The latest update to Windows 10 is moving things forward on the Microsoft side with 2-factor authentication that's more "user friendly". Basically, in a domain on a network, you'd still create a username and a traditional password for the user account, but the machine won't ever make the person use that password to authenticate themselves. The 2 factors will be combinations of a 6 digit (or longer) PIN code they selected and a biometric authentication such as fingerprint reader or facial recognition using the webcam. Or lacking input devices like a webcam or fingerprint reader, the hardware itself could serve as the second factor. The PC could already be registered in an MDM on the server so it can disallow a login where the login isn't coming from the specific machine assigned to that user.
Apple's 2 factor is really inconvenient, with its simplistic idea that it can send a push notification to one of your registered devices OTHER than the one you're using, to prove that you're really you. That's absolutely terrible when your other device(s) aren't with you and you need to enter the confirmation data that was just sent to one of them, back at your house while you're at work or on a trip or what-not.
Honestly, I see a whole lot of FUD up here - slamming this idea as horrible for American workers, etc. etc. Betting it would be a completely different response if the employer offering it was someone more liked than Wal-Mart.
A LONG time ago, I worked for a small computer store.... probably only a few years after I had my drivers' license and a car. I used to beg the owner to let me do runs occasionally, dropping off computers for his larger business clients. It was a nice change of pace instead of getting stuck in the back room working on PC repairs and builds all day long. I never thought of it as being "desperate enough to take the risk". I mean, sure -- if I got in an accident, my employer wouldn't have covered any of it. (He couldn't afford to, even if the law demanded it. I don't think either of us ever considered that was even a possibility.) But every time you drive, you run that same risk of something happening. It's called an "acceptable risk" and it's why people often go out for drives just for pleasure/fun, without so much as a destination in mind.
If you have the chance to make a few bucks doing a quick detour off the route you take every night anyway, going home from work -- that's a win-win for everybody, the way I see it?
Apple has DEFINITELY made some serious mistakes lately. But honestly, I'm interested to see what unfolds with them over the next couple years, more than anything else.
As I've pointed out on here before -- one "card up the sleeve" at Apple is this huge, new "spaceship" campus that's not up and running just yet. There's probably a whole lot of attention being directed at micro-managing all the aspects of setting that up - since among other things? It's considered Steve Jobs' last big project, and surely had all sorts of details of just how it was to be executed that are still being worked through. When that's finally finished and filled with staff? It would appear it gives Apple the chance to refocus efforts on the products it builds again, AND ability to hire a larger workforce to get things done.
Apple has been sending signals recently that it has plans to offer a whole new "Pro" workstation, likely using modular construction. (Buy the "base" for X price, and then snap on upgrade modules to custom tailor it for your needs, like you'd snap on LEGO bricks.) They also took a lot of flack with the last new Macbook Pro offering.... including complaints about the inability for its new 3D video card to perform as it should due to thermal throttling, the lack of ports, and the lack of more than 16GB of RAM offered in its configurations. We're definitely seeing a "version 2" of it, to be announced shortly -- where Apple has hopefully done something to appease the market.
On the lower end, rumors are saying the supposedly discontinued Macbook Air may get yet another revision. Quite frankly, this one makes a really good "standard issue corporate laptop" because it's stayed essentially the same since 2009. Companies that own lots of mag-safe adapters, USB to Ethernet adapters, and other accessories for them can recycle those investments as older Airs get replaced with newer revisions. And the price-point is attractively low, so you can give them to your "rank and file" employees without feeling like you're paying a huge "Apple tax" to do it. Sure, the LCD screen is way outdated with no "retina" resolution.... but lower res means objects are drawn bigger on that 13" screen, so less eyestrain for people. Battery life is quite good too. So it gets the job done.
There's also potential to refresh the Mac Mini with something that sparks some interest again. (All the Windows PC micro-sized desktops like the Intel NUC prove it can be made a lot smaller. Maybe even a Mac Mini that looks just like an AppleTV?) These things are mostly being bought by people using them as single purpose kiosks or controllers of some sort -- so in this case, small size really is a practical "plus" to buying one.
As for the iMac? I dislike the way Apple has trended towards making those less user upgradeable in recent years. But when you buy the high end configuration of them, they're still one of the better values in Macs, IMO. The 27" iMac gave you a 5K display as part of it, when nobody else was selling a stand alone 5K monitor for any less money. It was literally like getting the Mac free with the display purchase! Out of everything Apple sells, I think the iMac is the "staple" item they're still in the best position to keep selling without fears it's too outdated.... Just keep giving those the latest CPUs and GPUs, and they're going to continue to be good options for the audience interested in all-in-one computers.
The fact is, Woz comes from the breed of "garage engineers / tinkerers" which help make startup businesses famous.... not mega-corps who care about style over substance and who make as much money reselling entertainment created by other artists as building the tools that help artists make original content.
Many of the great computer companies were formed because of engineering-minded innovators. HP, for example -- where both founders were focused on scientific test equipment and computers as useful analytical tools. Certainly, one could say the same about IBM, back in the day.
Unfortunately, there's the inevitable trend towards catering to the masses, including chasing trends and pop-culture. That does seem to guarantee a continued revenue stream, but squashes real innovation.
Today's Apple can be summed up by looking at the software "change list" for something like the latest major iOS update. Prominent new features include emojis and animated icons in the iMessages chat program. "Details" so minor, they're not typically mentioned include replacing the entire core file system with a new one!
"Universal Basic Income" is just another trendy name for socialist policies, *unless* you're talking about redistributing income that's not generated by the labor of a human being in the first place.
In a futuristic, post-Capitalist economy, yes - a UBI could absolutely work. In that scenario, you're talking about technological advances getting all of us to the point where basic needs and wants are handled by automation. And the robots or machines doing the work are capable of repairing themselves too. Once that happens? Sure, you could come up with proposals like central governments utilizing excess capacity of the machinery used to supply food, clothing or energy to citizens, in order to create luxury items which get exported to other countries in exchange for currency. Then, those proceeds are redistributed to the citizenry as a UBI.
Essentially, currency would only be used for the extras in life - and those living in more successful nations would get the side benefit of more currency to spend on those luxuries.
But in the current economic environment? A UBI is just another mandated tax and wealth redistribution.
With no money down, it's still possible to get a USDA loan for a home. The "catch" is, you're going to have to select a home that's in one of the designated "rural" parts of America (as well as meeting some other criteria like having a reasonable debt to income ratio).
But USDA loans aren't just for buying farm-houses.... You might be surprised how many places qualify for one. You just have to consider a home that's outside a major city to have a shot at it.
You can't really avoid "closing costs" because the parties doing all the paperwork and making the sale happen want their cut. But this is negotiable too. Many times, a motivated seller of a pre-owned house will agree to pay all closing costs as part of the deal.
Clearly, it's not that difficult from a technical standpoint to put a stop to the password sharing. Just make sure that as soon as someone logs in successfully, any previous/existing sessions are immediately disconnected and logged out. And if the IP address of the client changes to indicate it's on a different ISP or part of the country? Just make the owner do something to verify it before it turns back on. That would create enough hassle for account sharers so they'd be discouraged from doing it.
The only reason password sharing is allowed to take place is because these services know where they stand. They're offering services that are luxuries, not necessities. And while they can't price the services below what they're supposed to be paying out in royalties or rights to stream the content, they know a lot of people will just pay ZERO and not use them at all if the monthly fees are too much of a burden.
I suspect if you sell one account (even knowing full well it's going to get shared among 2 or 3 people), at least you only have to pay any streaming rights out, counting it as ONE additional viewer. And that's one more subscription sold....
My experience doing I.T. for several mid-sized companies over the last 20 years is, none of them had big enough budgets to justify hiring dedicated "security" people. It's simply the best "bang for the buck" to hire a core group of a few I.T. "support people" who take care of servers, trouble tickets from users, and do some of the planning and upgrade projects.
When I've met "InfoSec" guys working for businesses similar to the ones I've worked for (perhaps a bit larger in size with larger budgets)? They typically come off as a bit arrogant. They like to spend a lot of time going around to other people in I.T., giving out their unsolicited advice on how something or other should be done, and do a lot of bending the ear of middle or upper management to get policies and procedures put in place to formalize their ideas.
Are they intelligent people who actually do have a lot of knowledge about securing a network? Yes! But they often fail to really grasp that security is always going to be a trade-off. The more you secure the environment, the less worker-friendly it becomes. The I.T. "generalists" who have been supporting networks, servers, workstations, and all the peripherals and software swirling around them often have an awareness that many of these recommendations for "better security" aren't being implemented. The InfoSec types become a bit like annoying flies or gnats that keep buzzing around your head while you're trying to work. They work against your own goal of improving efficiency and worker productivity with their demands that "everyone change their passwords every 14 days, using no less than X number of characters with upper and lowercase, plus at least 1 special symbol", or that all the USB ports on the desktops be glued shut, or ??
I'm sure that in many cases, these guys get paid handsomely to secure things, but once they've implemented all the ideas they can come up with -- they have a lot of time on their hands, just checking log files or doing the occasional audits of what's already supposed to be in place. It makes sense to utilize them to do more of the "day to day support" stuff, so you're not paying them to sit on their hands waiting for the next big malware outbreak or suspected hack to come along.
The main reason nuclear has been so costly isn't because the technology itself isn't feasible. The extremely high costs have historically had a lot to do with politics, fear of nuclear energy, and contractors taking advantage of the fact that it's "scary stuff".
Almost every time a new plant is schedule to be constructed, it turns into a big battle with groups fighting against it and requires expensive site surveys, safety studies and more. (Well, perhaps not in Communist countries where the people don't really get any say-so anyway -- but safety seems to take a back seat to just getting something up and running anyway, in those situations - a la Chernobyl.)
Here in the U.S. - there has often been a lot of poor long-term projecting of energy needs, also contributing to high cost of nuclear plants. For example, the power plant not far from where I used to live in St. Louis, MO, Callaway County Nuclear plant, had a whole lot of issues in the past including no need to operate it at above 50% or so of its generation capacity because power demands just didn't grow as quickly as they anticipated when it was constructed. (I also recall some issues where construction materials for the cooling pipes didn't wind up meeting the promised standards, leading to an inability to run the plant at full power until that was redone.) It received the top safety rating for risk of damage due to an earthquake though, and is apparently running quite profitably today. That didn't stop a lawsuit in 2014 though, trying to prevent it from getting its operating license renewed, over new rules allowing above-ground storage of spent fuel after years of failed efforts to build a permanent national storage site in Nevada.
The people who keep arguing we should use other "renewables" refuse to recognize the fact that wind and solar power aren't "always on" power sources. You generate nothing after dark with solar, and the wind doesn't blow constantly at a good rate of speed. The work-around for that always revolves around ideas of implementing large storage batteries, which greatly increases the cost of those projects and reduces reliability. (Batteries are based on chemical reactions and they wear out. Refurbishing them amounts to gutting them out and rebuilding their insides, making that process almost equivalent to just manufacturing new batteries.)
Among other things, there's a pretty clear understanding that robots serve useful purposes in surgery. We know that human beings have limitations of how steady of a hand they have, and how small of an object they can manipulate. Mechanical operations requiring a lot of precision are one of the key reasons to deploy robotics and automation!
When you're talking about a computer system that's supposed to recommend the "best savings account" option for you? That's far more dubious.... I think almost ALL of us have seen dozens of web sites making similar promises. Just fill in your information here, and we'll get you the cheapest quote on auto insurance, or find you the best deal on a skilled repairman for your problem, or ? In reality, they just market your personal contact info around to a group of participating businesses paying to get the referrals -- and there's no guarantee at all you're getting the "best deal" by using those sites.
As for the other comments made? Yeah, the "bar is pretty high" when it comes to expectations about security for the money a bank handles for us! I'm not even sure what planet some of these people are on in the banking industry, if they're frustrated by the fact that there are "ever higher standards" for convenience and security? Here in the U.S. at least, they've been expecting us to use all of our credit cards with the weak and *regularly* compromised security of card data sitting on a magnetic strip for FAR too long. By and large, they've been so clueless about building useful/functional web sites for banking that they tend to just outsource the projects to people building buggy, cookie-cutter banking sites. This causes issues like prompting for additional authentication each time, because they can't properly handle that you're connecting from the usual IP address at home or at work and clicked to "remember it" for future use. Most smaller banks and credit unions that say they can do Apple Pay are still unable to do that elegantly either. I usually get stuck waiting on hold for 45 minutes plus, trying to get someone to complete the initial "verification" process when I set a card up in it. And just recently, we ran into the "interesting" scenario where our 11 year old kid with an iPhone decided to try to add grandma's credit card to it. She didn't get past the verification step and when we caught her trying to do it, we took the card away and told her she couldn't do that. A week later? We get a written notice from the bank informing us that someone attempted to add the card to Apple Pay but it was declined. Well, guess what? The card is now in her Apple Pay wallet and *working* - despite that!
I think this article did sum things up pretty well, at least in a "big picture" sense. The key is realizing that if you did "network admin" or "sysadmin" work in the past, the trend is looking for people who are well versed in both cloud-based and on-site options for data storage and manipulation You need to be able to deploy the most efficient mix of them for the environment you're working in, and you can't be afraid to use different platforms.
I run into a lot of people who have Windows certifications and experience, who are probably very good at managing a Windows server environment. They may even stay on top of Microsoft-centric cloud solutions like Azure and Federated Active Directory services. But if they're afraid to deploy a mix of Linux servers or server appliances, they may be costing the company needless extra money in licensing and reducing reliability. EG. Where I work now, we chose ESET as our anti-virus solution. But I went with the Linux appliance version of the remote administration console for ESET, even though they have a Windows version that seems to be better documented and supported. It wasn't the easiest way to get the thing deployed. It had some major bugs that took researching and patching until the company finally released newer versions of it that ran better. But by going with a Linux VM, I don't have to worry about paying for an $800 or so Windows Server 2012R2 license just to run the thing legally, and the Linux VM has less CPU overhead too. I'm sure many people just deploy it on an existing server so they don't have to pay for more server licensing.... but that brings with it potential security risks, since you want to expose the remote administration server to the Internet. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to stay in communications with your anti-virus clients being used outside your local office network. Seems wiser to isolate one of these on its own server instance. I found a similar thing with using CrashPlan Pro-e for our workstation backups. There was some economic incentive to running the servers on Linux in our various offices.
You've also got all of these decisions with "hybrid" solutions out there now. The product may be based on something you run in-house, but it offers cloud-based extended capabilities that you may or may not wish to activate by subscription. A good sysadmin or network admin, today, has to be good at calculating the pros and cons and putting together the contracts / subscriptions for only the cloud-based portions that are smartest to leverage.
Unfortunately, though I can already imagine all sorts of bad scenarios that will come about from granting jokes copyright protections.... I'm not sure there's a strong argument to prevent the lawyers from hopping aboard this gravy train?
A professional comedian is essentially paid to deliver jokes and skits that make an audience laugh. In most cases, this is done with memorized lines, scripted and honed over time. In many situations (like late night TV), the host doing a bit of stand-up comedy as part of the show is using jokes purchased from writers who make the material for them.
So in that sense, yes - jokes have monetary value and it's customary to pay people to provide them for you.
Obviously, the DELIVERY of the lines is also a part of what makes a comedian "good" (and worth paying to see). But the same could be said for musical performances. We still extend copyright protection to songs, despite the fact that individual artists bring something unique when they perform them.
All of your statistics about electric vehicle range and cost to recharge vs. cost of gasoline may be perfectly valid and accurate. But 8 years is a short time to expect the end of an entire industry that's currently still thriving.
For starters? You've already got some issues developing when it comes to people trying to find suitable places to recharge an electric car. Tesla, who initially promised they'd place "superchargers" all over major highway routes that you'd get free access to changed that business model. Now, you have to pay extra to purchase permission to use them with a given Tesla. AND, people are starting to report long waits in line for available charging stations.
Gas stations, by contrast, are *everywhere*, and you can fill a tank in a matter of only a few minutes.
If you saw a sweeping change in less than a decade to most people driving electric cars? You'd need to have charging station coverage similar to the number of gas pumps available -- and I just don't see that happening that quickly at all. The push with electric cars, right now, is to convince most people that they're best used by recharging them overnight at home each night. That's fine for a daily commute but isn't the solution for road trips or someone who does a lot of driving as a courier or cab service.
Additionally, let's talk about the cost to redesign a vehicle. Manufacturers tend to keep a vehicle pretty much the same for at least a 5 year span... and sometimes as long as 10 years at a time. (I just bought a Nissan 370Z and it's been the same car since 2009, other than minor changes and tweaks.) That's because a total redesign is a VERY costly proposition. I don't see any of them being too eager to just stop building gasoline engines and converting everything to electric. Market demand will ultimately dictate what happens... but the logical expectation here is a much more gradual transition. Perhaps you'll see several electric car offerings for each of the major car makers, but initially, only the ones they think lend themselves best to a retrofit? Marketing will probably try to convince people that gasoline powered vehicles are the smarter choice for some scenarios, in the meantime. (EG. They could claim that minivans are best kept gasoline powered because the batteries required to move them are just too heavy, or take up room that allows things like "stow and go seating" today.)
I see new technologies making manual labor less of an effort as categorically good.
If these devices wind up increasing worker injuries on the job, due to increased demands they lift or move around heavy objects? Then that's a management failure... misusing or misunderstanding the capabilities the device gives people.
Every Lowes store I've been in has at least one person driving a forklift type vehicle around to do most of the moving of really large objects. I don't think that's going to change. This sounds more like an aid for the existing situation where people working on the floor are expected to assist customers carrying purchases out to their vehicle, or getting one specific item for them from a shelf.
Actually, no.... Capitalism doesn't encourage laziness or "slacking off". That's for sure. But "increasingly lower pay"? That's B.S. There's absolutely a pretty standard concept of receiving regular raises throughout the American workforce. And especially in times like we've seen in the recent past where there's really no inflation happening? Even those "cost of living adjustments" amount to raises that slightly increase your buying power.
You can't use the "minimum wage" as the sole metric for whether people are making less money with time! In fact, I'm not sure it's much of a useful metric at all?
Every employer/employee pay agreement in the private sector EXCEPT mandated minimum wages are decided on without government interference. Even in a union, you have a "collective" of workers who can push to receive a pay and/or benefits boost they think is fair, while the employer has to negotiate with their leadership to come to an agreement both sides can accept. In other situations, it's based on what you can "sell" your employer on as your value you bring to the table, and/or the value they perceive you bring - causing them to voluntarily give you more money, to keep you happy working for them.
And if you want to argue about "long hours"? I grant that statistically you can probably prove that people are putting in more hours than they used to. But I'd also say you really need to look at WHY before judging it a bad thing. I know doing I.T. work myself, I definitely put in more than a "40 hour work week", but much of that is by choice. Because actually, I take pride in what I do and I'm not happy leaving a project unfinished if I know I can get it up and running a little bit faster by poking at it a bit after hours in the evening or over a weekend. That doesn't mean someone is DEMANDING I put that time in, and it doesn't mean I'm missing out on social events or other things I *want* to do in my personal time. I'm simply choosing to do a bit here and there when I have nothing better to do.
Exactly the point, though.... Federal govt. really shouldn't be passing blanket laws over small details on how business is done. It has a role to play when it comes to regulating interstate commerce, since that pits state against state otherwise, trying to determine if some transaction is allowed and who is in the wrong, if not.
But when I pay for broadband internet access, I do so from a company doing business in my own town, subject to a lot of local regulation. Federal govt. really shouldn't have to intervene with any of this stuff.
I think in many ways, we got lost in the whole concept of Federally regulated monopolies. (Essentially, we made the leap of logic that because it was Federal govt. who had to grant a company monopoly status, that automatically meant it was Federal who got to give it rules on how it should operate.) When you think about it, the realities of the marketplace help illustrate why that's rather flawed. (We still have local and state governments placing rules and restrictions on monopolies all the time. There's no way Federal govt. is even capable of micro-managing things at the level needed for your power companies, water and gas companies, or cable companies.) May as well just let the states and cities dictate ALL of the terms and conditions of service since they've been dictating quite a bit of them anyway, all along.
If you're going to take companies like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft and just lump them under "sellers of data", that's a really broad description, almost to the point of being useless.
The reason these companies make revenue is because they provide complete "user experiences", making computers and other devices functional and useful. The entire smartphone business relies on Android (Alphabet/Google), iOS (Apple), or a small number of them running Windows Phone (Microsoft).
Every tablet out there? Same story, except Amazon has the whole Kindle Reader thing and Microsoft has pretty much zero at this point.
Microsoft has the lion's share of the personal computer and the server market down, selling not only the operating systems they run but the business apps used as staple items (MS Office, Great Plains accounting package, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Visio, MS Project, etc. etc.).
The fact these guys have huge data centers that collect information is a necessary component of what they do -- but it's not like just possessing quantities of data is equivalent to possessing large quantities of oil!
Maybe this new Surface laptop will be a big seller? Way too early to predict that. Regardless? I view this one as copying all of the wrong things Apple has done lately.
Basically, you've got Microsoft trying to compete on "thinnest, lightest!" (and for now, actually beating Apple at their own game in that department) - at the expense of functionality. You're always going to pay a premium price for hardware that's been crammed into as small a space as the manufacturer can possibly put it in... hence the underwhelming specs; offering a model with only 4GB of non-expandable RAM and only 128GB of drive storage.
The gimped edition of Windows 10 (even IF you can upgrade to the normal version at no charge for a limited time) is more evidence that MS realizes this thing costs more to build than it's really worth to a lot of people. (They've already laid out a "roadmap" for it that ensures once the early adopters have all bought theirs, they'll get to extract another $50 from each person after that who buys one expecting it to run a full-fledged Windows 10 OS.) That amounts to a way to keep the initial purchase price down and let people pay later for the whole Windows experience on it.
(Even Apple hasn't stooped to that level. OS X is OS X on every Mac out there. There's no "Professional" edition, "Home" edition, or any kind of "Lite" version that only lets you run apps purchased in the App Store!)
So many times, what I see people *really* wanting is a good, all-around portable computer with cutting edge graphics/GPU capabilities to go along with a good CPU. And right now, the industry still seems to have tunnel vision that only gamers would ever want such a thing. Just yesterday, an employee in our office got frustrated with slow performance doing "warp transform" processes on images in Photoshop on her PC. The Intel 4000 integrated graphics just weren't up to the task of handling that very well, even though her PC had good hardware specs in other areas.
But if the main focus continues to be making all laptops as thin as possible, you're not going to have better graphics because they can't dissipate the heat OR put big enough batteries in them to power the higher end video chipsets.
I remember, quite a while ago, reading in Popular Science magazine about the "Moller Air Car", which was another experimental project that claimed to be on the way to selling people personal flying machines, easy enough to pilot so you basically just used a joystick to tell it which direction to go.
That idea seems to have crashed and burned, so to speak.
I think the big challenge with any of these things is going to be getting the FAA to approve their use by the general public. I mean, let's face it. They couldn't even let people fly little drones as a hobby for very long before deciding they needed regulation, and set up a system to register them.
The air traffic controllers have a pretty full plate keeping tracking of all the commercial aircraft in the air and which flight patterns all of them are supposed to be on. I don't think they're looking forward to having to do the same job, on a much larger scale, for all the people operating personal air cars at lower altitudes.
It would be great to have flying cars that pretty much fly themselves safely and efficiently. But we're not there yet, and I think they'd require a more "hands off" type of government than we've got in place today.
Where I work, it turns out the Surface Pro 4 got chosen as the de-facto standard issue PC for all new hires, moving forward, unless they request a Mac instead. (We're a shop with about a 50/50 Mac and Windows PC mix. Lots of creative types work for us and often feel more comfortable or confident working on a Mac, so we give them that option. Other groups like Finance require Windows for the accounting software we run.)
Our whole I.T. group was issued Surface Pro 4 setups to use first, so we could get a real, hands-on evaluation of them for a while before recommending them to anyone else in the company. My experience is, as long as you don't totally cheap out and buy the lowest-end configurations -- you completely forget you're not on a modern, mid-range performance desktop PC when it's docked with a standard monitor, keyboard and mouse.
When I have to use mine on the go? I dislike the compromises it makes. The pencil stylus works pretty well but it's not that useful for most of what I do. For I.T., I need to remote into serves and make changes or update inventory spreadsheets or respond to emails and help tickets in the web-based system. None of that is made any better with the pencil. So that means using the keyboard cover with it, and that thing stinks. Even if it had better keys and feel, it's also just not pleasant how you have to flip back the plastic kickstand and use the flimsy cover on a flat surface to emulate a traditional hinged notebook. Doesn't work well if you're really trying to use it in your laptop instead of on a table. And the whole unit, with its plastic casing, just feels junky compared to the aluminum used with something like Apple's iPad. Not enough USB ports on a Surface Pro 4 either.
But the thing is? A lot of our employees WILL find the pencil really useful. They use Adobe apps and other drawing packages regularly. And others are more concerned about carrying around the thinnest, lightest-weight machine possible, so they like it too. Even the SP4's power adapter is really small and light compared to the bricks they want you to carry with you with many other machines.
And lastly? Just because MS makes it, they can do the type of integration that has always given Apple the edge over everyone else until now. They can push out firmware updates or driver updates as part of the normal Windows Update process, ensuring it stays current without users having to seek the updates out on a support web page or use clunky 3rd. party updater utilities that are known to screw up.
If you can't get dressed on your own without seeking the approval of others (who aren't even in the same room with you) -- then you're already failing at life.
I mean, I realize I'm a guy (and one of those "techie" types who is know not to care about clothing style as much as others). But this is ridiculous, no matter who you are. If you spent hard-earned money on pieces of clothing you've got hanging up in your closet, that means you liked them enough to buy them in the first place. You're just being petty and superficial if you start changing your mind about actually wearing what you, yourself liked and picked out, all because someone else (looking at a digital photo sent over the Internet) disagrees with you.
I often see people asking why so many users are willing to keep shelling out all the money it costs for products like Adobe Acrobat Pro, when free or inexpensive commercial or shareware alternatives are all over the place that would allow you to edit a PDF document and save a modified copy. Same goes for Adobe Photoshop, or even Microsoft Office.
The answer is most cases is that the familiarity makes it worthwhile. I mean, yes, in a minority of cases, you actually have users who need advanced features or functionality that's not provided by any of the alternatives. But I'd say the vast majority of the time, it's simply that someone spent years using those "name brand" products for the work they do, and switching to something else that has menu options in totally different places, and toolbars with different icons for the functions they're after doesn't seem like a good value to them.
This is asking for headaches and issues because you're forcing all of your mail and calendar/contact data to get stored TWICE and synced properly and rapidly between both entities consistently, at all times. Twice the risk of something going wrong with 2 major points of failure in the mix.
My thought is, it sounds like a good thing for the option of filtering out the plastic bits from the ocean water to recycle or re-use them in some manner. If mother nature is naturally making them collect in one area, that means half the work is already done for them!
It seems like the artificial sweeteners have been implicated as potential health threats for various reasons over the years. IMO, it's very possible that at least a few of them really do have negative side effects.
I agree with the people who questioned why you'd drink diet soda anyway? It always has a weird chemical aftertaste. Yes, like most things, you can get used to it after a while. But why bother? There's nothing redeeming, health-wise, about drinking a soda -- so it has no upsides there. Seems like you may as well get used to the flavor of something else instead like tea if you're just drinking it to avoid sugar and you want something with more flavor than plain water.
I'm kind of a regular soda fan, myself. Bad habit? Sure, but I really enjoy Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb and several of the others. But at least I don't feel like I'm compromising flavor when I drink one -- and I know the downsides of sugary drinks. It's not a big question-mark like artificial sweetener chemicals that were often discovered and produced initially for very different purposes.
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The latest update to Windows 10 is moving things forward on the Microsoft side with 2-factor authentication that's more "user friendly". Basically, in a domain on a network, you'd still create a username and a traditional password for the user account, but the machine won't ever make the person use that password to authenticate themselves. The 2 factors will be combinations of a 6 digit (or longer) PIN code they selected and a biometric authentication such as fingerprint reader or facial recognition using the webcam. Or lacking input devices like a webcam or fingerprint reader, the hardware itself could serve as the second factor. The PC could already be registered in an MDM on the server so it can disallow a login where the login isn't coming from the specific machine assigned to that user.
Apple's 2 factor is really inconvenient, with its simplistic idea that it can send a push notification to one of your registered devices OTHER than the one you're using, to prove that you're really you. That's absolutely terrible when your other device(s) aren't with you and you need to enter the confirmation data that was just sent to one of them, back at your house while you're at work or on a trip or what-not.
Honestly, I see a whole lot of FUD up here - slamming this idea as horrible for American workers, etc. etc. Betting it would be a completely different response if the employer offering it was someone more liked than Wal-Mart.
A LONG time ago, I worked for a small computer store .... probably only a few years after I had my drivers' license and a car. I used to beg the owner to let me do runs occasionally, dropping off computers for his larger business clients. It was a nice change of pace instead of getting stuck in the back room working on PC repairs and builds all day long. I never thought of it as being "desperate enough to take the risk". I mean, sure -- if I got in an accident, my employer wouldn't have covered any of it. (He couldn't afford to, even if the law demanded it. I don't think either of us ever considered that was even a possibility.) But every time you drive, you run that same risk of something happening. It's called an "acceptable risk" and it's why people often go out for drives just for pleasure/fun, without so much as a destination in mind.
If you have the chance to make a few bucks doing a quick detour off the route you take every night anyway, going home from work -- that's a win-win for everybody, the way I see it?
Apple has DEFINITELY made some serious mistakes lately. But honestly, I'm interested to see what unfolds with them over the next couple years, more than anything else.
As I've pointed out on here before -- one "card up the sleeve" at Apple is this huge, new "spaceship" campus that's not up and running just yet. There's probably a whole lot of attention being directed at micro-managing all the aspects of setting that up - since among other things? It's considered Steve Jobs' last big project, and surely had all sorts of details of just how it was to be executed that are still being worked through. When that's finally finished and filled with staff? It would appear it gives Apple the chance to refocus efforts on the products it builds again, AND ability to hire a larger workforce to get things done.
Apple has been sending signals recently that it has plans to offer a whole new "Pro" workstation, likely using modular construction. (Buy the "base" for X price, and then snap on upgrade modules to custom tailor it for your needs, like you'd snap on LEGO bricks.) They also took a lot of flack with the last new Macbook Pro offering.... including complaints about the inability for its new 3D video card to perform as it should due to thermal throttling, the lack of ports, and the lack of more than 16GB of RAM offered in its configurations. We're definitely seeing a "version 2" of it, to be announced shortly -- where Apple has hopefully done something to appease the market.
On the lower end, rumors are saying the supposedly discontinued Macbook Air may get yet another revision. Quite frankly, this one makes a really good "standard issue corporate laptop" because it's stayed essentially the same since 2009. Companies that own lots of mag-safe adapters, USB to Ethernet adapters, and other accessories for them can recycle those investments as older Airs get replaced with newer revisions. And the price-point is attractively low, so you can give them to your "rank and file" employees without feeling like you're paying a huge "Apple tax" to do it. Sure, the LCD screen is way outdated with no "retina" resolution .... but lower res means objects are drawn bigger on that 13" screen, so less eyestrain for people. Battery life is quite good too. So it gets the job done.
There's also potential to refresh the Mac Mini with something that sparks some interest again. (All the Windows PC micro-sized desktops like the Intel NUC prove it can be made a lot smaller. Maybe even a Mac Mini that looks just like an AppleTV?) These things are mostly being bought by people using them as single purpose kiosks or controllers of some sort -- so in this case, small size really is a practical "plus" to buying one.
As for the iMac? I dislike the way Apple has trended towards making those less user upgradeable in recent years. But when you buy the high end configuration of them, they're still one of the better values in Macs, IMO. The 27" iMac gave you a 5K display as part of it, when nobody else was selling a stand alone 5K monitor for any less money. It was literally like getting the Mac free with the display purchase! Out of everything Apple sells, I think the iMac is the "staple" item they're still in the best position to keep selling without fears it's too outdated.... Just keep giving those the latest CPUs and GPUs, and they're going to continue to be good options for the audience interested in all-in-one computers.
The fact is, Woz comes from the breed of "garage engineers / tinkerers" which help make startup businesses famous .... not mega-corps who care about style over substance and who make as much money reselling entertainment created by other artists as building the tools that help artists make original content.
Many of the great computer companies were formed because of engineering-minded innovators. HP, for example -- where both founders were focused on scientific test equipment and computers as useful analytical tools. Certainly, one could say the same about IBM, back in the day.
Unfortunately, there's the inevitable trend towards catering to the masses, including chasing trends and pop-culture. That does seem to guarantee a continued revenue stream, but squashes real innovation.
Today's Apple can be summed up by looking at the software "change list" for something like the latest major iOS update. Prominent new features include emojis and animated icons in the iMessages chat program. "Details" so minor, they're not typically mentioned include replacing the entire core file system with a new one!
"Universal Basic Income" is just another trendy name for socialist policies, *unless* you're talking about redistributing income that's not generated by the labor of a human being in the first place.
In a futuristic, post-Capitalist economy, yes - a UBI could absolutely work. In that scenario, you're talking about technological advances getting all of us to the point where basic needs and wants are handled by automation. And the robots or machines doing the work are capable of repairing themselves too. Once that happens? Sure, you could come up with proposals like central governments utilizing excess capacity of the machinery used to supply food, clothing or energy to citizens, in order to create luxury items which get exported to other countries in exchange for currency. Then, those proceeds are redistributed to the citizenry as a UBI.
Essentially, currency would only be used for the extras in life - and those living in more successful nations would get the side benefit of more currency to spend on those luxuries.
But in the current economic environment? A UBI is just another mandated tax and wealth redistribution.
With no money down, it's still possible to get a USDA loan for a home. The "catch" is, you're going to have to select a home that's in one of the designated "rural" parts of America (as well as meeting some other criteria like having a reasonable debt to income ratio).
But USDA loans aren't just for buying farm-houses .... You might be surprised how many places qualify for one. You just have to consider a home that's outside a major city to have a shot at it.
You can't really avoid "closing costs" because the parties doing all the paperwork and making the sale happen want their cut. But this is negotiable too. Many times, a motivated seller of a pre-owned house will agree to pay all closing costs as part of the deal.
Clearly, it's not that difficult from a technical standpoint to put a stop to the password sharing. Just make sure that as soon as someone logs in successfully, any previous/existing sessions are immediately disconnected and logged out. And if the IP address of the client changes to indicate it's on a different ISP or part of the country? Just make the owner do something to verify it before it turns back on. That would create enough hassle for account sharers so they'd be discouraged from doing it.
The only reason password sharing is allowed to take place is because these services know where they stand. They're offering services that are luxuries, not necessities. And while they can't price the services below what they're supposed to be paying out in royalties or rights to stream the content, they know a lot of people will just pay ZERO and not use them at all if the monthly fees are too much of a burden.
I suspect if you sell one account (even knowing full well it's going to get shared among 2 or 3 people), at least you only have to pay any streaming rights out, counting it as ONE additional viewer. And that's one more subscription sold....
My experience doing I.T. for several mid-sized companies over the last 20 years is, none of them had big enough budgets to justify hiring dedicated "security" people. It's simply the best "bang for the buck" to hire a core group of a few I.T. "support people" who take care of servers, trouble tickets from users, and do some of the planning and upgrade projects.
When I've met "InfoSec" guys working for businesses similar to the ones I've worked for (perhaps a bit larger in size with larger budgets)? They typically come off as a bit arrogant. They like to spend a lot of time going around to other people in I.T., giving out their unsolicited advice on how something or other should be done, and do a lot of bending the ear of middle or upper management to get policies and procedures put in place to formalize their ideas.
Are they intelligent people who actually do have a lot of knowledge about securing a network? Yes! But they often fail to really grasp that security is always going to be a trade-off. The more you secure the environment, the less worker-friendly it becomes. The I.T. "generalists" who have been supporting networks, servers, workstations, and all the peripherals and software swirling around them often have an awareness that many of these recommendations for "better security" aren't being implemented. The InfoSec types become a bit like annoying flies or gnats that keep buzzing around your head while you're trying to work. They work against your own goal of improving efficiency and worker productivity with their demands that "everyone change their passwords every 14 days, using no less than X number of characters with upper and lowercase, plus at least 1 special symbol", or that all the USB ports on the desktops be glued shut, or ??
I'm sure that in many cases, these guys get paid handsomely to secure things, but once they've implemented all the ideas they can come up with -- they have a lot of time on their hands, just checking log files or doing the occasional audits of what's already supposed to be in place. It makes sense to utilize them to do more of the "day to day support" stuff, so you're not paying them to sit on their hands waiting for the next big malware outbreak or suspected hack to come along.
The main reason nuclear has been so costly isn't because the technology itself isn't feasible.
The extremely high costs have historically had a lot to do with politics, fear of nuclear energy, and contractors taking advantage of the fact that it's "scary stuff".
Almost every time a new plant is schedule to be constructed, it turns into a big battle with groups fighting against it and requires expensive site surveys, safety studies and more. (Well, perhaps not in Communist countries where the people don't really get any say-so anyway -- but safety seems to take a back seat to just getting something up and running anyway, in those situations - a la Chernobyl.)
Here in the U.S. - there has often been a lot of poor long-term projecting of energy needs, also contributing to high cost of nuclear plants. For example, the power plant not far from where I used to live in St. Louis, MO, Callaway County Nuclear plant, had a whole lot of issues in the past including no need to operate it at above 50% or so of its generation capacity because power demands just didn't grow as quickly as they anticipated when it was constructed. (I also recall some issues where construction materials for the cooling pipes didn't wind up meeting the promised standards, leading to an inability to run the plant at full power until that was redone.) It received the top safety rating for risk of damage due to an earthquake though, and is apparently running quite profitably today. That didn't stop a lawsuit in 2014 though, trying to prevent it from getting its operating license renewed, over new rules allowing above-ground storage of spent fuel after years of failed efforts to build a permanent national storage site in Nevada.
The people who keep arguing we should use other "renewables" refuse to recognize the fact that wind and solar power aren't "always on" power sources. You generate nothing after dark with solar, and the wind doesn't blow constantly at a good rate of speed. The work-around for that always revolves around ideas of implementing large storage batteries, which greatly increases the cost of those projects and reduces reliability. (Batteries are based on chemical reactions and they wear out. Refurbishing them amounts to gutting them out and rebuilding their insides, making that process almost equivalent to just manufacturing new batteries.)
Among other things, there's a pretty clear understanding that robots serve useful purposes in surgery. We know that human beings have limitations of how steady of a hand they have, and how small of an object they can manipulate. Mechanical operations requiring a lot of precision are one of the key reasons to deploy robotics and automation!
When you're talking about a computer system that's supposed to recommend the "best savings account" option for you? That's far more dubious.... I think almost ALL of us have seen dozens of web sites making similar promises. Just fill in your information here, and we'll get you the cheapest quote on auto insurance, or find you the best deal on a skilled repairman for your problem, or ? In reality, they just market your personal contact info around to a group of participating businesses paying to get the referrals -- and there's no guarantee at all you're getting the "best deal" by using those sites.
As for the other comments made? Yeah, the "bar is pretty high" when it comes to expectations about security for the money a bank handles for us! I'm not even sure what planet some of these people are on in the banking industry, if they're frustrated by the fact that there are "ever higher standards" for convenience and security? Here in the U.S. at least, they've been expecting us to use all of our credit cards with the weak and *regularly* compromised security of card data sitting on a magnetic strip for FAR too long. By and large, they've been so clueless about building useful/functional web sites for banking that they tend to just outsource the projects to people building buggy, cookie-cutter banking sites. This causes issues like prompting for additional authentication each time, because they can't properly handle that you're connecting from the usual IP address at home or at work and clicked to "remember it" for future use. Most smaller banks and credit unions that say they can do Apple Pay are still unable to do that elegantly either. I usually get stuck waiting on hold for 45 minutes plus, trying to get someone to complete the initial "verification" process when I set a card up in it. And just recently, we ran into the "interesting" scenario where our 11 year old kid with an iPhone decided to try to add grandma's credit card to it. She didn't get past the verification step and when we caught her trying to do it, we took the card away and told her she couldn't do that. A week later? We get a written notice from the bank informing us that someone attempted to add the card to Apple Pay but it was declined. Well, guess what? The card is now in her Apple Pay wallet and *working* - despite that!
I think this article did sum things up pretty well, at least in a "big picture" sense. The key is realizing that if you did "network admin" or "sysadmin" work in the past, the trend is looking for people who are well versed in both cloud-based and on-site options for data storage and manipulation You need to be able to deploy the most efficient mix of them for the environment you're working in, and you can't be afraid to use different platforms.
I run into a lot of people who have Windows certifications and experience, who are probably very good at managing a Windows server environment. They may even stay on top of Microsoft-centric cloud solutions like Azure and Federated Active Directory services. But if they're afraid to deploy a mix of Linux servers or server appliances, they may be costing the company needless extra money in licensing and reducing reliability. EG. Where I work now, we chose ESET as our anti-virus solution. But I went with the Linux appliance version of the remote administration console for ESET, even though they have a Windows version that seems to be better documented and supported. It wasn't the easiest way to get the thing deployed. It had some major bugs that took researching and patching until the company finally released newer versions of it that ran better. But by going with a Linux VM, I don't have to worry about paying for an $800 or so Windows Server 2012R2 license just to run the thing legally, and the Linux VM has less CPU overhead too. I'm sure many people just deploy it on an existing server so they don't have to pay for more server licensing .... but that brings with it potential security risks, since you want to expose the remote administration server to the Internet. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to stay in communications with your anti-virus clients being used outside your local office network. Seems wiser to isolate one of these on its own server instance. I found a similar thing with using CrashPlan Pro-e for our workstation backups. There was some economic incentive to running the servers on Linux in our various offices.
You've also got all of these decisions with "hybrid" solutions out there now. The product may be based on something you run in-house, but it offers cloud-based extended capabilities that you may or may not wish to activate by subscription. A good sysadmin or network admin, today, has to be good at calculating the pros and cons and putting together the contracts / subscriptions for only the cloud-based portions that are smartest to leverage.
Unfortunately, though I can already imagine all sorts of bad scenarios that will come about from granting jokes copyright protections .... I'm not sure there's a strong argument to prevent the lawyers from hopping aboard this gravy train?
A professional comedian is essentially paid to deliver jokes and skits that make an audience laugh. In most cases, this is done with memorized lines, scripted and honed over time. In many situations (like late night TV), the host doing a bit of stand-up comedy as part of the show is using jokes purchased from writers who make the material for them.
So in that sense, yes - jokes have monetary value and it's customary to pay people to provide them for you.
Obviously, the DELIVERY of the lines is also a part of what makes a comedian "good" (and worth paying to see). But the same could be said for musical performances. We still extend copyright protection to songs, despite the fact that individual artists bring something unique when they perform them.
All of your statistics about electric vehicle range and cost to recharge vs. cost of gasoline may be perfectly valid and accurate. But 8 years is a short time to expect the end of an entire industry that's currently still thriving.
For starters? You've already got some issues developing when it comes to people trying to find suitable places to recharge an electric car. Tesla, who initially promised they'd place "superchargers" all over major highway routes that you'd get free access to changed that business model. Now, you have to pay extra to purchase permission to use them with a given Tesla. AND, people are starting to report long waits in line for available charging stations.
Gas stations, by contrast, are *everywhere*, and you can fill a tank in a matter of only a few minutes.
If you saw a sweeping change in less than a decade to most people driving electric cars? You'd need to have charging station coverage similar to the number of gas pumps available -- and I just don't see that happening that quickly at all. The push with electric cars, right now, is to convince most people that they're best used by recharging them overnight at home each night. That's fine for a daily commute but isn't the solution for road trips or someone who does a lot of driving as a courier or cab service.
Additionally, let's talk about the cost to redesign a vehicle. Manufacturers tend to keep a vehicle pretty much the same for at least a 5 year span ... and sometimes as long as 10 years at a time. (I just bought a Nissan 370Z and it's been the same car since 2009, other than minor changes and tweaks.) That's because a total redesign is a VERY costly proposition. I don't see any of them being too eager to just stop building gasoline engines and converting everything to electric. Market demand will ultimately dictate what happens ... but the logical expectation here is a much more gradual transition. Perhaps you'll see several electric car offerings for each of the major car makers, but initially, only the ones they think lend themselves best to a retrofit? Marketing will probably try to convince people that gasoline powered vehicles are the smarter choice for some scenarios, in the meantime. (EG. They could claim that minivans are best kept gasoline powered because the batteries required to move them are just too heavy, or take up room that allows things like "stow and go seating" today.)
I see new technologies making manual labor less of an effort as categorically good.
If these devices wind up increasing worker injuries on the job, due to increased demands they lift or move around heavy objects? Then that's a management failure ... misusing or misunderstanding the capabilities the device gives people.
Every Lowes store I've been in has at least one person driving a forklift type vehicle around to do most of the moving of really large objects. I don't think that's going to change. This sounds more like an aid for the existing situation where people working on the floor are expected to assist customers carrying purchases out to their vehicle, or getting one specific item for them from a shelf.
Actually, no .... Capitalism doesn't encourage laziness or "slacking off". That's for sure. But "increasingly lower pay"? That's B.S. There's absolutely a pretty standard concept of receiving regular raises throughout the American workforce. And especially in times like we've seen in the recent past where there's really no inflation happening? Even those "cost of living adjustments" amount to raises that slightly increase your buying power.
You can't use the "minimum wage" as the sole metric for whether people are making less money with time! In fact, I'm not sure it's much of a useful metric at all?
Every employer/employee pay agreement in the private sector EXCEPT mandated minimum wages are decided on without government interference. Even in a union, you have a "collective" of workers who can push to receive a pay and/or benefits boost they think is fair, while the employer has to negotiate with their leadership to come to an agreement both sides can accept. In other situations, it's based on what you can "sell" your employer on as your value you bring to the table, and/or the value they perceive you bring - causing them to voluntarily give you more money, to keep you happy working for them.
And if you want to argue about "long hours"? I grant that statistically you can probably prove that people are putting in more hours than they used to. But I'd also say you really need to look at WHY before judging it a bad thing. I know doing I.T. work myself, I definitely put in more than a "40 hour work week", but much of that is by choice. Because actually, I take pride in what I do and I'm not happy leaving a project unfinished if I know I can get it up and running a little bit faster by poking at it a bit after hours in the evening or over a weekend. That doesn't mean someone is DEMANDING I put that time in, and it doesn't mean I'm missing out on social events or other things I *want* to do in my personal time. I'm simply choosing to do a bit here and there when I have nothing better to do.
I wish I could have modded this up!
Exactly the point, though.... Federal govt. really shouldn't be passing blanket laws over small details on how business is done. It has a role to play when it comes to regulating interstate commerce, since that pits state against state otherwise, trying to determine if some transaction is allowed and who is in the wrong, if not.
But when I pay for broadband internet access, I do so from a company doing business in my own town, subject to a lot of local regulation. Federal govt. really shouldn't have to intervene with any of this stuff.
I think in many ways, we got lost in the whole concept of Federally regulated monopolies. (Essentially, we made the leap of logic that because it was Federal govt. who had to grant a company monopoly status, that automatically meant it was Federal who got to give it rules on how it should operate.) When you think about it, the realities of the marketplace help illustrate why that's rather flawed. (We still have local and state governments placing rules and restrictions on monopolies all the time. There's no way Federal govt. is even capable of micro-managing things at the level needed for your power companies, water and gas companies, or cable companies.) May as well just let the states and cities dictate ALL of the terms and conditions of service since they've been dictating quite a bit of them anyway, all along.
If you're going to take companies like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft and just lump them under "sellers of data", that's a really broad description, almost to the point of being useless.
The reason these companies make revenue is because they provide complete "user experiences", making computers and other devices functional and useful. The entire smartphone business relies on Android (Alphabet/Google), iOS (Apple), or a small number of them running Windows Phone (Microsoft).
Every tablet out there? Same story, except Amazon has the whole Kindle Reader thing and Microsoft has pretty much zero at this point.
Microsoft has the lion's share of the personal computer and the server market down, selling not only the operating systems they run but the business apps used as staple items (MS Office, Great Plains accounting package, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Visio, MS Project, etc. etc.).
The fact these guys have huge data centers that collect information is a necessary component of what they do -- but it's not like just possessing quantities of data is equivalent to possessing large quantities of oil!
Maybe this new Surface laptop will be a big seller? Way too early to predict that. Regardless? I view this one as copying all of the wrong things Apple has done lately.
Basically, you've got Microsoft trying to compete on "thinnest, lightest!" (and for now, actually beating Apple at their own game in that department) - at the expense of functionality. You're always going to pay a premium price for hardware that's been crammed into as small a space as the manufacturer can possibly put it in ... hence the underwhelming specs; offering a model with only 4GB of non-expandable RAM and only 128GB of drive storage.
The gimped edition of Windows 10 (even IF you can upgrade to the normal version at no charge for a limited time) is more evidence that MS realizes this thing costs more to build than it's really worth to a lot of people. (They've already laid out a "roadmap" for it that ensures once the early adopters have all bought theirs, they'll get to extract another $50 from each person after that who buys one expecting it to run a full-fledged Windows 10 OS.) That amounts to a way to keep the initial purchase price down and let people pay later for the whole Windows experience on it.
(Even Apple hasn't stooped to that level. OS X is OS X on every Mac out there. There's no "Professional" edition, "Home" edition, or any kind of "Lite" version that only lets you run apps purchased in the App Store!)
So many times, what I see people *really* wanting is a good, all-around portable computer with cutting edge graphics/GPU capabilities to go along with a good CPU. And right now, the industry still seems to have tunnel vision that only gamers would ever want such a thing. Just yesterday, an employee in our office got frustrated with slow performance doing "warp transform" processes on images in Photoshop on her PC. The Intel 4000 integrated graphics just weren't up to the task of handling that very well, even though her PC had good hardware specs in other areas.
But if the main focus continues to be making all laptops as thin as possible, you're not going to have better graphics because they can't dissipate the heat OR put big enough batteries in them to power the higher end video chipsets.
I remember, quite a while ago, reading in Popular Science magazine about the "Moller Air Car", which was another experimental project that claimed to be on the way to selling people personal flying machines, easy enough to pilot so you basically just used a joystick to tell it which direction to go.
That idea seems to have crashed and burned, so to speak.
I think the big challenge with any of these things is going to be getting the FAA to approve their use by the general public. I mean, let's face it. They couldn't even let people fly little drones as a hobby for very long before deciding they needed regulation, and set up a system to register them.
The air traffic controllers have a pretty full plate keeping tracking of all the commercial aircraft in the air and which flight patterns all of them are supposed to be on. I don't think they're looking forward to having to do the same job, on a much larger scale, for all the people operating personal air cars at lower altitudes.
It would be great to have flying cars that pretty much fly themselves safely and efficiently. But we're not there yet, and I think they'd require a more "hands off" type of government than we've got in place today.
Where I work, it turns out the Surface Pro 4 got chosen as the de-facto standard issue PC for all new hires, moving forward, unless they request a Mac instead. (We're a shop with about a 50/50 Mac and Windows PC mix. Lots of creative types work for us and often feel more comfortable or confident working on a Mac, so we give them that option. Other groups like Finance require Windows for the accounting software we run.)
Our whole I.T. group was issued Surface Pro 4 setups to use first, so we could get a real, hands-on evaluation of them for a while before recommending them to anyone else in the company. My experience is, as long as you don't totally cheap out and buy the lowest-end configurations -- you completely forget you're not on a modern, mid-range performance desktop PC when it's docked with a standard monitor, keyboard and mouse.
When I have to use mine on the go? I dislike the compromises it makes. The pencil stylus works pretty well but it's not that useful for most of what I do. For I.T., I need to remote into serves and make changes or update inventory spreadsheets or respond to emails and help tickets in the web-based system. None of that is made any better with the pencil. So that means using the keyboard cover with it, and that thing stinks. Even if it had better keys and feel, it's also just not pleasant how you have to flip back the plastic kickstand and use the flimsy cover on a flat surface to emulate a traditional hinged notebook. Doesn't work well if you're really trying to use it in your laptop instead of on a table. And the whole unit, with its plastic casing, just feels junky compared to the aluminum used with something like Apple's iPad. Not enough USB ports on a Surface Pro 4 either.
But the thing is? A lot of our employees WILL find the pencil really useful. They use Adobe apps and other drawing packages regularly. And others are more concerned about carrying around the thinnest, lightest-weight machine possible, so they like it too. Even the SP4's power adapter is really small and light compared to the bricks they want you to carry with you with many other machines.
And lastly? Just because MS makes it, they can do the type of integration that has always given Apple the edge over everyone else until now. They can push out firmware updates or driver updates as part of the normal Windows Update process, ensuring it stays current without users having to seek the updates out on a support web page or use clunky 3rd. party updater utilities that are known to screw up.
If you can't get dressed on your own without seeking the approval of others (who aren't even in the same room with you) -- then you're already failing at life.
I mean, I realize I'm a guy (and one of those "techie" types who is know not to care about clothing style as much as others). But this is ridiculous, no matter who you are. If you spent hard-earned money on pieces of clothing you've got hanging up in your closet, that means you liked them enough to buy them in the first place. You're just being petty and superficial if you start changing your mind about actually wearing what you, yourself liked and picked out, all because someone else (looking at a digital photo sent over the Internet) disagrees with you.
I often see people asking why so many users are willing to keep shelling out all the money it costs for products like Adobe Acrobat Pro, when free or inexpensive commercial or shareware alternatives are all over the place that would allow you to edit a PDF document and save a modified copy. Same goes for Adobe Photoshop, or even Microsoft Office.
The answer is most cases is that the familiarity makes it worthwhile. I mean, yes, in a minority of cases, you actually have users who need advanced features or functionality that's not provided by any of the alternatives. But I'd say the vast majority of the time, it's simply that someone spent years using those "name brand" products for the work they do, and switching to something else that has menu options in totally different places, and toolbars with different icons for the functions they're after doesn't seem like a good value to them.
This is asking for headaches and issues because you're forcing all of your mail and calendar/contact data to get stored TWICE and synced properly and rapidly between both entities consistently, at all times. Twice the risk of something going wrong with 2 major points of failure in the mix.
My thought is, it sounds like a good thing for the option of filtering out the plastic bits from the ocean water to recycle or re-use them in some manner. If mother nature is naturally making them collect in one area, that means half the work is already done for them!
It seems like the artificial sweeteners have been implicated as potential health threats for various reasons over the years. IMO, it's very possible that at least a few of them really do have negative side effects.
I agree with the people who questioned why you'd drink diet soda anyway? It always has a weird chemical aftertaste. Yes, like most things, you can get used to it after a while. But why bother? There's nothing redeeming, health-wise, about drinking a soda -- so it has no upsides there. Seems like you may as well get used to the flavor of something else instead like tea if you're just drinking it to avoid sugar and you want something with more flavor than plain water.
I'm kind of a regular soda fan, myself. Bad habit? Sure, but I really enjoy Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb and several of the others. But at least I don't feel like I'm compromising flavor when I drink one -- and I know the downsides of sugary drinks. It's not a big question-mark like artificial sweetener chemicals that were often discovered and produced initially for very different purposes.