It's not really that simple except for reasonably large, well studied components. But if you are doing the design of say, a motherboard or a the main board of your cell phone, you are essentially constructing a new thing, based on components that themselves may or may not be well understood even under their own environments. Processors are a crapshoot, many of them (including our favorites) don't have an MTTF at all, or any reliability data period. In fact quite a lot of smaller ICs are like that too. In a mature organization we do study the lifetime curves of the components (in some fashion or another), and there are standards of acceptability based on the market, but that is definitely not a good assumption to make about most consumer electronics (for example). A lot of those are made in some shady fly by night environments.
The whole topic in context of consumer electronics is kind of dumb. Nobody designs things to fail in a given window. It's hard to do even if you have reliable statistical models. You design not to fail in a given window, and inevitably outside of that window something eventually goes wrong somewhere. In reality you are often against some sticky design choices (quality, reliability, cost, pick one). My favorite is selecting decoupling capacitors for big digital ICs like CPUs. Failure to have adequate decoupling will result in random and unpredictable failures, yuck. Proper decoupling is frequently physically impossible, some people who make chip packages don't think this through real well and don't simulate. Yay. But the designer does the best he can, trying to find the smallest parts to get in to all the nooks and crannies, with the least inductance he can introduce. In choosing that small package he has chosen quality over reliability and cost: the smaller package will have a lower voltage rating and thus the MTTF will be lower (often very much lower in practice), and you often add cost in choosing those components because they require SMT lines that support small parts, the smaller footprints have larger manufacturing fallout (tombstoning, bridging, etc.) and sometimes they just cost more because only one guy sells them, etc. No one will ship if the derating curves are too bad, but at some point we say "a life of 3 years is good enough", and that's that. In reality decoupling in many environments is black magic, no one has the technical data to know how much is enough, and we massively overdesign it, and even as components fail nobody ever notices!
Then there's mfg variability. Your design may be absolutely correct on paper, it may even have met your DFM criteria for your factory. But there is a non-zero probability of failure in fab and assembly of every part of the design. Things happen, I mentioned surface mount part tomb-stoning (literally turning at 90 degrees to the PCB, like a tombstone) but that's just one of so many things. Not all of these produce a hard failure immediately, many of them make it through whatever physical and functional test you apply to a device after it is manufactured. But they fail early because the circuit as designed by the engineer, as hopefully studied for standard component failure, is now outside of its design spec, and is going to fail early. Or possibly someone mishandled a component and induced a latent ESD event to a device causing its lifetime to be reduced. So all that work above, designed to make sure your design works "just long enough" gets ruined horribly when it gets physically assembled.
In reality, yes we are making lifetime choices based on the market, but not in any devious technical way. Given the low costs the market demands on consumer goods, and the fast design cycles a number of less than optimal choices are being made that impact the final product. There is no way to predict what is going to fail first, all we can do is look at failures that come in and identify where the weaknesses must have been (even that is usually only done for the first 90 days, or maybe 1 year). However since products change so signifi
I would never say that SOME people might benefit from the extra 5-10% of performance (let's even get it to 20%); but you're only talking a couple of hundred-thousand machines WORLDWIDE. For a company the size of Apple, the numbers just don't add-up, for the extra R&D (both hardware and software), extra testing/support and extra supply and distribution logistics.
Explaining to me the business concerns does not change my opinion on the product I need, that is not my problem. I also think you grossly underestimate the performance delta and the number of users who would benefit from a high quality, well tested and artistically sound performance machine. What is the only real reason to run Windows at home? Games. You can do virtually everything else on OS X, Linux or just via some web app, usually better. Windows has one place in the market: the office, not so much on the merits of its technology but because of the infrastructure built around it (both software and IT). But at home? Games, otherwise it's a barnacle. But a lot of people have one.
I would argue that power & thermals are the main issue: an iMac with these parts would be thick and noisy. Enter the Mac Pro which has solved these things nicely. The Mac Pro is targeting a vanishingly small segment of the market, but Apple has stood behind it (and it's a a very nice machine for what it is, and as a system designer very impressive technologically considering what the competition is doing). The irony is that form factor seems less than ideal for the business where you want to stack things, and much more ideal for the home office or desktop where you may have only one computer. If only it had a single proc option with a more ideal video card. By not using Xeon the price would be lower (enticing more people to buy a turn-key solution). Next note this thing about gamers, they want the latest and greatest, from a business case this is a feature. Since the Mac Pro isn't a standard FF (and that's ok, the standard FF is not great from most quantitative perspectives, never mind the aesthetics), you are now in a position to sell the latest and greatest CPU and video card to them, on a yearly basis, without necessarily having to do a yearly upgrade cycle of the whole system. I believe Apple could solve this neatly, way better than what we currently do with aftermarket cards, and manually mounting sensitive electronics. It's just a matter of wanting to serve the market, and understanding how many people have more money than time (>30 w/kids and gamer, I imagine) and how much extra you can charge for a turn-key system.
Also, the trend for video articles... I guess it's the 21st century, some trends can't be stopped, but remind those involved that most of us read slashdot, and the articles. Reading is silent (if done properly), and suitable for the workplace where a bunch of us tend to do our slashdotting. Also, let's be honest, most nerds aren't that photogenic, if I wanted to look at grumpy-looking ugly men I can find a mirror or alight from my swivel chair and walk through cube land.
For desktop use, Linux is 2nd best. The linux desktop has become significantly less good in the past few years since Canonical mostly abandoned it, I remain optimistic against all odds that it will improve, but OS X is much cleaner and more responsive. It manages to combine the best parts of unix with the best parts of a modern UI. There are things I'd change, but compared to linux where even on a fast machine X responds slowly and with high latency, I use both and prefer OS X.
For server use, for multi-user, or for a workload that is largely headless, there's no question that linux is best.
I love my macs, but Apple does not sell anything that represents a performance machine, and never has. In fact that is why some of us learned to hate them in the 90s: we can put together a much faster machine, for less than their not so fast machines for users we, frankly, disrespect. Now I'm older and have a life, and I am sensitive to the argument that I want to use the machine not constantly tinker with it, and although I have designed computers literally from copper traces, I respect the investment Apple makes in building a very high quality machine that can last and requires very little TLC. They are the best machines out there for casual use.
But I still wish they made one with a high end processor and a high end GPU (hint: AMD does not make any, but then either does Intel). I don't want to hear about "not needing the performance", that is a horrible answer on many different levels, and in point of fact, is wrong for some of us.
So, Apple having forsaken us, we're forced to use the next best os (Linux) and cope with what drivers the gods of Proprietary Hell (right above Special Hell) deign to give us, and frequently bitch and moan about their idiocy. I don't especially care about Intel graphics myself, I always replace it, but I can understand the attractiveness some might see given the wider array of form factors some of these low end machines can come in, where Intel graphics is a key feature.
If only the stock market were concerned with the profitability of a company, rather than the belief that one should grow to be so large that it dominates the world.
... but they have all but abandoned the enterprise sector
Corporate customers are absolutely horrible, margin destroying machines. Can you blame them? Two of my employers derived the majority of their revenue from enterprise sales, and both of those companies are shadows of their former self. Unless you have a monopoly (or near to it), you will be nickled and dimed into obsolescence, which is a good market for China where tehy can compete with each other on equal footing, but US based companies get run out quickly.
On the other hand, individuals still have an eye for a good product, and will pay a lot of money for a good product. We don't have to report out quarterly earnings, nor do we even have to necessarily make the financially optimal solution. That's a much better market for American (or European) companies to be in. Unfortunately, because of our other economic woes, very few people can often afford to pay for the good product over the cheap shit, so the best one can hope for is to have a small but significant market share.
Toys are a good market for Apple, Enterprise is a good market for China.
Not very many people at all USA manufacture, and have not for 20 years. Apple is the richest of the lot currently, but they're not alone in their suffering. Having a strong dollar is great if we actually manufactured things here, or had a plan to do so in the short term.
That and generally employees tend to stay around a bit longer and won't immediately run off to a competitor unless they are laid off. HR tends to screen out resumes for employees whose work history looks like a bingo card. You can trust an employee a bit more because he has more to lose and has incentive to stick around a while and not immediately run off to a competitor.
A contractor on the other hand has to eat, he'll run off immediately at the end of his contract and take the best option available to him, which is frequently at a competitor. I can't blame them one bit, and if they borrow a bit of code it may be free money. Honestly just don't let contractors work on projects that are core to the business, that's not what contractors are supposed to be used for anyway. If it's really important you have employees doing it, and you motivate them to stay.
I don't need the actual code in-hand to walk away with anything actually worth stealing from your code.
I don't disagree with the overall premise, but there are many times when the actual implementation is more important than the concepts. How long did Microsoft keep the world hostage with proprietary document formats? There are quite a few examples of this in the industry.
If you think like an asshole, by which I mean an investor or CEO, then you have to figure out what is the fastest way to get rich quick and minimize the investment. Your concepts require translation to turn in to code, code requires testing to turn in to functional code, and, at times you require marketing & sales to turn it in to cash. While you are translating concepts to code, and code to functionality you are taking a paycheck, benefits, and office, infrastructure, and time, all of which requires accounting & other business overhead. This costs money. So, thinking like an asshole, how can we do away with all that and reduce it to the minimum (ideally just sales, hopefully on a website)? Steal as much as possible. It may be that the investment only makes sense to an asshole if the product is essentially stolen (or uh...leveraged).
Concepts are valuable to you, and if the market is relatively open and ready for a new product might be profitable to pursue. But give an asshole an easy way to cheat, he'll do it. So protecting your code isn't entirely insane. Protecting code so important to your company that you feel the need to employ draconian measures, but then hiring labor you can't trust because they are temps... that is probably insane.
An NDA works and makes for Target to sue if the code gets out.
No, in many companies you may not discuss anything at all without an NDA, but an NDA itself is not sufficient to get code access. Half of my previous employers would not allow contractors to even see code without a VP to sign off, and even then had to do so on site, with company equipment and were not allowed any electronics. Contractors are second class citizens in many places, usually for the same reason as why you hired them: they are disposable and will go off to other work (almost certainly at a competitor) when you release them.
Most of the time option "1" is what employers require, and tell those that won't work on site to take a hike. Option "2" is good if you can ensure file sharing doesn't work, and your mgmt believes it to be viable (which really requires a paper trail, not so much their personal opinion).
Honestly if a job is so essential to company success that you have to have these rules, then you really should have on-staff employees doing it, and reserve contractors for peripheral stuff that isn't so sensitive. That said, I know a few micro-mgmt types that really and truly believe everything employees do at work is top secret...
So... what, we should watch every crank and snake oil salesman to see if they've uncovered any new physical laws?
The most generous I can be is that someone may solve a useful problem in a novel way, while trying to do something else. Possibly elaborating the long list of potential and kinetic energy sources that exist in our environment that appear "free".
A common example of watches that never need batteries or winding. Yes, we know these aren't being powered by overunity/zeropoint black magic, but, watches that don't need winding under generally useful scenarios... I'll take it.
I'm sure there a still a few flaws or mechanisms we don't understand in theories like evolution, or the theory of gravity, and those should be pointed out and discussed to show that science is always evolving.
I was thinking the same thing, that in general any good theory should be able to stand up to debate and criticism, its flaws thrown before everyone's eyes and either repudiated or made known. Versus religion where disingenuous debate may exist, but the conclusion must usually lie in the dogma of the religion sponsoring the debate.
The problem I have, however, is that schools and high school in particular is not always a bastion of free-thinking and scholarship. In this case the students are disadvantaged by not necessarily having a solid foundation in math and science (in fact, by construction in this case, almost certainly they do not), and teachers who wish to suppress things they don't personally like may be able to harm students. Given the consequences of getting a bad grade in math or science for long term study, perhaps very good students who are exactly correct may find their future somewhat more limited by this sort of activity.
I still don't understand why we are using science class to deal with religious topics. Sunday school can cover that, all properly localized to the specific dialect of religion that the student's parents wish to subject him to.
Having lived in no-fault states and Texas, I'm really not sure the actual implementation is any different. People drive like raving lunatics in all big cities, pretty much showing the example of how not to behave.
The only difference is now when some idiot hits you, you have to play this dumb game of waiting for hte police to arrive, taking pictures of everything and trying to trick the other guy into admitting fault or some bad behavior.
I don't expect the number of cars to decrease, but perhaps you are correct about car ownerships (in cities). Someone will be owning the cars though, so perhaps that means they are targetting more corporate customers.
Those things are usually against company policy, but policy here can be effective because IT can easily trace this, and I'm not clever enough to figure out an excuse why it's a good idea to forward company email to personal accounts over insecure links. I suppose I should look to Hillary Clinton? I actually don't think that's a good idea, when I can do something better with VPN on my personal phone. Particularly since much of my email requires a "secure link" from/to our vendors (VPN has been determined to be secure, in 3 out of 4 past employers, and we simply ignored that fourth one's policy since we COULD plausibly defend it).
By contrast BYOD (legally or no) and installing shit on company property is much less traceable and easily defensible. IT is a CYA organization, they have neither the skillset nor background to evaluate "business need" for any set of applications employees have, and rely on user teams to elaborate such a list. User teams have little concern for IT's CYA policies, time to deal with the process, and do not keep active lists, nor are rigorous with vetting it although such lists exists for our own CYA. So basically unless the app is called "hooters&poon" it's pretty easy to ignore policy. Sensible companies stopped managing employee laptops 5 years ago, my current one doesn't even try, other than an asset tag no one has any code or backdoor access to my mbp, and I have my own image installed on it to be very sure. This of course requires users who aren't abject morons and who have used a computer, but somehow my past two employers managed to do this just fine, it still boggles my mind when my IT friends insist that without all of Windows' big brother nonsense their job would be unmanageable. I haven't had a windows machine at work in 8 years, but we somehow manage to make money.
As for salary for hours, it is a constant negotiation. I benefit strongly from flexible hours and the ability to commute outside of rush hour (and to be able to take kids to/from school), so it's not a major hardship for me to answer calls, get on conference calls, do occasional travel or even to work at other hours. I put in what I feel is appropriate and performance reviews decide if it's acceptable. If it's more than I can give and what I think I can get elsewhere, then it's time to move on. I've found that all companies expect 100% of your time, so generally you find the one that pays the best and try to be reasonable. If a company wastes my time with a lot of overseas nonsense and conference calls, then I am generally less willing to put in extra hours: you waste my time, I will get it back. If a company wants to give me a contract and outlines every last job detail, it tells me that's a job I probably do not want anyway, it's going to be a lot of administration and policing and not a lot of profitable work for either party.
employer has the ability to always contact you because you use that cell phone for personal purposes, it's not so convenient
At a certain level this is part of the job, and assumed with the salary and benefits. It's not that high, a developer or engineer may have no direct reports, but compared to someone that works in the factory or the sales floor has a significantly greater responsibility and is expected to at least answer a phone call outside of normal work hours. You can carry two phones and drive yourself nuts, or carry one. If the cost becomes significant, you can expense it, I've never been shot down for that. But why deal with multiple devices, isn't that more complexity to deal with?
The one reason i can think of is because I don't trust my IT department, I know they have spyware/malware installed and are busy dicking with my machine. If that is not an issue (as it is in most sensible places), then it's really just more of a headache to deal with dedicated machines and saves me no actual time, and beyond faux ideological principles, does not give me anything back.
Why are you doing these ridiculous things? They are ridiculous, employees are in open revolt, are not reliably carrying their leashes or are compromising them or outright replacing them. Stop doing these things.
And security went out the window.
A false sense of very corporate bureaucrat version of security went out the window.
BlackBerry
was not listening to its customers, it was listening to their keepers. People who were both requiring employees to keep an electronic leash, but also putting 20kV through it and making sure the choker collar also had spikes. It's not really a wonder the keepers got shot down.
Now I ask, has there ever been a time when "the data" was secure, even before BYOD, before wifi, before the internet? Isn't this just some insane paranoid fantasy in most cases? I've talked with older coworkers about how certain things were done before the internet, and not surprisingly found that security was more lax then than it is now, but about as easy to get around if you wanted to. It ultimately relied on employees to exercise judgement, and sometimes some employees exercised poor judgement (intentionally or otherwise) and Bad Things Happened. Someone was blamed, someone got fired, new ineffective policies were created but never invalidated because it would be years before next major Bad Thing Happened. On the whole, employees don't knowingly shit in their own beds, and hackers don't normally bother with corporate dregs because they know Joe Bob in data analysis probably has a very limited and possibly misleading collection of valuable data. What they really want is SVP Joseph Bobertson, who carries very little data, but all of it of extreme utility. It is only by the power of paranoia and hyperbole do we believe that every note, and every spreadsheet Joe Bob creates must be 100% corporate value.
Tomorrow: Apple Putting Physicians Out Of Work TFS: An apple a day keeps the doctor away, as more Americans eat apples, doctors are seeing appointments drop and are struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile the demand for apples have increased beyond the market's ability to supply them. Reports abound that child labor in Washington is being used to harvest apples, with children not being given helmets and being repeatedly struck on the head, leading to gravitation being discovered at an alarming rate. Isaac Newton could not be reached for comment.
Those people, and the anti-vaxxer community at large, should group up and pay for a study from someplace they feel isn't co-opted, who knows how to produce an honest result, and see what happens, rather than simply spouting their unsubstantiated nonsense and possibly slandering a company.
There's no question about GlaxoSmithKline's significant profit motive, but a profit motive does not necessarily create a crime. If a third party could show the drug is dangerous, that is best. Someone is either doing their job poorly, or outright lying.
Does Japan have any additional evidence that they feel invalidates TFA or did they ban it because of crying mom and her parents association? All articles say "amid health concerns", which sounds like a herd mentality reaction to unsubstantiated data. This article suggests they are conducting their own study (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/15/national/cervix-vaccine-issues-trigger-health-notice/#.VpPyhd-rQUE), which may or may not match the finding of TFA.
It is good that people are conducting their own research, and would be noteworthy if their research produced conflicting results. But it is the wrong conclusion to assume that because Japan's government has done something, that it was a data driven decision produced by anything like a proper scientific study. Note the crying mom in the article I linked... that is more effective at policy setting than boring numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really that simple except for reasonably large, well studied components. But if you are doing the design of say, a motherboard or a the main board of your cell phone, you are essentially constructing a new thing, based on components that themselves may or may not be well understood even under their own environments. Processors are a crapshoot, many of them (including our favorites) don't have an MTTF at all, or any reliability data period. In fact quite a lot of smaller ICs are like that too. In a mature organization we do study the lifetime curves of the components (in some fashion or another), and there are standards of acceptability based on the market, but that is definitely not a good assumption to make about most consumer electronics (for example). A lot of those are made in some shady fly by night environments.
The whole topic in context of consumer electronics is kind of dumb. Nobody designs things to fail in a given window. It's hard to do even if you have reliable statistical models. You design not to fail in a given window, and inevitably outside of that window something eventually goes wrong somewhere. In reality you are often against some sticky design choices (quality, reliability, cost, pick one). My favorite is selecting decoupling capacitors for big digital ICs like CPUs. Failure to have adequate decoupling will result in random and unpredictable failures, yuck. Proper decoupling is frequently physically impossible, some people who make chip packages don't think this through real well and don't simulate. Yay. But the designer does the best he can, trying to find the smallest parts to get in to all the nooks and crannies, with the least inductance he can introduce. In choosing that small package he has chosen quality over reliability and cost: the smaller package will have a lower voltage rating and thus the MTTF will be lower (often very much lower in practice), and you often add cost in choosing those components because they require SMT lines that support small parts, the smaller footprints have larger manufacturing fallout (tombstoning, bridging, etc.) and sometimes they just cost more because only one guy sells them, etc. No one will ship if the derating curves are too bad, but at some point we say "a life of 3 years is good enough", and that's that. In reality decoupling in many environments is black magic, no one has the technical data to know how much is enough, and we massively overdesign it, and even as components fail nobody ever notices!
Then there's mfg variability. Your design may be absolutely correct on paper, it may even have met your DFM criteria for your factory. But there is a non-zero probability of failure in fab and assembly of every part of the design. Things happen, I mentioned surface mount part tomb-stoning (literally turning at 90 degrees to the PCB, like a tombstone) but that's just one of so many things. Not all of these produce a hard failure immediately, many of them make it through whatever physical and functional test you apply to a device after it is manufactured. But they fail early because the circuit as designed by the engineer, as hopefully studied for standard component failure, is now outside of its design spec, and is going to fail early. Or possibly someone mishandled a component and induced a latent ESD event to a device causing its lifetime to be reduced. So all that work above, designed to make sure your design works "just long enough" gets ruined horribly when it gets physically assembled.
In reality, yes we are making lifetime choices based on the market, but not in any devious technical way. Given the low costs the market demands on consumer goods, and the fast design cycles a number of less than optimal choices are being made that impact the final product. There is no way to predict what is going to fail first, all we can do is look at failures that come in and identify where the weaknesses must have been (even that is usually only done for the first 90 days, or maybe 1 year). However since products change so signifi
We did, he chopped it up and glued it to his head.
. IF they allow this, expect cable rates to go up $10/month
Because we need more of an excuse to cut the cord.
I would never say that SOME people might benefit from the extra 5-10% of performance (let's even get it to 20%); but you're only talking a couple of hundred-thousand machines WORLDWIDE. For a company the size of Apple, the numbers just don't add-up, for the extra R&D (both hardware and software), extra testing/support and extra supply and distribution logistics.
Explaining to me the business concerns does not change my opinion on the product I need, that is not my problem. I also think you grossly underestimate the performance delta and the number of users who would benefit from a high quality, well tested and artistically sound performance machine. What is the only real reason to run Windows at home? Games. You can do virtually everything else on OS X, Linux or just via some web app, usually better. Windows has one place in the market: the office, not so much on the merits of its technology but because of the infrastructure built around it (both software and IT). But at home? Games, otherwise it's a barnacle. But a lot of people have one.
I would argue that power & thermals are the main issue: an iMac with these parts would be thick and noisy. Enter the Mac Pro which has solved these things nicely. The Mac Pro is targeting a vanishingly small segment of the market, but Apple has stood behind it (and it's a a very nice machine for what it is, and as a system designer very impressive technologically considering what the competition is doing). The irony is that form factor seems less than ideal for the business where you want to stack things, and much more ideal for the home office or desktop where you may have only one computer. If only it had a single proc option with a more ideal video card. By not using Xeon the price would be lower (enticing more people to buy a turn-key solution). Next note this thing about gamers, they want the latest and greatest, from a business case this is a feature. Since the Mac Pro isn't a standard FF (and that's ok, the standard FF is not great from most quantitative perspectives, never mind the aesthetics), you are now in a position to sell the latest and greatest CPU and video card to them, on a yearly basis, without necessarily having to do a yearly upgrade cycle of the whole system. I believe Apple could solve this neatly, way better than what we currently do with aftermarket cards, and manually mounting sensitive electronics. It's just a matter of wanting to serve the market, and understanding how many people have more money than time (>30 w/kids and gamer, I imagine) and how much extra you can charge for a turn-key system.
Also, the trend for video articles... I guess it's the 21st century, some trends can't be stopped, but remind those involved that most of us read slashdot, and the articles. Reading is silent (if done properly), and suitable for the workplace where a bunch of us tend to do our slashdotting. Also, let's be honest, most nerds aren't that photogenic, if I wanted to look at grumpy-looking ugly men I can find a mirror or alight from my swivel chair and walk through cube land.
For desktop use, Linux is 2nd best. The linux desktop has become significantly less good in the past few years since Canonical mostly abandoned it, I remain optimistic against all odds that it will improve, but OS X is much cleaner and more responsive. It manages to combine the best parts of unix with the best parts of a modern UI. There are things I'd change, but compared to linux where even on a fast machine X responds slowly and with high latency, I use both and prefer OS X.
For server use, for multi-user, or for a workload that is largely headless, there's no question that linux is best.
If only Cmdr Taco were here, we could have him add "Ghostface Killah" to the lameness filter for news posts.
I love my macs, but Apple does not sell anything that represents a performance machine, and never has. In fact that is why some of us learned to hate them in the 90s: we can put together a much faster machine, for less than their not so fast machines for users we, frankly, disrespect. Now I'm older and have a life, and I am sensitive to the argument that I want to use the machine not constantly tinker with it, and although I have designed computers literally from copper traces, I respect the investment Apple makes in building a very high quality machine that can last and requires very little TLC. They are the best machines out there for casual use.
But I still wish they made one with a high end processor and a high end GPU (hint: AMD does not make any, but then either does Intel). I don't want to hear about "not needing the performance", that is a horrible answer on many different levels, and in point of fact, is wrong for some of us.
So, Apple having forsaken us, we're forced to use the next best os (Linux) and cope with what drivers the gods of Proprietary Hell (right above Special Hell) deign to give us, and frequently bitch and moan about their idiocy. I don't especially care about Intel graphics myself, I always replace it, but I can understand the attractiveness some might see given the wider array of form factors some of these low end machines can come in, where Intel graphics is a key feature.
If only the stock market were concerned with the profitability of a company, rather than the belief that one should grow to be so large that it dominates the world.
Corporate customers are absolutely horrible, margin destroying machines. Can you blame them? Two of my employers derived the majority of their revenue from enterprise sales, and both of those companies are shadows of their former self. Unless you have a monopoly (or near to it), you will be nickled and dimed into obsolescence, which is a good market for China where tehy can compete with each other on equal footing, but US based companies get run out quickly.
On the other hand, individuals still have an eye for a good product, and will pay a lot of money for a good product. We don't have to report out quarterly earnings, nor do we even have to necessarily make the financially optimal solution. That's a much better market for American (or European) companies to be in. Unfortunately, because of our other economic woes, very few people can often afford to pay for the good product over the cheap shit, so the best one can hope for is to have a small but significant market share.
Toys are a good market for Apple, Enterprise is a good market for China.
Not very many people at all USA manufacture, and have not for 20 years. Apple is the richest of the lot currently, but they're not alone in their suffering. Having a strong dollar is great if we actually manufactured things here, or had a plan to do so in the short term.
That and generally employees tend to stay around a bit longer and won't immediately run off to a competitor unless they are laid off. HR tends to screen out resumes for employees whose work history looks like a bingo card. You can trust an employee a bit more because he has more to lose and has incentive to stick around a while and not immediately run off to a competitor.
A contractor on the other hand has to eat, he'll run off immediately at the end of his contract and take the best option available to him, which is frequently at a competitor. I can't blame them one bit, and if they borrow a bit of code it may be free money. Honestly just don't let contractors work on projects that are core to the business, that's not what contractors are supposed to be used for anyway. If it's really important you have employees doing it, and you motivate them to stay.
I don't need the actual code in-hand to walk away with anything actually worth stealing from your code.
I don't disagree with the overall premise, but there are many times when the actual implementation is more important than the concepts. How long did Microsoft keep the world hostage with proprietary document formats? There are quite a few examples of this in the industry.
If you think like an asshole, by which I mean an investor or CEO, then you have to figure out what is the fastest way to get rich quick and minimize the investment. Your concepts require translation to turn in to code, code requires testing to turn in to functional code, and, at times you require marketing & sales to turn it in to cash. While you are translating concepts to code, and code to functionality you are taking a paycheck, benefits, and office, infrastructure, and time, all of which requires accounting & other business overhead. This costs money. So, thinking like an asshole, how can we do away with all that and reduce it to the minimum (ideally just sales, hopefully on a website)? Steal as much as possible. It may be that the investment only makes sense to an asshole if the product is essentially stolen (or uh...leveraged).
Concepts are valuable to you, and if the market is relatively open and ready for a new product might be profitable to pursue. But give an asshole an easy way to cheat, he'll do it. So protecting your code isn't entirely insane. Protecting code so important to your company that you feel the need to employ draconian measures, but then hiring labor you can't trust because they are temps... that is probably insane.
An NDA works and makes for Target to sue if the code gets out.
No, in many companies you may not discuss anything at all without an NDA, but an NDA itself is not sufficient to get code access. Half of my previous employers would not allow contractors to even see code without a VP to sign off, and even then had to do so on site, with company equipment and were not allowed any electronics. Contractors are second class citizens in many places, usually for the same reason as why you hired them: they are disposable and will go off to other work (almost certainly at a competitor) when you release them.
Most of the time option "1" is what employers require, and tell those that won't work on site to take a hike. Option "2" is good if you can ensure file sharing doesn't work, and your mgmt believes it to be viable (which really requires a paper trail, not so much their personal opinion).
Honestly if a job is so essential to company success that you have to have these rules, then you really should have on-staff employees doing it, and reserve contractors for peripheral stuff that isn't so sensitive. That said, I know a few micro-mgmt types that really and truly believe everything employees do at work is top secret...
long in the tooth.
But, but, the untapped potential!
So ... what, we should watch every crank and snake oil salesman to see if they've uncovered any new physical laws?
The most generous I can be is that someone may solve a useful problem in a novel way, while trying to do something else. Possibly elaborating the long list of potential and kinetic energy sources that exist in our environment that appear "free".
A common example of watches that never need batteries or winding. Yes, we know these aren't being powered by overunity/zeropoint black magic, but, watches that don't need winding under generally useful scenarios... I'll take it.
I'm sure there a still a few flaws or mechanisms we don't understand in theories like evolution, or the theory of gravity, and those should be pointed out and discussed to show that science is always evolving.
I was thinking the same thing, that in general any good theory should be able to stand up to debate and criticism, its flaws thrown before everyone's eyes and either repudiated or made known. Versus religion where disingenuous debate may exist, but the conclusion must usually lie in the dogma of the religion sponsoring the debate.
The problem I have, however, is that schools and high school in particular is not always a bastion of free-thinking and scholarship. In this case the students are disadvantaged by not necessarily having a solid foundation in math and science (in fact, by construction in this case, almost certainly they do not), and teachers who wish to suppress things they don't personally like may be able to harm students. Given the consequences of getting a bad grade in math or science for long term study, perhaps very good students who are exactly correct may find their future somewhat more limited by this sort of activity.
I still don't understand why we are using science class to deal with religious topics. Sunday school can cover that, all properly localized to the specific dialect of religion that the student's parents wish to subject him to.
The whole concept reeks,
Having lived in no-fault states and Texas, I'm really not sure the actual implementation is any different. People drive like raving lunatics in all big cities, pretty much showing the example of how not to behave.
The only difference is now when some idiot hits you, you have to play this dumb game of waiting for hte police to arrive, taking pictures of everything and trying to trick the other guy into admitting fault or some bad behavior.
I don't expect the number of cars to decrease, but perhaps you are correct about car ownerships (in cities). Someone will be owning the cars though, so perhaps that means they are targetting more corporate customers.
Those things are usually against company policy, but policy here can be effective because IT can easily trace this, and I'm not clever enough to figure out an excuse why it's a good idea to forward company email to personal accounts over insecure links. I suppose I should look to Hillary Clinton? I actually don't think that's a good idea, when I can do something better with VPN on my personal phone. Particularly since much of my email requires a "secure link" from/to our vendors (VPN has been determined to be secure, in 3 out of 4 past employers, and we simply ignored that fourth one's policy since we COULD plausibly defend it).
By contrast BYOD (legally or no) and installing shit on company property is much less traceable and easily defensible. IT is a CYA organization, they have neither the skillset nor background to evaluate "business need" for any set of applications employees have, and rely on user teams to elaborate such a list. User teams have little concern for IT's CYA policies, time to deal with the process, and do not keep active lists, nor are rigorous with vetting it although such lists exists for our own CYA. So basically unless the app is called "hooters&poon" it's pretty easy to ignore policy. Sensible companies stopped managing employee laptops 5 years ago, my current one doesn't even try, other than an asset tag no one has any code or backdoor access to my mbp, and I have my own image installed on it to be very sure. This of course requires users who aren't abject morons and who have used a computer, but somehow my past two employers managed to do this just fine, it still boggles my mind when my IT friends insist that without all of Windows' big brother nonsense their job would be unmanageable. I haven't had a windows machine at work in 8 years, but we somehow manage to make money.
As for salary for hours, it is a constant negotiation. I benefit strongly from flexible hours and the ability to commute outside of rush hour (and to be able to take kids to/from school), so it's not a major hardship for me to answer calls, get on conference calls, do occasional travel or even to work at other hours. I put in what I feel is appropriate and performance reviews decide if it's acceptable. If it's more than I can give and what I think I can get elsewhere, then it's time to move on. I've found that all companies expect 100% of your time, so generally you find the one that pays the best and try to be reasonable. If a company wastes my time with a lot of overseas nonsense and conference calls, then I am generally less willing to put in extra hours: you waste my time, I will get it back. If a company wants to give me a contract and outlines every last job detail, it tells me that's a job I probably do not want anyway, it's going to be a lot of administration and policing and not a lot of profitable work for either party.
employer has the ability to always contact you because you use that cell phone for personal purposes, it's not so convenient
At a certain level this is part of the job, and assumed with the salary and benefits. It's not that high, a developer or engineer may have no direct reports, but compared to someone that works in the factory or the sales floor has a significantly greater responsibility and is expected to at least answer a phone call outside of normal work hours. You can carry two phones and drive yourself nuts, or carry one. If the cost becomes significant, you can expense it, I've never been shot down for that. But why deal with multiple devices, isn't that more complexity to deal with?
The one reason i can think of is because I don't trust my IT department, I know they have spyware/malware installed and are busy dicking with my machine. If that is not an issue (as it is in most sensible places), then it's really just more of a headache to deal with dedicated machines and saves me no actual time, and beyond faux ideological principles, does not give me anything back.
IT departments said:
Cover my ass, do these ridiculous things
Then some executive would ask
Why are you doing these ridiculous things? They are ridiculous, employees are in open revolt, are not reliably carrying their leashes or are compromising them or outright replacing them. Stop doing these things.
And security went out the window.
A false sense of very corporate bureaucrat version of security went out the window.
BlackBerry
was not listening to its customers, it was listening to their keepers. People who were both requiring employees to keep an electronic leash, but also putting 20kV through it and making sure the choker collar also had spikes. It's not really a wonder the keepers got shot down.
Now I ask, has there ever been a time when "the data" was secure, even before BYOD, before wifi, before the internet? Isn't this just some insane paranoid fantasy in most cases? I've talked with older coworkers about how certain things were done before the internet, and not surprisingly found that security was more lax then than it is now, but about as easy to get around if you wanted to. It ultimately relied on employees to exercise judgement, and sometimes some employees exercised poor judgement (intentionally or otherwise) and Bad Things Happened. Someone was blamed, someone got fired, new ineffective policies were created but never invalidated because it would be years before next major Bad Thing Happened. On the whole, employees don't knowingly shit in their own beds, and hackers don't normally bother with corporate dregs because they know Joe Bob in data analysis probably has a very limited and possibly misleading collection of valuable data. What they really want is SVP Joseph Bobertson, who carries very little data, but all of it of extreme utility. It is only by the power of paranoia and hyperbole do we believe that every note, and every spreadsheet Joe Bob creates must be 100% corporate value.
Profit Post!
Tomorrow: Apple Putting Physicians Out Of Work
TFS: An apple a day keeps the doctor away, as more Americans eat apples, doctors are seeing appointments drop and are struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile the demand for apples have increased beyond the market's ability to supply them. Reports abound that child labor in Washington is being used to harvest apples, with children not being given helmets and being repeatedly struck on the head, leading to gravitation being discovered at an alarming rate. Isaac Newton could not be reached for comment.
Those people, and the anti-vaxxer community at large, should group up and pay for a study from someplace they feel isn't co-opted, who knows how to produce an honest result, and see what happens, rather than simply spouting their unsubstantiated nonsense and possibly slandering a company.
There's no question about GlaxoSmithKline's significant profit motive, but a profit motive does not necessarily create a crime. If a third party could show the drug is dangerous, that is best. Someone is either doing their job poorly, or outright lying.
Does Japan have any additional evidence that they feel invalidates TFA or did they ban it because of crying mom and her parents association? All articles say "amid health concerns", which sounds like a herd mentality reaction to unsubstantiated data. This article suggests they are conducting their own study (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/06/15/national/cervix-vaccine-issues-trigger-health-notice/#.VpPyhd-rQUE), which may or may not match the finding of TFA.
It is good that people are conducting their own research, and would be noteworthy if their research produced conflicting results. But it is the wrong conclusion to assume that because Japan's government has done something, that it was a data driven decision produced by anything like a proper scientific study. Note the crying mom in the article I linked... that is more effective at policy setting than boring numbers.