Unless you were just being snarky, my guess is the poster is just a big aged and terms all of the higher end Mac laptops "PowerBooks". I myself tend to slip up on occasion and call a MacPro a PowerMac. Just force of habit. I doubt that any self respecting "senior exec" would still be using an actual PowerBook as of a year ago;).
Why is temperature data necessary? Why is mobo-based ambient temp not sufficient? Whens the last time you had a hard drive burn out before the processor shut down?
The front intake fan that blows across several of my drives died a few months back without me knowing. All the hard drives in that area were getting hotter (WAY hotter than the motherboard temp was reporting), but my 2TB drive in particular was really, REALLY getting hot. So hot that after the system was turned on for a while it would stop responding. That's the only problem the entire system was experiencing (after all, you're looking at a very localized buildup of heat - overall case temperature wouldn't be all that much out of whack).
Eventually after rebooting I looked into the SMART data records and saw that it had a recorded high temperature of 105 degrees Celsius. Shut the system down, checked and noticed the dead intake fan. Replaced it and the system is behaving completely fine again.
Now this doesn't indicate a need for Apple's proprietary crap, but in this case temperature data from the drive itself did help quite a bit. As said though, SMART is already providing that data.
That's not that bad of an attitude. For one, statistics can be a tricky thing. Honda Civics are far more common than a Maserati, so just because more of them are stolen doesn't mean that your RISK of theft is higher with one.
Also, even assuming a higher risk, from a liability standpoint, a Honda Civic is a lot easier (cost wise) to replace than a Maserati.
and that the average star is about the same as our Sun or less.
That's a bad assumption to make (unless by "or less" you're assuming a lot less). The vast majority of the stars in the galaxy (about 85%) are red dwarfs, which are typically 1/5th or less of the mass of the sun.
While our sun is right in the middle of the scale of possible sizes for stars, as far as frequency, it's in the upper 10% of the most massive stars.
The issue would be one of power. Law of conservation of energy and all that. Any people living on such a rock need energy to move around talk, and go about their daily lives. That energy has to come from somewhere. In our own cases, that's easy: 99% of the energy we use traces back to the sun in some way or another (geothermal is about the only naturally harnessable source that isn't solar - nucelar fission is available to societies that can harness it).
So in the end, such a rock would be useleess as a vessel unless it had a very active internal heating source, OR plenty of nuclear material. Even with that, I'd wager it'd be mighty hard to support a population of any size for too long.
He is paying the price of trying to be a decent sysadmin. Next time he will not try to be the nice guy,
No. He, once his employment was terminated, WAS NO LONGER A SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR. As much as you might feel like the network and servers are your "baby", you don't own them. You work for the owner. You cannot legally lock them out of it.
As to "next time", trust me - this guy has made himself unemployable in the IT sector for life. The worse anyone has to worry about for a "next time" from him is whether or not he spits on the burgers.
Not even close. If the repairman removes SOME of the RAM, then the computer will continue to function afterwards. The engine renders the card completely inoperable.
For a car analogy, it'd be more akin to the repair guy swapping out a V8 that someone brings in with a lower power/cost V6. A lot of people might not know the difference from a quick inspection - even in using it "something" might be a little off but it might not be immediately obvious what it is.
All in all, the established relationship we have is that in all things, the people that use them typically aren't expected to know how to fix them.
Here, most of us know how to fix a computer so it's easy to point and say "LOL - noobs!", but realistically the rest of us likely have cars, refridgerators, dish washers, washing machines, televisions, etc that we would have absolutely no clue how to repair if they broke. That doesn't make those people idiots - it just means that those items fall outside of their skill set.
And that's fine - I have no opposition to you having that option. It's things like Ubuntu deciding that on the side is the ONLY way you can set it up that annoy me. Just make an option to flip it between the top and bottom and screen and we can both be happy.
Correct. Using a widescreen monitor you have more room to store a bar horizontally. Placing a menu bar on the side of the screen like that necessitates scrolling through the bar to get to many icons, whereas they'd all be immediately accessible if laid out on the bottom (or even top, though that's not what I'm used to) of the screen.
Because it breaks the consistency of the workflow. When a window isn't maximized it looks one way. It's a trivial adjustment when maximizing to assume that it will look and behave identically when maximized, just that it will takeup the entirety of the open screen. Now, they instead cause the window to adopt two different control schemes between the two modes, AND mingle the window's controls with a distinctly different element of the UI (the base Ubuntu launcher menu).
Eh - I have a few less years than you - been programming IN GENERAL for 20 years but only on Unix for about 12 now. I like the Mac OS X interface pretty good. Unfortunately Unity is NOTHING like the OS X interface. Blending the title bar of maximized windows into the top pane is DUMB. The new "overlay scrollbars" are DUMB. The unity dock needs to have the ability to switch to the bottom of the screen rather than the side (where on widescreen monitors we have the least amount of space).
Overall, a single Gnome 2 panel a the top of the screen combined with Docky and Compiz was ALL I EVER NEEDED. It was a paradigm that was never broken to need fixing. I'm still using that thanks to Classic mode (though they did manage to finally break my Pulseaudio setup in 11.04), but its days are numbered.
Overall, I think Ubuntu finally just decided to give up reaching parity with the mainstream OS's in the areas that count. Instead they went back to the areas of the system that they actually had FINALLY gotten right, and decided to start all over.
And really, other than commercial uses, why would you want the car to move without a person in it?
Without a person in it? Not much use aside from as you say, commercial purposes. However, without a person at the controls has huge possibilities. For one, particularly in Nevada, it would be great if one could after a night of drinking just be able to press "Go Home" on the auto-drive system and have it take them rather than calling for a cab.
Alternatively, car trips on your same coast are usually cheaper than flying, but take a lot more time. For example, I live in Charleston, SC - I got to Miami, FL a few times a year. Round trip flight is about $350. Round trip in a car is about $125-150 in fuel. The drive takes 10-12 hours though, so sometimes I just fly to save the driving time. Would be awesome though if I could sit in a rear area of the vehicle for such a trip, taking a nap or otherwise just surfing the net, watching tv, or playing a game or something, while the computer drove the car for me.
In both such cases there would be an occupant in the car, but they wouldn't be available to take the wheel.
Because my hardware firewall doesn't allow this due to the security settings I have and I'm not opening it up just to play a game.
Well that settles it then. There exists a Slashdot user for which this solution will not work. Time to throw the whole idea out the window and start from scratch.
And Chinese isn't really a race anyway. It's a nationality.
Indeed. Chinese is a race about as much as Norwegian is a race.
There's too many -ism's floating around today anyways. It's gotten to the point where if you dislike any group for any reason someone else is ready to strike at you with an accusation of some -ism. In the real world there ARE real reasons to dislike certain groups, and a country spying on you or engaging in sabotage is a perfect reason to start disliking them.
I've seen both sides of this coin, and I can sympathize with both viewpoints. The "Agile" nonsense is the absolute most buzzword-tastic pile of crap I've ever had to mess with. It's a bunch of people more focused on playing a word game than actually getting work done.
On the other hand, I was recently given the task of doing some housework on a PHP application that a former colleague of mine had written on his own (it was a system designed to track purchases at local pawn shops for review by law enforcement for stolen merchandise).
Lets just say I wasn't impressed. Single character variable names everywhere. Virtually no comments. Code that should have been put into a function was just cut and pasted each time an operation was done. Tons of stuff (like the actual list of organizations we were receiving data from) was HARD CODED into the code. The passwords for the users were stored in plain text in a database.
What's sad is that I wasn't allowed to actually correct most of this. Management explicitly dictated that I was only to correct a few outstanding issues - NOT really delve into the code. The reasoning was "how much work" that program is because based on the workload of that previous guy (who was maintaining this nearly full-time) put into it. They figured we'd need another full-time developer. In reality the function of the program was relatively simple - it's just that it was so fucking poorly written that any small change took a mountain of work.
Just IMHO, what I think companies need more than feel-good processes is a small set of very thoroughly enforced coding standards. Developers who don't follow them need to seek employment elsewhere. No amount of process is going to make a bad programmer good.
Still, I think for most people this fragments their music collection. If a quarter of your music won't port over, then people will see that as a big negative.
Secondly, for CDs you import yourself the default is still to this day not to encode them in MP3 format. The user specifically has to select that... which means 90% don't.
I don't think this will be an issue. When importing a CD, iTunes doesn't (IIRC) import as MP3, but it also doesn't put DRM on it - it does AAC. Similarly, Windows Media Player used to import songs as WMA files. In the end, I'm guessing that Google's service will play either if you upload them to it. I doubt there's much to worry about on that front.
Who the hell wants "relicensed classics"? I'm not going to pay a monthly premium to a channel to rehash old material that I can easily get elsewhere.
Now, I WOULD be willing to pay for a channel for access to shows. I pay for HBO pretty much solely for True Blood and Game of Thrones. I'd gladly do it for science-fiction centric shows on a dedicated channel, but honestly, at this point I'm convinced that SyFy ain't the channel to do that. They'd probably go premium and use that new cash to get an even BETTER selection of wrestling.
Personally, I'd rather see a new channel pop up and offer something like this. Better yet, not even a cable channel - put it online. If someone could work out the deals with Netflix, iTunes, Xbox Live, and Amazon, I'd like to see a "direct to download" TV series take off. No ads, no middlemen - just straight sales to the consumers. Felecia Day has done great work with her "The Guild" web series working on tight budgets - I'm sure with just a bit more funding someone else could do good science fiction in a similar manner.
That's a problem a bit farther out (quite a bit, as its theorized that most smaller red dwarf stars will have lifespans measured in TRILLIONS of solar-years - which is an odd unit of measurement on that time scale - by that time a Solar year will be about as completely arbitrary a measurement as we can imagine). I'm sure that EVENTUALLY it will be a problem for someone though. Maybe our descendants - maybe a different species.
Overall though, all successful life has an instinctual gravitation towards preservation of one's self and one's offspring. Without that drive we would die out. Even on an individual level it makes no sense as you could say why even live if we all are going to die anyways. In the end it doesn't matter - it's all about maximizing the time alive, regardless of the inevitability of death. Eventually we'll all be gone - everyone and everything - but you can bet that whatever species are still living in the final days, they'll fight for survival down to the very last minute. It's just how things work.
Just a shot in the dark, but having seen such things before: the company may have had in-house software that it replaced with a commercial product, negating their need for a programmer. If the existing programming staff has a good working relationship with management, they may give them some leeway to re-purpose them into a new position rather than let them go.
I don't think anyone is claiming that app-stores in general are a bad thing. It's just that Apple has in the past proven that they are more than willing to set up a platform so that their app-store is the ONLY method for getting software on the device. The other players you mention have not done that.
Consider it like a kitchen knife. I use kitchen knives all the time - they're wonderful tools with a lot of utility. If Wolfgang Puck asks to borrow one I wouldn't regard that with a bit of suspicion. If Charles Manson asked for one though, there's going to be an issue.
Apple has already destroyed my trust in them. The locked down situation on their mobile devices isn't a "What if", a "You know, they might . ..", or any other situation. It's real, it's here. They did it. I don't trust them anymore. End of story.
Apple's desktops are already not really geared towards corporate use though. Apple's target market has always been home use, and the creative types working on films and other such artistic pursuits (ie, the type of environment where there usually isn't a formal IT department, and if there is, it's not your standard corporate setup).
Just about anybody running payroll, crunching spreadsheets, and doing all the other mundane stuff associated with plain old business computing, is doing it on a PC. I think a big part of that is just due to the mountain of obscure niche software that most businesses run. Most businesses are tied to an industry, and most industries have incredibly specific little things they need done. I work in government and we have to use very specialized software for tax billing, property appraisals, building permits, veteran's claim form tracking, etc. All things things are very specialized but used in few other industries. As a result, you have at most 2 or 3 vendors to choose from for most of this stuff and naturally, hoping to target the largest amounts of customers (particularly given that they might only have a few dozen customers total), this software gets written for Windows.
You can actually deposit checks through the ATM as well (not sure if you already knew that or just had an aversion to it). I still do it occasionally when someone sends me a money order or something for an online sale. Works great. Heck most of the newer ATM's have some form of OCR that will even recognize most handwriting and will automatically fill in the deposit amount after you insert the check (and print a scanned copy of the check on your deposit receipt).
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Annoying as hell in my opinion but it's how the business owner gets "the stability of a mac but capabilities of windows".
Guess he never heard that phrase that a chain's only as strong as its weakest link :).
Unless you were just being snarky, my guess is the poster is just a big aged and terms all of the higher end Mac laptops "PowerBooks". I myself tend to slip up on occasion and call a MacPro a PowerMac. Just force of habit. I doubt that any self respecting "senior exec" would still be using an actual PowerBook as of a year ago ;).
Why is temperature data necessary? Why is mobo-based ambient temp not sufficient? Whens the last time you had a hard drive burn out before the processor shut down?
The front intake fan that blows across several of my drives died a few months back without me knowing. All the hard drives in that area were getting hotter (WAY hotter than the motherboard temp was reporting), but my 2TB drive in particular was really, REALLY getting hot. So hot that after the system was turned on for a while it would stop responding. That's the only problem the entire system was experiencing (after all, you're looking at a very localized buildup of heat - overall case temperature wouldn't be all that much out of whack).
Eventually after rebooting I looked into the SMART data records and saw that it had a recorded high temperature of 105 degrees Celsius. Shut the system down, checked and noticed the dead intake fan. Replaced it and the system is behaving completely fine again.
Now this doesn't indicate a need for Apple's proprietary crap, but in this case temperature data from the drive itself did help quite a bit. As said though, SMART is already providing that data.
That's not that bad of an attitude. For one, statistics can be a tricky thing. Honda Civics are far more common than a Maserati, so just because more of them are stolen doesn't mean that your RISK of theft is higher with one.
Also, even assuming a higher risk, from a liability standpoint, a Honda Civic is a lot easier (cost wise) to replace than a Maserati.
and that the average star is about the same as our Sun or less.
That's a bad assumption to make (unless by "or less" you're assuming a lot less). The vast majority of the stars in the galaxy (about 85%) are red dwarfs, which are typically 1/5th or less of the mass of the sun.
While our sun is right in the middle of the scale of possible sizes for stars, as far as frequency, it's in the upper 10% of the most massive stars.
The issue would be one of power. Law of conservation of energy and all that. Any people living on such a rock need energy to move around talk, and go about their daily lives. That energy has to come from somewhere. In our own cases, that's easy: 99% of the energy we use traces back to the sun in some way or another (geothermal is about the only naturally harnessable source that isn't solar - nucelar fission is available to societies that can harness it).
So in the end, such a rock would be useleess as a vessel unless it had a very active internal heating source, OR plenty of nuclear material. Even with that, I'd wager it'd be mighty hard to support a population of any size for too long.
He is paying the price of trying to be a decent sysadmin. Next time he will not try to be the nice guy,
No. He, once his employment was terminated, WAS NO LONGER A SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR. As much as you might feel like the network and servers are your "baby", you don't own them. You work for the owner. You cannot legally lock them out of it.
As to "next time", trust me - this guy has made himself unemployable in the IT sector for life. The worse anyone has to worry about for a "next time" from him is whether or not he spits on the burgers.
Not even close. If the repairman removes SOME of the RAM, then the computer will continue to function afterwards. The engine renders the card completely inoperable.
For a car analogy, it'd be more akin to the repair guy swapping out a V8 that someone brings in with a lower power/cost V6. A lot of people might not know the difference from a quick inspection - even in using it "something" might be a little off but it might not be immediately obvious what it is.
All in all, the established relationship we have is that in all things, the people that use them typically aren't expected to know how to fix them.
Here, most of us know how to fix a computer so it's easy to point and say "LOL - noobs!", but realistically the rest of us likely have cars, refridgerators, dish washers, washing machines, televisions, etc that we would have absolutely no clue how to repair if they broke. That doesn't make those people idiots - it just means that those items fall outside of their skill set.
And that's fine - I have no opposition to you having that option. It's things like Ubuntu deciding that on the side is the ONLY way you can set it up that annoy me. Just make an option to flip it between the top and bottom and screen and we can both be happy.
Correct. Using a widescreen monitor you have more room to store a bar horizontally. Placing a menu bar on the side of the screen like that necessitates scrolling through the bar to get to many icons, whereas they'd all be immediately accessible if laid out on the bottom (or even top, though that's not what I'm used to) of the screen.
Because it breaks the consistency of the workflow. When a window isn't maximized it looks one way. It's a trivial adjustment when maximizing to assume that it will look and behave identically when maximized, just that it will takeup the entirety of the open screen. Now, they instead cause the window to adopt two different control schemes between the two modes, AND mingle the window's controls with a distinctly different element of the UI (the base Ubuntu launcher menu).
Eh - I have a few less years than you - been programming IN GENERAL for 20 years but only on Unix for about 12 now. I like the Mac OS X interface pretty good. Unfortunately Unity is NOTHING like the OS X interface. Blending the title bar of maximized windows into the top pane is DUMB. The new "overlay scrollbars" are DUMB. The unity dock needs to have the ability to switch to the bottom of the screen rather than the side (where on widescreen monitors we have the least amount of space).
Overall, a single Gnome 2 panel a the top of the screen combined with Docky and Compiz was ALL I EVER NEEDED. It was a paradigm that was never broken to need fixing. I'm still using that thanks to Classic mode (though they did manage to finally break my Pulseaudio setup in 11.04), but its days are numbered.
Overall, I think Ubuntu finally just decided to give up reaching parity with the mainstream OS's in the areas that count. Instead they went back to the areas of the system that they actually had FINALLY gotten right, and decided to start all over.
And really, other than commercial uses, why would you want the car to move without a person in it?
Without a person in it? Not much use aside from as you say, commercial purposes. However, without a person at the controls has huge possibilities. For one, particularly in Nevada, it would be great if one could after a night of drinking just be able to press "Go Home" on the auto-drive system and have it take them rather than calling for a cab.
Alternatively, car trips on your same coast are usually cheaper than flying, but take a lot more time. For example, I live in Charleston, SC - I got to Miami, FL a few times a year. Round trip flight is about $350. Round trip in a car is about $125-150 in fuel. The drive takes 10-12 hours though, so sometimes I just fly to save the driving time. Would be awesome though if I could sit in a rear area of the vehicle for such a trip, taking a nap or otherwise just surfing the net, watching tv, or playing a game or something, while the computer drove the car for me.
In both such cases there would be an occupant in the car, but they wouldn't be available to take the wheel.
Because my hardware firewall doesn't allow this due to the security settings I have and I'm not opening it up just to play a game.
Well that settles it then. There exists a Slashdot user for which this solution will not work. Time to throw the whole idea out the window and start from scratch.
And Chinese isn't really a race anyway. It's a nationality.
Indeed. Chinese is a race about as much as Norwegian is a race.
There's too many -ism's floating around today anyways. It's gotten to the point where if you dislike any group for any reason someone else is ready to strike at you with an accusation of some -ism. In the real world there ARE real reasons to dislike certain groups, and a country spying on you or engaging in sabotage is a perfect reason to start disliking them.
I've seen both sides of this coin, and I can sympathize with both viewpoints. The "Agile" nonsense is the absolute most buzzword-tastic pile of crap I've ever had to mess with. It's a bunch of people more focused on playing a word game than actually getting work done.
On the other hand, I was recently given the task of doing some housework on a PHP application that a former colleague of mine had written on his own (it was a system designed to track purchases at local pawn shops for review by law enforcement for stolen merchandise).
Lets just say I wasn't impressed. Single character variable names everywhere. Virtually no comments. Code that should have been put into a function was just cut and pasted each time an operation was done. Tons of stuff (like the actual list of organizations we were receiving data from) was HARD CODED into the code. The passwords for the users were stored in plain text in a database.
What's sad is that I wasn't allowed to actually correct most of this. Management explicitly dictated that I was only to correct a few outstanding issues - NOT really delve into the code. The reasoning was "how much work" that program is because based on the workload of that previous guy (who was maintaining this nearly full-time) put into it. They figured we'd need another full-time developer. In reality the function of the program was relatively simple - it's just that it was so fucking poorly written that any small change took a mountain of work.
Just IMHO, what I think companies need more than feel-good processes is a small set of very thoroughly enforced coding standards. Developers who don't follow them need to seek employment elsewhere. No amount of process is going to make a bad programmer good.
Still, I think for most people this fragments their music collection. If a quarter of your music won't port over, then people will see that as a big negative.
Secondly, for CDs you import yourself the default is still to this day not to encode them in MP3 format. The user specifically has to select that... which means 90% don't.
I don't think this will be an issue. When importing a CD, iTunes doesn't (IIRC) import as MP3, but it also doesn't put DRM on it - it does AAC. Similarly, Windows Media Player used to import songs as WMA files. In the end, I'm guessing that Google's service will play either if you upload them to it. I doubt there's much to worry about on that front.
Who the hell wants "relicensed classics"? I'm not going to pay a monthly premium to a channel to rehash old material that I can easily get elsewhere.
Now, I WOULD be willing to pay for a channel for access to shows. I pay for HBO pretty much solely for True Blood and Game of Thrones. I'd gladly do it for science-fiction centric shows on a dedicated channel, but honestly, at this point I'm convinced that SyFy ain't the channel to do that. They'd probably go premium and use that new cash to get an even BETTER selection of wrestling.
Personally, I'd rather see a new channel pop up and offer something like this. Better yet, not even a cable channel - put it online. If someone could work out the deals with Netflix, iTunes, Xbox Live, and Amazon, I'd like to see a "direct to download" TV series take off. No ads, no middlemen - just straight sales to the consumers. Felecia Day has done great work with her "The Guild" web series working on tight budgets - I'm sure with just a bit more funding someone else could do good science fiction in a similar manner.
That's a problem a bit farther out (quite a bit, as its theorized that most smaller red dwarf stars will have lifespans measured in TRILLIONS of solar-years - which is an odd unit of measurement on that time scale - by that time a Solar year will be about as completely arbitrary a measurement as we can imagine). I'm sure that EVENTUALLY it will be a problem for someone though. Maybe our descendants - maybe a different species.
Overall though, all successful life has an instinctual gravitation towards preservation of one's self and one's offspring. Without that drive we would die out. Even on an individual level it makes no sense as you could say why even live if we all are going to die anyways. In the end it doesn't matter - it's all about maximizing the time alive, regardless of the inevitability of death. Eventually we'll all be gone - everyone and everything - but you can bet that whatever species are still living in the final days, they'll fight for survival down to the very last minute. It's just how things work.
Nope, that movie was the first thing that popped into my head too (oddly enough I just watched it for the first time last week).
I do agree though - given that in legend Icarus fell to his death, it's not exactly a great choice of names :).
Just a shot in the dark, but having seen such things before: the company may have had in-house software that it replaced with a commercial product, negating their need for a programmer. If the existing programming staff has a good working relationship with management, they may give them some leeway to re-purpose them into a new position rather than let them go.
I don't think anyone is claiming that app-stores in general are a bad thing. It's just that Apple has in the past proven that they are more than willing to set up a platform so that their app-store is the ONLY method for getting software on the device. The other players you mention have not done that.
Consider it like a kitchen knife. I use kitchen knives all the time - they're wonderful tools with a lot of utility. If Wolfgang Puck asks to borrow one I wouldn't regard that with a bit of suspicion. If Charles Manson asked for one though, there's going to be an issue.
Apple has already destroyed my trust in them. The locked down situation on their mobile devices isn't a "What if", a "You know, they might . . .", or any other situation. It's real, it's here. They did it. I don't trust them anymore. End of story.
Apple's desktops are already not really geared towards corporate use though. Apple's target market has always been home use, and the creative types working on films and other such artistic pursuits (ie, the type of environment where there usually isn't a formal IT department, and if there is, it's not your standard corporate setup).
Just about anybody running payroll, crunching spreadsheets, and doing all the other mundane stuff associated with plain old business computing, is doing it on a PC. I think a big part of that is just due to the mountain of obscure niche software that most businesses run. Most businesses are tied to an industry, and most industries have incredibly specific little things they need done. I work in government and we have to use very specialized software for tax billing, property appraisals, building permits, veteran's claim form tracking, etc. All things things are very specialized but used in few other industries. As a result, you have at most 2 or 3 vendors to choose from for most of this stuff and naturally, hoping to target the largest amounts of customers (particularly given that they might only have a few dozen customers total), this software gets written for Windows.
I can't remember all of them off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure AviDemux was one of them though.
You can actually deposit checks through the ATM as well (not sure if you already knew that or just had an aversion to it). I still do it occasionally when someone sends me a money order or something for an online sale. Works great. Heck most of the newer ATM's have some form of OCR that will even recognize most handwriting and will automatically fill in the deposit amount after you insert the check (and print a scanned copy of the check on your deposit receipt).