That will only go so far. Architecture-agnostic code is fairly common these days; an exploit for, eg. SSH is likely to work on many platforms.
Running NetBSD on MIPS or something like that does have a somewhat inherent advantage in that regard, though. Ecological diversity leads to robustness.
As someone who 'made the mistake' of starting his family early, let me just say this (because everyone seems to think the opposite in today's culture): you waited too long to start a family and get on with your life.
You're 40 and on the way "up" in your social life. Your family is growing. Things are getting more complicated. Who in their right mind starts having kids at 40? You're "over the hill" and on your way down; your energy levels are lower than in your 20s and kids being up at night is going to murder you. You're already set in your ways and the strain of learning new things is more difficult now than when you were in your 20s (and you will be learning things as a parent - or you should be). My father was born when his parents were ~40, and he's got nothing good to say about the arrangement: his parents were genuinely old by the time he was in his teens, and he was mostly raised by his older sister. I never knew my grandparents.
Meanwhile, you're at a point in your career where you should be thinking of "settling down" for the long term. You're older and seen as one of the 'old guys', or at least the more seasoned, stable, and experienced people - or at least you should be by 40, in IT careers. Having a child at this point in your career is, IMO, foolish.
I don't mean to dig into you too hard here (by all means, have children) - we all make mistakes - but part of making those mistakes is learning how to live with them. I personally started my family at 20. That was a decade ago: we've had 3 children, we've been paying a reasonable mortgage on a house now for almost 3 years, and I am able to advance in my career. We're past the "hump", with our kids all out of diapers, talking, and generally approaching the "young adult" part of life. No, it's not going to get easier for us with teenagers, but compared to babies, it's not going to get harder, either. Time is freeing up to the point where my wife is able to consider her career options - going to school, starting a career.
I'm just putting the above out there for people who are thinking of 'waiting' to start a family. Sorry, there never will be a 'right time', as the OP indicates ('insecure' job, no house, tenuous income potential, etc.) You've just got to do it and make it work if you want it to happen at all. "It never gets easier."
Now, considering OP's questions:
1. Should I stay technical, and be ready to work as consultant/contractor?
Why not do both? From what I'm seeing, there is a big need for what might be termed "sales engineers". Good ones are indispensable in any technical discipline, but they require a good balance of management, technical, and sales experience or ability. From what I've seen, the good ones are typically technical people who cross over to the 'sales' side of things. They're knowledgable enough to keep the sales people in check, and the customers appreciate the hell out of you. You end up doing a lot of PM type work and coordinating with all people involved, becoming a pivotal point for project success.
How does medical insurance work in that case?
Generally, this is a "STFW" question, but I'll offer a little experience. Generally, it doesn't. It's not uncommon for contractors to not have health benefits unless they incorporate, but if you do, you go through a private health insurance company or one of those shared burden "timeshare" type healthcare systems. Rates are typically a bit higher but I'm not intimately familiar with them. I've no idea how ObamaCare is going to make things more difficult for people who do this, but my guess is "very" (because it's going to make things a lot more difficult for everyone).
The other option is to incorporate. If you incorporate (ie, a non-LLC, C-corp), you can get company health insurance. Typically pairing up with several other contractors to operate as your own corporation would be a good idea due to healthcare employee # requirements.
2. Should I c
Re:Eucalyptus trees are a bio terror weapon
on
Insects As Weapons
·
· Score: 1
I'm not a CA native. This Spring when these Eucalyptus trees have foliage was nice and moist, I almost always had the instant reaction of "someone's gas tank is leaking". They are incredibly odorous, having strong ether odors. The wood itself also burns incredibly hot and lights easily, even when freshly cut. Combine them with the poor/lazy forest management policy for the NFS and in California specifically, and you've got a pretty big fire hazard. It's quite disconcerting.
Yeah, because genderless stuffed animals wearing the same getup and using homosexual iconography as homosexuals during Gay Pride Day in San Francisco is a bit of a leap...
A serious problem in linux is that frequently you have to go to the command line to do a lot of things. You should NEVER have to go to command line.
Quick! You've got two flat databases with different data types, table layouts, and you want to conditionally filter then merge the data into a 3rd file.
No, you could probably do that in excel. The learning curve is probably similar but the result isn't going to be nearly as quick. And, you simply won't be able to do a lot of what may be necessary.
I'm really not sure what the general problem is, though. Simple things involving common use never need the command line in Linux; it's more likely to need the command line in Windows for 'basic' things than Linux these days. More advanced troubleshooting and "IT" things is another matter, but then you've got a lot more power to leverage in Linux to do this, too, so the incentive to drop to a terminal is higher than elsewhere.
I couldn't agree more (with the intention and sentiment). I LOL'd at your proposal, and I think it's a strikingly good one.
The irony is that the last decade of warfare has basically been continuous and at higher cost than Vietnam with much broader collateral damage. Unfortunately, Bush and Obama can not be held singularly responsible for this: US Congress as well as the people involved on the OF side.
The real tragedy is that it's being waged for political reasons, not actual stabilization. See: the jihadist coups of Egypt and Libya thanks to our benevolent administration. Jingoism is bad, but jihadism is probably a bit worse in terms of negative effects (deaths, poverty, enslavement, etc.) on the grander scale of history.
Craigslist doesn't really have a model which is applicable to anything other than psuedo-random listings, though. It's the very base level of a useful information repository. I highly doubt they don't restrict adding features and making progress out of a lack of desire to grow revenues, particularly in the face of many of their features getting siphoned off into more dynamic map- and item- type search engines.
No more so than the person who's able to perceive the other person forming "scissors" (or just going with rock) before their hand is already down and do a quick morph from "rock" to "paper" (or similar).
Please tell me I'm not the only one who has good luck winning rock/paper/scissors with last-minute "I don't know what I'm going to pick" choices.
What's impressive about this hand, to me, isn't so much the sensory data collection as it is the rapid processing of said motion data in conjunction with being able to quickly move the hand. Now, let me know when the hand is able to accurately and safely catch a glass of water falling off the counter, without spilling anything or breaking/damaging the glass.
We're all doomed when the hand can win at beer pong.
I can and on occassionally do tether to my Android phone from 9am until about 5pm and still have about 40% battery life by the time I'm actually home. This is while making calls throughout the day, usually concurrently. The only good reason I can see to have a cellular radio in the device is for 'corporate deployment' for field applications. That said, the cost of a cellular radio is cheap enough it might just make sense, "just in case".
By mentioning your commute, I can assume you're talking about public transit. Do you not have a cell phone? Put it in tethering mode and use the wifi on the tablet. I do this regularly.
Typically, however, anywhere you'd want to sit down and use a device these days is going to have wifi available. Not always, but usually.
In those corner cases where this doesn't hold true, it makes much more sense to use a tethered phone with a data plan or a $15 USB 3g modem than to have it integrated into the device. 3G only really makes sense when there's no other way to actually use the device due to the additional integration costs and necessity of an additional data service cellular plan (no thanks).
Now of course it will be compared to the iPad, but what's this obsession that if you're not the market leader, you're not worth buying? If that were the case there'd be no market for Android phones, or even WM7 phones.
iPad market share is slowing growth while Android tablets are gaining. Android phones far outnumber Apple phones at this point, both in new sales and market share.
It helps if you come to the discussion with pertinent information.;)
I was initially very impressed with my new iMac some years ago (10.5 had been out for about a year). The aesthetic design of Apple products is certainly very good, both at the software and hardware level. At the surface, it's a very nice platform well suited for general computing.
Then I had to start using it to do work. I have used window management software from OpenStep to fvvm, awesome, GNOME 1-3, KDE 2-4, Windows 3.1 and up, and a handful of others. MacOS Classic as well, but I tended to avoid it due to how it seemed to randomly arrange content windows in a fashion which usually made the window contents difficult to access. MacOSX was no better than OS Classic, except now I was using it on a big screen and there was even less reason for why it would make newly created windows smaller than the content or oddly splay the window off the edge of the display. And the damnest thing was that there was (is?) no way to not use the launch bar: if you want to manage your running apps in a different fashion, you're SOL. Good luck if you're one of those people who like running everything full screen or tile things, that's going to be even more difficult.
Then I had to manage a "Mac Server" running FileMaker. Sure, it's a shitty database, but it was also performing very poorly for the hardware it was on, per my previous understanding of what should be capable on older Macs running Linux. Turns out people, even Apple shops running Macs, had been jumping to FileMaker on Windows in droves due to OSX performance problems (moreso than the hardware costs). Any sort of threaded or multiprocess computing is doggedly laborious on a Mac due to the OSX context switching implementation: this is a long-running, long-known issue. It's been known and thoroughly documented since at least 2003. As far as I'm aware, the very poor context switching implementation still exists and has received no attention from Apple.
Then I had to manage support for both Apple laptops and desktops over the past year and a half, my view has been skewed even further. I'm now quite displeased with the hardware quality shipped from Apple, and there are even more glaring issues with the software (which, IMO, relegates the laptops from "nice mobile device" to "worse than a Windows XP laptop for wireless" in many regards). There is absolutely no excuse for such a poor wireless stack implementation, or for the many random lockups and "simply not working" wireless issues people encounter. Likewise, in the past year, I've seen an increasing number of MacOS systems need a full wipe and install due to self-inflicted (ie, the OS or a software update) breakages - for instance, signed libraries needed for system services weren't signed. (This, ironically, coincided with a decrease in Windows laptop support issues of similar kinds). All the while, Apple product physical design seems to be getting worse: lots of issues with the cases shorting out wireless adapters (see the above wireless issue, which may or may not be related). There are thermal issues I've not seen on anything in the PC domain except Toshiba in quite some time.
If you like them, great. I can see the appeal. Their power management functionality and hardware quality is pretty good compared to many Windows laptops have been in the past couple years, especially the $300-500 cheapie variants. I just don't see the appeal at this point outside the metal bodies. But at this point, pretty much everyone is using the same hardware (eg. I'm pretty sure Samsung has an Ultrabook which is identical to the current gen Macbook).
Google would be well served to have an internal department which handles only the resolution of software problems for paying customers - and I'm not talking about just "tech support", but something more akin to Launchpad (complete with user-ranked bugs). Things like the bugs in Google Calendar which make client-side association with the calendars in eg. Outlook or Thunderbird cause events to be unmodifiable by the owners when the account data is imported.
I was really looking forward to that one, too. Unfortunately, I'm going to bet that due to how awesome the device is and how much Windows 8 sucks, we're going to have to contend with SecureBoot. I'm not holding my breath that anything but Win8 will be able to be booted on it.
The one where they import the Apple Fanboys from, obviously.
This summary is laughable, as is the article. "The Transformer's tablet component is definitely no iPad-killer. When combined with the dock, though, the resulting hybrid offers a much more flexible computing platform." Everyone I know who has gotten a Transformer has had it do just that: replace their iPads outright. They end up collecting dust and then going on Ebay.
A Transformer with keyboard is basically the 'ultimate' portable device. It's not quite a "100%" device, but I suspect most systems administrators could get by performing almost all of their daily maintenance etc. work on one.
Google should require the viewers of linked videos (eg. over 50% of what's put on Facebook) to have a Google Plus account. What goes around comes around...
Here's a clue for those who don't understand how LLCs work or why people use them: This kind of thing is done every. single. day. Rich people form LLCs and trusts to move and shelter assets and to avoid taxes. Not-so-rich people do it, too, because it's a good vehicle for keeping business costs outside personal finances. Something almost exactly like this happens all the time with everyone from the small profitable restaurant owner up through corporate middle managers and CEOs.
I know contractors who get paid through their personal corporation. They do contract work, and the payment goes from one company to another for the work. The company pays the contractor(s). There is nothing all that uncommon, and just because it involves the house of a famous dead person does not make it news.
Two percent of a McMansion in Malibu is still going to be a lot more than a twenty percent tax levied on a yurt in Oklahoma. Blame big government. lawl.
You laugh, but for what it costs to get a McMansion in Malibu (or pretty much anywhere along the coast in California) you could buy a very nice "McMansion" at around 9k square feet for a lot less than the 6 million it'd cost in California - except it'd come with acres of land. A 2,000 square foot house in good condition won't cost much more than 100k throughout most of the region between the Rockies and the Mississippi/Missouri.
So? That's really not all important at the time being. Whether it's conventional or not, the grass needs to be firebombed before it's allowed to spread any further.
No, I'm not kidding.
It's reputedly a cold intolerant grass which has high yields. That means it spreads quickly and will only become more prevalent as the world warms. Supposedly, this is an actual mutation and not just a short-term response to the severe climatic stressors.
If it spreads, it will not only kill off one of the most effective and inexpensive sources of fat and protein everywhere it goes, but it will make the land unsuitable for grazing at all, for who knows how long. Possibly forever. Everywhere the plant grows will eventually become a deadzone to pretty much everything else due to the cyanide content (which will kill anything which eats it or the things which eat the things which eat it, including insects, other mammals, and birds). In all possibility, this would result in the entire warm region of America becoming desert, for all we know.
Maybe I'm being alarmist, but to me, it's better safe than sorry - sorry being a desert planet.:(
I'm only 30, but I've noticed that I can accomplish, while drunk, exhausted, and not really paying attention, the 'difficult' tasks you can find tutorials for on the internet which these young kids are lauded as being awesome for accomplishing. I can also do them in a lot less time: I've BTDT, and know how to not do it. Computers: ithey're the same thing they were then, just much, much more complex (and at the same time, much more abstracted to simplicity).
Add another 24 years, and it could be scary. Even people of mediocre intelligence and initiative can accumulate a lot of domain knowledge in a quarter century. Anyone who disses experience doesn't know what they're talking about, and probably hasn't had any which are of notable or appreciable quality.
I just turned 30 this past month. I'm not (that) old, yet. (Or, at least, the 18-22 year old women I attract don't think so...)
There is a technologically/scientifically inclined kid in the neighborhood who's going to school for EE. He just turned 18. He comes by to talk on occasion. He will occasionlally say, "back in your day" when he wants me to explain something. He can't comprehend a world without universal broadband Internet or free wireless. The concept of dialup - internet over two copper wires! and at THOSE speeds?! - is beyond astounding to him. He's never seen a monochrome monitor except on the occasional older bank kiosk and has had a "smartphone" for his entire teenage existence.
And yet, he's calling me an "old man", more or less, by how he looks at my experiences. It's not disrespectful, almost reverent, just sorta "wow, I've never seen that before". I was throwing out some "old junk" from my garage recently - old ISA SCSI cards, I think - and he asked me what they were. An XBox, to him, is "old".
At this point, If we had a "dark age' lasting several only a decade, I am convinced that we would probably not be able to recover much beyond the early 1970s within the following 100 years of recovery. Not because these younger kids aren't bright, but because the utility isn't desirable to most of the younger kids. It's not magical or interesting, it just "is".
For home users, there's little reason not to go with Microsoft Security Essentials as your antivirus: it does a good job of detecting most malware, it's free, and it's faster and less intrusive than most third-party solutions.
It's also the one which seems to most likely be "broken" at this point in time without bricking the system, so the user never notices unless tehy're security conscious. Little things don't work, but for the most part things keep working when it's been intentionally broken. In that regard, Symantec might actually be better: you at least know when someone's trying to take your banking info.
I'm a big fan of ESET for Windows. It may not be bulletproof, but in terms of preventing infections without breaking the system, it seems to be the best out there. Kaspersky comes in a close second, being stronger on detection and removal than prevention. Same goes for Avira.
Semantic is worse than running the system while infected with credit card stealing trojans. McAfee isn't as bad, but I'd still rather run without either. They're like a fat, sleeping security guard. He's just in your way when you need to get through the door, and nothing more.
ESET is available for Linux. I suspect the product is good. I've used ClamAV but I've honestly never seen the motivation to run it full-time. Nothing out there is capable of being vigorous enough to take the system "down", from my experience. For linux, a better tool is something like rkhunter which will check and verify system binary checksum integrity...
Meanwhile, this is really nothing new: Alcoholics figured it out thousands of years ago. Mastadon trample your kids? The chieftan fucking your wo-man? The bastards in Sales pissing you off? Great, have a fucking drink.
Slashdot Mirror
That will only go so far. Architecture-agnostic code is fairly common these days; an exploit for, eg. SSH is likely to work on many platforms.
Running NetBSD on MIPS or something like that does have a somewhat inherent advantage in that regard, though. Ecological diversity leads to robustness.
As someone who 'made the mistake' of starting his family early, let me just say this (because everyone seems to think the opposite in today's culture): you waited too long to start a family and get on with your life.
You're 40 and on the way "up" in your social life. Your family is growing. Things are getting more complicated. Who in their right mind starts having kids at 40? You're "over the hill" and on your way down; your energy levels are lower than in your 20s and kids being up at night is going to murder you. You're already set in your ways and the strain of learning new things is more difficult now than when you were in your 20s (and you will be learning things as a parent - or you should be). My father was born when his parents were ~40, and he's got nothing good to say about the arrangement: his parents were genuinely old by the time he was in his teens, and he was mostly raised by his older sister. I never knew my grandparents.
Meanwhile, you're at a point in your career where you should be thinking of "settling down" for the long term. You're older and seen as one of the 'old guys', or at least the more seasoned, stable, and experienced people - or at least you should be by 40, in IT careers. Having a child at this point in your career is, IMO, foolish.
I don't mean to dig into you too hard here (by all means, have children) - we all make mistakes - but part of making those mistakes is learning how to live with them. I personally started my family at 20. That was a decade ago: we've had 3 children, we've been paying a reasonable mortgage on a house now for almost 3 years, and I am able to advance in my career. We're past the "hump", with our kids all out of diapers, talking, and generally approaching the "young adult" part of life. No, it's not going to get easier for us with teenagers, but compared to babies, it's not going to get harder, either. Time is freeing up to the point where my wife is able to consider her career options - going to school, starting a career.
I'm just putting the above out there for people who are thinking of 'waiting' to start a family. Sorry, there never will be a 'right time', as the OP indicates ('insecure' job, no house, tenuous income potential, etc.) You've just got to do it and make it work if you want it to happen at all. "It never gets easier."
Now, considering OP's questions:
1. Should I stay technical, and be ready to work as consultant/contractor?
Why not do both? From what I'm seeing, there is a big need for what might be termed "sales engineers". Good ones are indispensable in any technical discipline, but they require a good balance of management, technical, and sales experience or ability. From what I've seen, the good ones are typically technical people who cross over to the 'sales' side of things. They're knowledgable enough to keep the sales people in check, and the customers appreciate the hell out of you. You end up doing a lot of PM type work and coordinating with all people involved, becoming a pivotal point for project success.
How does medical insurance work in that case?
Generally, this is a "STFW" question, but I'll offer a little experience. Generally, it doesn't. It's not uncommon for contractors to not have health benefits unless they incorporate, but if you do, you go through a private health insurance company or one of those shared burden "timeshare" type healthcare systems. Rates are typically a bit higher but I'm not intimately familiar with them. I've no idea how ObamaCare is going to make things more difficult for people who do this, but my guess is "very" (because it's going to make things a lot more difficult for everyone).
The other option is to incorporate. If you incorporate (ie, a non-LLC, C-corp), you can get company health insurance. Typically pairing up with several other contractors to operate as your own corporation would be a good idea due to healthcare employee # requirements.
2. Should I c
I'm not a CA native. This Spring when these Eucalyptus trees have foliage was nice and moist, I almost always had the instant reaction of "someone's gas tank is leaking". They are incredibly odorous, having strong ether odors. The wood itself also burns incredibly hot and lights easily, even when freshly cut. Combine them with the poor/lazy forest management policy for the NFS and in California specifically, and you've got a pretty big fire hazard. It's quite disconcerting.
Yeah, because genderless stuffed animals wearing the same getup and using homosexual iconography as homosexuals during Gay Pride Day in San Francisco is a bit of a leap...
A serious problem in linux is that frequently you have to go to the command line to do a lot of things. You should NEVER have to go to command line.
Quick! You've got two flat databases with different data types, table layouts, and you want to conditionally filter then merge the data into a 3rd file.
No, you could probably do that in excel. The learning curve is probably similar but the result isn't going to be nearly as quick. And, you simply won't be able to do a lot of what may be necessary.
I'm really not sure what the general problem is, though. Simple things involving common use never need the command line in Linux; it's more likely to need the command line in Windows for 'basic' things than Linux these days. More advanced troubleshooting and "IT" things is another matter, but then you've got a lot more power to leverage in Linux to do this, too, so the incentive to drop to a terminal is higher than elsewhere.
I couldn't agree more (with the intention and sentiment). I LOL'd at your proposal, and I think it's a strikingly good one.
The irony is that the last decade of warfare has basically been continuous and at higher cost than Vietnam with much broader collateral damage. Unfortunately, Bush and Obama can not be held singularly responsible for this: US Congress as well as the people involved on the OF side.
The real tragedy is that it's being waged for political reasons, not actual stabilization. See: the jihadist coups of Egypt and Libya thanks to our benevolent administration. Jingoism is bad, but jihadism is probably a bit worse in terms of negative effects (deaths, poverty, enslavement, etc.) on the grander scale of history.
Craigslist doesn't really have a model which is applicable to anything other than psuedo-random listings, though. It's the very base level of a useful information repository. I highly doubt they don't restrict adding features and making progress out of a lack of desire to grow revenues, particularly in the face of many of their features getting siphoned off into more dynamic map- and item- type search engines.
No more so than the person who's able to perceive the other person forming "scissors" (or just going with rock) before their hand is already down and do a quick morph from "rock" to "paper" (or similar).
Please tell me I'm not the only one who has good luck winning rock/paper/scissors with last-minute "I don't know what I'm going to pick" choices.
What's impressive about this hand, to me, isn't so much the sensory data collection as it is the rapid processing of said motion data in conjunction with being able to quickly move the hand. Now, let me know when the hand is able to accurately and safely catch a glass of water falling off the counter, without spilling anything or breaking/damaging the glass.
We're all doomed when the hand can win at beer pong.
No. It's an ARM device, not an x86 device. Wait for the Windows 8 tablet Asus is making. You should be able to put W7 on it if you want.
I can and on occassionally do tether to my Android phone from 9am until about 5pm and still have about 40% battery life by the time I'm actually home. This is while making calls throughout the day, usually concurrently. The only good reason I can see to have a cellular radio in the device is for 'corporate deployment' for field applications. That said, the cost of a cellular radio is cheap enough it might just make sense, "just in case".
By mentioning your commute, I can assume you're talking about public transit. Do you not have a cell phone? Put it in tethering mode and use the wifi on the tablet. I do this regularly.
Typically, however, anywhere you'd want to sit down and use a device these days is going to have wifi available. Not always, but usually.
In those corner cases where this doesn't hold true, it makes much more sense to use a tethered phone with a data plan or a $15 USB 3g modem than to have it integrated into the device. 3G only really makes sense when there's no other way to actually use the device due to the additional integration costs and necessity of an additional data service cellular plan (no thanks).
Now of course it will be compared to the iPad, but what's this obsession that if you're not the market leader, you're not worth buying? If that were the case there'd be no market for Android phones, or even WM7 phones.
iPad market share is slowing growth while Android tablets are gaining. Android phones far outnumber Apple phones at this point, both in new sales and market share.
It helps if you come to the discussion with pertinent information. ;)
I was initially very impressed with my new iMac some years ago (10.5 had been out for about a year). The aesthetic design of Apple products is certainly very good, both at the software and hardware level. At the surface, it's a very nice platform well suited for general computing.
Then I had to start using it to do work. I have used window management software from OpenStep to fvvm, awesome, GNOME 1-3, KDE 2-4, Windows 3.1 and up, and a handful of others. MacOS Classic as well, but I tended to avoid it due to how it seemed to randomly arrange content windows in a fashion which usually made the window contents difficult to access. MacOSX was no better than OS Classic, except now I was using it on a big screen and there was even less reason for why it would make newly created windows smaller than the content or oddly splay the window off the edge of the display. And the damnest thing was that there was (is?) no way to not use the launch bar: if you want to manage your running apps in a different fashion, you're SOL. Good luck if you're one of those people who like running everything full screen or tile things, that's going to be even more difficult.
Then I had to manage a "Mac Server" running FileMaker. Sure, it's a shitty database, but it was also performing very poorly for the hardware it was on, per my previous understanding of what should be capable on older Macs running Linux. Turns out people, even Apple shops running Macs, had been jumping to FileMaker on Windows in droves due to OSX performance problems (moreso than the hardware costs). Any sort of threaded or multiprocess computing is doggedly laborious on a Mac due to the OSX context switching implementation: this is a long-running, long-known issue. It's been known and thoroughly documented since at least 2003. As far as I'm aware, the very poor context switching implementation still exists and has received no attention from Apple.
Then I had to manage support for both Apple laptops and desktops over the past year and a half, my view has been skewed even further. I'm now quite displeased with the hardware quality shipped from Apple, and there are even more glaring issues with the software (which, IMO, relegates the laptops from "nice mobile device" to "worse than a Windows XP laptop for wireless" in many regards). There is absolutely no excuse for such a poor wireless stack implementation, or for the many random lockups and "simply not working" wireless issues people encounter. Likewise, in the past year, I've seen an increasing number of MacOS systems need a full wipe and install due to self-inflicted (ie, the OS or a software update) breakages - for instance, signed libraries needed for system services weren't signed. (This, ironically, coincided with a decrease in Windows laptop support issues of similar kinds). All the while, Apple product physical design seems to be getting worse: lots of issues with the cases shorting out wireless adapters (see the above wireless issue, which may or may not be related). There are thermal issues I've not seen on anything in the PC domain except Toshiba in quite some time.
If you like them, great. I can see the appeal. Their power management functionality and hardware quality is pretty good compared to many Windows laptops have been in the past couple years, especially the $300-500 cheapie variants. I just don't see the appeal at this point outside the metal bodies. But at this point, pretty much everyone is using the same hardware (eg. I'm pretty sure Samsung has an Ultrabook which is identical to the current gen Macbook).
I'd wager it's a fairly bottom heavy ratio.
Google would be well served to have an internal department which handles only the resolution of software problems for paying customers - and I'm not talking about just "tech support", but something more akin to Launchpad (complete with user-ranked bugs). Things like the bugs in Google Calendar which make client-side association with the calendars in eg. Outlook or Thunderbird cause events to be unmodifiable by the owners when the account data is imported.
I was really looking forward to that one, too. Unfortunately, I'm going to bet that due to how awesome the device is and how much Windows 8 sucks, we're going to have to contend with SecureBoot. I'm not holding my breath that anything but Win8 will be able to be booted on it.
The one where they import the Apple Fanboys from, obviously.
This summary is laughable, as is the article. "The Transformer's tablet component is definitely no iPad-killer. When combined with the dock, though, the resulting hybrid offers a much more flexible computing platform." Everyone I know who has gotten a Transformer has had it do just that: replace their iPads outright. They end up collecting dust and then going on Ebay.
A Transformer with keyboard is basically the 'ultimate' portable device. It's not quite a "100%" device, but I suspect most systems administrators could get by performing almost all of their daily maintenance etc. work on one.
You know what I would like to see?
Google should require the viewers of linked videos (eg. over 50% of what's put on Facebook) to have a Google Plus account. What goes around comes around...
Exactly. This isn't even tabloid level news.
Here's a clue for those who don't understand how LLCs work or why people use them: This kind of thing is done every. single. day. Rich people form LLCs and trusts to move and shelter assets and to avoid taxes. Not-so-rich people do it, too, because it's a good vehicle for keeping business costs outside personal finances. Something almost exactly like this happens all the time with everyone from the small profitable restaurant owner up through corporate middle managers and CEOs.
I know contractors who get paid through their personal corporation. They do contract work, and the payment goes from one company to another for the work. The company pays the contractor(s). There is nothing all that uncommon, and just because it involves the house of a famous dead person does not make it news.
Two percent of a McMansion in Malibu is still going to be a lot more than a twenty percent tax levied on a yurt in Oklahoma. Blame big government. lawl.
You laugh, but for what it costs to get a McMansion in Malibu (or pretty much anywhere along the coast in California) you could buy a very nice "McMansion" at around 9k square feet for a lot less than the 6 million it'd cost in California - except it'd come with acres of land. A 2,000 square foot house in good condition won't cost much more than 100k throughout most of the region between the Rockies and the Mississippi/Missouri.
So? That's really not all important at the time being. Whether it's conventional or not, the grass needs to be firebombed before it's allowed to spread any further.
No, I'm not kidding.
It's reputedly a cold intolerant grass which has high yields. That means it spreads quickly and will only become more prevalent as the world warms. Supposedly, this is an actual mutation and not just a short-term response to the severe climatic stressors.
If it spreads, it will not only kill off one of the most effective and inexpensive sources of fat and protein everywhere it goes, but it will make the land unsuitable for grazing at all, for who knows how long. Possibly forever. Everywhere the plant grows will eventually become a deadzone to pretty much everything else due to the cyanide content (which will kill anything which eats it or the things which eat the things which eat it, including insects, other mammals, and birds). In all possibility, this would result in the entire warm region of America becoming desert, for all we know.
Maybe I'm being alarmist, but to me, it's better safe than sorry - sorry being a desert planet. :(
I'm only 30, but I've noticed that I can accomplish, while drunk, exhausted, and not really paying attention, the 'difficult' tasks you can find tutorials for on the internet which these young kids are lauded as being awesome for accomplishing. I can also do them in a lot less time: I've BTDT, and know how to not do it. Computers: ithey're the same thing they were then, just much, much more complex (and at the same time, much more abstracted to simplicity).
Add another 24 years, and it could be scary. Even people of mediocre intelligence and initiative can accumulate a lot of domain knowledge in a quarter century. Anyone who disses experience doesn't know what they're talking about, and probably hasn't had any which are of notable or appreciable quality.
I just turned 30 this past month. I'm not (that) old, yet. (Or, at least, the 18-22 year old women I attract don't think so...)
There is a technologically/scientifically inclined kid in the neighborhood who's going to school for EE. He just turned 18. He comes by to talk on occasion. He will occasionlally say, "back in your day" when he wants me to explain something. He can't comprehend a world without universal broadband Internet or free wireless. The concept of dialup - internet over two copper wires! and at THOSE speeds?! - is beyond astounding to him. He's never seen a monochrome monitor except on the occasional older bank kiosk and has had a "smartphone" for his entire teenage existence.
And yet, he's calling me an "old man", more or less, by how he looks at my experiences. It's not disrespectful, almost reverent, just sorta "wow, I've never seen that before". I was throwing out some "old junk" from my garage recently - old ISA SCSI cards, I think - and he asked me what they were. An XBox, to him, is "old".
At this point, If we had a "dark age' lasting several only a decade, I am convinced that we would probably not be able to recover much beyond the early 1970s within the following 100 years of recovery. Not because these younger kids aren't bright, but because the utility isn't desirable to most of the younger kids. It's not magical or interesting, it just "is".
For home users, there's little reason not to go with Microsoft Security Essentials as your antivirus: it does a good job of detecting most malware, it's free, and it's faster and less intrusive than most third-party solutions.
It's also the one which seems to most likely be "broken" at this point in time without bricking the system, so the user never notices unless tehy're security conscious. Little things don't work, but for the most part things keep working when it's been intentionally broken. In that regard, Symantec might actually be better: you at least know when someone's trying to take your banking info.
I'm a big fan of ESET for Windows. It may not be bulletproof, but in terms of preventing infections without breaking the system, it seems to be the best out there. Kaspersky comes in a close second, being stronger on detection and removal than prevention. Same goes for Avira.
Semantic is worse than running the system while infected with credit card stealing trojans. McAfee isn't as bad, but I'd still rather run without either. They're like a fat, sleeping security guard. He's just in your way when you need to get through the door, and nothing more.
ESET is available for Linux. I suspect the product is good. I've used ClamAV but I've honestly never seen the motivation to run it full-time. Nothing out there is capable of being vigorous enough to take the system "down", from my experience. For linux, a better tool is something like rkhunter which will check and verify system binary checksum integrity...
Meanwhile, this is really nothing new: Alcoholics figured it out thousands of years ago. Mastadon trample your kids? The chieftan fucking your wo-man? The bastards in Sales pissing you off? Great, have a fucking drink.