Even with jobs available, it takes a lot of time and energy to handle a job change, from filling out the paperwork to dealing with the new surroundings, to finding the best way to commute there, to figuring out which co-workers to trust and which will happily throw you under the bus because they can.
Burnout sucks. You start not giving a rat's ass about your current work, get fired, and the next job, you are still just fatigued from the previous that your performance sucks, so you are likely going to get chucked from that, especially in 2-3 months when the summer hiring spree is over.
At best they could piggyback on an existing OEM/ODM to have a custom unit. However, it will always be behind the curve, technologically. So, it would have to actually pack features that are more than increased CPU/RAM/storage. The push button concierge was a good idea, but it seems to be suspended until this September. However, at the wealth level it is being aimed it, people already have their own twin-key reps at their beck and call.
The trick is to sell something that would be "worth" buying to the conspicuous consumption types. Electronics and smartphones have a market, but not at the price point Vertu is aiming at. If the price was lower, and it came with an option that the device could be used as a RFID pass to all airport lounges, it would be something execs would snap up. No, it wouldn't be money made on price, but relative volume, and still a low enough volume that the devices would be definitely uncommon.
I will give them credit for phones that look sharp and a different style as compared to the minimalist design that we are seeing on smartphones. They also have a nice Android skin as well.
However, of all things out there, electronics that are not "timeless" are not really status symbols past a certain point. Even Apple learned this with the Apple Watch Edition, which its five digit price tag apparently didn't have many takers since Apple wound up killing it, and moving the name to a ceramic model with a price an order of magnitude less.
Electronics are not exactly the top dog for conspicuous consumption. The expensive smartphone of today would be a laughingstock six months from now when the latest models come out. Especially without another brand to attach it to. If a smartphone had a built in remote and key for a Bugatti, it might command a price premium. However, Vertu's name is recognized, but it isn't recognized enough to be worth the cost.
Vertu definitely has a niche. If they sell the same products for the same price, but buy a license to use supercar logos or something with horse racing, they would have products that would be purchased. However, smartphones are something that might be used for 6-12 months and then tossed.
Another possibility would have been to do like Louis Vuitton and make cases for existing devices. Supposedly, the quad-digit Eye-Trunk by LV sells like hotcakes, especially as part of a general accessory set.
Even the rural areas appreciate solar panels, mainly because they are not as tied to the grid, and with the latent feeling that SHTF is happening soon, there is a lot of sentiment for having some off-grid capability, if only to have a fridge to keep one's Shiner Bock cold should the grid go down for a long time.
The point is moot anyway in Texas... the grid is needed to provide enough electricity to run A/C units and well pumps, which isn't really doable via solar.
External drives directly attached to the computer are great for handling the "oh shit" type of disasters, like disk failures. Install Veeam, Time Machine, or something else, and forget about it. However, all it takes is one format command and the data is history.
I always recommend people use the 3-2-1 method of backups: Three different storage areas, two different media types, one offsite. Keep the external HDD for full system restores, but look at CrashPlan, Mozy, or some other offsite backup for documents that is hard to reach by ransomware. Another solution is to back up to a NAS, then have the NAS dump itself to a cloud provider. A NAS that has snapshot functionality can be especially useful, since ransomware can be rolled back fairly easily.
I've seen "disk firewalls" in other operating systems. Macs use something like SELinux to keep all but root tasks out of the Time Machine repository.
I think this isn't a bad thing, and a must eventually. However, it does force an organization system (where the Documents folder winds up organized into Word, Excel, etc. subfolders, each only allowing the appropriate application and the backup program to access that directory.) Some ransomware can use a Dancing Bunnies attack and just ask the user for permission to write in that directory, in return for free pr0n.
I can see separation of files becoming commonplace, where the web browser has no access (except perhaps via a special dialog) to anything but its own VM [1], and perhaps applications start winding up more separate as well, with contexts (SELinux-like), containers, or VMs.
[1]: Web browsers need as much separation as possible, since they touch untrusted code constantly. It should be assumed that the machine the browser is running under is tainted, with downloads saved to a special one-way directory, perhaps passing through a Virustotal-like scanning system before plopping it in a place accessible by anything else.
I am surprised the government doesn't rotate out the PCs every 3-5 years. XP machines have no warranty, so spending money to find parts to fix stuff is likely more expensive than a replacement cycle, there are likely auditing issues (not sure what items they are under, but having backlevel machines and operating systems surely runs afoul of some regulation.)
Of all the things that need to be updated/upgraded, it would be PCs. For example, AppLocker as a policy, disallowing admin access unless needed, enabling BitLocker, and using Secure UEFI booting may not be glamorous... but those mechanisms would have stopped this latest ransomware attack cold. Even if Secure UEFI were enabled, it would have kept the ransomware from executing phase 2 where it did the worst damage.
H-1Bs are one thing. The startup visa means that people take their hard-earned currency and go to a more friendly country, be it France, China, or even Russia.
Turning away the idea-generators is the first step to becoming a footnote in history. History shows what happened to Portugal when they turned away Christopher Columbus.
I don't get why we need another streaming service. We have tons to choose from, and they have matured to where they are decent. To boot, why would I want a streaming service that I can't use everywhere, and not just my vehicle?
Then, there are times when I'm out of cellular tower range. Copying my music collection to a MicroSD card and playing that locally ensures that I have music even there.
I can understand Tesla "blessing" another music service, but creating their own? Doesn't sound like a real wise idea.
The problem is that moving to a new CPU architecture is something that not many companies want to do. POWER and SPARC are all but dead, which pretty much leaves us with x86 and ARM as what runs everything out there. I will say the Itanium was a definite step up, with hundreds of registers, but getting Linux ported, and a top tier distro maker to actually port packages to that architecture, and support it, will be an uphill battle.
The exception would be an architecture that can virtualize x86, allowing software to use x86, then dip their toes in features that the new architecture provides. This at least would get people moving to it slowly, however it can backfire, similar to OS/2 ("Why run a Windows 3.11 instance in an OS, when we can just run the OS bare metal?")
I use in store wi-fi all the time. Through my VPN software, that is. I've seen too much hanky-panky go on otherwise, be it some stores trying to force their own key for SSL requests, ad injections, redirects, blocking competitive sites as "pornographic", all types of shenanigans.
The problem is that open protocols don't bolster the quarterly results. This is why we have so many websites that are best served by HTML5 or something else going with apps. Plus, with the fact that most apps want every permission under the sun, it is another way to slurp data to sell to whomever has the cash, or find another way to throw ads as alerts. If it were not for the fact that we have multiple PC web platforms with different languages for coding in, I wouldn't be surprised to see sites require viewing through their app only, with the website just a forward to whatever store has it for download.
Depends on the ECU. The vehicle I have senses how much booze is in the gas tank, and adjusts mixture accordingly. It is happy up to E-85, and with E-85, it will add a few (5-10) horsepower... but the overall MPG loss (because alcohol doesn't have the energy density per gallon as gasoline) makes it not worth the bother.
I find it funny watching the soccer moms fight over the E-85 pump when their vehicles are not Flex-Fuel rated, though.
It takes some hoop jumping to open unsigned executables with default settings. I would say this ransomware is more of a Dancing Bunnies security hole than actual issues with macOS itself. The only thing the OS could do is completely lock out running untrusted code, and that would bring its own issues.
This stuff could run anywhere, including Linux... a statically linked executable that would prompt for root access to run, then generate a public/private key pair, encrypt the private key to the ransomware owner's public key, toss the unencrypted private key part, then use GnuPG to encrypt all documents, followed by a fstrim on all opened filesystems, so any deleted data on SSDs is rendered unrecoverable. Since Linux has no innate code signing abilities where stuff is validated before it is executed, it might be easier to sneak an executable to be run in some ways.
I have never understood the point of Scrum. Every place I was at that used that had at least 2-3 hour stand up meetings. Each. Day. One place even had 4-6 hour stand-up meetings a day, with teleconferences among a European and a division from you-know-where that turned into constant blamestorms and whine-fests about how everyone else but that group isn't doing their part.
How the hell are devs expected to do work when they have to deal with kangaroo court type of crap on a daily basis with so much time spent finger pointing?
The cores would be useful for desktop virtualization (running the web browser in a VM, so if/when it gets compromised, the carnage is left in one VM, rather than all over the place.) Microsoft seems to be taking more steps towards this, be it having Edge in its own VM, credentials in another VM, built in Docker functionality, etc.
Try Taobao as well if you want to see decently made stuff (for the most part) at bargain basement prices. Even using a shopping agent like Taobaoring that adds an 8% commission, you can buy stuff dirt cheap, and have it shipped your way.
If you want a couple gross of fidget spinners for door prizes, it might be the place to go.
I would say if I have to either buy a "smart fridge" that won't cool unless constantly connected to the Internet, versus buying an older model which does work, or even a three way fridge (propane/natural gas/electricity), I can go with electricity. Same with washers and dryers and other appliances. A 20 year old dishwasher works just as well as a new one. Nobody will be able to tell that your clothes came out of a gold dryer from the 1970s, provided it works well.
RVing and camping taught me how little one has to have not just to survive, but be comfortable as well. To boot, IoT devices really don't give much usefulness for the consumer. They are great for slurping data for a company to sell, as the end user is the product, not the customer. I already did a comparison of a Nest thermostat versus a Honeywell Econostat. 20 years from now, the Econostat, manually activated by a bimetallic strip, will be still working. I can't say the same about the Nest model.
I know Microsoft could make a mint with a desktop PC/XBox combo. There are places not in the US, where having one function for an appliance would be very useful. I'd probably say split the PC and console, so all the super-duper, locked down stuff stays on its side of the fence, while the PC side would get a decent i7, 32-64 gigs of RAM, a decently sized M.2, NVMe SSD, etc. Integrating the two sides can be done in many ways.
With some work, I can write a script for a full length, American "blockbuster" movie in less than 1k. Example:
Setting: Mega City One. Protagonists: Superman, Catwoman. Antagonists: Lex Luthor, Lobo. Time of Movie: 2:00:00.00 Quotes: "I only learned math so I can do body counts." Ending: Good. Git level: Medium. Saturation level: Gloomy
From there, a program can grab the models for the heroes and villains, render the setting, generate dialog, generate a soundtrack, put the quotes at a punctual moment, and end the movie on a selected happy/sad ending. Saturation and "grit" levels are how the movie looks, as well as how much bad stuff happens to the heroes in the meantime, all randomly generated.
I can even reduce it even more to a sentence, "Modern comic book hero movie", and let a RNG crank out another multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster candidate. Less than 64 bytes used, easily generating terabytes of footage data.
Boy, is that the truth. Last year, when I was interviewing after a merger and a mass layoff, I actually had people say that "if someone else doesn't think highly enough of you to hire you, then why should we?"
I would say the Volt is one of the most underappreciated cars in existence, just because it is American made. If Toyota or BMW made the exact same car with the exact same style for twice the price, it would be selling left and right, because it solves the range anxiety problems that pure BEVs might raise.
Slashdot Mirror
Even with jobs available, it takes a lot of time and energy to handle a job change, from filling out the paperwork to dealing with the new surroundings, to finding the best way to commute there, to figuring out which co-workers to trust and which will happily throw you under the bus because they can.
Burnout sucks. You start not giving a rat's ass about your current work, get fired, and the next job, you are still just fatigued from the previous that your performance sucks, so you are likely going to get chucked from that, especially in 2-3 months when the summer hiring spree is over.
At best they could piggyback on an existing OEM/ODM to have a custom unit. However, it will always be behind the curve, technologically. So, it would have to actually pack features that are more than increased CPU/RAM/storage. The push button concierge was a good idea, but it seems to be suspended until this September. However, at the wealth level it is being aimed it, people already have their own twin-key reps at their beck and call.
The trick is to sell something that would be "worth" buying to the conspicuous consumption types. Electronics and smartphones have a market, but not at the price point Vertu is aiming at. If the price was lower, and it came with an option that the device could be used as a RFID pass to all airport lounges, it would be something execs would snap up. No, it wouldn't be money made on price, but relative volume, and still a low enough volume that the devices would be definitely uncommon.
I will give them credit for phones that look sharp and a different style as compared to the minimalist design that we are seeing on smartphones. They also have a nice Android skin as well.
However, of all things out there, electronics that are not "timeless" are not really status symbols past a certain point. Even Apple learned this with the Apple Watch Edition, which its five digit price tag apparently didn't have many takers since Apple wound up killing it, and moving the name to a ceramic model with a price an order of magnitude less.
Electronics are not exactly the top dog for conspicuous consumption. The expensive smartphone of today would be a laughingstock six months from now when the latest models come out. Especially without another brand to attach it to. If a smartphone had a built in remote and key for a Bugatti, it might command a price premium. However, Vertu's name is recognized, but it isn't recognized enough to be worth the cost.
Vertu definitely has a niche. If they sell the same products for the same price, but buy a license to use supercar logos or something with horse racing, they would have products that would be purchased. However, smartphones are something that might be used for 6-12 months and then tossed.
Another possibility would have been to do like Louis Vuitton and make cases for existing devices. Supposedly, the quad-digit Eye-Trunk by LV sells like hotcakes, especially as part of a general accessory set.
Even the rural areas appreciate solar panels, mainly because they are not as tied to the grid, and with the latent feeling that SHTF is happening soon, there is a lot of sentiment for having some off-grid capability, if only to have a fridge to keep one's Shiner Bock cold should the grid go down for a long time.
The point is moot anyway in Texas... the grid is needed to provide enough electricity to run A/C units and well pumps, which isn't really doable via solar.
SELinux? If Apache gets compromised, and winds up with a root context, it won't be able to do much other than scrozzle its own directories.
External drives directly attached to the computer are great for handling the "oh shit" type of disasters, like disk failures. Install Veeam, Time Machine, or something else, and forget about it. However, all it takes is one format command and the data is history.
I always recommend people use the 3-2-1 method of backups: Three different storage areas, two different media types, one offsite. Keep the external HDD for full system restores, but look at CrashPlan, Mozy, or some other offsite backup for documents that is hard to reach by ransomware. Another solution is to back up to a NAS, then have the NAS dump itself to a cloud provider. A NAS that has snapshot functionality can be especially useful, since ransomware can be rolled back fairly easily.
I've seen "disk firewalls" in other operating systems. Macs use something like SELinux to keep all but root tasks out of the Time Machine repository.
I think this isn't a bad thing, and a must eventually. However, it does force an organization system (where the Documents folder winds up organized into Word, Excel, etc. subfolders, each only allowing the appropriate application and the backup program to access that directory.) Some ransomware can use a Dancing Bunnies attack and just ask the user for permission to write in that directory, in return for free pr0n.
I can see separation of files becoming commonplace, where the web browser has no access (except perhaps via a special dialog) to anything but its own VM [1], and perhaps applications start winding up more separate as well, with contexts (SELinux-like), containers, or VMs.
[1]: Web browsers need as much separation as possible, since they touch untrusted code constantly. It should be assumed that the machine the browser is running under is tainted, with downloads saved to a special one-way directory, perhaps passing through a Virustotal-like scanning system before plopping it in a place accessible by anything else.
I am surprised the government doesn't rotate out the PCs every 3-5 years. XP machines have no warranty, so spending money to find parts to fix stuff is likely more expensive than a replacement cycle, there are likely auditing issues (not sure what items they are under, but having backlevel machines and operating systems surely runs afoul of some regulation.)
Of all the things that need to be updated/upgraded, it would be PCs. For example, AppLocker as a policy, disallowing admin access unless needed, enabling BitLocker, and using Secure UEFI booting may not be glamorous... but those mechanisms would have stopped this latest ransomware attack cold. Even if Secure UEFI were enabled, it would have kept the ransomware from executing phase 2 where it did the worst damage.
H-1Bs are one thing. The startup visa means that people take their hard-earned currency and go to a more friendly country, be it France, China, or even Russia.
Turning away the idea-generators is the first step to becoming a footnote in history. History shows what happened to Portugal when they turned away Christopher Columbus.
I don't get why we need another streaming service. We have tons to choose from, and they have matured to where they are decent. To boot, why would I want a streaming service that I can't use everywhere, and not just my vehicle?
Then, there are times when I'm out of cellular tower range. Copying my music collection to a MicroSD card and playing that locally ensures that I have music even there.
I can understand Tesla "blessing" another music service, but creating their own? Doesn't sound like a real wise idea.
The problem is that moving to a new CPU architecture is something that not many companies want to do. POWER and SPARC are all but dead, which pretty much leaves us with x86 and ARM as what runs everything out there. I will say the Itanium was a definite step up, with hundreds of registers, but getting Linux ported, and a top tier distro maker to actually port packages to that architecture, and support it, will be an uphill battle.
The exception would be an architecture that can virtualize x86, allowing software to use x86, then dip their toes in features that the new architecture provides. This at least would get people moving to it slowly, however it can backfire, similar to OS/2 ("Why run a Windows 3.11 instance in an OS, when we can just run the OS bare metal?")
I use in store wi-fi all the time. Through my VPN software, that is. I've seen too much hanky-panky go on otherwise, be it some stores trying to force their own key for SSL requests, ad injections, redirects, blocking competitive sites as "pornographic", all types of shenanigans.
The problem is that open protocols don't bolster the quarterly results. This is why we have so many websites that are best served by HTML5 or something else going with apps. Plus, with the fact that most apps want every permission under the sun, it is another way to slurp data to sell to whomever has the cash, or find another way to throw ads as alerts. If it were not for the fact that we have multiple PC web platforms with different languages for coding in, I wouldn't be surprised to see sites require viewing through their app only, with the website just a forward to whatever store has it for download.
Depends on the ECU. The vehicle I have senses how much booze is in the gas tank, and adjusts mixture accordingly. It is happy up to E-85, and with E-85, it will add a few (5-10) horsepower... but the overall MPG loss (because alcohol doesn't have the energy density per gallon as gasoline) makes it not worth the bother.
I find it funny watching the soccer moms fight over the E-85 pump when their vehicles are not Flex-Fuel rated, though.
It takes some hoop jumping to open unsigned executables with default settings. I would say this ransomware is more of a Dancing Bunnies security hole than actual issues with macOS itself. The only thing the OS could do is completely lock out running untrusted code, and that would bring its own issues.
This stuff could run anywhere, including Linux... a statically linked executable that would prompt for root access to run, then generate a public/private key pair, encrypt the private key to the ransomware owner's public key, toss the unencrypted private key part, then use GnuPG to encrypt all documents, followed by a fstrim on all opened filesystems, so any deleted data on SSDs is rendered unrecoverable. Since Linux has no innate code signing abilities where stuff is validated before it is executed, it might be easier to sneak an executable to be run in some ways.
Yep, same reason I cancelled cable. I'm paying a company to sling me ads? Hell with that.
I have never understood the point of Scrum. Every place I was at that used that had at least 2-3 hour stand up meetings. Each. Day. One place even had 4-6 hour stand-up meetings a day, with teleconferences among a European and a division from you-know-where that turned into constant blamestorms and whine-fests about how everyone else but that group isn't doing their part.
How the hell are devs expected to do work when they have to deal with kangaroo court type of crap on a daily basis with so much time spent finger pointing?
The cores would be useful for desktop virtualization (running the web browser in a VM, so if/when it gets compromised, the carnage is left in one VM, rather than all over the place.) Microsoft seems to be taking more steps towards this, be it having Edge in its own VM, credentials in another VM, built in Docker functionality, etc.
Try Taobao as well if you want to see decently made stuff (for the most part) at bargain basement prices. Even using a shopping agent like Taobaoring that adds an 8% commission, you can buy stuff dirt cheap, and have it shipped your way.
If you want a couple gross of fidget spinners for door prizes, it might be the place to go.
I would say if I have to either buy a "smart fridge" that won't cool unless constantly connected to the Internet, versus buying an older model which does work, or even a three way fridge (propane/natural gas/electricity), I can go with electricity. Same with washers and dryers and other appliances. A 20 year old dishwasher works just as well as a new one. Nobody will be able to tell that your clothes came out of a gold dryer from the 1970s, provided it works well.
RVing and camping taught me how little one has to have not just to survive, but be comfortable as well. To boot, IoT devices really don't give much usefulness for the consumer. They are great for slurping data for a company to sell, as the end user is the product, not the customer. I already did a comparison of a Nest thermostat versus a Honeywell Econostat. 20 years from now, the Econostat, manually activated by a bimetallic strip, will be still working. I can't say the same about the Nest model.
I know Microsoft could make a mint with a desktop PC/XBox combo. There are places not in the US, where having one function for an appliance would be very useful. I'd probably say split the PC and console, so all the super-duper, locked down stuff stays on its side of the fence, while the PC side would get a decent i7, 32-64 gigs of RAM, a decently sized M.2, NVMe SSD, etc. Integrating the two sides can be done in many ways.
With some work, I can write a script for a full length, American "blockbuster" movie in less than 1k. Example:
Setting: Mega City One.
Protagonists: Superman, Catwoman.
Antagonists: Lex Luthor, Lobo.
Time of Movie: 2:00:00.00
Quotes: "I only learned math so I can do body counts."
Ending: Good.
Git level: Medium.
Saturation level: Gloomy
From there, a program can grab the models for the heroes and villains, render the setting, generate dialog, generate a soundtrack, put the quotes at a punctual moment, and end the movie on a selected happy/sad ending. Saturation and "grit" levels are how the movie looks, as well as how much bad stuff happens to the heroes in the meantime, all randomly generated.
I can even reduce it even more to a sentence, "Modern comic book hero movie", and let a RNG crank out another multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbuster candidate. Less than 64 bytes used, easily generating terabytes of footage data.
Boy, is that the truth. Last year, when I was interviewing after a merger and a mass layoff, I actually had people say that "if someone else doesn't think highly enough of you to hire you, then why should we?"
I would say the Volt is one of the most underappreciated cars in existence, just because it is American made. If Toyota or BMW made the exact same car with the exact same style for twice the price, it would be selling left and right, because it solves the range anxiety problems that pure BEVs might raise.
Then, some big multinational company will buy the land, and do the same thing, except on a larger scale.