He done got been able to shift yon decimal point and multiplies it by two
You know, that there exists apps to calculate a tip says that a shocking amount of people can't do this very basic bit of math.
Apparently there is a significant enough portion of society who need help for this. Hell, I've actually watched people struggle to calculate 10%, which is utterly mind boggling.
I don't know if people are really that stupid, or just so lazy as to have the same damned effect.
The rate at which America is jumping the shark into full on fascism is alarming.
This basically would amount to "fuck it, we don't give a damn about your rights or the Constitution... in order to keep you safe and defend your liberty we're going full surveillance society".
You should be very afraid of lawmakers pushing this kind of stuff... because they're openly attempting to destroy pretty much everything the US has historically claimed to stand for.
Don't these people take an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution? Because you can't defend it by ignoring it.
I kept things together the best I could but eventually realized I was being set up for failure. I was going to be the scapegoat.
The only things you can do in that situation are:
1) run like hell 2) document all of your concerns so they can't blame you when it blows up
But then if it ever comes to having to prove how you told them so, you'll be wondering why you didn't just run like hell in the first place, because at that point you've wasted your time and have been tainted by the project anyway as the ones really at fault continue to deflect when you're not around to defend yourself.
In some cases, the only way to win is not to play. It's important to be able to spot those.
1) The number of sides to a story is proportional to the square of the number of people. 2) There is a very small amount of information in TFS, so we have very little facts. 3) There exist organizations in which people have been keeping their head down and their mouth shut for years. 4) People have stuck with ancient garbage many times if it's the ancient garbage they know best.
My ability to determine if the poster has an accurate view of his situation is precisely zero.
This sounds like a highly dysfunctional environment, which might have taken years to get there. Being able to determine if you have a hope in hell of fixing it is a valuable skill here.
In which case the response becomes: possibly you are not completely understanding what is actually there, or things are so broken you might find the task insurmountable.
Neither is a good situation.
But the claim this "large" IT organization doesn't know the platforms you have sets off klaxon alarm bells of "how the hell can your IT people NOT know your current technology and still be doing their jobs?" Likewise, how can management allow this to happen?
So my cynical worst case... management has incompetently allowed a useless IT organization to be built up, and your attempts to fix it will be doomed to fail because BOTH of them will be problems.
That doesn't make me right, but it's the kinds of questions someone needs to be asking.
Is this the BOFH, or the legacy people leaving and being replaced with new guys with the wrong skillset?
My guess is if the boss allowed it to get to the point that your IT department has no relevant skills... he's going to look at the cost, squeal, and suggest you do it a different way or keep the current stuff running.
In which case it's update your CV and run like hell.
This sounds like a situation created by management. In which case management is likely to be unwilling to do what is actually needed to fix it.
I've had bosses brought in from the outside that thought they were gods' gift to the IT world that decided to try to remake the organization in their own image, only be be fired less than a year later because they pissed off all of the existing IT staff such that the boss got no results
I'm going to say if you have a large IT organization which has no skills in the technologies you actually have... then pissing off your IT department should be your goal, and if that doesn't work move to laying them off.
Yes, you can't run roughshod over everything and expect to make it work. But if your IT people don't know anything about the systems you have... you have an utterly useless IT department, and you're wasting money on them.
I mean, what is it they actually do if it doesn't include running the system you actually have? What are they doing every day? Creating proof-of-concept systems nobody will use and honing their skills to get certifications and leave?
but don't take personal offense to anything as it is now as there are probably good reasons why it is the way it is.
Or, and this is my guess based on the thin summary... your IT has been so badly managed for so long nobody can tell you a single reason why anything is the way it is, doesn't know how to run it, and couldn't fix it if it broke.
There's a huge difference between a pathologically broken IT department and a new manager who wants to rebuild the entire thing. And there simply isn't enough information to tell which is which other than and a large IT department with almost no skills in the technologies on site.
And that screams of an organization which is not doing you much good. Legacy systems which are EoL and which nobody understands? Who was sleeping at the switch when that happened?
The whole environment has rotted around you. Figure out how that happened, because that's going to be your main issues to try to fix.
As a senior techie, I've been tasked with helping bring the skillset of the rest of the staff up. Where would you start, given that most of the kit is EoL?
Well, you have 3 main choices:
1) Try to fix it and succeed 2) Try to fix it and fail 3) Run like hell
You won't be able to force the rest of the staff to bring up their skillset. Management has clearly left it to rot on the vine for a very long time. And, by the sounds of it, they don't know what they've even got.
A large IT department with no skills with the technologies on site? What exactly is that large IT department doing for this company? If you have a bunch of people with no skillsets with the technology they have... then what skillsets do they have, and how is it helping you?
Without more detail, I'm hearing "Hi, I've just joined a company with a terrible IT department, how do I fix that?" Who let it get into such a bad state? Because if they're still around, no way in hell you'll ever fix it.
Not "might not". Will not, can not, was never going to except in the mind of the idiot who thought it would. And it won't work in suburbs either.
Any marvelous technology which assumes the world will be redesigned around that marvelous technology is not marvelous technology. It's crap, and will never happen.
It's a designer or a futurist telling us how they've come up with a really elegant solution, and then complaining the world is too disorganized for your elegant solution to work.
Now, if we could just come up with an elegant solution to the fact that every posting from Nerval's Lobster links to Dice.com because he's apparently a paid shill they refuse to acknowledge.
If some asshat homeowner puts the bin out too far from the curb, or turned "wrong" (sideways or backwards or not mostly square to the road)
Oh, horseshit.
If your fucking marvelous system of automation is dependent on humans aligning something to precise specifications so a machine can do it... your marvelous system of automation is too useless to use in the real world.
Until I see the placement for these damned bins being embedded in the sidewalk or curb, having some idiot talking about how asshat humans can fuck up the whole system is missing the point. It needs to be pointed out that the world isn't built around, or predicated upon humans aligning things exactly according to your moronic plan.
but with a halfway considerate homeowner
Oh, fuck that. Don't blame me because some clueless idiot thinks he's going to have a system which works perfectly as long as the humans comply.
And in any place which actually gets snow and the like, the physical impossibility of this is pretty apparent on the first week.
I'll schlep my garbage to the curb, but don't assume I'll align it to a grid, because that's just a completely moronic assumption.
If these automated systems don't work in the real world, it's not because of defective humans. It's because of moron engineers who think the world needs to change to match their revolutionary new system. Period.
Until this shit is part of municipal infrastructure and planning (which is never will be), a bunch of people complaining about how the humans messed up this oh-so-elegant-system is pathetic. If you're system can't deal with the fact that a whiny teenager had to be cajoled into taking out the garbage... your system is useless, and makes stupid assumptions about the world.
You're simply never going to get people to comply with that, and expecting they will screams "too stupid to be solving this problem".
And, really... nobody has any sympathy for early adopters. Sure, they buy new tech and blaze the trail, and eventually the price comes down. But caring that someone was willing to spend thousands (if not tens of thousands) on new technology now has obsolete tech? No way.
Those guys who dropped $10K on plasma screen? Or any other piece of brand new tech? Nope, sorry... can't even begin to care that the last time I saw any in a store they were being liquidated for $400 or so.
Early adopters get first look, and in a lot of ways help to determine what the rest of us get. But the premium they pay for that privilege also comes with the risk of getting burned.
In your example, if you're a multi-millionaire, paying those prices to watch first-run movies with your friends in your own private cinema? Well, that pretty much sounds like chump change.
If you have 10 of your buddies in your private theater is $50 each, which you'll happily pay to be able to show off to your buddies or not be in the cineplex. Got a theater big enough for 20 people? Well, at $25 each you're not spending all that much money.
By the time you can afford to play on that field, the incremental cost isn't that much, because you've spent way more on building the cinema, furnishing it, lighting it, and buying all that movie stuff your decorator got for you. $500 to see a first run movie in your own cinema? If you could afford the gear, the cost of that is nothing.
And, really, on the high end of home cinema... one component costing $35K isn't really even that exceptional. By the time you're talking a home cinema with tiered seating, a bunch of high end seats, the floor lights and all the bells and whistles that people with money put into these things, the cost of the movie is nothing.
In other words voluntarily lock yourself into a walled garden? But isn't one of the biggest advantages of Android the freedom to install anything you want from any place you want?
Sure it is, but when you get malware and other crap... don't bitch to the rest of the world. Nobody said it would be safe, merely that you are free to do it if you want.
The problem is that even stuff which comes from the official Android stores are barely above what I'd call malware... they all want access to your contact list, phone, and everything else. Many of them send a lot of your data to ad servers and other parties without you explicitly knowing what is being sent to who and for which purposes.
It's like owning a PC... if you install random shit from the internet without knowing what it is, don't complain when you get malware.
I've taken to uninstalling a LOT of apps from my Android devices, precisely because I don't trust them, and Google has made it impossible for me to do things like deciding on an app-by-app basis what I'm really going to allow it to do. So instead you install a calculator app that wants access to your contact list... the intelligent solution is to say no, because a calculator doesn't need that shit.
Even legitimate Android apps are often little more than ad and analytics platforms.
Any functionality which can be accomplished with either a built-in app, or with a web-page... delete the damned app. It's probably offering you very little, and invading your privacy a lot. I've gone back and realized there's just so much crap in apps that many of them I simply have tossed.
The GPs advice is good, and has been good for years: don't install random shit if you don't know where it came from, don't assume software is trustworthy, and stop acting like every app which you want to install has any business with even half the permissions it wants.
All those apps that want your contact information and to be able to change your network status and all that.. if they don't need these perms for their core function... they're pretty much asking for carte blanche so they can monetize your experience.
Either you follow good security practices, or you don't. But if you don't, that's kind of for you to own. You can't have it both ways.
If you want to be free of a walled garden and install anything you want... you are your own security, for good or for ill.
So it really is true... all new technology must support porn.
From the first photography, to the first page-flip animations... it's all porn, and always has been.
And yet humans still idiotically think they can curb such things, despite hundreds of thousands of years of evolution which says "humans are hardwired for sex".
All these isms which say porn bad, sex bad... I figure they're mostly moronic because they completely ignore the fact that it's always been a part of humans, and isn't going to go away because your ism says so. In fact, if you ism wants it to go away, that's probably a sign your ism is crap.
If the first thing people do is say "in what way does this facilitate seeing boobies?", you're never going to get rid of it.
One of the reasons I have no interest in on-line gaming, and never will.
Interacting with the screeching masses in a video game seems like a pointless endeavor.
No thanks, if I can't play my game in an off-line mode, I really am not interested in it... which is why I have no interest at all in the latest generation of consoles. I want to play to relax and unwind, and I don't need the rest of the intertubes for that.
All of those people whose fun comes in the form of being raging assholes in a video game? I want nothing to do with that.
Translation: the police are totally willing to lie to you and bully you into signing a confession. They may or may not care if you're innocent. They probably don't.
Conclusion: Don't ever trust the police -- they care neither about your innocence or your rights.
And here we go with yet another example of politicians and other assholes with no technical understanding deciding to legislate "solutions" for their needs without the barest understanding of reality.
Yet another country who has decided their need to spy magically changes how technology works.
When will people start to realize that all of the shit they do because they think will solve one technology problem usually creates another one?
If you start putting in an app to track your children and monitor what they do... any exploit in that is going to have really bad results. And your band-aid solution slapped together is always going to have exploits. If you poke holes in encryption for law enforcement, law enforcement will never be the only ones who can exploit those holes.
As long as corporations aren't under any legal standard for encryption and security and bear no penalty for doing a bad job, this will always happen. Because they write the stuff which looks cool in a demo, and they may or may not ever get around to realizing they've been totally inept at security. And if they do realize they've been inept at security, they're likely to do nothing.
Almost without fail, these schemes of "won't someone think of the children" or "yarg, teh terrorists" end up with stupid solutions being implemented by people without a clue. And almost without fail someone loudly says "this has huge holes and issues in it and won't work".
And almost without fail, this proves to be true.
So, this is unfortunate. But, it's also something which was pretty much 100% predictable as something doomed to fail... because the people demanding it, and the people implementing it are seldom aware of, or qualified to deal with, the security holes created by shit like this.
This was kind of inevitable from the start.
If you institute something to track your children under the guise of protecting your children... you better be damned sure you're doing it to the highest possible standard. Otherwise, all you're doing it creating the situations where you're going to make this information available to someone else.
Yeah, watching applications load... an utter waste of my damned time.
When I first boot a machine, I incur the startup time of "OK, this browser gets these 12 tabs, this browser gets these tabs, here's my iTunes, here's my virtual machines, here's this, here's that"... they all go on their appropriate desktop. And then I don't need to worry about it for weeks until the next time I reboot.
When I need a program I flip to the appropriate virtual desktop, and I'm there in under a second. I find it more like putting all my tools on my work surface, and then not wasting any damned time getting the next one.
My 6 virtual desktops in my dual monitor setup is something I've pretty much decided is almost ideal for me... I'd love 3 monitors, but I need room on my desk for my laptop as well.
There's a reason I bought so much damned RAM and CPU capacity... precisely because I don't like to waste my time launching programs or switching from one to another.
Came here wondering who in the world uses virtual desktops?
Seriously? Because I've used virtual desktops since I fist discovered them in Linux in 1993, and as soon as I found the Windows Powertools or VirtuaWin I've always had them in Windows as well. In 1993 when the machine I had could a bunch of things in Linux when the exact same hardware would thrash in Windows, virtual desktops were awesome. I could have my desktop for coding, the one for FTP sessions, the one for the web browser. I remember using SLIP and having four terminal windows open for my school stuff.
Once you get used to them, the idea of having everything on one desktop feels moronic and cluttered. I don't want to go hunting for my window, and I tend to stay in one window (or set of windows) for a while at a time.
I don't close programs. I open them, and keep them open for days (if not weeks) at a time, and I keep them in separate desktops. I don't want to waste my time opening it, and I don't want it cluttering my view when I don't need it.
Hell, I've got a dual 24" monitor setup (one of which is shared with my laptop with a KVM) and I still run 6 virtual desktops to keep it from being cluttered and annoying to work with. And I find when I'm stuck with a single desktop, it's a nuisance to find stuff -- in part because I'll have 15-20 Windows open.
I can't imagine not using virtual desktops, because they've been part of how I work for over 20 years.
My "normal" load on my personal desktop is 3 different web browsers (for separate things and different levels of trust), 2-3 different VMs, iTunes, about 4 Windows Explorer windows, the software for my GPS, and occasionally my photo organizing software or my backups running.
Honestly, how do you think Trump has gotten himself rich if not by fleecing investors and having shady business partners?
And, really, why would you take him at his word?
My guess is that he's really adept at transferring other people's money into his own pockets. He's got a longhistory of being a pretty sketchy player and leaving his business partners holding the bag.
Donald Trump seems every bit a complete charlatan and a con man... he's been failing at business ventures and going bankrupt quite publicly for a long time. And I'm sure he's been leaving a trail of people in his wake who find themselves having been ripped off.
Sorry, but there are real world analogs to this... which makes this yet another moronic patent which essentially says "a system and methodology for doing something which is well understood in the real world, but with a computer".
So many of the visual metaphors used in computers are basically copies of things you do with real physical things. Granting patents on them means the concept of patents has become useless.
Troll?? Really?? This is from the last link in the summary:
Results The efficacy of paroxetine and imipramine was not statistically or clinically significantly different from placebo for any prespecified primary or secondary efficacy outcome. HAM-D scores decreased by 10.7 (least squares mean) (95% confidence interval 9.1 to 12.3), 9.0 (7.4 to 10.5), and 9.1 (7.5 to 10.7) points, respectively, for the paroxetine, imipramine and placebo groups (P=0.20). There were clinically significant increases in harms, including suicidal ideation and behaviour and other serious adverse events in the paroxetine group and cardiovascular problems in the imipramine group.
Conclusions Neither paroxetine nor high dose imipramine showed efficacy for major depression in adolescents, and there was an increase in harms with both drugs. Access to primary data from trials has important implications for both clinical practice and research, including that published conclusions about efficacy and safety should not be read as authoritative. The reanalysis of Study 329 illustrates the necessity of making primary trial data and protocols available to increase the rigour of the evidence base.
Unless you work for GSK or are one of the original authors, my summary of the conclusions is pretty damned accurate: they fucking lied about badly done science.
but they are spot-on when it comes to the over-prescribing of dangerous psychomeds
Even a broken clock is right now and then by sheer luck.
Why Scientology disregards this shit is still batshit crazy rantings, and has nothing to do with science... it has everything to do with the aliens trapped in your brain you haven't paid Scientology to remove yet.
That insane ramblings of people who believe stupid things occasionally coincides with actual facts doesn't lend any credibility to those insane ramblings of people who believe stupid things.
Sorry, but a "religion" written by a science fiction author who basically said "the real money is in starting a religion" isn't credible just because they disagree with anti-depressants.
The culmination of this belief system is Tom Cruise jumping on a couch spouting off about what he'd been trained to say.
Sure, but if fabricating science to sell a product for an application not approved or supported by the science really needs to be the kind of thing which leads to very significant legal action and penalties.
Essentially they fabricated a study to support a use of a drug, and the conclusions in that study were not founded.. because it wasn't a real study.
Sorry, but that's pretty much a criminal activity in my books.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, that there exists apps to calculate a tip says that a shocking amount of people can't do this very basic bit of math.
Apparently there is a significant enough portion of society who need help for this. Hell, I've actually watched people struggle to calculate 10%, which is utterly mind boggling.
I don't know if people are really that stupid, or just so lazy as to have the same damned effect.
The rate at which America is jumping the shark into full on fascism is alarming.
This basically would amount to "fuck it, we don't give a damn about your rights or the Constitution ... in order to keep you safe and defend your liberty we're going full surveillance society".
You should be very afraid of lawmakers pushing this kind of stuff ... because they're openly attempting to destroy pretty much everything the US has historically claimed to stand for.
Don't these people take an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution? Because you can't defend it by ignoring it.
Yeah .. the whole investing in people on line thing is a little old for me. BBS's were a long time ago.
I'm kinda the opposite of a hard-core gamer, apparently I don't have as many fingers as kids these days.
For me, I want old school console gaming ... alone, increasingly periodic, not a whole lot of skill required or time invested.
I coordinate at work. I coordinate with the wife. I coordinate with my golf buddies.
I sure as hell don't coordinate for video games.
I want to pick up a game after a few days, weeks, or months, fumble around with it for a while, and then put it back down.
Social or interactive gaming holds zero interest for me. Never has, never will.
The only things you can do in that situation are:
1) run like hell
2) document all of your concerns so they can't blame you when it blows up
But then if it ever comes to having to prove how you told them so, you'll be wondering why you didn't just run like hell in the first place, because at that point you've wasted your time and have been tainted by the project anyway as the ones really at fault continue to deflect when you're not around to defend yourself.
In some cases, the only way to win is not to play. It's important to be able to spot those.
Well, my general observations are:
1) The number of sides to a story is proportional to the square of the number of people.
2) There is a very small amount of information in TFS, so we have very little facts.
3) There exist organizations in which people have been keeping their head down and their mouth shut for years.
4) People have stuck with ancient garbage many times if it's the ancient garbage they know best.
My ability to determine if the poster has an accurate view of his situation is precisely zero.
This sounds like a highly dysfunctional environment, which might have taken years to get there. Being able to determine if you have a hope in hell of fixing it is a valuable skill here.
In which case the response becomes: possibly you are not completely understanding what is actually there, or things are so broken you might find the task insurmountable.
Neither is a good situation.
But the claim this "large" IT organization doesn't know the platforms you have sets off klaxon alarm bells of "how the hell can your IT people NOT know your current technology and still be doing their jobs?" Likewise, how can management allow this to happen?
So my cynical worst case ... management has incompetently allowed a useless IT organization to be built up, and your attempts to fix it will be doomed to fail because BOTH of them will be problems.
That doesn't make me right, but it's the kinds of questions someone needs to be asking.
Is this the BOFH, or the legacy people leaving and being replaced with new guys with the wrong skillset?
My guess is if the boss allowed it to get to the point that your IT department has no relevant skills ... he's going to look at the cost, squeal, and suggest you do it a different way or keep the current stuff running.
In which case it's update your CV and run like hell.
This sounds like a situation created by management. In which case management is likely to be unwilling to do what is actually needed to fix it.
I'm going to say if you have a large IT organization which has no skills in the technologies you actually have ... then pissing off your IT department should be your goal, and if that doesn't work move to laying them off.
Yes, you can't run roughshod over everything and expect to make it work. But if your IT people don't know anything about the systems you have ... you have an utterly useless IT department, and you're wasting money on them.
I mean, what is it they actually do if it doesn't include running the system you actually have? What are they doing every day? Creating proof-of-concept systems nobody will use and honing their skills to get certifications and leave?
Or, and this is my guess based on the thin summary... your IT has been so badly managed for so long nobody can tell you a single reason why anything is the way it is, doesn't know how to run it, and couldn't fix it if it broke.
There's a huge difference between a pathologically broken IT department and a new manager who wants to rebuild the entire thing. And there simply isn't enough information to tell which is which other than and a large IT department with almost no skills in the technologies on site.
And that screams of an organization which is not doing you much good. Legacy systems which are EoL and which nobody understands? Who was sleeping at the switch when that happened?
The whole environment has rotted around you. Figure out how that happened, because that's going to be your main issues to try to fix.
Well, you have 3 main choices:
1) Try to fix it and succeed
2) Try to fix it and fail
3) Run like hell
You won't be able to force the rest of the staff to bring up their skillset. Management has clearly left it to rot on the vine for a very long time. And, by the sounds of it, they don't know what they've even got.
A large IT department with no skills with the technologies on site? What exactly is that large IT department doing for this company? If you have a bunch of people with no skillsets with the technology they have ... then what skillsets do they have, and how is it helping you?
Without more detail, I'm hearing "Hi, I've just joined a company with a terrible IT department, how do I fix that?" Who let it get into such a bad state? Because if they're still around, no way in hell you'll ever fix it.
Not "might not". Will not, can not, was never going to except in the mind of the idiot who thought it would. And it won't work in suburbs either.
Any marvelous technology which assumes the world will be redesigned around that marvelous technology is not marvelous technology. It's crap, and will never happen.
It's a designer or a futurist telling us how they've come up with a really elegant solution, and then complaining the world is too disorganized for your elegant solution to work.
Now, if we could just come up with an elegant solution to the fact that every posting from Nerval's Lobster links to Dice.com because he's apparently a paid shill they refuse to acknowledge.
Oh, horseshit.
If your fucking marvelous system of automation is dependent on humans aligning something to precise specifications so a machine can do it ... your marvelous system of automation is too useless to use in the real world.
Until I see the placement for these damned bins being embedded in the sidewalk or curb, having some idiot talking about how asshat humans can fuck up the whole system is missing the point. It needs to be pointed out that the world isn't built around, or predicated upon humans aligning things exactly according to your moronic plan.
Oh, fuck that. Don't blame me because some clueless idiot thinks he's going to have a system which works perfectly as long as the humans comply.
And in any place which actually gets snow and the like, the physical impossibility of this is pretty apparent on the first week.
I'll schlep my garbage to the curb, but don't assume I'll align it to a grid, because that's just a completely moronic assumption.
If these automated systems don't work in the real world, it's not because of defective humans. It's because of moron engineers who think the world needs to change to match their revolutionary new system. Period.
Until this shit is part of municipal infrastructure and planning (which is never will be), a bunch of people complaining about how the humans messed up this oh-so-elegant-system is pathetic. If you're system can't deal with the fact that a whiny teenager had to be cajoled into taking out the garbage ... your system is useless, and makes stupid assumptions about the world.
You're simply never going to get people to comply with that, and expecting they will screams "too stupid to be solving this problem".
And, really ... nobody has any sympathy for early adopters. Sure, they buy new tech and blaze the trail, and eventually the price comes down. But caring that someone was willing to spend thousands (if not tens of thousands) on new technology now has obsolete tech? No way.
Those guys who dropped $10K on plasma screen? Or any other piece of brand new tech? Nope, sorry ... can't even begin to care that the last time I saw any in a store they were being liquidated for $400 or so.
Early adopters get first look, and in a lot of ways help to determine what the rest of us get. But the premium they pay for that privilege also comes with the risk of getting burned.
In your example, if you're a multi-millionaire, paying those prices to watch first-run movies with your friends in your own private cinema? Well, that pretty much sounds like chump change.
If you have 10 of your buddies in your private theater is $50 each, which you'll happily pay to be able to show off to your buddies or not be in the cineplex. Got a theater big enough for 20 people? Well, at $25 each you're not spending all that much money.
By the time you can afford to play on that field, the incremental cost isn't that much, because you've spent way more on building the cinema, furnishing it, lighting it, and buying all that movie stuff your decorator got for you. $500 to see a first run movie in your own cinema? If you could afford the gear, the cost of that is nothing.
And, really, on the high end of home cinema ... one component costing $35K isn't really even that exceptional. By the time you're talking a home cinema with tiered seating, a bunch of high end seats, the floor lights and all the bells and whistles that people with money put into these things, the cost of the movie is nothing.
Sure it is, but when you get malware and other crap ... don't bitch to the rest of the world. Nobody said it would be safe, merely that you are free to do it if you want.
The problem is that even stuff which comes from the official Android stores are barely above what I'd call malware ... they all want access to your contact list, phone, and everything else. Many of them send a lot of your data to ad servers and other parties without you explicitly knowing what is being sent to who and for which purposes.
It's like owning a PC ... if you install random shit from the internet without knowing what it is, don't complain when you get malware.
I've taken to uninstalling a LOT of apps from my Android devices, precisely because I don't trust them, and Google has made it impossible for me to do things like deciding on an app-by-app basis what I'm really going to allow it to do. So instead you install a calculator app that wants access to your contact list ... the intelligent solution is to say no, because a calculator doesn't need that shit.
Even legitimate Android apps are often little more than ad and analytics platforms.
Any functionality which can be accomplished with either a built-in app, or with a web-page ... delete the damned app. It's probably offering you very little, and invading your privacy a lot. I've gone back and realized there's just so much crap in apps that many of them I simply have tossed.
The GPs advice is good, and has been good for years: don't install random shit if you don't know where it came from, don't assume software is trustworthy, and stop acting like every app which you want to install has any business with even half the permissions it wants.
All those apps that want your contact information and to be able to change your network status and all that .. if they don't need these perms for their core function ... they're pretty much asking for carte blanche so they can monetize your experience.
Either you follow good security practices, or you don't. But if you don't, that's kind of for you to own. You can't have it both ways.
If you want to be free of a walled garden and install anything you want ... you are your own security, for good or for ill.
So it really is true ... all new technology must support porn.
From the first photography, to the first page-flip animations ... it's all porn, and always has been.
And yet humans still idiotically think they can curb such things, despite hundreds of thousands of years of evolution which says "humans are hardwired for sex".
All these isms which say porn bad, sex bad ... I figure they're mostly moronic because they completely ignore the fact that it's always been a part of humans, and isn't going to go away because your ism says so. In fact, if you ism wants it to go away, that's probably a sign your ism is crap.
If the first thing people do is say "in what way does this facilitate seeing boobies?", you're never going to get rid of it.
One of the reasons I have no interest in on-line gaming, and never will.
Interacting with the screeching masses in a video game seems like a pointless endeavor.
No thanks, if I can't play my game in an off-line mode, I really am not interested in it ... which is why I have no interest at all in the latest generation of consoles. I want to play to relax and unwind, and I don't need the rest of the intertubes for that.
All of those people whose fun comes in the form of being raging assholes in a video game? I want nothing to do with that.
Translation: the police are totally willing to lie to you and bully you into signing a confession. They may or may not care if you're innocent. They probably don't.
Conclusion: Don't ever trust the police -- they care neither about your innocence or your rights.
And here we go with yet another example of politicians and other assholes with no technical understanding deciding to legislate "solutions" for their needs without the barest understanding of reality.
Yet another country who has decided their need to spy magically changes how technology works.
And, as usual, this will never work in practice.
When will people start to realize that all of the shit they do because they think will solve one technology problem usually creates another one?
If you start putting in an app to track your children and monitor what they do ... any exploit in that is going to have really bad results. And your band-aid solution slapped together is always going to have exploits. If you poke holes in encryption for law enforcement, law enforcement will never be the only ones who can exploit those holes.
As long as corporations aren't under any legal standard for encryption and security and bear no penalty for doing a bad job, this will always happen. Because they write the stuff which looks cool in a demo, and they may or may not ever get around to realizing they've been totally inept at security. And if they do realize they've been inept at security, they're likely to do nothing.
Almost without fail, these schemes of "won't someone think of the children" or "yarg, teh terrorists" end up with stupid solutions being implemented by people without a clue. And almost without fail someone loudly says "this has huge holes and issues in it and won't work".
And almost without fail, this proves to be true.
So, this is unfortunate. But, it's also something which was pretty much 100% predictable as something doomed to fail ... because the people demanding it, and the people implementing it are seldom aware of, or qualified to deal with, the security holes created by shit like this.
This was kind of inevitable from the start.
If you institute something to track your children under the guise of protecting your children ... you better be damned sure you're doing it to the highest possible standard. Otherwise, all you're doing it creating the situations where you're going to make this information available to someone else.
Short version: Microsoft is going to bake in the security holes so low that it will be exploitable in epic ways.
Just like every time Microsoft decides to embed this stuff at a level nobody else can ... and there will be much pwning.
Yeah, watching applications load ... an utter waste of my damned time.
When I first boot a machine, I incur the startup time of "OK, this browser gets these 12 tabs, this browser gets these tabs, here's my iTunes, here's my virtual machines, here's this, here's that" ... they all go on their appropriate desktop. And then I don't need to worry about it for weeks until the next time I reboot.
When I need a program I flip to the appropriate virtual desktop, and I'm there in under a second. I find it more like putting all my tools on my work surface, and then not wasting any damned time getting the next one.
My 6 virtual desktops in my dual monitor setup is something I've pretty much decided is almost ideal for me ... I'd love 3 monitors, but I need room on my desk for my laptop as well.
There's a reason I bought so much damned RAM and CPU capacity ... precisely because I don't like to waste my time launching programs or switching from one to another.
Seriously? Because I've used virtual desktops since I fist discovered them in Linux in 1993, and as soon as I found the Windows Powertools or VirtuaWin I've always had them in Windows as well. In 1993 when the machine I had could a bunch of things in Linux when the exact same hardware would thrash in Windows, virtual desktops were awesome. I could have my desktop for coding, the one for FTP sessions, the one for the web browser. I remember using SLIP and having four terminal windows open for my school stuff.
Once you get used to them, the idea of having everything on one desktop feels moronic and cluttered. I don't want to go hunting for my window, and I tend to stay in one window (or set of windows) for a while at a time.
I don't close programs. I open them, and keep them open for days (if not weeks) at a time, and I keep them in separate desktops. I don't want to waste my time opening it, and I don't want it cluttering my view when I don't need it.
Hell, I've got a dual 24" monitor setup (one of which is shared with my laptop with a KVM) and I still run 6 virtual desktops to keep it from being cluttered and annoying to work with. And I find when I'm stuck with a single desktop, it's a nuisance to find stuff -- in part because I'll have 15-20 Windows open.
I can't imagine not using virtual desktops, because they've been part of how I work for over 20 years.
My "normal" load on my personal desktop is 3 different web browsers (for separate things and different levels of trust), 2-3 different VMs, iTunes, about 4 Windows Explorer windows, the software for my GPS, and occasionally my photo organizing software or my backups running.
Honestly, how do you think Trump has gotten himself rich if not by fleecing investors and having shady business partners?
And, really, why would you take him at his word?
My guess is that he's really adept at transferring other people's money into his own pockets. He's got a long history of being a pretty sketchy player and leaving his business partners holding the bag.
Donald Trump seems every bit a complete charlatan and a con man ... he's been failing at business ventures and going bankrupt quite publicly for a long time. And I'm sure he's been leaving a trail of people in his wake who find themselves having been ripped off.
And on doors for hundreds of years.
Sorry, but there are real world analogs to this ... which makes this yet another moronic patent which essentially says "a system and methodology for doing something which is well understood in the real world, but with a computer".
So many of the visual metaphors used in computers are basically copies of things you do with real physical things. Granting patents on them means the concept of patents has become useless.
Troll?? Really?? This is from the last link in the summary:
Unless you work for GSK or are one of the original authors, my summary of the conclusions is pretty damned accurate: they fucking lied about badly done science.
Even a broken clock is right now and then by sheer luck.
Why Scientology disregards this shit is still batshit crazy rantings, and has nothing to do with science ... it has everything to do with the aliens trapped in your brain you haven't paid Scientology to remove yet.
That insane ramblings of people who believe stupid things occasionally coincides with actual facts doesn't lend any credibility to those insane ramblings of people who believe stupid things.
Sorry, but a "religion" written by a science fiction author who basically said "the real money is in starting a religion" isn't credible just because they disagree with anti-depressants.
The culmination of this belief system is Tom Cruise jumping on a couch spouting off about what he'd been trained to say.
Sure, but if fabricating science to sell a product for an application not approved or supported by the science really needs to be the kind of thing which leads to very significant legal action and penalties.
Essentially they fabricated a study to support a use of a drug, and the conclusions in that study were not founded .. because it wasn't a real study.
Sorry, but that's pretty much a criminal activity in my books.