* FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up. * The same can be said about hardware support (and by support, I mean drivers which are considered stable) and a generally bug-free implementation. It's largely comparable to btrfs, but less verbose in actually telling you when something fucks up. * the FreeBSD implementation is still dogged by performance issues. Any significant workload on ZFS is still marginal compared to, well, pretty much anything else (including, dare I say, NTFS on Windows).
Many USG components are required to be manufacturered in the US. I'd argue most, though I've no basis for fact of this. The key word here is "manufactured". If, for instance, a plane is assembled in the US, and the fuselage and engines are made by a US company, this would "suffice". It's the government, FFS: you better believe there are reams and reams of paperwork defining "manufactured", "assembled", etc. in the contracts.
For instance, Beretta and FN have made manufacturing plants in the US to try to get US contract.
I believe even Toyota made plants in the US to capitalize on government contract potential.
The reason why someone would risk their reputation for a small increase in profit is cultural. The Chinese have no misgivings about ripping off their customers. Whatever they can get away with, they will.
While I don't disagree with this statement, it's hardly their exclusive domain. You'll find the same swindling assholes in, say (good example) California, where there are people who run businesses, charging top dollar for developers/contractors/consultants and hiring Indians and interns to do the work (albeit relatively competent versions of each).
This is what you get when your culture has disavowed the existence of a higher power. When there is only "me" and "the state", if "the state" won't find you out, the vast majority will disregard the state if they won't be caught.
The most usable UIs I've used, in this regard, are tiling window managers:
* awesome, by far the best * xmonad, a marginal second because * ion, because he (as far as I can tell) started the idea in vogue, and did a good implementation. That, and he's a vitriolic asshole who deserves honorable mention.
They're usable almost solely with a keyboard, but a keyboard you do need. Throw a launcher on there, and it'd be the bee's knees for anything with a keyboard. I've used one of the above on 4" touchscreens up through multiple 30" monitors, and it scales quite well.
What it comes down to, I think, is fragmentation and specialization of the market. One size no longer fits all.
Think back to the early Macs. They were incredibly limited in basic functionality compared to today, and their UIs demonstrated it. They were the cutting edge of UI and general personal computing.
Flash foward. In the early 2000s you had Mac OSX, and it was lauded as the next great thing for UI. Windows Vista, and to some degree, Windows 7, mimicked some of its functionality. Android and IOS in the lat 2000s also contributed to the 'simplification' or shall I say 'consumerization' of the UI. Windows 8 looks like it's going to push the desktop more in that general same "simplification" direction, just as GNOME 3/Unity have already attempted to do. (I wouldn't be surprised if Apple were planning the same thing with OSX).
At the same time, you've got Windows Server's headless mode and the emergence of more scripting-oriented Windows operation, Linux is as strong as ever on the server (and broader IT focus), and there is still a great deal of people who prefer Windows 7 'simple' or 'classic' and the XP 'classic' look (whatever they're called).
The 'traditional' interfaces are what people who work prefer. Consumers like the new glam looks.
We tend to get annoyed at the societies that are still shedding blood over imaginary lines on a piece of paper.
Do you like it when your neighbor lets himself into your house, shits in your toilet, looks through your wife's/girlfriend's underwear drawer, and helps himself to your coffee?
Or do you just leave the door unlocked and open so that he and his friends can do that?
Sorry, boundaries are there for a (good) reason. "Good fences make good neighbors." This is as true as it is between nations as it is between neighbors. Cultures are not intrinsically compatible (in fact, most are not).
What is it, exactly, that you think just happened in Libya? You do realize that most of the 'resistance' came from other countries, and the agenda being pushed in Libya (from outside) isn't exactly one of indigenous familiarity or comfort.
That whole affair was, hand and foot, sponsored by the UN. Hell, they carried out most of the conquest themselves.
Of the subsystems I've run into which have bad or simply wrong documentation in the past year, the list includes (geom, jails, zpool/zfs, and ports), they're not exactly 'small components' of freebsd.
Jails simply don't work as described, and what's described is inconsistent. ZFS is still highly, highly experimental (in terms of stability and performance, at least), yet has had teh green light for some time now (7.3 and 8.0? seriously?). What's more, there are some pretty horrible drivers, or hardware support: hardware which works fine in centos or debian crashes repeatedly under FreeBSD (things like Intel storage controllers.)
And don't even get me started about Ports. No, I realize its' not FreeBSD, but if you want software, you either build it yourself from an official repository for that package (I highly recommend it) or you use ports. Using ports works great, unless it doesn't: the package may be ancient, or the maintainer may have (probably did) munge the fuck out of it so that it doesn't work.
Sorry. FBSD is about as awesome as a bag of dead mice.
The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist
I think there are two ways to look at this.
First, the weeding out is necessary. By weeding out the students who are unable to memorize vast amounts of disassociated data, you are focusing on people who are actually able to do science with a lot of variables, working through it on their head before anything gets recorded. This is useful because it speeds up the rate at which science progresses.
Second, there can only be so many people doing "real science" due to funding concerns. Keeping the numbers low helps justify the higher salary someone with a 6-10 year degree has in a non-concrete, impractical discipline.
In contrast, I can see your point and ammend it. The drudgery kills creativity and the ability to think through problems in a person's own way. It's the same kind of work that turns neurotic medical students into doctors who couldn't reason their way out of a box (leaving all the diagnostic work up to nurses).
I went to a pretty good university (well, OK, one was a college - one which Penn State actively tried to poach students from), but my experience is quite different than your's. I was more able to sleep through classes (or not attend them) in college than high school. I was more able to not do the work and do well. College was, for the most part, dreadfully "easy" in that there was much less drudgery work. I simply had to demonstrate that I knew the material (with "showing up" being a course requirement which usually resulted in me dropping the class before it mattered).
Spam and exploits from.edu is incredibly common. Pretty much everyone who had "internet" access prior to around 1994 has a very, very large network (for their size). Most corporations have probably sold back their addresses by now, but it's not unheard of for small schools to have/22 or/20 networks, because "that's all they'd ever need". Public access to the Internet was still unheard of.
The result is that, even today, many (most? all the ones I have seen) campus dorms give their students public IP addresses (or, at least, they did as recent as 2004, which was the last time I had an eye into such an environment. Now I'm starting to feel old...) Not only do all servers often (unnecessarily) have public addresses, with little more than a router between them and the Internet-At-Large, but staff workstations are, as well. Usually, the amount of policing on these networks is less marked than what your average ISP provides.
The organizations/companies which run the networks which many schools get on can be said to be largely responsible for this poor state of affairs, I feel. They've been too liberal in allowing certain allotments to the institutions, and don't hold them responsible for serious network problems they cause.
Having had to deal with various admins in academic institutions over the past year or so, as well as experience doing IT in academic institutions, my experience is this:
* Nobody owns the systems. They're there. There are people there. Being an educational institution with peoples' primary purpose in being there to either teach or learn, efforts are focused elsewhere. * There are very few actual IT staff. Mostly, they're there to keep the systems directly responsible for education working, as well as lab computers. * The IT people there are overworked, particularly in the math and science departments. You'll have requests like "oh, I need an 8-year-old version of Mathematica" from a prominent math professor, or a CS professor who insists on having his VMS machines available for himself and his students. * The math/science/engineering departments often assume the role of IT for other departments. Sometimes, other departments don't have IT at all. * Most actual IT work, even outside support/maintenance/troubleshooting, is done by inexperienced students on work study (because the government pays for it, it's cheap). * Even many prominent schools only have one, maybe two "professionals" manning their IT staff, with the rest being students. When he goes on vacation, everything significant stops happening. Sometimes it's just a long-standing professor who enjoys the work; sometimes it's a group of skilled/experienced students. * Because it's academia, most decisions on maintenance and acquisitions fall on people who have no knowledge or understanding of IT. If facebook works and they're getting mail from whomever, they don't know (or care - they're only at the school until they can get their position at a much larger research institution in their field) that they've got an exploited mail server or the equipment is 8 years old. * This is true even for larger, well-known institutions. * Many of the systems in place on a campus were put in years and years ago by a singular prodigy who knew the systems well. You know, someone who knows djbdns, qmail, and cyrus backwards and forwards, and by god - why would anyone need (or want) anything else? "It's easy." Or sometimes, it's a programmer who has foolishly made it so nothign can be touched without breaking a dozen other things on the network, so nobody even tries. Meanwhile, the likelihood that someone is going to exploit the machine increases as time goes on.... * It is not unheard of for equipment to go missing. For instance, behind drywall, only to be discovered years later. This kind of thing still happens. I remember when this story came out with fond recollection. Since that time, however, I've personally witnessed several similar WTFs: a display-driving workstation inside a wall, an important server running on wireless, "mission critical" machines running on single dedicated disks, "secure" distributed networking using wall-wort ARM systems throughout the building complex. If you can't find it, you can't update it.
So, for gaming, why would I want one of these? That's still the question on most people's mind.
Most of the remainder of geeks think: but Bulldozer uses a gobton more power than the performance-equivalent Sandy Bridge chip (and it costs more). My existing AMD system out-performs it for single and double core workloads. I don't want one.
The common consumer buys what's almost cheapest, usually, thinking it's the value proposition. Sometimes that's a good deal, and sometimes it'll be AMD. Or, at least, that's the case historically: how is that going to be possible with the AMDs being more expensive now?
If you have high latency to an NFS store, you're doing something wrong. A single host share can scale quite well. I suggest looking at the underlying hardware to see if you've got enough IOPS, no hardware failures, and the like. This, of course, assumes you've configured it properly for the kind of workload you're throwing at it.
I suggest reading here: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/
Absolutely. This is a "bold" (ie, different) move. I've always liked AMD as a company, as their business decisions have always at least been long-game driven. "It hurts now, but two, three quarters from now, we'll like it".
I was starting to think AMD was going to fall way, way behind. Now, I think they're going to pull ahead of this one. (Hell, it took Nvidia one major revision in their cards to get from "poor performance and high power use" to "the head of the pack by a bit". From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...
No doubt. I threw my HD2 down a flight of inclined cement steps a while back this summer, in a fit of rage. It bounced two or three times and, granted, had an Otter case on it, but it survived intact.
Also to consider is: did they factor in the 'free' or 'low cost' nature into the service contract? Of course they did! They're making heavy profits on the people who don't have "cheap" phones.
If I were to guess, I'd wager most of the 'repairs' are early exchanges requiring the phone to be wiped, or something to that effect (eg people flashing a ROM to it). There's less to potentially break on an iPhone.
I'm not a fan of Redhat or RPM based distros in general, but I will say this: as someone who's come in behind admins who can't admin to save their life (half assed is being generous), RedHat support is able to pull up the slack quite nicely when it comes to having the knowledge to do things relatively sanely. If it wasn't for the changes they made/recommended in the configurations, I doubt anything would work.
In contrast, Windows is cheap if you don't consider many, many small things expensive.
Windows normally has problems at the user level. Every once in a while there's a big problem which normally results in an outage. You'll get lots of end user support issues and you'll need a lot more people to field the calls. (They won't be highly paid, so they'll be easily replaceable and anyone can do that job, but still.)
With Linux, you've got to pay your admins well, because they can't just be clicky-clicky monkeys: they've got to understand the systems, know how to not break them, and importantly, know how to perform clean upgrades of quite a few systems.
In essence, you need a couple project managers and some gurus instead of just one PM and an army of click monkeys. Arguably, it's a wash, financially - at least up front. The differences is you'll see one outage vs. an upgrade and minor conveniences, or many small conveniences ("support costs") vs. clean running.
I've been working in IT for 10 years. I've been working in progressively larger and more prestigious institutions this entire time. I've yet to work with anyone "smarter" or (sadly) more capable than I am (at least regarding information technology). The sad fact is that very, very few people are actually "good" at IT: this includes programming. Very few people are good at this, and even fewer are exceptionally good. I don't consider myself exceptional, though I am good.
You're a systems engineer if you're actually engineering a system. Responsible for Foundation Libraries, the LSB, or something similar? You're a systems engineer. Everyone else? Fuck off - you're a sysadmin, a support technician, or a desktop jockey who knows AD. Get over it.
You're a network engineer if you're actually engineering a network. This is pretty easy to accomplish, but difficult to do well enough to not be a pain in the ass for the next guy(s) (assuming the network is not relatively trivial). SMB networking? This doesn't qualify.
Software engineering is what smart people have done, and to a limited degree, are doing. Unless you write libraries or frameworks which others use, you are not a software engineer. I don't care how fucking fast you can develop a NextGen brainfuck with Ruby on Rails. Get in line.
Like most things in this field, the people with business/HR/marketing degrees fuck things up irreparably.
Don't be retarded. There are very, very few people who buy on "hardware price point" anymore. Usually, they're the geeks who wipe the machine and put their own (or pirated) software on it almost immediately who do that.
Everyone else looks at software. Applications, features, and capabilities. The Touchpads were quite capable for what they were (more so than the iPads I've seen, by far - so unless I'm not seeing all that's to offer in that department? - faster, more responsive, better UI, and a better browser). What they lacked (and lack) are the apps.
Android on the Touchpads, for instance, is pretty damn nice. Lighter? Sorry, I see that as a disadvantage in many regards. It's less sturdy.
I'm not saying the HP Touchpads were awesome, mind you. I'm just saying they didn't fly off the shelf due to the reasons you state. At $300, for instance, they'd have been a steal (or $350 with Android support - at $400, the Asus Transformer is a better deal).
Personally, I'm opposed to hiring idiots in the first place. Forget hiring them! By not hiring them, it saves valuable time and money spent firing them which could be better spent finding reliable people who are competent and capable.
Maybe this guy should've concentrated on those job skills.
It's shit like this which makes me wish I'd picked another career. Plumbers aren't held liable or responsible if a specific fitting they installed is found to be defective or prone to corrosion; electricians aren't considered idiots for installing something which, at the fault of others, causes power failure to their TV.
Hell, even the dipshit developers are regarded with higher esteem than IT.
Right. That's the problem with economic models. They're all theory, even though their proponents like to trumpet them as a religious gospel (capitalism, free markets, communism, socialism, etc. - pick your poison).
You allow a system rather than pragmatism to dictate the rules, and you're going to be in for a ride as people abuse that system.
Slashdot Mirror
ZFS development has moved to FreeBSD.
No. No, it has not.
Correct me if I'm wrong but:
* FreeBSD's ZFS is years behind what Illumos offers in features, and shows no signs of catching up.
* The same can be said about hardware support (and by support, I mean drivers which are considered stable) and a generally bug-free implementation. It's largely comparable to btrfs, but less verbose in actually telling you when something fucks up.
* the FreeBSD implementation is still dogged by performance issues. Any significant workload on ZFS is still marginal compared to, well, pretty much anything else (including, dare I say, NTFS on Windows).
Many USG components are required to be manufacturered in the US. I'd argue most, though I've no basis for fact of this. The key word here is "manufactured". If, for instance, a plane is assembled in the US, and the fuselage and engines are made by a US company, this would "suffice". It's the government, FFS: you better believe there are reams and reams of paperwork defining "manufactured", "assembled", etc. in the contracts.
For instance, Beretta and FN have made manufacturing plants in the US to try to get US contract.
I believe even Toyota made plants in the US to capitalize on government contract potential.
The reason why someone would risk their reputation for a small increase in profit is cultural. The Chinese have no misgivings about ripping off their customers. Whatever they can get away with, they will.
While I don't disagree with this statement, it's hardly their exclusive domain. You'll find the same swindling assholes in, say (good example) California, where there are people who run businesses, charging top dollar for developers/contractors/consultants and hiring Indians and interns to do the work (albeit relatively competent versions of each).
This is what you get when your culture has disavowed the existence of a higher power. When there is only "me" and "the state", if "the state" won't find you out, the vast majority will disregard the state if they won't be caught.
The most usable UIs I've used, in this regard, are tiling window managers:
* awesome, by far the best
* xmonad, a marginal second because
* ion, because he (as far as I can tell) started the idea in vogue, and did a good implementation. That, and he's a vitriolic asshole who deserves honorable mention.
They're usable almost solely with a keyboard, but a keyboard you do need. Throw a launcher on there, and it'd be the bee's knees for anything with a keyboard. I've used one of the above on 4" touchscreens up through multiple 30" monitors, and it scales quite well.
What it comes down to, I think, is fragmentation and specialization of the market. One size no longer fits all.
Think back to the early Macs. They were incredibly limited in basic functionality compared to today, and their UIs demonstrated it. They were the cutting edge of UI and general personal computing.
Flash foward. In the early 2000s you had Mac OSX, and it was lauded as the next great thing for UI. Windows Vista, and to some degree, Windows 7, mimicked some of its functionality. Android and IOS in the lat 2000s also contributed to the 'simplification' or shall I say 'consumerization' of the UI. Windows 8 looks like it's going to push the desktop more in that general same "simplification" direction, just as GNOME 3/Unity have already attempted to do. (I wouldn't be surprised if Apple were planning the same thing with OSX).
At the same time, you've got Windows Server's headless mode and the emergence of more scripting-oriented Windows operation, Linux is as strong as ever on the server (and broader IT focus), and there is still a great deal of people who prefer Windows 7 'simple' or 'classic' and the XP 'classic' look (whatever they're called).
The 'traditional' interfaces are what people who work prefer. Consumers like the new glam looks.
We tend to get annoyed at the societies that are still shedding blood over imaginary lines on a piece of paper.
Do you like it when your neighbor lets himself into your house, shits in your toilet, looks through your wife's/girlfriend's underwear drawer, and helps himself to your coffee?
Or do you just leave the door unlocked and open so that he and his friends can do that?
Sorry, boundaries are there for a (good) reason. "Good fences make good neighbors." This is as true as it is between nations as it is between neighbors. Cultures are not intrinsically compatible (in fact, most are not).
What is it, exactly, that you think just happened in Libya? You do realize that most of the 'resistance' came from other countries, and the agenda being pushed in Libya (from outside) isn't exactly one of indigenous familiarity or comfort.
That whole affair was, hand and foot, sponsored by the UN. Hell, they carried out most of the conquest themselves.
Of the subsystems I've run into which have bad or simply wrong documentation in the past year, the list includes (geom, jails, zpool/zfs, and ports), they're not exactly 'small components' of freebsd.
Jails simply don't work as described, and what's described is inconsistent. ZFS is still highly, highly experimental (in terms of stability and performance, at least), yet has had teh green light for some time now (7.3 and 8.0? seriously?). What's more, there are some pretty horrible drivers, or hardware support: hardware which works fine in centos or debian crashes repeatedly under FreeBSD (things like Intel storage controllers.)
And don't even get me started about Ports. No, I realize its' not FreeBSD, but if you want software, you either build it yourself from an official repository for that package (I highly recommend it) or you use ports. Using ports works great, unless it doesn't: the package may be ancient, or the maintainer may have (probably did) munge the fuck out of it so that it doesn't work.
Sorry. FBSD is about as awesome as a bag of dead mice.
The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist
I think there are two ways to look at this.
First, the weeding out is necessary. By weeding out the students who are unable to memorize vast amounts of disassociated data, you are focusing on people who are actually able to do science with a lot of variables, working through it on their head before anything gets recorded. This is useful because it speeds up the rate at which science progresses.
Second, there can only be so many people doing "real science" due to funding concerns. Keeping the numbers low helps justify the higher salary someone with a 6-10 year degree has in a non-concrete, impractical discipline.
In contrast, I can see your point and ammend it. The drudgery kills creativity and the ability to think through problems in a person's own way. It's the same kind of work that turns neurotic medical students into doctors who couldn't reason their way out of a box (leaving all the diagnostic work up to nurses).
I went to a pretty good university (well, OK, one was a college - one which Penn State actively tried to poach students from), but my experience is quite different than your's. I was more able to sleep through classes (or not attend them) in college than high school. I was more able to not do the work and do well. College was, for the most part, dreadfully "easy" in that there was much less drudgery work. I simply had to demonstrate that I knew the material (with "showing up" being a course requirement which usually resulted in me dropping the class before it mattered).
Spam and exploits from .edu is incredibly common. Pretty much everyone who had "internet" access prior to around 1994 has a very, very large network (for their size). Most corporations have probably sold back their addresses by now, but it's not unheard of for small schools to have /22 or /20 networks, because "that's all they'd ever need". Public access to the Internet was still unheard of.
The result is that, even today, many (most? all the ones I have seen) campus dorms give their students public IP addresses (or, at least, they did as recent as 2004, which was the last time I had an eye into such an environment. Now I'm starting to feel old...) Not only do all servers often (unnecessarily) have public addresses, with little more than a router between them and the Internet-At-Large, but staff workstations are, as well. Usually, the amount of policing on these networks is less marked than what your average ISP provides.
The organizations/companies which run the networks which many schools get on can be said to be largely responsible for this poor state of affairs, I feel. They've been too liberal in allowing certain allotments to the institutions, and don't hold them responsible for serious network problems they cause.
Having had to deal with various admins in academic institutions over the past year or so, as well as experience doing IT in academic institutions, my experience is this:
* Nobody owns the systems. They're there. There are people there. Being an educational institution with peoples' primary purpose in being there to either teach or learn, efforts are focused elsewhere.
* There are very few actual IT staff. Mostly, they're there to keep the systems directly responsible for education working, as well as lab computers.
* The IT people there are overworked, particularly in the math and science departments. You'll have requests like "oh, I need an 8-year-old version of Mathematica" from a prominent math professor, or a CS professor who insists on having his VMS machines available for himself and his students.
* The math/science/engineering departments often assume the role of IT for other departments. Sometimes, other departments don't have IT at all.
* Most actual IT work, even outside support/maintenance/troubleshooting, is done by inexperienced students on work study (because the government pays for it, it's cheap).
* Even many prominent schools only have one, maybe two "professionals" manning their IT staff, with the rest being students. When he goes on vacation, everything significant stops happening. Sometimes it's just a long-standing professor who enjoys the work; sometimes it's a group of skilled/experienced students.
* Because it's academia, most decisions on maintenance and acquisitions fall on people who have no knowledge or understanding of IT. If facebook works and they're getting mail from whomever, they don't know (or care - they're only at the school until they can get their position at a much larger research institution in their field) that they've got an exploited mail server or the equipment is 8 years old.
* This is true even for larger, well-known institutions.
* Many of the systems in place on a campus were put in years and years ago by a singular prodigy who knew the systems well. You know, someone who knows djbdns, qmail, and cyrus backwards and forwards, and by god - why would anyone need (or want) anything else? "It's easy." Or sometimes, it's a programmer who has foolishly made it so nothign can be touched without breaking a dozen other things on the network, so nobody even tries. Meanwhile, the likelihood that someone is going to exploit the machine increases as time goes on....
* It is not unheard of for equipment to go missing. For instance, behind drywall, only to be discovered years later. This kind of thing still happens. I remember when this story came out with fond recollection. Since that time, however, I've personally witnessed several similar WTFs: a display-driving workstation inside a wall, an important server running on wireless, "mission critical" machines running on single dedicated disks, "secure" distributed networking using wall-wort ARM systems throughout the building complex. If you can't find it, you can't update it.
So, for gaming, why would I want one of these? That's still the question on most people's mind.
Most of the remainder of geeks think: but Bulldozer uses a gobton more power than the performance-equivalent Sandy Bridge chip (and it costs more). My existing AMD system out-performs it for single and double core workloads. I don't want one.
The common consumer buys what's almost cheapest, usually, thinking it's the value proposition. Sometimes that's a good deal, and sometimes it'll be AMD. Or, at least, that's the case historically: how is that going to be possible with the AMDs being more expensive now?
If you have high latency to an NFS store, you're doing something wrong. A single host share can scale quite well. I suggest looking at the underlying hardware to see if you've got enough IOPS, no hardware failures, and the like. This, of course, assumes you've configured it properly for the kind of workload you're throwing at it.
I suggest reading here: http://nfs.sourceforge.net/
Absolutely. This is a "bold" (ie, different) move. I've always liked AMD as a company, as their business decisions have always at least been long-game driven. "It hurts now, but two, three quarters from now, we'll like it".
I was starting to think AMD was going to fall way, way behind. Now, I think they're going to pull ahead of this one. (Hell, it took Nvidia one major revision in their cards to get from "poor performance and high power use" to "the head of the pack by a bit". From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...
No doubt. I threw my HD2 down a flight of inclined cement steps a while back this summer, in a fit of rage. It bounced two or three times and, granted, had an Otter case on it, but it survived intact.
Also to consider is: did they factor in the 'free' or 'low cost' nature into the service contract? Of course they did! They're making heavy profits on the people who don't have "cheap" phones.
If I were to guess, I'd wager most of the 'repairs' are early exchanges requiring the phone to be wiped, or something to that effect (eg people flashing a ROM to it). There's less to potentially break on an iPhone.
Power users? Fuck. What is this, 1995? My grandmother thinks Unity is shit.
I'm not a fan of Redhat or RPM based distros in general, but I will say this: as someone who's come in behind admins who can't admin to save their life (half assed is being generous), RedHat support is able to pull up the slack quite nicely when it comes to having the knowledge to do things relatively sanely. If it wasn't for the changes they made/recommended in the configurations, I doubt anything would work.
In contrast, Windows is cheap if you don't consider many, many small things expensive.
Windows normally has problems at the user level. Every once in a while there's a big problem which normally results in an outage. You'll get lots of end user support issues and you'll need a lot more people to field the calls. (They won't be highly paid, so they'll be easily replaceable and anyone can do that job, but still.)
With Linux, you've got to pay your admins well, because they can't just be clicky-clicky monkeys: they've got to understand the systems, know how to not break them, and importantly, know how to perform clean upgrades of quite a few systems.
In essence, you need a couple project managers and some gurus instead of just one PM and an army of click monkeys. Arguably, it's a wash, financially - at least up front. The differences is you'll see one outage vs. an upgrade and minor conveniences, or many small conveniences ("support costs") vs. clean running.
Zombies have bathed somewhat recently.
The odor from zombies is somewhat lower.
Overall general appearance is somewhat better for zombies.
You may mistake an OWSer for a zombie, but never vice versa.
Unlike zombies, destroying OWSer brains has no perceivable effect.
Unlike zombies, there is no actual way to placate them.
Zombies clean up after themselves when they're done making a mess.
There are fewer festering sores on zombies.
Zombies have a higher likelihood of being able to reproduce.
Zombies are capable of peaceful assembly.
I've been working in IT for 10 years. I've been working in progressively larger and more prestigious institutions this entire time. I've yet to work with anyone "smarter" or (sadly) more capable than I am (at least regarding information technology). The sad fact is that very, very few people are actually "good" at IT: this includes programming. Very few people are good at this, and even fewer are exceptionally good. I don't consider myself exceptional, though I am good.
You're a systems engineer if you're actually engineering a system. Responsible for Foundation Libraries, the LSB, or something similar? You're a systems engineer. Everyone else? Fuck off - you're a sysadmin, a support technician, or a desktop jockey who knows AD. Get over it.
You're a network engineer if you're actually engineering a network. This is pretty easy to accomplish, but difficult to do well enough to not be a pain in the ass for the next guy(s) (assuming the network is not relatively trivial). SMB networking? This doesn't qualify.
Software engineering is what smart people have done, and to a limited degree, are doing. Unless you write libraries or frameworks which others use, you are not a software engineer. I don't care how fucking fast you can develop a NextGen brainfuck with Ruby on Rails. Get in line.
Like most things in this field, the people with business/HR/marketing degrees fuck things up irreparably.
Don't be retarded. There are very, very few people who buy on "hardware price point" anymore. Usually, they're the geeks who wipe the machine and put their own (or pirated) software on it almost immediately who do that.
Everyone else looks at software. Applications, features, and capabilities. The Touchpads were quite capable for what they were (more so than the iPads I've seen, by far - so unless I'm not seeing all that's to offer in that department? - faster, more responsive, better UI, and a better browser). What they lacked (and lack) are the apps.
Android on the Touchpads, for instance, is pretty damn nice. Lighter? Sorry, I see that as a disadvantage in many regards. It's less sturdy.
I'm not saying the HP Touchpads were awesome, mind you. I'm just saying they didn't fly off the shelf due to the reasons you state. At $300, for instance, they'd have been a steal (or $350 with Android support - at $400, the Asus Transformer is a better deal).
Personally, I'm opposed to hiring idiots in the first place. Forget hiring them! By not hiring them, it saves valuable time and money spent firing them which could be better spent finding reliable people who are competent and capable.
Maybe this guy should've concentrated on those job skills.
It's shit like this which makes me wish I'd picked another career. Plumbers aren't held liable or responsible if a specific fitting they installed is found to be defective or prone to corrosion; electricians aren't considered idiots for installing something which, at the fault of others, causes power failure to their TV.
Hell, even the dipshit developers are regarded with higher esteem than IT.
Right. That's the problem with economic models. They're all theory, even though their proponents like to trumpet them as a religious gospel (capitalism, free markets, communism, socialism, etc. - pick your poison).
You allow a system rather than pragmatism to dictate the rules, and you're going to be in for a ride as people abuse that system.