Honestly, I think one of the sad things is that relatively few companies manage to make the work environment pleasant enough so people actually like (or at least don't dislike) working.
There are always going to be jobs to do that practically nobody enjoys.... But that's also part of the beauty of Capitalism. There will be people who do them anyway because they aren't skilled enough to move up to something better, and that may motivate them to learn those new skills. Others will be ok doing work they dislike because for them, it's still acceptable to them to spend that portion of their lives doing things they dislike so they have the income to do things they DO like when they're not working there.
But in general, I think MOST jobs can be made much more pleasant than they are. This is one of the things good management can help accomplish. It's often a matter of changing around a few rules to allow some of the "little things".... Let people listen to music while working, maybe? Or relax the dress code so jeans are acceptable, if that makes some of your workers happier. Organize small blocks of social time, perhaps? (One of my jobs was in a tall building, so they worked something out with the building management to let us have the rooftop area once a month to do a rooftop lunch.) Personally, I've never accepted a job for any length of time at a place where I hated going in. Even if the only thing a place had going for it was a group of co-workers I liked talking to, it had to offer at least something like that of value. Otherwise, no... just quit and find a place that's a better fit for you.
Perhaps.... but at least in your example of "safety equipment and adaptations for people with disabilities" -- I'd say those are pretty well covered here in the U.S. today. In fact, some would say we overdo the "catering to folks with disabilities" with some of our legislation. (EG. Strict rules about how many handicapped parking spots you have to make available as a percentage of the total means in some establishments, you have row after row of them, unnecessarily wasting space and going unused.) And for some small businesses, they're forced to pay out large sums of money retrofitting older buildings to be wheelchair accessible as soon as they try to do any kind of update to the property that requires an inspection or permit -- even if they have no wheelchair bound employees at all, and no need for customers to access those parts of the building.
I'm not sure what types of safety related things you imagine the U.K. has in place that the U.S. doesn't, which they'd be eager to remove to be more competitive either? But from everything I've seen, safety is taken fairly seriously in the U.S. Organizations like OSHA impose all sorts of safety requirements, and even at the level of a person buying a used home, the homeowner's insurance often does a drive-by inspection and demands changes such as putting up railings on any outside steps, or else you risk getting your policy cancelled. The days of companies not caring at all about worker safety pretty much went out with the initial rise of the unions to power -- leading to those demands getting enshrined into Federal law of the land.
That's one argument you can make... but my point is, this particular college also offered an opportunity where you get a full 6 weeks of vacation per year, starting with your first year of employment, and work weeks are 35 hours, not 40, despite receiving all the same health insurance and related benefits of any 40 hour per week job. The salary is definitely not measurably lower than what anyone else offers for the same type of work, given those facts.
If computer support is considered such as "low level" type of work today (as some people on here claim), then surely it's within the abilities of some of these folks currently upset that their retail or fast food job won't pay them $15/hr. or more? Study to get an A+ certification and show some enthusiasm for wanting to work someplace, and you're essentially qualified.
But no... I guess it's easier to bellyache and claim we all need a basic income paid to us for doing nothing instead?
As a libertarian, many people expect I'm going to be completely against the concept of a UBI. However, that's not really the case. What I *am* against is the premature pushing of it on people in still-functional Capitalist society, which amounts to an appeal to convert to Socialism.
The UBI makes complete sense as a way to handle the economy in a POST Capitalist world, which we're nowhere near ready to transition to. (Just because you have some fear-mongering about specific industries like trucking going away doesn't mean "all the jobs are gone".)
From what I've observed on the hiring end of the equation? There are actually a lot of decent-paying, respectable jobs out there that go unfilled for months because the quality of the applicants is pretty terrible. My wife recently helped interview over a dozen people for a computer support job at a local college, and she showed me the "best of the bunch" of 40 or 50 resumes they received. We were laughing at how bad several were, including misspellings and people who had NO clue how to sell themselves as having any useful skills.
When they finally did interview 4 or 5 people? One of them showed up an hour late. They agreed to reschedule him and give him another chance, only because he had an excuse about a traffic accident on the highway keeping him from making it on time. When he was due to come back, he waited until 10 minutes before the scheduled time to tell them he wasn't interested any longer. Another candidate was a woman who actually sounded like she had good credentials on paper and they were excited to possibly offer her a position, but she was so "ho hum" about the whole interview, they decided to move on. She not only made no effort to dress nicely for it, but when asked questions about what she did in her previous jobs, etc. -- she just gave really brief answers, acted like she was bored, and didn't do a thing to impress anyone.
I see evidence of a similar mindset in other areas too, including this uproar over a $15 minimum wage.... In reality? You should really be able to eliminate the "minimum wage" completely and it would make no real difference. Why? Because first of all, there's no one number anybody can quote you that *really* makes sense as THE proper starting wage to pay people that's "fair" instead of "unfair". Depending on where you live in the country, the cost of living is radically different, for starters. A very small percentage of people in America actually work for the mandated minimum wage, and when they do? A big percentage of THOSE are people who earn tips - meaning it's almost not even fair to count them in those totals to begin with. What you wind up left with are a lot of people who don't really need a "living wage" in the first place. (For example, many of the mentally or physically handicapped people are already receiving SSI benefits, and can't earn much of their own income or they lose those. Yet they want to feel like productive members of society and get out of the house. So they'll accept very low paying jobs, doing such things as putting advertisements in envelopes. They don't really WANT a higher wage because it'd put them in a much worse situation overall than what they get without it.) But people keep pushing for this with the mindset that by boosting the minimum by another $X per hour, that translates to "across the board" increases of about the same amount. And that, in turn, means they can do some minimally skilled job of limited real value to an employer but receive the type of pay you should really only get for doing something much more valuable to society. I don't believe that really works except in the short-term, before the overall economy has time to adapt to the changes (inflation).
IMO, he gave a better answer/explanation for his request than many musicians do who have problems with phones.
Still? That whole attitude rubs me the wrong way. I'm from the generation who listened to White Zombie when it was new, and part of what gave that music its character was all the dubbing in of clips of sound f/x and people talking in old horror movies. In other words, he has re-recording pieces of other artist's work to thank for making his own music better.
But now, he takes issue with people recording his own performance.
Rock seems like it's dead to me, NOT because of people wanting to record parts of concerts they attend -- but because the core audience is older. I went to see Disturbed and Breaking Benjamin in concert recently. There just weren't that many of the energetic, partying college students and 20-somethings in the audience. You had far more middle-aged or older folks who got more excited about Disturbed's remake of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" than anything else. As a 40-something myself, I'm not going to scream my lungs out and go crazy jumping around at a concert anymore. Not happening when it means it'll impact my ability to do my job the next morning or other commitments. I think many of the people going to ROCK concerts today are in a similar mindset. We still love the music and want to experience it live, but we're happy to sit on the lawn drinking a beer and maybe eating a slice of pizza or a burger from the concession stand while we take it all in. If you, as a performer, need the whole audience going crazy to validate what you're doing? I can understand that, but that's going to be an ongoing challenge for you when you perform a type of music that appeals to an audience that's maturing and aging.
Personally? I support the right of musicians, comedians, and other performers to make these sorts of demands of their audience. As soon as you buy a ticket to any show, you've agreed to all sorts of contractual obligations (as printed in the fine print on the back that few people bother to read). So this is really just one more requirement to add to the list of things you can't do (like bringing in coolers).
BUT, I'd probably refuse to pay for a show with this rule in place. I know it drives some people crazy seeing others trying to take photos or video of a live performance with their phones. But in this day and age? That's a part of the experience people are paying for. I know when my wife and I went to see Van Halen last year, for example? We both grabbed video recordings of Eddie doing his guitar solo. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of those moments of "rock history" worth preserving. How many more years left of monster guitar playing does the guy have left in him? (And for that matter, how many more times will Van Halen perform live with David Lee Roth?) For what we paid to see it, I feel like getting to take home a little piece of the concert to replay later for friends isn't too much to ask.
Yes, it's stupid trying to record a whole show. All you're going to do is waste the money you spent to see it live so you have poor quality audio and relatively poor video of it that nobody will ever sit through and watch again. But making me put my phone in a locked bag until it's all over? That's a bit much.
Most instances where you have kids "jumping out in front of cars", you're talking about parking lots or side roads where the kids didn't look both ways before trying to cross the intersection. It's not something that should really ever happen on a highway or interstate where you've usually got fences, a thick tree line, or other things blocking easy access to get onto the highway by way of walking up to it.
The car will probably try to slow down as much as possible, if not come to a complete stop. At most - that would bump the kid(s) but not seriously injure them. Perhaps it would even turn to avoid them while slowing down, since it would know it wasn't going to flip the vehicle at that relatively slow rate of speed.
First off, the person who commented that it's "predictable when newer isn't better" is correct. Right now, I.T. technology is stagnant. IMO, that's not a bad thing either. What's happening is, just as many people are using computers and electronic devices as ever -- but the market has matured. There's a very low level of "techno lust" for the latest and greatest, because truthfully, what's already readily available is good enough for everything people want to do with their machines right now.
There's finally some sanity in corporate America, where technology is getting replaced on a schedule that reflects the time-frame it takes for the old gear to physically wear out, instead of demands for 2-3 year replacement cycles just because "the new thing is already old, since it can't run the cool new OS and new versions of apps X and Y".
And really, HP's situation is a different/unique one in the current round of layoffs. HP split their company into two, not long ago, realizing they had to jettison the "boat anchor" of printing/imaging so it didn't weigh down profits of the rest of the business. The HP doing all the layoffs now is the one holding the bag selling printers and scanners. They've also tried to acquire other printer manufacturers like Fujitsu, but ultimately, they're selling a product that's gone from a "must have" companion purchase with every new PC to a niche need. Their investment in 3D printing didn't appear to pan out either. (I think that's turned out to be a niche hobbyist interest, since it's still a very slow process to print a 3D object, the size of said object is really limited, AND it won't realize its full potential until there are much larger collections of downloadable projects to print. If all the major manufacturers of appliances offered a way to print repair parts on their "support" web sites, for example? Then you'd see 3D printing really take off.)
But claiming the people who get laid off have no future in I.T.? That's FUD, plain and simple. The trend to cloudify everything is still strong, but I've worked in the field long enough to say I'm confident it's going to trend back the other direction in the next decade or so. If you just look at the ridiculous number of data breaches in the news in the last year or two, you quickly see the problems with concentrating a large number of customer's data in one place. But hacking aside, the cloud services amount to giving up direct control over big chunks of your business operations. When one of these services has an outage, you can't do anything but sit around and hope they actually provide some status updates to pass along to your users and to management. Everyone's first question is "When will it be back up?" and you're stuck shrugging and saying, "Beats me! We're at the mercy of the provider." When this happens enough times, companies start demanding some more accountability and control. And you tend to get locked in to these services too. So if they raise prices or change pricing structures, you can't do much besides pay the new, higher bill (or go through a huge, unplanned project to migrate all the data elsewhere and retrain everyone on how to access it). I'm not sure how a cloud provider decides someone with many years of general I.T. experience, including such things as administering servers, troubleshooting networks and supporting staff wouldn't have skills applicable to working for their business anyway? But cloud is an overrated buzzword, either way.
I was just complaining about an earlier news item posted on Slashdot for a Facebook corporate chat client they were apparently going to sell as competition to apps like Slack chat. And now THIS?
I'm even a regular Facebook user and I have to say I hope this thing crashes and burns!
There are SO many options out there to handle "internal social media". Where I work, we've been using Salesforce "Chatter" for this stuff for years. WHY would anyone decide Facebook is the optimal thing to re-purpose as an Intranet site of sorts, for employees to share content?
Again, they're very late to the party and offering something that nobody should really need - hoping your company buys it anyway based on the familiar branding alone.
This quest for ever thinner phones with their thin batteries is only to blame if you dislike the downsides of pushing technology forward.
Any time you demand a considerable amount of energy storage in a small package, it has a certain amount of danger of catching fire or exploding.
We've randomly seen various models of laptops catch fire or explode too, and many of those weren't all that thin, nor would you describe their batteries as "thin" -- especially compared to any smartphone ever manufactured.
I can't say I know exactly where Samsung is failing this particular time, since competitors have similar sized devices with similar sized batteries that are clearly working more reliably? But it sounds like they wrote things off as a simple battery production defect when it might turn out to be a more complicated problem to fix. (As someone else said - maybe they have the battery sitting too close to the CPU or other chips that help warm it up past a safe operational parameter?)
Currently, I work for a company where it's very advantageous for me to work from home whenever possible. (Otherwise, I have to deal with an hour long commute, often in heavy traffic, followed by paying about $9-10 per day in parking fees. The gas and parking adds up, cutting into my salary -- not to mention all the wasted time in transit.)
I work in an I.T. support/sysadmin role, and initially? There was definitely some hesitation from management about my not coming in to the office all the time. I have to agree very much with the article recommending you come in all the time as a new employee, and slowly gravitate towards telecommuting after you've proven you're a good, hard-worker. That's how it played out in my situation. But there's got to be the element of personal responsibility involved. For example? I may try to work from home the majority of the time, but I still have to keep an eye on the trends and what's coming up on the office calendar that might make it wise for me to drive in on certain days. I started making an effort to drive in on Mondays, for example, after noticing that the bulk of our trouble tickets for urgent problems tend to happen on Monday mornings. (People bring laptops home over the weekend and any issues they encountered then tend to get noted and brought in to get addressed on Monday. And additionally, there seems to be a general "thing" in the company that if a server or network application is starting to act up on a Friday -- they're winding down what they're working on for the week anyway, so they may not even report it. Then, the memory leak making the app slow or the failing drive causing the random faults or whatever gets worse over the weekend, until it's dead on Monday when they come back in to use it again.)
I really don't do any less work when I work from home than I do when I'm actually in the office though. I have a pretty much identical computer setup at home to my office setup, so as long as the VPN tunnel is up - I have the same remote assistance tools and apps. Our desk phones are VoIP and I have software on my cellphone allowing taking or making calls from that number and viewing the same directory of who is on the phone and available/not available. We started enforcing a rule, long ago, where people need to submit trouble tickets (either via email or the web) and our team grab them as soon as we can get to them. So to the users, they don't see anything different whether I take a ticket from home or from the office PC.
It's important to keep up those social connections too. But IMO, much of that can be done (at least in my I.T. support role) by showing up for all of the meetings that get scheduled. (Usually, such thing as our "quarterly meetings" involving the whole company include a free lunch before them, encouraging that time window to socialize and informally suggest ideas.) That, plus the previously mentioned balance/sense of when it's wise to make the physical appearances to be there if there's a high probability of more help/support needed than normal.
I take offense to the suggestion that I deserve "less pay than people who come in every day" though. Why? I'm getting the same things accomplished as anyone else they'd hire in my role.
Even now, after adding most of the USA to this data cap -- they've avoided the entire Washington DC metro area (Northern Virginia and Maryland included). I'm very thankful for that as a MD resident stuck using Comcast for broadband.... but am I the only one who suspects this is on purpose? Comcast probably figures they won't get push-back from angry legislators as long as they make sure all of THOSE folks aren't affected by the changes.
As I'm not a developer, I had to read through some of the comments left to the original stories to figure out what the fuss was all about.
Maybe most Slashdot readers are more focused than I am on coding and already know all of this. But what I learned is that essentially, sticking this BUG_ON line someplace in the code causes Linux to do the equivalent of a Windows blue screen of death when it hits it. It's a purposeful way to cause an instant system halt because you believe the software should never reach that spot in the code, and if it does, you're worried that data corruption will result -- so better to halt things than let that happen.
It sounds like even back in 2002 though, Linus was expressing his dislike for using it and recommended a WARN_ON alternative that would just alert people to the issue but let things continue.
The thing is? I'm not entirely sure Linus's anger is warranted here? It sounds like basically, he's of the philosophy that "the code must go on". In other words, it's almost always better to keep the system running, despite any bugs, than to kernel panic and stop the whole thing. Perhaps in a world of virtual machines and servers running a whole slew of different processes at the same time, there's logic to this? (EG. If one of your boxes is needed to perform DNS, DHCP and/or other basic functions for a whole network -- you'd probably rather it keep doing those things, even if a bug is hit that means a process reading/writing data to files someplace else gets a critical error that could corrupt records in a database or improperly truncate some other file it was working with.)
BUT.... this could just as easily be subjective, based on where the bug lies and what it impacts, vs. what YOU consider a mission critical use of the machine in question. If BUG_ON saves data from loss, maybe that really is better for SOME users than letting it go on generating/logging warnings that people aren't going to notice right away?
I get the idea Linus leans the direction he does on this issue mainly because he wants any kernel he approves as "stable" to have that appearance, buggy or not.
Sure, the same "lock in" that exists in the WHOLE computer industry....
Know many gamers who avoided ever buying a Playstation, Nintendo or XBox because they were "locked in" to only buying games and accessories made for that platform?
Heck, my Ryobi lawn trimmer is "locked in" to only using attachments made by Ryobi for it, and only the type of battery pack they make for it. That's not even a computer or phone.
Pfft.... Why this is voted "insightful" - I have no idea. Sounds more like a troll to me.
The reason people keep buying the iPhone is simply because they like and/or are familiar with the UI. That and they have some investment in the platform.
I've happily switched back and forth between iOS and Android devices several times in the past, but more recently I've just settled on iPhones. It's not because I'm some "fanboi" who has to carry around things with an Apple logo on them. It's that practically-speaking, I own quite a few nice/useful iOS apps under my iCloud login and I'd miss all of that if I switched away from it. I'd wind up re-buying at least a few things again just to get Android versions. And I've got all of my calendar data standardized in iCloud now too. I don't really feel like going to the effort to migrate all of that to Google.
And honestly, even though I work in I.T. and have business reasons to stay familiar with where all the options are on either platform -- it's still a hassle. I can almost automatically go right to the configuration options I need on an iPad or iPhone -- but these days, I have to poke around more in Android to get to them. This is probably even worse for the average user who isn't that computer-savvy in the first place.
Lastly, the "Apple costs too much!" argument is mostly B.S. - as has been explained MANY, MANY times before. The devices will have far more resale value than the cheaper Android handsets have, when you go to resell one. So you get back what you put into it. It's only a problem if you're on a tight budget initially and can only afford something cheaper and lower-end. Apple doesn't really cater to the low end.
Technically, you're correct. But realistically? I'm not seeing where worn out batteries in iPhones have been a problem for anyone.
Yes, if you actually still have people trying to get more use out of an iPhone 2 or 3, they probably need a new battery in it by now. I'm sure this is getting to the point where it's true for the iPhone 4 series as well.
But not many people still bother with a phone that old.... not when you have to pay just as much for monthly cellular service on it as to make a current or recent model work on the same network.
Everyone I see still using an iPhone 4 series are pre-teens who got the phone free when one of their parents or family members got something new and discarded it. At that point, if they really need a new battery in it, they can justify paying one of these 3rd. party phone repair places to swap it for them.
I'm not sure how much success this group will have vs. a Federal regulatory agency like the FAA? But that doesn't mean I agree with your assertion that the drone community "brought this on themselves" or that it's anything like the transition from horses to motor vehicles.
The *only* reason attention was drawn to drones was the hype and news about their use in the military. Without that association in people's minds, drones would still be regarded as toys or photographic tools by most people -- and not viewed as a threat to regulate.
Long before drones were a "thing", you could still buy a pretty good quality radio controlled helicopter, which was capable of attaching a camera to it. It took more skill to learn to fly it because of the lack of computer assisted flight systems. But that would have come along eventually for those, even if no other "drones" were developed.
IMO, people misusing drones and doing stupid things with them should be handled on a case-by-case basis. Registration requirements do little to nothing to help anything here.
Higher fuel prices mean people drive a little bit less. (You start phasing out the unnecessary stuff, and encourage people to be a little more efficient about the trips they do make.) But that's the low-hanging fruit that doesn't really have a huge impact. People who are short on money already behave this way because even $2/gallon gas gets expensive. You can buy a couple of meals for what you pay to fill your tank one time.
And the "urban sprawl" you refer to is, IMO, a thing with just as many benefits as downsides. There's MUCH more to it than just worrying about logistics of how close to a job someone lives.
For example, look at the water shortage challenges happening in some places on the West Coast. That's basically a distribution issue caused by having too many people interested in trying to live all packed in to relatively small areas. Or look at some of the challenges with garbage in places like New York City. The people who decide they don't want to live in the "big city" help spread out the impact we have on our geography and natural resources. And as someone pointed out above - it has the effect of keeping housing prices down too. When you get a big concentration of people in one city, there's too much competition for housing and costs skyrocket for rent as well as home ownership.
There's nothing wrong with or unsustainable about the "American dream" as it traditionally existed. If you extend that to building a McMansion with a number of large rooms you rarely use but keep paying to heat and cool anyway -- that's a different situation. But for our family of 6, finding an older 2 story home with 4 bedrooms and a 2 car garage was exactly what we needed. This, in turn, allows my wife's mother to live with us instead of the popular theme today of pushing our elders off to some retirement community or nursing home to live out their remaining days....
I'll be *very* surprised if this catches on. There are plenty of people trying to sell corporate IM solutions -- and Facebook is a late entrant in this category.
We adopted Slack and I had my doubts, initially, that it was even going to amount to much for our company. But it's proven itself to be pretty handy, largely because they gave a lot of ability to link up notifications and error messages from other applications to it, and everything put into Slack is persistent. (I can go back in a search and find a troubleshooting tip or a web URL that a co-worker mentioned months ago, if I need to.) Plus, it's cross-platform compatible with clients that work well on our iPads and iPhones, Windows PCs, Macs, etc.
Still, we're finding ourselves in a situation where we've got an IM client built into our VoIP phone system's control panel on our computers, and Slack for our departmental communications, plus all of our Mac and Windows users long ago standardizing on using AOL's AIM messenger (linkable to Apple iMessages on the Mac) and publishing a directory of all of our employee's IM names in there. We're pretty saturated on corporate chat clients.
Facebook has a relatively poor reputation in the workplace anyway, though. People consider it a time-waster and a site needing to be blocked in some instances.
The author concludes that our best hope to fix this trend is a return of high gasoline prices.
IMO, that's ONE way it might change, but pretty much the WORST option.
Personally, I'd rather see more people opt for electric cars or public transit because improvements were made in those areas, making them more desirable!
High fuel prices punish the people who are already struggling, on tight budgets. If they need to drive a vehicle for any kind of delivery or taxi job (Uber, Lyft, etc.) - it means their costs go up, because they can't just "drive less". Often, it's the same story for someone who relies on a car to commute to/from work. All those people telling you to carpool to work or take a bus aren't being that realistic. In many cases, you need the ability to haul things around in a trunk or back seat of a car that you don't get when using a bus or other mass transit, and you can't always find a workable carpool. It makes everyone pay more for package delivery too, harming your ability to get your asking price when you sell used goods on the Internet via sites like eBay. (It actually hurts the whole economy since pretty much every business relies on shipping in some manner. But it hurts individuals the most, IMO. The big companies do enough volume so they can negotiate pretty nice discounts with shippers like UPS or FedEx. They may pay more than they used to to ship goods, but it'll still be far less than you or I pay.)
I know personally, I live around 50 miles from my workplace. I used to take the commuter train, but the combination of increased prices for it and reliability issues forced me to go back to driving. There are just too many times the train is really late due to freight train traffic that gets priority on the rails they use, or mechanical breakdowns. When I was waiting on the last train of the evening and it was one hour, then 1 1/2 hours, then 2, 3 and finally 3 1/2 hours late -- I had enough. (To add insult to injury, it was cold and raining outside, and the station platform is outdoors with no good shielding from the wind or rain.)
What I *have* done is to express my plight to my bosses at work, who finally agreed to let me start working from home more often. That winds up letting me claw back all of that commuting time I lost before - as well as saving on travel expenses. So it's a win all around. But yeah -- I really tried to stick with the public transit option. They just don't have their act together enough to make it attractive.
One of our pre-teens is an avid gamer, and lately, we've noticed she started complaining about getting banned from online games she plays. When we looked into it more closely, we found out most of it was for attempts at hacking. Even in Pokemon Go, she had two accounts set up.... one "regular" one, and the other she was using to hack.
She definitely exhibits the interest in manipulating software to get the results she wants, and despite our lectures about why cheating is bad, etc. -- it seems to increasingly fall on deaf ears.
Now, would I say all of this means she's headed down the road of becoming a cyber-criminal? Not exactly.... In daily life, she abides by most of the rules. She's not the type to try to steal something from a store, for example. She generally knows right from wrong. But I think when it comes to games where everything is virtual, she has a feeling, deep-down, that it's more "ok" to cheat and hack. And in 1 or 2 cases where I thought she was "permanently banned" from a game, she got her accounts back again. I'd say it's quite likely that required a bit of bending the truth to an admin somewhere, to make that happen.
So all I guess I'm saying is, there's probably kind of a mushy grey-area here. Once you start taking an interest in dishonest play in a computer game and experience the thrill of successfully beating the system to do it -- you're exhibiting the same characteristics the common criminal does (enjoys the challenge of outsmarting the system for personal gain). I think many will draw a line in the sand, deciding that for example, "copying a copyrighted piece of music is acceptable" (because you didn't actually deprive anyone else of their copy by doing it) and "cheating in games is acceptable" because they're just entertainment anyway and nobody's really getting hurt. But you have a sense of morals/ethics that says you'd stop at something that was actually emptying another person's bank account or taking tangible goods without compensating someone for them. Others won't, especially if nobody really tried to teach them right and wrong....
Yes, it's good advice to try to install the "Convenience Rollup" on a fresh Win 7 SP1 install before trying to update the rest of the OS. But from my experience with that? You absolutely *do* have to install the prerequisite KB30203369 first, or else it won't do a thing. And when you download and run that prerequisite, it still has to go through some type of "searching for updates" process which seems to involve communicating with the Windows Update servers Microsoft hosts. I had a lot of problems with THAT process getting stuck for hours and having to reboot and try again once or twice before it finally went through.
I remember back in the mid to late 90's, many companies viewed I.T. as much more than "overhead". In some cases, it was pretty understandable. They literally brought businesses to whole new levels of efficiency by eliminating paper and pencil methods of handling customer orders, inventory and more.
When you first started giving everyone personal computers as business tools just as essential as the telephones on their desks, you created a massive shift in the way business was conducted. Nobody but internal I.T. (or paid I.T. workers coming in on an hourly basis) were responsible for implementing that.
The problem is, there was an expectation that somehow, I.T. staff would keep coming up with more amazing ways to re-imagine or refine the business to make it more profitable and efficient. And increasingly, that STOPPED happening as the people employed in I.T. found themselves bogged down in just keeping the existing infrastructure functioning and keeping employees trained to use it.
I think if the patches are bundled together now - you basically have to treat them as one larger patch. In other words, nothing changes except any time you find you did one and it breaks something, you roll the whole collection back until it can be rectified.
IMO, Microsoft's Windows Updates have been a huge, overly confusing mess for a long time anyway. I used to use WSUS to centrally administer them and for our small to mid-sized company, it became more trouble than it was worth. I like the advantage that you only have to download the patches once to the central WSUS server and then all the clients grab copies from there to save your Internet bandwidth. But in practice, our workforce is mobile enough that it's almost better we just let their laptops grab updates over the net from wherever they're at so they get patched more quickly.
Sifting through all of their patches and deciding when it was safe to "release" them was getting to be way more time-consuming for I.T. than it should have been. So often, you have slews of patches that wind up marked "superseded" by other patches, and there are weird dependencies too. Can't do certain patches unless you've done others first. (Why not automate all of that so any patch dependent on another one just auto-applies the required one as part of its installation?)
If you do a fresh install of Windows 7 these days? The update process is PAINFUL! You'll literally need to leave the PC downloading updates for a good 8-10 hours or more before it finally starts doing anything obvious. (It seems that it needs so many individual patches to get current, it overwhelms their updater service trying to sort through all of it and prepare to download them in the proper order?)
I was just going to post when your comment made me rethink the whole thing and write this reply instead.
Having worked in I.T. for 25 years or so now, I'm pretty familiar with the "computer security" marketplace. Most of the time, you've got a combination of "former hackers who decided they could make a living out of selling comp-sec stuff" and big companies seeing $$$$'s by getting behind these initiatives to sell solutions.
Meanwhile, in the rest of corporate America, I.T. expenditures are increasingly under a microscope, because companies have long since been burned by and learned from the old idea that I.T. was an investment in the company's future. These days, I.T. is viewed more like a line item expense on budget spreadsheets. Sure, it's necessary.... but it's necessary like hiring a janitor is necessary, or like buying office supplies is necessary. When your I.T. staff recommends the latest gizmo that promises to do X and Y to stop outside system attacks or to analyze traffic? They start asking a lot of questions. What would it really cost us if we didn't buy this and we got hacked? What kind of disaster recovery stuff do we have in place to put things back to the way they were before the hack? What else can I.T. do to improve our security before we go buying all of this new stuff?
And guess what? In the majority of situations, the reasonable answer is to say "no" to the expensive new security appliances or software. A lot of that stuff is going to quickly become obsolete anyway. (Quite a bit of it is subscription-based where it receives regular updates from the manufacturer as long as you stay current on your payments. Guess what? When the (often small startup) security company making it gets bought out by someone else or goes belly up, you're often left with a costly paperweight that someone wants MORE $'s to replace with the "new, supported alternative/improvement" to it.)
If your I.T. people are competent enough, they should be keeping up with all the OS and software updates/patches, and that alone seals up quite a few of the security holes at NO extra cost. Other times, the smarter choice may be outsourcing one or more of the services you used to host in-house. Let the "big guys" host it for you and let THEM pay all that money for the fancy security appliances to protect your data AND the data of thousands of other customers of theirs. At scale, those security tools/software purchases make a lot more sense.
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Honestly, I think one of the sad things is that relatively few companies manage to make the work environment pleasant enough so people actually like (or at least don't dislike) working.
There are always going to be jobs to do that practically nobody enjoys.... But that's also part of the beauty of Capitalism. There will be people who do them anyway because they aren't skilled enough to move up to something better, and that may motivate them to learn those new skills. Others will be ok doing work they dislike because for them, it's still acceptable to them to spend that portion of their lives doing things they dislike so they have the income to do things they DO like when they're not working there.
But in general, I think MOST jobs can be made much more pleasant than they are. This is one of the things good management can help accomplish. It's often a matter of changing around a few rules to allow some of the "little things".... Let people listen to music while working, maybe? Or relax the dress code so jeans are acceptable, if that makes some of your workers happier. Organize small blocks of social time, perhaps? (One of my jobs was in a tall building, so they worked something out with the building management to let us have the rooftop area once a month to do a rooftop lunch.) Personally, I've never accepted a job for any length of time at a place where I hated going in. Even if the only thing a place had going for it was a group of co-workers I liked talking to, it had to offer at least something like that of value. Otherwise, no ... just quit and find a place that's a better fit for you.
Perhaps.... but at least in your example of "safety equipment and adaptations for people with disabilities" -- I'd say those are pretty well covered here in the U.S. today. In fact, some would say we overdo the "catering to folks with disabilities" with some of our legislation. (EG. Strict rules about how many handicapped parking spots you have to make available as a percentage of the total means in some establishments, you have row after row of them, unnecessarily wasting space and going unused.) And for some small businesses, they're forced to pay out large sums of money retrofitting older buildings to be wheelchair accessible as soon as they try to do any kind of update to the property that requires an inspection or permit -- even if they have no wheelchair bound employees at all, and no need for customers to access those parts of the building.
I'm not sure what types of safety related things you imagine the U.K. has in place that the U.S. doesn't, which they'd be eager to remove to be more competitive either? But from everything I've seen, safety is taken fairly seriously in the U.S. Organizations like OSHA impose all sorts of safety requirements, and even at the level of a person buying a used home, the homeowner's insurance often does a drive-by inspection and demands changes such as putting up railings on any outside steps, or else you risk getting your policy cancelled. The days of companies not caring at all about worker safety pretty much went out with the initial rise of the unions to power -- leading to those demands getting enshrined into Federal law of the land.
That's one argument you can make ... but my point is, this particular college also offered an opportunity where you get a full 6 weeks of vacation per year, starting with your first year of employment, and work weeks are 35 hours, not 40, despite receiving all the same health insurance and related benefits of any 40 hour per week job. The salary is definitely not measurably lower than what anyone else offers for the same type of work, given those facts.
If computer support is considered such as "low level" type of work today (as some people on here claim), then surely it's within the abilities of some of these folks currently upset that their retail or fast food job won't pay them $15/hr. or more? Study to get an A+ certification and show some enthusiasm for wanting to work someplace, and you're essentially qualified.
But no... I guess it's easier to bellyache and claim we all need a basic income paid to us for doing nothing instead?
As a libertarian, many people expect I'm going to be completely against the concept of a UBI. However, that's not really the case. What I *am* against is the premature pushing of it on people in still-functional Capitalist society, which amounts to an appeal to convert to Socialism.
The UBI makes complete sense as a way to handle the economy in a POST Capitalist world, which we're nowhere near ready to transition to. (Just because you have some fear-mongering about specific industries like trucking going away doesn't mean "all the jobs are gone".)
From what I've observed on the hiring end of the equation? There are actually a lot of decent-paying, respectable jobs out there that go unfilled for months because the quality of the applicants is pretty terrible. My wife recently helped interview over a dozen people for a computer support job at a local college, and she showed me the "best of the bunch" of 40 or 50 resumes they received. We were laughing at how bad several were, including misspellings and people who had NO clue how to sell themselves as having any useful skills.
When they finally did interview 4 or 5 people? One of them showed up an hour late. They agreed to reschedule him and give him another chance, only because he had an excuse about a traffic accident on the highway keeping him from making it on time. When he was due to come back, he waited until 10 minutes before the scheduled time to tell them he wasn't interested any longer. Another candidate was a woman who actually sounded like she had good credentials on paper and they were excited to possibly offer her a position, but she was so "ho hum" about the whole interview, they decided to move on. She not only made no effort to dress nicely for it, but when asked questions about what she did in her previous jobs, etc. -- she just gave really brief answers, acted like she was bored, and didn't do a thing to impress anyone.
I see evidence of a similar mindset in other areas too, including this uproar over a $15 minimum wage.... In reality? You should really be able to eliminate the "minimum wage" completely and it would make no real difference. Why? Because first of all, there's no one number anybody can quote you that *really* makes sense as THE proper starting wage to pay people that's "fair" instead of "unfair". Depending on where you live in the country, the cost of living is radically different, for starters. A very small percentage of people in America actually work for the mandated minimum wage, and when they do? A big percentage of THOSE are people who earn tips - meaning it's almost not even fair to count them in those totals to begin with. What you wind up left with are a lot of people who don't really need a "living wage" in the first place. (For example, many of the mentally or physically handicapped people are already receiving SSI benefits, and can't earn much of their own income or they lose those. Yet they want to feel like productive members of society and get out of the house. So they'll accept very low paying jobs, doing such things as putting advertisements in envelopes. They don't really WANT a higher wage because it'd put them in a much worse situation overall than what they get without it.) But people keep pushing for this with the mindset that by boosting the minimum by another $X per hour, that translates to "across the board" increases of about the same amount. And that, in turn, means they can do some minimally skilled job of limited real value to an employer but receive the type of pay you should really only get for doing something much more valuable to society. I don't believe that really works except in the short-term, before the overall economy has time to adapt to the changes (inflation).
IMO, he gave a better answer/explanation for his request than many musicians do who have problems with phones.
Still? That whole attitude rubs me the wrong way. I'm from the generation who listened to White Zombie when it was new, and part of what gave that music its character was all the dubbing in of clips of sound f/x and people talking in old horror movies. In other words, he has re-recording pieces of other artist's work to thank for making his own music better.
But now, he takes issue with people recording his own performance.
Rock seems like it's dead to me, NOT because of people wanting to record parts of concerts they attend -- but because the core audience is older. I went to see Disturbed and Breaking Benjamin in concert recently. There just weren't that many of the energetic, partying college students and 20-somethings in the audience. You had far more middle-aged or older folks who got more excited about Disturbed's remake of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" than anything else. As a 40-something myself, I'm not going to scream my lungs out and go crazy jumping around at a concert anymore. Not happening when it means it'll impact my ability to do my job the next morning or other commitments. I think many of the people going to ROCK concerts today are in a similar mindset. We still love the music and want to experience it live, but we're happy to sit on the lawn drinking a beer and maybe eating a slice of pizza or a burger from the concession stand while we take it all in. If you, as a performer, need the whole audience going crazy to validate what you're doing? I can understand that, but that's going to be an ongoing challenge for you when you perform a type of music that appeals to an audience that's maturing and aging.
Personally? I support the right of musicians, comedians, and other performers to make these sorts of demands of their audience. As soon as you buy a ticket to any show, you've agreed to all sorts of contractual obligations (as printed in the fine print on the back that few people bother to read). So this is really just one more requirement to add to the list of things you can't do (like bringing in coolers).
BUT, I'd probably refuse to pay for a show with this rule in place. I know it drives some people crazy seeing others trying to take photos or video of a live performance with their phones. But in this day and age? That's a part of the experience people are paying for. I know when my wife and I went to see Van Halen last year, for example? We both grabbed video recordings of Eddie doing his guitar solo. As far as I'm concerned, that's one of those moments of "rock history" worth preserving. How many more years left of monster guitar playing does the guy have left in him? (And for that matter, how many more times will Van Halen perform live with David Lee Roth?) For what we paid to see it, I feel like getting to take home a little piece of the concert to replay later for friends isn't too much to ask.
Yes, it's stupid trying to record a whole show. All you're going to do is waste the money you spent to see it live so you have poor quality audio and relatively poor video of it that nobody will ever sit through and watch again. But making me put my phone in a locked bag until it's all over? That's a bit much.
Most instances where you have kids "jumping out in front of cars", you're talking about parking lots or side roads where the kids didn't look both ways before trying to cross the intersection. It's not something that should really ever happen on a highway or interstate where you've usually got fences, a thick tree line, or other things blocking easy access to get onto the highway by way of walking up to it.
The car will probably try to slow down as much as possible, if not come to a complete stop. At most - that would bump the kid(s) but not seriously injure them. Perhaps it would even turn to avoid them while slowing down, since it would know it wasn't going to flip the vehicle at that relatively slow rate of speed.
First off, the person who commented that it's "predictable when newer isn't better" is correct. Right now, I.T. technology is stagnant. IMO, that's not a bad thing either. What's happening is, just as many people are using computers and electronic devices as ever -- but the market has matured. There's a very low level of "techno lust" for the latest and greatest, because truthfully, what's already readily available is good enough for everything people want to do with their machines right now.
There's finally some sanity in corporate America, where technology is getting replaced on a schedule that reflects the time-frame it takes for the old gear to physically wear out, instead of demands for 2-3 year replacement cycles just because "the new thing is already old, since it can't run the cool new OS and new versions of apps X and Y".
And really, HP's situation is a different/unique one in the current round of layoffs. HP split their company into two, not long ago, realizing they had to jettison the "boat anchor" of printing/imaging so it didn't weigh down profits of the rest of the business. The HP doing all the layoffs now is the one holding the bag selling printers and scanners. They've also tried to acquire other printer manufacturers like Fujitsu, but ultimately, they're selling a product that's gone from a "must have" companion purchase with every new PC to a niche need. Their investment in 3D printing didn't appear to pan out either. (I think that's turned out to be a niche hobbyist interest, since it's still a very slow process to print a 3D object, the size of said object is really limited, AND it won't realize its full potential until there are much larger collections of downloadable projects to print. If all the major manufacturers of appliances offered a way to print repair parts on their "support" web sites, for example? Then you'd see 3D printing really take off.)
But claiming the people who get laid off have no future in I.T.? That's FUD, plain and simple. The trend to cloudify everything is still strong, but I've worked in the field long enough to say I'm confident it's going to trend back the other direction in the next decade or so. If you just look at the ridiculous number of data breaches in the news in the last year or two, you quickly see the problems with concentrating a large number of customer's data in one place. But hacking aside, the cloud services amount to giving up direct control over big chunks of your business operations. When one of these services has an outage, you can't do anything but sit around and hope they actually provide some status updates to pass along to your users and to management. Everyone's first question is "When will it be back up?" and you're stuck shrugging and saying, "Beats me! We're at the mercy of the provider." When this happens enough times, companies start demanding some more accountability and control. And you tend to get locked in to these services too. So if they raise prices or change pricing structures, you can't do much besides pay the new, higher bill (or go through a huge, unplanned project to migrate all the data elsewhere and retrain everyone on how to access it). I'm not sure how a cloud provider decides someone with many years of general I.T. experience, including such things as administering servers, troubleshooting networks and supporting staff wouldn't have skills applicable to working for their business anyway? But cloud is an overrated buzzword, either way.
I was just complaining about an earlier news item posted on Slashdot for a Facebook corporate chat client they were apparently going to sell as competition to apps like Slack chat. And now THIS?
I'm even a regular Facebook user and I have to say I hope this thing crashes and burns!
There are SO many options out there to handle "internal social media". Where I work, we've been using Salesforce "Chatter" for this stuff for years.
WHY would anyone decide Facebook is the optimal thing to re-purpose as an Intranet site of sorts, for employees to share content?
Again, they're very late to the party and offering something that nobody should really need - hoping your company buys it anyway based on the familiar branding alone.
This quest for ever thinner phones with their thin batteries is only to blame if you dislike the downsides of pushing technology forward.
Any time you demand a considerable amount of energy storage in a small package, it has a certain amount of danger of catching fire or exploding.
We've randomly seen various models of laptops catch fire or explode too, and many of those weren't all that thin, nor would you describe their batteries as "thin" -- especially compared to any smartphone ever manufactured.
I can't say I know exactly where Samsung is failing this particular time, since competitors have similar sized devices with similar sized batteries that are clearly working more reliably? But it sounds like they wrote things off as a simple battery production defect when it might turn out to be a more complicated problem to fix. (As someone else said - maybe they have the battery sitting too close to the CPU or other chips that help warm it up past a safe operational parameter?)
Currently, I work for a company where it's very advantageous for me to work from home whenever possible. (Otherwise, I have to deal with an hour long commute, often in heavy traffic, followed by paying about $9-10 per day in parking fees. The gas and parking adds up, cutting into my salary -- not to mention all the wasted time in transit.)
I work in an I.T. support/sysadmin role, and initially? There was definitely some hesitation from management about my not coming in to the office all the time. I have to agree very much with the article recommending you come in all the time as a new employee, and slowly gravitate towards telecommuting after you've proven you're a good, hard-worker. That's how it played out in my situation. But there's got to be the element of personal responsibility involved. For example? I may try to work from home the majority of the time, but I still have to keep an eye on the trends and what's coming up on the office calendar that might make it wise for me to drive in on certain days. I started making an effort to drive in on Mondays, for example, after noticing that the bulk of our trouble tickets for urgent problems tend to happen on Monday mornings. (People bring laptops home over the weekend and any issues they encountered then tend to get noted and brought in to get addressed on Monday. And additionally, there seems to be a general "thing" in the company that if a server or network application is starting to act up on a Friday -- they're winding down what they're working on for the week anyway, so they may not even report it. Then, the memory leak making the app slow or the failing drive causing the random faults or whatever gets worse over the weekend, until it's dead on Monday when they come back in to use it again.)
I really don't do any less work when I work from home than I do when I'm actually in the office though. I have a pretty much identical computer setup at home to my office setup, so as long as the VPN tunnel is up - I have the same remote assistance tools and apps. Our desk phones are VoIP and I have software on my cellphone allowing taking or making calls from that number and viewing the same directory of who is on the phone and available/not available. We started enforcing a rule, long ago, where people need to submit trouble tickets (either via email or the web) and our team grab them as soon as we can get to them. So to the users, they don't see anything different whether I take a ticket from home or from the office PC.
It's important to keep up those social connections too. But IMO, much of that can be done (at least in my I.T. support role) by showing up for all of the meetings that get scheduled. (Usually, such thing as our "quarterly meetings" involving the whole company include a free lunch before them, encouraging that time window to socialize and informally suggest ideas.) That, plus the previously mentioned balance/sense of when it's wise to make the physical appearances to be there if there's a high probability of more help/support needed than normal.
I take offense to the suggestion that I deserve "less pay than people who come in every day" though. Why? I'm getting the same things accomplished as anyone else they'd hire in my role.
Even now, after adding most of the USA to this data cap -- they've avoided the entire Washington DC metro area (Northern Virginia and Maryland included). I'm very thankful for that as a MD resident stuck using Comcast for broadband .... but am I the only one who suspects this is on purpose? Comcast probably figures they won't get push-back from angry legislators as long as they make sure all of THOSE folks aren't affected by the changes.
As I'm not a developer, I had to read through some of the comments left to the original stories to figure out what the fuss was all about.
Maybe most Slashdot readers are more focused than I am on coding and already know all of this. But what I learned is that essentially, sticking this BUG_ON line someplace in the code causes Linux to do the equivalent of a Windows blue screen of death when it hits it. It's a purposeful way to cause an instant system halt because you believe the software should never reach that spot in the code, and if it does, you're worried that data corruption will result -- so better to halt things than let that happen.
It sounds like even back in 2002 though, Linus was expressing his dislike for using it and recommended a WARN_ON alternative that would just alert people to the issue but let things continue.
The thing is? I'm not entirely sure Linus's anger is warranted here? It sounds like basically, he's of the philosophy that "the code must go on". In other words, it's almost always better to keep the system running, despite any bugs, than to kernel panic and stop the whole thing. Perhaps in a world of virtual machines and servers running a whole slew of different processes at the same time, there's logic to this? (EG. If one of your boxes is needed to perform DNS, DHCP and/or other basic functions for a whole network -- you'd probably rather it keep doing those things, even if a bug is hit that means a process reading/writing data to files someplace else gets a critical error that could corrupt records in a database or improperly truncate some other file it was working with.)
BUT .... this could just as easily be subjective, based on where the bug lies and what it impacts, vs. what YOU consider a mission critical use of the machine in question. If BUG_ON saves data from loss, maybe that really is better for SOME users than letting it go on generating/logging warnings that people aren't going to notice right away?
I get the idea Linus leans the direction he does on this issue mainly because he wants any kernel he approves as "stable" to have that appearance, buggy or not.
Sure, the same "lock in" that exists in the WHOLE computer industry....
Know many gamers who avoided ever buying a Playstation, Nintendo or XBox because they were "locked in" to only buying games and accessories made for that platform?
Heck, my Ryobi lawn trimmer is "locked in" to only using attachments made by Ryobi for it, and only the type of battery pack they make for it. That's not even a computer or phone.
Pfft.... Why this is voted "insightful" - I have no idea. Sounds more like a troll to me.
The reason people keep buying the iPhone is simply because they like and/or are familiar with the UI. That and they have some investment in the platform.
I've happily switched back and forth between iOS and Android devices several times in the past, but more recently I've just settled on iPhones. It's not because I'm some "fanboi" who has to carry around things with an Apple logo on them. It's that practically-speaking, I own quite a few nice/useful iOS apps under my iCloud login and I'd miss all of that if I switched away from it. I'd wind up re-buying at least a few things again just to get Android versions. And I've got all of my calendar data standardized in iCloud now too. I don't really feel like going to the effort to migrate all of that to Google.
And honestly, even though I work in I.T. and have business reasons to stay familiar with where all the options are on either platform -- it's still a hassle. I can almost automatically go right to the configuration options I need on an iPad or iPhone -- but these days, I have to poke around more in Android to get to them. This is probably even worse for the average user who isn't that computer-savvy in the first place.
Lastly, the "Apple costs too much!" argument is mostly B.S. - as has been explained MANY, MANY times before. The devices will have far more resale value than the cheaper Android handsets have, when you go to resell one. So you get back what you put into it. It's only a problem if you're on a tight budget initially and can only afford something cheaper and lower-end. Apple doesn't really cater to the low end.
Technically, you're correct. But realistically? I'm not seeing where worn out batteries in iPhones have been a problem for anyone.
Yes, if you actually still have people trying to get more use out of an iPhone 2 or 3, they probably need a new battery in it by now. I'm sure this is getting to the point where it's true for the iPhone 4 series as well.
But not many people still bother with a phone that old .... not when you have to pay just as much for monthly cellular service on it as to make a current or recent model work on the same network.
Everyone I see still using an iPhone 4 series are pre-teens who got the phone free when one of their parents or family members got something new and discarded it. At that point, if they really need a new battery in it, they can justify paying one of these 3rd. party phone repair places to swap it for them.
I'm not sure how much success this group will have vs. a Federal regulatory agency like the FAA? But that doesn't mean I agree with your assertion that the drone community "brought this on themselves" or that it's anything like the transition from horses to motor vehicles.
The *only* reason attention was drawn to drones was the hype and news about their use in the military. Without that association in people's minds, drones would still be regarded as toys or photographic tools by most people -- and not viewed as a threat to regulate.
Long before drones were a "thing", you could still buy a pretty good quality radio controlled helicopter, which was capable of attaching a camera to it. It took more skill to learn to fly it because of the lack of computer assisted flight systems. But that would have come along eventually for those, even if no other "drones" were developed.
IMO, people misusing drones and doing stupid things with them should be handled on a case-by-case basis. Registration requirements do little to nothing to help anything here.
Higher fuel prices mean people drive a little bit less. (You start phasing out the unnecessary stuff, and encourage people to be a little more efficient about the trips they do make.) But that's the low-hanging fruit that doesn't really have a huge impact. People who are short on money already behave this way because even $2/gallon gas gets expensive. You can buy a couple of meals for what you pay to fill your tank one time.
And the "urban sprawl" you refer to is, IMO, a thing with just as many benefits as downsides. There's MUCH more to it than just worrying about logistics of how close to a job someone lives.
For example, look at the water shortage challenges happening in some places on the West Coast. That's basically a distribution issue caused by having too many people interested in trying to live all packed in to relatively small areas. Or look at some of the challenges with garbage in places like New York City. The people who decide they don't want to live in the "big city" help spread out the impact we have on our geography and natural resources. And as someone pointed out above - it has the effect of keeping housing prices down too. When you get a big concentration of people in one city, there's too much competition for housing and costs skyrocket for rent as well as home ownership.
There's nothing wrong with or unsustainable about the "American dream" as it traditionally existed. If you extend that to building a McMansion with a number of large rooms you rarely use but keep paying to heat and cool anyway -- that's a different situation. But for our family of 6, finding an older 2 story home with 4 bedrooms and a 2 car garage was exactly what we needed. This, in turn, allows my wife's mother to live with us instead of the popular theme today of pushing our elders off to some retirement community or nursing home to live out their remaining days ....
I'll be *very* surprised if this catches on.
There are plenty of people trying to sell corporate IM solutions -- and Facebook is a late entrant in this category.
We adopted Slack and I had my doubts, initially, that it was even going to amount to much for our company. But it's proven itself to be pretty handy, largely because they gave a lot of ability to link up notifications and error messages from other applications to it, and everything put into Slack is persistent. (I can go back in a search and find a troubleshooting tip or a web URL that a co-worker mentioned months ago, if I need to.) Plus, it's cross-platform compatible with clients that work well on our iPads and iPhones, Windows PCs, Macs, etc.
Still, we're finding ourselves in a situation where we've got an IM client built into our VoIP phone system's control panel on our computers, and Slack for our departmental communications, plus all of our Mac and Windows users long ago standardizing on using AOL's AIM messenger (linkable to Apple iMessages on the Mac) and publishing a directory of all of our employee's IM names in there. We're pretty saturated on corporate chat clients.
Facebook has a relatively poor reputation in the workplace anyway, though. People consider it a time-waster and a site needing to be blocked in some instances.
The author concludes that our best hope to fix this trend is a return of high gasoline prices.
IMO, that's ONE way it might change, but pretty much the WORST option.
Personally, I'd rather see more people opt for electric cars or public transit because improvements were made in those areas, making them more desirable!
High fuel prices punish the people who are already struggling, on tight budgets. If they need to drive a vehicle for any kind of delivery or taxi job (Uber, Lyft, etc.) - it means their costs go up, because they can't just "drive less". Often, it's the same story for someone who relies on a car to commute to/from work. All those people telling you to carpool to work or take a bus aren't being that realistic. In many cases, you need the ability to haul things around in a trunk or back seat of a car that you don't get when using a bus or other mass transit, and you can't always find a workable carpool. It makes everyone pay more for package delivery too, harming your ability to get your asking price when you sell used goods on the Internet via sites like eBay. (It actually hurts the whole economy since pretty much every business relies on shipping in some manner. But it hurts individuals the most, IMO. The big companies do enough volume so they can negotiate pretty nice discounts with shippers like UPS or FedEx. They may pay more than they used to to ship goods, but it'll still be far less than you or I pay.)
I know personally, I live around 50 miles from my workplace. I used to take the commuter train, but the combination of increased prices for it and reliability issues forced me to go back to driving. There are just too many times the train is really late due to freight train traffic that gets priority on the rails they use, or mechanical breakdowns. When I was waiting on the last train of the evening and it was one hour, then 1 1/2 hours, then 2, 3 and finally 3 1/2 hours late -- I had enough. (To add insult to injury, it was cold and raining outside, and the station platform is outdoors with no good shielding from the wind or rain.)
What I *have* done is to express my plight to my bosses at work, who finally agreed to let me start working from home more often. That winds up letting me claw back all of that commuting time I lost before - as well as saving on travel expenses. So it's a win all around. But yeah -- I really tried to stick with the public transit option. They just don't have their act together enough to make it attractive.
One of our pre-teens is an avid gamer, and lately, we've noticed she started complaining about getting banned from online games she plays. When we looked into it more closely, we found out most of it was for attempts at hacking. Even in Pokemon Go, she had two accounts set up .... one "regular" one, and the other she was using to hack.
She definitely exhibits the interest in manipulating software to get the results she wants, and despite our lectures about why cheating is bad, etc. -- it seems to increasingly fall on deaf ears.
Now, would I say all of this means she's headed down the road of becoming a cyber-criminal? Not exactly .... In daily life, she abides by most of the rules. She's not the type to try to steal something from a store, for example. She generally knows right from wrong. But I think when it comes to games where everything is virtual, she has a feeling, deep-down, that it's more "ok" to cheat and hack. And in 1 or 2 cases where I thought she was "permanently banned" from a game, she got her accounts back again. I'd say it's quite likely that required a bit of bending the truth to an admin somewhere, to make that happen.
So all I guess I'm saying is, there's probably kind of a mushy grey-area here. Once you start taking an interest in dishonest play in a computer game and experience the thrill of successfully beating the system to do it -- you're exhibiting the same characteristics the common criminal does (enjoys the challenge of outsmarting the system for personal gain). I think many will draw a line in the sand, deciding that for example, "copying a copyrighted piece of music is acceptable" (because you didn't actually deprive anyone else of their copy by doing it) and "cheating in games is acceptable" because they're just entertainment anyway and nobody's really getting hurt. But you have a sense of morals/ethics that says you'd stop at something that was actually emptying another person's bank account or taking tangible goods without compensating someone for them. Others won't, especially if nobody really tried to teach them right and wrong....
Yes, it's good advice to try to install the "Convenience Rollup" on a fresh Win 7 SP1 install before trying to update the rest of the OS.
But from my experience with that? You absolutely *do* have to install the prerequisite KB30203369 first, or else it won't do a thing. And when you download and run that prerequisite, it still has to go through some type of "searching for updates" process which seems to involve communicating with the Windows Update servers Microsoft hosts. I had a lot of problems with THAT process getting stuck for hours and having to reboot and try again once or twice before it finally went through.
I remember back in the mid to late 90's, many companies viewed I.T. as much more than "overhead". In some cases, it was pretty understandable. They literally brought businesses to whole new levels of efficiency by eliminating paper and pencil methods of handling customer orders, inventory and more.
When you first started giving everyone personal computers as business tools just as essential as the telephones on their desks, you created a massive shift in the way business was conducted. Nobody but internal I.T. (or paid I.T. workers coming in on an hourly basis) were responsible for implementing that.
The problem is, there was an expectation that somehow, I.T. staff would keep coming up with more amazing ways to re-imagine or refine the business to make it more profitable and efficient. And increasingly, that STOPPED happening as the people employed in I.T. found themselves bogged down in just keeping the existing infrastructure functioning and keeping employees trained to use it.
I think if the patches are bundled together now - you basically have to treat them as one larger patch. In other words, nothing changes except any time you find you did one and it breaks something, you roll the whole collection back until it can be rectified.
IMO, Microsoft's Windows Updates have been a huge, overly confusing mess for a long time anyway. I used to use WSUS to centrally administer them and for our small to mid-sized company, it became more trouble than it was worth. I like the advantage that you only have to download the patches once to the central WSUS server and then all the clients grab copies from there to save your Internet bandwidth. But in practice, our workforce is mobile enough that it's almost better we just let their laptops grab updates over the net from wherever they're at so they get patched more quickly.
Sifting through all of their patches and deciding when it was safe to "release" them was getting to be way more time-consuming for I.T. than it should have been. So often, you have slews of patches that wind up marked "superseded" by other patches, and there are weird dependencies too. Can't do certain patches unless you've done others first. (Why not automate all of that so any patch dependent on another one just auto-applies the required one as part of its installation?)
If you do a fresh install of Windows 7 these days? The update process is PAINFUL! You'll literally need to leave the PC downloading updates for a good 8-10 hours or more before it finally starts doing anything obvious. (It seems that it needs so many individual patches to get current, it overwhelms their updater service trying to sort through all of it and prepare to download them in the proper order?)
I was just going to post when your comment made me rethink the whole thing and write this reply instead.
Having worked in I.T. for 25 years or so now, I'm pretty familiar with the "computer security" marketplace. Most of the time, you've got a combination of "former hackers who decided they could make a living out of selling comp-sec stuff" and big companies seeing $$$$'s by getting behind these initiatives to sell solutions.
Meanwhile, in the rest of corporate America, I.T. expenditures are increasingly under a microscope, because companies have long since been burned by and learned from the old idea that I.T. was an investment in the company's future. These days, I.T. is viewed more like a line item expense on budget spreadsheets. Sure, it's necessary .... but it's necessary like hiring a janitor is necessary, or like buying office supplies is necessary. When your I.T. staff recommends the latest gizmo that promises to do X and Y to stop outside system attacks or to analyze traffic? They start asking a lot of questions. What would it really cost us if we didn't buy this and we got hacked? What kind of disaster recovery stuff do we have in place to put things back to the way they were before the hack? What else can I.T. do to improve our security before we go buying all of this new stuff?
And guess what? In the majority of situations, the reasonable answer is to say "no" to the expensive new security appliances or software. A lot of that stuff is going to quickly become obsolete anyway. (Quite a bit of it is subscription-based where it receives regular updates from the manufacturer as long as you stay current on your payments. Guess what? When the (often small startup) security company making it gets bought out by someone else or goes belly up, you're often left with a costly paperweight that someone wants MORE $'s to replace with the "new, supported alternative/improvement" to it.)
If your I.T. people are competent enough, they should be keeping up with all the OS and software updates/patches, and that alone seals up quite a few of the security holes at NO extra cost. Other times, the smarter choice may be outsourcing one or more of the services you used to host in-house. Let the "big guys" host it for you and let THEM pay all that money for the fancy security appliances to protect your data AND the data of thousands of other customers of theirs. At scale, those security tools/software purchases make a lot more sense.