Maybe they even did some kind of study that showed that 75% of the people never used more than one port at a time and that 90% of the time people didn’t connect anything to the USB port (I made those numbers up, but chances are so did some product manager who earned a bonus if they cranked up the margin by a few percent).
Tim Cook once said on stage something to that effect - an internal study produced results similar to the ones you made up.
The Macbook and Air were responses to that study.
My original plan was to get a Thunderbolt dock, since I typically need all of the ports, or just one, and whether I’m home or not is usually the biggest determinator of which mode I’m in.
Dell monitors can’t be counted on to be VESA compliant, especially in the IPS line - the thin-and-light Dells use proprietary mounts, and don’t give you enough room to get bulky plugs into the video jacks, thanks to a “chin” - and if you do get your Displayport to VGA cable in place, you’re never getting it off again.
My monitor is a Dell S2240M. If you need a similar low-bezel model (I use this because most other monitors won’t fit my desk) I recommend the S2240L - the L model uses HDMI, whereas the M uses DVI, and doesn’t give you enough room for a typical DVI cable to plug in. As a result, my DVI port is constantly flexed, and I’m just waiting for this thing to finally let go.
OSX - the only place I can get a UNIX command line, Microsoft Office (or better) - Google Docs might count, if it worked offline, but it doesn’t - and a really good bulk-renaming utility. Printing being less of a pain in the dick (my, how the tables turn!) is just gravy at this point.
Backup software - Time Machine makes restoring from backup painless. The one time I’ve had OSX shit itself since I bought my first Mac, I spent ten minutes doing diagnostics, and then I shrugged and spent an hour reinstalling and restoring from backup. I lost nothing, except the time spent not fucking around on Digg (this was a while ago) and the blood pressure spike associated with looking for troubleshooting information on Google.
Service Contracts - Apple is the only place mere mortals can buy corporate service contracts. I’ve gotten more free MacBooks than ones I’ve paid for, thanks to that GeForce 8600 thermal pad issue. I cracked the die on four 2007 MacbooksPro because of Team Fortress 2. The final effect was to get me issued a 2009 Macbook Pro. When my router - a Macbook accessory - dies, I call and a new one is overnighted to me. And one time I emailed Steve Jobs, and his secretary called me back two days later. It helps that I had reasonable demands and discovered a real problem in their router firmware, (which impacted their rollout of iCloud) but there’s a good goddamn reason that Apple scores in the vicinity of 90% satisfaction ratings with their customer service department, and their closest competition were fighting each other over the mid–60s second place rating. The third reason I go with Apple is, without exaggerating, I know they’ve got my back when something goes south.
I know more people working 40+ hours / week who earn below the poverty line than those living off of "government cheese" by a... huh - a 1:0 margin.
okay, it's more like a 7:0 margin, but that's bad statistics. Also, it's limited by the fact that I only know so many people. (:/ ) That said, there's more people getting screwed than living on the public tit by a 100% margin.
I am going on record that this happened to me during my freshman introduction in college:
While explaining the school’s policy on consent, you needed explicit verbal permission to add any further intimacy to a sex act - and not “ooh yeah!”, you were expected to get your partner to say “Yes, Jeremy, you can take my bra off.” Any less, and you were at risk of being arrested by the campus police - yes, they had power of arrest - for sexual assault.
Further, the female could retroactively revoke consent.
Let me repeat that for emphasis - the female could retroactively revoke consent.
If she thought she had any grounds for feeling pressured, or she’d been drinking, or any circumstantial justification for not being at 100% at the time, she could have revoked consent retroactively, and set the campus cops on you, and congratulations - how’s it feel to be a rapist?
Yes, I am angry and bitter about the double standard during my formative years. And this was in the early oughties, so not far removed from now.
Today, terrorists and criminals are increasingly using encryption to foil law enforcement efforts, even in the face of a court order. We need strong encryption to protect personal data, but we also need to know when terrorists are plotting to kill Americans.”
I switched from X10 to a combination of Zigbee and Z-Wave (with a long period of “nothing” in the middle) because of X10’s poltergeists waking people up with lights and radios no less than 20 times in a week. Any WAF it had - and it had accrued quite a head of steam by that point - died an ugly death.
Fortunately, Zigbee and Z-Wave are open standards; if I want to, I can kick together a home automation hub out of a Raspberry Pi and keep using everything I own except the wi-fi power strip (which was free, so I can only bring myself to care so much) and Quirky’s prototype garage-door sensor. (It’s a solid product - shame they went belly-up.)
I’m irked that I mistook a Lutron dimmer for Z-wave; Caseta wireless may be Homekit-enabled, but it’s expensive and proprietary to Lutron. It has its own remote, however, and that’s the only way it gets used, so no big loss.
I had a big X10 investment, and had just bought a bunch of in-wall switches, but there was no combination of housecode and device range that didn’t get trampled by somebody else nearby, or someone’s (electrically) noisy blender (commutated motors and universal (AC/DC) motors are renowned for the amount of electrical noise they produce) or smart meters, or whatever. It never got better, and when I tried to use them again five years later, the poltergeisting started again within three hours.
Z-wave, by comparison, has been bulletproof, and my only regret was that I went with that one Lutron module instead of a similar Z-wave box.
First, I don’t think you’re familiar with the way secure cryptosystems are designed to operate. They simply don’t work unless they’re configured into a fail-deadly state.
No, what they’re protecting against with this approach to repair is okay, they’re protecting you against several attacks. The first and most likely is phone theft. An AppleID locked phone is stolen. Someone takes it to a launderer, who opens the phone and swaps the TouchID cable over to a special device that spoofs the TouchID to the secure enclave. It sends the all-clear, and the secure enclave unlocks the phone. This lets you jailbreak, which lets you bypass the rest of the phone’s security, turn off Find My iPhone, and wipe the device to factory new (un-jailbreaking in the process, and hiding the evidence of the theft). They put the TouchID cable back, screw the display back in place, and have just unbricked your phone. Smartphone thefts were so rampant before activation lock that a noun was coined to describe it - “Apple picking.”
Second, there’s identity theft and fraud. Steal the phone of someone, and use it to crowbar your way into their bank accounts and credit cards.
Third, there’s industrial espionage - steal the phone belonging to someone who works at the company you’re targeting, and steal their VPN credentials before they can report their phone missing.
Fourth, there’s nation-state attacks - think of people like Bashar al’Assad, and how he might like to get into dissidents’ phones, and since “dissident” is described as “anybody not in the army” and dissidents are all fair game for assassination or airstrikes, well Finding out where people live would be a priority for him.
You don’t need to give them their phone back once you have a malicious TouchID or spoofing device - you’ve already got the keys to the kingdom.
That the cryptosystem only checks for compromise at OS update and not at boot is bad - it lets people think their phones are actually fixed when they’re not, and it lets devices go compromised for quite a while if someone does have a malicious TouchID sensor, which do exist - many third-party knockoff TouchIDs just sent the same fingerprint image that was stored in ROM every time they were touched, so as to fool the user into thinking that TouchID was working. On the other hand, anybody else could stick their dick on the sensor, and it’d say that it was definitely your thumbprint.
Chemical castration has a distressing way of becoming permanent in a non-deterministic way. IE, sometimes you stop the pills/injections/implants/spice, and your endocrine system doesn't restart. Bodybuilders use a drug - nandralone? Fuck it's gone from late to early - to kick their system back into functioning after a while on the steroids, but it's not all that reliable, not all that legal, not all that available, and generally unpleasant. If you're going to castrate your kids, it's best to do it before puberty. That way, they don't suffer withdrawal effects, DNA methylation and acetylation patterns won't change to become dependent on sex hormones, and will tend to live 12 years longer than their un-neutered classmates.
Science, bitches! You'd be fucking amazed what it'll justify if misused, and I haven't even said anything that's technically incorrect.
Case in point: statistics inform me, dear reader, that you're probably 10+ pounds over your ideal weight. As a/. reader, you probably consider yourself to be above-average motivated, etc, but I'll bet you're (still) planning to get rid of the weight, and how's that working out? Now, if you suddenly couldn't get any kind of sex whenever you're 3+ lbs. over your ideal weight, how long would it take you to get and stay skinny?
As someone who cut classes to take his sister to doctors' appointments, who is still looking for technical jobs at 5:10 in the morning, please do me a favor and get fucked. Sure, I could lose some around the middle, but all the motivation in the world won't get me a gym membership, and if I run until I drop, I still won't lose any weight - it takes anaerobic exercise to build muscle and increase your BMR. If I couldn't get laid until I was within sneezing distance of my ideal weight, nothing would change.
Maybe I'm just bitter and angry and spent ten years studying shit for no reason, but I spent ten years learning to do the stuff that was going to be in demand until the 2008 recession scuttled the expansion plans of all the biotechs I was aiming to play against each other, and if you spend four years in college, nobody calls you back for the "Would you like fries with that?" industry, because they know (rightly) that you'll bail at the first opportunity, so frankly, I'd be pleased as fucking punch if I could get someone to pay me while I found someone who needs a rare and specialized skillset to do Real Interesting Fucking Things to push the world onto a path with less human suffering.
Yeah - bitter, angry, and I'd like to look forward to getting out of bed, rather than checking for calls back I never get.
I, for one, am grossly underemployed. NPR reported that african-american youth unemployment was over 50%. Full employment looks like that?
And second, while it makes workers more productive, who are the workers? These days, it's those who can write code. The computer-illiterate, smartphone-holdout, and people who don't get internet access at home are by definition not "workers" in the knowledge economy. Sure, they might perform essential tasks, but until self-improving AI is a thing, it's hard to call any industry a growth industry. Machine learning and computer vision are going to make more and more easily automatable.
What's different this time is that automation is hitting huge swaths of the market simultaneously. Sure, while technology makes workers more productive, and goods and services cheaper in terms of human labor, it also does displace human labor. Given that it can take ten years to train for a job that gets replaced in a year of coding, we come to the limiting factor: Shit changes faster than we can be trained to deal with it. If you have labor to exchange, you're golden. If you don't, where are you going to find a few millibitcoins to exchange for the right to sleep in a 3d-printed hotel room for a night?
Can you find something you can do that's worth paying you minimum wage? If not, can you live sustainably on less than minimum wage? (Emphasis on sustainably - your diet can't cause diabetus, malnutrition, micronutrient starvation, or obesity, for example, and your dwelling has to be secure enough that what you can't carry on your person at all times will be there when you need it.)
Except some of them do produce a waveform where a line should be, and it's good to know which ones - you don't want to run that into a cell phone you like.
Well, if we stick with the assumption that garden worlds - places where ecosystems evolve naturally - are somewhat scarce, but that it's easy to build places people like to live (but are ultimately designed places), having FTL, a Dyson sphere, and seeding those precious garden worlds so that they develop new ecosystems (us) is internally consistent.
This isn't even close implying my suggestion is correct, just that it's possible to produce an internally consistent narrative explaining such behavior to refute claims of impossibility.
If they seeded our planet with life using FTL drives, the light of their civilization's dawn could just be reaching us now. If we accept the given of rare garden worlds, and cosmic gardening, the odds of seeing this are actually quite good.
If we're strip-mining Jupiter, that's peanuts. Why Jupiter? We might want some fusion reactors for localized or pulsed power, or rocket fuel, and solar panels are lousy at providing both.
If it was a problem with women in particular, I suspect that we'd see homosexual relationships at two to three times the biological rate, as every bisexual person looking for a relationship went for one with less friction. This sounds a lot like something we can test with Science!
H(null): We will see no increase in homosexual relationships close to the size of the bisexual demographic: People just don't want to deal with having a relationship due to, in spite of, or concurrent with shitty prospects, too much stress, and a corporate culture that's toxic to starting a family.
H(1): Homosexual relationships will expand to everyone who isn't constitutionally opposed to faggotry. We will likely see a tripling of homosexual relationships compared to our control group, representing the entire homosexual and bisexual demographics fleeing a toxic heterosexuality.
H(2): If we see some intermediate effect not trivially explained, we should investigate to see whether cultural condemnation of faggotry is intense enough to dissuade anyone who could have an emotionally fulfilling relationship with another of the same sex - cultural confounding effects or a mixture of motivations are likely results, but it is impossible to accurately predict which, precisely, at this point.
It's not like BattleBots is ever going to stop being popular - we just had someone challenge a Japanese mecha-building firm to a goddamn duel on an aircraft carrier. I'm not sure which is more sci-fi - the thing the last guy said, or the New York Times.
On the contrary, Z-Wave is more fiddly, but plenty hackable and durable. And given that there are controller apps you can run on a Raspberry Pi, you should have no problem with rolling your own network or sensors.
And on the flip side, I don't have the luxury of going into the main breaker panel and installing a choke and a household surge suppressor and niceties like that. I don't doubt I could get it to work if I had large stacks of cash to burn on it, but for reliably automating a few lights, and remotely controlling a radio, it's hard to do better than my X-10 system.
Slashdot Mirror
Tim Cook once said on stage something to that effect - an internal study produced results similar to the ones you made up.
The Macbook and Air were responses to that study.
My original plan was to get a Thunderbolt dock, since I typically need all of the ports, or just one, and whether I’m home or not is usually the biggest determinator of which mode I’m in.
Dell monitors can’t be counted on to be VESA compliant, especially in the IPS line - the thin-and-light Dells use proprietary mounts, and don’t give you enough room to get bulky plugs into the video jacks, thanks to a “chin” - and if you do get your Displayport to VGA cable in place, you’re never getting it off again.
My monitor is a Dell S2240M. If you need a similar low-bezel model (I use this because most other monitors won’t fit my desk) I recommend the S2240L - the L model uses HDMI, whereas the M uses DVI, and doesn’t give you enough room for a typical DVI cable to plug in. As a result, my DVI port is constantly flexed, and I’m just waiting for this thing to finally let go.
The screen resolution is explicitly 1080p - not crap, but about "minimum viable laptop".
I, for one, buy Macs because of:
My net worth for some mod points... But I guess I can't get something for nothing.
I know more people working 40+ hours / week who earn below the poverty line than those living off of "government cheese" by a ... huh - a 1:0 margin.
:/ ) That said, there's more people getting screwed than living on the public tit by a 100% margin.
okay, it's more like a 7:0 margin, but that's bad statistics. Also, it's limited by the fact that I only know so many people. (
I am going on record that this happened to me during my freshman introduction in college:
While explaining the school’s policy on consent, you needed explicit verbal permission to add any further intimacy to a sex act - and not “ooh yeah!”, you were expected to get your partner to say “Yes, Jeremy, you can take my bra off.” Any less, and you were at risk of being arrested by the campus police - yes, they had power of arrest - for sexual assault.
Further, the female could retroactively revoke consent.
Let me repeat that for emphasis - the female could retroactively revoke consent.
If she thought she had any grounds for feeling pressured, or she’d been drinking, or any circumstantial justification for not being at 100% at the time, she could have revoked consent retroactively, and set the campus cops on you, and congratulations - how’s it feel to be a rapist?
Yes, I am angry and bitter about the double standard during my formative years. And this was in the early oughties, so not far removed from now.
I hate to say it, but they make my ears hurt, too. On the other hand, they actually work...
We do - but we cannot have both.
Choose wisely.
On /.
I switched from X10 to a combination of Zigbee and Z-Wave (with a long period of “nothing” in the middle) because of X10’s poltergeists waking people up with lights and radios no less than 20 times in a week. Any WAF it had - and it had accrued quite a head of steam by that point - died an ugly death.
Fortunately, Zigbee and Z-Wave are open standards; if I want to, I can kick together a home automation hub out of a Raspberry Pi and keep using everything I own except the wi-fi power strip (which was free, so I can only bring myself to care so much) and Quirky’s prototype garage-door sensor. (It’s a solid product - shame they went belly-up.)
I’m irked that I mistook a Lutron dimmer for Z-wave; Caseta wireless may be Homekit-enabled, but it’s expensive and proprietary to Lutron. It has its own remote, however, and that’s the only way it gets used, so no big loss.
I had a big X10 investment, and had just bought a bunch of in-wall switches, but there was no combination of housecode and device range that didn’t get trampled by somebody else nearby, or someone’s (electrically) noisy blender (commutated motors and universal (AC/DC) motors are renowned for the amount of electrical noise they produce) or smart meters, or whatever. It never got better, and when I tried to use them again five years later, the poltergeisting started again within three hours.
Z-wave, by comparison, has been bulletproof, and my only regret was that I went with that one Lutron module instead of a similar Z-wave box.
First, I don’t think you’re familiar with the way secure cryptosystems are designed to operate. They simply don’t work unless they’re configured into a fail-deadly state.
No, what they’re protecting against with this approach to repair is okay, they’re protecting you against several attacks. The first and most likely is phone theft. An AppleID locked phone is stolen. Someone takes it to a launderer, who opens the phone and swaps the TouchID cable over to a special device that spoofs the TouchID to the secure enclave. It sends the all-clear, and the secure enclave unlocks the phone. This lets you jailbreak, which lets you bypass the rest of the phone’s security, turn off Find My iPhone, and wipe the device to factory new (un-jailbreaking in the process, and hiding the evidence of the theft). They put the TouchID cable back, screw the display back in place, and have just unbricked your phone. Smartphone thefts were so rampant before activation lock that a noun was coined to describe it - “Apple picking.”
Second, there’s identity theft and fraud. Steal the phone of someone, and use it to crowbar your way into their bank accounts and credit cards.
Third, there’s industrial espionage - steal the phone belonging to someone who works at the company you’re targeting, and steal their VPN credentials before they can report their phone missing.
Fourth, there’s nation-state attacks - think of people like Bashar al’Assad, and how he might like to get into dissidents’ phones, and since “dissident” is described as “anybody not in the army” and dissidents are all fair game for assassination or airstrikes, well Finding out where people live would be a priority for him.
You don’t need to give them their phone back once you have a malicious TouchID or spoofing device - you’ve already got the keys to the kingdom.
That the cryptosystem only checks for compromise at OS update and not at boot is bad - it lets people think their phones are actually fixed when they’re not, and it lets devices go compromised for quite a while if someone does have a malicious TouchID sensor, which do exist - many third-party knockoff TouchIDs just sent the same fingerprint image that was stored in ROM every time they were touched, so as to fool the user into thinking that TouchID was working. On the other hand, anybody else could stick their dick on the sensor, and it’d say that it was definitely your thumbprint.
So yes, actually, that thing you blew off as:
is exactly how things work these days.
Welcome to the future, cyberpunk.
If they're using SQRL, then I don't have any new security concerns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl....
Keep your phone secure, and the authentication scheme is really hard to break.
A bored, intoxicated biologist says:
Chemical castration has a distressing way of becoming permanent in a non-deterministic way. IE, sometimes you stop the pills/injections/implants/spice, and your endocrine system doesn't restart. Bodybuilders use a drug - nandralone? Fuck it's gone from late to early - to kick their system back into functioning after a while on the steroids, but it's not all that reliable, not all that legal, not all that available, and generally unpleasant. If you're going to castrate your kids, it's best to do it before puberty. That way, they don't suffer withdrawal effects, DNA methylation and acetylation patterns won't change to become dependent on sex hormones, and will tend to live 12 years longer than their un-neutered classmates.
Science, bitches! You'd be fucking amazed what it'll justify if misused, and I haven't even said anything that's technically incorrect.
As someone who cut classes to take his sister to doctors' appointments, who is still looking for technical jobs at 5:10 in the morning, please do me a favor and get fucked. Sure, I could lose some around the middle, but all the motivation in the world won't get me a gym membership, and if I run until I drop, I still won't lose any weight - it takes anaerobic exercise to build muscle and increase your BMR. If I couldn't get laid until I was within sneezing distance of my ideal weight, nothing would change.
Maybe I'm just bitter and angry and spent ten years studying shit for no reason, but I spent ten years learning to do the stuff that was going to be in demand until the 2008 recession scuttled the expansion plans of all the biotechs I was aiming to play against each other, and if you spend four years in college, nobody calls you back for the "Would you like fries with that?" industry, because they know (rightly) that you'll bail at the first opportunity, so frankly, I'd be pleased as fucking punch if I could get someone to pay me while I found someone who needs a rare and specialized skillset to do Real Interesting Fucking Things to push the world onto a path with less human suffering.
Yeah - bitter, angry, and I'd like to look forward to getting out of bed, rather than checking for calls back I never get.
I, for one, am grossly underemployed. NPR reported that african-american youth unemployment was over 50%. Full employment looks like that?
And second, while it makes workers more productive, who are the workers? These days, it's those who can write code. The computer-illiterate, smartphone-holdout, and people who don't get internet access at home are by definition not "workers" in the knowledge economy. Sure, they might perform essential tasks, but until self-improving AI is a thing, it's hard to call any industry a growth industry. Machine learning and computer vision are going to make more and more easily automatable.
What's different this time is that automation is hitting huge swaths of the market simultaneously. Sure, while technology makes workers more productive, and goods and services cheaper in terms of human labor, it also does displace human labor. Given that it can take ten years to train for a job that gets replaced in a year of coding, we come to the limiting factor: Shit changes faster than we can be trained to deal with it. If you have labor to exchange, you're golden. If you don't, where are you going to find a few millibitcoins to exchange for the right to sleep in a 3d-printed hotel room for a night?
Can you find something you can do that's worth paying you minimum wage? If not, can you live sustainably on less than minimum wage? (Emphasis on sustainably - your diet can't cause diabetus, malnutrition, micronutrient starvation, or obesity, for example, and your dwelling has to be secure enough that what you can't carry on your person at all times will be there when you need it.)
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/...
Except some of them do produce a waveform where a line should be, and it's good to know which ones - you don't want to run that into a cell phone you like.
Well, if we stick with the assumption that garden worlds - places where ecosystems evolve naturally - are somewhat scarce, but that it's easy to build places people like to live (but are ultimately designed places), having FTL, a Dyson sphere, and seeding those precious garden worlds so that they develop new ecosystems (us) is internally consistent.
This isn't even close implying my suggestion is correct, just that it's possible to produce an internally consistent narrative explaining such behavior to refute claims of impossibility.
If they seeded our planet with life using FTL drives, the light of their civilization's dawn could just be reaching us now. If we accept the given of rare garden worlds, and cosmic gardening, the odds of seeing this are actually quite good.
If we're strip-mining Jupiter, that's peanuts. Why Jupiter? We might want some fusion reactors for localized or pulsed power, or rocket fuel, and solar panels are lousy at providing both.
If it was a problem with women in particular, I suspect that we'd see homosexual relationships at two to three times the biological rate, as every bisexual person looking for a relationship went for one with less friction. This sounds a lot like something we can test with Science!
H(null): We will see no increase in homosexual relationships close to the size of the bisexual demographic: People just don't want to deal with having a relationship due to, in spite of, or concurrent with shitty prospects, too much stress, and a corporate culture that's toxic to starting a family.
H(1): Homosexual relationships will expand to everyone who isn't constitutionally opposed to faggotry. We will likely see a tripling of homosexual relationships compared to our control group, representing the entire homosexual and bisexual demographics fleeing a toxic heterosexuality.
H(2): If we see some intermediate effect not trivially explained, we should investigate to see whether cultural condemnation of faggotry is intense enough to dissuade anyone who could have an emotionally fulfilling relationship with another of the same sex - cultural confounding effects or a mixture of motivations are likely results, but it is impossible to accurately predict which, precisely, at this point.
It's not like BattleBots is ever going to stop being popular - we just had someone challenge a Japanese mecha-building firm to a goddamn duel on an aircraft carrier. I'm not sure which is more sci-fi - the thing the last guy said, or the New York Times.
You also read "Things I Won't Work With", don't you?
On the contrary, Z-Wave is more fiddly, but plenty hackable and durable. And given that there are controller apps you can run on a Raspberry Pi, you should have no problem with rolling your own network or sensors. And on the flip side, I don't have the luxury of going into the main breaker panel and installing a choke and a household surge suppressor and niceties like that. I don't doubt I could get it to work if I had large stacks of cash to burn on it, but for reliably automating a few lights, and remotely controlling a radio, it's hard to do better than my X-10 system.
Z-Wave is encrypted, unlike many other systems; I'm unsure about Zigbee.
:(
That happened to my X-10 kit, though.