You really deserve a shiv in the liver, mother fucker.
Why?
Bush Jr did more damage to our freedoms than any other president in the history of our country. Given enough time he would have managed to revert us to a feudal system of government. He set the stage in which our current president is continuing to encroach on our rights unchecked. Bush Jr behaved more like a despot than an elected official, and played the nation for the fools that we are. I don't know who I hold more contempt for, Bush or the people who still can't see him for what he is.
So yes, I am happy that he got some limited kind of justice because he sure as hell will never see any real justice for his crimes.
I didn't vote for any of these asshats, and I find it appropriate when their sociopathic tendencies come back to bite them in the ass. Vigilante justice may not be the best form of justice, but it is the only form these people will ever face.
I'm trying to sort out your twisted logic, but all I keep getting is a strange comparison between Obama and Bush, as if those were the only two presidents we have ever had. Both of them suck. At times I have a hard time telling where a Bush policy starts and an Obama policy ends. They are both ineffective partisan asshats who should never have been allowed to run anything. It should be noted that neither one of them has a scrap of integrity. The same can be said of pretty much every president in the last three decades with the possible exception of Reagan, but he was just acting.
The problem here isn't the individual in the white house, its the system that puts them there. That system virtually guarantees that someone who is able to make tough decisions based solely on the merits and not on the special interests, is doomed to fail. Once you have chosen a political ideology to stand behind (and the associated candidates), you have become part of the problem.
If evidence of wrongdoing is uncovered, this might be justified.
By that logic... the hack is justified from the beginning because without opening up these emails... we would have no way to know if there is any wrongdoing.
No... this is wrong. Period.
No, it really isn't wrong. The reason is simple. Bush Jr went to great pains to erode our constitutional protections, and successfully rendered our privacy moot. Thanks to Bush, the federal government can search my e-mail without a warrant . If the government has this right by Bush's admission, we the people should have that right. To my mind that makes Bush's e-mail fair game for public consumption. Any way you slice it, GW had this coming, and I can only hope that there is something in there that in some way diminishes Bush and his ilk in the years to come.
Goodness, look. It's someone from another country who can act the part of the outraged world citizen because their country couldn't do this shit if they wanted to. It's easy to be righteous from the sidelines.
Said the anonymous coward. Put your name on it or STFU.
UPS and Fedex will do this too. When you order from places online, put the following in the shipping instructions: "Shipper Release". This will force the carrier to leave the package, and you wont have to run over to the warehouse every time.
I can get two solid days of heavy use on my iPhone 4. If I'm not using apps, I can get 3 days out of it.
So how come no one else I know can get more than a day?
Let me guess, they're using their iPhones wrong?
The most likely culprit is that they have not turned off the "automatically join networks" option. Leaving this on, leaves the wifi in high power mode all of the time. Turning that off doubled my battery life. I have to manually join the wifi network, but this is less of a pain than having no phone because i forgot to charge it last night. Also, note I have a 4, not a 4S. I thought I remember something about the 4S and the 5's using significantly more juice, but I could be wrong about that part.
The early blackberrys were highly optimized text messaging machines...everything was aimed at maximizing battery life.
Once you start bringing in big bright high def screens, arbitrary apps, fluid video, fancy gui elements, etc. you pretty much by definition are going to use more battery keeping the whole thing running.
You could have 3 days of battery life now if you were willing to go back to the feature set of the 8830.
In that time, batteries have improved dramatically as well. I can get two solid days of heavy use on my iPhone 4. If I'm not using apps, I can get 3 days out of it. Poor battery life is the result of engineers who either didn't care or didn't understand the importance of power consumption optimization. In short, its an engineering failure.
REALLY GOOD TOOLS TO INTEGRATE WITH BUSINESS
Everything you mention except remote wipe are for the end user. When people talk about tools to integrate with business they are usually referring to enterprise infrastructure integration tools. The problem is...The end user usually outnumbers the enterprise admin 200 to 1 so you have 200 people all going "It does what I need it to do" and 1 guy desperately trying to get anybody to listen to him about the inadequacies of the overall system. For enterprise the phone is but one piece to a very large whole. BlackBerry designed an enterprise system whereas Apple and Google designed a consumer oriented ecosystem. The former allows for fine granular control from the infrastructure to be pushed outward. The latter allows the end user to get stuff from iTunes/GooglePlay. From the very first BB phone connected to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) the infrastructure group was able to mandate policies on the device. There are third party policy tools to manage iOS devices in the enterprise but they are not as mature or feature rich as BES. Of course the new BES 10 actually has built in support for iOS/Android devices now which could aid in enterprise adoption of these platforms but BlackBerry will be making money off of each device with a seat license. But BB 10 upgrades can use existing licenses. BlackBerry wins either way.
Your post inadvertently exposes the entire reason that RIM is loosing, and will continue to burn.
The whole point is that phones used to be a corporate provided necessity, that the end user had mostly no use for outside of work. That meant that the company could have sole control and there would be no issue. Today, that situation is reversed, The smartphone is mostly for the end users use, and the company gets to tag along (often at no cost to the company even). The entirety of the needed technology is to prevent sensitive materials from ending up on the phone in the first place, as it cannot be considered a secure device. This is best achieved as en e-mail server administration policy. Any other solution is far more money and trouble than it is worth. Simply prevent the e-mail system from pushing attachments to smartphones devices, and you're 99.9% of the way there.
The reason this is so important is a matter of control. End users do not want to give up *any* control over their devices. The devices belong to them, and they won't tolerate the company tinkering with it in any form. We are a typical operation that makes heavy use of smartphones to keep in constant contact. The company does not pay for private phones or plans, but will provide a company cell phone to anyone who needs a phone / refuses to use their personal phone. The company phones are obnoxious enough that most people just use their own. The company happily interfaces with the private phones for e-mail and corporate messaging as easily as for the corporate phones, but the no attachments policy is enforced on the email servers. Even if someone looses a personal smartphone, there is nothing of any real value that is exposed to theft, so there is very little risk.
To implement all of that support requires only that the IT department implement attachment control policies on the email servers, and otherwise its a non-issue. Our wireless networks are already isolated from the corporate networks and considered completely untrusted, so there was never any exposure from wifi access in the first place. Even after all of that, we have not had anyone come to us and complain that something they were trying to do with their private or corporate phone wouldn't work.
At the end of the day there isn't anything that a fancy BES system and draconian lock down provides that we don't already have, and we save a huge amount of money by not having to provide phones and plans to everyone, not to mention the cost of supporting BES and / or whatever other systems your way calls for. BES and its brethren is a solution to a problem that no longer really exists. RIM is doomed because they came late to the smartphone party with features that no one really needs anymore, and as MS is discovering, the market moves too fast to be playing catchup.
No, Microsoft needed to split with the past APIs (.NET, win32, COM, etc) and build a single one to replace them all. They needed to get a tablet interface. They needed to get a 30%-cut app store. They needed to get us all to upgrade (again).
So yes, Microsoft sees the desktop as the problem.
So basically, MS missed the boat. Now they want us to collectively pay for a new boat so they can play catch up? Truthfully, I'm ok with leaving them to sit in the lifeboat, they're in now, until it sinks. The Microsoft that climbs back out of the water will be a lot smaller, and a lot better for the experience.
Windows 8 is one of the best consumer products Microsoft has ever made. I've introduced 4 low level users to it, and after a couple months, without fail, they all love it.
Win8 is one of those things people will look back at after the fact and recognize that it was much better than everyone thought.
Its no accident that nearly every post I have seen in favor of Win 8 has been anonymous. I have met one real life person who "likes" the new interface, and I just found out he works part time as a MS sales rep, and in spite of that, he qualifies all of his remarks about win 8.
Short answer is, MS built the damn thing to try and get users familiar with an OS that would give their mobile platforms a competitive edge, in the same way that having a uniform UI between business and consumer offerings helped MS gain and maintain dominance in the business software markets. MS knows no other way to operate, and likely they never will.
People that started in the mail-room and made it to CEO were almost always the former CEO's/Chairman's son.
They didn't stay in the mail-room long.
I'm afraid that statement is just a little too far fetched. Please provide some kind of evidence to support that claim, otherwise we'll have to dismiss it as the tinfoil hat produced rambling that it likely is.
Right, because keeping an aerodynamically unstable shape pointed forward is butt simple controls. Just monitor and report, correct deflections from set values? Maybe monitor a velocity so you don't overshoot? Even an elevator is more complicated then that. What were you designing controls for?
I don't doubt you understand cell phones. You don't understand aero. The shuttle is hardly a good example. It's pretty stable and as you say, old tech.
We're talking about controls, not autopilot. The pilots keep the plane pointed correctly. Yes, the autopilot is fairly sophisticated, but minus the autopilot, there is not much that is all that different between a fly by wire control system and a hydraulic one that any 1950s era airplane mechanic would recognize. A plane can easily be flown without the autopilot. Even the autopilot is fairly simple compared, say, mpeg compression for video files, or voice recognition software. You're the one without a proper frame of reference. Just because you think of it as a difficult task doesn't mean it is. For the record, the Shuttle was/is hideously unstable. Think flying brick. The autopilot on that thing really was a sophisticated piece of equipment, more so because of the woeful lack of processing power available in the early 80's
You might have stopped to take a control systems class before running your mouth.
As someone who has spent more than a decade designing embedded control systems, and more recently, designing cell phone communication subsystems, I can assure you that the situation is exactly as I described it. There is a reason why the space shuttles main control systems still used an archaic microprocessor even 30 years on, Anything more sophisticated is not only overkill, but actually dangerous, as simplicity lends itself to robustness. Complexity kills as it were.
Cell phones on the other hand require ever greater amounts of compute power, not just to run apps, but to provide the massive bandwidth that modern users demand. The two are simply not in the same ballpark as far as complexity goes. Cell phone communication is so specialized that a whole breed of processor has grown up tailored just to handling the complexity. Its akin to the difference between the software for a 2D sidescroller game, and a 3D game. If software and hardware at the complexity level of a cell phone had to be as reliable as the avionics package on a modern aircraft, Motorola would be the only manufacturer to have successfully brought one to market, and you could kiss smartphones goodbye. The only reason that people can even design and build avionics packages as robust as they are is because of how simple the actual problem is to solve. The only remotely complex parts of position controllers is the use of PID controllers, and that problem was solved decades ago in both software and hardware. Compare that with trying to patch a software system that occupies over 100MBs of code space, while its running, and you can begin to understand the difference in complexity. Hell, concurrency alone adds a level of complexity that any half-way intelligent embedded system designer avoids like the plague.
Modern aircraft contain serious amounts of software. It can and did kill people, if it contains bugs.
But at least for commercial aircraft, the design, coding, debugging and testing practices are wholly different from what is done in any kind of PC software, web service, telephone and the like. If you telephone bricks, you don't die in a minute. If the control software of an airliner bricks, it can easily be 300 people dead in two minutes and less.
The control software on an aircraft (even a modern one), is far less complicated than the software for something as simple as a smartphone. The only complicated part of an avionics package is the human interface, and even that is relatively simple. Most of the avionics package consists of measure the positions of everything, and report that information to the user. Measure the user input and push the control surfaces to the right position. The only complexity comes in when it comes to redundancy and verifying that everything is working correctly. 98% of what the software does is make sure that the hardware isn't broken in any kind of dangerous way, and try to deal with it if it is.
A smartphone software on the other hand has to handle multiple communication channels and a large variety of software. It also has to handle on the fly software updates, and usually it is designed to handle multiple hardware versions. It also gets to deal with the most destructive force on earth: Stupid users. Give a smartphone and your avionics package an hour with a typical teenager and see which one crashes first...
False Dichotomy. There are very large pieces of software with almost bulletproof reliability. BSD and Linux kernels, for example. Or medical and aviation software. Where it matters, software is at least as well-done as other engineering artifacts.
It just DOES NOT matter, if your little Windows PC is infected or not. Nobody is killed from that.
Almost bulletproof, but not provably so. The whole idea in engineering, and why it costs so much, is that you can prove it without having to test it. Your "bulletproof" software is the result of a very extensive testing effort, and real world testing. If buildings had 5 nines reliability, there would be multiple building collapses every day. Realistically speaking, buildings have about 14 or 15 nines reliability. They are many orders of magnitude more reliable than software because of the effort that goes into making them reliable, as well as the relative simplicity of a building as compared with a typical computer.
Before I start getting blasted about how buildings are not simple, you have to look at how easily they can be described in engineering plans. The plans for a building will not take up anywhere near the storage space as the combined plans for all of the technology in a typical PC (not counting the software). When you add in the software involved, and the space is simply staggering. The complexity of a simple Windows 7 based PC is phenomenal. The OS source code alone is on the order of GB of data. When you add in the source for all of the drivers, and services software that runs in the background on a typical PC, and you're looking at 100's of GB of data. Compare that with a building, which takes up only a fraction of that.
Another way to look at it is that modern computer hardware is so complex that it cant even be designed without the aid of complex computer simulation software. Buildings on the other hand have been successfully designed and built for thousands of years.
It should also be noted that aviation software (on the whole), is relatively simple software, and the basics will run on an uContoller board. These projects are small enough that the software can be reasonably well understood, and the designers of this software do not need to contend with having their software run on hardware that they didn't expect. The avionics package is a complete package, and the hardware and software are designed together. This vastly simplifies the task as compared to, say, The Linux kernel that has to support every hardware out there. Even on medical equipment, the software can be complex enough to cause problems
If a structural engineer signs off on that without doing the actual calculations to show it is safe and that project is investigated they will lose their license.
They will also end up with criminal liability.
Yes, but if a structural engineer signs off, and a year later someone switches out the landfill or the foundation (Think hardware upgrade), then the civil engineer is no longer liable. Software works the same way, except that it is a given that large scale components of the system will be changed on a regular basis.
Imagine the chaos if IT professionals had to re-evaluate each system every time they wanted to add RAM or drives to a server...
The civil engineering equivalent to that would be adding floors onto a building. There is a reason server upgrades happen in minutes, and building upgrades happen in years. One has the potential to kill people so time and care is taken to make sure it is absolutely correct.
If the software industry used the same methodologies as civil engineering (and carried the same liability), the computer industry and everything it supports would still be in the stone ages. If civil engineering used the same methodologies as software engineering, we would have mile high cities that could house hundreds of millions of people, but every couple of months a sky-scraper somewhere would fall down. Each design methodology has its pros and cons, and each is tailored to the risk it must manage.
And if they knew about it for that long then they should be able to be sued for negligence.
Perhaps when the software industry has to accept the same liability and culpability as anyone else they will take their job seriously.
Aircraft are extremely complex and they cant use that as a get out of jail free card, software should not be able to either. If they want protection and patents then they can accept the down side, liability.
Your argument actually exemplifies why software creators typically have reduced liability. An aircraft is not a component of a larger system in the classic sense. It is operated as a standalone appliance that works as designed. You can't switch the wings out for a different version and expect it to work as designed.
Software by contrast is, by definition, run on a piece of hardware that can be swapped for different hardware that may or may not behave the same way. Even seemingly innocuous changes that have nothing to do with a particular software, can have consequences on that software that the coders never envisioned and didn't have to deal with originally. Any piece of software can be broken in dangerous ways if the hardware designers are trying to. It stands to reason that the same kind of thing could happen by accident as well. In short, it is the responsibility of operator of the entire system to ensure that they are using the parts correctly, and to test to verify functionality. If there is a problem with the software, most software companies will be glad to fix it once they know about it, but there are too many factors beyond their control for them to be held liable for the behavior of the whole system.
I've never comprehended why the hell schools believe they can get away with charging more for an online class (usually usual tuition plus a fee).
I've never comprehended why the hell students believe online courses should cost less.
Because they use less resources, and have significant advantages when it comes to economy of scale. There is a reason that many larger schools have freshman year courses with hundreds of students in them. An on line course should, in theory, have no practical limit to the number of students on at any one time, and the school only really needs to provide graders and an assistant to help the students who get stuck. All told, not having to pay for nearly as many bricks and mortar facilities saves a fortune.
It should also be noted that the kinds of classes that lend themselves to online distribution are the kinds of classes that require far fewer expensive facilities. Labs are the most expensive parts of a schools facilities, and yet online courses require none of that. End of the day, an online course should be able to provide for 1000+ students per semester, and only cost the school about $200,000 in wages and equipment. (1/2 year salary for a professor, 1/2 dozen assistants and graders, Server farms and utility costs. Thats a whopping $200 per student. Now can you tell me why the cost to the student is higher than that by almost an order of magnitude? I can, its because the universities have the same delusion as the content industries did, they thought that the internet somehow added value to their product in and of itself, when in reality, the only value it adds is to reduce operating costs and distribution costs. The value to the end user (and the value they expect to receive) is in lower prices.
Tapeout has an archaic meaning. It probably used to mean when the layout database was copied to tape, to send for creating masks. Since we don't use tapes anymore, tapeout just refers they passed sign-off and signals the beginning of production.
Actually, they generally still use tapes. You're starting to see more and more SSDs and USB type drives being used, but Tapes are the tried and true method. Today, Hard Drives (Spindle and SSD) are just getting to the same density as tapes, but tapes are far cheaper per MB, and are more likely to still be good 30 years down the line, which appeals to the archivists and MBAs in the crowd.
that was their total profit though, so even if they had 5+ plants my point is it would pay for its self so fast that it would be utterly negligible.
Only if everything goes to plan. In many Fabs, there are configuration and start up problems that can delay production for months or even years. In the microprocessor industry, a year might as well be an eternity. And remember that these fabs employ a small army, so you have 1000+ people making 40k / year + benefits, and you find your fab has a manpower cost of 100 mil/year whether you have good production or not. If you have a bad start up, you could very easily go bankrupt before you can turn a profit, and if the delays are bad enough, you find yourself badly behind the technology curve, and can only produce lower margin products such as NVrams, and Lower end FPGAs and the like. In short, it is usually very profitable, but it definitely not a sure bet, and don't forget that were talking about a loss that would annihilate all but the largest companies.
I'm very good at the English language but I have no idea what this means. How do you 'tape out' a processor? What's a 'fabless ecosystem'? (The rainforests are rather wonderful, I hear.)
Tape out is an expression that ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) designers use. It means to finalize a version and send it out to be manufactured. There is some disagreement where it came from, but it most likely referred to the fact that magnetic tapes were used to transfer the (largish) electronic design descriptions to the manufacturers site. These tapes were used because they were the only medium at the time that could store the entire files on one volume instead of having to split the data among volumes.
"Fabless ecosystem" refers to the lack of a "fab" or fabrication facility. There are two types of setups for designing and manufacturing integrated circuits. The first is the "classical" model where a design company designs and manufactures the chips themselves. The other type of model is one where two separate companies design and manufacture the chips. This is called fabless, since the designer does not have a fab themselves (and in theory are free to go with any of a number of fabs and or manufacturing methods). Being fabless has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that your company does not have to eat all of the overhead of owning and operating a fab (Each one costs around the same as a modern aircraft carrier, and employs the same number of people). If you have limited production runs you don't have to pay the full overhead, but instead that cost is split among all of the customers of a given fab. It also allows you to switch between fabs if your current fab is not meeting your particular requirements (cost, failure rate, QA, whatever). The biggest disadvantage is that your company doesn't have any control over the fabrication process, so you have very limited say as to how they manufacture your parts. The fab is also free to manufacture parts for your competitors, which makes it very difficult to have significant performance differences between competitors. Intel maintains a large part of its performance edge by using proprietary fab techniques that other companies do not have access to.
Borrowing from Cracked's Afterhours segment, Star Trek isn't about betterment of the population, but of finding something to be interested in. They are scouring the universe for entertainment.
That is appropriate on so many levels its disturbing. Every time I read that sentence again, I find another way to interpret it that is even more enlightening than the last...
Slashdot Mirror
You really deserve a shiv in the liver, mother fucker.
Why?
Bush Jr did more damage to our freedoms than any other president in the history of our country. Given enough time he would have managed to revert us to a feudal system of government. He set the stage in which our current president is continuing to encroach on our rights unchecked. Bush Jr behaved more like a despot than an elected official, and played the nation for the fools that we are. I don't know who I hold more contempt for, Bush or the people who still can't see him for what he is.
So yes, I am happy that he got some limited kind of justice because he sure as hell will never see any real justice for his crimes.
-=Geoskd
You're part of the problem.
I'm pretty sure I'm not.
I didn't vote for any of these asshats, and I find it appropriate when their sociopathic tendencies come back to bite them in the ass. Vigilante justice may not be the best form of justice, but it is the only form these people will ever face.
-=Geoskd
I'm trying to sort out your twisted logic, but all I keep getting is a strange comparison between Obama and Bush, as if those were the only two presidents we have ever had. Both of them suck. At times I have a hard time telling where a Bush policy starts and an Obama policy ends. They are both ineffective partisan asshats who should never have been allowed to run anything. It should be noted that neither one of them has a scrap of integrity. The same can be said of pretty much every president in the last three decades with the possible exception of Reagan, but he was just acting.
The problem here isn't the individual in the white house, its the system that puts them there. That system virtually guarantees that someone who is able to make tough decisions based solely on the merits and not on the special interests, is doomed to fail. Once you have chosen a political ideology to stand behind (and the associated candidates), you have become part of the problem.
-=Geoskd
By that logic... the hack is justified from the beginning because without opening up these emails... we would have no way to know if there is any wrongdoing.
No... this is wrong. Period.
No, it really isn't wrong. The reason is simple. Bush Jr went to great pains to erode our constitutional protections, and successfully rendered our privacy moot. Thanks to Bush, the federal government can search my e-mail without a warrant . If the government has this right by Bush's admission, we the people should have that right. To my mind that makes Bush's e-mail fair game for public consumption. Any way you slice it, GW had this coming, and I can only hope that there is something in there that in some way diminishes Bush and his ilk in the years to come.
Goodness, look. It's someone from another country who can act the part of the outraged world citizen because their country couldn't do this shit if they wanted to. It's easy to be righteous from the sidelines.
Said the anonymous coward. Put your name on it or STFU.
-=Geoskd
UPS and Fedex will do this too. When you order from places online, put the following in the shipping instructions: "Shipper Release". This will force the carrier to leave the package, and you wont have to run over to the warehouse every time.
I can get two solid days of heavy use on my iPhone 4. If I'm not using apps, I can get 3 days out of it.
So how come no one else I know can get more than a day?
Let me guess, they're using their iPhones wrong?
The most likely culprit is that they have not turned off the "automatically join networks" option. Leaving this on, leaves the wifi in high power mode all of the time. Turning that off doubled my battery life. I have to manually join the wifi network, but this is less of a pain than having no phone because i forgot to charge it last night. Also, note I have a 4, not a 4S. I thought I remember something about the 4S and the 5's using significantly more juice, but I could be wrong about that part.
Will they blend?
Oh, They'll blend alright...
The early blackberrys were highly optimized text messaging machines...everything was aimed at maximizing battery life.
Once you start bringing in big bright high def screens, arbitrary apps, fluid video, fancy gui elements, etc. you pretty much by definition are going to use more battery keeping the whole thing running.
You could have 3 days of battery life now if you were willing to go back to the feature set of the 8830.
In that time, batteries have improved dramatically as well. I can get two solid days of heavy use on my iPhone 4. If I'm not using apps, I can get 3 days out of it. Poor battery life is the result of engineers who either didn't care or didn't understand the importance of power consumption optimization. In short, its an engineering failure.
-=Geoskd
REALLY GOOD TOOLS TO INTEGRATE WITH BUSINESS Everything you mention except remote wipe are for the end user. When people talk about tools to integrate with business they are usually referring to enterprise infrastructure integration tools. The problem is...The end user usually outnumbers the enterprise admin 200 to 1 so you have 200 people all going "It does what I need it to do" and 1 guy desperately trying to get anybody to listen to him about the inadequacies of the overall system. For enterprise the phone is but one piece to a very large whole. BlackBerry designed an enterprise system whereas Apple and Google designed a consumer oriented ecosystem. The former allows for fine granular control from the infrastructure to be pushed outward. The latter allows the end user to get stuff from iTunes/GooglePlay. From the very first BB phone connected to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) the infrastructure group was able to mandate policies on the device. There are third party policy tools to manage iOS devices in the enterprise but they are not as mature or feature rich as BES. Of course the new BES 10 actually has built in support for iOS/Android devices now which could aid in enterprise adoption of these platforms but BlackBerry will be making money off of each device with a seat license. But BB 10 upgrades can use existing licenses. BlackBerry wins either way.
Your post inadvertently exposes the entire reason that RIM is loosing, and will continue to burn.
The whole point is that phones used to be a corporate provided necessity, that the end user had mostly no use for outside of work. That meant that the company could have sole control and there would be no issue. Today, that situation is reversed, The smartphone is mostly for the end users use, and the company gets to tag along (often at no cost to the company even). The entirety of the needed technology is to prevent sensitive materials from ending up on the phone in the first place, as it cannot be considered a secure device. This is best achieved as en e-mail server administration policy. Any other solution is far more money and trouble than it is worth. Simply prevent the e-mail system from pushing attachments to smartphones devices, and you're 99.9% of the way there.
The reason this is so important is a matter of control. End users do not want to give up *any* control over their devices. The devices belong to them, and they won't tolerate the company tinkering with it in any form. We are a typical operation that makes heavy use of smartphones to keep in constant contact. The company does not pay for private phones or plans, but will provide a company cell phone to anyone who needs a phone / refuses to use their personal phone. The company phones are obnoxious enough that most people just use their own. The company happily interfaces with the private phones for e-mail and corporate messaging as easily as for the corporate phones, but the no attachments policy is enforced on the email servers. Even if someone looses a personal smartphone, there is nothing of any real value that is exposed to theft, so there is very little risk.
To implement all of that support requires only that the IT department implement attachment control policies on the email servers, and otherwise its a non-issue. Our wireless networks are already isolated from the corporate networks and considered completely untrusted, so there was never any exposure from wifi access in the first place. Even after all of that, we have not had anyone come to us and complain that something they were trying to do with their private or corporate phone wouldn't work.
At the end of the day there isn't anything that a fancy BES system and draconian lock down provides that we don't already have, and we save a huge amount of money by not having to provide phones and plans to everyone, not to mention the cost of supporting BES and / or whatever other systems your way calls for. BES and its brethren is a solution to a problem that no longer really exists. RIM is doomed because they came late to the smartphone party with features that no one really needs anymore, and as MS is discovering, the market moves too fast to be playing catchup.
-=Geoskd
No, Microsoft needed to split with the past APIs (.NET, win32, COM, etc) and build a single one to replace them all. They needed to get a tablet interface. They needed to get a 30%-cut app store. They needed to get us all to upgrade (again).
So yes, Microsoft sees the desktop as the problem.
So basically, MS missed the boat. Now they want us to collectively pay for a new boat so they can play catch up? Truthfully, I'm ok with leaving them to sit in the lifeboat, they're in now, until it sinks. The Microsoft that climbs back out of the water will be a lot smaller, and a lot better for the experience.
-=Geoskd
Windows 8 is one of the best consumer products Microsoft has ever made. I've introduced 4 low level users to it, and after a couple months, without fail, they all love it.
Win8 is one of those things people will look back at after the fact and recognize that it was much better than everyone thought.
Its no accident that nearly every post I have seen in favor of Win 8 has been anonymous. I have met one real life person who "likes" the new interface, and I just found out he works part time as a MS sales rep, and in spite of that, he qualifies all of his remarks about win 8.
Short answer is, MS built the damn thing to try and get users familiar with an OS that would give their mobile platforms a competitive edge, in the same way that having a uniform UI between business and consumer offerings helped MS gain and maintain dominance in the business software markets. MS knows no other way to operate, and likely they never will.
-=Geoskd
People that started in the mail-room and made it to CEO were almost always the former CEO's/Chairman's son.
They didn't stay in the mail-room long.
I'm afraid that statement is just a little too far fetched. Please provide some kind of evidence to support that claim, otherwise we'll have to dismiss it as the tinfoil hat produced rambling that it likely is.
Right, because keeping an aerodynamically unstable shape pointed forward is butt simple controls. Just monitor and report, correct deflections from set values? Maybe monitor a velocity so you don't overshoot? Even an elevator is more complicated then that. What were you designing controls for?
I don't doubt you understand cell phones. You don't understand aero. The shuttle is hardly a good example. It's pretty stable and as you say, old tech.
We're talking about controls, not autopilot. The pilots keep the plane pointed correctly. Yes, the autopilot is fairly sophisticated, but minus the autopilot, there is not much that is all that different between a fly by wire control system and a hydraulic one that any 1950s era airplane mechanic would recognize. A plane can easily be flown without the autopilot. Even the autopilot is fairly simple compared, say, mpeg compression for video files, or voice recognition software. You're the one without a proper frame of reference. Just because you think of it as a difficult task doesn't mean it is.
For the record, the Shuttle was/is hideously unstable. Think flying brick. The autopilot on that thing really was a sophisticated piece of equipment, more so because of the woeful lack of processing power available in the early 80's
You might have stopped to take a control systems class before running your mouth.
As someone who has spent more than a decade designing embedded control systems, and more recently, designing cell phone communication subsystems, I can assure you that the situation is exactly as I described it. There is a reason why the space shuttles main control systems still used an archaic microprocessor even 30 years on, Anything more sophisticated is not only overkill, but actually dangerous, as simplicity lends itself to robustness. Complexity kills as it were.
Cell phones on the other hand require ever greater amounts of compute power, not just to run apps, but to provide the massive bandwidth that modern users demand. The two are simply not in the same ballpark as far as complexity goes. Cell phone communication is so specialized that a whole breed of processor has grown up tailored just to handling the complexity. Its akin to the difference between the software for a 2D sidescroller game, and a 3D game. If software and hardware at the complexity level of a cell phone had to be as reliable as the avionics package on a modern aircraft, Motorola would be the only manufacturer to have successfully brought one to market, and you could kiss smartphones goodbye. The only reason that people can even design and build avionics packages as robust as they are is because of how simple the actual problem is to solve. The only remotely complex parts of position controllers is the use of PID controllers, and that problem was solved decades ago in both software and hardware. Compare that with trying to patch a software system that occupies over 100MBs of code space, while its running, and you can begin to understand the difference in complexity. Hell, concurrency alone adds a level of complexity that any half-way intelligent embedded system designer avoids like the plague.
Modern aircraft contain serious amounts of software. It can and did kill people, if it contains bugs.
But at least for commercial aircraft, the design, coding, debugging and testing practices are wholly different from what is done in any kind of PC software, web service, telephone and the like. If you telephone bricks, you don't die in a minute. If the control software of an airliner bricks, it can easily be 300 people dead in two minutes and less.
The control software on an aircraft (even a modern one), is far less complicated than the software for something as simple as a smartphone. The only complicated part of an avionics package is the human interface, and even that is relatively simple. Most of the avionics package consists of measure the positions of everything, and report that information to the user. Measure the user input and push the control surfaces to the right position. The only complexity comes in when it comes to redundancy and verifying that everything is working correctly. 98% of what the software does is make sure that the hardware isn't broken in any kind of dangerous way, and try to deal with it if it is.
A smartphone software on the other hand has to handle multiple communication channels and a large variety of software. It also has to handle on the fly software updates, and usually it is designed to handle multiple hardware versions. It also gets to deal with the most destructive force on earth: Stupid users. Give a smartphone and your avionics package an hour with a typical teenager and see which one crashes first...
-=Geoskd
False Dichotomy. There are very large pieces of software with almost bulletproof reliability. BSD and Linux kernels, for example. Or medical and aviation software. Where it matters, software is at least as well-done as other engineering artifacts. It just DOES NOT matter, if your little Windows PC is infected or not. Nobody is killed from that.
Almost bulletproof, but not provably so. The whole idea in engineering, and why it costs so much, is that you can prove it without having to test it. Your "bulletproof" software is the result of a very extensive testing effort, and real world testing. If buildings had 5 nines reliability, there would be multiple building collapses every day. Realistically speaking, buildings have about 14 or 15 nines reliability. They are many orders of magnitude more reliable than software because of the effort that goes into making them reliable, as well as the relative simplicity of a building as compared with a typical computer.
Before I start getting blasted about how buildings are not simple, you have to look at how easily they can be described in engineering plans. The plans for a building will not take up anywhere near the storage space as the combined plans for all of the technology in a typical PC (not counting the software). When you add in the software involved, and the space is simply staggering. The complexity of a simple Windows 7 based PC is phenomenal. The OS source code alone is on the order of GB of data. When you add in the source for all of the drivers, and services software that runs in the background on a typical PC, and you're looking at 100's of GB of data. Compare that with a building, which takes up only a fraction of that.
Another way to look at it is that modern computer hardware is so complex that it cant even be designed without the aid of complex computer simulation software. Buildings on the other hand have been successfully designed and built for thousands of years.
It should also be noted that aviation software (on the whole), is relatively simple software, and the basics will run on an uContoller board. These projects are small enough that the software can be reasonably well understood, and the designers of this software do not need to contend with having their software run on hardware that they didn't expect. The avionics package is a complete package, and the hardware and software are designed together. This vastly simplifies the task as compared to, say, The Linux kernel that has to support every hardware out there. Even on medical equipment, the software can be complex enough to cause problems
-=Geoskd
If a structural engineer signs off on that without doing the actual calculations to show it is safe and that project is investigated they will lose their license.
They will also end up with criminal liability.
Yes, but if a structural engineer signs off, and a year later someone switches out the landfill or the foundation (Think hardware upgrade), then the civil engineer is no longer liable. Software works the same way, except that it is a given that large scale components of the system will be changed on a regular basis.
Imagine the chaos if IT professionals had to re-evaluate each system every time they wanted to add RAM or drives to a server...
The civil engineering equivalent to that would be adding floors onto a building. There is a reason server upgrades happen in minutes, and building upgrades happen in years. One has the potential to kill people so time and care is taken to make sure it is absolutely correct.
If the software industry used the same methodologies as civil engineering (and carried the same liability), the computer industry and everything it supports would still be in the stone ages. If civil engineering used the same methodologies as software engineering, we would have mile high cities that could house hundreds of millions of people, but every couple of months a sky-scraper somewhere would fall down. Each design methodology has its pros and cons, and each is tailored to the risk it must manage.
-=Geoskd
And if they knew about it for that long then they should be able to be sued for negligence.
Perhaps when the software industry has to accept the same liability and culpability as anyone else they will take their job seriously.
Aircraft are extremely complex and they cant use that as a get out of jail free card, software should not be able to either. If they want protection and patents then they can accept the down side, liability.
Your argument actually exemplifies why software creators typically have reduced liability. An aircraft is not a component of a larger system in the classic sense. It is operated as a standalone appliance that works as designed. You can't switch the wings out for a different version and expect it to work as designed.
Software by contrast is, by definition, run on a piece of hardware that can be swapped for different hardware that may or may not behave the same way. Even seemingly innocuous changes that have nothing to do with a particular software, can have consequences on that software that the coders never envisioned and didn't have to deal with originally. Any piece of software can be broken in dangerous ways if the hardware designers are trying to. It stands to reason that the same kind of thing could happen by accident as well. In short, it is the responsibility of operator of the entire system to ensure that they are using the parts correctly, and to test to verify functionality. If there is a problem with the software, most software companies will be glad to fix it once they know about it, but there are too many factors beyond their control for them to be held liable for the behavior of the whole system.
-=Geoskd
Lol, so,you have SSH access blocked in order to avoid tunnels?
Nice IT dept.
Can you think of a particularly good reason why people should be connecting to SSH servers outside the company?
If you're talking about accessing an offsite facility, then the they should already be running a VPN anyways.
-=Geoskd
I've never comprehended why the hell schools believe they can get away with charging more for an online class (usually usual tuition plus a fee).
I've never comprehended why the hell students believe online courses should cost less.
Because they use less resources, and have significant advantages when it comes to economy of scale. There is a reason that many larger schools have freshman year courses with hundreds of students in them. An on line course should, in theory, have no practical limit to the number of students on at any one time, and the school only really needs to provide graders and an assistant to help the students who get stuck. All told, not having to pay for nearly as many bricks and mortar facilities saves a fortune.
It should also be noted that the kinds of classes that lend themselves to online distribution are the kinds of classes that require far fewer expensive facilities. Labs are the most expensive parts of a schools facilities, and yet online courses require none of that. End of the day, an online course should be able to provide for 1000+ students per semester, and only cost the school about $200,000 in wages and equipment. (1/2 year salary for a professor, 1/2 dozen assistants and graders, Server farms and utility costs. Thats a whopping $200 per student. Now can you tell me why the cost to the student is higher than that by almost an order of magnitude? I can, its because the universities have the same delusion as the content industries did, they thought that the internet somehow added value to their product in and of itself, when in reality, the only value it adds is to reduce operating costs and distribution costs. The value to the end user (and the value they expect to receive) is in lower prices.
-=Geoskd
Tapeout has an archaic meaning. It probably used to mean when the layout database was copied to tape, to send for creating masks. Since we don't use tapes anymore, tapeout just refers they passed sign-off and signals the beginning of production.
Actually, they generally still use tapes. You're starting to see more and more SSDs and USB type drives being used, but Tapes are the tried and true method. Today, Hard Drives (Spindle and SSD) are just getting to the same density as tapes, but tapes are far cheaper per MB, and are more likely to still be good 30 years down the line, which appeals to the archivists and MBAs in the crowd.
-=Geoskd
that was their total profit though, so even if they had 5+ plants my point is it would pay for its self so fast that it would be utterly negligible.
Only if everything goes to plan. In many Fabs, there are configuration and start up problems that can delay production for months or even years. In the microprocessor industry, a year might as well be an eternity. And remember that these fabs employ a small army, so you have 1000+ people making 40k / year + benefits, and you find your fab has a manpower cost of 100 mil /year whether you have good production or not. If you have a bad start up, you could very easily go bankrupt before you can turn a profit, and if the delays are bad enough, you find yourself badly behind the technology curve, and can only produce lower margin products such as NVrams, and Lower end FPGAs and the like. In short, it is usually very profitable, but it definitely not a sure bet, and don't forget that were talking about a loss that would annihilate all but the largest companies.
-=Geoskd
I'm very good at the English language but I have no idea what this means. How do you 'tape out' a processor? What's a 'fabless ecosystem'? (The rainforests are rather wonderful, I hear.)
Tape out is an expression that ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) designers use. It means to finalize a version and send it out to be manufactured. There is some disagreement where it came from, but it most likely referred to the fact that magnetic tapes were used to transfer the (largish) electronic design descriptions to the manufacturers site. These tapes were used because they were the only medium at the time that could store the entire files on one volume instead of having to split the data among volumes.
"Fabless ecosystem" refers to the lack of a "fab" or fabrication facility. There are two types of setups for designing and manufacturing integrated circuits. The first is the "classical" model where a design company designs and manufactures the chips themselves. The other type of model is one where two separate companies design and manufacture the chips. This is called fabless, since the designer does not have a fab themselves (and in theory are free to go with any of a number of fabs and or manufacturing methods). Being fabless has advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that your company does not have to eat all of the overhead of owning and operating a fab (Each one costs around the same as a modern aircraft carrier, and employs the same number of people). If you have limited production runs you don't have to pay the full overhead, but instead that cost is split among all of the customers of a given fab. It also allows you to switch between fabs if your current fab is not meeting your particular requirements (cost, failure rate, QA, whatever). The biggest disadvantage is that your company doesn't have any control over the fabrication process, so you have very limited say as to how they manufacture your parts. The fab is also free to manufacture parts for your competitors, which makes it very difficult to have significant performance differences between competitors. Intel maintains a large part of its performance edge by using proprietary fab techniques that other companies do not have access to.
-=Geoskd
Borrowing from Cracked's Afterhours segment, Star Trek isn't about betterment of the population, but of finding something to be interested in. They are scouring the universe for entertainment.
That is appropriate on so many levels its disturbing. Every time I read that sentence again, I find another way to interpret it that is even more enlightening than the last...
-=Geoskd