I've always said that to be a good IT pro, you have to be lazy in a particular way. Automation is a good example of it. Another is the tendency to come up with a permanent fix instead of constantly dealing with the fallout.
For example, I remember working one place where a particular server crashed in the middle of the night every week. When I came into the company, it had been happening for six months, and once a week, one of the IT guys had to come in early to make sure the server got started up before everyone else came in. They told me I'd be added to the rotation, and some weeks I'd have to come in early.
So my first thought was, I don't want to come in early. My second: One of these days, someone is going to come in to turn that server on, and it won't turn on. I don't want that to happen on my day. Instead, I spent a few hours researching and looking through logs. I don't remember what the fix was-- something like the VSS from the backup was causing a crash and the server needed a hotfix or... whatever. Doesn't matter. In a few hours, I fixed the problem, and the server stopped crashing.
It was an act of laziness-- I didn't want to keep fixing the problem over and over again, so instead I spent extra time to fix it properly the first time.
Something like an Apple Store? Microsoft Store? Something else?
So you're really just asking what it should *look* like? As in, what should the aesthetic design be?
Sure. Make it look like an Apple Store.
It seems like the bigger question should be, what should be in it? What should the exhibits be, and how should it work? Whatever the aesthetics, what are kids going to learn from the experience?
And I don't know what the goal is or what resources are available, but just to throw an idea out there, the first thing that popped into my head was (perhaps obviously) to have interactive exhibits showing the progress computers have made. As much as possible, have old computers or replicas so that kids can see what the actual physical machine looked like. Maybe show them a Babbage Difference Engine, and see if you can break down how it works. Maybe things like the early IBM PCs, an Apple II, and the first Mac. Let them have access to some emulators that show what the different old operating systems were like-- DOS, early versions of MacOS and Windows. Provide some sort of interactive method for illustrating how long it would take for operation would happen on a computer from 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. Maybe have an exhibit where they can play different video games from different eras.
Maybe it's just me, but that's what I think of if you say the words, "Children's Computer Museum"-- some collection of interactive exhibits arranged chronologically to show kids the development of computers, focusing on the development of personal computing (starting circa 1980), but with a couple of things early on to talk about how things developed from an abacus through mainframes, leading up to the PC.
Is the company really saving that much money by using 2012 processors and 4GB of RAM as standard?
It seems that this is in reference to the non-Retina Macbook Pro, which means that the author is completely missing the point. Apple isn't selling those as a method of saving money. Apple doesn't put those models in their marketing. They aren't on display at Apple Stores. It's not remotely the model that Apple wants you to buy. It's a legacy model. No one at Apple is going to recommend that you buy that model, except in very specific circumstances.
Essentially, Apple continues to sell them only because they're still in demand. If you want an Apple laptop that has an Ethernet port or Firewire ports (without using a dongle), or without a Retina Display, or with a built-in DVD drive, that's the one model that Apple keeps around in order to cater to your needs.
If anything, this is a problem caused by Apple being too far ahead of the curve in their laptop designs. They were the first company to drop PS2 ports in favor of USB. They were the first company to drop all floppy and CD/DVD drives. They were the first company to implement high resolution displays. I'd expect that, in a few years, you might find that the only port to be found on any of their devices is the current iteration of Thunderbolt. When you keep moving ahead so quickly, you're going to find that you're leaving some of your customers behind. As a result, they have sometimes held onto legacy models to service people who can't use the newest designs, for whatever reason.
You may have a valid criticism, but this is actually an instance where a story is justified.
In case you're not tracking what's going on (it sounds like maybe you're trying to tune this stuff out), Microsoft is saying they're not going to move past Windows 10. All new updates to Windows 10 are still going to be labelled Windows 10, but this is about as big an update as Microsoft is going to do all at once. So if it helps you to better understand this story, this is about as big an update to Windows as Microsoft is likely to make anytime soon. You may as well think of it as Windows 11.
Or I guess Windows 10 was really Windows 9, so this is really Windows 10...? Whatever.
So one of the biggest most important and influential operating systems just released it's next big version. If any Microsoft news is worth reporting, this is probably it.
So Verizon bought AOL, and now they're buying Yahoo. What's next? Are they going to buy Compuserve, Prodigy, Lycos, or Excite?
But really, what's the plan here? I find it a little frightening that Verizon's strategy seems to be to acquire whatever large content sources they can get their hands on. They (and Comcast) have given some indications that they'd like to leverage their control over infrastructure to push their own content and services.
Say I'm being unreasonable, but here's my immediate reaction: infrastructure providers, whether they're fiber or cellular, should just provide the infrastructure. Voice service should be decoupled from the physical infrastructure. It should be competitive VoIP products based on open standards. The expectation should be that I can get a phone on Verizon's network, but my phone service might be through services like Google Hangouts or Skype, but that Google Hangouts and Skype can talk to each other the same way that Gmail can send email to Office 365. Same with video calls and messenger apps, frankly.
If you start from that viewpoint, then it's not about forcing Verizon to filter calls. All the questions boil down to "What should these open standards look like?" and "How do we get people to agree to use these standards?" If you have a set of good, secure standards, then you should have better luck verifying the identity of the source of the messages, and thereby identifying abusers. You'll still have some of the same problems we have in filtering spam, but (a) if you're building these standards from the ground up with modern knowledge, we can do better than what we've done with email; and (b) if you don't like your spam filtering, you can easily switch to a different provider that does a better job, and providing a good spam filter becomes a competitive edge.
Of course, this isn't going to happen. Everyone wants to lock their users into walled gardens. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all trying to strong-arm users into using their services rather than giving them a free choice to use the best provider. If the web were being designed today, it would all look like the early AOL, with everyone walled into the garden that they signed up for, completely unable to access content or services unless they are offered by their ISP. It's absurd.
The only difference is that democrats want a safety net that they can't afford, whereas Republicans simply want their roads, their military, and their Medicare and want to live tax-free, apparently paying for the programs with manna from the sky.
So Democrats want a safety net they can't afford while Republicans want tax breaks they can't afford. Meanwhile a lot of the Republicans also want to have our government run as a theocracy, having our laws based on morals gleaned from their experience handling snakes and speaking in tongues.
These games always disturb me a bit-- the "free" games that let you buy some sort of credits. I haven't played the game, so I'm wondering what you can get with "PokéCoins".
Because it seems to me that a game where you buy credits would fall into one of two groups. Either (a) the game developer intentionally included some game mechanic that is unpleasant, that most people would not want to spend time on, and is selling the credits as a method for bypassing that mechanic; or (b) the game developer intentionally made some portions of the game impossible without additional assistance, and then sells you credits as that necessary assistance.
Now I'm not going to buy those credits, which means that in scenario A, the developer has made a boring/annoying game. In scenario B, the developer has made an incomplete game. What's the deal here?
Well they're paid, but they aren't necessarily paid by Torvalds. I forget who are the big contributors. Redhat and IBM? Anyway, it's still a public project, and so he's making public statements about his style guide. I think if he were slightly less dickish about it, it would be fine.
So every 18 to 36 months you spend $200 for a new card, and can likely sell your old one for a bit of cash. And every 4.5 to 6 years you buy a new mobo,CPU, and probably RAM for $250.
So if you spent $200 every 18 months, that's about $650 over 5 years, let's say. Plus $250 every 4.5 to 6 years. So let's just say $900 every 5 years. If you want to (or have to) buy a new hard drive over the span of those 5 years-- let's say your hard drive fails, or you decide to upgrade to a flash drive-- suddenly that gets bumped up to $1000 or more. It's basically the same thing.
The author of the article claims that for one to build a gaming PC, they need an "unreasonable" amount of disposable income, and also have an unreasonable amount of time to "research, shop around, and assemble parts" for their computer.
Or they could just buy a pre-made gaming PC. You might be able to save a few dollars by putting one together yourself, but if you're worried about all the time and effort spent, and having "sausage fingers" that can't seat a motherboard, buying an already-assembled system is an option.
It's not necessarily that expensive, even-- the Alienware Alpha, for example, starts at $500. It's not the most powerful system ever, but it'll play an awful lot of PC games.
The author adds that a person looking into making one such gear also needs to always have to keep investing time and money in as long as they want to stay at the cutting edge or recommended specifications range for new PC games.
Well yes, if you want to stay on the cutting edge, you need to spend money to stay there. Not necessarily time, since there are companies who will build you a pretty cutting-edge system for a price. But money, yes, you have to spend money to stay on the cutting edge. However, you don't need to stay on the cutting edge. You can buy a $1000 system and play games on it for several years. Even a $1000 gaming rig will play most mainstream games at medium or high graphics settings, at playable frame rates. It might not play the most demanding games on "ultra high" at 100fps, but honestly, you can do it. My pattern for the past couple decades has been to buy a $1000 system every 5 years, updating the video card to whatever I can get for $200 halfway through the lifecycle. I haven't really had trouble playing games.
There's one huge reason why ruling your society based on "science" is a bad idea: What you will generally find is that, whatever method you use to govern, it will eventually fall under the sway and corruption of the rich and powerful. Attempting to merge science and politics won't result in politics being ruled by scientists, but in science being run by politicians.
Of course, there are other more specific problems, one being that "scientists" are often not as detached and rational as they believe themselves to be. What constitutes sufficient evidence is itself under constant debate. There are difficulties with the question of whether science can determine morality... And more. Every vague or uncertain point and every place where there's wiggle-room will become a tool of people seeking political power.
And why do you think "creationism" is a thing, after all? You try to marry science and politics, and politicians will exploit ignorance and uncertainty to make their positions sound "scientific" to those who don't know better. Neil deGrasse Tyson wants more of that? He should stick to physics, and stay out of fields he doesn't understand.
3. Can someone be President if they are not cleared to see 90% of what crosses their desk?
I'm no expert, but I'd imagine being president trumps the idea of "not having security clearance". Otherwise, some government bureaucrat could just deny candidates clearance and thereby exclude them from being elected into office.
the mere presence of a backdoor would lead to hackers exploiting it.
Well, it would lead to hackers exploiting the encryption used by regular, law abiding people. Criminals and terrorists could still encrypt things with other schemes that don't include a back door.
Don't assume that expertise means caring what's best for society. It just means you know what's best for you.
It's more complicated than that, even. Sometimes expertise works against you by limiting your perspective. If you're an expert developer, it might predispose you to building applications that make sense to developers and are useful for developers, while having a very hard time making applications that make sense to regular people. You see a app that most people would find simple, elegant, and frustration-free, and you get annoyed at the lack of features (features that most people would find extraneous and confusing). And it's not that you're wrong. You're an expert. But your expertise acts like blinders, making it harder to see things that aren't within your narrow focus.
It's wonderful to have the benefit of expert advice, and when put in a position to make important decisions on a certain subject, you should try to attain some level of expertise on that subject. However, there are times when a pair of fresh eyes can help to inform the experts.
I noticed this a few months back. I noticed that I was getting a lot more friend suggestions of people that I didn't know, which was the first thing that made me curious. Facebook had always been suggesting that I friend people when I had mutual friends with that person, but suddenly it was suggesting that I friend people that I didn't recognize, and with whom I shared no mutual friends. So I started paying a bit more attention.
Then I noticed that, among the random strangers, there were a few people that I did know but did not have any mutual Facebook friends and hadn't checked in at the same locations or anything else. That was my first tip-off that Facebook was trying to do something clever to link up friends, so I scanned the suggestions again looking for a possible pattern. Then I noticed that some of the strangers looked familiar. It took me a second to place them, but they were people who lived in the same apartment building or worked in the same office building. In some cases, it was people who lived in a nearby apartment building and got coffee from the same place that I did.
They're definitely using location data to match people up. My only question is whether it's tracking your location all the time, only when the app is open, or only when you post.
So I think the obvious answer here would be something like "fancier and faster hardware". That's the the traditional kind of difference between the "normal" and "pro" version of laptops (e.g. the Macbook Pro ran the same stuff as the Macbook, but was faster hardware in a nicer case).
But it seems to me that the more interesting ideas would not be about a "Chromebook Pro" but a "ChromeOS Pro". Could they, for example, take the best parts of ChromeOS, Android, and Linux desktop distributions to build a real competitor to Windows and macOS? Could they achieve a better balance of appeasing both basic users and power users? Could they get 3rd party vendor support? -- not just for things like Adobe CC or Microsoft Office to run natively, but for things like 3rd party RMM providers. Could they make it so you have the easy option to use the OS while opting out of Google's apps and services, using Dropbox as your basis for storage, for example? Or could there be an easy way for administrators to have all the data stored on internal file servers? Could you substitute another SSO for the Google sign-in?
Maybe Chrome can already do some of these things. I've only played with it a little, and don't know if there are non-obvious fancy things you can do. But you get the idea.
I feel like that'd be more like a "Chromebook Dev" or something. Valuable for someone who wants to hack into it, but not really adding value to normal professional users.
Is the new iOS running on Apple's new filesystem? Supposedly part of the features of the new filesystem is that it has greater control over file encryption. Given this explanation, it may be that they previously encrypted the kernel because it was the best way to encrypt user data, whereas with a new filesystem they may be able to encrypt the files they want to encrypt without needing to encrypt anything else.
And by the way, fiber is a public infrastructure generally, because most towns grant the franchise to dig up streets / string cable to one company only.
Also, (and I know I'm about to oversimplify a little, but...) there's not much point in having multiple fiber runs all throughout town, even if the town allows it. It's sort of like if you had a few different "road providers" who each had to run their roads into your neighborhood, creating separate driveways for each road. It's inefficient.
Or if you are going to run redundant lines, make it part of the same system, and design it all to provide real redundancy. Right now, businesses frequently get multiple lines from different vendors in order to ensure uptime, but if we cut all the investment in competing infrastructure and instead invested that money in creating robust and redundant infrastructure, then we should all end up with faster and more reliable connections.
Also, it's worth noting that Apple will often "reinvent the wheel" when the existing wheels don't quite work they way they'd like. They don't have to maintain compatibility with other vendors or old concepts, which frees them to do what they like.
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I've always said that to be a good IT pro, you have to be lazy in a particular way. Automation is a good example of it. Another is the tendency to come up with a permanent fix instead of constantly dealing with the fallout.
For example, I remember working one place where a particular server crashed in the middle of the night every week. When I came into the company, it had been happening for six months, and once a week, one of the IT guys had to come in early to make sure the server got started up before everyone else came in. They told me I'd be added to the rotation, and some weeks I'd have to come in early.
So my first thought was, I don't want to come in early. My second: One of these days, someone is going to come in to turn that server on, and it won't turn on. I don't want that to happen on my day. Instead, I spent a few hours researching and looking through logs. I don't remember what the fix was-- something like the VSS from the backup was causing a crash and the server needed a hotfix or... whatever. Doesn't matter. In a few hours, I fixed the problem, and the server stopped crashing.
It was an act of laziness-- I didn't want to keep fixing the problem over and over again, so instead I spent extra time to fix it properly the first time.
Something like an Apple Store? Microsoft Store? Something else?
So you're really just asking what it should *look* like? As in, what should the aesthetic design be?
Sure. Make it look like an Apple Store.
It seems like the bigger question should be, what should be in it? What should the exhibits be, and how should it work? Whatever the aesthetics, what are kids going to learn from the experience?
And I don't know what the goal is or what resources are available, but just to throw an idea out there, the first thing that popped into my head was (perhaps obviously) to have interactive exhibits showing the progress computers have made. As much as possible, have old computers or replicas so that kids can see what the actual physical machine looked like. Maybe show them a Babbage Difference Engine, and see if you can break down how it works. Maybe things like the early IBM PCs, an Apple II, and the first Mac. Let them have access to some emulators that show what the different old operating systems were like-- DOS, early versions of MacOS and Windows. Provide some sort of interactive method for illustrating how long it would take for operation would happen on a computer from 1985, 1995, 2005, and 2015. Maybe have an exhibit where they can play different video games from different eras.
Maybe it's just me, but that's what I think of if you say the words, "Children's Computer Museum"-- some collection of interactive exhibits arranged chronologically to show kids the development of computers, focusing on the development of personal computing (starting circa 1980), but with a couple of things early on to talk about how things developed from an abacus through mainframes, leading up to the PC.
Ok, regardless, they were the first company to throw their weight behind USB and do away with old legacy ports.
Is the company really saving that much money by using 2012 processors and 4GB of RAM as standard?
It seems that this is in reference to the non-Retina Macbook Pro, which means that the author is completely missing the point. Apple isn't selling those as a method of saving money. Apple doesn't put those models in their marketing. They aren't on display at Apple Stores. It's not remotely the model that Apple wants you to buy. It's a legacy model. No one at Apple is going to recommend that you buy that model, except in very specific circumstances.
Essentially, Apple continues to sell them only because they're still in demand. If you want an Apple laptop that has an Ethernet port or Firewire ports (without using a dongle), or without a Retina Display, or with a built-in DVD drive, that's the one model that Apple keeps around in order to cater to your needs.
If anything, this is a problem caused by Apple being too far ahead of the curve in their laptop designs. They were the first company to drop PS2 ports in favor of USB. They were the first company to drop all floppy and CD/DVD drives. They were the first company to implement high resolution displays. I'd expect that, in a few years, you might find that the only port to be found on any of their devices is the current iteration of Thunderbolt. When you keep moving ahead so quickly, you're going to find that you're leaving some of your customers behind. As a result, they have sometimes held onto legacy models to service people who can't use the newest designs, for whatever reason.
You may have a valid criticism, but this is actually an instance where a story is justified.
In case you're not tracking what's going on (it sounds like maybe you're trying to tune this stuff out), Microsoft is saying they're not going to move past Windows 10. All new updates to Windows 10 are still going to be labelled Windows 10, but this is about as big an update as Microsoft is going to do all at once. So if it helps you to better understand this story, this is about as big an update to Windows as Microsoft is likely to make anytime soon. You may as well think of it as Windows 11.
Or I guess Windows 10 was really Windows 9, so this is really Windows 10...? Whatever.
So one of the biggest most important and influential operating systems just released it's next big version. If any Microsoft news is worth reporting, this is probably it.
Because those deaths are according to plan.
So Verizon bought AOL, and now they're buying Yahoo. What's next? Are they going to buy Compuserve, Prodigy, Lycos, or Excite?
But really, what's the plan here? I find it a little frightening that Verizon's strategy seems to be to acquire whatever large content sources they can get their hands on. They (and Comcast) have given some indications that they'd like to leverage their control over infrastructure to push their own content and services.
Say I'm being unreasonable, but here's my immediate reaction: infrastructure providers, whether they're fiber or cellular, should just provide the infrastructure. Voice service should be decoupled from the physical infrastructure. It should be competitive VoIP products based on open standards. The expectation should be that I can get a phone on Verizon's network, but my phone service might be through services like Google Hangouts or Skype, but that Google Hangouts and Skype can talk to each other the same way that Gmail can send email to Office 365. Same with video calls and messenger apps, frankly.
If you start from that viewpoint, then it's not about forcing Verizon to filter calls. All the questions boil down to "What should these open standards look like?" and "How do we get people to agree to use these standards?" If you have a set of good, secure standards, then you should have better luck verifying the identity of the source of the messages, and thereby identifying abusers. You'll still have some of the same problems we have in filtering spam, but (a) if you're building these standards from the ground up with modern knowledge, we can do better than what we've done with email; and (b) if you don't like your spam filtering, you can easily switch to a different provider that does a better job, and providing a good spam filter becomes a competitive edge.
Of course, this isn't going to happen. Everyone wants to lock their users into walled gardens. Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all trying to strong-arm users into using their services rather than giving them a free choice to use the best provider. If the web were being designed today, it would all look like the early AOL, with everyone walled into the garden that they signed up for, completely unable to access content or services unless they are offered by their ISP. It's absurd.
The only difference is that democrats want a safety net that they can't afford, whereas Republicans simply want their roads, their military, and their Medicare and want to live tax-free, apparently paying for the programs with manna from the sky.
So Democrats want a safety net they can't afford while Republicans want tax breaks they can't afford. Meanwhile a lot of the Republicans also want to have our government run as a theocracy, having our laws based on morals gleaned from their experience handling snakes and speaking in tongues.
These games always disturb me a bit-- the "free" games that let you buy some sort of credits. I haven't played the game, so I'm wondering what you can get with "PokéCoins".
Because it seems to me that a game where you buy credits would fall into one of two groups. Either (a) the game developer intentionally included some game mechanic that is unpleasant, that most people would not want to spend time on, and is selling the credits as a method for bypassing that mechanic; or (b) the game developer intentionally made some portions of the game impossible without additional assistance, and then sells you credits as that necessary assistance.
Now I'm not going to buy those credits, which means that in scenario A, the developer has made a boring/annoying game. In scenario B, the developer has made an incomplete game. What's the deal here?
Is this actually a "middle-out" compression, or is that just a joke? Do we know what the Weissman score is?
Well they're paid, but they aren't necessarily paid by Torvalds. I forget who are the big contributors. Redhat and IBM? Anyway, it's still a public project, and so he's making public statements about his style guide. I think if he were slightly less dickish about it, it would be fine.
I honestly feel like $1000 is going overboard.
Well here's the thing, later on you say:
So every 18 to 36 months you spend $200 for a new card, and can likely sell your old one for a bit of cash. And every 4.5 to 6 years you buy a new mobo,CPU, and probably RAM for $250.
So if you spent $200 every 18 months, that's about $650 over 5 years, let's say. Plus $250 every 4.5 to 6 years. So let's just say $900 every 5 years. If you want to (or have to) buy a new hard drive over the span of those 5 years-- let's say your hard drive fails, or you decide to upgrade to a flash drive-- suddenly that gets bumped up to $1000 or more. It's basically the same thing.
The author of the article claims that for one to build a gaming PC, they need an "unreasonable" amount of disposable income, and also have an unreasonable amount of time to "research, shop around, and assemble parts" for their computer.
Or they could just buy a pre-made gaming PC. You might be able to save a few dollars by putting one together yourself, but if you're worried about all the time and effort spent, and having "sausage fingers" that can't seat a motherboard, buying an already-assembled system is an option.
It's not necessarily that expensive, even-- the Alienware Alpha, for example, starts at $500. It's not the most powerful system ever, but it'll play an awful lot of PC games.
The author adds that a person looking into making one such gear also needs to always have to keep investing time and money in as long as they want to stay at the cutting edge or recommended specifications range for new PC games.
Well yes, if you want to stay on the cutting edge, you need to spend money to stay there. Not necessarily time, since there are companies who will build you a pretty cutting-edge system for a price. But money, yes, you have to spend money to stay on the cutting edge. However, you don't need to stay on the cutting edge. You can buy a $1000 system and play games on it for several years. Even a $1000 gaming rig will play most mainstream games at medium or high graphics settings, at playable frame rates. It might not play the most demanding games on "ultra high" at 100fps, but honestly, you can do it. My pattern for the past couple decades has been to buy a $1000 system every 5 years, updating the video card to whatever I can get for $200 halfway through the lifecycle. I haven't really had trouble playing games.
Would it be better if he were using task scheduler to schedule compiled C++ apps with no error handling or logging?
There's one huge reason why ruling your society based on "science" is a bad idea: What you will generally find is that, whatever method you use to govern, it will eventually fall under the sway and corruption of the rich and powerful. Attempting to merge science and politics won't result in politics being ruled by scientists, but in science being run by politicians.
Of course, there are other more specific problems, one being that "scientists" are often not as detached and rational as they believe themselves to be. What constitutes sufficient evidence is itself under constant debate. There are difficulties with the question of whether science can determine morality... And more. Every vague or uncertain point and every place where there's wiggle-room will become a tool of people seeking political power.
And why do you think "creationism" is a thing, after all? You try to marry science and politics, and politicians will exploit ignorance and uncertainty to make their positions sound "scientific" to those who don't know better. Neil deGrasse Tyson wants more of that? He should stick to physics, and stay out of fields he doesn't understand.
3. Can someone be President if they are not cleared to see 90% of what crosses their desk?
I'm no expert, but I'd imagine being president trumps the idea of "not having security clearance". Otherwise, some government bureaucrat could just deny candidates clearance and thereby exclude them from being elected into office.
the mere presence of a backdoor would lead to hackers exploiting it.
Well, it would lead to hackers exploiting the encryption used by regular, law abiding people. Criminals and terrorists could still encrypt things with other schemes that don't include a back door.
Don't assume that expertise means caring what's best for society. It just means you know what's best for you.
It's more complicated than that, even. Sometimes expertise works against you by limiting your perspective. If you're an expert developer, it might predispose you to building applications that make sense to developers and are useful for developers, while having a very hard time making applications that make sense to regular people. You see a app that most people would find simple, elegant, and frustration-free, and you get annoyed at the lack of features (features that most people would find extraneous and confusing). And it's not that you're wrong. You're an expert. But your expertise acts like blinders, making it harder to see things that aren't within your narrow focus.
It's wonderful to have the benefit of expert advice, and when put in a position to make important decisions on a certain subject, you should try to attain some level of expertise on that subject. However, there are times when a pair of fresh eyes can help to inform the experts.
I noticed this a few months back. I noticed that I was getting a lot more friend suggestions of people that I didn't know, which was the first thing that made me curious. Facebook had always been suggesting that I friend people when I had mutual friends with that person, but suddenly it was suggesting that I friend people that I didn't recognize, and with whom I shared no mutual friends. So I started paying a bit more attention.
Then I noticed that, among the random strangers, there were a few people that I did know but did not have any mutual Facebook friends and hadn't checked in at the same locations or anything else. That was my first tip-off that Facebook was trying to do something clever to link up friends, so I scanned the suggestions again looking for a possible pattern. Then I noticed that some of the strangers looked familiar. It took me a second to place them, but they were people who lived in the same apartment building or worked in the same office building. In some cases, it was people who lived in a nearby apartment building and got coffee from the same place that I did.
They're definitely using location data to match people up. My only question is whether it's tracking your location all the time, only when the app is open, or only when you post.
So I think the obvious answer here would be something like "fancier and faster hardware". That's the the traditional kind of difference between the "normal" and "pro" version of laptops (e.g. the Macbook Pro ran the same stuff as the Macbook, but was faster hardware in a nicer case).
But it seems to me that the more interesting ideas would not be about a "Chromebook Pro" but a "ChromeOS Pro". Could they, for example, take the best parts of ChromeOS, Android, and Linux desktop distributions to build a real competitor to Windows and macOS? Could they achieve a better balance of appeasing both basic users and power users? Could they get 3rd party vendor support? -- not just for things like Adobe CC or Microsoft Office to run natively, but for things like 3rd party RMM providers. Could they make it so you have the easy option to use the OS while opting out of Google's apps and services, using Dropbox as your basis for storage, for example? Or could there be an easy way for administrators to have all the data stored on internal file servers? Could you substitute another SSO for the Google sign-in?
Maybe Chrome can already do some of these things. I've only played with it a little, and don't know if there are non-obvious fancy things you can do. But you get the idea.
I feel like that'd be more like a "Chromebook Dev" or something. Valuable for someone who wants to hack into it, but not really adding value to normal professional users.
Is the new iOS running on Apple's new filesystem? Supposedly part of the features of the new filesystem is that it has greater control over file encryption. Given this explanation, it may be that they previously encrypted the kernel because it was the best way to encrypt user data, whereas with a new filesystem they may be able to encrypt the files they want to encrypt without needing to encrypt anything else.
Just a shot in the dark, though.
And by the way, fiber is a public infrastructure generally, because most towns grant the franchise to dig up streets / string cable to one company only.
Also, (and I know I'm about to oversimplify a little, but...) there's not much point in having multiple fiber runs all throughout town, even if the town allows it. It's sort of like if you had a few different "road providers" who each had to run their roads into your neighborhood, creating separate driveways for each road. It's inefficient.
Or if you are going to run redundant lines, make it part of the same system, and design it all to provide real redundancy. Right now, businesses frequently get multiple lines from different vendors in order to ensure uptime, but if we cut all the investment in competing infrastructure and instead invested that money in creating robust and redundant infrastructure, then we should all end up with faster and more reliable connections.
Also, it's worth noting that Apple will often "reinvent the wheel" when the existing wheels don't quite work they way they'd like. They don't have to maintain compatibility with other vendors or old concepts, which frees them to do what they like.