until executives start making security a priority, rather than a reflexive action, nothing will change. The majority of corporate boardrooms are filled with MBA types and people with sales backgrounds. Even in high tech companies, the tech founder usually gets squeezed out at some point to make room for the MBA that is going to grow the company.
Typically, MBA's and salespeople view security as a burden, a necessary evil, a nuisance. They would rather allocate funds to marketing. Or the latest diversity flavor of the week. IT in general is viewed as a cost center and data security gets lumped in with that. Most corporate leaders don't really understand IT security because they generally don't come from an IT background. So it gets treated as an afterthought and, predictably, the IT folks are left to stamp out the resulting brush fires.
Standard operating procedure:
1) Send everyone a letter telling them that their credentials have been compromised 2) Offer them 6 months of free credit monitoring 3) Issue them a new card 4) Encourage the customer to change their password 5) Sweep it under the rug
How much of a kickback is the IOC chairman getting? Because everything about the Olympics involves money and scandals and payoffs of some sort. I can't believe that VISA would stupid enough to introduce something like a new payment system at the Olympics of all places - the absolute epitome of dirty money, scandal ridden events.
I mean seriously, is this some sort of joke? So future Olympic bribes can now be conducted using the VISA payment ring...untraceable, discreet, no more bulky envelopes in a dark alley. No...graft can now be done from the comfort of your own living room. What could possibly go wrong?
That's an interesting analysis. Tasks that can be automated WILL be automated. It's only a matter of when and to what extent. In the Auto industry we have seen what it might look like already. You have robots that can create thousands of perfect welds, better than any human could do. Then you have a human to inspect the welds to make sure nothing was missed. That's the model. Robot makes the fries, human inspects the fries before they get served to anyone.
As you pointed out above, raising the minimum wage (or shaming companies into doing so) simply accelerates the process. The real question is what happens to all these newly displaced workers? Many of the fast food workers are high school kids so they can just deliver pizzas or something. But what about semi skilled workers? Retraining is difficult and costly. Government led retraining efforts have historically been dismal failures. My fear is that 10% unemployment will become the "new normal". Obviously this will put a tremendous strain on an already strained entitlement system. Which will lead to even higher taxes on the middle class (the upper class always finds a way to evade paying their fair share).
I keep hearing about these start ups and how lithe and agile they are and everyone dresses down and flat management structure and no politics. I've worked for small companies and my experience was that flat management meant that nobody was in charge. And trust me, small companies have plenty of office politics. It's just human nature and the people that are managers - they operate the same way no matter the size of the company. It's how they are trained.
The only reason to join a small company is to get some training (baptism by fire, but training none the less) and maybe cash in if they go public. Other than that you can look forward to low pay, crummy benefits and a chaotic work environment.
All corporate environments involve meaningless buzzwords and unnecessary meetings. Big ones just have more of it.
all you out there clamoring for $15/hr minimum wage. This is the beginning of the end of low paying/entry level jobs. We're seeing this in the fast food industry as well with automated french fry machines, and probably burger makers soon too. When government decides to get involved and try to tell businesses how to do things this is the predictable response.
When you are in a low margin business like fast food, or WalMart for that matter, you simply can't make a profit paying people $15/hr for entry level jobs that require little to no skill. So they turn to cheaper robots. So instead of a bunch of $10/hr jobs you end up with zero, or close to zero, $15/hr jobs.
Yes its an old language and not very sexy by today's standards. What COBOL does really really well is process huge sums of data very quickly and efficiently. The Payroll systems I work on today use COBOL and NOBODY touches them. Why? Because they work. Being around so long, the language is pretty much air tight in terms of bugs, etc.
The biggest challenge is trying to find someone that can code in COBOL. Universities these days don't teach it anymore.
Yes it would be a niche product (the 17" laptop). My current rig for travel is a 12" laptop and when I can hook it up to an external monitor its great. The problem is that often my clients don't have spare monitors and if they do they are mostly junk ones that nobody else wants.
Your point about the extra weight is well taken. But having a 17" display means that I don't need to go look for a spare monitor. If I can find one then all the better but having the larger screen means that it can function just fine on its own.
Fast food restaurants ARE going robotic. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Raising or not raising the minimum wage is a red herring. Just look at what has happened in the auto industry. Sure there are people still working on the assembly line but when you have a robot that can perform 100,000 welds absolutely perfectly the writing is on the wall.
Eventually these fast food robots (McBots?) will be able to make a batch of fries with greater consistency than a human can. Without any waste. Without dropping any hairs in there. Without any cross contamination between the cash drawer and the fry station. Without using the bathroom or blowing your nose and forgetting to wash your hands. Without calling in sick.
Raising the minimum wage merely gives these companies cover to accelerate the whole process. "Why, if we have to pay $15 an hour we'll be out of business. You leave us no choice but to automate!". Even if the minimum wage were only $5 an hour eventually the process will be automated. It's just a matter of when.
Meg Wittman has to go down as one of the worst CEO's in history. HP, the once proud company, is being reduced to a steaming pile. So now EDS is being spun off, which HP massively overpaid for in the first place. This is after Meg triumphantly declared that HP was going to be a huge player in the "services" market.
Same mistake that IBM and DELL made. Another hardware vendor tries to become a services player and falls flat on its face.
Pretty soon HP will be reduced to a company with some patents and selling printers. Meanwhile Meg feathers her nest in anticipation of the golden parachute jump. But before that happens thousands more will lose their jobs and the company continues to be gutted.
"Doctor's income has very little to do with the skyrocketing cost of health care here in the US." - Spot on and you have outlined the real reasons quite nicely. In my view, Doctors should make more money not less. There are very few professions that require the amount of formal education and rigor that it requires to become a physician. Don't even get me started on how much athletes and entertainers make. It is obscene.
I think the problem with the healthcare system is that nobody has any real skin in the game. All patients care about is how much their co-pay is for a given service. Doctors don't really care how much the lab charges or how much a given procedure costs as long as the insurance company will reimburse them for it. Insurance companies don't really care how much the doctor charges or the lab, as long as they can collect enough in premiums to cover it or pass it along to the patient in the form of a co-payment.
Obamacare, despite addressing a few issues, does nothing to contain costs. It does nothing to address unnecessary or repetitive procedures. It does nothing to address frivolous malpractice lawsuits. It does nothing to address spiraling drug costs. Until those things are tackled costs will continue to rise.
I hear what you're saying about the memory soldering. But I have to say that my 2008 Macbook Pro has been rock solid and I have added memory more than once. so the connectors have not been an issue, at least for me. Besides, how many times would someone add or remove memory? Not more than a few times I would think. My issue with soldering the memory is that once you buy the laptop you cannot upgrade the memory. What happens to the person that cannot spring for the extra money for the memory right then or the person that buys the laptop thinking it will be fine and they come to find out later that they need more memory? With the soldered memory you are SOL. And, admittedly, I do like to tinker and I just feel like I'm missing out if I can't fiddle with stuff:-)
Why is there any human intervention at all? If this is truly "trending" news then it should make the list solely based on a numbers based algorithm that looks at not only what the major news agencies are reporting but, more importantly, what is being discussed. Facebook keeps track of how many "likes" a story gets and how many Shares it gets and how many comments are posted to any given story.
That should be what determines what is trending. Not some collection of editors. What exactly are they going to "train" these people to do? Train them to artificially promote conservative news stories to tamp down the current outcry? What happens when that goes too far and liberals start complaining about it? More training? Lather rinse repeat. Nothing more than window dressing. Is this supposed to be like the SCOTUS where you have x number of conservatives and x number of liberals and everything is supposed to balance out? How about just letting news stories "trend" on their own merits?
Why is Apple stubbornly staying with soldered memory when users clearly don't like it? Are they not supposed to be the company of great customer service that loves and listens to their community? Not in this case. I can sure see how it benefits Apple to do it that way but Joe Public...not so much.
Here is my wish list:
1) Bring back the 17" Macbook Pro. Yes it's big and bulky but I'm willing to put up with that for the extra screen real estate. 2) Bring back user upgradable memory. If it truly is a Macbook Pro then it should come with 8GB minimum and I should be able to plug in up to 32GB (or maybe even 64) as and when I need it. If the laptop was aimed at home users I could maybe see not wanting them to be able to do this but I'm a professional and I know how to open laptops and upgrade them. I should be able to do this on my own and without a trip to the Genius lab. 3) Ports - lots of them. Wireless is nice but sometimes I prefer a hardwired network connection. Gimme a network port. I also need a couple of HDMI ports and at least 3 USB ports. Why not throw in a Firewire port too? I know that it's kind of old technology now but a lot of people still have firewire drives and would like to be able to plug them in. 4) Bootcamp. Why not have the option to have Bootcamp pre-installed if you know you're going to use it? Or maybe a prebuilt virtualized Windows. Yes, some of use would prefer to do it ourselves but others might appreciate the convenience. 5) I'm tired of the race to the thinnest laptop. I want something with a battery big enough to last the whole day, or more, doing intensive processing. If that adds a half pound or a half inch so be it. This is supposed to be a big boy laptop, not some hipster toy. 6) 4K display. Could you imagine a 4K display on a sweet 17" laptop with a matte finish? Heaven.
Until then I'm hanging on to my creaky old 2008 era Macbook Pro.
Must have been a slow day on the liberal news front. Time to throw up a man hater story. How is giving less than favorable reviews to a TV show "sabotaging" it? Did it ever occur to anyone that Sex and the City really and truly does suck? Four selfish, narcissistic, shallow, materialistic bimbos stumbling through their me first world in high heels. Yeah...sure sounds riveting to me - yawn!
And since when did winning awards equate to quality programming? Hollywood abandoned that notion years ago. I gave up on sitcoms years ago so my example is dated but let's examine Everybody loves Raymond. The guy is depicted as a complete and utter dope. The woman, of course, is depicted as smart, confident, funny, etc. In other words, she wears the pants in the family. Much to the delight of the feminists, and feminist surrogates. Of course if the roles were reversed the man would be accused to being anti-female, sexist, you name it.
pardon the pun. But a Chromebook is nothing near a Macbook. Chromebooks have very little in the way of memory and storage. The $200 versions have terrible screens. The utility, when not connected to the internet, is quite limited. The Macbook is a full fledged workstation.
I'm not saying that it's a bad choice for schools who are putting them in the hands of teenagers that have yet to develop, shall we say, a sense of responsibility.
Probably a fairer comparison would be to the Surface but even then the Surface has a lot more going for it than a Chromebook. The Chromebook is a low end internet appliance. For very basic tasks its great. Which is to say, for most students it is just fine. But to compare a Chromebook to a Macbook is like comparing a Chevy to a Ferrari.
I have had to take drug tests for numerous clients that I have worked with and I always wondered about this. What if you live in a state where it is legal to use pot (Washington State for example) for recreational purposes. You work in a state where that is not the case. The test comes up positive. Can you still be denied employment because of that?
I've been told the answer is yes. The whole thing is messed up. The federal government says its illegal, some states say it is legal and employers have their own independent rules.
Personally I think that alcohol is a far bigger problem that pot. From an employers standpoint, how many man hours are lost to people calling in sick because they are hungover? Or people dragging their ass into work hungover and working at half speed? Or making business decisions in that state? Not to mention drunk driving and alcohol fueled assaults.
At the end of the day employers should be free to choose the employees they want. I just wonder if they are missing some of the bad ones.
Whenever government gets its dirty mitts involved in business these are the types of results we should expect. While I sympathize with people making minimum wage flipping burgers at Wendy's is simply not worth $15 an hour. Neither is $21 million a year for a CEO but at least the CEO is a skilled position. When I was a kid my first job was minimum wage. Worked in a kitchen. It was hot, messy, hard work. But I learned a lot. One of the most important lessons I learned was that unless I got an education I was going to be doing this crappy job for the rest of my life. It was a motivator. The low skilled jobs are not mean to be career positions. It is a starting point to learn the business. If you learn it well enough you can become a manager and they make a decent living (six figures in some cases).
Next time you visit a fast food joint take a look behind the counter and see who is working there. My bet is that almost all of them are high school kids and one adult manager. Those kids are learning valuable job skills. If they want to advance they can. If not they can take those skills elsewhere. Forcing these places to pay high minimum salaries is basically forcing their hands. If they want to remain profitable then they will automate the low skill jobs. Either that or they have to start charging $10 for a fast food burger and nobody is going to pay that.
This is yet another example of the government having good intentions but hurting people in the end.
I usually don't respond to AC's but for the record I don't work on SAP systems. But I've been working on ERP systems for 18 years so I speak with some authority on it. Someone asked what SAP was so I shared some knowledge. Take it or leave it pal.
I'm not disputing that what Facebook did was wrong. They have, once again, deceived their users. This kind of behavior goes way back. Which is precisely why I don't give a shit what they put on their page. I don't trust them in the least and I refuse to use Facebook. If, after all this, others continue to use it then shame on them. How many times does that sleazeball Zuckerberg have to pull these kind of stunts before people wake up?
Spot on. This will end up being another Congress grandstanding effort. Meanwhile, the real issues (one of which you point out) go unresolved. Who gives a shit about what Facebook puts on their news page? They are obviously trying to sell a political agenda, not unlike every other news outlet on the planet. If you don't like what Facebook puts in their news feed or you think they are untrustworthy then stop using it. Simple.
SAP is either the #1 or #2 (depending on which stats you believe) ERP vendor. ERP is just a fancy term for integrated software. In the past many companies would have one vendor for their Accounting software, one for their Payroll, and another for Inventory. And so on. Often these disparate systems would be written in different languages with different data models making it very difficult to pass information from Accounting to Inventory, etc. For really big companies we could be talking dozens or even hundreds of systems.
SAP (as well as Oracle, Workday, NetSuite) comes with built in integration.You can buy as many or as few modules as you like knowing that they are designed to work together. That's a big deal for huge companies.
The other selling point is regulatory compliance. Big companies are subject to an enormous amount of regulatory compliance from various government agencies and this type of software is built around that.
Is it big and cumbersome and expensive? Sure. But it's not as expensive as not being able to ship your products, or take customer orders, or pay your employees. Bottom line...the software works. When things go wrong it's usually because of poor decisions.
The cable companies are desperately clinging to content monopolies (ex. ESPN, etc.) to survive. I rarely watch anything live on TV anymore, other than the local news. Even sports, which I at one time swore had to be watched live, is better on the DVR. I watched the Superbowl that way last year. Zipped over all the commercials and that ridiculous time waster of a half time show. Must have cut a good hour out of it.
When I watch Netflix the thing I notice about having no commercials is not only less time to watch the show but the flow does not get interrupted.
It's not only the commercials. The amount of money the cable companies charge is an absolute ripoff. You are paying for 200 channels, of which you might actually watch 10 or less. The cable companies have fought tooth and nail against a la carte programming. If they ever do agree to it you can be certain that it will cost as much or more than the 200 channel package.
Many on this thread are missing the point. Facebook is a private company and they are entitled to promote whatever they consider "news". They are no different in that regard from Fox News and CNN and the New York Times. Each of which produces its own version of the news, designed to push whatever political agenda they happen to have. This should be obvious to anyone that watches or reads content from those outlets. The exact same story will get reported in a different way, sometimes slightly different, sometimes completely different. Other stories are simply not reported.
What makes it different for Facebook is that they claim their new stories appear as a result of "trending". Meaning that they are the most talked about, most "liked", most "shared" stories and that there is some fancy algorithm behind it. When it appears that these stories appear in the trending section based solely upon the opinion of a small group of editors at Facebook. Fox and CNN and the NYT make no such claims. It just so happens that conservative stories were suppressed but it would no less evil had it been liberal stories.
The point is that Facebook has lied and mislead its users. Sadly, Facebook has a long history of this. It is one of the reasons that I don't use Facebook. I simply don't trust them. Not with my data and not to deliver an unbiased news feed.
Slashdot Mirror
until executives start making security a priority, rather than a reflexive action, nothing will change. The majority of corporate boardrooms are filled with MBA types and people with sales backgrounds. Even in high tech companies, the tech founder usually gets squeezed out at some point to make room for the MBA that is going to grow the company.
Typically, MBA's and salespeople view security as a burden, a necessary evil, a nuisance. They would rather allocate funds to marketing. Or the latest diversity flavor of the week. IT in general is viewed as a cost center and data security gets lumped in with that. Most corporate leaders don't really understand IT security because they generally don't come from an IT background. So it gets treated as an afterthought and, predictably, the IT folks are left to stamp out the resulting brush fires.
Standard operating procedure:
1) Send everyone a letter telling them that their credentials have been compromised
2) Offer them 6 months of free credit monitoring
3) Issue them a new card
4) Encourage the customer to change their password
5) Sweep it under the rug
How much of a kickback is the IOC chairman getting? Because everything about the Olympics involves money and scandals and payoffs of some sort. I can't believe that VISA would stupid enough to introduce something like a new payment system at the Olympics of all places - the absolute epitome of dirty money, scandal ridden events.
I mean seriously, is this some sort of joke? So future Olympic bribes can now be conducted using the VISA payment ring...untraceable, discreet, no more bulky envelopes in a dark alley. No...graft can now be done from the comfort of your own living room. What could possibly go wrong?
That's an interesting analysis. Tasks that can be automated WILL be automated. It's only a matter of when and to what extent. In the Auto industry we have seen what it might look like already. You have robots that can create thousands of perfect welds, better than any human could do. Then you have a human to inspect the welds to make sure nothing was missed. That's the model. Robot makes the fries, human inspects the fries before they get served to anyone.
As you pointed out above, raising the minimum wage (or shaming companies into doing so) simply accelerates the process. The real question is what happens to all these newly displaced workers? Many of the fast food workers are high school kids so they can just deliver pizzas or something. But what about semi skilled workers? Retraining is difficult and costly. Government led retraining efforts have historically been dismal failures. My fear is that 10% unemployment will become the "new normal". Obviously this will put a tremendous strain on an already strained entitlement system. Which will lead to even higher taxes on the middle class (the upper class always finds a way to evade paying their fair share).
I keep hearing about these start ups and how lithe and agile they are and everyone dresses down and flat management structure and no politics. I've worked for small companies and my experience was that flat management meant that nobody was in charge. And trust me, small companies have plenty of office politics. It's just human nature and the people that are managers - they operate the same way no matter the size of the company. It's how they are trained.
The only reason to join a small company is to get some training (baptism by fire, but training none the less) and maybe cash in if they go public. Other than that you can look forward to low pay, crummy benefits and a chaotic work environment.
All corporate environments involve meaningless buzzwords and unnecessary meetings. Big ones just have more of it.
all you out there clamoring for $15/hr minimum wage. This is the beginning of the end of low paying/entry level jobs. We're seeing this in the fast food industry as well with automated french fry machines, and probably burger makers soon too. When government decides to get involved and try to tell businesses how to do things this is the predictable response.
When you are in a low margin business like fast food, or WalMart for that matter, you simply can't make a profit paying people $15/hr for entry level jobs that require little to no skill. So they turn to cheaper robots. So instead of a bunch of $10/hr jobs you end up with zero, or close to zero, $15/hr jobs.
Great idea! Let's hope more people start doing that.
Yes its an old language and not very sexy by today's standards. What COBOL does really really well is process huge sums of data very quickly and efficiently. The Payroll systems I work on today use COBOL and NOBODY touches them. Why? Because they work. Being around so long, the language is pretty much air tight in terms of bugs, etc.
The biggest challenge is trying to find someone that can code in COBOL. Universities these days don't teach it anymore.
Yes it would be a niche product (the 17" laptop). My current rig for travel is a 12" laptop and when I can hook it up to an external monitor its great. The problem is that often my clients don't have spare monitors and if they do they are mostly junk ones that nobody else wants.
Your point about the extra weight is well taken. But having a 17" display means that I don't need to go look for a spare monitor. If I can find one then all the better but having the larger screen means that it can function just fine on its own.
HPE becomes the steaming pile I referred to above :-)
Fast food restaurants ARE going robotic. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Raising or not raising the minimum wage is a red herring. Just look at what has happened in the auto industry. Sure there are people still working on the assembly line but when you have a robot that can perform 100,000 welds absolutely perfectly the writing is on the wall.
Eventually these fast food robots (McBots?) will be able to make a batch of fries with greater consistency than a human can. Without any waste. Without dropping any hairs in there. Without any cross contamination between the cash drawer and the fry station. Without using the bathroom or blowing your nose and forgetting to wash your hands. Without calling in sick.
Raising the minimum wage merely gives these companies cover to accelerate the whole process. "Why, if we have to pay $15 an hour we'll be out of business. You leave us no choice but to automate!". Even if the minimum wage were only $5 an hour eventually the process will be automated. It's just a matter of when.
Meg Wittman has to go down as one of the worst CEO's in history. HP, the once proud company, is being reduced to a steaming pile. So now EDS is being spun off, which HP massively overpaid for in the first place. This is after Meg triumphantly declared that HP was going to be a huge player in the "services" market.
Same mistake that IBM and DELL made. Another hardware vendor tries to become a services player and falls flat on its face.
Pretty soon HP will be reduced to a company with some patents and selling printers. Meanwhile Meg feathers her nest in anticipation of the golden parachute jump. But before that happens thousands more will lose their jobs and the company continues to be gutted.
Bill and David must be rolling in their graves.
"Doctor's income has very little to do with the skyrocketing cost of health care here in the US." - Spot on and you have outlined the real reasons quite nicely. In my view, Doctors should make more money not less. There are very few professions that require the amount of formal education and rigor that it requires to become a physician. Don't even get me started on how much athletes and entertainers make. It is obscene.
I think the problem with the healthcare system is that nobody has any real skin in the game. All patients care about is how much their co-pay is for a given service. Doctors don't really care how much the lab charges or how much a given procedure costs as long as the insurance company will reimburse them for it. Insurance companies don't really care how much the doctor charges or the lab, as long as they can collect enough in premiums to cover it or pass it along to the patient in the form of a co-payment.
Obamacare, despite addressing a few issues, does nothing to contain costs. It does nothing to address unnecessary or repetitive procedures. It does nothing to address frivolous malpractice lawsuits. It does nothing to address spiraling drug costs. Until those things are tackled costs will continue to rise.
I hear what you're saying about the memory soldering. But I have to say that my 2008 Macbook Pro has been rock solid and I have added memory more than once. so the connectors have not been an issue, at least for me. Besides, how many times would someone add or remove memory? Not more than a few times I would think. My issue with soldering the memory is that once you buy the laptop you cannot upgrade the memory. What happens to the person that cannot spring for the extra money for the memory right then or the person that buys the laptop thinking it will be fine and they come to find out later that they need more memory? With the soldered memory you are SOL. And, admittedly, I do like to tinker and I just feel like I'm missing out if I can't fiddle with stuff :-)
Why is there any human intervention at all? If this is truly "trending" news then it should make the list solely based on a numbers based algorithm that looks at not only what the major news agencies are reporting but, more importantly, what is being discussed. Facebook keeps track of how many "likes" a story gets and how many Shares it gets and how many comments are posted to any given story.
That should be what determines what is trending. Not some collection of editors. What exactly are they going to "train" these people to do? Train them to artificially promote conservative news stories to tamp down the current outcry? What happens when that goes too far and liberals start complaining about it? More training? Lather rinse repeat. Nothing more than window dressing. Is this supposed to be like the SCOTUS where you have x number of conservatives and x number of liberals and everything is supposed to balance out? How about just letting news stories "trend" on their own merits?
Why is Apple stubbornly staying with soldered memory when users clearly don't like it? Are they not supposed to be the company of great customer service that loves and listens to their community? Not in this case. I can sure see how it benefits Apple to do it that way but Joe Public...not so much.
Here is my wish list:
1) Bring back the 17" Macbook Pro. Yes it's big and bulky but I'm willing to put up with that for the extra screen real estate.
2) Bring back user upgradable memory. If it truly is a Macbook Pro then it should come with 8GB minimum and I should be able to plug in up to 32GB (or maybe even 64) as and when I need it. If the laptop was aimed at home users I could maybe see not wanting them to be able to do this but I'm a professional and I know how to open laptops and upgrade them. I should be able to do this on my own and without a trip to the Genius lab.
3) Ports - lots of them. Wireless is nice but sometimes I prefer a hardwired network connection. Gimme a network port. I also need a couple of HDMI ports and at least 3 USB ports. Why not throw in a Firewire port too? I know that it's kind of old technology now but a lot of people still have firewire drives and would like to be able to plug them in.
4) Bootcamp. Why not have the option to have Bootcamp pre-installed if you know you're going to use it? Or maybe a prebuilt virtualized Windows. Yes, some of use would prefer to do it ourselves but others might appreciate the convenience.
5) I'm tired of the race to the thinnest laptop. I want something with a battery big enough to last the whole day, or more, doing intensive processing. If that adds a half pound or a half inch so be it. This is supposed to be a big boy laptop, not some hipster toy.
6) 4K display. Could you imagine a 4K display on a sweet 17" laptop with a matte finish? Heaven.
Until then I'm hanging on to my creaky old 2008 era Macbook Pro.
Must have been a slow day on the liberal news front. Time to throw up a man hater story. How is giving less than favorable reviews to a TV show "sabotaging" it? Did it ever occur to anyone that Sex and the City really and truly does suck? Four selfish, narcissistic, shallow, materialistic bimbos stumbling through their me first world in high heels. Yeah...sure sounds riveting to me - yawn!
And since when did winning awards equate to quality programming? Hollywood abandoned that notion years ago. I gave up on sitcoms years ago so my example is dated but let's examine Everybody loves Raymond. The guy is depicted as a complete and utter dope. The woman, of course, is depicted as smart, confident, funny, etc. In other words, she wears the pants in the family. Much to the delight of the feminists, and feminist surrogates. Of course if the roles were reversed the man would be accused to being anti-female, sexist, you name it.
pardon the pun. But a Chromebook is nothing near a Macbook. Chromebooks have very little in the way of memory and storage. The $200 versions have terrible screens. The utility, when not connected to the internet, is quite limited. The Macbook is a full fledged workstation.
I'm not saying that it's a bad choice for schools who are putting them in the hands of teenagers that have yet to develop, shall we say, a sense of responsibility.
Probably a fairer comparison would be to the Surface but even then the Surface has a lot more going for it than a Chromebook. The Chromebook is a low end internet appliance. For very basic tasks its great. Which is to say, for most students it is just fine. But to compare a Chromebook to a Macbook is like comparing a Chevy to a Ferrari.
I have had to take drug tests for numerous clients that I have worked with and I always wondered about this. What if you live in a state where it is legal to use pot (Washington State for example) for recreational purposes. You work in a state where that is not the case. The test comes up positive. Can you still be denied employment because of that?
I've been told the answer is yes. The whole thing is messed up. The federal government says its illegal, some states say it is legal and employers have their own independent rules.
Personally I think that alcohol is a far bigger problem that pot. From an employers standpoint, how many man hours are lost to people calling in sick because they are hungover? Or people dragging their ass into work hungover and working at half speed? Or making business decisions in that state? Not to mention drunk driving and alcohol fueled assaults.
At the end of the day employers should be free to choose the employees they want. I just wonder if they are missing some of the bad ones.
Whenever government gets its dirty mitts involved in business these are the types of results we should expect. While I sympathize with people making minimum wage flipping burgers at Wendy's is simply not worth $15 an hour. Neither is $21 million a year for a CEO but at least the CEO is a skilled position. When I was a kid my first job was minimum wage. Worked in a kitchen. It was hot, messy, hard work. But I learned a lot. One of the most important lessons I learned was that unless I got an education I was going to be doing this crappy job for the rest of my life. It was a motivator. The low skilled jobs are not mean to be career positions. It is a starting point to learn the business. If you learn it well enough you can become a manager and they make a decent living (six figures in some cases).
Next time you visit a fast food joint take a look behind the counter and see who is working there. My bet is that almost all of them are high school kids and one adult manager. Those kids are learning valuable job skills. If they want to advance they can. If not they can take those skills elsewhere. Forcing these places to pay high minimum salaries is basically forcing their hands. If they want to remain profitable then they will automate the low skill jobs. Either that or they have to start charging $10 for a fast food burger and nobody is going to pay that.
This is yet another example of the government having good intentions but hurting people in the end.
I usually don't respond to AC's but for the record I don't work on SAP systems. But I've been working on ERP systems for 18 years so I speak with some authority on it. Someone asked what SAP was so I shared some knowledge. Take it or leave it pal.
I'm not disputing that what Facebook did was wrong. They have, once again, deceived their users. This kind of behavior goes way back. Which is precisely why I don't give a shit what they put on their page. I don't trust them in the least and I refuse to use Facebook. If, after all this, others continue to use it then shame on them. How many times does that sleazeball Zuckerberg have to pull these kind of stunts before people wake up?
Spot on. This will end up being another Congress grandstanding effort. Meanwhile, the real issues (one of which you point out) go unresolved. Who gives a shit about what Facebook puts on their news page? They are obviously trying to sell a political agenda, not unlike every other news outlet on the planet. If you don't like what Facebook puts in their news feed or you think they are untrustworthy then stop using it. Simple.
Had to weigh in here....
SAP is either the #1 or #2 (depending on which stats you believe) ERP vendor. ERP is just a fancy term for integrated software. In the past many companies would have one vendor for their Accounting software, one for their Payroll, and another for Inventory. And so on. Often these disparate systems would be written in different languages with different data models making it very difficult to pass information from Accounting to Inventory, etc. For really big companies we could be talking dozens or even hundreds of systems.
SAP (as well as Oracle, Workday, NetSuite) comes with built in integration.You can buy as many or as few modules as you like knowing that they are designed to work together. That's a big deal for huge companies.
The other selling point is regulatory compliance. Big companies are subject to an enormous amount of regulatory compliance from various government agencies and this type of software is built around that.
Is it big and cumbersome and expensive? Sure. But it's not as expensive as not being able to ship your products, or take customer orders, or pay your employees. Bottom line...the software works. When things go wrong it's usually because of poor decisions.
The cable companies are desperately clinging to content monopolies (ex. ESPN, etc.) to survive. I rarely watch anything live on TV anymore, other than the local news. Even sports, which I at one time swore had to be watched live, is better on the DVR. I watched the Superbowl that way last year. Zipped over all the commercials and that ridiculous time waster of a half time show. Must have cut a good hour out of it.
When I watch Netflix the thing I notice about having no commercials is not only less time to watch the show but the flow does not get interrupted.
It's not only the commercials. The amount of money the cable companies charge is an absolute ripoff. You are paying for 200 channels, of which you might actually watch 10 or less. The cable companies have fought tooth and nail against a la carte programming. If they ever do agree to it you can be certain that it will cost as much or more than the 200 channel package.
Many on this thread are missing the point. Facebook is a private company and they are entitled to promote whatever they consider "news". They are no different in that regard from Fox News and CNN and the New York Times. Each of which produces its own version of the news, designed to push whatever political agenda they happen to have. This should be obvious to anyone that watches or reads content from those outlets. The exact same story will get reported in a different way, sometimes slightly different, sometimes completely different. Other stories are simply not reported.
What makes it different for Facebook is that they claim their new stories appear as a result of "trending". Meaning that they are the most talked about, most "liked", most "shared" stories and that there is some fancy algorithm behind it. When it appears that these stories appear in the trending section based solely upon the opinion of a small group of editors at Facebook. Fox and CNN and the NYT make no such claims. It just so happens that conservative stories were suppressed but it would no less evil had it been liberal stories.
The point is that Facebook has lied and mislead its users. Sadly, Facebook has a long history of this. It is one of the reasons that I don't use Facebook. I simply don't trust them. Not with my data and not to deliver an unbiased news feed.