This is the truth! I live in Brunswick, MD (origin point for the "Brunswick line" for the MARC commuter rail line in Maryland). CSX constantly does anything in its power to disrupt the MARC and make it appear the lines are overcrowded. Since I live about a block from the train yard, I can tell when pretty much every train passes through. And it's quite common that there will be no train coming through for hours at a time, but during the time window when the MARC runs? Mysteriously, they have all of this freight rail traffic too, and have to make the MARC wait behind a freight train.
To CSX, commuter rail is simply a nuisance that creates more scheduling hassles for them.
Ideally, they'd build another set of tracks that the MARC could use exclusively, or at least in some kind of shared agreement with CSX where MARC gets priority on them. But the last time I saw this proposed, the funding was never approved (after some haggling and debate that led to a watered down proposal of adding an extra track only between a few communities in the DC suburbs like Gaithersburg and Rockville).
As a transplant to the DC Metro area for my job, I largely agree.
There are a couple things to consider though:
1. The Crystal City, VA location for the new Amazon HQ really only replaces the number of people who used to work there before government made some cutbacks and changes. Crystal City is pretty much a city full of tall office buildings from the 1970's and 80's, with a whole set of underground tunnels connecting them together with strip mall type food places, shoe shine people, and the like inside them. It was all built up back when govt. contractors and a couple of major Federal govt. organizations were stationed there, and has been sitting, vastly under-utilized and slowly decaying ever since. Location-wise, it sits close enough to DC so you can see it out the windows of buildings there, and has the Pentagon on the other side of it. Reagan National airport is adjacent to it, too -- and 2 Metro lines get you to a Crystal City station stop. So it has good strategic placement. (Of course, having Amazon there will probably get rid of the relatively good deals on hotel stays there, that some travelers have been taking advantage of on DC trips for the last decade or so.)
2. IMO, if you're going to live in this area, you have to be willing to do a longer commute AND negotiate to work from home at least 1 day per week (preferrably more than that). Increasingly, the DC government workers have the option to telecommute, and private businesses are catching on that people here expect it too. I found a good deal on a nice-sized 3 bedroom home in a semi-rural community, about an hour west of Bethesda, MD. It's possible to take commuter rail in to DC itself, or to get off at Rockville, MD and transfer to the Metro, to go other places like Bethesda. I think a commute to/from Northern VA might be more time-consuming from where I live, but there are likely other, similar options on the VA side, when you start looking at smaller towns around 60-80 minutes from where your office is located.
Quite frankly, the inexpensive consumer-grade inkjet printers do a generally awful job of networking, across the board.
One of the big issues I've encountered is that almost all of the wi-fi enabled printers still only support the 2.4Ghz band, which tends to become very crowded with SSIDs if you're in a multi-story office or apartment complex. So not only can you struggle to get a wireless frequency that's usable and reliable, but often, the number of SSIDs exceeds the memory allocated to display them in a scrolling list on the printer's front panel! I've had HP DeskJet printers that would only let you select your own wireless SSID one out of every 2 or 3 times you did a scan for them, because there were too many in the list and it truncated a bunch of them.
I'm not sure why a wireless printer would require uPnP support enabled on a router though? As far as I've ever seen, the uPnP thing on the router only exists as an attempt to automate the process of opening firewall ports for applications that require them. With it disabled, you should still be able to get anything to work on your LAN by finding out what ports it actually uses to communicate with the outside world and manually port forwarding them to those devices, in your router.
(Disabling it doesn't stop your devices on your local network from doing automatic searches or scans. So for example, a printer driver should be able to auto-detect a new inkjet printer you connected to your LAN by probing for its MAC address, regardless of uPnP being enabled.)
I think the reason some people are finding it odd that you have conservatives suddenly supporting these new import taxes, while liberals are suddenly against them, is because TRUMP suggested them. He's been such a polarizing force, people will flip-flop on their ideals just to get behind the man, or to bash another one of his decisions.
If you can step away from all that nonsense for a bit and just look at the facts? I think you'll find that most libertarian, pro free-market types are as much against the tariffs as they've ever been about tariffs in general. But China has also been kind of a "worst case scenario" for America because we rely so heavily on them for things we used to manufacture here, but stopped bothering with. Under normal circumstances, you don't have to compete against a foreign government that's artificially subsidizing production of goods getting exported, to ensure they can be bought far below the cost of production. That's often what China has done, in a gambit to destroy our will to do production ourselves. This absolutely happened with the market for solar panels, and I've heard claims it happened with items as basic as roofing nails.
I really don't think it's our government's job to try to enforce other governments treating their citizens at what we deem an "acceptable standard". Chinese citizens will be the ones who have to revolt against their own government, if they want real change and better working/living conditions. So no, I don't support slapping on tariffs just to try to offset Americans getting great buys on imported products. I do, however, think you can't really have a fair global economy if the playing field isn't level thanks to a government covering losses on sales to undercut ALL competitors.
I wondered about that too. Unless the German auto parts company was one he had ownership in, it doesn't seem like there would be enough in it for him to take these kinds of risks and go through all the hassles to forge documents claiming the other firm was paid, etc.
I mean, even if he received kickbacks for getting Tesla to do more business with the German firm instead of the Taiwanese firm? He was on borrowed time, knowing the Taiwanese firm expected to be paid for whatever they supplied.
I mean, when you buy a Mac, you're paying a premium to get OS X. Part of the price includes that software license. Apple is willing to support Windows as an alternate bootable OS too. AND, nothing stops you from running a flavor of Linux via virtualization either, that I know of?
So who, exactly, really has a problem with this limitation? I suppose you have a very small segment of "power users" who want a multi-boot environment that lets you start Linux, OS X or Windows from an initial menu. But realistically, why bother except showing off you did it?
The main things I run Linux for these days are dedicated servers or appliances, or possibly as a way to get more life out of an older PC laptop.
I saw this kind of thing coming for years, on their platform. A long time ago, I used to do a lot of selling via the original "Amazon Auctions" service. It was more or less a direct eBay competitor, where any individual or business could start listing whatever used or new products they wanted to sell, with auction bidding.
Then, that disappeared and all of us were herded to Amazon Marketplace instead -- a service that demanded you list your items for sale at fixed prices, but did help you determine the optimal sale price at least. (It would tell you if identical products were currently listed by other sellers, and if your price was below all of theirs or not. If you were willing to sell at the lowest price on the site, they'd promote your listing to people as such.)
Then, I kept seeing Amazon revising the Marketplace, catering more and more towards big businesses and large volume sellers. You started having to create listings in kind of an inventory grid, that looked totally out of place for an individual selling a few items at a time as a side gig to make some extra cash.....
Finally, they added so many rules and restrictions on sellers, it became unreasonable for the "little guy" to even bother with it. (Essentially, you got kicked off Amazon as a seller if you didn't agree to give any buyer a full refund for just about ANY reason. They could buy your product, switch it out with a defective/worn out and dirty version of the same one, and ship it back for a full refund claiming "Product was not as advertised." They could claim your perfectly good product was non-functional and get irate with you as soon as you tried to email them back to help them troubleshoot it. Again, you had to give them the refund and eat your original shipping costs to mail it to them. And if this nonsense went on a few times within a couple month period? Your percentage of satisfaction dropped to below their acceptable levels, even if you happily handed out all those refunds and lost money trying to sell your stuff. And you'd risk suspension for not keeping up your metrics.)
Since then, they've been pedaling Chinese counterfeit versions of everything from shoes to iPhone chargers -- and only apologizing when someone like Apple catches them in the act, red-handed. Then, Amazon claims "We fixed the problem!" as they move on to the next high volume seller who wants to give it a try. So of COURSE they're gonna cater to Apple on this one. They don't want to get branded the bad guy....
I finally invested in a used Tesla, so I don't worry about buying gasoline anymore.
There are actually a lot of electric car options out there now, even on the used market, so you can no longer really say they're "un-affordable". I mean, not unless your budget only includes beater cars under $2,000 or something.
I regularly see electric Smart4Two cars for sale, going for as little as $6,000-ish each, often with low mileage. If you're single and just need a vehicle for a work commute, it'll get the job done, even if it's tiny and you think it looks goofy.
If you can deal with something more like a typical monthly car payment on a new vehicle? A Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt would be reasonable options. So far, you can still get that Federal tax credit of $7,500 back on one of those purchases too.
If you really get stressed out by driving and dislike the whole thing? Then sure, don't buy a car and don't drive. This is the age of services like Uber and Lyft, making it even easier to avoid owning a vehicle. But I've always been kind of a car enthusiast and I guess I'm not ready to let go completely of the freedoms that come with owning one you can just get in at any time, and go anywhere you like. No worries about timetables or relying on someone else....
This argument sounds good, but I didn't find it was really that true when I took public transit to and from the office.
For starters, the commuter rail line I had to take in to the city had really spotty cellular data coverage. As it went through tunnels or through open fields, you had no service. Only once you got close to my stop did LTE start being consistent and reliable.
When I took the metro around (DC area), they still have this ridiculous exclusive deal with Verizon wireless so they're the ONLY provider giving you cellular signal underground in the metro system. Since I have T-Mobile, again a problem. They do brag about having wi-fi at most station platforms now, but that's not going to get a lot done for you in the 5-7 minutes you might be standing there, waiting for your metro train.
Also, at the speeds the trains all run out here? You can drive from my house to my office and get there just as fast as using mass transit. The only time that's not true is when a car accident causes a real traffic blockage that makes everyone sit in traffic for an hour, not moving, or something like that. In general, the only time savings I saw with the train over driving in was that last 10-15 minutes I might spend parking my car in a garage, often up on the 6th. level or so, and then getting from there back in to the office itself.
These days, I always drive in because I have flexibility to work late and not worry about missing a train, and I have a trunk in the car that can hold bigger items I might need to haul around. (I have to take care of our corporate network and I've had times a large box shipped to one location, but I needed to unbox and configure the contents, and then install at a different office. That's terrible, trying to carry all that stuff on the Metro.)
When our family relocated because I took an I.T. position in Maryland, we were stuck renting a run-down 1970's townhouse for the first couple of years, as we got our bearings. The school district it was in was rated very highly, so with 3 kids, that was a prime concern.
As we started getting serious about searching for a house, we quickly found that almost anything out here with 3 bedrooms or more, suitable for our 5 person (6 with grandma, who lives with us most of the year now) family was WAY outside our price range unless we moved over an hour from the metro area.
We finally compromised on buying a 105 year old home that had a separate 2 car garage and a partially finished basement, plus the bonus of a nice view near the top of a hill. It's in a small town near the river, and has a rail line running through it with a commuter train you can take to and from where I work. The school district? Not as good as where we stayed initially, but this district was still rated ok when we got here. I think it's gotten worse since then, but thankfully - our kids are reaching their teens and will be out of it soon.
My workplace recently relocated me, along with a subset of our group, to a new office that's about 20 minutes closer to my house than my old office. But it ALSO meant there's no way to take the train there anymore, without doing a bus transfer. Too much headache so now I just deal with the drive.
All in all, the driving around sucks -- but I don't regret our decisions either. I've been able to argue for my employer letting me work from home more often, these days, so that makes it a lot less painful. Compromising on the biggest investment you'll probably ever make (your house) doesn't seem wise to me, just to play a game of trying to be close to work. Not when work is full of highly mobile employees and they have multiple offices all over the country, and have already done 2 mergers and eliminated one new business they tried to start up in one city.
It works because the mouse isn't aware why the cheese is free.
Uber-liberal San Francisco will continue to destroy itself as long as it embraces these "rob from the rich and give to the poor" policies. But perhaps it's necessary to let some of our cities follow these flawed ideas through, in the hopes that it educates more people?
Again, though it falls on deaf ears with the people who aren't already in agreement.... A vast majority of the homeless will not better their situations, even if large amounts of money are spent on giving them free things. Many have mental illnesses and simply aren't capable of functioning as contributing members of society. Occasionally, they even HAVE money but are living on the streets anyway, because that money is tied up in some sort of trust, set up for them by family members who knew they had issues. They're not in a frame of mind to withdraw that money and use it constructively on things like renting an apartment.....
America has some real challenges dealing with mental health, but I'm not sure the science is even at a stage where we can provide many solutions? You can give a lot of these people treatment, but serious mental problems don't get cured by any of the drugs out there. At best, some drug combinations work temporarily for a person, until their effectiveness decreases over the years. And it's a crap shoot if a new drug cocktail can be prescribed that gets them back to a functional state again for X number of additional years.
Once upon a time, we just locked them all away in asylums so the public didn't have to see or interact with them. Now, we don't - so you see them sleeping in the streets. It is what it is, but I don't want to punish businesses for any of it.
I'm not sure how many times I applied for openings at larger companies? But I went through at least 4 or 5 job interviews with them inside a one year period where I made a concerted effort to job hunt, and it didn't go well.
For example, one place sat me down in a rather brutal "team interview" with 5 people taking turns grilling me with questions. It felt like every time I answered something to one person's satisfaction, one of the others would chime in, expressing dissatisfaction with the answer. They were looking for an Exchange administrator at the time, and I'd done a lot of work with Exchange as part of my last job. But they stressed how they were an international business with servers in China as well as America. They wanted to be sure I knew all the intricacies of working with foreign language character sets in email and the routing issues involved. It was way beyond the scope of what I did with Exchange before. By the end of that interview, I didn't WANT the job anymore and just wanted to leave!
At another company, I already had 2 friends working there in management and they tried to put in a good word for me. I hoped that would pan out, but after the initial interview and tour of the company, I didn't get a call back. I pressed my buddy to try to find out what my status was. He said he had even put a copy of my resume on the top of his boss's stack with a note in red ink, to take a closer look at me. But still nothing. (I would have just written it off as them finding a better qualified candidate and dropped it, but I took this one a bit personally. My other friend they hired learned most of what he knew about computers and tech from me when we were growing up....)
I even had a time when I tried to apply for a university I.T. position and nothing came of it, even though I was a near perfect fit based on their requirements. Again, I knew a guy working there so I asked him about it. He came back, telling me, "You're not going to believe this one. The hiring manager knows who you are from the years when you ran a computer BBS and he's intimidated by you. He won't hire you because he thinks you know more than he does and it would make him look bad."
Understaffed might certainly be part of the problem, and we're in the process of hiring another person as "first level support" to take the initial help-desk tickets and resolve the "no brainer" ones, while trying to distribute the rest out to us as appropriate.
As far as the switch failure I mentioned? Sure, that wasn't very difficult to resolve. BUT, I guess I should have also mentioned that we have 4 different offices in this geographic area. So in addition to doing some work from home, I have to travel among those locations as needed to address hardware problems. In this case, the failure happened on a Friday afternoon so I had to use my Saturday to drive about 1 1/2 hours out there to replace it with a spare. Additionally? Because this is a small company that's gone through a lot of growth and mergers with other small businesses in the last 5 years or so -- we have a lot of gear in use that's not really optimal. In this case, the switch that failed was part of a stack of 3 older Netgear PoE switches that we couldn't manage remotely at all. (They're supposed to have some basic management capability via Netgear's software, but even after doing hard resets on them, the software could never detect them on the LAN to configure them. Probably corrupt firmware in them or something - -but these were inherited from the company we merged with so not sure.)
We use Cisco Meraki gear to link our locations together, but their smart switches are priced outside what our I.T. budget allows for. So we're starting to deploy some Netgear cloud managed switches that appear to be adequate, at least. This office will get 3 of them in the coming weeks to replace what's in there now.
If there's one thing I guess I'm hoping to get from reading replies to my original post? It's trying to get a real sense of how much workload other people really have, who do similar tasks. Slashdot is full of software developers who don't necessarily have much experience with hardware or networks. But I couldn't think of a better forum to ask this question on, out of the ones I have accounts on and read regularly.
A couple of responses have been like yours -- implying that everything I listed as having to run around and do is "not a big deal" and "just a normal day". That disturbs me, because I feel like a properly working environment should generally just "run itself". A switch failure that causes a whole office to break into chaos should be a very rare occurrence. Logins using SSO should "just work" too, once you have them working initially. As I said above -- I assumed our company was just high stress and had less reliability than some because of our budgetary limits and rapid growth. But I'm starting to get concerned that the whole industry is making it harder and harder to keep on top of everything. Microsoft's constant Windows 10 updates are part of the problem. But it's also compounded by such things as browser changes revamping how SSL works and Apple making big changes with their T2 encryption chips in their new hardware. Add the constant flow of security issues to mitigate (just saw last night where a number of SSDs allow bypassing Bitlocker encryption) and it just feels like it's getting tough to keep up with it all.
Yeah... I'm not sure I ever had hatred for the "old timer" when I first started working in corporate I.T. But I can definitely relate to the first part of your post, if nothing else!
I think that's the maddening part.... It just feels like the rate of change keeps increasing, and the moving parts get ever more complex (and broken). I mean, instead of "just" dealing with Windows Active Directory and all the headaches it can cause in a domain that spans multiple sites, now you're dealing with Azure and a cloud-synced, centralized A.D. for single sign-on. And it feels like Microsoft doesn't even yet know how all the pieces of that are supposed to work with each other, as they move forward. Or the web-based servers you set up for various purposes all create SSL certificate headaches, because the web browser makers, in an effort to increase security, make it increasingly difficult to work with a self-signed certificate. Or over on the Mac side, you have them suddenly releasing a product line with the T2 encryption chip handling the drive encryption and controlling the boot process. So you can't rely on traditional methods of imaging them from a master disk image anymore to deploy them. An MDM solution is mandatory, so all the existing procedures, used for years, are out the window there.
All of these things would be tolerable and manageable, on their own -- but they start to pile on in a complex environment, and your group of 3 or 4 people taking care of it all starts feeling inadequate to keep getting it all right.
I saw a couple of responses so far that seem to be saying the same thing....
I guess I didn't explain my career history quite well enough, or perhaps I really did screw up somewhere along the line by not trying to something different in I.T.?
I'm not sure? But the short version is, I've never really been able to find employment where user support wasn't rolled in as an expectation. I've always been hired by smaller companies -- not big corporations with thousands of employees and big departments that segment up the I.T. When I started out working in I.T., it was back in the late 1990's, working in the back room as a technician for small computer resellers or "mom and pop" type computer stores. From there, I progressed to a 7 year long stint for a mid-sized manufacturing firm that had a small department for software development (one in-house app they used as kind of an ERP system, customized for their industry), and the other small department I was employed in as "PC Support Specialist". We took care of everything that wasn't software development - including server backups, networking, maintaining the phone PBX, new deployments, customizing drive images for the workstations, etc.
After that, I helped an entrepreneur try to get his idea off the ground to refurbish older/vintage Macs as first computers for small kids. We installed a bunch of them in daycare centers and sold others at trade shows and advertisements. I was pretty much THE guy who did all the technical work, and much of the work developing sales brochures and marketing materials for that one. After a year or two, it was clear it wasn't profitable for the owner and I ducked out when it turned into a "free for all" of him trying to get me to do all sorts of odd jobs related to anything he needed or could come up with. That gave me a really good handle on Macs though, as his office machines were modern OS X machines and I worked with those a lot too.
I spent some time after that doing on-site service work for an old friend who had a business venture doing that and grew it enough to need a helping hand. Then, I spun that off into my own consulting business. But again, the corporate customers truly wanting consulting work on anything more technical wasn't enough to pay the bills. A big part of my income there was always the home user, wanting a virus or malware cleanup after little Johnny visited porn sites or hacker sites again on the family PC.
I kept that as a side job while accepting a position as "Network Manager" for a steel fabricator (again, kind of a small family owned company). The only people I really managed, though, were the outside consultants they called in occasionally, for a few hours or a 1 day project, here or there. Everything else turned into expectations I'd do all the end-user support, day to day, along with reporting to the CEO and V.P. with annual budget proposals, plans for upgrading their infrastructure and network, etc. I honestly hoped that position was going to finally be my "launchpad" into some kind of management position and out of the daily grind of end-user support -- but it wasn't to be.
At present, the company I work for has a focus on marketing, but more the internal aspects than marketing products or services to customers. The user-base is a mix of creative types, sales types, and of course your Finance staffers, managers, and H.R. They run a mixed environment that's about 50% Mac and 50% Windows 10. They have offices nation-wide and a highly mobile workforce, so we use a lot of cloud technologies -- but still have some infrastructure in house.
I've seen far too many people try to "advance their career" out of this type of work, into project management, and then whither and die on the vine doing it. I don't look forward to sitting in meetings all day, dealing with people problems and losing my ability to do I.T. hands-on. But I think I really WOULD like to get to where I could specialize on projects themselves. Things like setting up new servers for such things as system backup
I don't disagree with your premise. We have way too much convenient, easily accessible (and tasty!) food that has a lot of carbs and sugar in it.
What I have a problem with is the idea it's government's job to step in, playing the role of parent, to force people to make "better food choices" by punishing people offering the less healthy options that are so popular.
Heck, I know I eat way too much sugary and processed food, myself. But I wouldn't be happy at all if my government outlawed the stuff I'm buying or placed big restrictions (likely high taxes) on it. I know the reasons why I tend to choose these things, and a lot comes down to lack of free time. If you insist on only eating fresh foods, you run into the age-old problem that they don't keep well. Just try putting a tossed salad in the fridge for a couple of days and then take it back out to eat it. Doesn't look so appetizing anymore with the lettuce starting to turn brown around its edges, the tomatoes getting mushy, and water starting to seep out of the veggies and into a little pool at the bottom of the salad bowl. America doesn't really have a culture like some European countries where you can wake up, walk down the steps and outside, to buy some fresh bread or other items to make breakfast with from a street vendor right around the corner.
I even live in a fairly rural area where I can drive a few miles and stop by a fresh produce stand that one of the local farmers has set up. I occasionally get some ears or corn or what-not from them. But still, my work and family life is usually way too hectic for me to make time for that. Most of the time, I'm driving quickly past them to pick up a kid that had to stay late after class and can't get a bus ride home, or running to one of 4 offices to fix the latest computer or tech crisis one of them is having..... things like that.
To fix this, you'd really need a big cultural shift in America.... a change in attitude about what's expected of people in their daily work life and a change in the way people prefer to buy their groceries. Right now? It is what it is, so I just settle for eating healthy when it's viable and being thankful for the technology that allows frozen dinners and canned food that stays good until you're ready to eat it.
and they just waited around with 1,000 women on the payroll in order to achieve it. that wouldn't work so well if some of the women weren't even pregnant after all, and others were prone to miscarriages for medical reasons.
That's more like the situation here.... They can't get a project going in time to get thousands of small satellites in low space orbit if a big number of their engineers tasked with the project are still of the mentality of going much slower and reducing risk of a failed satellite to as near 0 as possible (based on the more traditional satellite launch where one big, costly one is counted on to do a job in the same orbit as other big, costly ones owned by other people).
Once in a while, game developers put together a "perfect storm". In this case, from the demos I saw, you've got a title that ticks a whole lot of boxes for people. First off, you're going with the Country Western theme; a genre that's stood the test of time, yet is underserved in the world of video games. (And look how often a game in this genre was little more than a fixed shooting gallery type offering, vs. an open world you could explore.)
Second, the graphics for this one looked excellent. Again, I think we've all seen our share of games that do a good job imagining space travel with various types of craft, or auto racing games. But there's something that still gets people's attention when you do a good job simulating animals like horses, running around the open land. (The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, did a pretty respectable job of this and I'm convinced it's one of things that made people "ooh" and "ah" over the title, propelling sales.)
It has pedigree too, coming from Rockstar Games. They've done so much with the GTA franchise over the years that you feel like you won't be let down by such things as poor quality acting/dialog, or a lack of interesting things to see and do in the virtual world they created for you.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten really selective about which games I'll buy or spend any time playing. I only have so much free time to waste on computer games, for starters. But I've also just gotten jaded, as a gamer from back in the 1980's through the present. So many games come out and just remind me of something else I played before, so I take a pass on them. I'd have to say this is one I'd put on my short list to consider buying, along with Fallout 76.
I'm not discounting the possibility that in the future, tech will advance far enough so virtual reality becomes attractive to people again (probably at the stage where we can inexpensively generate 3D holograms of things floating in front of people). But this constant incremental churn of VR headsets and gear is stale and not getting much traction.
Among other things, I think some people in the industry aren't willing to accept that when it comes to gaming, a whole lot of people don't WANT that level of immersion! Picture your typical teenage console or PC gamer at home, already constantly dealing with getting yelled at by parents for not hearing what they're telling them because they're sucked into their "stupid video game". There's still a need to be able to hear when the "real world" is trying to get your attention, even if that jest means the doorbell ringing because your pizza delivery arrived. It's enough of a problem when you wear headphones or use earbuds, without a big, chunky pair of glasses immersing your whole field of vision in the game too.
Even as an adult, I like playing video games to unwind in the evening after work.... but I don't want to block out everything happening around me. If my wife needs to tell me something important, or the kids have an emergency - they should be able to interrupt my game and communicate with me. VR would make that too difficult.
And we're not even talking about the motion sickness problems some people experience. Gaming isn't much fun if it gets your stomach upset or gives you headaches. VR just amplifies those issues and makes them unbearable for some people.
But even if the whole experience was ideal in other perspectives, the cost is still a problem. I work for a marketing company where they toyed around with the idea of setting up VR experiences for clients. It was soundly rejected as not being financially feasible, each time it was presented as a possibility. (Imagine scenarios like universities doing fundraiser events where alumni are invited back to their schools. Theoretically, you could put on a show where everyone in a room puts on a VR headset and has a shared experience of taking a virtual tour of what the campus used to look like when it was new.... time-warping to the days they attended, and again to the present or even envisioned future that their donations could make possible. Cool, right? Except the computer hardware and expense building that whole 3D VR world runs the cost up way beyond the ROI.)
Even for a fixed, limited market like Playstation 4 owners, their VR solution just isn't compelling because again, the content creation for it seems to be hugely intensive. You wind up with a few basic, simplistic VR specific titles that feel more like product demos, and a few major game titles that use SOME VR in limited parts of the game. That's really not enough to sell most people on it.
Tesla owners are complaining about this very thing right now. The much lauded version 9.0 software update they're pushing out to Teslas right now rethinks the whole UI. Model S owners can no longer pick any two application to split on the top and bottom halves of their screens. Instead, Tesla decided the navigation window should always be present, with anything else you might want to see on a toolbar along the bottom that lets you pick one to slide up, overlaying the bottom portion of the nav screen.
So effectively, people who have been driving their cars since 2012 with things laid out their preferred way (backup camera screen always visible while music/stereo controls occupy the other half of the display, perhaps?) are now forced to do things differently.
It seems like the computer industry has this unique perspective that their designers know what's best for their users and dictate where and how you'll control what you use - changing it at will.
I'm just wondering how they come to these conclusions that "1 out of 35 deaths" has a cause of air pollution?
Seems pretty suspect to me, since it's not extremely common you hear of a coroner's report stating "air pollution" as the cause of death.
I mean, is this total counting every single time somebody stupidly runs a fossil fuel burning space heater indoors with no ventilation? Is this making an assumption that COPD sufferers who damaged their lungs by decades of cigarette smoking and now require oxygen are dying from air pollution? What determines these stats? I have a feeling the totals aren't really showing a reality where otherwise healthy individuals die prematurely because of the pollution in the air they're breathing in the city they live in....
I feel weird defending this one, because I consider myself agnostic and not a fan at all of many organized religions.
But as a scientist, Hawking should realize that very few things have the proof necessary to declare them as facts, vs. theories. To claim that there is no God, I'd expect him to provide his proof to back up the statement. Obviously, that's something he can't do. So he resorts to explaining he really just bases his claim on his feelings (when he goes into the issue he takes with some people's claims that disabilities are forms of punishment doled out by a higher power).
If anything, it seems to me that the better we begin to understand the universe, the more of an argument we start to have that there might have been some sort of creator involved. I don't know if there's strong evidence to show that such a creator actively chooses to interact with humans or listens to our prayers? I think much of that is just wishful thinking. (If you pray every time you want to see a positive outcome, you're going to get a positive outcome by pure chance at least every so often. Attributing that to your prayers being answered constitutes some really weak evidence for your case.) But as complex as life is, not to mention as hard as it is to fathom that matter in the universe that became stars, planets, asteroids, etc. was just "always here" in some form? Attributing it to some sort of creator seems as good a theory as anything else.
I work for an employer who bought dozens of these new Macbook Pro 13" models to deploy to our creative professionals. So far? I've only had one person complain about keyboard issues, and he was one of our I.T. guys. (To be honest, he's kind of rough on his gear anyway. His Windows laptops he's had in the past are always scratched and dented up and covered with stickers, etc.)
I have one of these new Macbook Pros too, and although I don't use it as my primary machine, I do take it with me on the go fairly regularly. So far, no keyboard issues on mine either.
So based on our experiences, I can't say the new keyboards are an absolute failure or disaster, by any stretch. But clearly, they're not the most durable things around either. And just as bad, in my estimation, is the difficulty typing on one of them due to the tiny amount of key travel.
As a general rule, Apple makes a lot of products that are about style as much as substance. But with that seems to come an expectation that the user is really protective about the styling/appearance too. You have everything from touch-screens that need constant wipe-downs with micro-fiber cloths to avoid fingerprints all over the place, to iPhones made with glass and easily scuff-able metals that practically require being put in a case to preserve their beauty. I think now, we're getting to the point where the laptops have the same expectations about their daily use. EG. Don't ever eat anything around them and wash your hands before typing on them, so you don't get crumbs in them.
As much as they cost, I tend to be at least somewhat respectful of them and handle them with kid gloves. But they really need to be able to withstand a bit more abuse, or else they're not going to be what many people choose when they spend this much money.
Wikipedia is, indeed, a handy resource. But it's also one that sometimes seems like it wants to have things both ways; free for everyone's unlimited use AND a service that's owed some kind of regular donation if you utilize it.
Considering the content (which is the only reason the site has ANY value) is contributed by users volunteering to write it? I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on if they're upset Amazon uses it without compensating them.
In fact, the decision made to make Wikipedia a free to use resource has some negative implications for them. (EG. It's not usually considered a source one can site when writing any kind of term paper for schools.) Commercial encyclopedias are acceptable as such sources, by contrast, because the content is vetted by publishers who are responsible for maintaining their accuracy. Either you're a publisher, or you're just a content platform hosting service. Wikipedia chooses to be the later.
Nope.... I'll never support suggestions that it's somehow wise to try to roll back technology by way of taxation.
You can always play the "What if?" game, arguing why we might be better off if something or other didn't exist. But everything we create that gets traction and becomes part of our lifestyle does so because it adds immense value. The downsides need to be looked at and addressed -- but trying to tax a genie back into a bottle? I'd say politically impossible! Politically difficult to enact the tax itself, perhaps. But impossible to achieve the desired result.
Once people are aware that a means exists to do something, they expect to be able to do it. Government might have more leverage than normal with the airplane, but only because it's always maintained a high level of control of flights. Still, if taxes became too high for people to afford to fly for vacations, they'd look for ways around it. They wouldn't go back to a blissful unawareness that a vacation overseas could be a thing.
Our levels of energy consumption probably rise and fall too, as opposed to a linear upward trend. I don't know if there are any good stats to prove this argument? But just looking at utility prices and demand alone, I see evidence of that. I remember when the power companies were investing heavily in new power plants to meet estimated future demand, only to find out it didn't materialize. The nuclear plant near my old residence in Missouri was running at about 50% capacity for years for that reason. And even if you just look at a specific tech like computers? We went from power hungry desktop and tower systems to a vast majority of people using laptops instead. On the flip-side, you had a big surge of power usage for crypto-coin mining in recent years, which will again fade away as it becomes unprofitable and people migrate to new crypto-coins that don't necessarily demand all of that CPU power to work with them.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the truth! I live in Brunswick, MD (origin point for the "Brunswick line" for the MARC commuter rail line in Maryland). CSX constantly does anything in its power to disrupt the MARC and make it appear the lines are overcrowded. Since I live about a block from the train yard, I can tell when pretty much every train passes through. And it's quite common that there will be no train coming through for hours at a time, but during the time window when the MARC runs? Mysteriously, they have all of this freight rail traffic too, and have to make the MARC wait behind a freight train.
To CSX, commuter rail is simply a nuisance that creates more scheduling hassles for them.
Ideally, they'd build another set of tracks that the MARC could use exclusively, or at least in some kind of shared agreement with CSX where MARC gets priority on them. But the last time I saw this proposed, the funding was never approved (after some haggling and debate that led to a watered down proposal of adding an extra track only between a few communities in the DC suburbs like Gaithersburg and Rockville).
As a transplant to the DC Metro area for my job, I largely agree.
There are a couple things to consider though:
1. The Crystal City, VA location for the new Amazon HQ really only replaces the number of people who used to work there before government made some cutbacks and changes. Crystal City is pretty much a city full of tall office buildings from the 1970's and 80's, with a whole set of underground tunnels connecting them together with strip mall type food places, shoe shine people, and the like inside them. It was all built up back when govt. contractors and a couple of major Federal govt. organizations were stationed there, and has been sitting, vastly under-utilized and slowly decaying ever since. Location-wise, it sits close enough to DC so you can see it out the windows of buildings there, and has the Pentagon on the other side of it. Reagan National airport is adjacent to it, too -- and 2 Metro lines get you to a Crystal City station stop. So it has good strategic placement. (Of course, having Amazon there will probably get rid of the relatively good deals on hotel stays there, that some travelers have been taking advantage of on DC trips for the last decade or so.)
2. IMO, if you're going to live in this area, you have to be willing to do a longer commute AND negotiate to work from home at least 1 day per week (preferrably more than that). Increasingly, the DC government workers have the option to telecommute, and private businesses are catching on that people here expect it too. I found a good deal on a nice-sized 3 bedroom home in a semi-rural community, about an hour west of Bethesda, MD. It's possible to take commuter rail in to DC itself, or to get off at Rockville, MD and transfer to the Metro, to go other places like Bethesda. I think a commute to/from Northern VA might be more time-consuming from where I live, but there are likely other, similar options on the VA side, when you start looking at smaller towns around 60-80 minutes from where your office is located.
Quite frankly, the inexpensive consumer-grade inkjet printers do a generally awful job of networking, across the board.
One of the big issues I've encountered is that almost all of the wi-fi enabled printers still only support the 2.4Ghz band, which tends to become very crowded with SSIDs if you're in a multi-story office or apartment complex. So not only can you struggle to get a wireless frequency that's usable and reliable, but often, the number of SSIDs exceeds the memory allocated to display them in a scrolling list on the printer's front panel! I've had HP DeskJet printers that would only let you select your own wireless SSID one out of every 2 or 3 times you did a scan for them, because there were too many in the list and it truncated a bunch of them.
I'm not sure why a wireless printer would require uPnP support enabled on a router though? As far as I've ever seen, the uPnP thing on the router only exists as an attempt to automate the process of opening firewall ports for applications that require them. With it disabled, you should still be able to get anything to work on your LAN by finding out what ports it actually uses to communicate with the outside world and manually port forwarding them to those devices, in your router.
(Disabling it doesn't stop your devices on your local network from doing automatic searches or scans. So for example, a printer driver should be able to auto-detect a new inkjet printer you connected to your LAN by probing for its MAC address, regardless of uPnP being enabled.)
I think the reason some people are finding it odd that you have conservatives suddenly supporting these new import taxes, while liberals are suddenly against them, is because TRUMP suggested them. He's been such a polarizing force, people will flip-flop on their ideals just to get behind the man, or to bash another one of his decisions.
If you can step away from all that nonsense for a bit and just look at the facts? I think you'll find that most libertarian, pro free-market types are as much against the tariffs as they've ever been about tariffs in general. But China has also been kind of a "worst case scenario" for America because we rely so heavily on them for things we used to manufacture here, but stopped bothering with. Under normal circumstances, you don't have to compete against a foreign government that's artificially subsidizing production of goods getting exported, to ensure they can be bought far below the cost of production. That's often what China has done, in a gambit to destroy our will to do production ourselves. This absolutely happened with the market for solar panels, and I've heard claims it happened with items as basic as roofing nails.
I really don't think it's our government's job to try to enforce other governments treating their citizens at what we deem an "acceptable standard". Chinese citizens will be the ones who have to revolt against their own government, if they want real change and better working/living conditions. So no, I don't support slapping on tariffs just to try to offset Americans getting great buys on imported products. I do, however, think you can't really have a fair global economy if the playing field isn't level thanks to a government covering losses on sales to undercut ALL competitors.
I wondered about that too. Unless the German auto parts company was one he had ownership in, it doesn't seem like there would be enough in it for him to take these kinds of risks and go through all the hassles to forge documents claiming the other firm was paid, etc.
I mean, even if he received kickbacks for getting Tesla to do more business with the German firm instead of the Taiwanese firm? He was on borrowed time, knowing the Taiwanese firm expected to be paid for whatever they supplied.
I mean, when you buy a Mac, you're paying a premium to get OS X. Part of the price includes that software license. Apple is willing to support Windows as an alternate bootable OS too. AND, nothing stops you from running a flavor of Linux via virtualization either, that I know of?
So who, exactly, really has a problem with this limitation? I suppose you have a very small segment of "power users" who want a multi-boot environment that lets you start Linux, OS X or Windows from an initial menu. But realistically, why bother except showing off you did it?
The main things I run Linux for these days are dedicated servers or appliances, or possibly as a way to get more life out of an older PC laptop.
I saw this kind of thing coming for years, on their platform. A long time ago, I used to do a lot of selling via the original "Amazon Auctions" service. It was more or less a direct eBay competitor, where any individual or business could start listing whatever used or new products they wanted to sell, with auction bidding.
Then, that disappeared and all of us were herded to Amazon Marketplace instead -- a service that demanded you list your items for sale at fixed prices, but did help you determine the optimal sale price at least. (It would tell you if identical products were currently listed by other sellers, and if your price was below all of theirs or not. If you were willing to sell at the lowest price on the site, they'd promote your listing to people as such.)
Then, I kept seeing Amazon revising the Marketplace, catering more and more towards big businesses and large volume sellers. You started having to create listings in kind of an inventory grid, that looked totally out of place for an individual selling a few items at a time as a side gig to make some extra cash.....
Finally, they added so many rules and restrictions on sellers, it became unreasonable for the "little guy" to even bother with it. (Essentially, you got kicked off Amazon as a seller if you didn't agree to give any buyer a full refund for just about ANY reason. They could buy your product, switch it out with a defective/worn out and dirty version of the same one, and ship it back for a full refund claiming "Product was not as advertised." They could claim your perfectly good product was non-functional and get irate with you as soon as you tried to email them back to help them troubleshoot it. Again, you had to give them the refund and eat your original shipping costs to mail it to them. And if this nonsense went on a few times within a couple month period? Your percentage of satisfaction dropped to below their acceptable levels, even if you happily handed out all those refunds and lost money trying to sell your stuff. And you'd risk suspension for not keeping up your metrics.)
Since then, they've been pedaling Chinese counterfeit versions of everything from shoes to iPhone chargers -- and only apologizing when someone like Apple catches them in the act, red-handed. Then, Amazon claims "We fixed the problem!" as they move on to the next high volume seller who wants to give it a try. So of COURSE they're gonna cater to Apple on this one. They don't want to get branded the bad guy....
I finally invested in a used Tesla, so I don't worry about buying gasoline anymore.
There are actually a lot of electric car options out there now, even on the used market, so you can no longer really say they're "un-affordable". I mean, not unless your budget only includes beater cars under $2,000 or something.
I regularly see electric Smart4Two cars for sale, going for as little as $6,000-ish each, often with low mileage. If you're single and just need a vehicle for a work commute, it'll get the job done, even if it's tiny and you think it looks goofy.
If you can deal with something more like a typical monthly car payment on a new vehicle? A Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt would be reasonable options. So far, you can still get that Federal tax credit of $7,500 back on one of those purchases too.
If you really get stressed out by driving and dislike the whole thing? Then sure, don't buy a car and don't drive. This is the age of services like Uber and Lyft, making it even easier to avoid owning a vehicle. But I've always been kind of a car enthusiast and I guess I'm not ready to let go completely of the freedoms that come with owning one you can just get in at any time, and go anywhere you like. No worries about timetables or relying on someone else....
This argument sounds good, but I didn't find it was really that true when I took public transit to and from the office.
For starters, the commuter rail line I had to take in to the city had really spotty cellular data coverage. As it went through tunnels or through open fields, you had no service. Only once you got close to my stop did LTE start being consistent and reliable.
When I took the metro around (DC area), they still have this ridiculous exclusive deal with Verizon wireless so they're the ONLY provider giving you cellular signal underground in the metro system. Since I have T-Mobile, again a problem. They do brag about having wi-fi at most station platforms now, but that's not going to get a lot done for you in the 5-7 minutes you might be standing there, waiting for your metro train.
Also, at the speeds the trains all run out here? You can drive from my house to my office and get there just as fast as using mass transit. The only time that's not true is when a car accident causes a real traffic blockage that makes everyone sit in traffic for an hour, not moving, or something like that. In general, the only time savings I saw with the train over driving in was that last 10-15 minutes I might spend parking my car in a garage, often up on the 6th. level or so, and then getting from there back in to the office itself.
These days, I always drive in because I have flexibility to work late and not worry about missing a train, and I have a trunk in the car that can hold bigger items I might need to haul around. (I have to take care of our corporate network and I've had times a large box shipped to one location, but I needed to unbox and configure the contents, and then install at a different office. That's terrible, trying to carry all that stuff on the Metro.)
When our family relocated because I took an I.T. position in Maryland, we were stuck renting a run-down 1970's townhouse for the first couple of years, as we got our bearings. The school district it was in was rated very highly, so with 3 kids, that was a prime concern.
As we started getting serious about searching for a house, we quickly found that almost anything out here with 3 bedrooms or more, suitable for our 5 person (6 with grandma, who lives with us most of the year now) family was WAY outside our price range unless we moved over an hour from the metro area.
We finally compromised on buying a 105 year old home that had a separate 2 car garage and a partially finished basement, plus the bonus of a nice view near the top of a hill. It's in a small town near the river, and has a rail line running through it with a commuter train you can take to and from where I work. The school district? Not as good as where we stayed initially, but this district was still rated ok when we got here. I think it's gotten worse since then, but thankfully - our kids are reaching their teens and will be out of it soon.
My workplace recently relocated me, along with a subset of our group, to a new office that's about 20 minutes closer to my house than my old office. But it ALSO meant there's no way to take the train there anymore, without doing a bus transfer. Too much headache so now I just deal with the drive.
All in all, the driving around sucks -- but I don't regret our decisions either. I've been able to argue for my employer letting me work from home more often, these days, so that makes it a lot less painful. Compromising on the biggest investment you'll probably ever make (your house) doesn't seem wise to me, just to play a game of trying to be close to work. Not when work is full of highly mobile employees and they have multiple offices all over the country, and have already done 2 mergers and eliminated one new business they tried to start up in one city.
It works because the mouse isn't aware why the cheese is free.
Uber-liberal San Francisco will continue to destroy itself as long as it embraces these "rob from the rich and give to the poor" policies. But perhaps it's necessary to let some of our cities follow these flawed ideas through, in the hopes that it educates more people?
Again, though it falls on deaf ears with the people who aren't already in agreement .... A vast majority of the homeless will not better their situations, even if large amounts of money are spent on giving them free things. Many have mental illnesses and simply aren't capable of functioning as contributing members of society. Occasionally, they even HAVE money but are living on the streets anyway, because that money is tied up in some sort of trust, set up for them by family members who knew they had issues. They're not in a frame of mind to withdraw that money and use it constructively on things like renting an apartment.....
America has some real challenges dealing with mental health, but I'm not sure the science is even at a stage where we can provide many solutions? You can give a lot of these people treatment, but serious mental problems don't get cured by any of the drugs out there. At best, some drug combinations work temporarily for a person, until their effectiveness decreases over the years. And it's a crap shoot if a new drug cocktail can be prescribed that gets them back to a functional state again for X number of additional years.
Once upon a time, we just locked them all away in asylums so the public didn't have to see or interact with them. Now, we don't - so you see them sleeping in the streets. It is what it is, but I don't want to punish businesses for any of it.
I'm not sure how many times I applied for openings at larger companies? But I went through at least 4 or 5 job interviews with them inside a one year period where I made a concerted effort to job hunt, and it didn't go well.
For example, one place sat me down in a rather brutal "team interview" with 5 people taking turns grilling me with questions. It felt like every time I answered something to one person's satisfaction, one of the others would chime in, expressing dissatisfaction with the answer. They were looking for an Exchange administrator at the time, and I'd done a lot of work with Exchange as part of my last job. But they stressed how they were an international business with servers in China as well as America. They wanted to be sure I knew all the intricacies of working with foreign language character sets in email and the routing issues involved. It was way beyond the scope of what I did with Exchange before. By the end of that interview, I didn't WANT the job anymore and just wanted to leave!
At another company, I already had 2 friends working there in management and they tried to put in a good word for me. I hoped that would pan out, but after the initial interview and tour of the company, I didn't get a call back. I pressed my buddy to try to find out what my status was. He said he had even put a copy of my resume on the top of his boss's stack with a note in red ink, to take a closer look at me. But still nothing. (I would have just written it off as them finding a better qualified candidate and dropped it, but I took this one a bit personally. My other friend they hired learned most of what he knew about computers and tech from me when we were growing up....)
I even had a time when I tried to apply for a university I.T. position and nothing came of it, even though I was a near perfect fit based on their requirements. Again, I knew a guy working there so I asked him about it. He came back, telling me, "You're not going to believe this one. The hiring manager knows who you are from the years when you ran a computer BBS and he's intimidated by you. He won't hire you because he thinks you know more than he does and it would make him look bad."
Understaffed might certainly be part of the problem, and we're in the process of hiring another person as "first level support" to take the initial help-desk tickets and resolve the "no brainer" ones, while trying to distribute the rest out to us as appropriate.
As far as the switch failure I mentioned? Sure, that wasn't very difficult to resolve. BUT, I guess I should have also mentioned that we have 4 different offices in this geographic area. So in addition to doing some work from home, I have to travel among those locations as needed to address hardware problems. In this case, the failure happened on a Friday afternoon so I had to use my Saturday to drive about 1 1/2 hours out there to replace it with a spare. Additionally? Because this is a small company that's gone through a lot of growth and mergers with other small businesses in the last 5 years or so -- we have a lot of gear in use that's not really optimal. In this case, the switch that failed was part of a stack of 3 older Netgear PoE switches that we couldn't manage remotely at all. (They're supposed to have some basic management capability via Netgear's software, but even after doing hard resets on them, the software could never detect them on the LAN to configure them. Probably corrupt firmware in them or something - -but these were inherited from the company we merged with so not sure.)
We use Cisco Meraki gear to link our locations together, but their smart switches are priced outside what our I.T. budget allows for. So we're starting to deploy some Netgear cloud managed switches that appear to be adequate, at least. This office will get 3 of them in the coming weeks to replace what's in there now.
If there's one thing I guess I'm hoping to get from reading replies to my original post? It's trying to get a real sense of how much workload other people really have, who do similar tasks. Slashdot is full of software developers who don't necessarily have much experience with hardware or networks. But I couldn't think of a better forum to ask this question on, out of the ones I have accounts on and read regularly.
A couple of responses have been like yours -- implying that everything I listed as having to run around and do is "not a big deal" and "just a normal day". That disturbs me, because I feel like a properly working environment should generally just "run itself". A switch failure that causes a whole office to break into chaos should be a very rare occurrence. Logins using SSO should "just work" too, once you have them working initially. As I said above -- I assumed our company was just high stress and had less reliability than some because of our budgetary limits and rapid growth. But I'm starting to get concerned that the whole industry is making it harder and harder to keep on top of everything. Microsoft's constant Windows 10 updates are part of the problem. But it's also compounded by such things as browser changes revamping how SSL works and Apple making big changes with their T2 encryption chips in their new hardware. Add the constant flow of security issues to mitigate (just saw last night where a number of SSDs allow bypassing Bitlocker encryption) and it just feels like it's getting tough to keep up with it all.
Yeah ... I'm not sure I ever had hatred for the "old timer" when I first started working in corporate I.T. But I can definitely relate to the first part of your post, if nothing else!
I think that's the maddening part.... It just feels like the rate of change keeps increasing, and the moving parts get ever more complex (and broken). I mean, instead of "just" dealing with Windows Active Directory and all the headaches it can cause in a domain that spans multiple sites, now you're dealing with Azure and a cloud-synced, centralized A.D. for single sign-on. And it feels like Microsoft doesn't even yet know how all the pieces of that are supposed to work with each other, as they move forward. Or the web-based servers you set up for various purposes all create SSL certificate headaches, because the web browser makers, in an effort to increase security, make it increasingly difficult to work with a self-signed certificate. Or over on the Mac side, you have them suddenly releasing a product line with the T2 encryption chip handling the drive encryption and controlling the boot process. So you can't rely on traditional methods of imaging them from a master disk image anymore to deploy them. An MDM solution is mandatory, so all the existing procedures, used for years, are out the window there.
All of these things would be tolerable and manageable, on their own -- but they start to pile on in a complex environment, and your group of 3 or 4 people taking care of it all starts feeling inadequate to keep getting it all right.
I saw a couple of responses so far that seem to be saying the same thing....
I guess I didn't explain my career history quite well enough, or perhaps I really did screw up somewhere along the line by not trying to something different in I.T.?
I'm not sure? But the short version is, I've never really been able to find employment where user support wasn't rolled in as an expectation. I've always been hired by smaller companies -- not big corporations with thousands of employees and big departments that segment up the I.T. When I started out working in I.T., it was back in the late 1990's, working in the back room as a technician for small computer resellers or "mom and pop" type computer stores. From there, I progressed to a 7 year long stint for a mid-sized manufacturing firm that had a small department for software development (one in-house app they used as kind of an ERP system, customized for their industry), and the other small department I was employed in as "PC Support Specialist". We took care of everything that wasn't software development - including server backups, networking, maintaining the phone PBX, new deployments, customizing drive images for the workstations, etc.
After that, I helped an entrepreneur try to get his idea off the ground to refurbish older/vintage Macs as first computers for small kids. We installed a bunch of them in daycare centers and sold others at trade shows and advertisements. I was pretty much THE guy who did all the technical work, and much of the work developing sales brochures and marketing materials for that one. After a year or two, it was clear it wasn't profitable for the owner and I ducked out when it turned into a "free for all" of him trying to get me to do all sorts of odd jobs related to anything he needed or could come up with. That gave me a really good handle on Macs though, as his office machines were modern OS X machines and I worked with those a lot too.
I spent some time after that doing on-site service work for an old friend who had a business venture doing that and grew it enough to need a helping hand. Then, I spun that off into my own consulting business. But again, the corporate customers truly wanting consulting work on anything more technical wasn't enough to pay the bills. A big part of my income there was always the home user, wanting a virus or malware cleanup after little Johnny visited porn sites or hacker sites again on the family PC.
I kept that as a side job while accepting a position as "Network Manager" for a steel fabricator (again, kind of a small family owned company). The only people I really managed, though, were the outside consultants they called in occasionally, for a few hours or a 1 day project, here or there. Everything else turned into expectations I'd do all the end-user support, day to day, along with reporting to the CEO and V.P. with annual budget proposals, plans for upgrading their infrastructure and network, etc. I honestly hoped that position was going to finally be my "launchpad" into some kind of management position and out of the daily grind of end-user support -- but it wasn't to be.
At present, the company I work for has a focus on marketing, but more the internal aspects than marketing products or services to customers. The user-base is a mix of creative types, sales types, and of course your Finance staffers, managers, and H.R. They run a mixed environment that's about 50% Mac and 50% Windows 10. They have offices nation-wide and a highly mobile workforce, so we use a lot of cloud technologies -- but still have some infrastructure in house.
I've seen far too many people try to "advance their career" out of this type of work, into project management, and then whither and die on the vine doing it. I don't look forward to sitting in meetings all day, dealing with people problems and losing my ability to do I.T. hands-on. But I think I really WOULD like to get to where I could specialize on projects themselves. Things like setting up new servers for such things as system backup
I don't disagree with your premise. We have way too much convenient, easily accessible (and tasty!) food that has a lot of carbs and sugar in it.
What I have a problem with is the idea it's government's job to step in, playing the role of parent, to force people to make "better food choices" by punishing people offering the less healthy options that are so popular.
Heck, I know I eat way too much sugary and processed food, myself. But I wouldn't be happy at all if my government outlawed the stuff I'm buying or placed big restrictions (likely high taxes) on it. I know the reasons why I tend to choose these things, and a lot comes down to lack of free time. If you insist on only eating fresh foods, you run into the age-old problem that they don't keep well. Just try putting a tossed salad in the fridge for a couple of days and then take it back out to eat it. Doesn't look so appetizing anymore with the lettuce starting to turn brown around its edges, the tomatoes getting mushy, and water starting to seep out of the veggies and into a little pool at the bottom of the salad bowl. America doesn't really have a culture like some European countries where you can wake up, walk down the steps and outside, to buy some fresh bread or other items to make breakfast with from a street vendor right around the corner.
I even live in a fairly rural area where I can drive a few miles and stop by a fresh produce stand that one of the local farmers has set up. I occasionally get some ears or corn or what-not from them. But still, my work and family life is usually way too hectic for me to make time for that. Most of the time, I'm driving quickly past them to pick up a kid that had to stay late after class and can't get a bus ride home, or running to one of 4 offices to fix the latest computer or tech crisis one of them is having..... things like that.
To fix this, you'd really need a big cultural shift in America.... a change in attitude about what's expected of people in their daily work life and a change in the way people prefer to buy their groceries. Right now? It is what it is, so I just settle for eating healthy when it's viable and being thankful for the technology that allows frozen dinners and canned food that stays good until you're ready to eat it.
and they just waited around with 1,000 women on the payroll in order to achieve it. that wouldn't work so well if some of the women weren't even pregnant after all, and others were prone to miscarriages for medical reasons.
That's more like the situation here .... They can't get a project going in time to get thousands of small satellites in low space orbit if a big number of their engineers tasked with the project are still of the mentality of going much slower and reducing risk of a failed satellite to as near 0 as possible (based on the more traditional satellite launch where one big, costly one is counted on to do a job in the same orbit as other big, costly ones owned by other people).
Once in a while, game developers put together a "perfect storm". In this case, from the demos I saw, you've got a title that ticks a whole lot of boxes for people. First off, you're going with the Country Western theme; a genre that's stood the test of time, yet is underserved in the world of video games. (And look how often a game in this genre was little more than a fixed shooting gallery type offering, vs. an open world you could explore.)
Second, the graphics for this one looked excellent. Again, I think we've all seen our share of games that do a good job imagining space travel with various types of craft, or auto racing games. But there's something that still gets people's attention when you do a good job simulating animals like horses, running around the open land. (The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, did a pretty respectable job of this and I'm convinced it's one of things that made people "ooh" and "ah" over the title, propelling sales.)
It has pedigree too, coming from Rockstar Games. They've done so much with the GTA franchise over the years that you feel like you won't be let down by such things as poor quality acting/dialog, or a lack of interesting things to see and do in the virtual world they created for you.
As I've gotten older, I've gotten really selective about which games I'll buy or spend any time playing. I only have so much free time to waste on computer games, for starters. But I've also just gotten jaded, as a gamer from back in the 1980's through the present. So many games come out and just remind me of something else I played before, so I take a pass on them. I'd have to say this is one I'd put on my short list to consider buying, along with Fallout 76.
I'm not discounting the possibility that in the future, tech will advance far enough so virtual reality becomes attractive to people again (probably at the stage where we can inexpensively generate 3D holograms of things floating in front of people). But this constant incremental churn of VR headsets and gear is stale and not getting much traction.
Among other things, I think some people in the industry aren't willing to accept that when it comes to gaming, a whole lot of people don't WANT that level of immersion! Picture your typical teenage console or PC gamer at home, already constantly dealing with getting yelled at by parents for not hearing what they're telling them because they're sucked into their "stupid video game". There's still a need to be able to hear when the "real world" is trying to get your attention, even if that jest means the doorbell ringing because your pizza delivery arrived. It's enough of a problem when you wear headphones or use earbuds, without a big, chunky pair of glasses immersing your whole field of vision in the game too.
Even as an adult, I like playing video games to unwind in the evening after work .... but I don't want to block out everything happening around me. If my wife needs to tell me something important, or the kids have an emergency - they should be able to interrupt my game and communicate with me. VR would make that too difficult.
And we're not even talking about the motion sickness problems some people experience. Gaming isn't much fun if it gets your stomach upset or gives you headaches. VR just amplifies those issues and makes them unbearable for some people.
But even if the whole experience was ideal in other perspectives, the cost is still a problem. I work for a marketing company where they toyed around with the idea of setting up VR experiences for clients. It was soundly rejected as not being financially feasible, each time it was presented as a possibility. (Imagine scenarios like universities doing fundraiser events where alumni are invited back to their schools. Theoretically, you could put on a show where everyone in a room puts on a VR headset and has a shared experience of taking a virtual tour of what the campus used to look like when it was new .... time-warping to the days they attended, and again to the present or even envisioned future that their donations could make possible. Cool, right? Except the computer hardware and expense building that whole 3D VR world runs the cost up way beyond the ROI.)
Even for a fixed, limited market like Playstation 4 owners, their VR solution just isn't compelling because again, the content creation for it seems to be hugely intensive. You wind up with a few basic, simplistic VR specific titles that feel more like product demos, and a few major game titles that use SOME VR in limited parts of the game. That's really not enough to sell most people on it.
Tesla owners are complaining about this very thing right now. The much lauded version 9.0 software update they're pushing out to Teslas right now rethinks the whole UI. Model S owners can no longer pick any two application to split on the top and bottom halves of their screens. Instead, Tesla decided the navigation window should always be present, with anything else you might want to see on a toolbar along the bottom that lets you pick one to slide up, overlaying the bottom portion of the nav screen.
So effectively, people who have been driving their cars since 2012 with things laid out their preferred way (backup camera screen always visible while music/stereo controls occupy the other half of the display, perhaps?) are now forced to do things differently.
It seems like the computer industry has this unique perspective that their designers know what's best for their users and dictate where and how you'll control what you use - changing it at will.
I'm just wondering how they come to these conclusions that "1 out of 35 deaths" has a cause of air pollution?
Seems pretty suspect to me, since it's not extremely common you hear of a coroner's report stating "air pollution" as the cause of death.
I mean, is this total counting every single time somebody stupidly runs a fossil fuel burning space heater indoors with no ventilation? Is this making an assumption that COPD sufferers who damaged their lungs by decades of cigarette smoking and now require oxygen are dying from air pollution? What determines these stats? I have a feeling the totals aren't really showing a reality where otherwise healthy individuals die prematurely because of the pollution in the air they're breathing in the city they live in ....
I feel weird defending this one, because I consider myself agnostic and not a fan at all of many organized religions.
But as a scientist, Hawking should realize that very few things have the proof necessary to declare them as facts, vs. theories. To claim that there is no God, I'd expect him to provide his proof to back up the statement. Obviously, that's something he can't do. So he resorts to explaining he really just bases his claim on his feelings (when he goes into the issue he takes with some people's claims that disabilities are forms of punishment doled out by a higher power).
If anything, it seems to me that the better we begin to understand the universe, the more of an argument we start to have that there might have been some sort of creator involved. I don't know if there's strong evidence to show that such a creator actively chooses to interact with humans or listens to our prayers? I think much of that is just wishful thinking. (If you pray every time you want to see a positive outcome, you're going to get a positive outcome by pure chance at least every so often. Attributing that to your prayers being answered constitutes some really weak evidence for your case.) But as complex as life is, not to mention as hard as it is to fathom that matter in the universe that became stars, planets, asteroids, etc. was just "always here" in some form? Attributing it to some sort of creator seems as good a theory as anything else.
It's still a valid complaint.
I work for an employer who bought dozens of these new Macbook Pro 13" models to deploy to our creative professionals. So far? I've only had one person complain about keyboard issues, and he was one of our I.T. guys. (To be honest, he's kind of rough on his gear anyway. His Windows laptops he's had in the past are always scratched and dented up and covered with stickers, etc.)
I have one of these new Macbook Pros too, and although I don't use it as my primary machine, I do take it with me on the go fairly regularly. So far, no keyboard issues on mine either.
So based on our experiences, I can't say the new keyboards are an absolute failure or disaster, by any stretch. But clearly, they're not the most durable things around either. And just as bad, in my estimation, is the difficulty typing on one of them due to the tiny amount of key travel.
As a general rule, Apple makes a lot of products that are about style as much as substance. But with that seems to come an expectation that the user is really protective about the styling/appearance too. You have everything from touch-screens that need constant wipe-downs with micro-fiber cloths to avoid fingerprints all over the place, to iPhones made with glass and easily scuff-able metals that practically require being put in a case to preserve their beauty. I think now, we're getting to the point where the laptops have the same expectations about their daily use. EG. Don't ever eat anything around them and wash your hands before typing on them, so you don't get crumbs in them.
As much as they cost, I tend to be at least somewhat respectful of them and handle them with kid gloves. But they really need to be able to withstand a bit more abuse, or else they're not going to be what many people choose when they spend this much money.
Wikipedia is, indeed, a handy resource. But it's also one that sometimes seems like it wants to have things both ways; free for everyone's unlimited use AND a service that's owed some kind of regular donation if you utilize it.
Considering the content (which is the only reason the site has ANY value) is contributed by users volunteering to write it? I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on if they're upset Amazon uses it without compensating them.
In fact, the decision made to make Wikipedia a free to use resource has some negative implications for them. (EG. It's not usually considered a source one can site when writing any kind of term paper for schools.) Commercial encyclopedias are acceptable as such sources, by contrast, because the content is vetted by publishers who are responsible for maintaining their accuracy. Either you're a publisher, or you're just a content platform hosting service. Wikipedia chooses to be the later.
Nope.... I'll never support suggestions that it's somehow wise to try to roll back technology by way of taxation.
You can always play the "What if?" game, arguing why we might be better off if something or other didn't exist. But everything we create that gets traction and becomes part of our lifestyle does so because it adds immense value. The downsides need to be looked at and addressed -- but trying to tax a genie back into a bottle? I'd say politically impossible! Politically difficult to enact the tax itself, perhaps. But impossible to achieve the desired result.
Once people are aware that a means exists to do something, they expect to be able to do it. Government might have more leverage than normal with the airplane, but only because it's always maintained a high level of control of flights. Still, if taxes became too high for people to afford to fly for vacations, they'd look for ways around it. They wouldn't go back to a blissful unawareness that a vacation overseas could be a thing.
Our levels of energy consumption probably rise and fall too, as opposed to a linear upward trend. I don't know if there are any good stats to prove this argument? But just looking at utility prices and demand alone, I see evidence of that. I remember when the power companies were investing heavily in new power plants to meet estimated future demand, only to find out it didn't materialize. The nuclear plant near my old residence in Missouri was running at about 50% capacity for years for that reason. And even if you just look at a specific tech like computers? We went from power hungry desktop and tower systems to a vast majority of people using laptops instead. On the flip-side, you had a big surge of power usage for crypto-coin mining in recent years, which will again fade away as it becomes unprofitable and people migrate to new crypto-coins that don't necessarily demand all of that CPU power to work with them.