Yes, burnout does exist. It's a serious problem, and it's one that everyone just glosses over, without really talking about what it is.
It's not 'depression' but from my experience, the initial symptoms are similar. The coffee stops doing its job and just becomes a routine. They've got chronic low energy. Their productivity drops despite their efforts, and they end up either not trying or not being able to think clearly.
And then the person pulls themselves out of the situation or they snap and get fired, and take a brake. And that's what they continue to do, even after they pick up another job. They're just permanently out to lunch, as if they've burned through an in-born reserve of excellence. Everything they touch is mediocre from that point on, either because they're not able to motivate themselves to try, they're too spent to give a damn, or some other factor - I don't know.
Maybe it's like drug use, where it damages your brain over time. People have a 'bad trip' and they're just out to lunch for the foreseeable future. I don't know. What I do know is that people who are awesome in their 20s and play the burnout game seem to peter off in their 30s.
You're right. It has absolutely nothing to do with predominantly culturally unified societies (vs. say, the US or the UK) with large amounts of natural resources that the populations are willing to exploit for financial gain.
Yep. I had an employer push on me like that. I was salaried, so I just started coming in less. What was he going to do, fire me for being the most productive person while working 35 hours a week?
. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over.
Then why was Microsoft's revenue not stunted by copying their crappy innovation? Even in the 3.1 days, Windows was preferable over a Mac by most.
Same for MacOS X. It can't context switch for shit, which is even more apparent on a modern multicore system. They've changed the "look and feel" a dozen times, it seems, but nothing substantive (except for this latest iteration, which everyone apparently hates).
China manufactures a lot of goods for the US. Now ask yourself, what does the US have to offer China, and the rest of our world? Intellectual Property, which is only reinforced by our nations laws?
Competence?
It's a running joke that Americans are fat, stupid, lazy bastards. Many of us are. It's true for Northern Europe, too. What is also true is that when you're looking for field experts and one-of-a-kind capabilities, this is still where you look.
You fail to realize that when another country needs precise engineering (regardless of the field), they'll usually look to the US. Yes, even today. With few exceptions, the rest of the world still looks to the White Man Culture to implement the new, important, interesting, useful things - and then "steals" them, implementing lesser versions of them.
* skilled machinists * structural engineers * any precision instruments * specialty, non-consumer electronics * competent sysadmins * software that actually does its job well (what, did you think you'd find something in India?)
This isn't race pride or anything like that. You can find eg. good software engineering in India, but it's rare due to the culture.
Don't be fooled by the news and these patent sharks. There is still a lot of capability left in the US and the West as a whole, despite the powers that be trying to pillage it away.
There are different approaches to the same problem, often with different motivations (even for the same outcome).
In this case, I'm guessing it's because they either have highly skilled Westerners working for them and there was a really bad threat, or this is a typical display of Arab Ingenuity. For whatever reason, "fixing" something over there means hitting it with a hammer until it's fixed, Inshallah.
Interesting that the outcome may have been from drastically oppositional approaches.:P
In contrast, I've got a 733MHz machine which has been running Debian for the better part of a decade now - first on Debian 3, and now on 6. I think it's broken a couple times, but never official packages/repos. It's always been the added repositories for things which aren't available in debian (rare/far between), and the fix has never been tedious or outside the package manager itself.
Translation: "Here are a lot of words which try to explain away the fact that Apple has no valid engineering reasons for this. They just want the money from licensing the new interface and everyone only being able to buy Apple or Apple-licensed accessories."
Wow, that's going to be really embarassing for whoever owns it in 5 to 10 years, if they're able to identify what it's used for still. They actually put iPod connectors in cars? I understand USB, because it's a pretty awesome connector type and is very versatile, but an iProduct connector?
Bullshit. I've never seen or heard of this happening, not on XDA (where I'll troll), not from any of my friends.
My son has faithfully been using my old HTC HD2 for the past year now. The phone gets some fairly severe abuse, and was fairly heavily abused by me as well. It would be dead right now from blunt trauma a dozen times if it wasn't for the Otterbox. He will drain the battery at least twice a day. Not a single problem.
What I have done, is damaged cables by picking up the phone too forcefully and/or dropping the phone on the connector. Woo, I'll just pull another $2 cable from the drawer and use that.
Speaking of frail connetors, look at Apple's current connectors, or any of the other 'legacy' phone connectors. Those are seriously frail with those small, exposed pins (which will rip out if the device is hanked). I've seen a number of iPhones with their connectors broken off inside. (The phones were otherwise destroyed by the drops, so it didn't really matter, but the point stands that the connectors are weak.)
It'll never happen. Do you realize how much of Apple's profits come from their (severely) over-priced iProduct-specific accessories?
They'd never give their customers that choice, because that choice will remove lock-in. Whatever it is, it's going to be patent encumbered and licensed to anyone who wants to make a product for their iAccessory.
This will, IMO, back fire. Apple is losing market share; why would a company pay a massive licensing fee to have the 'right' to make a non-standard accessory for a has-been novelty?
A Bobcat board, in case you weren't aware, is fairly bottom basement. 1.6GHz dual core, first generation of AMD's new craptastic performance range of hardware. It has performance similar to (but for my purposes, less than) a 1.6GHz Atom 330.
The desktop is a bargain price first generation i5 with a low end 60GB Corsair SSD and 4GB of RAM. Not exactly blazing fast, but no slouch, either.
I've got another laptop on which Windows 7 boots in under a minute. (Logging in takes a bit more time; this doesn't change on Windows 8. What they probably did was just push more of the user-facing services to occur later in the boot process so that they're loading in the background after the users log in...)
So it's not just "my hardware". It's "anything you'd be able to run Windows 8 on", more or less. Besides the fact that boot time is an all-but-insignificant factor (Booting impacts you, what, once or twice a day? Any more and you've got problems.)
Let me know when W8 is able to get from "fresh install" to "updates 6 months from now" without having to reboot, and then we'll talk. Boot time is all but insignificant (I've got an 800MHz machine that boots Ubuntu in under a minute, too; bfd) and really, not much to boast about until they figure out how to have instant-on last-use-state "booting" (or hibernation restore) without glitching. Rebooting shouldn't be necessary unless we're updating the kernel itself.
On the other hand unmarked police cars have been able to follow your car wherever it goes without a warrant, and that was not considered a privacy violation.
Where are you from? Because where I sit, that very much is a privacy violation. You can get an officer reprimanded for those tactics and, in the case of profiling and repeat violations, fired. I'm sorry, but it's considered harassment for this kind of thing to go on.
Furthermore: there isn't the budget for the police to monitor everyone by squad car. People simply wouldn't put up with that kind of expenditure. This global monitoring gets through the cracks due to the relatively insignificant cost (probably not much more than one or two cars for a small city).
And what if they use the database of automatically gathered plate numbers to build a profile of vehicles found near the scene of the crime? Is that profiling? What if someone is arrested with that automatically-gathered information? Sure, that's legitimate, but what if it's simply an 'overwhelming' body of circumstantial evidence? I work next to where my neighbor works, but he's a painter and I'm an electrician, but would they assume I'm also a painter because I park in the same parking lot as him? Probably, without any evidence to the contrary: I'd have to prove myself innocent.
Calling this not an invasion of privacy is like saying that installing a video camera into your bedroom window isn't an invasion of privacy or voyeurism because the camera was installed on public property and nobody's actually there - it's just a camera, right?
To use another analogy, taking a penny from the penny thing at the checkout isn't stealing. People place them there due to the denomination being too small to care about (at a personal level).
If you do that on a grand scale, it's considered theft (by individuals, not necessarily the law - eg. high frequency trading).
So based on your Orwellian tautology, a totalitarian regime in the vein of 1984 would actually be demonstrative of a perfect society? It's the perfect mix of governance and enforcement.
Here's a handful of abuses a cop in his car would be able to perform: * know where you were, every day for the past whenever * without knowing who the driver is, observe regular driving patterns * know where you live (or at least where the vehicle is registered - maybe you remember the concern when this became possible from a police car?) * know whether you travel to or from a 'crime' area on a regular basis * potentially know (using some of the newer systems) if any crimes coincide with your regular visits to a certain locale * probably 100 other things statist statisticians have decided can be inferred
The truth is, you've got it backwards. Society doesn't require governance; government requires a society. You can not have a government with fractured society - not for any significant period of time. That's the idea behind Democracy here in the West: you avoid totalitarianism by providing a fluid, non-derisive, upheaval-free method of societal governance change.
When you have a statist government moving towards totalitarianism, the sheer ability for self-regulation is being slowly denied. A growing totalitarian government essentially strangles democracy slowly, killing the society and culture which built it, replacing it with a shallow stereotyped shell. You can clearly see this in every totalitarian state that has grown and fallen over the past century: the USSR, Nazi Germany, China, North Korea, etc.
Tangibly faster startup / shutdown / resume etc. Tangibly faster switching between apps / windows etc.
I've got a VM running on a Bobcat board. It takes about 7 or 8 seconds to boot. I've got W7 installed on a physical desktop with an SSD and the boot time is less than it takes to resume from suspend. I can't hit the power button and sit down before it's ready for a login.
And how is 'tangibly faster app switching' possible when that's already instantaneous? You must be running on old hardware - or are you commenting on the supposed UI improvements which make things easier for people bad at mousing/amputees/blind people?
Now, if there were an easy way to "empty" a payment card though some stupid exploit, then I can understand that being a problem, but that assumes that there is such an exploit.
You must be new around here.
We're dealing with hardware based encryption, not something which can be updated like software. There most certainly is a flaw, as there is in all encryption methods. They will be found out not because the criminals want to spend that $10, but because they want to spend that $10 - over, and over, and over again.
The basic premise, as I understand it, is that the MintChip is basically a hardware crypto key. It's used as an authentication token via something like RFID, bluetooth, or NFC to communicate with other devices. The MintChip is associated with an online account. The user then needs to authorize the MintChip for a transaction to the recipient: some form of checking is performed on the MintChip (all in software and/or Internet), and the user's credentials are also checked.
This doesn't appear to be much different than, say, Google Wallet. Or Paypal. Or for that matter, a credit card (which is basically the same idea but based on immature digital concepts from the 1970s). One thing it does do slightly differently than credit cards is that it requires the good security technique of "something you have and something you know". It's also available to the masses (eg. unlike Google Market, which requires a smartphone).
This really isn't that different than existing schemes. But it is mass market, and supported by the government (complete with all the 'guarantees' that's going to have to be backed by). If criminals can figure out how to exploit it and get away with it, they most certainly will. (When things like UFC is allowed and the SEC does nothing in the US to stop the obvious micro pump-and-dump going on, if the 'right people' steal something, they're usually allowed to get away with it.)
Off the top of my head, they'll be prone to the following attacks which cash is not:
* Physical man in the middle attack on the NFC/Bluetooth/RFID/etc. to duplicate keys and play them back * reverse engineering and subsequent mass replication of the method used to create the chips * an attack on the MintChip infrastructure itself. See: Paypal, Amazon, et al. This is by far the most significant and likely. * theft of the MintChip with a parallel theft/monitoring of their security mechanisms
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Yes, burnout does exist. It's a serious problem, and it's one that everyone just glosses over, without really talking about what it is.
It's not 'depression' but from my experience, the initial symptoms are similar. The coffee stops doing its job and just becomes a routine. They've got chronic low energy. Their productivity drops despite their efforts, and they end up either not trying or not being able to think clearly.
And then the person pulls themselves out of the situation or they snap and get fired, and take a brake. And that's what they continue to do, even after they pick up another job. They're just permanently out to lunch, as if they've burned through an in-born reserve of excellence. Everything they touch is mediocre from that point on, either because they're not able to motivate themselves to try, they're too spent to give a damn, or some other factor - I don't know.
Maybe it's like drug use, where it damages your brain over time. People have a 'bad trip' and they're just out to lunch for the foreseeable future. I don't know. What I do know is that people who are awesome in their 20s and play the burnout game seem to peter off in their 30s.
You're right. It has absolutely nothing to do with predominantly culturally unified societies (vs. say, the US or the UK) with large amounts of natural resources that the populations are willing to exploit for financial gain.
Yep. I had an employer push on me like that. I was salaried, so I just started coming in less. What was he going to do, fire me for being the most productive person while working 35 hours a week?
. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over.
Then why was Microsoft's revenue not stunted by copying their crappy innovation? Even in the 3.1 days, Windows was preferable over a Mac by most.
Same for MacOS X. It can't context switch for shit, which is even more apparent on a modern multicore system. They've changed the "look and feel" a dozen times, it seems, but nothing substantive (except for this latest iteration, which everyone apparently hates).
Or the last 3 versions of the iPhone, and the last decade of MacOS?
China manufactures a lot of goods for the US. Now ask yourself, what does the US have to offer China, and the rest of our world? Intellectual Property, which is only reinforced by our nations laws?
Competence?
It's a running joke that Americans are fat, stupid, lazy bastards. Many of us are. It's true for Northern Europe, too. What is also true is that when you're looking for field experts and one-of-a-kind capabilities, this is still where you look.
You fail to realize that when another country needs precise engineering (regardless of the field), they'll usually look to the US. Yes, even today. With few exceptions, the rest of the world still looks to the White Man Culture to implement the new, important, interesting, useful things - and then "steals" them, implementing lesser versions of them.
* skilled machinists
* structural engineers
* any precision instruments
* specialty, non-consumer electronics
* competent sysadmins
* software that actually does its job well (what, did you think you'd find something in India?)
This isn't race pride or anything like that. You can find eg. good software engineering in India, but it's rare due to the culture.
Don't be fooled by the news and these patent sharks. There is still a lot of capability left in the US and the West as a whole, despite the powers that be trying to pillage it away.
You're an idiot.
$10k is a not-uncommon cost for a middle of the range IBM server.
There are different approaches to the same problem, often with different motivations (even for the same outcome).
In this case, I'm guessing it's because they either have highly skilled Westerners working for them and there was a really bad threat, or this is a typical display of Arab Ingenuity. For whatever reason, "fixing" something over there means hitting it with a hammer until it's fixed, Inshallah.
Interesting that the outcome may have been from drastically oppositional approaches. :P
In contrast, I've got a 733MHz machine which has been running Debian for the better part of a decade now - first on Debian 3, and now on 6. I think it's broken a couple times, but never official packages/repos. It's always been the added repositories for things which aren't available in debian (rare/far between), and the fix has never been tedious or outside the package manager itself.
tl;dr
Translation: "Here are a lot of words which try to explain away the fact that Apple has no valid engineering reasons for this. They just want the money from licensing the new interface and everyone only being able to buy Apple or Apple-licensed accessories."
You know you've got a good gorilla marketing department when a new connector for one of your devices is front page news on every website.
Fixed it for you.
Apple is a small fish with a high profit margin and a big marketing department.
Wow, that's going to be really embarassing for whoever owns it in 5 to 10 years, if they're able to identify what it's used for still. They actually put iPod connectors in cars? I understand USB, because it's a pretty awesome connector type and is very versatile, but an iProduct connector?
Um, but what if I want computer-like functionality in my smartphone?
Yeah, I'll take USB host, thanks. I like being able to plug in wired ethernet adapters, mice, and keyboards into my phone as necessary.
Bullshit. I've never seen or heard of this happening, not on XDA (where I'll troll), not from any of my friends.
My son has faithfully been using my old HTC HD2 for the past year now. The phone gets some fairly severe abuse, and was fairly heavily abused by me as well. It would be dead right now from blunt trauma a dozen times if it wasn't for the Otterbox. He will drain the battery at least twice a day. Not a single problem.
What I have done, is damaged cables by picking up the phone too forcefully and/or dropping the phone on the connector. Woo, I'll just pull another $2 cable from the drawer and use that.
Speaking of frail connetors, look at Apple's current connectors, or any of the other 'legacy' phone connectors. Those are seriously frail with those small, exposed pins (which will rip out if the device is hanked). I've seen a number of iPhones with their connectors broken off inside. (The phones were otherwise destroyed by the drops, so it didn't really matter, but the point stands that the connectors are weak.)
It'll never happen. Do you realize how much of Apple's profits come from their (severely) over-priced iProduct-specific accessories?
They'd never give their customers that choice, because that choice will remove lock-in. Whatever it is, it's going to be patent encumbered and licensed to anyone who wants to make a product for their iAccessory.
This will, IMO, back fire. Apple is losing market share; why would a company pay a massive licensing fee to have the 'right' to make a non-standard accessory for a has-been novelty?
The remaining 10% are reportedly Muslix. They'll last a bit longer in hell and put off a sweet, savory roasted oats odor as they cook...
A Bobcat board, in case you weren't aware, is fairly bottom basement. 1.6GHz dual core, first generation of AMD's new craptastic performance range of hardware. It has performance similar to (but for my purposes, less than) a 1.6GHz Atom 330.
The desktop is a bargain price first generation i5 with a low end 60GB Corsair SSD and 4GB of RAM. Not exactly blazing fast, but no slouch, either.
I've got another laptop on which Windows 7 boots in under a minute. (Logging in takes a bit more time; this doesn't change on Windows 8. What they probably did was just push more of the user-facing services to occur later in the boot process so that they're loading in the background after the users log in...)
So it's not just "my hardware". It's "anything you'd be able to run Windows 8 on", more or less. Besides the fact that boot time is an all-but-insignificant factor (Booting impacts you, what, once or twice a day? Any more and you've got problems.)
Let me know when W8 is able to get from "fresh install" to "updates 6 months from now" without having to reboot, and then we'll talk. Boot time is all but insignificant (I've got an 800MHz machine that boots Ubuntu in under a minute, too; bfd) and really, not much to boast about until they figure out how to have instant-on last-use-state "booting" (or hibernation restore) without glitching. Rebooting shouldn't be necessary unless we're updating the kernel itself.
On the other hand unmarked police cars have been able to follow your car wherever it goes without a warrant, and that was not considered a privacy violation.
Where are you from? Because where I sit, that very much is a privacy violation. You can get an officer reprimanded for those tactics and, in the case of profiling and repeat violations, fired. I'm sorry, but it's considered harassment for this kind of thing to go on.
Furthermore: there isn't the budget for the police to monitor everyone by squad car. People simply wouldn't put up with that kind of expenditure. This global monitoring gets through the cracks due to the relatively insignificant cost (probably not much more than one or two cars for a small city).
And what if they use the database of automatically gathered plate numbers to build a profile of vehicles found near the scene of the crime? Is that profiling? What if someone is arrested with that automatically-gathered information? Sure, that's legitimate, but what if it's simply an 'overwhelming' body of circumstantial evidence? I work next to where my neighbor works, but he's a painter and I'm an electrician, but would they assume I'm also a painter because I park in the same parking lot as him? Probably, without any evidence to the contrary: I'd have to prove myself innocent.
Yep.
Calling this not an invasion of privacy is like saying that installing a video camera into your bedroom window isn't an invasion of privacy or voyeurism because the camera was installed on public property and nobody's actually there - it's just a camera, right?
To use another analogy, taking a penny from the penny thing at the checkout isn't stealing. People place them there due to the denomination being too small to care about (at a personal level).
If you do that on a grand scale, it's considered theft (by individuals, not necessarily the law - eg. high frequency trading).
So based on your Orwellian tautology, a totalitarian regime in the vein of 1984 would actually be demonstrative of a perfect society? It's the perfect mix of governance and enforcement.
Here's a handful of abuses a cop in his car would be able to perform:
* know where you were, every day for the past whenever
* without knowing who the driver is, observe regular driving patterns
* know where you live (or at least where the vehicle is registered - maybe you remember the concern when this became possible from a police car?)
* know whether you travel to or from a 'crime' area on a regular basis
* potentially know (using some of the newer systems) if any crimes coincide with your regular visits to a certain locale
* probably 100 other things statist statisticians have decided can be inferred
The truth is, you've got it backwards. Society doesn't require governance; government requires a society. You can not have a government with fractured society - not for any significant period of time. That's the idea behind Democracy here in the West: you avoid totalitarianism by providing a fluid, non-derisive, upheaval-free method of societal governance change.
When you have a statist government moving towards totalitarianism, the sheer ability for self-regulation is being slowly denied. A growing totalitarian government essentially strangles democracy slowly, killing the society and culture which built it, replacing it with a shallow stereotyped shell. You can clearly see this in every totalitarian state that has grown and fallen over the past century: the USSR, Nazi Germany, China, North Korea, etc.
Vistart is a piece of shit that installs the babylon toolbar and a bunch of other things (some of which don't "remove" properly).
Sorry, W8 is toyware.
What?
Tangibly faster startup / shutdown / resume etc.
Tangibly faster switching between apps / windows etc.
I've got a VM running on a Bobcat board. It takes about 7 or 8 seconds to boot. I've got W7 installed on a physical desktop with an SSD and the boot time is less than it takes to resume from suspend. I can't hit the power button and sit down before it's ready for a login.
And how is 'tangibly faster app switching' possible when that's already instantaneous? You must be running on old hardware - or are you commenting on the supposed UI improvements which make things easier for people bad at mousing/amputees/blind people?
Now, if there were an easy way to "empty" a payment card though some stupid exploit, then I can understand that being a problem, but that assumes that there is such an exploit.
You must be new around here.
We're dealing with hardware based encryption, not something which can be updated like software. There most certainly is a flaw, as there is in all encryption methods. They will be found out not because the criminals want to spend that $10, but because they want to spend that $10 - over, and over, and over again.
The basic premise, as I understand it, is that the MintChip is basically a hardware crypto key. It's used as an authentication token via something like RFID, bluetooth, or NFC to communicate with other devices. The MintChip is associated with an online account. The user then needs to authorize the MintChip for a transaction to the recipient: some form of checking is performed on the MintChip (all in software and/or Internet), and the user's credentials are also checked.
This doesn't appear to be much different than, say, Google Wallet. Or Paypal. Or for that matter, a credit card (which is basically the same idea but based on immature digital concepts from the 1970s). One thing it does do slightly differently than credit cards is that it requires the good security technique of "something you have and something you know". It's also available to the masses (eg. unlike Google Market, which requires a smartphone).
This really isn't that different than existing schemes. But it is mass market, and supported by the government (complete with all the 'guarantees' that's going to have to be backed by). If criminals can figure out how to exploit it and get away with it, they most certainly will. (When things like UFC is allowed and the SEC does nothing in the US to stop the obvious micro pump-and-dump going on, if the 'right people' steal something, they're usually allowed to get away with it.)
Off the top of my head, they'll be prone to the following attacks which cash is not:
* Physical man in the middle attack on the NFC/Bluetooth/RFID/etc. to duplicate keys and play them back
* reverse engineering and subsequent mass replication of the method used to create the chips
* an attack on the MintChip infrastructure itself. See: Paypal, Amazon, et al. This is by far the most significant and likely.
* theft of the MintChip with a parallel theft/monitoring of their security mechanisms
I don't expect it to gain any traction. Remember the firearm/gun owner registry? That went over so well.