Or - and I know this is crazy - actually use that cloud thing the kids are talking about.
It doesn't have to be someone else's. I have a home NAS (which is solidly in the category of "things people who would need a MacBook Pro would likely benefit from having anyway"). It stores all our ripped CDs and DVDs, and when I'm at home I can play all of those directly off the network share. If I'm traveling, I can download the stuff I want to take with me. If I forget something, I can download it from my NAS while I'm on the road.
So basically my laptop has the properties you're describing: I can be home plugged in to power and with several TB of fast local network storage, or I can be traveling with a lightweight laptop without all the things I don't need when I'm not in my living room.
Or you can be in a Slack conversation with your team and say "hey, look at this...". Paste in a block of code. Slack renders it inline and syntax-highlighted. You discuss and move on to the next topic. That's vastly simpler than opening a browser to copy-and-paste a few lines so you can get a link to it.
It takes more than half that time for many people to become fully engaged in a complex task
That's debatable. It helps a lot if you have a short description of what you're trying to accomplish. Now, I wouldn't want to write a novel or an architecture document that way, but it's great for knocking out a dozen well-defined chores.
I love how on a tech site we still have people who are proud of their ignorance of industry trends. Are you also that guy at parties who brags about not owning a TV and doesn't know any popular music?
Step one: Make a Facebook profile (either your first or an additional one) and add a few friends.
Step two: Post lots of short updates matching their expected "safe driver" ruleset.
Step three: Point your insurer at that account and enjoy lower premiums.
I think this is an excellent idea from the insurers, and I encourage anyone I'm about to borrow money from to use the same process. Please.
Maybe I just don't multi-task well....but anyway, I find that for the most part, constant communication with IM, at least for tech work...kills my productivity and ability to concentrate and work.
With Slack, you can set Do Not Disturb and not get any notifications. I like working that way: I set DND and go into a 25 minute sprint. At the end, I look at Slack and see messages, dog videos, and whatever, then minimize it and go back to work for another 25 minutes.
You're discounting the value of UI. You can drop Slack on a new employee and they can immediately click around and figure out how to use it. You and I like IRC and it's great. I also like Usenet, but that's a usability nightmare for anyone used to common web comment tools.
Yes I use the XDHC slot and I dont want to wait a week for these to transfer over wifi.
I'd counter: are new formats even compatible with my old 2011 MacBook Pro? I can't upgrade the card slot in my MBP, but I could easily upgrade the external reader as technologies improve.
That's a terrible argument: they're not going to sacrifice a multi-billion dollar product line just to shovel out a few accessories. But if I were going to buy that kind of thing, I'd strongly consider something like this instead. This is where moving to USB-C is a clear win. Park this on your desk and plug your monitor and other accessories into it. Come to work, sit down, plug a single cable into your laptop, and get charging, video, and peripherals all at once.
An SD slot is a waste of space and circuitry for me. Same for an Ethernet jack - I haven't wanted to plug my laptop into a wired network in years. (Pre-empting the "but I need it....!" objections: great! Get an adapter and now you have it!) I'd missing having the USB-A jacks except that the new hub-as-a-charging-dock replacement is better in every single way that I care about. I think that by this time in 2017, all those various form factors will look like legacy dinosaurs.
And yes, I'd be saying the exact same thing if Lenovo or Dell were doing this. I think moving to a single do-everything port is an excellent idea and I hope the whole industry moves in this direction.
I doubt this is something my work would use because we're a Google Docs + Slack shop. Still, I wish Microsoft well in this. I like Slack but I want them to be on their toes and competitive, not just resting on "way better than HipChat" and calling it a day.
I declare my self as wealthy as Google (but it ain't true). I found it telling that when I went to a panel of security researchers (including Bruce Schneier among others), every single one of them used an iPhone. Someone in the audience asked why, and as a group they answered that 1) iPhones get updates, and 2) Apple at least attempts to make customer-friendly security designs. Android might be hypothetically more secure in restricted situations, but since only a tiny handful of Android phones will ever have those patches you can't reasonably say that the OS is secure.
There might be a super-duper secure, non-spyware version of Windows floating around in a Microsoft lab, but if no one gets to use it, it doesn't count. Same here.
At the end of the day ROI is all the bean counters give two shits about.
Well, right. ROI also includes things like making your customers happy so that they buy more stuff, and apparently someone at MS ran the numbers and still decided this was a better long-term strategy.
It is possible to run Linux binaries compiled 20 years ago on modern Linux distros.
LOL yeah. That works great for the handful of statically linked binaries on your system, but good luck running something from '96 against a modern/lib.
More likely MS is embarrassed by the consumer dislike of windows 10.
I'm far from a MS apologist (typing this on a Mac; doing my development on Linux) but I think a simpler explanation is that they don't want to support a 7 year old OS. You can only keep backporting features and fixes that are developed on a new platform for so long. Once the platforms diverge sufficient, it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain that compatibility.
Think of it this way: would you want to port Chrome to Windows 95? Of course not: it doesn't have half the APIs you'd want to use. You could port compatibility stubs, but eventually you'd end up rewriting half of the new OS onto the old until it became a Frankenstein's monster of a beast to maintain.
Where Microsoft really failed long-term is that they established the expectation that software written on the platform will run forever and ever, as a binary, unchanged. That's a terrible idea! On Mac and Linux, the expectation is that vendors will occasionally have to at least recompile their software to run on newer platforms. Simply having that expectation is enough for vendors to be used to it, and for end users to be used to their vendors doing it. Even just recompiling a project with a newer Xcode is often a big feature and performance win so there's not much resistance to doing so.
You don't install an app for most major OSes and expect it to run as-is for the next 20 years. And yet that's exactly what Microsoft has trained everyone to expect, and it's increasingly coming to bite them in the ass.
I hate being pedantic, but if you want to, sure: the default legal conditions in the country where Slashdot is hosted and most of its commenters live and where Automattic is located is, at this point in time, for 1) all works to be automatically copyrighted upon their creation, and 2) for no one else to have the right to... erm... copy them without explicit license from their creators (with a small set of Fair Use exceptions). Vary any of those conditionals and you can get something else, but these are the ones we're talking about so in normal conversation you can safely and reasonably ignore the others.
What is unclear is how enforceable the GPL is in court in many jurisdictions.
It's pretty clear: if the code is distributed only under the terms of the GPL, and you do not comply with those terms, then you lose the right to distribute works derived from it. The default right is that you have no rights to it.
Opposite here. I was skeptical about buying a 6+, but I wanted a replacement for my iPad Mini that I could easily read while my commuter bus was bouncing along the freeway. It felt HUGE for about a week until it became the new normal. Now I can barely type on an SE because it feels like I'm jabbing at a tiny little Barbie phone. Now that I've acclimated to the Plus's form factor, I'd hate going back.
I want a "panic" finger such that it displays a "could not read fingerprint - try again" message and then immediate sets "allow_unlocking_with_fingerprint=False" internally so that a password is required. Make it indistinguishable from the usual unlock failure message so that it's impossible to tell that it was triggered (even by examining the on-device logs, if that's possible).
Your suggestion, in a thread about relative costs of systems, is to buy a custom piece of hardware, from a vendor who's website doesn't actually list a price.
if things ever get too hairy for a dell, your restore process is entirely automated in windows or linux. restoring a mac is nothing short of corporate witchcraft.
To backup: buy a Synology NAS. Enable the Time Machine service. Configure your Macs to back up to it. Voila, done.
To restore from scratch: hold down Command-R when booting a Mac. Tell it to restore from Time Machine. Wait an hour. Voila, done.
because Mac is like 10 percent of the worlds PC sales, and the viruses usually dont survive that far when the percentage of ownership is that low
That has zero to do with the relative dearth of malware on Macs. (Pausing for a moment for a pedant to point out the one or two Mac bugs they've read about. Yes, we know. It's still proportionally much less than Mac's market share so move along.) Macs are initially more expensive, but that also means there owners tend to have more money and therefore the machines are more valuable targets. There are also still tens of millions of Macs out there in the wild. Even if there are more PCs, there are still a hell of a lot of Macs to be owned for anyone interested and capable. The fact that they're not is an indicator that building a nice interface on top of a solid Unix platform is a good way to end up with a stable, secure desktop.
OMG yes. I bought my wife an MLB.tv season pass because she loves watching baseball. What do you get for $109.99? Every game on TV except the ones in your home market. You can watch the Twins suck any time you want, so long as you don't live in Minnesota. Oh, and no postseason: that's a separate subscription.
Who the fuck came up with those ideas? I'll be damned if MLB ever gets another penny from us.
Slashdot Mirror
Or - and I know this is crazy - actually use that cloud thing the kids are talking about.
It doesn't have to be someone else's. I have a home NAS (which is solidly in the category of "things people who would need a MacBook Pro would likely benefit from having anyway"). It stores all our ripped CDs and DVDs, and when I'm at home I can play all of those directly off the network share. If I'm traveling, I can download the stuff I want to take with me. If I forget something, I can download it from my NAS while I'm on the road.
So basically my laptop has the properties you're describing: I can be home plugged in to power and with several TB of fast local network storage, or I can be traveling with a lightweight laptop without all the things I don't need when I'm not in my living room.
and now he thinks I am part of the God denying conspiracy.
"I hadn't been, dumbass, but now I'm strongly considering it."
Or you can be in a Slack conversation with your team and say "hey, look at this...". Paste in a block of code. Slack renders it inline and syntax-highlighted. You discuss and move on to the next topic. That's vastly simpler than opening a browser to copy-and-paste a few lines so you can get a link to it.
It takes more than half that time for many people to become fully engaged in a complex task
That's debatable. It helps a lot if you have a short description of what you're trying to accomplish. Now, I wouldn't want to write a novel or an architecture document that way, but it's great for knocking out a dozen well-defined chores.
I love how on a tech site we still have people who are proud of their ignorance of industry trends. Are you also that guy at parties who brags about not owning a TV and doesn't know any popular music?
Step one: Make a Facebook profile (either your first or an additional one) and add a few friends.
Step two: Post lots of short updates matching their expected "safe driver" ruleset.
Step three: Point your insurer at that account and enjoy lower premiums.
I think this is an excellent idea from the insurers, and I encourage anyone I'm about to borrow money from to use the same process. Please.
Maybe I just don't multi-task well....but anyway, I find that for the most part, constant communication with IM, at least for tech work...kills my productivity and ability to concentrate and work.
With Slack, you can set Do Not Disturb and not get any notifications. I like working that way: I set DND and go into a 25 minute sprint. At the end, I look at Slack and see messages, dog videos, and whatever, then minimize it and go back to work for another 25 minutes.
You're discounting the value of UI. You can drop Slack on a new employee and they can immediately click around and figure out how to use it. You and I like IRC and it's great. I also like Usenet, but that's a usability nightmare for anyone used to common web comment tools.
Yes I use the XDHC slot and I dont want to wait a week for these to transfer over wifi.
I'd counter: are new formats even compatible with my old 2011 MacBook Pro? I can't upgrade the card slot in my MBP, but I could easily upgrade the external reader as technologies improve.
That's a terrible argument: they're not going to sacrifice a multi-billion dollar product line just to shovel out a few accessories. But if I were going to buy that kind of thing, I'd strongly consider something like this instead. This is where moving to USB-C is a clear win. Park this on your desk and plug your monitor and other accessories into it. Come to work, sit down, plug a single cable into your laptop, and get charging, video, and peripherals all at once.
An SD slot is a waste of space and circuitry for me. Same for an Ethernet jack - I haven't wanted to plug my laptop into a wired network in years. (Pre-empting the "but I need it....!" objections: great! Get an adapter and now you have it!) I'd missing having the USB-A jacks except that the new hub-as-a-charging-dock replacement is better in every single way that I care about. I think that by this time in 2017, all those various form factors will look like legacy dinosaurs.
And yes, I'd be saying the exact same thing if Lenovo or Dell were doing this. I think moving to a single do-everything port is an excellent idea and I hope the whole industry moves in this direction.
I doubt this is something my work would use because we're a Google Docs + Slack shop. Still, I wish Microsoft well in this. I like Slack but I want them to be on their toes and competitive, not just resting on "way better than HipChat" and calling it a day.
There might be a super-duper secure, non-spyware version of Windows floating around in a Microsoft lab, but if no one gets to use it, it doesn't count. Same here.
At the end of the day ROI is all the bean counters give two shits about.
Well, right. ROI also includes things like making your customers happy so that they buy more stuff, and apparently someone at MS ran the numbers and still decided this was a better long-term strategy.
It is possible to run Linux binaries compiled 20 years ago on modern Linux distros.
LOL yeah. That works great for the handful of statically linked binaries on your system, but good luck running something from '96 against a modern /lib.
More likely MS is embarrassed by the consumer dislike of windows 10.
I'm far from a MS apologist (typing this on a Mac; doing my development on Linux) but I think a simpler explanation is that they don't want to support a 7 year old OS. You can only keep backporting features and fixes that are developed on a new platform for so long. Once the platforms diverge sufficient, it becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain that compatibility.
Think of it this way: would you want to port Chrome to Windows 95? Of course not: it doesn't have half the APIs you'd want to use. You could port compatibility stubs, but eventually you'd end up rewriting half of the new OS onto the old until it became a Frankenstein's monster of a beast to maintain.
Where Microsoft really failed long-term is that they established the expectation that software written on the platform will run forever and ever, as a binary, unchanged. That's a terrible idea! On Mac and Linux, the expectation is that vendors will occasionally have to at least recompile their software to run on newer platforms. Simply having that expectation is enough for vendors to be used to it, and for end users to be used to their vendors doing it. Even just recompiling a project with a newer Xcode is often a big feature and performance win so there's not much resistance to doing so.
You don't install an app for most major OSes and expect it to run as-is for the next 20 years. And yet that's exactly what Microsoft has trained everyone to expect, and it's increasingly coming to bite them in the ass.
I hate being pedantic, but if you want to, sure: the default legal conditions in the country where Slashdot is hosted and most of its commenters live and where Automattic is located is, at this point in time, for 1) all works to be automatically copyrighted upon their creation, and 2) for no one else to have the right to... erm... copy them without explicit license from their creators (with a small set of Fair Use exceptions). Vary any of those conditionals and you can get something else, but these are the ones we're talking about so in normal conversation you can safely and reasonably ignore the others.
What is unclear is how enforceable the GPL is in court in many jurisdictions.
It's pretty clear: if the code is distributed only under the terms of the GPL, and you do not comply with those terms, then you lose the right to distribute works derived from it. The default right is that you have no rights to it.
I wear jeans to work every day and the 6+ sits comfortably in my pocket. It stopped feeling strange within a couple of days.
Opposite here. I was skeptical about buying a 6+, but I wanted a replacement for my iPad Mini that I could easily read while my commuter bus was bouncing along the freeway. It felt HUGE for about a week until it became the new normal. Now I can barely type on an SE because it feels like I'm jabbing at a tiny little Barbie phone. Now that I've acclimated to the Plus's form factor, I'd hate going back.
I want a "panic" finger such that it displays a "could not read fingerprint - try again" message and then immediate sets "allow_unlocking_with_fingerprint=False" internally so that a password is required. Make it indistinguishable from the usual unlock failure message so that it's impossible to tell that it was triggered (even by examining the on-device logs, if that's possible).
Your suggestion, in a thread about relative costs of systems, is to buy a custom piece of hardware, from a vendor who's website doesn't actually list a price.
Y'all got Amazon where you live? Or access to any of the vendors they list on their website?
But it's not like Windows can backup to thin air. You have to have something on the other end of that CAT-5, so it's probably a wash hardware-wise.
Do you know what I think when I see a website selling a product but not listing a unit price.
"Huh, I wonder if Amazon has them?" would have been my first thought, but apparently it wasn't yours.
if things ever get too hairy for a dell, your restore process is entirely automated in windows or linux. restoring a mac is nothing short of corporate witchcraft.
To backup: buy a Synology NAS. Enable the Time Machine service. Configure your Macs to back up to it. Voila, done.
To restore from scratch: hold down Command-R when booting a Mac. Tell it to restore from Time Machine. Wait an hour. Voila, done.
because Mac is like 10 percent of the worlds PC sales, and the viruses usually dont survive that far when the percentage of ownership is that low
That has zero to do with the relative dearth of malware on Macs. (Pausing for a moment for a pedant to point out the one or two Mac bugs they've read about. Yes, we know. It's still proportionally much less than Mac's market share so move along.) Macs are initially more expensive, but that also means there owners tend to have more money and therefore the machines are more valuable targets. There are also still tens of millions of Macs out there in the wild. Even if there are more PCs, there are still a hell of a lot of Macs to be owned for anyone interested and capable. The fact that they're not is an indicator that building a nice interface on top of a solid Unix platform is a good way to end up with a stable, secure desktop.
sports blackouts
OMG yes. I bought my wife an MLB.tv season pass because she loves watching baseball. What do you get for $109.99? Every game on TV except the ones in your home market. You can watch the Twins suck any time you want, so long as you don't live in Minnesota. Oh, and no postseason: that's a separate subscription.
Who the fuck came up with those ideas? I'll be damned if MLB ever gets another penny from us.
"Purple cups eat grass." I mean, as long as we're throwing out random words that aren't relevant to reality.
But now it's not Just Some Guy's Blog anymore
Leave me out of this.