"Computers long ago reached the point where they were fast enough..."
For you, maybe - but not for everyone. I work with people daily who need more computing power, and in fact would benefit even further if processors were faster even than they are today. "Fast enough" is a fallacy - there is always, and will always be, room for improvement. Folks doing media editing, 3D animation, scientific research, financial calculations, and a whole host of other things need more power from their computers - not to move away to a less capable platform.
Heck, even in games this is apparent. A lot of new games simply will not play well on processors from 2006 - that is seven years ago now, before quad-core processors were widely available! So please, don't take your one case and assume that means no one else has different needs for their computers.
For 99% of computer users, they are "fast enough". For the 1% doing the things you mention, they are capable enough but that 1% always desires to have it all done in the least amount of time possible, so faster will always be better.
And for the gamers in the 99% that don't qualify in the 1% - well, for them it's just about the who has the bigger "equipment", regardless of whether or not what they had before was actually "fast enough" for what they do - they'll still spend the top dollar on stuff they don't really need.
However, most people just do e-mail, productivity (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), watch videos, etc - and for them, any computer since 2005 will be fast enough.
Agreed. I've never had issues with the native console support, it's always when the video drivers start coming into play that the console breaks. My AMD64 system has no console one I go into X because the nVidia Blob Driver breaks it.
While it's nice having ntfs-3g for reading usb flash drives and the like, it's way too cpu intensive for any sort of performance IO..and yes many of us need to read/write ntfs at speed when needed (say shared external disks). I don't get why it was rewritten for fuse. The old ntfs kernel driver still persists to this day in all its limited glory, so it can't be a patent issue.
Can't recall the last time I used the FUSE NTFS-3G driver as the in-kernel driver now has full read/write support and is at least on-par with the FUSE driver for functionality.
Not as long as desktops are around, which won't be forever. Prounouncing the death of the desktop now would be premature, but lets face it, 20 years from now, 10 even, people aren't going to be using a mouse, dude. Lets get real.
They've had the ability to do touch-screen displays for well over 20 years. They even tried to do it in the 1980's. However, they found that it was not practical for a desktop - and produced what got coined as "Gorilla Arm". That's why Touch Screen will never take off on the desktop.
That said, I still think you are right that the desktop won't really be around in 10-20 years except for in some very niche cases. Touch-based systems will replace it, but they won't be desktop's like you think today. They'll be mobile systems integrated in a fashion that provides the same functionality most people need from a desktop now.
And for direct manipulation of digital objects, gestures a la Minority Report, but no need for special gloves. Just reach out and manipulate the objects that will be shown from a 3d projector that your cell phone is equiped with.
Personally I think it will be more akin to the keyboard in "Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within" than what was shown in "Minority Report". One company - HelioDisplay - pretty much already has the technology in one form (ionized air + projectors) but it is still a long ways from the requisite capabilities.
Quick portrait of the future; an engineer is walking around downtown when he gets a call from his boss that a change needs to be made to a product design asap. The engineer ends the conversation using his cell phone and then whips out a can of instant LCD and sprays it on a convinient wall in a rough 32x32 box. The spray contains nanite machines that assemble the components of the spray into the LCD + a wifi (or bluetooth or other, new gen, interface). The engineer then tells his digital buter application (in his phone) to connect to the display that he just sprayed on the nearby wall, and to bring up the product plans. He then makes changes using his hands to manipulate directly the product parts. Then tells his digital assistant to save the changes, puts his cell phone in his pocket, and moves on. The connection to the spray-on LCD terminated, the nanites from the spray can dissassemble the spray-on LCD, rendering the wall the same as it was before.
More like, the engineer drops his cell phone on the table, and the wall lights up with the display. The touch interface on the table in front of him activates and allows him to start manipulating the display and operate the computer running from the cell phone. Additional processors and memory, if needed, are supplied by the table to help run the software using NUMA techniques.
Not just QT/QML, a more complete API sharing is what they should embrace, something like are trying to normalize Plasma Active, Sailfish and Ubuntu Mobile. You could have all the apps in all platforms, and choosing the right one based on your needs (they seem to have different targets), not a particular app you want.
You do realize that the Plasma Active/Sailfish/Ubuntu Mobile unification is all based on QT+QML, don't you?
RIM continued to sell a shitload of their pieces of crap for years and years before they really went under. And make no mistake, a comeback now would be short of a miracle. It's just not in their DNA to build something user friendly, sexy and fun.
The only thing that hurt RIM was the outage of their own centralized servers that everyone using their products relied on. RIM had a healthy market share until then. BB10 will do very well if they can show they've learned from that outage to keep it from happening on such a large scale again.
Bullshit. If you have a Ph.D., you've published original research papers, so you know your field as well as anyone. Sounds like someone never got theirs, but still thinks they should be considered to be in the same league as someone who did?
And yet he could have published in completely unrelated areas of physics to the discussion at hand, thus making him no more qualified for the discussion and a high school student.
Ms has always tried to get popular FOSS applications running decent on their platform in a futile attempt to negate the need to run GNU/Linux for those said apps. Then when Linux became the killer app Ms went out of their way to accomodate Linux on their hyper-v system. This is not because they want Linux or FOSS around in the marketplace. They know that if they do not accomodate FOSS their system will become more and more marginalized by emerging tech.
MS only started that strategy when those FOSS applications on Linux really started eating their lunch - back around 2005. Prior to that, they were utilizing the Unix compatiblity layer to get people to run their applications on Windows in order to get Windows in the shop, and then force them to get performance by converting to Win32 from POSIX. Problem with applications like PHP and Apache was they already had those Win32 layers and very good performance, but the performance under Linux was still extremely better. IIS couldn't compete with Apache - still can't.
Microsoft is about their bottom line, plain and simple.
That's a bizarre thing to say. They're one of the oldest software companies in history. Companies don't survive (and thrive) as long as they do without some forward thinking. You want to consider doing some reading about this history of the company, especially in relation to other companies that size, and re-consider your admittedly short-sighted response.
True; however, that left the building with Bill Gates. No one else has ever had a vision for the company, and it's floundered pretty badly since.
If windows 8 hasn't failed yet, it will. It is certain to fail. It is such a dreadful experience that it makes even (spit!) Vista look good.
Lets not go overboard. Win 8 has an infuriating interface, but thats (AFAICT) the only really major ding against it. In every other regard, its Win7, just with better internals.
Vista = 6.0, Win7 = 6.1, and Win8 = 6.2. Yes, Windows 8 is just an updated version of Windows 7 with a completely different interface on top. It's also the only version of Windows - or any software really - that started making my eyes hurt after even only 1 or 2 hours of use (I have in VMware on my Linux laptop for testing purposes.). Windows 8 will fail. But don't expect to hear that from Microsoft or anything. They've already started a push towards releasing Windows Blue in 2013 - an update to Windows 8 alread, and not even a year after release.
Vista on the other hand had a pointlessly shiney new interface, and everything under the hood was slow, buggy, and generally unpleasant to deal with. File copy times that went way up, infuriatingly slow boot times, way over-aggressive UAC, missing drivers for everything
There were numerous problems when Vista came out, and they're mostly Microsoft's. Vista was a major refactor of the Windows codebase, and one that was not very well optimized when Vista was released - which is why it required more memory and more processor than Windows 7, and why it generally ran a little bit slower. The drivers issue was due to the fact that Microsoft changed the driver APIs between the last beta release and the RTM - so everyone that had drivers ready, tested, etc all of a sudden didn't - they had to go back and fix them, retest, etc; it was very poorly handled by Microsoft who should have done another Beta, but was under the gun by manufacturers to meet the Holiday build schedules.
As to UAC...Microsoft had for years encouraged developers to use APIs that required Administrative Priviledges. Then they changed their tune but developers didn't listen. The mess that was UAC when Vista was first released was the end result. It got better only because (i) users were given an option to turn it down, and (ii) developers finally listened and fixed their code.
anyone who did support for Vista is probably thankful right now that the Win8 interface / Metro shenanigans are ALL they got wrong.
Actually I missed Aero in Win8. The lack of it made Win8 feel rather dull. But they had to remove it from Win8 to meet performance requirements for phones and tablets; they should have left it for the desktops though.
>Really, if they took metro out and gave me back my start menu (and no, its not worth buying some product to fix for me), I really wouldnt have any complaints that I didnt have for Win7.
I made it until at least 4.3 and probably 4.4 before I gave up and went back to Windows. And this is from someone who hadn't used Windows in 4 years. KDE 4.2 was didn't hold a candle to KDE 3.5 for me.
I stuck with 3.5.10 until 4.4 on some systems and 4.5 on others. But I haven't looked back.
Honestly, I looked at 4.0 through 4.3 from time to time but kept seeing that they were not production ready, and KDE themselves didn't call them production ready either - especially 4.0 and 4.1.
In all honest, Blackberry even as it stands now has better integration, infrastructure, and toe-holds in the enterprise market for mobile than Microsoft will ever get with respect to mobile. So, yeah - they'll do well and they'll steal market share that Microsoft might otherwise have gotten - and really needs. Look for BB to outsell MS in the mobile space once again with BB10.
Yeah, I thought twice about posting my comment giving the recent shooting. But my thoughts were more about the knee jerk reaction to the shooting and that it only takes two seconds to swap out a standard 10 shot clip, so the 30 shot clip is not significantly more deadly than multiple 10 shot clips. Likewise, with the lunchboxes, which were banned, because they can be used as a weapon to hit somebody upside the head - well, I'd rather be hit upside the head with an 8 ounce lunch box than a 4 pound laptop, but nobody is clambering to band laptops at schools. I figure if somebody wants to do harm to another human being, they are going to find a way to do it.
I was more thinking of the edge getting turned into a razor - especially for metal business card holders - than used as a blunt force weapon.
But I do agree that school violence is a serious issue. I just think, though, that it is a symptom of a bigger underlying problem and until society addresses the real problem, a lot of resources will be expended solving the wrong thing.
Quite agree. They keep trying to tackle this from the wrong side, and the whole "cannot hurt their self-esteem" approach doesn't help anything either as it just ties the hands of the school administration for doing any kind of workable punishment. (And if you think suspension is a workable punishment for many of the kids that don't take the school administration and teachers seriously then I have a bridge to sell you - most of them just show up for the detention or suspension, and then go about what they were going to do anyway.)
The same could be said about the RFID issue. If the purpose is to ensure the students are their for state funding, the first question to ask is "Why does the state require that?" Why not fund based on registered students? Seems to be a lot simpler and you could do random spot checks in a district to verify accuracy. Besides, if 10% of the kids are missing (2 kids from each class) on any given day, you can't cut staff, you need the same number of teachers, which is your primary cost.
Again, a misguided attempt on behalf of the school district administration, though also in part of the public school system and those administering the funds for it. In part, due to the reality that not all students are registered (e.g. illegal immigrants have a hard time getting registered) and not all registered students show up for various reason (skipping school, sick, vacation, etc.).
If it was intended to be only for people with extant licenses, wouldn't they already HAVE serial codes? They posted the files AND working codes, and the software is 7-10 years old anyway.
Except the codes they had from their purchased versions would not longer work since Adobe turned off the servers that the software used to check the validity of the codes.
I think it was deliberate, AND not a bad move. I know I've got a crappy, gray-area copy of Sony Vegas 6 that I've used for years and am tempted to brave the learning curve to learn Premiere Pro and switch now that I could be using an
a) more current tech (ie it understands MP4, etc)
b) legitimate copy.
I think it's a smart move on their part too if they stick with it. It's still unclear what their intentions were, but while IANAL it's probably clear on what people can do with it regardless since it's not really protected - even a search for CS2 download on Adobe's own website yielded a direct link to the page with the serial numbers and no warnings about who its for.
Schools probably banned metal lunchboxes as potential dangerous weapons.
If you carry an Altoids tin, they probably assume you're storing contraband drugs (like aspirin) in it.
They make those aluminum wallets and metal business card holders. As for Altoids, they can assume what they want. They would have to prove it is contraband drugs in it. As for lunchboxes, yes, those were banned because they were considered to be possible weapons. We should have seen that coming when they first banned the extended 30 lunch box clip.
To much of a potential weapon. Banned.
All kidding aside...that might not be a joke for some schools.
Because they are using them to take attendance and the central computer can detect their presence in most places in the school.
Or the students will get smart, and take turns holding multiple badges so that they can skip classes they don't want to be there for for whatever reason.
Or one of the Numb3rs episodes in which the school used RFID to track students and a few students when on a killing spree using RFID to track their targets becomes a reality...then what?
It's sorta weird to see how RFID is associated with privacy. The student is at school, in their physical body, that we all can see with our built-in eyes! Normally, they're accounted for via some "roll-call" in the mornings (or at least that's how we used to do it back in the day), and then that information was sent to the office where it was processed, and a larger set of information was sent to the state, and everyone that was at school that day was accounted for, it's been happening for a long time now. So what if they want to put teachers at all corners of the halls and watch all of the students, what's wrong with that?...other than it being waaay to expensive for the tax payers to pay the teachers. So instead, they try this idea, and everyone is trying to freak out over a privacy issue. I don't get it, but I'm old and it's probably time that I just move on to yelling at the neighborhood kids about my fine grass.
Yeah, so now they just hand it off to one of their friends and head out. The teacher does the same and the next scandal ensues, but each has an iron clad aliby through the school's RFID tracking.
As a CPA, former auditor, and forensic consultant,
Well, I'm not a CPA - but my wife is (now) and of course in her studies I picked up a thing or two...
I can tell you 3 things:
(1) Audits are not designed to detect fraud, further, i.e, they are only designed to provide only reasonable assurance that the statements are free from material error. Typically this is interpreted to mean that if members of a company were conspiring to commit fraud as opposed to some lone individual stealing money, it is less likely to be caught.
Exactly, but it's also with respect to the Auditing Plan submitted by the firm being audited, which does have standards (GAAS, IIRC) that it must comply with. Though as a forensic consultant you probably are looking for any traces regardless. But it's a pretty big loophole that firms could use to hide fraud, simply by leaving it out of the Auditing Plan.
(2) Most auditors are dumb, especially in the US, in my view largely because the CPA exam is far too easy and largely memorization based.
Can't speak to that. Though I do know they've been making some major changes to the CPA exams - all four parts - in the last few years. Some of it would be very hard to answer based on memorization - essays and simulations are now a big part of several of them, but there's still a lot of multiple choice in there too.
(3) You won't find many accountants on slashdot since they tend not to be among the intellectually/technologically curious types in my experience.
True. Accounting is, IMHO, just filling out forms which is rather boring to this crowd. Yes, you have to understand the numbers to fill out the forms correctly and all that, but this crowd would be more interested in automating that whole process. Of course, Auditors will always have to be involved to make sure that (i) the people using the automated software are using it correctly, and (ii) that the software is written correctly but making sure everything works out. And that whole process of auditing just changes as the software changes...yeah...not this crowds cup-o-tea.
Citing a thing like "FAA identified errors in the assembly of fuel line couplings in the Dreamliner." when the actual fire, according to this morning's Boston Globe, was "[a] Small electrical fire..."
This article brought to you by Airbus Industries.
Well, for the Airbus they probably would have had to enter in a dozen codes, several two user keys, and more just to release the fire surpressent.
I live in Boeing's former home town (Seattle) and it may be sour grapes, but the buzz I hear here is that the other/new assembly site in South Carolina is an amateur hour kind of thing. Boeing set up shop there because of the union workers here, and the quality went away. I hear from labor and management folks both that Boeing is no longer in the aircraft business- they are now in the vendor management business, and there are no effective mechanisms for enforcing quality or delivery timeframes.
Keep in mind also that only one plane (to Air India) has been delivered from SC. I doubt the one in Boston is from SC. Just saying, you can't blame the SC facility.
I live in Boeing's former home town (Seattle) and it may be sour grapes, but the buzz I hear here is that the other/new assembly site in South Carolina is an amateur hour kind of thing. Boeing set up shop there because of the union workers here, and the quality went away. I hear from labor and management folks both that Boeing is no longer in the aircraft business- they are now in the vendor management business, and there are no effective mechanisms for enforcing quality or delivery timeframes.
While I do believe that the union's strikes were taken into account (and legally so), I find it hard to believe that it is an amatuer shop; there might be some learning curves for the folks, but they will get it and do just the same quality as those union folks - only, they'll probably turn out more than the union folks too.
Except that it's pretty much the honor system. Having made FULL versions available for download, as well as full working serial numbers, saying "but you should only download this if you legitimately own a copy" is fairly silly.
If that's what they intenteded, then it would be on the site also where the links are. That is very much not the case. You can also do a search on Adobe's own website for "cs2 download" and get the same link, no login required, etc. It'll be hard to put the cat back in the bag.
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Work is making things like movies, music and games.
So what is it that the other 99% of computer-using workers do for 8 hours a day?
Play Solitaire. Thus games.
"Computers long ago reached the point where they were fast enough..."
For you, maybe - but not for everyone. I work with people daily who need more computing power, and in fact would benefit even further if processors were faster even than they are today. "Fast enough" is a fallacy - there is always, and will always be, room for improvement. Folks doing media editing, 3D animation, scientific research, financial calculations, and a whole host of other things need more power from their computers - not to move away to a less capable platform.
Heck, even in games this is apparent. A lot of new games simply will not play well on processors from 2006 - that is seven years ago now, before quad-core processors were widely available! So please, don't take your one case and assume that means no one else has different needs for their computers.
For 99% of computer users, they are "fast enough". For the 1% doing the things you mention, they are capable enough but that 1% always desires to have it all done in the least amount of time possible, so faster will always be better.
And for the gamers in the 99% that don't qualify in the 1% - well, for them it's just about the who has the bigger "equipment", regardless of whether or not what they had before was actually "fast enough" for what they do - they'll still spend the top dollar on stuff they don't really need.
However, most people just do e-mail, productivity (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), watch videos, etc - and for them, any computer since 2005 will be fast enough.
Can't recall the last time I used the FUSE NTFS-3G driver as the in-kernel driver now has full read/write support and is at least on-par with the FUSE driver for functionality.
Not as long as desktops are around, which won't be forever. Prounouncing the death of the desktop now would be premature, but lets face it, 20 years from now, 10 even, people aren't going to be using a mouse, dude. Lets get real.
They've had the ability to do touch-screen displays for well over 20 years. They even tried to do it in the 1980's. However, they found that it was not practical for a desktop - and produced what got coined as "Gorilla Arm". That's why Touch Screen will never take off on the desktop.
That said, I still think you are right that the desktop won't really be around in 10-20 years except for in some very niche cases. Touch-based systems will replace it, but they won't be desktop's like you think today. They'll be mobile systems integrated in a fashion that provides the same functionality most people need from a desktop now.
And for direct manipulation of digital objects, gestures a la Minority Report, but no need for special gloves. Just reach out and manipulate the objects that will be shown from a 3d projector that your cell phone is equiped with.
Personally I think it will be more akin to the keyboard in "Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within" than what was shown in "Minority Report". One company - HelioDisplay - pretty much already has the technology in one form (ionized air + projectors) but it is still a long ways from the requisite capabilities.
Quick portrait of the future; an engineer is walking around downtown when he gets a call from his boss that a change needs to be made to a product design asap. The engineer ends the conversation using his cell phone and then whips out a can of instant LCD and sprays it on a convinient wall in a rough 32x32 box. The spray contains nanite machines that assemble the components of the spray into the LCD + a wifi (or bluetooth or other, new gen, interface). The engineer then tells his digital buter application (in his phone) to connect to the display that he just sprayed on the nearby wall, and to bring up the product plans. He then makes changes using his hands to manipulate directly the product parts. Then tells his digital assistant to save the changes, puts his cell phone in his pocket, and moves on. The connection to the spray-on LCD terminated, the nanites from the spray can dissassemble the spray-on LCD, rendering the wall the same as it was before.
More like, the engineer drops his cell phone on the table, and the wall lights up with the display. The touch interface on the table in front of him activates and allows him to start manipulating the display and operate the computer running from the cell phone. Additional processors and memory, if needed, are supplied by the table to help run the software using NUMA techniques.
Not just QT/QML, a more complete API sharing is what they should embrace, something like are trying to normalize Plasma Active, Sailfish and Ubuntu Mobile. You could have all the apps in all platforms, and choosing the right one based on your needs (they seem to have different targets), not a particular app you want.
You do realize that the Plasma Active/Sailfish/Ubuntu Mobile unification is all based on QT+QML, don't you?
RIM continued to sell a shitload of their pieces of crap for years and years before they really went under. And make no mistake, a comeback now would be short of a miracle. It's just not in their DNA to build something user friendly, sexy and fun.
The only thing that hurt RIM was the outage of their own centralized servers that everyone using their products relied on. RIM had a healthy market share until then. BB10 will do very well if they can show they've learned from that outage to keep it from happening on such a large scale again.
Bullshit. If you have a Ph.D., you've published original research papers, so you know your field as well as anyone. Sounds like someone never got theirs, but still thinks they should be considered to be in the same league as someone who did?
And yet he could have published in completely unrelated areas of physics to the discussion at hand, thus making him no more qualified for the discussion and a high school student.
Ms has always tried to get popular FOSS applications running decent on their platform in a futile attempt to negate the need to run GNU/Linux for those said apps. Then when Linux became the killer app Ms went out of their way to accomodate Linux on their hyper-v system. This is not because they want Linux or FOSS around in the marketplace. They know that if they do not accomodate FOSS their system will become more and more marginalized by emerging tech.
MS only started that strategy when those FOSS applications on Linux really started eating their lunch - back around 2005. Prior to that, they were utilizing the Unix compatiblity layer to get people to run their applications on Windows in order to get Windows in the shop, and then force them to get performance by converting to Win32 from POSIX. Problem with applications like PHP and Apache was they already had those Win32 layers and very good performance, but the performance under Linux was still extremely better. IIS couldn't compete with Apache - still can't.
Microsoft is about their bottom line, plain and simple. That's a bizarre thing to say. They're one of the oldest software companies in history. Companies don't survive (and thrive) as long as they do without some forward thinking. You want to consider doing some reading about this history of the company, especially in relation to other companies that size, and re-consider your admittedly short-sighted response.
True; however, that left the building with Bill Gates. No one else has ever had a vision for the company, and it's floundered pretty badly since.
Who wants to write a new open source license which conflicts with these terms to the maximum possible extent?
Last I checked, they had a pretty broad exception for OSI approved licenses - meaning the rest of the terms pretty much didn't apply.
It'd be ironic, yes; but they're pretty desparate for market share in the mobile space - that's the only reason they're doing it.
If windows 8 hasn't failed yet, it will. It is certain to fail. It is such a dreadful experience that it makes even (spit!) Vista look good.
Lets not go overboard. Win 8 has an infuriating interface, but thats (AFAICT) the only really major ding against it. In every other regard, its Win7, just with better internals.
Vista = 6.0, Win7 = 6.1, and Win8 = 6.2. Yes, Windows 8 is just an updated version of Windows 7 with a completely different interface on top. It's also the only version of Windows - or any software really - that started making my eyes hurt after even only 1 or 2 hours of use (I have in VMware on my Linux laptop for testing purposes.). Windows 8 will fail. But don't expect to hear that from Microsoft or anything. They've already started a push towards releasing Windows Blue in 2013 - an update to Windows 8 alread, and not even a year after release.
Vista on the other hand had a pointlessly shiney new interface, and everything under the hood was slow, buggy, and generally unpleasant to deal with. File copy times that went way up, infuriatingly slow boot times, way over-aggressive UAC, missing drivers for everything
There were numerous problems when Vista came out, and they're mostly Microsoft's. Vista was a major refactor of the Windows codebase, and one that was not very well optimized when Vista was released - which is why it required more memory and more processor than Windows 7, and why it generally ran a little bit slower. The drivers issue was due to the fact that Microsoft changed the driver APIs between the last beta release and the RTM - so everyone that had drivers ready, tested, etc all of a sudden didn't - they had to go back and fix them, retest, etc; it was very poorly handled by Microsoft who should have done another Beta, but was under the gun by manufacturers to meet the Holiday build schedules.
As to UAC...Microsoft had for years encouraged developers to use APIs that required Administrative Priviledges. Then they changed their tune but developers didn't listen. The mess that was UAC when Vista was first released was the end result. It got better only because (i) users were given an option to turn it down, and (ii) developers finally listened and fixed their code.
anyone who did support for Vista is probably thankful right now that the Win8 interface / Metro shenanigans are ALL they got wrong.
Actually I missed Aero in Win8. The lack of it made Win8 feel rather dull. But they had to remove it from Win8 to meet performance requirements for phones and tablets; they should have left it for the desktops though.
>Really, if they took metro out and gave me back my start menu (and no, its not worth buying some product to fix for me), I really wouldnt have any complaints that I didnt have for Win7.
Still very true and 100% agree.
I made it until at least 4.3 and probably 4.4 before I gave up and went back to Windows. And this is from someone who hadn't used Windows in 4 years. KDE 4.2 was didn't hold a candle to KDE 3.5 for me.
I stuck with 3.5.10 until 4.4 on some systems and 4.5 on others. But I haven't looked back.
Honestly, I looked at 4.0 through 4.3 from time to time but kept seeing that they were not production ready, and KDE themselves didn't call them production ready either - especially 4.0 and 4.1.
In all honest, Blackberry even as it stands now has better integration, infrastructure, and toe-holds in the enterprise market for mobile than Microsoft will ever get with respect to mobile. So, yeah - they'll do well and they'll steal market share that Microsoft might otherwise have gotten - and really needs. Look for BB to outsell MS in the mobile space once again with BB10.
Yeah, I thought twice about posting my comment giving the recent shooting. But my thoughts were more about the knee jerk reaction to the shooting and that it only takes two seconds to swap out a standard 10 shot clip, so the 30 shot clip is not significantly more deadly than multiple 10 shot clips. Likewise, with the lunchboxes, which were banned, because they can be used as a weapon to hit somebody upside the head - well, I'd rather be hit upside the head with an 8 ounce lunch box than a 4 pound laptop, but nobody is clambering to band laptops at schools. I figure if somebody wants to do harm to another human being, they are going to find a way to do it.
I was more thinking of the edge getting turned into a razor - especially for metal business card holders - than used as a blunt force weapon.
But I do agree that school violence is a serious issue. I just think, though, that it is a symptom of a bigger underlying problem and until society addresses the real problem, a lot of resources will be expended solving the wrong thing.
Quite agree. They keep trying to tackle this from the wrong side, and the whole "cannot hurt their self-esteem" approach doesn't help anything either as it just ties the hands of the school administration for doing any kind of workable punishment. (And if you think suspension is a workable punishment for many of the kids that don't take the school administration and teachers seriously then I have a bridge to sell you - most of them just show up for the detention or suspension, and then go about what they were going to do anyway.)
The same could be said about the RFID issue. If the purpose is to ensure the students are their for state funding, the first question to ask is "Why does the state require that?" Why not fund based on registered students? Seems to be a lot simpler and you could do random spot checks in a district to verify accuracy. Besides, if 10% of the kids are missing (2 kids from each class) on any given day, you can't cut staff, you need the same number of teachers, which is your primary cost.
Again, a misguided attempt on behalf of the school district administration, though also in part of the public school system and those administering the funds for it. In part, due to the reality that not all students are registered (e.g. illegal immigrants have a hard time getting registered) and not all registered students show up for various reason (skipping school, sick, vacation, etc.).
If it was intended to be only for people with extant licenses, wouldn't they already HAVE serial codes? They posted the files AND working codes, and the software is 7-10 years old anyway.
Except the codes they had from their purchased versions would not longer work since Adobe turned off the servers that the software used to check the validity of the codes.
I think it was deliberate, AND not a bad move. I know I've got a crappy, gray-area copy of Sony Vegas 6 that I've used for years and am tempted to brave the learning curve to learn Premiere Pro and switch now that I could be using an a) more current tech (ie it understands MP4, etc) b) legitimate copy.
I think it's a smart move on their part too if they stick with it. It's still unclear what their intentions were, but while IANAL it's probably clear on what people can do with it regardless since it's not really protected - even a search for CS2 download on Adobe's own website yielded a direct link to the page with the serial numbers and no warnings about who its for.
Schools probably banned metal lunchboxes as potential dangerous weapons.
If you carry an Altoids tin, they probably assume you're storing contraband drugs (like aspirin) in it.
They make those aluminum wallets and metal business card holders. As for Altoids, they can assume what they want. They would have to prove it is contraband drugs in it. As for lunchboxes, yes, those were banned because they were considered to be possible weapons. We should have seen that coming when they first banned the extended 30 lunch box clip.
To much of a potential weapon. Banned.
All kidding aside...that might not be a joke for some schools.
Because they are using them to take attendance and the central computer can detect their presence in most places in the school.
Or the students will get smart, and take turns holding multiple badges so that they can skip classes they don't want to be there for for whatever reason.
Or one of the Numb3rs episodes in which the school used RFID to track students and a few students when on a killing spree using RFID to track their targets becomes a reality...then what?
It's sorta weird to see how RFID is associated with privacy. The student is at school, in their physical body, that we all can see with our built-in eyes! Normally, they're accounted for via some "roll-call" in the mornings (or at least that's how we used to do it back in the day), and then that information was sent to the office where it was processed, and a larger set of information was sent to the state, and everyone that was at school that day was accounted for, it's been happening for a long time now. So what if they want to put teachers at all corners of the halls and watch all of the students, what's wrong with that? ...other than it being waaay to expensive for the tax payers to pay the teachers. So instead, they try this idea, and everyone is trying to freak out over a privacy issue. I don't get it, but I'm old and it's probably time that I just move on to yelling at the neighborhood kids about my fine grass.
Yeah, so now they just hand it off to one of their friends and head out. The teacher does the same and the next scandal ensues, but each has an iron clad aliby through the school's RFID tracking.
With WiFi and BlueTooth it's just a matter of time until our Lego SkyNet overlord is replicating itself to take over.
Are there any special fees or friendly payments? If so, I'm in. Give me a call. My phone number is 419....
I'll join too. Just call me at 911-5673.
As a CPA, former auditor, and forensic consultant,
Well, I'm not a CPA - but my wife is (now) and of course in her studies I picked up a thing or two...
I can tell you 3 things: (1) Audits are not designed to detect fraud, further, i.e, they are only designed to provide only reasonable assurance that the statements are free from material error. Typically this is interpreted to mean that if members of a company were conspiring to commit fraud as opposed to some lone individual stealing money, it is less likely to be caught.
Exactly, but it's also with respect to the Auditing Plan submitted by the firm being audited, which does have standards (GAAS, IIRC) that it must comply with. Though as a forensic consultant you probably are looking for any traces regardless. But it's a pretty big loophole that firms could use to hide fraud, simply by leaving it out of the Auditing Plan.
(2) Most auditors are dumb, especially in the US, in my view largely because the CPA exam is far too easy and largely memorization based.
Can't speak to that. Though I do know they've been making some major changes to the CPA exams - all four parts - in the last few years. Some of it would be very hard to answer based on memorization - essays and simulations are now a big part of several of them, but there's still a lot of multiple choice in there too.
(3) You won't find many accountants on slashdot since they tend not to be among the intellectually/technologically curious types in my experience.
True. Accounting is, IMHO, just filling out forms which is rather boring to this crowd. Yes, you have to understand the numbers to fill out the forms correctly and all that, but this crowd would be more interested in automating that whole process. Of course, Auditors will always have to be involved to make sure that (i) the people using the automated software are using it correctly, and (ii) that the software is written correctly but making sure everything works out. And that whole process of auditing just changes as the software changes...yeah...not this crowds cup-o-tea.
Citing a thing like "FAA identified errors in the assembly of fuel line couplings in the Dreamliner." when the actual fire, according to this morning's Boston Globe, was "[a] Small electrical fire..." This article brought to you by Airbus Industries.
Well, for the Airbus they probably would have had to enter in a dozen codes, several two user keys, and more just to release the fire surpressent.
Yes- this ^
I live in Boeing's former home town (Seattle) and it may be sour grapes, but the buzz I hear here is that the other/new assembly site in South Carolina is an amateur hour kind of thing. Boeing set up shop there because of the union workers here, and the quality went away. I hear from labor and management folks both that Boeing is no longer in the aircraft business- they are now in the vendor management business, and there are no effective mechanisms for enforcing quality or delivery timeframes.
Keep in mind also that only one plane (to Air India) has been delivered from SC. I doubt the one in Boston is from SC. Just saying, you can't blame the SC facility.
Yes- this ^
I live in Boeing's former home town (Seattle) and it may be sour grapes, but the buzz I hear here is that the other/new assembly site in South Carolina is an amateur hour kind of thing. Boeing set up shop there because of the union workers here, and the quality went away. I hear from labor and management folks both that Boeing is no longer in the aircraft business- they are now in the vendor management business, and there are no effective mechanisms for enforcing quality or delivery timeframes.
While I do believe that the union's strikes were taken into account (and legally so), I find it hard to believe that it is an amatuer shop; there might be some learning curves for the folks, but they will get it and do just the same quality as those union folks - only, they'll probably turn out more than the union folks too.
Except that it's pretty much the honor system. Having made FULL versions available for download, as well as full working serial numbers, saying "but you should only download this if you legitimately own a copy" is fairly silly.
If that's what they intenteded, then it would be on the site also where the links are. That is very much not the case. You can also do a search on Adobe's own website for "cs2 download" and get the same link, no login required, etc. It'll be hard to put the cat back in the bag.