No, as a parent, it's not your job to "cater to your child's every whim" -- but on the flip side? I'm not so sure I buy into what seems to be a general assumption out there today that video games, computers, tablets, and other such tech is "bad" for a kid if he/she uses too much of it in a day?
When I was growing up in the 80's myself, I latched onto early computer tech. like a fish to water. I knew right away that THIS was the stuff I truly had a deep interest in and that some day, it was going to be my career as well. I spent an awful lot of time holed up in my bedroom with a little TImex Sinclair 1000 attached to a small black and white TV learning BASIC programming and playing around with all of the early software titles I could get my hands on. I'm thankful that both of my parents weren't really the "outdoorsy" types and were busy enough themselves (both college teachers) that they didn't harp on me to "get off that computer and go play outside!" like what happened to some of my peers.
Because truthfully, I learned FAR more useful skills on that computer than I ever would have running around outside with the neighbor kids. And don't get me wrong. I still had friends I wanted to go outside and do things with once in a while. But screw the self-righteous parents who were SO sure they knew just how many hours of time spent with technology was supposed to be "ok" and how much was suddenly "bad" or "unhealthy". Most great things are accomplished by those with obsessions over what they do... not just a rationed, limited engagement with it for X number of hours per day or week.
No, frankly, I just find it weird because I don't understand the value in pretending technologies don't really exist or ignoring innovation under the flawed assumption that advances really aren't advances.
Obviously people can live without the internet or tablets or cellphones. Quite often, people do it for a while on purpose as part of a "get away from it all" vacation trip to a remote part of the world where such things aren't prevalent.
But again, that makes sense and works because it's simply taking s short break from those things while you immerse yourself in a completely different lifestyle.
If I try to go back to 1986 from today, there's very little that fundamentally changes. I just suffer with inferior tools to accomplish the exact same things I always wanted to do. (EG. I may have to talk to people on a corded land-line telephone, instead of having freedom to make or take a call while I'm out and about. I have to listen to my music from a form of physical media which means I'm less able to carry a large selection of content around with me, and battery life of any portable music players is significantly worse.) Beyond perhaps being an interesting learning experience (modern history?) for a kid for a little while, I don't see any real advantages?
I have no doubt this is true, but my experience is that for the "electronic" music genre (won't split hairs about sub-genres here, but I'm using the term to include all sorts of material out there that's primarily created on the computer using synthesizers and samplers plus a potentially highly-processed vocal track), this was *always* the case.
I used to play rhythm guitar in a band back in the early 90's ('91 - '93 time frame) and we knew guys doing "Industrial music" at the time who didn't even think it was necessary to have "songs", in the sense of pieces of music performed the same way every time. To them, it was all about being one big "performance" where they hit "play" on their gear to play back whatever backing track they created earlier for the show, and overlaid all sorts of sounds or tweaks to sounds by playing around with sliders and controllers while everything played live. As long as the audience could dance to it and liked what they heard, it seemed to work for them. But the whole thing bothered me from a musician's standpoint. I mean, if you aren't even practicing your material to create segments you can play back basically the same way multiple times, upon request -- aren't you conveniently skipping over a standard prerequisite of being a musician?
I think of these guys (like Deadmau5) as blurring the lines between musician and DJ, really. And that's ok as long as everyone's honest about what's going on. But I wouldn't say what they do is indicative of a decline in music on the whole. The digital tools available today open up these new possibilities to perform in new ways, but sometimes at the expense of using skill-sets traditionally considered "part and parcel" of being a musician.
I get the technical reasons why this would allow the flexibility of easily porting/running iOS apps on OS X Macs... but I'm trying to figure out what the real benefits would be?
The vast majority of apps developed for iOS are designed to work better with the limitations of a very portable device (small screen, limited memory and disk storage, etc.). In most cases, they already have more full-featured and capable counterparts that run on regular computer operating systems.
Many times, the only reason an "app" exists for iOS (or Android) is to improve an experience that's just fine with a web browser on a Mac or PC, but winds up sub-par on a small touchscreen device. I'd put almost all of the "shopping" apps in this category. Whether it's the Amazon mobile app, eBay's mobile app, or a retailer like CVS or Target -- you'd never really care about the app in the first place if the company's web sites functioned better on a phone or tablet.
For starters, SSDs are being marketed as mainstream replacement for HDDs -- not as exotic high-performance upgrades. (So that Ferrari analogy is pretty much invalid here.)
Sure, they outperform regular HDDs -- but Core i5 and i7 CPUs outperform older Pentium 4 core-duos too, and those outperform PIII processors by a long-shot -- yet you don't expect them to be far less reliable just because they're faster. If anything, the promise was the lack of mechanical moving parts would virtually guarantee they last longer.
As an I.T. guy myself who works on the side doing computer service, I agree completely.
I love SSD's as far as the performance goes, and basically swapped out all of my boot drives for them over a year ago, on my own machines. But I don't trust these statistics claiming they're more reliable than spinning hard drives. Like you say, there's more to data loss than just the fact that a storage device failed. SSD's just die suddenly, or as I observed in a few cases -- corrupt the system randomly and badly, every so many reboots. So you can go crazy doing reinstalls and data restores on a PC, thinking all is good again, until 3-4 weeks later -- boom, corrupt and non-bootable again!
Especially with more recent SATA hard drives and motherboards/BIOS's -- I've found the SMART technology often does what it's supposed to. You'll boot up and get a SMART failure message about a drive, even though the drive is still working. If you heed the warning and get your data off of it ASAP, you can just swap the drive before it ever really fails on you. Can't that that ever helped me with an SSD yet.
Seriously, I don't think so.... In fact, from every indication, they're all really struggling to find increasingly creative ways to cram more magnetic data on a given amount of platter space, and reliability is probably suffering.
I don't have proof, but MANY people I know who are in I.T. and work with large capacity drives every day will tell you it's their observation that SATA drives became less reliable when capacities went over the 1 to 1.5TB mark. The 2TB drives all started using the newer "perpendicular write" technologies, and I suspect the added complexity led to higher failure rates.
Just as anecdotal evidence I've observed personally? When I built a FreeNAS media server last year, I used brand new 2TB drives in it. In 6 months' time or so, I had 2 of the 7 drives in it fail. I also experienced a drive failure with an external 2TB SATA drive in a Maxtor enclosure. My Mac Pro tower, however, also ran 24 hours/7 days because I had a small ftp server on it, among other things... and it had a mix of 1TB and 1.5TB drives in it (all purchased at least 2-3 years ago). To this day, all of those drives are still running fine. My wife's "Time Machine" external backup drive on her iMac died late last year too, just outside the 1 year warranty period on it. What was in it? A Seagate 2TB drive.
I mean, fine with me if you distrust Apple so much, you suspect they'd stoop to uploading the locally stored fingerprint data to a central server and hang onto all of that data. (Never-mind the fact you'd think if they had an interest in doing so, they would have designed the iPhone 5s so the data synced with their servers in the first place.)
But how far does this distrust go? Your cellphone carrier can track your movements as long as your cellphone is powered on, you know.... What if they're selling that info to someone? Seems to me you better pass on a cellular phone, period!
I'm with you on this.... but at the same time, since "EVERYONE does this stuff", why keep trying to make it into a bigger deal than it really is with such things as lame smartphone apps featuring or simulating the behaviors?
Yep, you just hit on what I think is pretty much "key" here.
When you look at all of the (often ridiculous) alt-coins out there on the exchanges, you realize developers can create a new one out of thin air, based on the source code used to design a previous coin, give it a new name, and voila - it's out there.
The truth is though, investors are only buying the things because they're cheap (think "penny stocks" here) and because at least early on, it's possible to buy enough of the sum total of the coins in existence so you can play "pump and dump" schemes -- forcing the price up temporarily with big purchase orders, and cashing in for a tidy little profit when you sell them all off again ASAP.
The online exchanges are more than happy to list these worthless "joke coins" though because they get a cut of each transaction, no matter what happens. As long as someone is willing to put in buy and sell orders, it's worth offering.
Of course, bitcoin has established itself far more than these other alt-coins (perhaps simply the privilege of being first with the idea?), and is actually accepted as currency for a number of goods and services -- but the same thing applies. If you're helping the currency change hands, you're always earning a profit off the top, no matter if the coin's value is headed up or down. It's the best "investment position" of all from the standpoint of safely making a steady profit.
Fair enough statement.... but oddly enough, as long as I've been into computers and I.T.? I still vastly prefer my iPhone to any of the Android devices I've tried using in its place.
To address your points specifically?
Customization of the UI is something I don't necessarily consider "inferior", simply because what's provided doesn't allow as much modification. The REAL question is how much you like what they give you initially. (To use the way popular "car analogy" on Slashdot once again? With very FEW exceptions, vehicle dashboards are not user-configurable at all. Many accepted standards have been kept to, such as placing a speedometer someplace more or less directly above the steering column, and placing a fuel gauge just to the left of it. Several items like a tachometer are absent or present, depending on the particular vehicle's design, but you'll always find an odometer in about the same place, turn signal indicator arrows done a similar way, etc. etc. This arrangement works quite well, and most people don't feel a pressing need to rearrange it. If you asked most drivers about preferences for the dash, they'd talk mainly about the styling details... whether they preferred chrome rings around the gauges, or if they liked the gauge needles to be white instead of red.) That's how I view the iPhone. You can still pick custom "wallpapers" to change up the look a bit, and you have control over arrangement of the icons on multiple screens. Without jailbreaking and using unsupported hacks, no... you can't "go crazy" with it, radically changing the UI. But that also means businesses writing instructions for configuring the phones can safely write them ONE time, based on a single sample iPhone, and the instructions will make sense for pretty much all iPhone users. It means someone who mastered his/her iPhone can easily share knowledge with any other iPhone user. So the ONLY valid benefit I see to all the customizing possible on Android is if you really dislike what Apple has done with iOS and find the UI unworkable/frustrating enough that you need a totally different design. Again, fine if that's you. But iOS works great for many millions of satisfied users every day.
Not quite sure what "non Apple software" you're upset the iPhone "won't play well" with? It supports the latest Bluetooth connectivity standards, so in that regard, links up with all manner of non-Apple branded devices just fine. Yes, it's designed around Apple's iTunes as the preferred "central management hub" for placing media on it. But 3rd. party alternatives exist too, including programs that will let you download music FROM your iPhone to save onto a computer, instead of Apple's default "one way" setup where content only syncs TO the phone. Overall, I find I use smartphones as essentially "stand alone" devices anyway, once I have them initially configured. There's only so much outside software it needs to work with?
From a Huffington Post article on the subject last year:
"Much of the red ink in 2012 was due to mounting mandatory costs for future retiree health benefits, which made up $11.1 billion of the losses. Without that and other related labor expenses, the mail agency sustained an operating loss of $2.4 billion."
So pension issues aside, the USPS was BILLIONS in debt in 2012 anyway. Potentially fixable? Sure... but let's not pretend it was a well managed and profitable business until Congress came along with the crazy pension idea. That was just an attempt to drown it for good, which hasn't quite worked yet.
Actually, many of the hotels have wised up to this practice, deciding there's a profit opportunity in it for them too.
I work for a place that often helps put on shows or presentations in various parts of the country, so we tend to ship out big "show kits" full of gear, just before flying to the destination. Then the show kit can be picked up at the hotel lobby when it's ready, saving a lot of hassle lugging it through an airport and into a taxi or rental car or what-mot.
Unfortunately, the hotels tend to tack on $75 or so per item "handling" or "storage" charges, just for accepting the delivery signature for the kit and keeping it behind the desk for you.
So no, it's doubtful this practice will save you much money. Everyone wants a cut of the money when you're traveling.
I'd agree that this is not really a vulnerability in the traditional sense.... but under the circumstances, Mega should (IMO) do more to convince customers the data they store there isn't going to be viewed by any 3rd. parties.
Ultimately, I suppose a custom browser plug-in could be written which would divulge your secret personal key, too. But I'd rather see a less trivial process to upload a user's key than some basic javascript making it possible. (Otherwise, it's too easy to trick a user into visiting what he/she thinks is a landing page for Mega, but is actually a site designed to capture keys.)
Yes, except this is Tesla's unique strategy with electric car production. Musk said he actually did string together a whole bunch of "off the shelf" 18650 batteries, intended for use in laptops originally, in order to assemble a functional electric car power pack at a lower cost than if he designed a specific one for it.
As time goes on, I expect he will change strategies to having a custom battery pack built for him by someone (similar to what GM has done with the Volt). But at least to get his Tesla S out the door at a competitive price, this was part of his plan.
I'm in my early 40's and currently working in a company where I'm one of the older employees. (Basically, the only people older than me are the management, owners or partners of the company.) Before this though, I worked in a manufacturing place (as their only I.T. guy) where I was about the youngest one there (except for a receptionist who they let go eventually, when the economy made things really slow for them).
So I've been on both sides of the "age fence". At the manufacturing job, it was entirely a generation used to picking up the phone and dialing someone's extension if they had a question or wanted to see if you could look at something for them. Everyone had Outlook running on their desktop PC so emails were usually fairly promptly read and answered.... but for these people, the phone was king. That took some getting used to for me, because being an I.T. guy, I really liked the flexibility of other communications tools like IM, email, etc. But in the end, I think they were correct. In a phone call, you can immediately convey actual *emotions* along with the request or problem. There was no doubt if an issue was causing someone intense frustration, or was just a minor thing annoying them. That wasn't always obvious when reading an email or IM message. As an I.T. person, you can do a lot to calm someone down during a brief phone call (even if it's just going off topic a bit to crack a joke or pointing out some upside to a change the person didn't initially consider). By contrast, even the best written instructions with screen-shots in an email just stresses someone out further (Oh no.... MORE stuff I gotta do to try to get this working again!!), once they're upset.
Where I work now, the younger crowd LOVES to send IMs or emails or set up a video conference, or even use some other project management or collaboration tool via the web.... Only a few of them seem comfortable making a phone call within the office, by contrast. But still, I have to waste a lot of time going up to see someone in person and talking to them to figure out what they need, because they simply don't put enough details in what they type out when they have issues. The people who make the phone calls still communicate more effectively what they need or what's not working for them.
Speaking of SIlk Road -- have you ever actually looked around that site at any length?
After ignoring it for the longest time, I finally created an account there and took a good look at it, just to satisfy my curiosity.
What surprised me the most about it was the LACK of anything really exciting up there for sale! I mean, when you read the news hype and all the supposed angst from politicians and law enforcement over its existence, you expect the place to be a hotbed of sex slavery, child porn, virus/malware dealers, email spammers, and what-not.
In reality, I saw a fair number of people simply offering to exchange your bitcoin for US currency or bars of silver, a few people selling used electronics gear, and a lot of offers to sell information on how to supposedly do such things as hacking an ATM machine (reminds me of the old "G-Files" people passed around the local BBS's in the late 80's except those were free!).
Sure, there were some people offering to sell you pharmaceuticals and even small amounts of drugs like cocaine, but that's one category out of dozens - and there wasn't even a dramatic number of ads posted for them.
I'd say that one significant factor is the easy to install and use Tor Browser bundle with FIrefox.
Not all that long ago, setting up Tor was kind of laborious. Now, you can do it as easily as you install any other new piece of software.
And to be honest, I wasn't even keeping up with it enough to realize they'd put something like that out, until I read the recent news article revealing the govt. was finding out the source IP addresses of some Tor users thanks to a security vulnerability in the older version of Firefox the browser bundle was based on. (A problem since corrected.)
I'd agree, but the cost is still a pretty big barrier to entry for most people.
I'm not just talking about the cost of the power generation equipment itself here, but the big picture. For example, I'm renting a townhouse from a guy right now, and while I'd love to generate some of my own electricity and get off the grid? I'm not even allowed to put anything on his (recently re-shingled) roof. Even running a small backup generator during a power outage is problematic here, thanks to decisions like hard-wiring the electric water heater instead of making it plug into a wall outlet. (Can't just unplug it from the wall and attach to an extension cord going outside to a gas powered generator.)
When we buy our next home, I'll have more options.... but even then? Unless I'm able to take out a mortgage for more than the home's price to cover it, we won't really have the disposable income to invest in something like solar power. (IMO, the companies selling everything from natural gas powered backup generators to wind turbines to solar panels need to come up with a "no money down" program where monthly payments are no more than the utility bills you replaced with them. Until that's feasible, it's still overpriced for a lot of us.)
You're not allowed to remove the bed bugs from the room, since they count as hotel property. If he would have just put them back after showing the front desk, maybe none of this would have happened?
But seriously, businesses are really getting fixated on maintaining good appearances via social media these days. They view the whole thing as a marketing/advertising playground for them, so honest review sites with negative reviews are a real thorn in the side for them. I don't think the hotel has any legal grounds for this lawsuit if the review is truthful.... but that doesn't mean it won't try intimidation tactics anyway.
It amazes me how companies pay people to watch Twitter feeds like a hawk these days. You can be a Twitter user who never tweets a single thing and basically has no followers. But if you have problems with a product or service and figure out the right name to tag on a tweet to get the company's attention? They're almost always right on top of replying and trying to do damage control. Never-mind the fact that same user might have posted something just as negative over on Facebook or elsewhere, and the company never so much as notices that comment.
I currently work in I.T. for a company that is fairly flexible about my working from home. Truthfully, the biggest issues with it are the more subtle things. Since many of the people I do support for have to be in the office the vast majority of the time, there's that psychological issue where they don't see me, so they begin to feel like I don't put in as much time/effort as they do. (And by the same token, I eventually start feeling a sense of guilt or concern that I'll get perceived that way if I don't make an appearance sometimes, despite there really being no pressing reason to spend money on the gas to drive 45 minutes into work and back again.)
The "always on call" thing is definitely a problem, especially since there are only a few of us working in I.T. supporting around 150 users in multiple time zones. If one of us is on vacation, you can bet on getting at least a few calls or emails about "need it now" issues happening after you should really be done for the day. But I don't find it's any worse working from home than in the office? Either way, people are going to put in their requests whenever they need to and you either see it on a PC at home or on a PC at work, or on your smartphone while you're out someplace. If you don't push back a bit,saying "This time is now MY time... so I'll just ignore this one until tomorrow.", then yes - you're caught in a trap. But it's a trap you allowed yourself to get locked into....
I viewed the initial comment as relatively insightful. No, I don't think anyone's calling disease or disability a gift. But since the human body is a biochemical machine, it seems to generally cease functioning via those processes. (Not everyone is going to die cleanly and painlessly in their sleep.)
The "gift" refers to the beauty inherently designed into the process as a whole. IMO, medicine should be focused on giving the best quality of life possible, within the parameters nature has set up -- NOT trying to "cheat" the natural course of things.
I recall reading a piece of sci-fi a while ago where the characters had supposedly achieved very long life-spans (thousands of years, typically). Eventually, many just opted to "check out" after a while, voluntarily putting themselves into a coma. The idea was, after you've been around that long, you reach a point where you feel like you've "seen everything, done everything". The things you still haven't learned yet are pretty much the things you already concluded you simply have no interest in, or get no enjoyment from -- and you're bored with the rest.
It's just a fiction story, but I think it would be pretty accurate.... Most of the people who fear death or even aging just fear the unknown. If you can't say that you lived a "full, rewarding" life in the window of time most of us naturally get, you were doing something wrong. Plus, there's just something that motivates us, knowing that our time is limited on this planet. If you had essentially unlimited time to accomplish things, would you really get more done -- or would you just keep putting things off?
I'm not old enough to say for certain yet, but I sure hope there are some great, valuable and rewarding experiences to be had when I'm in those older, retirement years. When society (and your own health situation) deem you incapable of working a job each day for a paycheck and you've reached "old age", it's a little bit like a second shot at childhood, except with all the wisdom you gathered along the way as an adult. Surveys have been taken, asking people how happy they were in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's... and overall, people were increasingly happy with each decade. So "youth" clearly isn't everything.
You never know.... but from everything I've read about the man, I don't think his ordering Apple to end donations to those programs was necessarily something he did out of hatred?
Most companies do this primarily for the sake of getting tax credits and publicity. Considering there's little record of Jobs making donations to charities on even a personal level, I'd say it's as likely as anything he simply found it distasteful to donate non-anonymously?
When you have the type of income he had, it becomes a disadvantage not to give to charities, really. You have to find ways to reduce taxable income, sometimes, or at least you come out ahead by maximizing the tax write-offs possible by doing so.
Oh, please.... You have every right to decide Ayn Rand's philosophies aren't ones you side with. But she was *clearly* anything but a moron, and I'd argue not a hypocrite either (at least based on your claims).
If one is forced to contribute a portion of his/her income to the government by way of taxation, why wouldn't he/she at least take advantage of an opportunity to reclaim some of that money if the opportunity arose to do so legally? It's not like she spent her whole life on the government dole while she wrote her books.
It's possible to participate in a system while still disliking and protesting it, and advising people it needs to be eliminated or changed.
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No, as a parent, it's not your job to "cater to your child's every whim" -- but on the flip side? I'm not so sure I buy into what seems to be a general assumption out there today that video games, computers, tablets, and other such tech is "bad" for a kid if he/she uses too much of it in a day?
When I was growing up in the 80's myself, I latched onto early computer tech. like a fish to water. I knew right away that THIS was the stuff I truly had a deep interest in and that some day, it was going to be my career as well. I spent an awful lot of time holed up in my bedroom with a little TImex Sinclair 1000 attached to a small black and white TV learning BASIC programming and playing around with all of the early software titles I could get my hands on. I'm thankful that both of my parents weren't really the "outdoorsy" types and were busy enough themselves (both college teachers) that they didn't harp on me to "get off that computer and go play outside!" like what happened to some of my peers.
Because truthfully, I learned FAR more useful skills on that computer than I ever would have running around outside with the neighbor kids. And don't get me wrong. I still had friends I wanted to go outside and do things with once in a while. But screw the self-righteous parents who were SO sure they knew just how many hours of time spent with technology was supposed to be "ok" and how much was suddenly "bad" or "unhealthy". Most great things are accomplished by those with obsessions over what they do ... not just a rationed, limited engagement with it for X number of hours per day or week.
No, frankly, I just find it weird because I don't understand the value in pretending technologies don't really exist or ignoring innovation under the flawed assumption that advances really aren't advances.
Obviously people can live without the internet or tablets or cellphones. Quite often, people do it for a while on purpose as part of a "get away from it all" vacation trip to a remote part of the world where such things aren't prevalent.
But again, that makes sense and works because it's simply taking s short break from those things while you immerse yourself in a completely different lifestyle.
If I try to go back to 1986 from today, there's very little that fundamentally changes. I just suffer with inferior tools to accomplish the exact same things I always wanted to do. (EG. I may have to talk to people on a corded land-line telephone, instead of having freedom to make or take a call while I'm out and about. I have to listen to my music from a form of physical media which means I'm less able to carry a large selection of content around with me, and battery life of any portable music players is significantly worse.) Beyond perhaps being an interesting learning experience (modern history?) for a kid for a little while, I don't see any real advantages?
I have no doubt this is true, but my experience is that for the "electronic" music genre (won't split hairs about sub-genres here, but I'm using the term to include all sorts of material out there that's primarily created on the computer using synthesizers and samplers plus a potentially highly-processed vocal track), this was *always* the case.
I used to play rhythm guitar in a band back in the early 90's ('91 - '93 time frame) and we knew guys doing "Industrial music" at the time who didn't even think it was necessary to have "songs", in the sense of pieces of music performed the same way every time. To them, it was all about being one big "performance" where they hit "play" on their gear to play back whatever backing track they created earlier for the show, and overlaid all sorts of sounds or tweaks to sounds by playing around with sliders and controllers while everything played live. As long as the audience could dance to it and liked what they heard, it seemed to work for them. But the whole thing bothered me from a musician's standpoint. I mean, if you aren't even practicing your material to create segments you can play back basically the same way multiple times, upon request -- aren't you conveniently skipping over a standard prerequisite of being a musician?
I think of these guys (like Deadmau5) as blurring the lines between musician and DJ, really. And that's ok as long as everyone's honest about what's going on. But I wouldn't say what they do is indicative of a decline in music on the whole. The digital tools available today open up these new possibilities to perform in new ways, but sometimes at the expense of using skill-sets traditionally considered "part and parcel" of being a musician.
I get the technical reasons why this would allow the flexibility of easily porting/running iOS apps on OS X Macs ... but I'm trying to figure out what the real benefits would be?
The vast majority of apps developed for iOS are designed to work better with the limitations of a very portable device (small screen, limited memory and disk storage, etc.). In most cases, they already have more full-featured and capable counterparts that run on regular computer operating systems.
Many times, the only reason an "app" exists for iOS (or Android) is to improve an experience that's just fine with a web browser on a Mac or PC, but winds up sub-par on a small touchscreen device. I'd put almost all of the "shopping" apps in this category. Whether it's the Amazon mobile app, eBay's mobile app, or a retailer like CVS or Target -- you'd never really care about the app in the first place if the company's web sites functioned better on a phone or tablet.
For starters, SSDs are being marketed as mainstream replacement for HDDs -- not as exotic high-performance upgrades. (So that Ferrari analogy is pretty much invalid here.)
Sure, they outperform regular HDDs -- but Core i5 and i7 CPUs outperform older Pentium 4 core-duos too, and those outperform PIII processors by a long-shot -- yet you don't expect them to be far less reliable just because they're faster. If anything, the promise was the lack of mechanical moving parts would virtually guarantee they last longer.
As an I.T. guy myself who works on the side doing computer service, I agree completely.
I love SSD's as far as the performance goes, and basically swapped out all of my boot drives for them over a year ago, on my own machines. But I don't trust these statistics claiming they're more reliable than spinning hard drives. Like you say, there's more to data loss than just the fact that a storage device failed. SSD's just die suddenly, or as I observed in a few cases -- corrupt the system randomly and badly, every so many reboots. So you can go crazy doing reinstalls and data restores on a PC, thinking all is good again, until 3-4 weeks later -- boom, corrupt and non-bootable again!
Especially with more recent SATA hard drives and motherboards/BIOS's -- I've found the SMART technology often does what it's supposed to. You'll boot up and get a SMART failure message about a drive, even though the drive is still working. If you heed the warning and get your data off of it ASAP, you can just swap the drive before it ever really fails on you. Can't that that ever helped me with an SSD yet.
Seriously, I don't think so.... In fact, from every indication, they're all really struggling to find increasingly creative ways to cram more magnetic data on a given amount of platter space, and reliability is probably suffering.
I don't have proof, but MANY people I know who are in I.T. and work with large capacity drives every day will tell you it's their observation that SATA drives became less reliable when capacities went over the 1 to 1.5TB mark. The 2TB drives all started using the newer "perpendicular write" technologies, and I suspect the added complexity led to higher failure rates.
Just as anecdotal evidence I've observed personally? When I built a FreeNAS media server last year, I used brand new 2TB drives in it. In 6 months' time or so, I had 2 of the 7 drives in it fail. I also experienced a drive failure with an external 2TB SATA drive in a Maxtor enclosure. My Mac Pro tower, however, also ran 24 hours/7 days because I had a small ftp server on it, among other things ... and it had a mix of 1TB and 1.5TB drives in it (all purchased at least 2-3 years ago). To this day, all of those drives are still running fine. My wife's "Time Machine" external backup drive on her iMac died late last year too, just outside the 1 year warranty period on it. What was in it? A Seagate 2TB drive.
I mean, fine with me if you distrust Apple so much, you suspect they'd stoop to uploading the locally stored fingerprint data to a central server and hang onto all of that data. (Never-mind the fact you'd think if they had an interest in doing so, they would have designed the iPhone 5s so the data synced with their servers in the first place.)
But how far does this distrust go? Your cellphone carrier can track your movements as long as your cellphone is powered on, you know.... What if they're selling that info to someone? Seems to me you better pass on a cellular phone, period!
I'm with you on this .... but at the same time, since "EVERYONE does this stuff", why keep trying to make it into a bigger deal than it really is with such things as lame smartphone apps featuring or simulating the behaviors?
Yep, you just hit on what I think is pretty much "key" here.
When you look at all of the (often ridiculous) alt-coins out there on the exchanges, you realize developers can create a new one out of thin air, based on the source code used to design a previous coin, give it a new name, and voila - it's out there.
The truth is though, investors are only buying the things because they're cheap (think "penny stocks" here) and because at least early on, it's possible to buy enough of the sum total of the coins in existence so you can play "pump and dump" schemes -- forcing the price up temporarily with big purchase orders, and cashing in for a tidy little profit when you sell them all off again ASAP.
The online exchanges are more than happy to list these worthless "joke coins" though because they get a cut of each transaction, no matter what happens. As long as someone is willing to put in buy and sell orders, it's worth offering.
Of course, bitcoin has established itself far more than these other alt-coins (perhaps simply the privilege of being first with the idea?), and is actually accepted as currency for a number of goods and services -- but the same thing applies. If you're helping the currency change hands, you're always earning a profit off the top, no matter if the coin's value is headed up or down. It's the best "investment position" of all from the standpoint of safely making a steady profit.
Fair enough statement.... but oddly enough, as long as I've been into computers and I.T.? I still vastly prefer my iPhone to any of the Android devices I've tried using in its place.
To address your points specifically?
Customization of the UI is something I don't necessarily consider "inferior", simply because what's provided doesn't allow as much modification. The REAL question is how much you like what they give you initially. (To use the way popular "car analogy" on Slashdot once again? With very FEW exceptions, vehicle dashboards are not user-configurable at all. Many accepted standards have been kept to, such as placing a speedometer someplace more or less directly above the steering column, and placing a fuel gauge just to the left of it. Several items like a tachometer are absent or present, depending on the particular vehicle's design, but you'll always find an odometer in about the same place, turn signal indicator arrows done a similar way, etc. etc. This arrangement works quite well, and most people don't feel a pressing need to rearrange it. If you asked most drivers about preferences for the dash, they'd talk mainly about the styling details ... whether they preferred chrome rings around the gauges, or if they liked the gauge needles to be white instead of red.) That's how I view the iPhone. You can still pick custom "wallpapers" to change up the look a bit, and you have control over arrangement of the icons on multiple screens. Without jailbreaking and using unsupported hacks, no ... you can't "go crazy" with it, radically changing the UI. But that also means businesses writing instructions for configuring the phones can safely write them ONE time, based on a single sample iPhone, and the instructions will make sense for pretty much all iPhone users. It means someone who mastered his/her iPhone can easily share knowledge with any other iPhone user. So the ONLY valid benefit I see to all the customizing possible on Android is if you really dislike what Apple has done with iOS and find the UI unworkable/frustrating enough that you need a totally different design. Again, fine if that's you. But iOS works great for many millions of satisfied users every day.
Not quite sure what "non Apple software" you're upset the iPhone "won't play well" with? It supports the latest Bluetooth connectivity standards, so in that regard, links up with all manner of non-Apple branded devices just fine. Yes, it's designed around Apple's iTunes as the preferred "central management hub" for placing media on it. But 3rd. party alternatives exist too, including programs that will let you download music FROM your iPhone to save onto a computer, instead of Apple's default "one way" setup where content only syncs TO the phone. Overall, I find I use smartphones as essentially "stand alone" devices anyway, once I have them initially configured. There's only so much outside software it needs to work with?
From a Huffington Post article on the subject last year:
"Much of the red ink in 2012 was due to mounting mandatory costs for future retiree health benefits, which made up $11.1 billion of the losses. Without that and other related labor expenses, the mail agency sustained an operating loss of $2.4 billion."
So pension issues aside, the USPS was BILLIONS in debt in 2012 anyway. Potentially fixable? Sure ... but let's not pretend it was a well managed and profitable business until Congress came along with the crazy pension idea. That was just an attempt to drown it for good, which hasn't quite worked yet.
Actually, many of the hotels have wised up to this practice, deciding there's a profit opportunity in it for them too.
I work for a place that often helps put on shows or presentations in various parts of the country, so we tend to ship out big "show kits" full of gear, just before flying to the destination. Then the show kit can be picked up at the hotel lobby when it's ready, saving a lot of hassle lugging it through an airport and into a taxi or rental car or what-mot.
Unfortunately, the hotels tend to tack on $75 or so per item "handling" or "storage" charges, just for accepting the delivery signature for the kit and keeping it behind the desk for you.
So no, it's doubtful this practice will save you much money. Everyone wants a cut of the money when you're traveling.
I'd agree that this is not really a vulnerability in the traditional sense.... but under the circumstances, Mega should (IMO) do more to convince customers the data they store there isn't going to be viewed by any 3rd. parties.
Ultimately, I suppose a custom browser plug-in could be written which would divulge your secret personal key, too. But I'd rather see a less trivial process to upload a user's key than some basic javascript making it possible. (Otherwise, it's too easy to trick a user into visiting what he/she thinks is a landing page for Mega, but is actually a site designed to capture keys.)
Yes, except this is Tesla's unique strategy with electric car production. Musk said he actually did string together a whole bunch of "off the shelf" 18650 batteries, intended for use in laptops originally, in order to assemble a functional electric car power pack at a lower cost than if he designed a specific one for it.
As time goes on, I expect he will change strategies to having a custom battery pack built for him by someone (similar to what GM has done with the Volt). But at least to get his Tesla S out the door at a competitive price, this was part of his plan.
Actually, I have to disagree with you.
I'm in my early 40's and currently working in a company where I'm one of the older employees. (Basically, the only people older than me are the management, owners or partners of the company.) Before this though, I worked in a manufacturing place (as their only I.T. guy) where I was about the youngest one there (except for a receptionist who they let go eventually, when the economy made things really slow for them).
So I've been on both sides of the "age fence". At the manufacturing job, it was entirely a generation used to picking up the phone and dialing someone's extension if they had a question or wanted to see if you could look at something for them. Everyone had Outlook running on their desktop PC so emails were usually fairly promptly read and answered.... but for these people, the phone was king. That took some getting used to for me, because being an I.T. guy, I really liked the flexibility of other communications tools like IM, email, etc. But in the end, I think they were correct. In a phone call, you can immediately convey actual *emotions* along with the request or problem. There was no doubt if an issue was causing someone intense frustration, or was just a minor thing annoying them. That wasn't always obvious when reading an email or IM message. As an I.T. person, you can do a lot to calm someone down during a brief phone call (even if it's just going off topic a bit to crack a joke or pointing out some upside to a change the person didn't initially consider). By contrast, even the best written instructions with screen-shots in an email just stresses someone out further (Oh no.... MORE stuff I gotta do to try to get this working again!!), once they're upset.
Where I work now, the younger crowd LOVES to send IMs or emails or set up a video conference, or even use some other project management or collaboration tool via the web.... Only a few of them seem comfortable making a phone call within the office, by contrast. But still, I have to waste a lot of time going up to see someone in person and talking to them to figure out what they need, because they simply don't put enough details in what they type out when they have issues. The people who make the phone calls still communicate more effectively what they need or what's not working for them.
Despite candy cigarettes resembling / modeling the real thing, we still allow kids to buy them and ingest them.
It shouldn't be anyone's fault but the purchaser / user if a product is properly labeled as to what it is and isn't, and yet it's misused anyway.
Speaking of SIlk Road -- have you ever actually looked around that site at any length?
After ignoring it for the longest time, I finally created an account there and took a good look at it, just to satisfy my curiosity.
What surprised me the most about it was the LACK of anything really exciting up there for sale! I mean, when you read the news hype and all the supposed angst from politicians and law enforcement over its existence, you expect the place to be a hotbed of sex slavery, child porn, virus/malware dealers, email spammers, and what-not.
In reality, I saw a fair number of people simply offering to exchange your bitcoin for US currency or bars of silver, a few people selling used electronics gear, and a lot of offers to sell information on how to supposedly do such things as hacking an ATM machine (reminds me of the old "G-Files" people passed around the local BBS's in the late 80's except those were free!).
Sure, there were some people offering to sell you pharmaceuticals and even small amounts of drugs like cocaine, but that's one category out of dozens - and there wasn't even a dramatic number of ads posted for them.
Mountain out of a molehill, all in all.
I'd say that one significant factor is the easy to install and use Tor Browser bundle with FIrefox.
Not all that long ago, setting up Tor was kind of laborious. Now, you can do it as easily as you install any other new piece of software.
And to be honest, I wasn't even keeping up with it enough to realize they'd put something like that out, until I read the recent news article revealing the govt. was finding out the source IP addresses of some Tor users thanks to a security vulnerability in the older version of Firefox the browser bundle was based on. (A problem since corrected.)
I'd agree, but the cost is still a pretty big barrier to entry for most people.
I'm not just talking about the cost of the power generation equipment itself here, but the big picture. For example, I'm renting a townhouse from a guy right now, and while I'd love to generate some of my own electricity and get off the grid? I'm not even allowed to put anything on his (recently re-shingled) roof. Even running a small backup generator during a power outage is problematic here, thanks to decisions like hard-wiring the electric water heater instead of making it plug into a wall outlet. (Can't just unplug it from the wall and attach to an extension cord going outside to a gas powered generator.)
When we buy our next home, I'll have more options .... but even then? Unless I'm able to take out a mortgage for more than the home's price to cover it, we won't really have the disposable income to invest in something like solar power. (IMO, the companies selling everything from natural gas powered backup generators to wind turbines to solar panels need to come up with a "no money down" program where monthly payments are no more than the utility bills you replaced with them. Until that's feasible, it's still overpriced for a lot of us.)
You're not allowed to remove the bed bugs from the room, since they count as hotel property. If he would have just put them back after showing the front desk, maybe none of this would have happened?
But seriously, businesses are really getting fixated on maintaining good appearances via social media these days. They view the whole thing as a marketing/advertising playground for them, so honest review sites with negative reviews are a real thorn in the side for them. I don't think the hotel has any legal grounds for this lawsuit if the review is truthful .... but that doesn't mean it won't try intimidation tactics anyway.
It amazes me how companies pay people to watch Twitter feeds like a hawk these days. You can be a Twitter user who never tweets a single thing and basically has no followers. But if you have problems with a product or service and figure out the right name to tag on a tweet to get the company's attention? They're almost always right on top of replying and trying to do damage control. Never-mind the fact that same user might have posted something just as negative over on Facebook or elsewhere, and the company never so much as notices that comment.
I currently work in I.T. for a company that is fairly flexible about my working from home. Truthfully, the biggest issues with it are the more subtle things. Since many of the people I do support for have to be in the office the vast majority of the time, there's that psychological issue where they don't see me, so they begin to feel like I don't put in as much time/effort as they do. (And by the same token, I eventually start feeling a sense of guilt or concern that I'll get perceived that way if I don't make an appearance sometimes, despite there really being no pressing reason to spend money on the gas to drive 45 minutes into work and back again.)
The "always on call" thing is definitely a problem, especially since there are only a few of us working in I.T. supporting around 150 users in multiple time zones. If one of us is on vacation, you can bet on getting at least a few calls or emails about "need it now" issues happening after you should really be done for the day. But I don't find it's any worse working from home than in the office? Either way, people are going to put in their requests whenever they need to and you either see it on a PC at home or on a PC at work, or on your smartphone while you're out someplace. If you don't push back a bit ,saying "This time is now MY time... so I'll just ignore this one until tomorrow.", then yes - you're caught in a trap. But it's a trap you allowed yourself to get locked into....
I viewed the initial comment as relatively insightful. No, I don't think anyone's calling disease or disability a gift. But since the human body is a biochemical machine, it seems to generally cease functioning via those processes. (Not everyone is going to die cleanly and painlessly in their sleep.)
The "gift" refers to the beauty inherently designed into the process as a whole. IMO, medicine should be focused on giving the best quality of life possible, within the parameters nature has set up -- NOT trying to "cheat" the natural course of things.
I recall reading a piece of sci-fi a while ago where the characters had supposedly achieved very long life-spans (thousands of years, typically). Eventually, many just opted to "check out" after a while, voluntarily putting themselves into a coma. The idea was, after you've been around that long, you reach a point where you feel like you've "seen everything, done everything". The things you still haven't learned yet are pretty much the things you already concluded you simply have no interest in, or get no enjoyment from -- and you're bored with the rest.
It's just a fiction story, but I think it would be pretty accurate.... Most of the people who fear death or even aging just fear the unknown. If you can't say that you lived a "full, rewarding" life in the window of time most of us naturally get, you were doing something wrong. Plus, there's just something that motivates us, knowing that our time is limited on this planet. If you had essentially unlimited time to accomplish things, would you really get more done -- or would you just keep putting things off?
I'm not old enough to say for certain yet, but I sure hope there are some great, valuable and rewarding experiences to be had when I'm in those older, retirement years. When society (and your own health situation) deem you incapable of working a job each day for a paycheck and you've reached "old age", it's a little bit like a second shot at childhood, except with all the wisdom you gathered along the way as an adult. Surveys have been taken, asking people how happy they were in their 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's ... and overall, people were increasingly happy with each decade. So "youth" clearly isn't everything.
You never know .... but from everything I've read about the man, I don't think his ordering Apple to end donations to those programs was necessarily something he did out of hatred?
Most companies do this primarily for the sake of getting tax credits and publicity. Considering there's little record of Jobs making donations to charities on even a personal level, I'd say it's as likely as anything he simply found it distasteful to donate non-anonymously?
When you have the type of income he had, it becomes a disadvantage not to give to charities, really. You have to find ways to reduce taxable income, sometimes, or at least you come out ahead by maximizing the tax write-offs possible by doing so.
Oh, please.... You have every right to decide Ayn Rand's philosophies aren't ones you side with. But she was *clearly* anything but a moron, and I'd argue not a hypocrite either (at least based on your claims).
If one is forced to contribute a portion of his/her income to the government by way of taxation, why wouldn't he/she at least take advantage of an opportunity to reclaim some of that money if the opportunity arose to do so legally? It's not like she spent her whole life on the government dole while she wrote her books.
It's possible to participate in a system while still disliking and protesting it, and advising people it needs to be eliminated or changed.