You've clearly never researched how SED drives work. No one has "the key for the drive," it's generated by the drive on the fly. The drive ships unsecured, and when you secure it, it generates a new encryption key using the passphrase you supply. When you Instant Secure Erase the drive, it throws out the old keys and generates new ones. You can revert the encryption settings back to factory default, but you lose all data in the process. On top of that, on the better drives, all of this is reviewed by NIST for FIPS compliance.
Software encryption requires a couple of sufficiently motivated and clever Russians to break. Proper hardware encryption requires far more motivated, clever, and trained NSA engineers.
With SED drives, depending on the system architecture, the key to unlock them is often stored on the controller (think servers, here). So, if you steal a drive or find a drive in the rubbish bin, etc., you can't access it, but if you get the whole server or the drives + controller, you have full access, nothing else required. The big benefits to SED drives are: 1) MUCH faster than software-based FDE. The encryption basically happens at drive speed, and when you build a larger array, there's no slowdown - the encryption scales with the number of drives, since each disk has its own controller doing the encryption. 2) Instant Secure Erase - this wipes out the encryption keys in the drive's controller, rendering the original data permanently unrecoverable (assuming the encryption itself isn't broken). So, you can dispose of the drive (or RMA it) without worry that your corporate secrets are going to float out into the world. So, expensive "keep your hard drive" support plans can go away, as can expensive drive shredding services.
It probably depends on the hospital/clinic. Where I was, they asked for payment when I left. They didn't ask for evidence of my ability to pay when I arrived, about to collapse and puking on their floor. They treated me first (for a full day), then asked for payment. Contrast that with a trip to the ER I had in the US, where I had just been stabilized after anaphylaxis from an allergic reaction. While I was still being wheeled back, they were asking how I was going to be paying for that, if I had insurance, etc., trying to determine my ability to pay (presumably so they could determine what level of care to give me).
I would probably put both "individual pay" and "fully socialized" above our current system, or maybe a mixture, but one where there's true competition instead of the mess we have now.
I believe you're confused about how insurance companies affect health costs, there. When you look at a health bill, it does appear that the insurance company is keeping rates low by refusing to pay part of the billed amount, but what allowed those billed amounts to skyrocket in the first place? At one point, most people in this country could afford a doctor (who would make a house call) when they needed it. Then insurance plans came around and became widespread, and because some company was obligated to pay for the health care instead of the patient, prices shot upwards. Also, people began seeing the doctor for more trivial issues, because they "didn't have to pay for it," it was all "covered by insurance." This has, over time, lead us to the present time, where we have some of the most expensive health care in the world. An overnight hospital stay for dehydration in Mexico cost me $274, complete with IV fluids, anti-nausea/anti-vomiting drugs, my own private room with air conditioning, TV, and attached bathroom/shower, and breakfast. In the US, you could probably expect to add a couple 0's to that number, and I almost certainly would've been in a shared room, without the ability to control the temperature to my liking, with a bathroom further down the hall than I could walk on my own. In Mexico, I had to pay cash when I left. Here in the US, I would have paid more in deductible.
Chances are, they need safe food and clean water far more than they need to know how to use a computer. Once they have that, work on things like ending child marriages and treating women like property. Go from there.
It's not racial discrimination any more than it's protectionist to charge more for a Mexican mango because it's larger/heavier than a Florida mango. The price is based on weight, not where it came from.
HUGE profit cushions? What airlines are you looking at? Airlines have historically struggled with being profitable at all. They typically operate on razor-thin margins, and some of the more creative have just in the last few years become profitable on an ongoing basis. There's a lot of money moving around in the airline industry, but a surprisingly small amount of it is profit.
I believe the airlines should charge not based on the weight of the passenger, but based on the weight of the passenger and all luggage/carry-on. So, tickets would be priced as "$xx.xx + $y.yy * [unit of weight]." A person might weigh 80 lbs but carry 100 lbs of luggage/carry-on, so they would be charged the base rate for a seat plus 180 * price/lb.
This is no different (and no more discriminatory) than driving; cars, like airplanes, use more fuel when they're weighed down more heavily. The fuel station isn't discriminating when they dispense more fuel to fill the tank of the car carrying a lardo, and the car isn't discriminating when it burns more fuel, it's simply obeying the laws of physics. Same with FedEx or UPS when they charge more for a 100-lb package than for a 5-lb package.
So, stop the ridiculous checked-bag fees, let people check whatever they want to free up the overhead storage for actual carry-on luggage, and charge for everything (passenger+bags) at a flat per-pound (or per-kilo) rate. Simple, effective, and non-discriminatory.
And my Civic coupe (gas) was $13k after all taxes and licensing were paid, and for my style of driving (>90% highway, most trips 40+ miles) I get nearly equivalent fuel mileage (35-42mpg). On top of that, it's WAY more fun than driving a Prius, I can work on it myself, and it'll probably go at least 400k miles before I decide to replace it, and though I may have to replace the battery a couple times, I'll never have to replace the entire battery pack.
So yeah, EVs cost significantly more than gas cars.
More and more, as the hipster commies push their $15/hr minimum wage agenda, these stores will go away and you'll have to get to the suburbs to get your groceries. Have fun doing that on your bicycle.
Teach them that for many people, tech skills are pointless. They don't need "tech skills" to be successful in life, they need people skills, writing skills, basic math skills, troubleshooting skills, thinking skills. If these kids aren't excited about tech, team them things that DO excite them, like welding, or cooking, or auto repair, or carpentry, or plumbing, or any of a host of other things useful in real life. Not everyone needs "tech skills" to be successful.
Is OpenOffice/LibreOffice still a thing? I mean, it was great when I was in college and wanted something free to run on my old crusty hardware running Linux or Win2k, but MS Office really blew it out of the water last time I compared them side by side. Now that I have an income, I just buy the real thing.
Really? Surveillance flights along predetermined routes, with people from the country being surveilled on board the aircraft? Besides wasting fuel, what does this accomplish?
I agree, it is kind of sad. Most of the carriers have never really given it a chance or put it in a place in their stores where potential customers could look at and play with it. I'm in Western Washington, so I'm pretty certain it has a higher market penetration here. In my office (and no, I don't work at Microsoft), it seems like we have a fairly even mix between iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android devices (to be fair, many people in the office came from Microsoft and had their WP devices subsidized while there).
Outside of work, I have several friends who also use WP - a couple in the insurance industry, a couple students, etc. All of them seem pretty happy with them.
Each of the 3 OSs has some benefits over the others, but when compared side by side I wouldn't say any is at a clear disadvantage. WP probably has the best hardware quality available with the iPhone 6 a close second, Android is easily the most customizable, and iOS may win in the "mostly just works for everything you really want to do" department (has all the apps and the simplicity/consistency of UI).
So, to each their own, but counting out WP just because "it's Microsoft" or "because WP7 sucked" is shortsighted at best.
Among the people who use it, Windows Phone is already hugely popular. Every time I'm around people with iPhones or Android phones, I hear complaint after complaint about things that don't work right, underwhelming features, etc.
Everyone I know with a Windows phone loves it. Note that this was NOT true of WP7, but the latest WP8.1 phones are great! I've had a Lumia 521, Lumia 925, and now Lumia 830, and all have been excellent phones. The 521 is still my backup/travel phone.
How many models of phone does Microsoft make? Add to that, how many models of phones are available from other manufacturers running the Windows Phone OS?
How many models of phone does Apple make?
I don't think Microsoft is losing in the mobile space because of giving customers too few options.
That's the best they could come up with from their scrap pile? *puke* They'll pay more for power over the next 3 years than it would cost them to buy some decent enterprise-level servers with real switches.
The EX-4200 is great, for a basic SOHO or OOB switch, but I wouldn't use it where any real connectivity was required.
"it's so weird-looking; it's up in the air in terms of what it is. It is unbelievably fragile, and... it looks like it has wet tissue paper floating behind it. And it has a weird snout — it looks like a cartoon dog snout."
Sounds an awful lot like someone I saw walking out of the women's restroom at WalMart once.
Oops, I forgot.. pointing out that Microsoft does things for logical business reasons gets one down-modded around here. I repent. Microsoft just did it to screw you, *personally.* All the new beta features have been directed to whichever platform you don't use, as a way to screw you for being you.
Actually, suicide is typically not talked about in Western media because they're trying not to encourage copycats. That's why, with very few exceptions (Robin Williams, other famous people) you typically won't find anything in the paper. I know Microsoft has had at least one jumper from the Lincoln Square office in Bellevue, other tech companies probably have too. Funny thing, anywhere you treat people as sub-human for long enough, strange psychological things happen and they start to lose the will to live.
But, by and large, I agree with the lack of coverage in the media. People who may be borderline suicidal can be triggered by reading about other peoples' suicides, no need for the media to perpetuate the problem with in-depth coverage and how-to guides.
In case you never noticed, Skype needs customers to stay relevant. Even the idiots in management at Microsoft realize this. They also - at least mostly - realize that no matter how popular, not even Skype will bring users to a crap OS like Windows 8. They continue to support other OSs (and even add support for new non-MSFT platforms) because the world has moved on from being Windows-only. That doesn't stop them from releasing new features for their own flagshit OS first, however (typo not accidental).
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You've clearly never researched how SED drives work. No one has "the key for the drive," it's generated by the drive on the fly. The drive ships unsecured, and when you secure it, it generates a new encryption key using the passphrase you supply. When you Instant Secure Erase the drive, it throws out the old keys and generates new ones. You can revert the encryption settings back to factory default, but you lose all data in the process. On top of that, on the better drives, all of this is reviewed by NIST for FIPS compliance.
Software encryption requires a couple of sufficiently motivated and clever Russians to break. Proper hardware encryption requires far more motivated, clever, and trained NSA engineers.
With SED drives, depending on the system architecture, the key to unlock them is often stored on the controller (think servers, here). So, if you steal a drive or find a drive in the rubbish bin, etc., you can't access it, but if you get the whole server or the drives + controller, you have full access, nothing else required. The big benefits to SED drives are: 1) MUCH faster than software-based FDE. The encryption basically happens at drive speed, and when you build a larger array, there's no slowdown - the encryption scales with the number of drives, since each disk has its own controller doing the encryption. 2) Instant Secure Erase - this wipes out the encryption keys in the drive's controller, rendering the original data permanently unrecoverable (assuming the encryption itself isn't broken). So, you can dispose of the drive (or RMA it) without worry that your corporate secrets are going to float out into the world. So, expensive "keep your hard drive" support plans can go away, as can expensive drive shredding services.
It probably depends on the hospital/clinic. Where I was, they asked for payment when I left. They didn't ask for evidence of my ability to pay when I arrived, about to collapse and puking on their floor. They treated me first (for a full day), then asked for payment. Contrast that with a trip to the ER I had in the US, where I had just been stabilized after anaphylaxis from an allergic reaction. While I was still being wheeled back, they were asking how I was going to be paying for that, if I had insurance, etc., trying to determine my ability to pay (presumably so they could determine what level of care to give me).
I would probably put both "individual pay" and "fully socialized" above our current system, or maybe a mixture, but one where there's true competition instead of the mess we have now.
I believe you're confused about how insurance companies affect health costs, there. When you look at a health bill, it does appear that the insurance company is keeping rates low by refusing to pay part of the billed amount, but what allowed those billed amounts to skyrocket in the first place? At one point, most people in this country could afford a doctor (who would make a house call) when they needed it. Then insurance plans came around and became widespread, and because some company was obligated to pay for the health care instead of the patient, prices shot upwards. Also, people began seeing the doctor for more trivial issues, because they "didn't have to pay for it," it was all "covered by insurance." This has, over time, lead us to the present time, where we have some of the most expensive health care in the world. An overnight hospital stay for dehydration in Mexico cost me $274, complete with IV fluids, anti-nausea/anti-vomiting drugs, my own private room with air conditioning, TV, and attached bathroom/shower, and breakfast. In the US, you could probably expect to add a couple 0's to that number, and I almost certainly would've been in a shared room, without the ability to control the temperature to my liking, with a bathroom further down the hall than I could walk on my own. In Mexico, I had to pay cash when I left. Here in the US, I would have paid more in deductible.
Chances are, they need safe food and clean water far more than they need to know how to use a computer. Once they have that, work on things like ending child marriages and treating women like property. Go from there.
I think you meant to say "Surface Pro Copy." But hey, at least it will run Office, maybe even almost as well as the real deal.
It's not racial discrimination any more than it's protectionist to charge more for a Mexican mango because it's larger/heavier than a Florida mango. The price is based on weight, not where it came from.
HUGE profit cushions? What airlines are you looking at? Airlines have historically struggled with being profitable at all. They typically operate on razor-thin margins, and some of the more creative have just in the last few years become profitable on an ongoing basis. There's a lot of money moving around in the airline industry, but a surprisingly small amount of it is profit.
I believe the airlines should charge not based on the weight of the passenger, but based on the weight of the passenger and all luggage/carry-on. So, tickets would be priced as "$xx.xx + $y.yy * [unit of weight]." A person might weigh 80 lbs but carry 100 lbs of luggage/carry-on, so they would be charged the base rate for a seat plus 180 * price/lb.
This is no different (and no more discriminatory) than driving; cars, like airplanes, use more fuel when they're weighed down more heavily. The fuel station isn't discriminating when they dispense more fuel to fill the tank of the car carrying a lardo, and the car isn't discriminating when it burns more fuel, it's simply obeying the laws of physics. Same with FedEx or UPS when they charge more for a 100-lb package than for a 5-lb package.
So, stop the ridiculous checked-bag fees, let people check whatever they want to free up the overhead storage for actual carry-on luggage, and charge for everything (passenger+bags) at a flat per-pound (or per-kilo) rate. Simple, effective, and non-discriminatory.
And my Civic coupe (gas) was $13k after all taxes and licensing were paid, and for my style of driving (>90% highway, most trips 40+ miles) I get nearly equivalent fuel mileage (35-42mpg). On top of that, it's WAY more fun than driving a Prius, I can work on it myself, and it'll probably go at least 400k miles before I decide to replace it, and though I may have to replace the battery a couple times, I'll never have to replace the entire battery pack.
So yeah, EVs cost significantly more than gas cars.
More and more, as the hipster commies push their $15/hr minimum wage agenda, these stores will go away and you'll have to get to the suburbs to get your groceries. Have fun doing that on your bicycle.
Teach them that for many people, tech skills are pointless. They don't need "tech skills" to be successful in life, they need people skills, writing skills, basic math skills, troubleshooting skills, thinking skills. If these kids aren't excited about tech, team them things that DO excite them, like welding, or cooking, or auto repair, or carpentry, or plumbing, or any of a host of other things useful in real life. Not everyone needs "tech skills" to be successful.
Is OpenOffice/LibreOffice still a thing? I mean, it was great when I was in college and wanted something free to run on my old crusty hardware running Linux or Win2k, but MS Office really blew it out of the water last time I compared them side by side. Now that I have an income, I just buy the real thing.
Yeah, Microsoft is making buckets of money from it, from licensing. As a shareholder, this makes me happy. :)
Really? Surveillance flights along predetermined routes, with people from the country being surveilled on board the aircraft? Besides wasting fuel, what does this accomplish?
I agree, it is kind of sad. Most of the carriers have never really given it a chance or put it in a place in their stores where potential customers could look at and play with it. I'm in Western Washington, so I'm pretty certain it has a higher market penetration here. In my office (and no, I don't work at Microsoft), it seems like we have a fairly even mix between iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android devices (to be fair, many people in the office came from Microsoft and had their WP devices subsidized while there).
Outside of work, I have several friends who also use WP - a couple in the insurance industry, a couple students, etc. All of them seem pretty happy with them.
Each of the 3 OSs has some benefits over the others, but when compared side by side I wouldn't say any is at a clear disadvantage. WP probably has the best hardware quality available with the iPhone 6 a close second, Android is easily the most customizable, and iOS may win in the "mostly just works for everything you really want to do" department (has all the apps and the simplicity/consistency of UI).
So, to each their own, but counting out WP just because "it's Microsoft" or "because WP7 sucked" is shortsighted at best.
Among the people who use it, Windows Phone is already hugely popular. Every time I'm around people with iPhones or Android phones, I hear complaint after complaint about things that don't work right, underwhelming features, etc.
Everyone I know with a Windows phone loves it. Note that this was NOT true of WP7, but the latest WP8.1 phones are great! I've had a Lumia 521, Lumia 925, and now Lumia 830, and all have been excellent phones. The 521 is still my backup/travel phone.
How many models of phone does Microsoft make? Add to that, how many models of phones are available from other manufacturers running the Windows Phone OS?
How many models of phone does Apple make?
I don't think Microsoft is losing in the mobile space because of giving customers too few options.
Alright, you got me... hands up! don't shoot!
Everyone who enters starts saying impulsively, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!"
That's the best they could come up with from their scrap pile? *puke* They'll pay more for power over the next 3 years than it would cost them to buy some decent enterprise-level servers with real switches.
The EX-4200 is great, for a basic SOHO or OOB switch, but I wouldn't use it where any real connectivity was required.
"it's so weird-looking; it's up in the air in terms of what it is. It is unbelievably fragile, and... it looks like it has wet tissue paper floating behind it. And it has a weird snout — it looks like a cartoon dog snout."
Sounds an awful lot like someone I saw walking out of the women's restroom at WalMart once.
Oops, I forgot.. pointing out that Microsoft does things for logical business reasons gets one down-modded around here. I repent. Microsoft just did it to screw you, *personally.* All the new beta features have been directed to whichever platform you don't use, as a way to screw you for being you.
Actually, suicide is typically not talked about in Western media because they're trying not to encourage copycats. That's why, with very few exceptions (Robin Williams, other famous people) you typically won't find anything in the paper. I know Microsoft has had at least one jumper from the Lincoln Square office in Bellevue, other tech companies probably have too. Funny thing, anywhere you treat people as sub-human for long enough, strange psychological things happen and they start to lose the will to live.
But, by and large, I agree with the lack of coverage in the media. People who may be borderline suicidal can be triggered by reading about other peoples' suicides, no need for the media to perpetuate the problem with in-depth coverage and how-to guides.
In case you never noticed, Skype needs customers to stay relevant. Even the idiots in management at Microsoft realize this. They also - at least mostly - realize that no matter how popular, not even Skype will bring users to a crap OS like Windows 8. They continue to support other OSs (and even add support for new non-MSFT platforms) because the world has moved on from being Windows-only. That doesn't stop them from releasing new features for their own flagshit OS first, however (typo not accidental).