus, you weren't just paying or one $500 phone, you were also paying for the $200 "free" phone from the carrier.
Also, the market for the Nexus is the same group that knows better than to buy Rev A. Always wait for the second generation.
Go try the same thing with every other computer manufacturer on the planet and tell me how many of them will replace a screen for less than 70% of the MSRP of the laptop. If you find even one, I'll be shocked. That's an industry thing, not an Apple thing.
And I can top your story. I once broke the LCD on a new Sony digital camera. While it was a poor design (no protective shield over the LCD of a device intended to be carried in a pocket), it was entirely my fault that it broke. I called and asked what it would cost to replace the screen. Out of warranty repair would be $$$ but that model was just released a month ago so it should still be under warranty. After I explained that it wasn't a warranty failure but user damage, the price went to $$$+50. Fuck you, Sony! And I couldn't buy a screen on ebay because it was such a new model that nobody was parting them out yet.
The moral of the story: Take care of your stuff!
And, if you don't think you'll be able to take care of your stuff, insure it. (And Applecare is not insurance.)
Did you miss the part where they're talking about docking stations with video cards built in, USB3, network, etc.?
"The first applications, which will start sampling next year, will let you connect your laptop to a base station with all kinds of storage controllers, networking controllers, and yes, an external graphics processor."
I don't know how your company works but, around here, we expect people to show up at roughly the same time every day and...erm...work. Like simultaneously. And, yes, many of our laptop users prefer docking stations to plugging and unplugging power/network/video/keyboard/mouse/monitor every time they come and go. And, yes, quite a few people use their laptops exclusively. In fact, very few people have both a laptop and a desktop. What would be the point?
So, yeah, the scenario described as the first application of this new technology that we can expect to see involves people pushing lots of data across the connection for long periods of time.
Let's say I've got even a little building with 50 people who want to use this. Will I be able to pack 50 of these point-to-point units into a building and have all of these systems perform at peak capacity without stepping all over each other? That would be amazing.
And, aside from the technical issues of getting it to work well in a dense environment, there's still one cord that needs to be connected to the laptop. Power. If I have to plug that in, I may as well snap the laptop into a docking station and skip the wireless connection entirely. One connection is one connection and I won't have to worry about interference, security, bandwidth, etc.
I'm 99.44% sure that my check card info was compromised in a data theft incident but I have no proof. One day, I got a call from my bank saying that my current check card was susceptible to fraud and that a new card had been sent to my mailing address. Please call if you have not received this card.
That set off a couple WTF questions in my head. First of all, it was implied that my replacement card should have arrived which means they'd sent it at least 2-3 days earlier. If fraudulent activity had been detected, they should have notified me immediately and blocked the Visa number. But I'd used the card the day before and that call was the first I heard about fraud.
I took a closer look at my account activity for the previous few months and every payment and credit was legit. I called my bank and spent almost an hour talking to several different people to get an explanation. The best I got was, "Well, they want to upgrade the gold check card holders to platinum." I asked if there would be a new Visa number and expiration date on the card because I had to update some autopayments if that was changing. "Nope. The number won't change." If that was the case, why couldn't they just wait another 6 months until my gold card expired? And why follow up the early mailing with a phone call talking about fraud?
So I went home and checked the mail. There was my new platinum check card with a new Visa number and expiration date. Why the new number? I'd had the old one for 12 years and it was burned into my brain.
So all I can figure is the details of my old card were lost in a security breach but hadn't been used yet. Why else would I get bumped to a new card 6 months early and a new Visa account number for the first time in over a decade? I'm sure if I pressed hard enough, I could get an answer but their first and second tier people are doing a good Sargent Schultz imitation and I'd wasted enough time on it.
But I shouldn't have to dig and probe. I should have received a letter with my new card explaining EXACTLY why the new card and account were necessary. The name of the processor that lost the data, the date/time the data was compromised, and the action taken against the company that lost the data.
Well, I've been doing the more brains than money thing for quite a while and I'd like to try it the other way around just to see what all the hype is about. There are so many of those people out there I figure they must be on to something.
I assume you're going on vacation or you'd just use whatever system your IT department has set up. If I'm right and this is a vacation, then freakin' GO ON VACATION. If you get all shaky and twitchy if you go more than a couple hours with a direct neural feed, you need to address your addiction before you leave. You can access everything you'll need while on vacation. You don't NEED to look up "subversive" things while you're on vacation.
If you want to see what the Great Firewall blocks, go to websitepulse (or one of the many other test sites) and use a "test behind the great firewall" tool to see if your favorite sites are being blocked or modified.
If you absolutely must have unfiltered access, get a router that runs dd-WRT and set yourself up the VPN. In fact, get several friends to do the same. Then you can connect to those routers via VPN and surf through those connections. Unless China cuts off your VPN service. As others have noted, this happens regularly.
Bottom line: When you're on vacation, part of being on vacation is immersing yourself in the local culture. In this case, part of the culture involves filtering and sanitizing information. Go with it. I think you'll be surprised at how little the Great Firewall impacts your trip.
What was that robot thinking?
So you're saying you have "people skills"...
You can get a refund. But don't sit through the entire move and then go demand a refund. That would be like eating an entire meal then saying you don't want to pay because it wasn't good enough. How bad could it have been if you finished the whole thing? Leave in the first 20 minutes or so (you'll know if it's bad by then) and go find a manager to demand a refund.
I almost did that with Battlefield Earth but it was like watching a slow-motion pileup on an icy road. I just couldn't stop watching. They should have given out "I survived" t-shirts after that movie.
I had someone send a document in MS Works format a few months ago. Not joking at all. Apparently Microsoft is still selling this product. Which makes absolutely no sense considering you need to install compatibility packs on both ends to exchange files with Office users.
Yeah, "One platform to rule them all" is absolute bullshit. None of the platforms that were around when I was in school are still in use today. I didn't see my first windowed (not Windows(tm)) environment until college. In my programming classes, we used a number of different environments ranging from IBM XT (yes, 8088) computers to MacOS to VMS. And not one of those environments is directly relevant to the operating systems I use today other than the very basic core concepts of How Computers Work.
Cramming these kids into a homogeneous environment is not going to prepare them for the real world. Not at all. Many of them will memorize processes and procedures by rote with no understanding of what they're doing. I work with people like that every day and I don't know how they manage to dress themselves in he morning and obtain food.
In my ideal world, these kids would be getting Macs not because they're shiny but because they can run the greatest number of mainstream operating systems. Load those puppies up with OSX, Linux, and Windows. Each with a different set of tools that all do the same job. (Say, iWork, OpenOffice, and Office for productivity apps.) When the kid turns it on, the OS is randomly selected for the day and that's what they use. Make them learn how to use computers in the general sense, not the specific sense.
Because whatever they learn now, the real world is going to be WAY different by the time they get out there in 8, 9, 10 years. If they've only learned one way to do things, they'll be screwed.
Lemme know how that works out when your SAN gets tossed in a truck and spends most of a day banging around city streets and parking lots.