A lot of companies expect you to do more than Y hours for no extra $X...
There has to be give and take... I'm expected to do 40 hours a week, sometimes i do 30 and sometimes i do 50, my boss is fine with this so long as the work gets done and he's happy that if work needs to be done outside of normal hours he can ask me to do it. Similarly, i'm happy that i can take a morning off or a long lunch to do my own thing sometimes. It balances out, the work gets done and the staff are happier and more flexible.
On the other hand i worked for a previous company that demanded i sit in the office even if i wasn't working, keep to strict lunchtimes, never be late arriving but often be late leaving, they frequently demanded that i work extra hours for no extra pay, often tried to contact me when i took pre-arranged holiday, or expected me to spend a lot of time travelling to other locations for work. It was all take and no give on their part, so i started working to rule (arrive on time, leave on time, ignore emails/calls out of hours etc), looking for another job and fairly quickly quit that job and moved on.
I've actually been in several jobs like that, the boss asks me how long i need for a particular project, i quote a time i think will be reasonable with a little margin for error and he then proceeds to give me twice as much time as i asked for... My quotes were honest, if i said i needed a week i would actually be done within a week, and i never got any complaints that the work was not completed to a sufficient standard. What am i supposed to do with the extra time?
But to flip that in reverse, outside of working hours is YOUR time, and yet many companies expect people to work more than their contracted hours sometimes...
If a company wants to be strict with hours, then the employee should be too... If they want to be flexible, then the employee can be flexible too but you can't have it both ways.
Microsoft software is not intended for use in critical applications, it says so in the license agreement. If you're using it in such an environment you're in breach of the terms and so the liability comes back to you. Plus MS will sue you for pirating their software.
Intent is often taken into account, for instance carrying a knife isn't illegal unless you intended to use it for illegal purposes - you might be intending to use it for cooking etc.
You could argue that by bricking these insecure devices, you were attempting to prevent other more serious crimes from taking place.
People buy such devices because they're cheap, if the device gets bricked they won't know how or why it got bricked just that it stopped working... They will either get it replaced under warranty (if there is one), or just write it off and buy a replacement (cheap devices being unreliable is no surprise to anyone).
The welfare system in most of europe is even better, and the UK has about the most generous in europe... It results in large numbers of people trying to get in, often through illegal means.
To someone scraping by in a third world country it sounds like a lot of money and luxury life, but the reality is that the cost of living is also much higher so things balance out somewhat.
It also depends upon the use case of the device... A modern car may be far more environmentally friendly than one from 30 years ago, but if you only use it occasionally then the resources required to produce a modern replacement would exceed the difference in usage over a considerable period of time. The same is true for many physical devices.
But for software the opposite is likely to be true - newer software is generally more resource intensive than old, and therefore will require more energy to operate assuming it can run on the same physical hardware (and if it cant, thats likely to be an artificial limitation such as lack of drivers for the newer hardware).
Not to foil you, just to keep some spare jumpers in stock for use on other cards... If they wanted to prevent you from reusing the equipment they would physically snap the boards in two.
We used to do the same, retrieve used computers from dumpsters... Some were just old but fully working, some were faulty but had usable components etc...
Let's not forget that Ukraine also gave up their nukes, and Russia promised to protect them... Look what happened there.
North Korea is a small country with a relatively weak military, who have either lost or are in the process of losing their powerful allies. As it stands, a conventional war between north and south korea would end very swiftly in defeat for the north especially if america got involved on the south's behalf and right now pretty much the only thing stopping this from happening is china, and it doesn't look like the chinese will be backing them for much longer.
On the other hand if they have nukes and are able to deliver even a small number that would make any aggressors think twice about attacking because even though north korea would still ultimately lose, there would end up being significant losses on both sides and neither the us or south korean governments would be able to justify this to their people.
The north is highly unlikely to ever strike first, because there is no way they would ever be able to hit hard enough that there wouldn't be a severe response. They might be able to blow up a few cities, but then they would have america attacking them back in full force.
Let's also consider the economic sanctions imposed on north korea, they don't hurt the regime - there are still plenty of black market channels through which kim jong un can obtain his imacs and whatever else, and the lack of open trade/communication is helping the regime keep their people away from foreign sources a propaganda. Meanwhile the negative attention and threat has caused them to spend a disproportionate amount of their budget on the military in order to defend themselves.
Yes, copyright was always supposed to be a give and take but in recent times it has become abused and distorted. If you want to retain copyright you should be required to support your product as well as making it available to anyone willing to purchase it (for the original price or less, or companies will abuse it by increasing the price so massively that its effectively not available).
If you want to wash your hands of a product you have to relinquish copyrights and put it into the public domain, no keeping it locked up for years.
There's the problem tho, things are being tilted further and further to the end user's disadvantage... We need a fair system of give and take.
Manufacturers should provide a warranty up front which is a fixed cost or included in the price, with a fixed duration, or an ongoing service for a monthly/annual cost etc. And users should also have the documentation necessary to repair the products themselves, especially once the manufacturer has lost interest in supporting the product at all. Nothing wrong with making the two mutually exclusive (ie you can no longer claim warranty repairs after attempting repairs yourself), but options should always be available for the customer.
Products with a defined "end of life" are extremely damaging to consumers and to the environment. Old devices should be available cheaply for people with limited finances. Various old devices in a variety of fields are still extremely useful and there's often no practical reason why they couldn't continue to be used. Even if they lack the features or performance of modern equivalents, they can be repurposed or used for educational purposes which is far better than ending up in landfill.
The OS is much more reliable today, because of memory protection... The application software likely is a lot less reliable, you just notice it less because you only have to restart the crashed application and not the whole system.
Memory protection was a thing back then too, it just required expensive highend hardware... Old unix, mainframe and vms systems from those days are probably still more stable than anything available today.
All of that pretty much comes from the x86 architecture being poorly designed, other processors (eg m68k) and the platforms using them didn't have these problems.
A lack of memory protection actually did however encourage people to write better code, i found application software on the amiga tended to be quite stable or at least application software specifically written for the amiga and not ported from another platform.
Unix however did exist in those days, it just ran on very expensive hardware compared to the home computers of the day.
Desktop computers running traditional operating systems were never suitable for typical users, they always have been geek toys... Expecting users to worry about updates, drivers, avoiding malware etc was always ridiculous and never going to work. The sooner the vast majority of non technical users have more suitable systems the better.
Do people really expect that a HP laptop bought for $400 is going to last the advertised number of hours?
Yes, because not doing so is false advertising. We can reasonably expect a $400 laptop to be inferior to a $1500 laptop, but that doesn't necessarily mean battery life - the $1500 laptop might be a hugely over powered gaming laptop with terrible battery life.
One problem i have with most (non apple) laptops however is you usually have no guarantee of components... A given model could have several different chipsets for various things like the wireless or ethernet card and while these cards will nominally support the same specifications and have drivers for the default preinstalled os there is quite some variation between them (power usage, quality of drivers, signal strength/sensitivity, availability of drivers for other os, support for niche features like wireless monitor mode etc), and there is usually no way to tell which chipset until after you've bought it. I recently tried to look up wifi drivers for an acer laptop, searching for the model or even serial number on the acer site listed no fewer than 6 different wireless drivers.
They are probably testing with default settings, which is exactly what they should do... These laptops are advertised in the mass market at consumers who typically won't know how to adjust settings to prolong battery life and will just use the laptop in its default state.
Claimed battery life should reflect typical use cases (and they should disclose what those use cases are), and should be based on the default settings the laptop ships with. Apple seem to manage this, why can't anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of companies expect you to do more than Y hours for no extra $X...
There has to be give and take... I'm expected to do 40 hours a week, sometimes i do 30 and sometimes i do 50, my boss is fine with this so long as the work gets done and he's happy that if work needs to be done outside of normal hours he can ask me to do it. Similarly, i'm happy that i can take a morning off or a long lunch to do my own thing sometimes. It balances out, the work gets done and the staff are happier and more flexible.
On the other hand i worked for a previous company that demanded i sit in the office even if i wasn't working, keep to strict lunchtimes, never be late arriving but often be late leaving, they frequently demanded that i work extra hours for no extra pay, often tried to contact me when i took pre-arranged holiday, or expected me to spend a lot of time travelling to other locations for work. It was all take and no give on their part, so i started working to rule (arrive on time, leave on time, ignore emails/calls out of hours etc), looking for another job and fairly quickly quit that job and moved on.
I've actually been in several jobs like that, the boss asks me how long i need for a particular project, i quote a time i think will be reasonable with a little margin for error and he then proceeds to give me twice as much time as i asked for...
My quotes were honest, if i said i needed a week i would actually be done within a week, and i never got any complaints that the work was not completed to a sufficient standard. What am i supposed to do with the extra time?
But to flip that in reverse, outside of working hours is YOUR time, and yet many companies expect people to work more than their contracted hours sometimes...
If a company wants to be strict with hours, then the employee should be too... If they want to be flexible, then the employee can be flexible too but you can't have it both ways.
Microsoft software is not intended for use in critical applications, it says so in the license agreement.
If you're using it in such an environment you're in breach of the terms and so the liability comes back to you. Plus MS will sue you for pirating their software.
Intent is often taken into account, for instance carrying a knife isn't illegal unless you intended to use it for illegal purposes - you might be intending to use it for cooking etc.
You could argue that by bricking these insecure devices, you were attempting to prevent other more serious crimes from taking place.
People buy such devices because they're cheap, if the device gets bricked they won't know how or why it got bricked just that it stopped working... They will either get it replaced under warranty (if there is one), or just write it off and buy a replacement (cheap devices being unreliable is no surprise to anyone).
The welfare system in most of europe is even better, and the UK has about the most generous in europe... It results in large numbers of people trying to get in, often through illegal means.
To someone scraping by in a third world country it sounds like a lot of money and luxury life, but the reality is that the cost of living is also much higher so things balance out somewhat.
And what did you do before that?
It also depends upon the use case of the device... A modern car may be far more environmentally friendly than one from 30 years ago, but if you only use it occasionally then the resources required to produce a modern replacement would exceed the difference in usage over a considerable period of time. The same is true for many physical devices.
But for software the opposite is likely to be true - newer software is generally more resource intensive than old, and therefore will require more energy to operate assuming it can run on the same physical hardware (and if it cant, thats likely to be an artificial limitation such as lack of drivers for the newer hardware).
Not to foil you, just to keep some spare jumpers in stock for use on other cards...
If they wanted to prevent you from reusing the equipment they would physically snap the boards in two.
We used to do the same, retrieve used computers from dumpsters... Some were just old but fully working, some were faulty but had usable components etc...
North korean people are starving partly because of the years of economic sanctions placed upon them.
Let's not forget that Ukraine also gave up their nukes, and Russia promised to protect them... Look what happened there.
North Korea is a small country with a relatively weak military, who have either lost or are in the process of losing their powerful allies. As it stands, a conventional war between north and south korea would end very swiftly in defeat for the north especially if america got involved on the south's behalf and right now pretty much the only thing stopping this from happening is china, and it doesn't look like the chinese will be backing them for much longer.
On the other hand if they have nukes and are able to deliver even a small number that would make any aggressors think twice about attacking because even though north korea would still ultimately lose, there would end up being significant losses on both sides and neither the us or south korean governments would be able to justify this to their people.
The north is highly unlikely to ever strike first, because there is no way they would ever be able to hit hard enough that there wouldn't be a severe response. They might be able to blow up a few cities, but then they would have america attacking them back in full force.
Let's also consider the economic sanctions imposed on north korea, they don't hurt the regime - there are still plenty of black market channels through which kim jong un can obtain his imacs and whatever else, and the lack of open trade/communication is helping the regime keep their people away from foreign sources a propaganda. Meanwhile the negative attention and threat has caused them to spend a disproportionate amount of their budget on the military in order to defend themselves.
Yes, copyright was always supposed to be a give and take but in recent times it has become abused and distorted.
If you want to retain copyright you should be required to support your product as well as making it available to anyone willing to purchase it (for the original price or less, or companies will abuse it by increasing the price so massively that its effectively not available).
If you want to wash your hands of a product you have to relinquish copyrights and put it into the public domain, no keeping it locked up for years.
There's the problem tho, things are being tilted further and further to the end user's disadvantage... We need a fair system of give and take.
Manufacturers should provide a warranty up front which is a fixed cost or included in the price, with a fixed duration, or an ongoing service for a monthly/annual cost etc. And users should also have the documentation necessary to repair the products themselves, especially once the manufacturer has lost interest in supporting the product at all. Nothing wrong with making the two mutually exclusive (ie you can no longer claim warranty repairs after attempting repairs yourself), but options should always be available for the customer.
Products with a defined "end of life" are extremely damaging to consumers and to the environment. Old devices should be available cheaply for people with limited finances. Various old devices in a variety of fields are still extremely useful and there's often no practical reason why they couldn't continue to be used. Even if they lack the features or performance of modern equivalents, they can be repurposed or used for educational purposes which is far better than ending up in landfill.
The OS is much more reliable today, because of memory protection...
The application software likely is a lot less reliable, you just notice it less because you only have to restart the crashed application and not the whole system.
Memory protection was a thing back then too, it just required expensive highend hardware... Old unix, mainframe and vms systems from those days are probably still more stable than anything available today.
All of that pretty much comes from the x86 architecture being poorly designed, other processors (eg m68k) and the platforms using them didn't have these problems.
A lack of memory protection actually did however encourage people to write better code, i found application software on the amiga tended to be quite stable or at least application software specifically written for the amiga and not ported from another platform.
Unix however did exist in those days, it just ran on very expensive hardware compared to the home computers of the day.
Or you can use an ISP that provides a static IP...
4 years old now, but its going to be released next year by which time it will be 5 years old anyway...
There used to be many more operating systems in the early days, we've actually regressed in this regard...
Desktop computers running traditional operating systems were never suitable for typical users, they always have been geek toys... Expecting users to worry about updates, drivers, avoiding malware etc was always ridiculous and never going to work. The sooner the vast majority of non technical users have more suitable systems the better.
Do people really expect that a HP laptop bought for $400 is going to last the advertised number of hours?
Yes, because not doing so is false advertising.
We can reasonably expect a $400 laptop to be inferior to a $1500 laptop, but that doesn't necessarily mean battery life - the $1500 laptop might be a hugely over powered gaming laptop with terrible battery life.
One problem i have with most (non apple) laptops however is you usually have no guarantee of components... A given model could have several different chipsets for various things like the wireless or ethernet card and while these cards will nominally support the same specifications and have drivers for the default preinstalled os there is quite some variation between them (power usage, quality of drivers, signal strength/sensitivity, availability of drivers for other os, support for niche features like wireless monitor mode etc), and there is usually no way to tell which chipset until after you've bought it.
I recently tried to look up wifi drivers for an acer laptop, searching for the model or even serial number on the acer site listed no fewer than 6 different wireless drivers.
They are probably testing with default settings, which is exactly what they should do... These laptops are advertised in the mass market at consumers who typically won't know how to adjust settings to prolong battery life and will just use the laptop in its default state.
Claimed battery life should reflect typical use cases (and they should disclose what those use cases are), and should be based on the default settings the laptop ships with. Apple seem to manage this, why can't anyone else?
Unix (and therefore mac) has "sleep mode for applications" in the form of kill -STOP which suspends a process from executing...
Only reviewers tend to perform reviews of laptops when they are new, not after several years of use.