As others have pointed out, it is about the provisioning and maintenance. Chromebooks are essentially interchangeable. Suppose I log into one and do a ton of work, and then it gets stolen that afternoon. My data is secure since it is fully encrypted (with TPM support), and if I log into a new one in a few seconds all my bookmarks, extensions, applications, etc are up and running. And of course my files are all in the cloud. The only thing I'd lose is anything cached offline (a la html5), or the local file store if you're dumb enough to keep anything on it (it is intended just to be a place to download/view files, or download them from website A to upload them to website B).
For a more sophisticated setup provisioning just requires the admin to log in once using a special account, and then all the company's policies get automatically applied, and can be updated from a web-based dashboard.
So, a small business just needs a laptop for each employee, and one or two spares in the closet. That is, assuming they can run entirely off the cloud. For a true cloud-based company the only local infrastructure they would require is a WiFi access point, and maybe a consultant to help set it all up. Compared to the cost of backing up, virus protecting, encrypting, and provisioning replacement laptops, it is a bargain. Now, if your small business skimps on that stuff then they could do it cheaper with a bunch of consumer laptops, but then you're rolling the dice anytime somebody loses a laptop (or browses the web with outdated antivirus), and your employees will spend a lot of time tweaking their desktops any time they get a new system.
Oh, and employees can swap laptops without the risk of them getting into each other's data - the secure boot process ensures that nobody has root without you knowing about it, and individual home dirs are encrypted.
I'm not saying Chrome is without fault or limitation - clearly it isn't going to work for everybody yet - at least not 100%. However, if I were running a small business not in the IT domain, I'd probably strongly consider it. Drive down the street on the way to work and 95% of the places you pass probably don't need any software on the desktop that can't run in a web browser these days.
Yup, hypoglycemia is no joke - I help take care of somebody who is diabetic. Hospitals always error on the side of hyperglycemia as a result - it is harder for them to control sugar with everything going on so they'd rather go too high than too low.
That said, I've heard that studies have shown that tight sugar control improves hospital outcomes. That being the case I don't know why hospitals don't just put all their diabetics on insulin IV pumps. Check their sugar hourly until you get a baseline and then maybe back off on the checks. If something goes wrong you can stop the pump and the insulin will clear very quickly (IV insulin has a half-life measured in minutes I think - much faster than even a pump). If they're concerned about interruptions/etc they could use lantus/etc for baseline coverage as well and augment with an IV.
The more I've read up on pumps the more convinced I've become that we should be treating a lot more people with them. Sure, if you can get your A1C down to 6 or whatever without a pump and without hypoglycemic episodes, then why deal with the complications. However, many people have fairly poor control from oral meds and it probably is a lot better to be more aggressive. I'd also love to see continuous glucose monitoring become more popular - it would allow for more aggressive treatment and in the long term probably save a lot more than it costs...
Certainly if you are going to build a medical device that uses wireless technology you need VERY strong security controls around authentication/etc. If somebody steals your handheld controller and does a mission impossible on it I could understand that no security is perfect. On the other hand, I shouldn't be able to take apart my insulin pump and then use what I learn to remote control your insulin pump.
The wireless features are handy. The typical use cases I'm aware of are:
1. You test your sugar with a glucose monitor. You tell the monitor what you are about to eat. The monitor recommends a dose, and upon confirmation tells your pump to administer the dose.
2. You have a four year old with diabetes. You set the pump on full lockout mode so that they don't kill themselves, and then just manage their diabetes with the remote monitor. At the appropriate age you start teaching them what you're doing. You don't even have to wake them if they're sleeping to adjust things.
Never owned a pump, but I've been the the position of having to shop around for them recently...
Yeah, but in this case medical device #1 costs $5k - insulin pumps may be simple, but they are NOT cheap.
In theory the whole reason medical devices are so expensive is precisely because the vendor has to ensure that stuff like remote wireless hacks can't happen.
I've thought about what it would take to build an insulin pump. To do a cheap job probably wouldn't be very hard - a simple pump just needs a syringe with a plunger and a motor that runs at constant speed.
But, start thinking about all the "what if's". The device has to be designed so that if you shake it the syringe or whatever won't push out a few mL of insulin, and then aspirate back in some air or interstitial fluid or whatever. If you try to change the syringe without detaching it from your body it shouldn't suddenly gravity flow or whatever. If you invert the thing it can't cause any problems. If the battery starts to go too low it needs to warn the user and not do something stupid like run at the wrong rate.
Oh, and any random combination of keypresses/etc has to result in the device staying in a controlled state. Now, you can't prevent all user error like the user telling the device they just ate a cheesesteak when they skipped a meal, but you need a reasonably robust UI and never have a failure mode that results in something that doesn't make sense.
So, something like an insulin pump requires both good software engineering and good hardware engineering. Oh, and our crazy regulatory/insurance system is going to probably require a bazillion tests to show that it meets some kind of medical outcome (and not just test that when you say you output 2 units per hour you do that). Then you're going to be selling thousands of these and not millions, so the per-unit sunk cost is pretty high.
More than once during my brief hands-on I have to rotate an object to look for a clue to a puzzle, or read a document, and it's all done without going to a different screen or do anything more complex than wiggling sticks and hitting a face button. It's easy to imagine that a system like this in Oblivion or Fallout could have shaved hours off the average player's actual game-time.
Uh, now every time I pick up something I need to visualize it in 3 dimensions and then figure out if something is scrawled on the back of it? This is in a world where you can grab and lift just about everything in the game?
This is starting to sound like something out of Riven, where somehow the designers confused challenge with tedium (walk up to door, then turn around 180 degrees and click the magic pixel on some object).
So, the whole point of punishing criminals is to deter crime.
I could make a lot of money if I robbed a bank. However, most likely I'd end up in prison. So, why take the chance?
If we didn't punish bank robbers because people still rob banks, then now I have no incentive to not give it a try myself.
Now, I agree that this doesn't work perfectly, and some nutcases will be criminals no matter how little sense it makes. However, it isn't like every civilization in history invented a criminal justice system of some sort simply because they're all crazy.
Big fines pretty-much destroy the ability for somebody to live a normal life (raise kids, pay for their college, etc). However, they have little impact on the ability of somebody to be a scumbag since there a man with no dependents can easily hide assets, not own anything like a house that is easy to sieze, use exceptions in laws to allow people to pay for living expenses, and so on.
If I got hit with a $711 million fine it would ruin my life. But, if I decided to become a scumbag and just abandon my family and live a life of crime, it probably wouldn't do much but force my wife slog it out with whoever I own money to in divorce court - I'd already be resigned to not getting a penny so it would just be pure entertainment for me.
In fact, these kinds of punishments actually give people perverse incentives to become criminals, just like the tendency of companies to not hire ex-cons.
Aside from software issues, one of the major issues the suppliers had was trying to be too helpful; every hospital will insist they are somehow unique and by pandering to every possible requirement the scope of the software build simply exploded.
Vendors do this all the time - since usually it is in their interests to do so. Most contracts are time-and-materials, so the more you shoot yourself in the foot, the more money the vendor makes.
Why would an analyst for the vendor fight some bigwig doctor over the feature they want which will add six months and six million dollars to the project? First, they tick off a stakeholder who is used to getting what they want. Second, they make six million dollars less. Third, they make the project get six months closer to the day when they all lose their jobs. Finally, if the project never gets done nobody will ever be able to prove that the vendor couldn't have done it in the first place.
If you're a contractor paid by the hour, the best thing you can do is accept every scope change you can - the more disastrous the better. The only people who will complain are the twits in IT who actually are supposed to deliver the project on time, but you can usually convince the users of the system to use their clout to override the IT objections.
It is called groupthink. Put a bunch of people in a room, and have them talk only to each other 99% of the time, occasionally tossing in the odd conversation with some fanboy somewhere. They end up coming up with something that just makes everybody else scratch their heads.
I've seen it at work, or with the shuttle disasters, or the odd Hollywood bomb, or whatever.
FOSS tends to be more immune with larger projects, EXCEPT when there is a subclass of developers who get paid. If you have 100 developers who are volunteers working an hour or two per week, and 10 developers who are paid who work 40 hours per week in close proximity under a single person's authority, you can imagine how the project tends to go.
I doubt anybody is getting paid off. Some successfully FOSS projects have turned into small businesses, since they have the cash now to do it, and most small business fail. Sometimes the best way to kill a project is to give them a little bit of money and success...
Yup. I see the same thing in the corporate world - everybody keeps talking about how will IT handle the tablet revolution and all that.
I can see the appeal of tablets in the home, if you're the sort that spends 90% of your time on the web reading/viewing stuff, 8% of your time entering replies of "me too!," and 2% of your time actually posting something that is longer than a sentence.
I can see the appeal of tablets to managers in the corporate world, if they're the sort that spends 90% of their time reading emails and looking at presentations, 8% of their time entering replies of "yes" or "no," and 2% of their time actually typing something longer than a sentence.
The problem is that people get lost with how useful tablets are for those functions, and forget that for the average person who needs to actually CREATE something they often aren't well-suited to the job. Now, I'll grant that there are isolated cases where they do a better job than desktops, and for those uses I'm all for deploying them. However, if an employee crunches spreadsheets all day, or edits 14 page documents, then a tablet is seriously going to lower their productivity.
People get too focused on the "Wow!" factor and lose sight of the whole reason they're using a computer in the first place. People also get too focused on something that works well in one context, and they don't evaluate whether it really works in another.
Uh, Gentoo pretty-much lets you mix and match anything unless there is a true dependency.
However, I'm sure that eventually gnome 2 will be dropped from portage, at which time you're on your own (I'm sure somebody will set up an overlay but maintenance will become an issue).
Unless a bunch of people are willing to fork gnome 2 eventually security holes and incompatibilities are going to make it unusable.
Agreed. I used to be a kde 3.5 fan, and moved to xfce when it was deprecated on my distro. At the time my CPU/RAM was a bit dated and I found that my computer churned just making the UI work - which is just silly.
Now I'm on a quad-core with 8GB of RAM, and I'm still running xfce. I occasionally think about switching back, but then I keep thinking, why? I can only think of a few KDE features that I miss - the smb:// and fish:// URLs in konqueror/etc being the biggest. I'm sure if I looked hard I could find something like this. I also wouldn't be surprised if they "just worked" if I installed konqueror and ran it under xfce - k3b and a few other apps work fine without the whole DE running. This way, when I'm not running those apps I don't have a bazillion shared objects in RAM and a ton of processes chewing up CPU. Plus when I get those "might need to reboot/etc since you upgraded dbus notices" I just smile since it never impacts me.
Xfce gives me a menu (which I almost never use), the ability to hit Alt-F2, a taskbar, a few shortcut icons (configurable), virtual desktops, a clock, and a system tray / notification area. What am I even missing?
Yup, although you could argument that if somebody came up with a new sequence/protein (not a simple derivative of something that exists) then that should be patentable.
However, with the modern pace of innovation I'm supportive of shorter patents across the board...
Actually, believe it or not it is based on Gentoo - at least the package management aspects are. The end-user experience is pretty appliance-ish.
One thing going for Chrome is the fact that it uses secure boot, so that greatly limits attack vectors, and if you do manage to get temporary control the next OS upgrade is going to fix that, unless you manage to somehow block those (and that will be even harder to do without tripping the signature checks). And, it is pretty trivial to re-image in the absolute worst case (push a button and insert a USB drive - re-provisioning takes 2 minutes and your settings/apps get completely restored on first login). There is an app you can download to make the rescue drive, and Google is looking to make it possible to create it from chrome.
On the other hand if you can root a phone chances are you'll be able to root chrome - nothing is perfect. However, compared to the typical general-purpose OS it is fairly secure.
Yup. Half the problem with recidivism is that ex-convicts have few legitimate careers available to them.
If you're a manager, and you have 50 resumes for one job opening, and 3 are from ex-cons, what is the chance that you'll even look at those resumes? Maybe if none of the other 47 are a fit, you might. However, in most economies there tend to be more qualified applicants than positions. For the person without a record that might getting rejected for 4 positions, but eventually luck will work out and an offer will come. For an ex-con, their experience will superficially look the same, but the offer will just never come.
Instead they end up being limited to very undesirable jobs, which tend to pay poorly. If the ex-con is very intelligent or determined, they may find that for them the risk/reward trade-off leads them to more lucrative, but illegal, opportunities.
My feeling is that if somebody can't safely be a part of society, then they shouldn't be a part of society. If they can be, then we're just shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't make that work out.
So, my point was that in a browser that doesn't do all those things that any browser can do, I can at least use a flash blocker to accomplish the same thing.
Of course html5 should make it easier for the browser to block audio. The problem is that none of them really do.
Now, imagine that you have a refinery that cost a billion dollars to build. It costs $100M to operate annually, and you make $150M in sales on the product. That is $50M in profit, and your margin is 50%. However, the overhead is the fact that you need to own a billion dollar refinery in the first place to make that money. If you took that billion dollars and invested it in treasury bills you'd make around $35M in profit and your money (by most standards) would be very secure compared to a refinery that can burn down or break down at any time.
On the other hand, the costs usually include interest and depreciation which does reflect some of this already (but not opportunity cost).
The bottom line is that there are a lot of "profitable" things that just aren't worth doing.
How much of it is taken by the first guy to trade a futures option? How much of it is taken by the second guy to trade a futures option? How much of it is taken by the third guy to trade a futures option?.... How much of it is taken by the hundredth guy to trade a futures option?
Notice how the price of gas crashed after the economic meltdown. My theory is that all those hedge fund managers were too busy trying to pay out all their CDS's/etc and they didn't have cash to keep buying oil futures.
Ever drive on a highway that is normally bumper-to-bumper traffic on some day when schools are closed but nobody else is? Often the traffic moves MUCH faster, even though maybe only a few percent of the cars are off the road. And, when the demand for electricity only exceeded supply by a modest amount in California the markets went nuts years back (yes, I know this was engineered, but the fact that it was possible to engineer illustrates my point). There are a lot of systems where there is a natural capacity and once you go over it by just a tiny amount the system responds dramatically. I think that oil prices are one of them, since demand isn't very elastic and a LOT of people trade these futures.
Yup, media industry has a HUGE amount of power. Far disproportionate to their actual earnings, since they influence how the masses think. They pay everybody from singers to actors to newscasters.
Hey, my force-feedback Joystick for MS FS still plugs into the game port.:) Good thing the motherboard still had PCI the last time I replaced it.
Yup, one of these days I'll probably have to replace it with a USB. Mixed feelings - the newer joysticks work a whole lot better, but they won't cost $15 on clearance the way my current one did.
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Yup, measurement is definitely the safer place to start - especially with non-invasive gear.
If somebody ever creates a closed loop sugar measurement / insulin pump system it probably would wipe out half of the world's healthcare spending...
As others have pointed out, it is about the provisioning and maintenance. Chromebooks are essentially interchangeable. Suppose I log into one and do a ton of work, and then it gets stolen that afternoon. My data is secure since it is fully encrypted (with TPM support), and if I log into a new one in a few seconds all my bookmarks, extensions, applications, etc are up and running. And of course my files are all in the cloud. The only thing I'd lose is anything cached offline (a la html5), or the local file store if you're dumb enough to keep anything on it (it is intended just to be a place to download/view files, or download them from website A to upload them to website B).
For a more sophisticated setup provisioning just requires the admin to log in once using a special account, and then all the company's policies get automatically applied, and can be updated from a web-based dashboard.
So, a small business just needs a laptop for each employee, and one or two spares in the closet. That is, assuming they can run entirely off the cloud. For a true cloud-based company the only local infrastructure they would require is a WiFi access point, and maybe a consultant to help set it all up. Compared to the cost of backing up, virus protecting, encrypting, and provisioning replacement laptops, it is a bargain. Now, if your small business skimps on that stuff then they could do it cheaper with a bunch of consumer laptops, but then you're rolling the dice anytime somebody loses a laptop (or browses the web with outdated antivirus), and your employees will spend a lot of time tweaking their desktops any time they get a new system.
Oh, and employees can swap laptops without the risk of them getting into each other's data - the secure boot process ensures that nobody has root without you knowing about it, and individual home dirs are encrypted.
I'm not saying Chrome is without fault or limitation - clearly it isn't going to work for everybody yet - at least not 100%. However, if I were running a small business not in the IT domain, I'd probably strongly consider it. Drive down the street on the way to work and 95% of the places you pass probably don't need any software on the desktop that can't run in a web browser these days.
Yup, hypoglycemia is no joke - I help take care of somebody who is diabetic. Hospitals always error on the side of hyperglycemia as a result - it is harder for them to control sugar with everything going on so they'd rather go too high than too low.
That said, I've heard that studies have shown that tight sugar control improves hospital outcomes. That being the case I don't know why hospitals don't just put all their diabetics on insulin IV pumps. Check their sugar hourly until you get a baseline and then maybe back off on the checks. If something goes wrong you can stop the pump and the insulin will clear very quickly (IV insulin has a half-life measured in minutes I think - much faster than even a pump). If they're concerned about interruptions/etc they could use lantus/etc for baseline coverage as well and augment with an IV.
The more I've read up on pumps the more convinced I've become that we should be treating a lot more people with them. Sure, if you can get your A1C down to 6 or whatever without a pump and without hypoglycemic episodes, then why deal with the complications. However, many people have fairly poor control from oral meds and it probably is a lot better to be more aggressive. I'd also love to see continuous glucose monitoring become more popular - it would allow for more aggressive treatment and in the long term probably save a lot more than it costs...
Well, why would anybody kill anybody?
Certainly if you are going to build a medical device that uses wireless technology you need VERY strong security controls around authentication/etc. If somebody steals your handheld controller and does a mission impossible on it I could understand that no security is perfect. On the other hand, I shouldn't be able to take apart my insulin pump and then use what I learn to remote control your insulin pump.
The wireless features are handy. The typical use cases I'm aware of are:
1. You test your sugar with a glucose monitor. You tell the monitor what you are about to eat. The monitor recommends a dose, and upon confirmation tells your pump to administer the dose.
2. You have a four year old with diabetes. You set the pump on full lockout mode so that they don't kill themselves, and then just manage their diabetes with the remote monitor. At the appropriate age you start teaching them what you're doing. You don't even have to wake them if they're sleeping to adjust things.
Never owned a pump, but I've been the the position of having to shop around for them recently...
Yeah, but in this case medical device #1 costs $5k - insulin pumps may be simple, but they are NOT cheap.
In theory the whole reason medical devices are so expensive is precisely because the vendor has to ensure that stuff like remote wireless hacks can't happen.
I've thought about what it would take to build an insulin pump. To do a cheap job probably wouldn't be very hard - a simple pump just needs a syringe with a plunger and a motor that runs at constant speed.
But, start thinking about all the "what if's". The device has to be designed so that if you shake it the syringe or whatever won't push out a few mL of insulin, and then aspirate back in some air or interstitial fluid or whatever. If you try to change the syringe without detaching it from your body it shouldn't suddenly gravity flow or whatever. If you invert the thing it can't cause any problems. If the battery starts to go too low it needs to warn the user and not do something stupid like run at the wrong rate.
Oh, and any random combination of keypresses/etc has to result in the device staying in a controlled state. Now, you can't prevent all user error like the user telling the device they just ate a cheesesteak when they skipped a meal, but you need a reasonably robust UI and never have a failure mode that results in something that doesn't make sense.
So, something like an insulin pump requires both good software engineering and good hardware engineering. Oh, and our crazy regulatory/insurance system is going to probably require a bazillion tests to show that it meets some kind of medical outcome (and not just test that when you say you output 2 units per hour you do that). Then you're going to be selling thousands of these and not millions, so the per-unit sunk cost is pretty high.
So, I can see why it costs a fortune.
Yup, if everybody gets one free warning and the risk of prosecution is low to begin with, then there is virtually no incentive to not commit a crime.
More than once during my brief hands-on I have to rotate an object to look for a clue to a puzzle, or read a document, and it's all done without going to a different screen or do anything more complex than wiggling sticks and hitting a face button. It's easy to imagine that a system like this in Oblivion or Fallout could have shaved hours off the average player's actual game-time.
Uh, now every time I pick up something I need to visualize it in 3 dimensions and then figure out if something is scrawled on the back of it? This is in a world where you can grab and lift just about everything in the game?
This is starting to sound like something out of Riven, where somehow the designers confused challenge with tedium (walk up to door, then turn around 180 degrees and click the magic pixel on some object).
So, the whole point of punishing criminals is to deter crime.
I could make a lot of money if I robbed a bank. However, most likely I'd end up in prison. So, why take the chance?
If we didn't punish bank robbers because people still rob banks, then now I have no incentive to not give it a try myself.
Now, I agree that this doesn't work perfectly, and some nutcases will be criminals no matter how little sense it makes. However, it isn't like every civilization in history invented a criminal justice system of some sort simply because they're all crazy.
Big fines pretty-much destroy the ability for somebody to live a normal life (raise kids, pay for their college, etc). However, they have little impact on the ability of somebody to be a scumbag since there a man with no dependents can easily hide assets, not own anything like a house that is easy to sieze, use exceptions in laws to allow people to pay for living expenses, and so on.
If I got hit with a $711 million fine it would ruin my life. But, if I decided to become a scumbag and just abandon my family and live a life of crime, it probably wouldn't do much but force my wife slog it out with whoever I own money to in divorce court - I'd already be resigned to not getting a penny so it would just be pure entertainment for me.
In fact, these kinds of punishments actually give people perverse incentives to become criminals, just like the tendency of companies to not hire ex-cons.
Aside from software issues, one of the major issues the suppliers had was trying to be too helpful; every hospital will insist they are somehow unique and by pandering to every possible requirement the scope of the software build simply exploded.
Vendors do this all the time - since usually it is in their interests to do so. Most contracts are time-and-materials, so the more you shoot yourself in the foot, the more money the vendor makes.
Why would an analyst for the vendor fight some bigwig doctor over the feature they want which will add six months and six million dollars to the project? First, they tick off a stakeholder who is used to getting what they want. Second, they make six million dollars less. Third, they make the project get six months closer to the day when they all lose their jobs. Finally, if the project never gets done nobody will ever be able to prove that the vendor couldn't have done it in the first place.
If you're a contractor paid by the hour, the best thing you can do is accept every scope change you can - the more disastrous the better. The only people who will complain are the twits in IT who actually are supposed to deliver the project on time, but you can usually convince the users of the system to use their clout to override the IT objections.
It is called groupthink. Put a bunch of people in a room, and have them talk only to each other 99% of the time, occasionally tossing in the odd conversation with some fanboy somewhere. They end up coming up with something that just makes everybody else scratch their heads.
I've seen it at work, or with the shuttle disasters, or the odd Hollywood bomb, or whatever.
FOSS tends to be more immune with larger projects, EXCEPT when there is a subclass of developers who get paid. If you have 100 developers who are volunteers working an hour or two per week, and 10 developers who are paid who work 40 hours per week in close proximity under a single person's authority, you can imagine how the project tends to go.
I doubt anybody is getting paid off. Some successfully FOSS projects have turned into small businesses, since they have the cash now to do it, and most small business fail. Sometimes the best way to kill a project is to give them a little bit of money and success...
Yup, now if only he had done as much to promote world peace... :)
Yup. I see the same thing in the corporate world - everybody keeps talking about how will IT handle the tablet revolution and all that.
I can see the appeal of tablets in the home, if you're the sort that spends 90% of your time on the web reading/viewing stuff, 8% of your time entering replies of "me too!," and 2% of your time actually posting something that is longer than a sentence.
I can see the appeal of tablets to managers in the corporate world, if they're the sort that spends 90% of their time reading emails and looking at presentations, 8% of their time entering replies of "yes" or "no," and 2% of their time actually typing something longer than a sentence.
The problem is that people get lost with how useful tablets are for those functions, and forget that for the average person who needs to actually CREATE something they often aren't well-suited to the job. Now, I'll grant that there are isolated cases where they do a better job than desktops, and for those uses I'm all for deploying them. However, if an employee crunches spreadsheets all day, or edits 14 page documents, then a tablet is seriously going to lower their productivity.
People get too focused on the "Wow!" factor and lose sight of the whole reason they're using a computer in the first place. People also get too focused on something that works well in one context, and they don't evaluate whether it really works in another.
Uh, Gentoo pretty-much lets you mix and match anything unless there is a true dependency.
However, I'm sure that eventually gnome 2 will be dropped from portage, at which time you're on your own (I'm sure somebody will set up an overlay but maintenance will become an issue).
Unless a bunch of people are willing to fork gnome 2 eventually security holes and incompatibilities are going to make it unusable.
Agreed. I used to be a kde 3.5 fan, and moved to xfce when it was deprecated on my distro. At the time my CPU/RAM was a bit dated and I found that my computer churned just making the UI work - which is just silly.
Now I'm on a quad-core with 8GB of RAM, and I'm still running xfce. I occasionally think about switching back, but then I keep thinking, why? I can only think of a few KDE features that I miss - the smb:// and fish:// URLs in konqueror/etc being the biggest. I'm sure if I looked hard I could find something like this. I also wouldn't be surprised if they "just worked" if I installed konqueror and ran it under xfce - k3b and a few other apps work fine without the whole DE running. This way, when I'm not running those apps I don't have a bazillion shared objects in RAM and a ton of processes chewing up CPU. Plus when I get those "might need to reboot/etc since you upgraded dbus notices" I just smile since it never impacts me.
Xfce gives me a menu (which I almost never use), the ability to hit Alt-F2, a taskbar, a few shortcut icons (configurable), virtual desktops, a clock, and a system tray / notification area. What am I even missing?
Yup, although you could argument that if somebody came up with a new sequence/protein (not a simple derivative of something that exists) then that should be patentable.
However, with the modern pace of innovation I'm supportive of shorter patents across the board...
Yup, if you want to survive WWIII your bomb shelter is only going to be as useful as its defensibility.
Actually, believe it or not it is based on Gentoo - at least the package management aspects are. The end-user experience is pretty appliance-ish.
One thing going for Chrome is the fact that it uses secure boot, so that greatly limits attack vectors, and if you do manage to get temporary control the next OS upgrade is going to fix that, unless you manage to somehow block those (and that will be even harder to do without tripping the signature checks). And, it is pretty trivial to re-image in the absolute worst case (push a button and insert a USB drive - re-provisioning takes 2 minutes and your settings/apps get completely restored on first login). There is an app you can download to make the rescue drive, and Google is looking to make it possible to create it from chrome.
On the other hand if you can root a phone chances are you'll be able to root chrome - nothing is perfect. However, compared to the typical general-purpose OS it is fairly secure.
Yup. Half the problem with recidivism is that ex-convicts have few legitimate careers available to them.
If you're a manager, and you have 50 resumes for one job opening, and 3 are from ex-cons, what is the chance that you'll even look at those resumes? Maybe if none of the other 47 are a fit, you might. However, in most economies there tend to be more qualified applicants than positions. For the person without a record that might getting rejected for 4 positions, but eventually luck will work out and an offer will come. For an ex-con, their experience will superficially look the same, but the offer will just never come.
Instead they end up being limited to very undesirable jobs, which tend to pay poorly. If the ex-con is very intelligent or determined, they may find that for them the risk/reward trade-off leads them to more lucrative, but illegal, opportunities.
My feeling is that if somebody can't safely be a part of society, then they shouldn't be a part of society. If they can be, then we're just shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't make that work out.
So, my point was that in a browser that doesn't do all those things that any browser can do, I can at least use a flash blocker to accomplish the same thing.
Of course html5 should make it easier for the browser to block audio. The problem is that none of them really do.
With force-feedback?
Yup, I'm not sure the word overhead is right.
Now, imagine that you have a refinery that cost a billion dollars to build. It costs $100M to operate annually, and you make $150M in sales on the product. That is $50M in profit, and your margin is 50%. However, the overhead is the fact that you need to own a billion dollar refinery in the first place to make that money. If you took that billion dollars and invested it in treasury bills you'd make around $35M in profit and your money (by most standards) would be very secure compared to a refinery that can burn down or break down at any time.
On the other hand, the costs usually include interest and depreciation which does reflect some of this already (but not opportunity cost).
The bottom line is that there are a lot of "profitable" things that just aren't worth doing.
Uh, and don't forget:
How much of it is taken by the first guy to trade a futures option? ....
How much of it is taken by the second guy to trade a futures option?
How much of it is taken by the third guy to trade a futures option?
How much of it is taken by the hundredth guy to trade a futures option?
Notice how the price of gas crashed after the economic meltdown. My theory is that all those hedge fund managers were too busy trying to pay out all their CDS's/etc and they didn't have cash to keep buying oil futures.
Ever drive on a highway that is normally bumper-to-bumper traffic on some day when schools are closed but nobody else is? Often the traffic moves MUCH faster, even though maybe only a few percent of the cars are off the road. And, when the demand for electricity only exceeded supply by a modest amount in California the markets went nuts years back (yes, I know this was engineered, but the fact that it was possible to engineer illustrates my point). There are a lot of systems where there is a natural capacity and once you go over it by just a tiny amount the system responds dramatically. I think that oil prices are one of them, since demand isn't very elastic and a LOT of people trade these futures.
Yup, media industry has a HUGE amount of power. Far disproportionate to their actual earnings, since they influence how the masses think. They pay everybody from singers to actors to newscasters.
Maybe if Google starts a movie/music studio...
Hey, my force-feedback Joystick for MS FS still plugs into the game port. :) Good thing the motherboard still had PCI the last time I replaced it.
Yup, one of these days I'll probably have to replace it with a USB. Mixed feelings - the newer joysticks work a whole lot better, but they won't cost $15 on clearance the way my current one did.