You can run Windows on a Mac when you need.. But if you buy a Mac for the better hardware specs, you might as well play with the Mac OS - which you'll find runs smoother on Mac laptops than any Windows-based laptop I have seen. Just try the touchpad on the newest Mac laptop and you'll see it is far superior to any touchpad on any Windows laptop available now.
Seriously.. the laptops available for Windows fucking suck. They're shit. They're all shit since IBM sold Thinkpad to Lenovo. Dell makes shit. HP makes shit. The consumer 'Best Buy' laptops are shiny shit. The 'enterprise' class laptops are flimsy shit. Nothing available holds a candle to any of the Mac laptops in terms of hardware. They're all too thick or flimsy or get too hot. The only thing Mac is missing that would allow it to take over the enterprise is a docking station (probably because that's against Steve Job's whackjob religion.)
Show me a Windows laptop with hardware that can hold a candle to Mac's current lineup, and I'll buy one. I'm currently using a Dell M4400 and I think it's a flimsy piece of crap that has a formfactor as usable as a potato chip and somehow it gets good reviews. I don't own any Macs - but other developers I work with use them.
Oh ya.. and Windows 7 is a crappy OS that just happens to be less crappy than Vista.
It's really sad.. I went from being the biggest nerd in the world that had to have every latest and greatest gadget to being the most jaded. Every new electronic device from cell phones to laptops is missing features I used to have with an old device. At least Mac is making an attempt to introduce higher quality with newer devices. Every other company is racing to offer the cheapest piece of Chinese shit they can find.
If I haven't affended you a little, it's because I spent so little effort in my rant. Am I the only one that is completely annoyed by the lack of technological progression in consumer electronic devices - both hardware, software, and everything else that has to do with them?
My career is in industrial automation - and I am an IT guy who 'gets' both sides of things. There are not a lot of people like me and I constantly face an uphill battle when I try to explain computer security to people or try to explain why certain things are much more complicated than they believe. For example, you have an industrial network that is completely unnattached from the corporate network that is used for automating an exothermic chemical process on a large scale where you cannot just 'hit e-stops' and safely shut down the process. If you lose 'visibility' on the process at any time, there is potential for an explosion or chemical release. They think they're immune to viruses and they do not run virus-scanning software (imo, usually a good thing in an industrial network) so they do not even bother to completely lock down the computers. We're talking Windows boxes where everyone knows the admin password. After a virus or two, they usually pay me to lock everything down and put the operators on limited profiles. Then, the white-collar management wants to be able to connect into everything to see what is going on. Suffice it to say.. it's a damn headache. IT doesn't get it and the plant managers don't get it.. And usually one wins out over the others. If IT wins, expect a plant to randomly shut down because they push an incompatible Windows patch. If the plant wins, expect a laughably insecure network where an operator charging his cell phone can take the whole network offline.
Basically, if you ask an IT guy 'What is security?' it will be a lot different than an industrial plant manager's response. An industrial plant manager will say a SCADA system is most secure if the people on site always have control over the plant. If a man has his hand caught in a machine, should another person at the plant have to login to a terminal to turn the machine off?
I'm frustrated by this virus, though, because from what I've seen, there has been NO utilities released to detect if you have it. I have seen abnormal activity on multiple HMI computers and the people in charge of maintaining them plug their thumb drives in randomly thinking as long as their laptop doesn't detect a virus on it, they're safe. At least conficker was obvious to detect on a thumb drive or running computer.
If there is a utility, can someone link to it for me?
It's already been patented about 30 different ways by 10 different companies in the middle of 40 legal battles and will never be useful in any way to the public.
I second the motion to 'Fire that marketroid!' If Google keeps the kind of idiots that think forcing visual garbage on all their users - whether personal or professional - is a good idea, they'll be the next big search engine to fail... no different than the others.
However, I cannot believe this was unintentional. Google knows, especially by now, that dropping forced changes on their users makes them angry. Here is what I suspect..
Google did this on purpose to gather more personal data from users. The site was set up to display a random background image. If you wanted to change the image, you had to create a Google account that asks for personal information. This would allow Google to put names to the IP addresses they track. For the people that use Gmail or other Google services, Google really does not receive any new data. However, Google only really cares about the discrete accumulation of identification data - so any new attachment of names to IP addresses is useful to them.
Google will publicly treat this as a blunder.. but I wonder what their real intent was..
But nobody here can grasp the scales of those measurements. How about you translate those little-known measurements into standard Slashdot summary lingo? For example:
Wow, obviously you are a consumer. I cannot imagine anyone worth their pay in the business world replacing individual components in a computer. Usually, it is just tossed.. or handed back to the oem to get fixed..
Second, when is the last time you had a processor fail?
That's the problem. CNN cares about ratings. That means they care about the short term at the expense of their reputation as a viable news organization.
Here's a quick fact for all of you TV executives: YOUR RATINGS ARE GOING DOWN BECAUSE PEOPLE HAVE MORE OPTIONS. Quit trying to build this 'one size fits all morons' news channel and start actually reporting news. Hollywood gossip belongs on the Entertainment channel. Quick one-liners and talking heads belong on the Commentary channel. Crazy banners trying to get me all worked up over the world's dumbest terrorist (ya.. that guy from Pakistan recently) belong on the Fear channel. Instead, CNN includes all these things and then calls it the News channel. Seriously? CNN, right now, you are stupider than your audience. You target an audience of stupid people with even stupider content. Even stupid people want to get smarter.
Right now, if you watched CNN all day 24/7, you would not know who your lawmakers are, you would not know which countries are where or what their political system is, understand any non-simplistic political or social situations, understand social and market changes or direction, hear more than a single sentence from a single person at a time without her being interrupted, hear about any real dirt or corruption involved with any affiliated corporation, or understand the real 'world situation.' So, it's entertainment - not news.
And, you talking head assholes (that's pretty much every CNN reporter except Jack Cafferty), IT'S NOT YOUR FUCKING JOB TO SET THE AGENDA FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Quit trying to tell people how to think. Quit identifying any political candidates as 'non-viable' or 'a longshot' or 'fringe' before you talk about them without letting people decide for themselves. Quit having opinions on everything. Quit being condescending to less educated people trying to make a difference in less affluent areas. Quit fabricating shit out of nothing - If there was a device that people thought was a bomb, but was determined not to be a bomb, don't report that it was a bomb! Quit talking only about buzzword political issues like abortion, gun control, and prayer in schools - like they are the only political problems facing the US. Quit wasting our time.
The idea of eliminating patents and intellectual property rights seem better than the current alternative.. The RIAA/MPAA has proven that they can be such litigious assholes over a non-universal 'right' that is not even accepted in countries with 94% of the world's population (according to the recent US research) that eliminating them seems more beneficial to society as a whole. The current patent mess in the technology world is infuriating. You cannot develop anything new and useful - even completely innovative - without some bullshit company that should not even exist suing you for bullshit reasons. Patent laws exist so the little guy can compete with the big guys.. Instead, the current patent law in the US is being used so the big guys cannot compete with the bigger guys - and the little guy is completely shut out.
In the US, we keep getting told that every adaptation of any existing technology is 'stealing.' But, isn't it stealing from the rest of society if a technological innovation based on a logical conclusion is patented and strictly enforced?
On a computer screen, I want as much resolution as possible! And.. even on my hdtv, I want as much resolution as possible. Even in my living room, watching a Bluray at 1080p, I still see the pixels from 10-12 feet away on the couch. Maybe I'm more picky than the average person.. or maybe I have better eyes (not really.. i wear contacts)...
But here's where I really get mad.. Half the people are posting that too high of resolution causes web pages to look too small.. or GUI's to look to funky.. That is where I have a problem! Why the hell don't we have vector graphics gui's by now? First, I blame Intel.. Intel sucks so bad at graphics that they cannot even run Aero properly.. still.. in 2010. Intel, your engineers are of average intelligence. And yet, your goddamn graphics chips are in half our computers. (Maybe some of you think Intel runs Aero fine.. but I'm still not happy with it.) Second.. WTF is Aero? It's a piece of shit GUI band-aid.. that's what it is. It adds like one 3d feature just so the dumbass consumer goes 'ohhh.. pretty candy'. Weren't we promised a vector-based GUI with Vista? So Microsoft, you suck too. Your management is incompetent and your programmers lack talent. Third.. Why the hell can't I take advantage of the contrast of a computer monitor and just have a black background? Why the hell am I pretty much forced with a white background and black text whether I'm running linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Apple, OS2, YourMom (an OS I wrote in like 5 minutes that's better than Windows 7.) Seriously.. every OS basically forces white background/black text.. Why not have vector-based black background with bright green text.. like in the 80's.. back when it was hilariously easy to read text on a crappy 14" CRT monitor? Fourth, fuck you both Firefox and Opera. You both should do a better job of seperating the CONTENT (read.. the fucking text) from the rest of the bullshit on the webpage. Let me, the viewer, decide what color I want for the background and text.. and figure out how to make it look halfway decent! IE, you don't even count because you are from Microsoft and therefore cannot innovate. Apple, do not think you're getting out of this.. You're still living in pixel land. Come on, Steve Jobs, force your overworked minions to develop the best goddamn vector graphics GUI in existence.. Then open the new OS to all platforms.. Then dominate the entire marketplace. Seriously.. the entire world will be scrambling to develop the highest resolution monitor.. Steve, if you don't do this, you have tiny balls. OMG, I almost forgot the monitor companies.. God you suck. I am using a Samsung 1920x1200 26" TV as my monitor right now.. Don't think I didn't notice you went from 16:10 to 16:9 behind my back.. I found the one TV on clearance that still had the 0:+1 more than everyone else.
So, imo, where the entire computer industry is screaming, "Look at me.. I'm soo great.. I have multitouch or I have a stupid 3d feature.. or I have 1080p!", remember that you still have a lot to do.. Please hurry up and get it done..
AMD, you get a free pass.
I have a lot more to bitch about.. but I'm busy.. and I only have so much karma to blow.
First of all, "holy grail of transportation engineering"?? Bullshit. The goal of transportation engineering should be to achieve the best balance of maximized capacity, efficiency, and safety. You can always make roads safer by slowing things down - until you try to make them safer by causing congestion.. and the congestion causes frustrated and aggressive driving. The study basically says to throw more shit in the way of drivers to slow things down.. That's because it's creating an unsafe environment.. and drivers naturally try to compensate for it.
Here in Florida, the transportation engineers have decided that old people react slower. Therefore, all traffic lights change slower.. So that causes inattentive driving since people can be waiting as much as 5 minutes between lights. Then, people are very slow to start proceeding through the intersection once lights turn green - partly because desperate drivers run all the yellow lights because they have to wait another 5 minutes between lights. My argument would be that traffic rules should not change to accomodate for people unable to follow the rules. Chicago's lights change quickly at an intersection..
Also, our political wanker of a governor (Charlie Christ) decided he did not like the 'move over law' because he said it promoted speeding. So, people are free to sit in the left lane of major highways going under the speed limit while others try to get around them. Florida interstates are a clusterfuck.. Nobody moves over.. So you have a clump of cars bumper to bumper for a mile.. and then a mile of highway that hardly has anyone on it.. I would argue it would be safer to have an actual passing lane and allow people to spread out.
Cars today have more horsepower, more traction, better safety, and more braking power than cars 20-30 years ago.. Yet, our speed limits have decreased.. Why?
Traffic is an absolute mess.. and the idea that 'slower is safer' is contributing to that mess.
This seems just like another 'divide and conquer' attempt in order for Washington to get nothing done and still spend taxpayer money. Getting rid of illegal immigration is a top goal of the rightwing liberty movement as well as preserving privacy through resisting a national ID.. So, if you want to divide the rightwing movement and dilute their influence, come up with solutions that require implementing problems. That way, some of the rightwing movment will support the National ID in order to prevent illegal immigration and some will resist the National ID and thus look like supporters of amnesty (since our political system tries to label everyone on every issue in either one or the other category while ignoring all other options). It falsely makes those against a National ID appear to be for amnesty.
We don't need a National ID card to deter illegal immigration. Instead, we need enforcement of current laws. Companies that hire illegal immigrants need to be penalized. The rampant illegal immigration is a result of lack of penalties; not a result of illegal immigrants being hard to find. For example, Tyson Foods (btw, a huge political contributer) continues to operate despite repeated slap-on-the-wrist fines for employing illegal immigrants. The law needs to be enforced better from the top down. Companies should not be able to make cost-based decisions that involve breaking the law in order to save money.
I agree this study is bad.. or at least the summaries are badly worded. This study uses the false premise that people fit into one category or another when the two categories are not diametrically opposed. It is like saying, "If you are not a Republican, then you are a Democrat." One group tends to view nanotech as dangerous and another tends to view it as having positive possibilities. I would argue that the vast majority of people, after reading the smallest amount of factual representation about nanotechnology, would view nanotech as having positive possibilities while acknowledging the danger. But even if my opinion t is wrong, you cannot attempt to lump the populus into two distinct categories and declare meaningful measurement if both categories mostly overlap.
I mean.. it seems laughable that 'scientists' conducted this. It reads like:
"Recently, scientists have been measuring the effects of political viewpoints on people by categorizing them as either 'healthy' or 'happy' depending on their answers to arbitrary, but completely unbiased, questions after being presented with related, and equally unbiased factual information that only scientists understand. Scientists were able to deduce that Republicans tend to be healthy people while Democrats tend to be happy people. After being presented with information that the subjects may or may not have some experience or preconceived opinion about, it was assumed that the subjects had no prior knowledge of the subject. Also, scientists compared subject reponses to a list of the correct scientific opinions in order to determine the amount of incorrectness in subject opinions. After the proper precautions were calculated in order to ignore all reasoning behind subjects' reasons for declaring themselves Democrat or Republican, meaningful scientific findings were created. Therefore, Democrats are unhealhty."
How about industrial plants.. closed control networks for automation systems that never touch the Internet.. Imagine if some contractors that don't know that Windows 7 needs to phone home every 90 days install the human-machine interface (touch-screen for the manufacturing system) on Windows 7 computers for a chemical manufacturing plant. Sure, there's e-stops and circuit breakers.. But how about the problems where there may be explosive gas build-up in a certain pipe that needs a certain valve to immediatly open 100%? Looks to me like this 'phone home' feature could cause the HMI program not to run.. and the operaters to lose visibility on their plant.. That could kill people.
Wow, ok, let me pick this apart, since it's modded +5.
In order to prevent widespread unrest, they must keep the peasants peasantlike.
No, they have to keep the peasants busy working and trying to make money to raise their standard of living, instead of out of work and making trouble. That means they need to continue to grow and increase their middle class, or the populace won't be happy at all. Remember, it's all about standard of living, or as another guy said it, having a TV in every household.
It also matters what is shown on that TV.
Therefore, the government keeps hording money.
This is a non-sequitor. The government hording money does not affect the populace's standard of living. Nor does it make sense for the government to horde money to keep the populace poor if they want to keep the populace happy. If the divide between the wealthy (government) and the poor is great, there is a greater chance of unreset.
I said the government wants to keep control - not keep the people happy. The divide is growing - not shrinking - even if the 'middle class' is improving.
Because the government is hording money, they buy our 'worthless' dollars and prop the value up therefore spreading the wealth to the US rather than spreading it through their citizenry.
The first part doesn't make sense. If the chinese government is hording money, they won't be buying up dollars. That's spending their money to buy dollars.
They are propping up the US economy. But they're also spending a lot of it domestically. Their entire bailout package was to throw money around to stimulate the economy. Where've you been for the past 2 years?
Exchanging one form of currency with another is 'spending' nothing. Compared to China's actual growth, the 'bailout' package was scraps.
Once their citizenry see this, and begin to realize their lack of wealth in relation to the rest of the world, and began to want the things they feel a middle class should deserve, there will have to be widespread social unrest to effect the inevitable change. Further, an economy with widespread social arrest is less desirable to investors.
Non-sequitors. And they don't even make sense. In a healthy economy, everybody is growing wealthier. This is basic econ, 101. And what does investors have to do with anything?
The outside investment is a huge reason their economy is growing. Further, I never argued the 'middle class' was growing poorer.. I am saying, however, that they are not growing in line with the wealth of their government.
Either the Chinese middle class becomes more affluent through shared prosperity of the Chinese economy - prompting social unrest because of middle class desires such as free speech, the right to own property, the right to ones' investments
A happy middle class is a complacent middle class. Just look to the US. Happy middle class means the government can trample over the people's rights. It's when things are bad that people start to get up in arms. Social unrest doesn't happen when everything's fine and dandy.
Good argument.. But I would argue the more the Chinese 'middle class' finds out about the rest of the world, the more they realize 'fine and dandy' is relative.
or the Chinese government continues to prosper at the expense of the peasant class prompting social unrest.
Which isn't happening. The Chinese government (and China in general) is prospering at the expense of the rest of the developed world. What's left of the peasant class is prospering along with everybody else.
No. They will be propsering when they can actually buy something that was not made in China.
In order to maintain control, the Chinese government must prevent widespread unrest. In order to prevent widespread unrest, they must keep the peasants peasantlike. In order to maintain their status in the world, they must keep growing economically. Therefore, the government keeps hording money. Because the government is hording money, they buy our 'worthless' dollars and prop the value up therefore spreading the wealth to the US rather than spreading it through their citizenry. Once their citizenry see this, and begin to realize their lack of wealth in relation to the rest of the world, and began to want the things they feel a middle class should deserve, there will have to be widespread social unrest to effect the inevitable change. Further, an economy with widespread social arrest is less desirable to investors.
Either the Chinese middle class becomes more affluent through shared prosperity of the Chinese economy - prompting social unrest because of middle class desires such as free speech, the right to own property, the right to ones' investments; or the Chinese government continues to prosper at the expense of the peasant class prompting social unrest.
My prediction: Eventual widespread social unrest and burst of the economic bubble that is China. The US has nothing to lose from social unrest in China.
I remember Steve Ballmer screaming 'Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!' and that has been the IE 'menality' ever since. The mentality is "Give the developers (especially big huge companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Google) complete control over the users' computers just by clicking 'ok' in Internet Explorer one time." That has got to be seen as a security hole. Every goddamn piece of software now wants to run as a service, check for updates, annoy the user, and prioritize itself. For example, once you install Adobe Flash, it is there.. on every web page.. despite whether the user might want to choose not to load the annoying flash for that particular web page. I am not complaining just about flash - just about the lack of options to make installed software optional. Why can't I have an option to 'right click, show flash' on all my flash animations? and for that matter.. all other software that wants to open by default without giving me an option to save?
Here's how I would make IE more secure in a general sense:
1. Program the 'stop' button as the highest priority. IE is useless if it decides it has to load an entire complicated web page (or malware site) before I can click 'stop' and cancel all of it.
2. Put options in IE to disallow resizing of IE windows by script, removing of toolbar buttons, preventing the user from resizing windows, and using 100% of system resources to process a web page.
3. Remove the ability for a 'Windows popup button' to prevent the user from stopping a script. How asinine is it that a web page can merely repeatedly pop up system messages forcing the user to click ok before allowing the user to click stop? IE screws this up royally with Java helping.
4. Put a 'cookie tracker' right inside Internet Explorer.. Allow the user to control whether a site can modify a cookie. Notify the user (at the bottom status bar - not in his fucking face) that 'a cookie was created or modified' when visiting a web page. User might get suspicious when his favorite porn site tries to modify the 'gmail' cookie.
5. Never allow web pages to stop me from right-clicking. Fuck you. It's my computer.
I'm sure there's a whole lot of other things I could say that Microsoft will continue to ignore..
Just because China has 1.3 billion people does not make them all good customers.
This is such a true statement.. Especially considering China's economic policy artifically keeps the middle class poor while the government accumulates large sums of money. Imagine if their 'middle class' got some spending power.. and started making certain middle class demands for luxuries like free speech..
Good for Google.. I still distrust them as I distrust every big megacorporation..but good for Google.
I swear that sometimes the future is stupidly obvious and these big dumb corporations adamantly try to refuse it.. A $1000 tablet may be a temporary success... but the future is cheap 'netbook' tablets like in Star Trek TNG. The point of a tablet PC is to offer a computing platform that removes the need for paper. Paper is cheap. A dual-screen tablet is the stupidest of the stupid moronic stupid things Microsoft would do..
So right now, while electronics shops cope with el-cheapo lcd screens being placed in every product, why the hell aren't these big dumb companies seeing that the el-cheapo lcd photoframes are just a few steps away from being the tablets we need? To truly remove the need for paper, we do not need speed or the latest in 3d multimedia. We need el-cheapo tablets that can be passed around while the personal information is contained in removable cards (SD? miniSD? microSD? who cares). Let me write on the screen. Convert my text to type. Let me play a video - but not necessarily a video game. Let me browse the net. Let me read an ebook. Let me write up my notes at a meeting and toss them on my boss's desk. Put this with a slow-ass cheap processor, minimum OS (fuck you Microsoft, but still XP is small enough), minimum other parts, and a touch-screen. Also, make it easily replaceable.. If I lose my tablet, lemme buy another for $200. Let the data automatically sync to my desktop computer when I bring the tablet near it. Waterproof the tablet.. should be easy, right? just one rubber compartment around the storage cards and ports.. let it borrow internet access from my nearby cell phone or my wifi..
The tablet does not need to do the following: - charge me a monthly fee of any kind - so it should not have cell phone shit in it - play 3d games - rival my desktop in performance - weigh more than 1.2 lbs - be more than 3/8" thick - download automatic updates - use front surface area for anything other than a screen - cost more than $200 ($300 in 2011, $500 in 2012 to account for inflation)
This is the future of tablet computing that I remember.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't worry. We are slowing down the Evo speeds too and we will be charging them $29.99/month for wifi hotspot."
You can run Windows on a Mac when you need.. But if you buy a Mac for the better hardware specs, you might as well play with the Mac OS - which you'll find runs smoother on Mac laptops than any Windows-based laptop I have seen. Just try the touchpad on the newest Mac laptop and you'll see it is far superior to any touchpad on any Windows laptop available now.
Seriously.. the laptops available for Windows fucking suck. They're shit. They're all shit since IBM sold Thinkpad to Lenovo. Dell makes shit. HP makes shit. The consumer 'Best Buy' laptops are shiny shit. The 'enterprise' class laptops are flimsy shit. Nothing available holds a candle to any of the Mac laptops in terms of hardware. They're all too thick or flimsy or get too hot. The only thing Mac is missing that would allow it to take over the enterprise is a docking station (probably because that's against Steve Job's whackjob religion.)
Show me a Windows laptop with hardware that can hold a candle to Mac's current lineup, and I'll buy one. I'm currently using a Dell M4400 and I think it's a flimsy piece of crap that has a formfactor as usable as a potato chip and somehow it gets good reviews. I don't own any Macs - but other developers I work with use them.
Oh ya.. and Windows 7 is a crappy OS that just happens to be less crappy than Vista.
It's really sad.. I went from being the biggest nerd in the world that had to have every latest and greatest gadget to being the most jaded. Every new electronic device from cell phones to laptops is missing features I used to have with an old device. At least Mac is making an attempt to introduce higher quality with newer devices. Every other company is racing to offer the cheapest piece of Chinese shit they can find.
If I haven't affended you a little, it's because I spent so little effort in my rant. Am I the only one that is completely annoyed by the lack of technological progression in consumer electronic devices - both hardware, software, and everything else that has to do with them?
Don't cyber snitch.
If the majority of Americans ignore a law, then that law is wrong.
My career is in industrial automation - and I am an IT guy who 'gets' both sides of things. There are not a lot of people like me and I constantly face an uphill battle when I try to explain computer security to people or try to explain why certain things are much more complicated than they believe. For example, you have an industrial network that is completely unnattached from the corporate network that is used for automating an exothermic chemical process on a large scale where you cannot just 'hit e-stops' and safely shut down the process. If you lose 'visibility' on the process at any time, there is potential for an explosion or chemical release. They think they're immune to viruses and they do not run virus-scanning software (imo, usually a good thing in an industrial network) so they do not even bother to completely lock down the computers. We're talking Windows boxes where everyone knows the admin password. After a virus or two, they usually pay me to lock everything down and put the operators on limited profiles. Then, the white-collar management wants to be able to connect into everything to see what is going on. Suffice it to say.. it's a damn headache. IT doesn't get it and the plant managers don't get it.. And usually one wins out over the others. If IT wins, expect a plant to randomly shut down because they push an incompatible Windows patch. If the plant wins, expect a laughably insecure network where an operator charging his cell phone can take the whole network offline.
Basically, if you ask an IT guy 'What is security?' it will be a lot different than an industrial plant manager's response. An industrial plant manager will say a SCADA system is most secure if the people on site always have control over the plant. If a man has his hand caught in a machine, should another person at the plant have to login to a terminal to turn the machine off?
I'm frustrated by this virus, though, because from what I've seen, there has been NO utilities released to detect if you have it. I have seen abnormal activity on multiple HMI computers and the people in charge of maintaining them plug their thumb drives in randomly thinking as long as their laptop doesn't detect a virus on it, they're safe. At least conficker was obvious to detect on a thumb drive or running computer.
If there is a utility, can someone link to it for me?
Everyone has a 100% mortality rate.
It's already been patented about 30 different ways by 10 different companies in the middle of 40 legal battles and will never be useful in any way to the public.
I second the motion to 'Fire that marketroid!' If Google keeps the kind of idiots that think forcing visual garbage on all their users - whether personal or professional - is a good idea, they'll be the next big search engine to fail... no different than the others.
However, I cannot believe this was unintentional. Google knows, especially by now, that dropping forced changes on their users makes them angry. Here is what I suspect..
Google did this on purpose to gather more personal data from users. The site was set up to display a random background image. If you wanted to change the image, you had to create a Google account that asks for personal information. This would allow Google to put names to the IP addresses they track. For the people that use Gmail or other Google services, Google really does not receive any new data. However, Google only really cares about the discrete accumulation of identification data - so any new attachment of names to IP addresses is useful to them.
Google will publicly treat this as a blunder.. but I wonder what their real intent was..
But nobody here can grasp the scales of those measurements. How about you translate those little-known measurements into standard Slashdot summary lingo? For example:
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
How many songs does it hold?
How many digital pictures is it?
How many truck loads of floppy disks is it?
Wow, obviously you are a consumer. I cannot imagine anyone worth their pay in the business world replacing individual components in a computer. Usually, it is just tossed.. or handed back to the oem to get fixed..
Second, when is the last time you had a processor fail?
That's the problem. CNN cares about ratings. That means they care about the short term at the expense of their reputation as a viable news organization.
Here's a quick fact for all of you TV executives: YOUR RATINGS ARE GOING DOWN BECAUSE PEOPLE HAVE MORE OPTIONS. Quit trying to build this 'one size fits all morons' news channel and start actually reporting news. Hollywood gossip belongs on the Entertainment channel. Quick one-liners and talking heads belong on the Commentary channel. Crazy banners trying to get me all worked up over the world's dumbest terrorist (ya.. that guy from Pakistan recently) belong on the Fear channel. Instead, CNN includes all these things and then calls it the News channel. Seriously? CNN, right now, you are stupider than your audience. You target an audience of stupid people with even stupider content. Even stupid people want to get smarter.
Right now, if you watched CNN all day 24/7, you would not know who your lawmakers are, you would not know which countries are where or what their political system is, understand any non-simplistic political or social situations, understand social and market changes or direction, hear more than a single sentence from a single person at a time without her being interrupted, hear about any real dirt or corruption involved with any affiliated corporation, or understand the real 'world situation.' So, it's entertainment - not news.
And, you talking head assholes (that's pretty much every CNN reporter except Jack Cafferty), IT'S NOT YOUR FUCKING JOB TO SET THE AGENDA FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Quit trying to tell people how to think. Quit identifying any political candidates as 'non-viable' or 'a longshot' or 'fringe' before you talk about them without letting people decide for themselves. Quit having opinions on everything. Quit being condescending to less educated people trying to make a difference in less affluent areas. Quit fabricating shit out of nothing - If there was a device that people thought was a bomb, but was determined not to be a bomb, don't report that it was a bomb! Quit talking only about buzzword political issues like abortion, gun control, and prayer in schools - like they are the only political problems facing the US. Quit wasting our time.
The idea of eliminating patents and intellectual property rights seem better than the current alternative.. The RIAA/MPAA has proven that they can be such litigious assholes over a non-universal 'right' that is not even accepted in countries with 94% of the world's population (according to the recent US research) that eliminating them seems more beneficial to society as a whole. The current patent mess in the technology world is infuriating. You cannot develop anything new and useful - even completely innovative - without some bullshit company that should not even exist suing you for bullshit reasons. Patent laws exist so the little guy can compete with the big guys.. Instead, the current patent law in the US is being used so the big guys cannot compete with the bigger guys - and the little guy is completely shut out.
In the US, we keep getting told that every adaptation of any existing technology is 'stealing.' But, isn't it stealing from the rest of society if a technological innovation based on a logical conclusion is patented and strictly enforced?
I'm just glad it doesn't flush while I'm still going.
On a computer screen, I want as much resolution as possible! And.. even on my hdtv, I want as much resolution as possible. Even in my living room, watching a Bluray at 1080p, I still see the pixels from 10-12 feet away on the couch. Maybe I'm more picky than the average person.. or maybe I have better eyes (not really.. i wear contacts)...
But here's where I really get mad.. Half the people are posting that too high of resolution causes web pages to look too small.. or GUI's to look to funky.. That is where I have a problem! Why the hell don't we have vector graphics gui's by now? First, I blame Intel.. Intel sucks so bad at graphics that they cannot even run Aero properly.. still.. in 2010. Intel, your engineers are of average intelligence. And yet, your goddamn graphics chips are in half our computers. (Maybe some of you think Intel runs Aero fine.. but I'm still not happy with it.) Second.. WTF is Aero? It's a piece of shit GUI band-aid.. that's what it is. It adds like one 3d feature just so the dumbass consumer goes 'ohhh.. pretty candy'. Weren't we promised a vector-based GUI with Vista? So Microsoft, you suck too. Your management is incompetent and your programmers lack talent. Third.. Why the hell can't I take advantage of the contrast of a computer monitor and just have a black background? Why the hell am I pretty much forced with a white background and black text whether I'm running linux, Windows, FreeBSD, Apple, OS2, YourMom (an OS I wrote in like 5 minutes that's better than Windows 7.) Seriously.. every OS basically forces white background/black text.. Why not have vector-based black background with bright green text.. like in the 80's.. back when it was hilariously easy to read text on a crappy 14" CRT monitor? Fourth, fuck you both Firefox and Opera. You both should do a better job of seperating the CONTENT (read.. the fucking text) from the rest of the bullshit on the webpage. Let me, the viewer, decide what color I want for the background and text.. and figure out how to make it look halfway decent! IE, you don't even count because you are from Microsoft and therefore cannot innovate. Apple, do not think you're getting out of this.. You're still living in pixel land. Come on, Steve Jobs, force your overworked minions to develop the best goddamn vector graphics GUI in existence.. Then open the new OS to all platforms.. Then dominate the entire marketplace. Seriously.. the entire world will be scrambling to develop the highest resolution monitor.. Steve, if you don't do this, you have tiny balls. OMG, I almost forgot the monitor companies.. God you suck. I am using a Samsung 1920x1200 26" TV as my monitor right now.. Don't think I didn't notice you went from 16:10 to 16:9 behind my back.. I found the one TV on clearance that still had the 0:+1 more than everyone else.
So, imo, where the entire computer industry is screaming, "Look at me.. I'm soo great.. I have multitouch or I have a stupid 3d feature.. or I have 1080p!", remember that you still have a lot to do.. Please hurry up and get it done..
AMD, you get a free pass.
I have a lot more to bitch about.. but I'm busy.. and I only have so much karma to blow.
First of all, "holy grail of transportation engineering"?? Bullshit. The goal of transportation engineering should be to achieve the best balance of maximized capacity, efficiency, and safety. You can always make roads safer by slowing things down - until you try to make them safer by causing congestion.. and the congestion causes frustrated and aggressive driving. The study basically says to throw more shit in the way of drivers to slow things down.. That's because it's creating an unsafe environment.. and drivers naturally try to compensate for it.
Here in Florida, the transportation engineers have decided that old people react slower. Therefore, all traffic lights change slower.. So that causes inattentive driving since people can be waiting as much as 5 minutes between lights. Then, people are very slow to start proceeding through the intersection once lights turn green - partly because desperate drivers run all the yellow lights because they have to wait another 5 minutes between lights. My argument would be that traffic rules should not change to accomodate for people unable to follow the rules. Chicago's lights change quickly at an intersection..
Also, our political wanker of a governor (Charlie Christ) decided he did not like the 'move over law' because he said it promoted speeding. So, people are free to sit in the left lane of major highways going under the speed limit while others try to get around them. Florida interstates are a clusterfuck.. Nobody moves over.. So you have a clump of cars bumper to bumper for a mile.. and then a mile of highway that hardly has anyone on it.. I would argue it would be safer to have an actual passing lane and allow people to spread out.
Cars today have more horsepower, more traction, better safety, and more braking power than cars 20-30 years ago.. Yet, our speed limits have decreased.. Why?
Traffic is an absolute mess.. and the idea that 'slower is safer' is contributing to that mess.
This seems just like another 'divide and conquer' attempt in order for Washington to get nothing done and still spend taxpayer money. Getting rid of illegal immigration is a top goal of the rightwing liberty movement as well as preserving privacy through resisting a national ID.. So, if you want to divide the rightwing movement and dilute their influence, come up with solutions that require implementing problems. That way, some of the rightwing movment will support the National ID in order to prevent illegal immigration and some will resist the National ID and thus look like supporters of amnesty (since our political system tries to label everyone on every issue in either one or the other category while ignoring all other options). It falsely makes those against a National ID appear to be for amnesty.
We don't need a National ID card to deter illegal immigration. Instead, we need enforcement of current laws. Companies that hire illegal immigrants need to be penalized. The rampant illegal immigration is a result of lack of penalties; not a result of illegal immigrants being hard to find. For example, Tyson Foods (btw, a huge political contributer) continues to operate despite repeated slap-on-the-wrist fines for employing illegal immigrants. The law needs to be enforced better from the top down. Companies should not be able to make cost-based decisions that involve breaking the law in order to save money.
They're!
I agree this study is bad.. or at least the summaries are badly worded. This study uses the false premise that people fit into one category or another when the two categories are not diametrically opposed. It is like saying, "If you are not a Republican, then you are a Democrat." One group tends to view nanotech as dangerous and another tends to view it as having positive possibilities. I would argue that the vast majority of people, after reading the smallest amount of factual representation about nanotechnology, would view nanotech as having positive possibilities while acknowledging the danger. But even if my opinion t is wrong, you cannot attempt to lump the populus into two distinct categories and declare meaningful measurement if both categories mostly overlap.
I mean.. it seems laughable that 'scientists' conducted this. It reads like:
"Recently, scientists have been measuring the effects of political viewpoints on people by categorizing them as either 'healthy' or 'happy' depending on their answers to arbitrary, but completely unbiased, questions after being presented with related, and equally unbiased factual information that only scientists understand. Scientists were able to deduce that Republicans tend to be healthy people while Democrats tend to be happy people. After being presented with information that the subjects may or may not have some experience or preconceived opinion about, it was assumed that the subjects had no prior knowledge of the subject. Also, scientists compared subject reponses to a list of the correct scientific opinions in order to determine the amount of incorrectness in subject opinions. After the proper precautions were calculated in order to ignore all reasoning behind subjects' reasons for declaring themselves Democrat or Republican, meaningful scientific findings were created. Therefore, Democrats are unhealhty."
Here's a potentially dangerous example..
How about industrial plants.. closed control networks for automation systems that never touch the Internet.. Imagine if some contractors that don't know that Windows 7 needs to phone home every 90 days install the human-machine interface (touch-screen for the manufacturing system) on Windows 7 computers for a chemical manufacturing plant. Sure, there's e-stops and circuit breakers.. But how about the problems where there may be explosive gas build-up in a certain pipe that needs a certain valve to immediatly open 100%? Looks to me like this 'phone home' feature could cause the HMI program not to run.. and the operaters to lose visibility on their plant.. That could kill people.
Wow, ok, let me pick this apart, since it's modded +5.
In order to prevent widespread unrest, they must keep the peasants peasantlike.
No, they have to keep the peasants busy working and trying to make money to raise their standard of living, instead of out of work and making trouble. That means they need to continue to grow and increase their middle class, or the populace won't be happy at all. Remember, it's all about standard of living, or as another guy said it, having a TV in every household.
It also matters what is shown on that TV.
Therefore, the government keeps hording money.
This is a non-sequitor. The government hording money does not affect the populace's standard of living. Nor does it make sense for the government to horde money to keep the populace poor if they want to keep the populace happy. If the divide between the wealthy (government) and the poor is great, there is a greater chance of unreset.
I said the government wants to keep control - not keep the people happy. The divide is growing - not shrinking - even if the 'middle class' is improving.
Because the government is hording money, they buy our 'worthless' dollars and prop the value up therefore spreading the wealth to the US rather than spreading it through their citizenry.
The first part doesn't make sense. If the chinese government is hording money, they won't be buying up dollars. That's spending their money to buy dollars.
They are propping up the US economy. But they're also spending a lot of it domestically. Their entire bailout package was to throw money around to stimulate the economy. Where've you been for the past 2 years?
Exchanging one form of currency with another is 'spending' nothing. Compared to China's actual growth, the 'bailout' package was scraps.
Once their citizenry see this, and begin to realize their lack of wealth in relation to the rest of the world, and began to want the things they feel a middle class should deserve, there will have to be widespread social unrest to effect the inevitable change. Further, an economy with widespread social arrest is less desirable to investors.
Non-sequitors. And they don't even make sense. In a healthy economy, everybody is growing wealthier. This is basic econ, 101. And what does investors have to do with anything?
The outside investment is a huge reason their economy is growing. Further, I never argued the 'middle class' was growing poorer.. I am saying, however, that they are not growing in line with the wealth of their government.
Either the Chinese middle class becomes more affluent through shared prosperity of the Chinese economy - prompting social unrest because of middle class desires such as free speech, the right to own property, the right to ones' investments
A happy middle class is a complacent middle class. Just look to the US. Happy middle class means the government can trample over the people's rights. It's when things are bad that people start to get up in arms. Social unrest doesn't happen when everything's fine and dandy.
Good argument.. But I would argue the more the Chinese 'middle class' finds out about the rest of the world, the more they realize 'fine and dandy' is relative.
or the Chinese government continues to prosper at the expense of the peasant class prompting social unrest.
Which isn't happening. The Chinese government (and China in general) is prospering at the expense of the rest of the developed world. What's left of the peasant class is prospering along with everybody else.
No. They will be propsering when they can actually buy something that was not made in China.
In order to maintain control, the Chinese government must prevent widespread unrest. In order to prevent widespread unrest, they must keep the peasants peasantlike. In order to maintain their status in the world, they must keep growing economically. Therefore, the government keeps hording money. Because the government is hording money, they buy our 'worthless' dollars and prop the value up therefore spreading the wealth to the US rather than spreading it through their citizenry. Once their citizenry see this, and begin to realize their lack of wealth in relation to the rest of the world, and began to want the things they feel a middle class should deserve, there will have to be widespread social unrest to effect the inevitable change. Further, an economy with widespread social arrest is less desirable to investors.
Either the Chinese middle class becomes more affluent through shared prosperity of the Chinese economy - prompting social unrest because of middle class desires such as free speech, the right to own property, the right to ones' investments; or the Chinese government continues to prosper at the expense of the peasant class prompting social unrest.
My prediction: Eventual widespread social unrest and burst of the economic bubble that is China. The US has nothing to lose from social unrest in China.
You're pushing the nerd envelope - even for Slashdot..
I remember Steve Ballmer screaming 'Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!' and that has been the IE 'menality' ever since. The mentality is "Give the developers (especially big huge companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Google) complete control over the users' computers just by clicking 'ok' in Internet Explorer one time." That has got to be seen as a security hole. Every goddamn piece of software now wants to run as a service, check for updates, annoy the user, and prioritize itself. For example, once you install Adobe Flash, it is there.. on every web page.. despite whether the user might want to choose not to load the annoying flash for that particular web page. I am not complaining just about flash - just about the lack of options to make installed software optional. Why can't I have an option to 'right click, show flash' on all my flash animations? and for that matter.. all other software that wants to open by default without giving me an option to save?
Here's how I would make IE more secure in a general sense:
1. Program the 'stop' button as the highest priority. IE is useless if it decides it has to load an entire complicated web page (or malware site) before I can click 'stop' and cancel all of it.
2. Put options in IE to disallow resizing of IE windows by script, removing of toolbar buttons, preventing the user from resizing windows, and using 100% of system resources to process a web page.
3. Remove the ability for a 'Windows popup button' to prevent the user from stopping a script. How asinine is it that a web page can merely repeatedly pop up system messages forcing the user to click ok before allowing the user to click stop? IE screws this up royally with Java helping.
4. Put a 'cookie tracker' right inside Internet Explorer.. Allow the user to control whether a site can modify a cookie. Notify the user (at the bottom status bar - not in his fucking face) that 'a cookie was created or modified' when visiting a web page. User might get suspicious when his favorite porn site tries to modify the 'gmail' cookie.
5. Never allow web pages to stop me from right-clicking. Fuck you. It's my computer.
I'm sure there's a whole lot of other things I could say that Microsoft will continue to ignore..
Just because China has 1.3 billion people does not make them all good customers.
This is such a true statement.. Especially considering China's economic policy artifically keeps the middle class poor while the government accumulates large sums of money. Imagine if their 'middle class' got some spending power.. and started making certain middle class demands for luxuries like free speech..
Good for Google.. I still distrust them as I distrust every big megacorporation..but good for Google.
I swear that sometimes the future is stupidly obvious and these big dumb corporations adamantly try to refuse it.. A $1000 tablet may be a temporary success... but the future is cheap 'netbook' tablets like in Star Trek TNG. The point of a tablet PC is to offer a computing platform that removes the need for paper. Paper is cheap. A dual-screen tablet is the stupidest of the stupid moronic stupid things Microsoft would do..
So right now, while electronics shops cope with el-cheapo lcd screens being placed in every product, why the hell aren't these big dumb companies seeing that the el-cheapo lcd photoframes are just a few steps away from being the tablets we need? To truly remove the need for paper, we do not need speed or the latest in 3d multimedia. We need el-cheapo tablets that can be passed around while the personal information is contained in removable cards (SD? miniSD? microSD? who cares). Let me write on the screen. Convert my text to type. Let me play a video - but not necessarily a video game. Let me browse the net. Let me read an ebook. Let me write up my notes at a meeting and toss them on my boss's desk. Put this with a slow-ass cheap processor, minimum OS (fuck you Microsoft, but still XP is small enough), minimum other parts, and a touch-screen. Also, make it easily replaceable.. If I lose my tablet, lemme buy another for $200. Let the data automatically sync to my desktop computer when I bring the tablet near it. Waterproof the tablet.. should be easy, right? just one rubber compartment around the storage cards and ports.. let it borrow internet access from my nearby cell phone or my wifi..
The tablet does not need to do the following:
- charge me a monthly fee of any kind - so it should not have cell phone shit in it
- play 3d games
- rival my desktop in performance
- weigh more than 1.2 lbs
- be more than 3/8" thick
- download automatic updates
- use front surface area for anything other than a screen
- cost more than $200 ($300 in 2011, $500 in 2012 to account for inflation)
This is the future of tablet computing that I remember.