I'm not claiming there's no legitimate reason for the public to want to track a vehicle.... but honestly, that's probably one of the best (only?) really solid arguments for demanding license plates on them. Without plates as unique identifiers, it's difficult to determine exactly which vehicle was used in a crime committed against you. If you say "A guy driving a late model blue Ford truck ran me off the road and drove off!" or what-not, that's not really good enough. And obviously, the VIN number isn't practical for this purpose either.
But yes, I *do* consider my car a personal possession. It certainly isn't public or state property! The only reason government really has any special reason to get involved with aspects of my vehicle ownership at all is because they built and maintain the road infrastructure most of us (including me) operate our vehicles on. Other than that, they should treat it like any other purchase I make.... Collect the same sales tax as they would any other time, but leave it alone after that.
The problems I have with what Westfield is doing aren't necessarily legal in nature. I think if they own the cameras and computers and they operate them on their own private property, plus they inform customers that they're in place? They're legally in the clear. But clearly, they're using technology that was never even considered as a possibility when license plates were first conceived -- and it's an implementation that some customers may not be comfortable with. I'd certainly think twice about parking in their garage if they start this at my local Westfield shopping plazas. The fact that it conveniently helps me locate my car is a small benefit, but as others have pointed out? There's a lot of potential for this information to be logged and cross-analyzed to provide marketing information I didn't agree to or get fairly compensated for providing.
Let me ask you this: How would you feel if every time you drove into a mall, some guy appeared with a clipboard and jotted down info including exactly where you parked in relation to their store entrances, the time/date you parked, and the type of vehicle you drove... and THEN appeared again as you were leaving to note what you were carrying to your vehicle, how long you took to load it up and leave the parking space, and again, a time/date stamp of exactly when that was? This is just an automated version of the same, really (with some of the details only extractable if they want to review the camera footage).
Ummm.... I think it's still worth considering that we wouldn't usually be in the position of having to wrestle with a company achieving this monopoly status if govt. didn't originally CAUSE the problem with their manipulation and regulation of the marketplace. AT&T started out WAY ahead of everyone else in the telecom game because they were granted legal monopoly status for many decades. In a truly free marketplace, I'm not convinced monopolies really happen very often. They're more of a rare anomaly than anything else. Typically, it takes the force of govt. mandates/legislation to guarantee a business is insulated from potential competitors.
It seems to me the problem we've seen in recent years is that Federal govt. isn't really *capable* of breaking up a monopoly in an effective and lasting manner, once they've created it and let it go for a length of time. By the nature of a regulated monopoly, it has MANY close ties to people in governmental positions of power, coupled with enormous wealth that's usually spread out in various places. If there ever comes a day when we collectively decide it's time to end the monopolies for public utility companies, for example? Can you really imagine the power or gas companies just "going away quietly"?
One of the only monopolies I can think of that didn't start out with government protection/sanction would be Microsoft... yet even there, that's very debatable. IBM essentially held the same status in the computer world before they came along and toppled them. Today, IBM is still a profitable player, but they have to compete on pretty much the same set of rules all the other big technology players play by. And without govt. intervention, Microsoft is doing a great job of imploding from within, as of late. (How's that popularity of those Windows Mobile phones going?)
Maybe you need to do a little more research.... Ron Paul ran on the LIBERTARIAN ticket in the past, and has NOT ever been a member of the Constitution party. The difference between the two parties, realistically? Not a huge amount, BUT, the Constitution party generally expresses much closer ties to some sort of "God" and/or religion having a place along-side of "proper governance".
In any case, the fact that the Constitution currently mandates the USPS doesn't negate the possibility that it's time to pass a new amendment to said Constitution to delete that requirement. We've already got quite a few of those amendments to the original document, because *sometimes* a revision is needed as times change. Most Libertarians I know would be more than accepting of the discontinuation of a Federal govt. provided service, if it's failing to work as intended and private industry has proven it's capable of handling the task. (When the USPS was new, mail was delivered on horseback.... a LOT has changed since then. The Internet is a HUGE factor, as is the proliferation of electronic bill-pay, either by touch-tone phone or Internet.)
As for your opinion on a private business trying to advertise with flyers, on a tight budget, being "criminal"? All I can say is I hope, some day, you try to start your own business and you receive a rude awakening about the cost of advertising, and how it can easily make or break your new start-up operation! The fact is, for every 100 flyers I distributed? I very consistently got at least 1 to 3 new customers, so SOME people were appreciative I handed those out. For everyone else? It was just one more piece of paper they could use as scrap paper if they wished, or recycle, or use as some extra fuel for their fireplace. Whatever... The idea that it created some huge hardship for you to have this one extra advertisement in your mailbox is insane.
I know I occasionally receive a flyer on my doorstep from a landscaping company or other such "home improvement/repair" related place, and quite often, I actually save them and scan copies into my computer to hang onto. Why? Because personally, I'd much rather give my money to the "little guy" trying to advertise that way than to some big firm running TV ads or taking out glossy color ads in the local papers. I know I'm not just paying inflated prices to cover that advertising!
Your point would be valid, except I think the tactic is generally not to CARE about trying to enforce an NDA or copyright or anything else. You simply want the really cheap labor to code the thing for you. What they do with it after that is rather irrelevant. For starters, assuming your project requires graphics, you probably have 2 different people outsourced to work on it for one. One guy is designing the GUI screens or the game characters and look of the backgrounds for the game levels, or what-not, while the other guy is coding the core of it. Since only YOU have the whole "ball of wax", neither one of them is able to completely steal the app.
If they go off and redesign your idea into something similar but a little bit different, and start trying to sell it? That's ok. You've probably got your app out there first, which has inherent value. But additionally, you can add value if you keep up good communications skills with your customers and occasionally offer product updates (which you could again outsource to yet another new developer, ensuring the first guy trying to screw you by submitting your original app idea as his doesn't have access to the revised one).
The more you pay for a product, the more justification you have for complaining if it doesn't meet your standards in certain ways. When the companies decided to "up the ante" as a rule, selling new PS3 game titles for a pretty standard price of $55 each, for example? They asked for harsh criticisms at every turn.
The argument that "players demand ever improving graphics quality and soundtracks, and more intricate level design" is largely bogus, IMO. Rarely do I hear people bemoaning those issues. Actually much more often, I hear the opposite sentiment; a lot of reflective commentary on the "glory days" of gaming, when a game was simply fun and addictive to play DESPITE relatively simple graphics and a basic premise.
The whole "improved graphics" thing is largely a function of basic expectations that software will make use of the currently available graphics power of the hardware of the day. A fun game is a fun game, period... and if you're sucked into it deeply enough, you'll cease to really notice the details in the graphics anyway. (I remember, for example, comparisons being made between Bioshock in Wndows on a Direct-X 9 capable setup and a Direct-X 10 capable one. They were bragging about the better looking ripple effects in the water and so forth, but it made me realize how much of a NON-issue the whole thing was! If they hadn't captured the scenes as frozen-in-time screen shots to look at while I wasn't playing, I wouldn't have really noticed or cared about the improvements!)
Nobody really wants to spend a bunch of money on a new machine, only to discover every single piece of software they buy runs no differently than it ran on their OLD system. So in that sense, yes, expectations increase. But not because gamers specifically demand it, with a mentality that the game can't be any good otherwise. The tools being used to MAKE the games improve in power with time too, so compile times vastly decrease and animation tools increasingly simplify design of animated scenes. All of this should balance things out for developers.
I think it's also worthwhile to step back and ask oneself what TYPE of game we're dealing with. If you're talking about a SIMULATION? By nature, that calls for doing everything possible to make it seem as much like what it simulates as possible. Sims are historically some of the most demanding programs out there for computers. Since the early days of the PC, the "Flight Simulator" game from Microsoft served as a benchmark test because it was so complex. Most of today's sports titles really come under the same heading. They're attempting to simulate a live sporting event. I'd argue that most of the 1st. person shooters have reached a simulation status of sorts, too. While the game-play may be far from "true to life", the virtual environment and movement of the characters as they interact with items in the world are attempting to simulate reality.
Traditional arcade games really never attempted to achieve "sim" status. Cartoonish representations of everything were plenty suitable, and basic ideas of gravity were good enough (no physics engine ensuring particles fly out from explosions in accurate patterns, etc).
Umm... first of all, as a libertarian and supporter of very much of what Ron Paul advocates right now? Sure, I'm happily a "teabagger" if that's how you'd choose to label me. On the other hand, I think most of the people rallying under the "Tea Party Republican" label are blithering idiots, including Palin, Bachmann, and even Rick Perry.
With THAT out of the way? I see a few problems with your "logic". First of all, if it's so critical for my mailbox at the end of the street to comply with numerous govt. regulations to "ensure it can be accessed easily from the postal truck", why not outlaw all the mail-slots in people's front doors? Surely, those things make mail delivery FAR more time-consuming and difficult for mail carriers than *anything* you could put near the end of your street/driveway for them to use? The fact is, the placement of a mailbox should be a common sense thing. Just put the thing up in such a manner so it can be used for its intended purpose. If it's impossible, because you did something really stupid (like putting it 10 feet from the edge of the road), the mail carrier doesn't have to use it until it's fixed. None of that requires a bunch of technical details to be codified into federal law. My garbage pickup company doesn't specify how many inches from the curb I have to leave my trash out for them, for them to pick it up....
More importantly? People who want to distribute advertising flyers shouldn't be made into criminals because they're trying to save money on postage by hand-delivering the materials themselves. Right now, they're told they should "rubber band or other affix the materials to a front door-knob". I actually did this sort of work once, trying to help promote my wife's housecleaning business, and I can tell you it triples the time and effort required to canvas a neighborhood, vs. being able to slip the flyers into mailboxes along the way. The excuse that this legislation helps stop people from stealing your mail is preposterous. Anyone who cared to observe could see the difference between a person carrying a stack of identical flyers and dropping one into each mailbox, and a person taking mail out of said mailboxes as he/she walked by. There's no need to decriminalize theft of mail, just to start allowing people to INSERT materials in a mailbox.
I'd agree with your point about package delivery being optimized differently than general mail delivery, but I still don't see why that negates the argument that mail delivery could be privatized. You're saying only the U.S. govt. is capable of organizing things in a profitable and efficient manner so people could drive a truck past each street address and drop off mail for you?? If UPS and FedEx simply set things up so every time they delivered a box to a given address, all the day's mail they had for that same address was delivered at the same time, they'd improve efficiency over what the USPS does right now. They could still run trucks for the purpose of delivering the rest of the mail and reduce the workload for those drivers.
I'm going to get a little bit snarky here, but there's a point to it.
Why go to all this effort to learn a language like C++ these days, if you're not already employed someplace where you're clearly able to earn more income fixing/building something specific for your employer that requires that skill-set?
As one of my good friends just realized, he's been struggling to master Objective-C so he could learn to code a few apps for the iPhone and iPad -- but he's "going about it all wrong", ultimately. After all, his reason for wanting to create those apps is a financial one, so he's far ahead to simply outsource the coding to another country where labor is relatively cheap, and simply "project manage" its progress as it's developed for him.
"Why tend the farm when you can own the plantation?" was his wording, I believe.... In a way, it's a shame our country has come to this (United States in our case), but it's a reality of the global economy. As long as someone can create a user account on a website like odesk.com and place want-ads for iOS developers, graphic artists, etc. and actually FIND people willing to do this work for as little as $7-9/hr. -- it's not remotely cost-effective to try to code an app yourself instead. Will the resulting code be a bunch of "spaghetti" that's difficult to maintain or decipher? Oh, quite likely! But the end-user won't CARE as long as he/she can download the thing for as little as 99 cents a copy and it basically does what it says.
It's VERY possible to spend as little as $800 or so and receive a complete, working game or other iOS app in return. Then, it's equally possible to turn around and earn at least $100-300 per month, month after month, for NO additional work beyond doing a little promotion of the app's existence and answering emails about it. More importantly, if one rolls the profits back into paying for development of the next app, the process can be done in a "wash, rinse repeat" process, ensuring a multiplication of monthly income. Don't forget, with tools like push notifications, one can announce the new apps to owners of the existing, previously sold apps, which helps drive more sales....
Obviously, the original poster wasn't referring to developing for smartphones.... but rather, using a long-standing, popular language for writing apps or even operating systems themselves. But my point remains.... We're reaching a stage where it's just not financially smart to hire developers at the kind of salaries or hourly wages they'd expect to receive for the type of work they're doing (and amount of learning required to be ABLE to do it). Outsourcing is becoming the new norm, even if it results in poorer quality code (and I think it often does).
The document management software we purchased, where I work, for many thousands of dollars back around 2004-05 used to be developed in-house, here in the U.S. Guess what? The entire last major revision was coded as outsourced labor in India. They retain a "help desk" in the U.S. to answer their phones and give the appearance you're still dealing with a U.S. based company -- but all the trouble tickets eventually get turned into work orders for Indian developers to do either as a "hotfix" or more often, as a required change for the next service pack or version of the software they have scheduled to release.
I was going to point out the same thing... that their massive retirement health package was a huge boat-anchor weighing down the ability of the USPS to function profitably. Still, I'm not sure that even without that, they'd be successful at this point?
The problem I have with the whole thing is the same issue I've had with the USPS for decades. It doesn't seem like there's any good reason to keep them around, vs. allowing existing package delivery services to deliver the rest of the mail as well?
For starters, the entire concept of a "mailbox" regulated by federal govt. laws and restrictions is rather ridiculous in this day and age. I can go out to the local Home Depot and buy myself a new mailbox right now, but immediately, I'm subject to a number of rules and regulations when I go to put the thing up in my front yard. It must be no more or less than a specific height, no more or less than a certain distance from the curb, must have my house numbers placed on it following certain rules, etc. And then, it's still considered "government controlled property" despite the fact I *bought* it myself and put it on *my* own land. It's illegal for a passer-by to open it and place any form of advertising inside. (Why?! Only plausible reason they'd care is to protect their monopoly status on delivery of such items!)
For years now, the U.S. govt. has been privately contracting with FedEx to help them deliver the USPS Express and Priority mail -- showing they're not even as capable of doing that as the private competitors are. Why not just END the entire thing? If the UPS or FedEx or DHL truck is driving down my street practically every day anyway to drop off or pick up a box, it'd be more fuel efficient for them to deliver the rest of my mail while they're at it -- vs. the USPS running another truck to do the same thing.
How many computer or electronic device makers have Chinese plants producing their circuit boards for them? Last I checked, Apple was only one of MANY. Yet this article makes it sound like Apple, alone, is at fault here for not making good on their claim that they're committed to driving the highest standards of social responsibility throughout their supply base.
Let's face the facts. Only *China* can take care of pollution in China. If their government doesn't consider it important for businesses operating there not to dump hazardous waste into their ground-water, that's the decision they've made on behalf of their citizens.
When you do business with China, you accept many pros and cons. For example, as Apple is finding out, China also has little regard for intellectual property and copyright -- so plenty of jobs are being created by way of counterfeiting Apple's products and tarnishing their reputation/good name. Again, as much as Apple may be committed to ensuring their intellectual property is protected, they can only do what the Chinese government is WILLING to do for them in those regards, in their nation.
Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem? Delivering content from strategically located caches is an OLD concept, and it's always been trouble-prone, with some sites not receiving updated content in a timely manner and others getting corrupted.
Quite frankly, I wish some of the big players with vested commercial interests in a good-performing internet (like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft) would pitch in on some investment funding to upgrade the infrastructure itself. I know Google has experimented with it on a small scale, running fiber to the door in a few U.S. cities. But I'm talking about thinking MUCH bigger. Fund a non-profit initiative that installs trans-Atlantic cables and maintains them, perhaps? If a nation wants to censor/control things, perhaps they'd reject such a thing coming to their country, but that's ok.... their loss. Done properly, I can see it guaranteeing a more open and accessible internet for all the participants (since presumably, use of such circuits, funded by a non-profit, would include stipulations that the connections would NOT get shut off or tampered with by government).
Honestly, I've *never* seen an extended warranty that was truly a "good deal", in the sense that it saved you money over any of your other options. Extended warranties are like insurance policies though; you agree to pay a certain price for a certain length of time of coverage, ensuring that if anything breaks, you're not out of pocket a large, surprise amount of money to get it working again.
Most of the computers Best Buy sells are models more liable than average to break and need service in the first place, so I'd argue that rather than paying hundreds more for their extended service plan, it would be smarter to buy a better quality machine from the start. (I hate to name names, but the Toshiba Satellite and Satellite Pro series I've seen MANY people purchase at Best Buy stores over the years seem like they're always going back in for some kind of service work -- from dead motherboards to overheating issues to bad video chipsets, to broken CD/DVD drives and trays. A number of the HP Pavilion laptops I've seen people buy there had issues too - especially with power adapter jacks that came loose or again, motherboard failures.)
When you're talking about a large investment like a car or truck purchase, I can see more justification for the extended warranty, assuming it really covers enough potential problems and it's being sold by someone reputable (manufacturer's own are probably safest). In those cases, you're probably doing financing over as long as 5 or 6 years anyway - so it's relatively painless to cough up the several thousand dollars so it's rolled into the monthly payments. Even if you only have 1 or 2 claims over the life of that ext. warranty plan and they total up to, say, $800-1500 less than you paid for the plan? You essentially paid for peace of mind that beyond that initially agreed-upon monthly finance payment, you wouldn't get stuck having to come up with $1000 or more all at once or have a disabled vehicle you were STILL paying the bank for until you could come up with it.
With a laptop computer, you likely paid under $1,000 for it from Best Buy in the first place, right? If it lasts through the 1 year factory warranty period (and if not, will get fixed free by the manufacturer, presumably), you're probably in a good position to either A) resell it while it's still in good working order, and just over 1 year old, so you can recoup enough cash to put towards another new model, or B) use it until something DOES break and find out how much that repair costs. It may be possible to buy another identical (broken with a different problem) laptop off eBay or Craigslist and use parts from it to fix yours inexpensively. If it's just a failed hard drive or bad RAM -- no big deal. $100 or less in most cases to replace that stuff. If it's serious like a bad motherboard, just eBay it for parts (screen might still be good in that case, for example) and buy a new machine.
I'm betting that if you always stick to my above strategy, you'll come out ahead of trying to hang onto an older system that has extended warranty left on it. There's some value in having a new (likely faster) machine that you miss out on if you keep fixing that older one, and disadvantages of waiting to get a broken one back from the shop if and when it does break and you use that extended warranty on it.
I've been in I.T. long enough to have a few guesses.
IMHO, the "cloud" push will largely turn out to be little more than a fad or phase. I'm not saying it will go away; rather, businesses will go through initiatives to move as much as possible into the cloud, only to discover some serious disadvantages over time which cause most of them to pull back. Eventually, I think you'll see it stabilize into a situation where many people have at least ONE application (Exchange being a really good candidate) in the cloud, while still maintaining local I.T. infrastructure and servers for other things.
I know where I work now, for example, one of our issues is limited bandwidth. We can't get cable Internet without paying close to $15,000 in expenses to roll the cable out to our location first, and high speed DSL isn't an option either. We're stuck with T1 circuits, and currently, a 3mbit bonded T1 pair is around $700 per month (even higher if I didn't really shop around for the lowest price). Given that, it makes no sense to put our mission critical apps out in the cloud, where everyone would vie for that 3mbit of bandwidth to run them, AND still need it for regular Internet downloads and surfing.
But even if you HAVE cheap broadband, there are always questions like data security. (Say your cloud provider goes out of business. What guarantee do you have they'll really wipe all the hard drives and backups holding your data when they liquidate all their equipment?) Furthermore, as the cloud gets more popular, I think you'll see more instances of outages/downtime to go with it. Whether it's really warranted or not, businesses are going to get nervous when the execs read about the latest outage someplace, and start asking what their I.T. departments are doing to ensure it doesn't impact them. The most cost-effective and practical answer is going to involve replication and running some local hardware, IMO -- again ensuring your I.T. staff has to be retained.
But ultimately, I think the BIGGEST reasons most companies need to retain some I.T. staff is the user training and support/hand-holding that's expected. The vast majority of employees are NOT that computer-savvy, yet they're asked to spend a lot of time using a computer in their workplace. That demand comes with a hidden cost. Either they pay a premium up-front to only hire people with a high level of computer skills, or they pay by way of retaining I.T. "help desk" and "support specialist" staffers who come running when Lisa in accounting jams up the laser printer trying to run checks, or Joe needs to know how to sum several columns in an Excel spreadsheet. None of that is going to change if the apps are hosted off-site instead of on-site.
Not everyone is a good novelist. Some people are outstanding when they limit themselves to writing only short stories, but they'd get completely bogged down attempting a "War and Peace".
The video game industry, by and large, has a problem because they've set expectations of how long a game "should be". Game writers should quit worrying about hitting any targets of a specific length of time to complete a game, and just concentrate on making everything in it as FUN as possible. When you run out of creative ideas, maybe it's time to end the game there and focus on cleaning up the details of what you already wrote!
Replay value is another factor to consider. If a game can be completed quickly, that doesn't necessarily mean it lacks value for its price. If it's designed the right way, some people who finish it will still enjoy it enough to go back through it again (just like some people will re-read a really good book). It helps if the game allows completion with different classes of characters, and is flexible enough to make things play out in very different ways when it is played through with different characters. That's a potential advantage a book author doesn't have, with books being static.
I'm *so* tired of this "ban cellphones in the car" crusade!
This guy's behavior was obviously reckless and stupid - but that doesn't mean the ANSWER is to ban the devices. I've regularly used a cellphone in my vehicle for YEARS and never really had an issue with it. I've had a total of two accidents in the last 5 years,and you know what? Both times, people rear-ended me and it was clearly not my fault whatsoever. (The first time, I simply came to a stop on a 30MPH road where a guy was making a left turn into a shopping plaza entrance and a woman behind me in her minivan didn't stop. The second time, traffic came to a sudden stop on the interstate, and I stopped in time, but a guy behind me in a pickup truck had worn tires and wasn't able to stop completely.)
I always use bluetooth hands-free kits these days, but I used to simply hold the handset in one hand and that was doable too, though admittedly slightly less safe than a hands-free kit, simply because you can't keep both hands on the wheel while holding one. I don't text while driving, since that's pretty clearly a bad idea.
This whole problem comes down to people needing to use some common sense, and perhaps needing some awareness training. One has to develop a subconscious awareness that anything related to the cellphone is of only secondary priority to driving the vehicle. EG. If I suddenly run into a difficult traffic situation, I tend to tune out the person I was talking to for a little while, to focus on the road instead. Afterwards, I'll simply apologize, telling them I had to deal with some traffic and ask if they could please repeat whatever they were saying. If I'm holding a cellphone and suddenly find it's hindering me from making a turn I need to make, I'll just let go of the phone. It's better to interrupt a phone call suddenly and have to hassle with finding where the phone fell under your seat, after you pull over to the side, than get in a wreck because you didn't want to let go of it!
I suspect if this was actually taught as part of drivers' ed, the cellphone problem would cease to be a real problem.
A while ago, I tried to tackle a similar project with an Acer 486 class notebook I was given for free. (It was in practically new condition, other than its battery not holding much of a charge any more. The owner took immaculate care of it and then stuffed it in a carrying bag, in a coat closet, for years before giving it to me.)
I thought it was a shame not to try to get it running something useful. (It had Windows '95 on it, which didn't run very well. Even if I wanted to keep '95 on it, I would have needed the restore/recovery media which was missing.) Linux seemed like the obvious answer, but after wasting several days downloading and trying out various distros, I found that the only ones providing good performance were VERY stripped down obscure versions designed for old/obsolete hardware.
In the end, I wound up with a machine that had a working Linux OS on it, but nobody would ever really use for anything. I mean, why bother when the typical smartphone was WAY more functional and user-friendly? Not to mention, replacement battery packs for this old laptop were still selling for upwards of $70 new, which would REALLY make no sense to invest in it. Yet without one, it didn't even offer the level of portability a laptop was supposed to provide.
If you step back to something even OLDER like this 386 machine? You're really reaching a point where you're simply being foolish to waste your time with it. Even the article's author struggled to justify a possible use for the computer he going working with Debian. Basically, all he could come up with is that it might work as something you didn't care if you screwed up, just to poke around and learn the basics on Linux on. Well, let's stop and think about that one a minute. With all the hassle it was setting it up in the FIRST place, would it really be "no big deal" if you screwed up the installation messing around with it? I think, as slow as it was doing the install on it, it would be a rather big headache, actually. And you'd really want to use an ancient 386 laptop as a Linux learning tool? You couldn't find SOMEONE who'd give you a free Dell or HP desktop/mini tower that had at least a generation or two newer CPU in it?? (I think I have at least 4 or 5 such systems out in my garage collecting dust as we speak.)
About the only real nugget of interest I gleaned from this whole article is the fact that pretty much everyone has removed the 386 support from their Linux distros these days. (I doubt I would have ever spent the time to verify that fact myself.)
I like computer history as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean a feel a duty to be curator of my own computer hardware museum. If you can't find a good dedicated job for an ancient machine of this type to do (say a controller for a model railroad layout or a dedicated machine to program phone PBX systems or high-end routers or switches with?), I think you're probably best sending it off for recycling and looking for something a little newer.
The problem here, as I see it, is that all of these tablets and smartphones started appealing to the crowd that never really took to the computer in the first place. That means you've suddenly got another big wave of people discovering things like Twitter, Facebook, personal email accounts and Google's various services, or finally getting on-board with shopping for things online. Some of them are even getting hooked on casual gaming (Angry Birds, etc.).
If you ask THOSE folks, sure - they're very likely to believe the "end of the desktop PC is upon us", because they think they've got something "better" with their tablet or smartphone, netbook or e-reader. And hey, it always feels good to be able proclaim a device "dead" or "dying" when you never liked it in the first place.
If there really is such a thing as the "post PC age", it will consist of a COMBINATION of desktop PCs and notebooks, PLUS all of these new devices. As usual, the content CREATORS usually want/need a system more powerful than what you can cram into a super-portable container, suitable for consumption of that content. And ergonomics aren't changing any time soon either. It's harder on the eyes looking at a tiny screen and less comfortable for one's back working for long periods of time on a portable devices that you typically sit on furniture not designed specifically for that purpose (unlike a computer desk). By the time you make all the compromises needed to attach a tablet or netbook to a full size LCD display, link it with a standard size keyboard and pointing device, and attach a power source so it can run for an extended time without batteries running out? You might as well just get a regular desktop PC to leave set up in that space permanently, most of the time!
More and more people are waking up to the reality of things. Politicians play politics, period. It doesn't really matter which side you happen to be on. The "game" has the same goals for either party, really. It's all about getting enough votes to get into and stay in power. I blame just about everyone in the Senate, in Congress, our current and past few presidents, and the rest of the folks more concerned about their short-term political success than the long-term welfare of the nation.
It's immensely clear when you look at the lies spread, all around, about the entire issue. EG. Threatening the American people with the fear of a default if the debt ceiling legislation wasn't passed by a specific time? Pure B.S.! If the debt ceiling wasn't raised, government would simply have to prioritize who it paid first and who had to wait longer.
Heck, we spent most of the debt limit increase in a DAY:
Though I've never even attempted to write any content for Wikipedia, I can easily believe your story. Just yesterday, a buddy of mine found an old photo of me playing electric guitar in a band we formed back around the 1990 time-frame. In it, I had a red Charvette branded guitar (part of Charvel's cheaper line of electric guitars at the time). I'd forgotten all about it until seeing the pic, so I thought to look it up on Wikipedia and learn a little more about the brand. Oddly enough, they had an entry for Charvel with quite a bit of info on their products, not nothing about Charvette whatsoever!
When I did a Google search, though, a cached copy of the same Charvel entry apparently did. It looked to me like someone decided Charvette didn't belong in the Charvel entry (for who knows what reason?) and deleted mention of it in a revision.
IMHO, if you don't have enough info about a specific product or product line to justify its own independent entry, there's *nothing* wrong with referencing it under a parent manufacturer or in some article where it could be related to the primary topic. It's better to have the info accessible than to have nothing at all about it, simply because nobody collected enough info to meet some editor's standards for a separate entry.
I am using a 2010 Macbook Pro 17" with Lion as we speak, and so far, no sign of any graphics driver issues? The kernel panics and black screens described sound pretty typical of an overheating video chip to me, and we've certainly seen it before with a defective batch of nVidia mobile GPUs across many product lines.
Did they release some defective GPUs again in the 2010 Macbook Pros, perhaps? Or maybe some of them just have too much heatsink paste applied, causing inefficient cooling? Lots of possibilities here, but as others have said -- this definitely is NOT a major issue that Lion users are running up against. This is the first I've heard of it despite combing Apple related forums on a daily basis.
That's actually my biggest concern about these super tall structures. It seems like the more occupants you place in a single structure, the more you risk accidents that cause a need for evacuation (fire most obviously, but also such things as flooding from burst pipes or carelessness). If a far more efficient system of elevators isn't put together than what I normally see used, I'd worry about the safety of such buildings. I know we've got a pretty basic 22 story apartment building (former hotel) here in town that I occasionally get called out to for computer service calls, and quite a few older people in relatively poor health have moved in there. It only has 2 regular passenger elevators (and I believe a 3rd. freight elevator on an opposite wall), and at least one of the two primary elevators is often shut down for maintenance or repairs. You can expect to spend a good 4-5 minutes getting from an upper floor apartment to the lobby, in most cases, with all the people constantly going in and out. It already seems to me like it pushes the boundaries of "safe", as "run of the mill" as it is in height.
Plus, despite all the talk about real-estate becoming so scare we need these structures? I'm not sure there aren't diminishing returns past a certain number of floors. How much extra money does it cost to construct buildings like this to withstand high winds and to run utilities that far up and down to each room that needs them? Wouldn't you be better off building all of the buildings in the area with, say, 15 or 20 floors, vs. trying to have a few mega-structures like this?
Yeah, but that's actually kind of my point in my original message.... These systems should be INDEPENDENT of the ECU in most cases. Vehicle remotes for starting the engine, opening the trunk, etc. don't worry me as a huge problem. I can't really see why they require any direct communications with the ECU (though they probably do simply for cost-savings reasons in many cases)? But really, those things are fairly basic; System listens for command and does ONE specific function of turning a switch on/off. If you succeed in hacking into it, what does that get you? Remote starts should be essentially disabled/non-functional while the engine is actually running and the car is in gear, so you shouldn't be able to just shut the engine off while someone's driving. Being able to open their locks means you can physically get into the vehicle while it's not moving -- but that's just a security issue, no different than being able to make a skeleton key that opens the doors/trunk.
Things like On-Star? Yeah, much more of a potential issue since they do implement "kill switches" that can be triggered remotely. So far though, I've never heard of one being mis-used -- only positive stories of killing engines to recover stolen vehicles. So I'm not sure exactly how much or little security they already use in that particular system? (Hyundai is coming out with "Blue Link" on some of their vehicles, which implements something similar.)
Again, I'm not suggesting that Enterprise uses of PC rack-mount hardware should consider a switch to Mac Pros if they fit in 4U of rack space!
I'm simply saying that realistically, most people considering a Mac as their server are already an all-Mac shop, or at least have an all-Mac department. In these situations, you're not typically worried about packing as many servers as possible into a given amount of rack space. A single Mac Pro server is probably all they'd ever want to rack mount for a departmental server (plus a disk storage cabinet, perhaps, like a Promise V-Trak or something).
The 1U XServes simply weren't selling well, and I think it's largely for my reason above. They were never price-competitive with 1U Linux servers out there, and Windows shops certainly wouldn't bother to take notice of them, since they ship with OS X on them, not Windows Server. They served a niche purpose, which is further whittled away at by facilities that get by just fine rack-mounting groups of Mac Minis with special mounting kits and places that don't want/need to rack mount their server equipment in the first place.
OS X Lion Server does have a few interesting niche capabilities, BTW, that justify using it. For example, it easily functions as a document interchange server for iOS devices (iPad or iPhone running Apple iWork suite, for example), so those users have a network location to load/save documents. It also has a podcast server built in, and can function as the Mac equivalent of Active Directory (even supplementing an existing Microsoft Active Directory server in what Apple calls "Golden Triangle" mode, so it will handle only the Mac-specific directory info that AD doesn't deal with itself).
It seems to me there's really no inherent danger in adding wireless networking and other new electronics technologies to our vehicles. A big part of the potential problem stems from the insistence of auto-makers to integrate everything into ONE common system. For example, my 2007 Jeep Patriot 4x4 uses a CANBUS interface as the central communications bus for practically all of the electronics in the vehicle. If you try to swap out something like the factory headlights with an aftermarket set of HID lamps? You're likely to run into problems, because the system senses less electrical resistance on the headlight circuit than it expects, so it makes lights blink on and off in an "error" pattern. You can't successfully change out the factory stereo with an aftermarket one either, without spending $150+ more for a CANBUS module to plug in behind it, so the computer system communicates with it as it expects to see it. Other factory accessories won't work properly either, until the Jeep is taken in to the dealer and the firmware re-flashed with a version that has those features "enabled" in it.
If things like wi-fi in the car are only interfaced with the stereo/media center, and that system is independent of the computer handling the engine, transmission, etc.? Hackers won't be able to do a single thing that directly affects the safety or performance of the vehicle. They'll only be able to mess up your in-dash entertainment system.
It's only conjecture, mind you, but it's also a definite possibility that when the next revision of the Mac Pro arrives (should be around the September 2011 time-frame), Apple will redesign the case so you can actually flip it on its side and rack-mount it. It's *almost* doable right now, except the case has those arched "handles" on the top and bottom that aren't removable and it's not exactly the right height for a perfect fit. It wouldn't be hard to design it with optional rack rails you could attach to the top and bottom, swapping out removable handles, and making sure it has the appropriate case dimensions to span the width of a rack perfectly.
That would make a lot of sense from their point-of-view. No more need to maintain a product that's a relatively poor/slow seller, while allowing flexibility for Pro users to run the towers as servers in rack installations, where applicable.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if anyone's considered donating CPU time to a project like Folding@Home or this, and then writing off the electricity costs on their taxes?
I'm not claiming there's no legitimate reason for the public to want to track a vehicle.... but honestly, that's probably one of the best (only?) really solid arguments for demanding license plates on them. Without plates as unique identifiers, it's difficult to determine exactly which vehicle was used in a crime committed against you. If you say "A guy driving a late model blue Ford truck ran me off the road and drove off!" or what-not, that's not really good enough. And obviously, the VIN number isn't practical for this purpose either.
But yes, I *do* consider my car a personal possession. It certainly isn't public or state property! The only reason government really has any special reason to get involved with aspects of my vehicle ownership at all is because they built and maintain the road infrastructure most of us (including me) operate our vehicles on. Other than that, they should treat it like any other purchase I make.... Collect the same sales tax as they would any other time, but leave it alone after that.
The problems I have with what Westfield is doing aren't necessarily legal in nature. I think if they own the cameras and computers and they operate them on their own private property, plus they inform customers that they're in place? They're legally in the clear. But clearly, they're using technology that was never even considered as a possibility when license plates were first conceived -- and it's an implementation that some customers may not be comfortable with. I'd certainly think twice about parking in their garage if they start this at my local Westfield shopping plazas. The fact that it conveniently helps me locate my car is a small benefit, but as others have pointed out? There's a lot of potential for this information to be logged and cross-analyzed to provide marketing information I didn't agree to or get fairly compensated for providing.
Let me ask you this: How would you feel if every time you drove into a mall, some guy appeared with a clipboard and jotted down info including exactly where you parked in relation to their store entrances, the time/date you parked, and the type of vehicle you drove ... and THEN appeared again as you were leaving to note what you were carrying to your vehicle, how long you took to load it up and leave the parking space, and again, a time/date stamp of exactly when that was? This is just an automated version of the same, really (with some of the details only extractable if they want to review the camera footage).
Ummm.... I think it's still worth considering that we wouldn't usually be in the position of having to wrestle with a company achieving this monopoly status if govt. didn't originally CAUSE the problem with their manipulation and regulation of the marketplace. AT&T started out WAY ahead of everyone else in the telecom game because they were granted legal monopoly status for many decades. In a truly free marketplace, I'm not convinced monopolies really happen very often. They're more of a rare anomaly than anything else. Typically, it takes the force of govt. mandates/legislation to guarantee a business is insulated from potential competitors.
It seems to me the problem we've seen in recent years is that Federal govt. isn't really *capable* of breaking up a monopoly in an effective and lasting manner, once they've created it and let it go for a length of time. By the nature of a regulated monopoly, it has MANY close ties to people in governmental positions of power, coupled with enormous wealth that's usually spread out in various places. If there ever comes a day when we collectively decide it's time to end the monopolies for public utility companies, for example? Can you really imagine the power or gas companies just "going away quietly"?
One of the only monopolies I can think of that didn't start out with government protection/sanction would be Microsoft ... yet even there, that's very debatable. IBM essentially held the same status in the computer world before they came along and toppled them. Today, IBM is still a profitable player, but they have to compete on pretty much the same set of rules all the other big technology players play by. And without govt. intervention, Microsoft is doing a great job of imploding from within, as of late. (How's that popularity of those Windows Mobile phones going?)
Maybe you need to do a little more research.... Ron Paul ran on the LIBERTARIAN ticket in the past, and has NOT ever been a member of the Constitution party. The difference between the two parties, realistically? Not a huge amount, BUT, the Constitution party generally expresses much closer ties to some sort of "God" and/or religion having a place along-side of "proper governance".
In any case, the fact that the Constitution currently mandates the USPS doesn't negate the possibility that it's time to pass a new amendment to said Constitution to delete that requirement. We've already got quite a few of those amendments to the original document, because *sometimes* a revision is needed as times change. Most Libertarians I know would be more than accepting of the discontinuation of a Federal govt. provided service, if it's failing to work as intended and private industry has proven it's capable of handling the task. (When the USPS was new, mail was delivered on horseback .... a LOT has changed since then. The Internet is a HUGE factor, as is the proliferation of electronic bill-pay, either by touch-tone phone or Internet.)
As for your opinion on a private business trying to advertise with flyers, on a tight budget, being "criminal"? All I can say is I hope, some day, you try to start your own business and you receive a rude awakening about the cost of advertising, and how it can easily make or break your new start-up operation! The fact is, for every 100 flyers I distributed? I very consistently got at least 1 to 3 new customers, so SOME people were appreciative I handed those out. For everyone else? It was just one more piece of paper they could use as scrap paper if they wished, or recycle, or use as some extra fuel for their fireplace. Whatever ... The idea that it created some huge hardship for you to have this one extra advertisement in your mailbox is insane.
I know I occasionally receive a flyer on my doorstep from a landscaping company or other such "home improvement/repair" related place, and quite often, I actually save them and scan copies into my computer to hang onto. Why? Because personally, I'd much rather give my money to the "little guy" trying to advertise that way than to some big firm running TV ads or taking out glossy color ads in the local papers. I know I'm not just paying inflated prices to cover that advertising!
Your point would be valid, except I think the tactic is generally not to CARE about trying to enforce an NDA or copyright or anything else. You simply want the really cheap labor to code the thing for you. What they do with it after that is rather irrelevant. For starters, assuming your project requires graphics, you probably have 2 different people outsourced to work on it for one. One guy is designing the GUI screens or the game characters and look of the backgrounds for the game levels, or what-not, while the other guy is coding the core of it. Since only YOU have the whole "ball of wax", neither one of them is able to completely steal the app.
If they go off and redesign your idea into something similar but a little bit different, and start trying to sell it? That's ok. You've probably got your app out there first, which has inherent value. But additionally, you can add value if you keep up good communications skills with your customers and occasionally offer product updates (which you could again outsource to yet another new developer, ensuring the first guy trying to screw you by submitting your original app idea as his doesn't have access to the revised one).
The more you pay for a product, the more justification you have for complaining if it doesn't meet your standards in certain ways. When the companies decided to "up the ante" as a rule, selling new PS3 game titles for a pretty standard price of $55 each, for example? They asked for harsh criticisms at every turn.
The argument that "players demand ever improving graphics quality and soundtracks, and more intricate level design" is largely bogus, IMO. Rarely do I hear people bemoaning those issues. Actually much more often, I hear the opposite sentiment; a lot of reflective commentary on the "glory days" of gaming, when a game was simply fun and addictive to play DESPITE relatively simple graphics and a basic premise.
The whole "improved graphics" thing is largely a function of basic expectations that software will make use of the currently available graphics power of the hardware of the day. A fun game is a fun game, period ... and if you're sucked into it deeply enough, you'll cease to really notice the details in the graphics anyway. (I remember, for example, comparisons being made between Bioshock in Wndows on a Direct-X 9 capable setup and a Direct-X 10 capable one. They were bragging about the better looking ripple effects in the water and so forth, but it made me realize how much of a NON-issue the whole thing was! If they hadn't captured the scenes as frozen-in-time screen shots to look at while I wasn't playing, I wouldn't have really noticed or cared about the improvements!)
Nobody really wants to spend a bunch of money on a new machine, only to discover every single piece of software they buy runs no differently than it ran on their OLD system. So in that sense, yes, expectations increase. But not because gamers specifically demand it, with a mentality that the game can't be any good otherwise. The tools being used to MAKE the games improve in power with time too, so compile times vastly decrease and animation tools increasingly simplify design of animated scenes. All of this should balance things out for developers.
I think it's also worthwhile to step back and ask oneself what TYPE of game we're dealing with. If you're talking about a SIMULATION? By nature, that calls for doing everything possible to make it seem as much like what it simulates as possible. Sims are historically some of the most demanding programs out there for computers. Since the early days of the PC, the "Flight Simulator" game from Microsoft served as a benchmark test because it was so complex. Most of today's sports titles really come under the same heading. They're attempting to simulate a live sporting event. I'd argue that most of the 1st. person shooters have reached a simulation status of sorts, too. While the game-play may be far from "true to life", the virtual environment and movement of the characters as they interact with items in the world are attempting to simulate reality.
Traditional arcade games really never attempted to achieve "sim" status. Cartoonish representations of everything were plenty suitable, and basic ideas of gravity were good enough (no physics engine ensuring particles fly out from explosions in accurate patterns, etc).
Umm... first of all, as a libertarian and supporter of very much of what Ron Paul advocates right now? Sure, I'm happily a "teabagger" if that's how you'd choose to label me. On the other hand, I think most of the people rallying under the "Tea Party Republican" label are blithering idiots, including Palin, Bachmann, and even Rick Perry.
With THAT out of the way? I see a few problems with your "logic". First of all, if it's so critical for my mailbox at the end of the street to comply with numerous govt. regulations to "ensure it can be accessed easily from the postal truck", why not outlaw all the mail-slots in people's front doors? Surely, those things make mail delivery FAR more time-consuming and difficult for mail carriers than *anything* you could put near the end of your street/driveway for them to use? The fact is, the placement of a mailbox should be a common sense thing. Just put the thing up in such a manner so it can be used for its intended purpose. If it's impossible, because you did something really stupid (like putting it 10 feet from the edge of the road), the mail carrier doesn't have to use it until it's fixed. None of that requires a bunch of technical details to be codified into federal law. My garbage pickup company doesn't specify how many inches from the curb I have to leave my trash out for them, for them to pick it up....
More importantly? People who want to distribute advertising flyers shouldn't be made into criminals because they're trying to save money on postage by hand-delivering the materials themselves. Right now, they're told they should "rubber band or other affix the materials to a front door-knob". I actually did this sort of work once, trying to help promote my wife's housecleaning business, and I can tell you it triples the time and effort required to canvas a neighborhood, vs. being able to slip the flyers into mailboxes along the way. The excuse that this legislation helps stop people from stealing your mail is preposterous. Anyone who cared to observe could see the difference between a person carrying a stack of identical flyers and dropping one into each mailbox, and a person taking mail out of said mailboxes as he/she walked by. There's no need to decriminalize theft of mail, just to start allowing people to INSERT materials in a mailbox.
I'd agree with your point about package delivery being optimized differently than general mail delivery, but I still don't see why that negates the argument that mail delivery could be privatized. You're saying only the U.S. govt. is capable of organizing things in a profitable and efficient manner so people could drive a truck past each street address and drop off mail for you?? If UPS and FedEx simply set things up so every time they delivered a box to a given address, all the day's mail they had for that same address was delivered at the same time, they'd improve efficiency over what the USPS does right now. They could still run trucks for the purpose of delivering the rest of the mail and reduce the workload for those drivers.
I'm going to get a little bit snarky here, but there's a point to it.
Why go to all this effort to learn a language like C++ these days, if you're not already employed someplace where you're clearly able to earn more income fixing/building something specific for your employer that requires that skill-set?
As one of my good friends just realized, he's been struggling to master Objective-C so he could learn to code a few apps for the iPhone and iPad -- but he's "going about it all wrong", ultimately. After all, his reason for wanting to create those apps is a financial one, so he's far ahead to simply outsource the coding to another country where labor is relatively cheap, and simply "project manage" its progress as it's developed for him.
"Why tend the farm when you can own the plantation?" was his wording, I believe.... In a way, it's a shame our country has come to this (United States in our case), but it's a reality of the global economy. As long as someone can create a user account on a website like odesk.com and place want-ads for iOS developers, graphic artists, etc. and actually FIND people willing to do this work for as little as $7-9/hr. -- it's not remotely cost-effective to try to code an app yourself instead. Will the resulting code be a bunch of "spaghetti" that's difficult to maintain or decipher? Oh, quite likely! But the end-user won't CARE as long as he/she can download the thing for as little as 99 cents a copy and it basically does what it says.
It's VERY possible to spend as little as $800 or so and receive a complete, working game or other iOS app in return. Then, it's equally possible to turn around and earn at least $100-300 per month, month after month, for NO additional work beyond doing a little promotion of the app's existence and answering emails about it. More importantly, if one rolls the profits back into paying for development of the next app, the process can be done in a "wash, rinse repeat" process, ensuring a multiplication of monthly income. Don't forget, with tools like push notifications, one can announce the new apps to owners of the existing, previously sold apps, which helps drive more sales....
Obviously, the original poster wasn't referring to developing for smartphones .... but rather, using a long-standing, popular language for writing apps or even operating systems themselves. But my point remains.... We're reaching a stage where it's just not financially smart to hire developers at the kind of salaries or hourly wages they'd expect to receive for the type of work they're doing (and amount of learning required to be ABLE to do it). Outsourcing is becoming the new norm, even if it results in poorer quality code (and I think it often does).
The document management software we purchased, where I work, for many thousands of dollars back around 2004-05 used to be developed in-house, here in the U.S. Guess what? The entire last major revision was coded as outsourced labor in India. They retain a "help desk" in the U.S. to answer their phones and give the appearance you're still dealing with a U.S. based company -- but all the trouble tickets eventually get turned into work orders for Indian developers to do either as a "hotfix" or more often, as a required change for the next service pack or version of the software they have scheduled to release.
I was going to point out the same thing ... that their massive retirement health package was a huge boat-anchor weighing down the ability of the USPS to function profitably. Still, I'm not sure that even without that, they'd be successful at this point?
The problem I have with the whole thing is the same issue I've had with the USPS for decades. It doesn't seem like there's any good reason to keep them around, vs. allowing existing package delivery services to deliver the rest of the mail as well?
For starters, the entire concept of a "mailbox" regulated by federal govt. laws and restrictions is rather ridiculous in this day and age. I can go out to the local Home Depot and buy myself a new mailbox right now, but immediately, I'm subject to a number of rules and regulations when I go to put the thing up in my front yard. It must be no more or less than a specific height, no more or less than a certain distance from the curb, must have my house numbers placed on it following certain rules, etc. And then, it's still considered "government controlled property" despite the fact I *bought* it myself and put it on *my* own land. It's illegal for a passer-by to open it and place any form of advertising inside. (Why?! Only plausible reason they'd care is to protect their monopoly status on delivery of such items!)
For years now, the U.S. govt. has been privately contracting with FedEx to help them deliver the USPS Express and Priority mail -- showing they're not even as capable of doing that as the private competitors are. Why not just END the entire thing? If the UPS or FedEx or DHL truck is driving down my street practically every day anyway to drop off or pick up a box, it'd be more fuel efficient for them to deliver the rest of my mail while they're at it -- vs. the USPS running another truck to do the same thing.
How many computer or electronic device makers have Chinese plants producing their circuit boards for them? Last I checked, Apple was only one of MANY. Yet this article makes it sound like Apple, alone, is at fault here for not making good on their claim that they're committed to driving the highest standards of social responsibility throughout their supply base.
Let's face the facts. Only *China* can take care of pollution in China. If their government doesn't consider it important for businesses operating there not to dump hazardous waste into their ground-water, that's the decision they've made on behalf of their citizens.
When you do business with China, you accept many pros and cons. For example, as Apple is finding out, China also has little regard for intellectual property and copyright -- so plenty of jobs are being created by way of counterfeiting Apple's products and tarnishing their reputation/good name. Again, as much as Apple may be committed to ensuring their intellectual property is protected, they can only do what the Chinese government is WILLING to do for them in those regards, in their nation.
Isn't this little more than an expensive band-aid for the underlying bandwidth problem? Delivering content from strategically located caches is an OLD concept, and it's always been trouble-prone, with some sites not receiving updated content in a timely manner and others getting corrupted.
Quite frankly, I wish some of the big players with vested commercial interests in a good-performing internet (like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft) would pitch in on some investment funding to upgrade the infrastructure itself. I know Google has experimented with it on a small scale, running fiber to the door in a few U.S. cities. But I'm talking about thinking MUCH bigger. Fund a non-profit initiative that installs trans-Atlantic cables and maintains them, perhaps? If a nation wants to censor/control things, perhaps they'd reject such a thing coming to their country, but that's ok.... their loss. Done properly, I can see it guaranteeing a more open and accessible internet for all the participants (since presumably, use of such circuits, funded by a non-profit, would include stipulations that the connections would NOT get shut off or tampered with by government).
Honestly, I've *never* seen an extended warranty that was truly a "good deal", in the sense that it saved you money over any of your other options. Extended warranties are like insurance policies though; you agree to pay a certain price for a certain length of time of coverage, ensuring that if anything breaks, you're not out of pocket a large, surprise amount of money to get it working again.
Most of the computers Best Buy sells are models more liable than average to break and need service in the first place, so I'd argue that rather than paying hundreds more for their extended service plan, it would be smarter to buy a better quality machine from the start. (I hate to name names, but the Toshiba Satellite and Satellite Pro series I've seen MANY people purchase at Best Buy stores over the years seem like they're always going back in for some kind of service work -- from dead motherboards to overheating issues to bad video chipsets, to broken CD/DVD drives and trays. A number of the HP Pavilion laptops I've seen people buy there had issues too - especially with power adapter jacks that came loose or again, motherboard failures.)
When you're talking about a large investment like a car or truck purchase, I can see more justification for the extended warranty, assuming it really covers enough potential problems and it's being sold by someone reputable (manufacturer's own are probably safest). In those cases, you're probably doing financing over as long as 5 or 6 years anyway - so it's relatively painless to cough up the several thousand dollars so it's rolled into the monthly payments. Even if you only have 1 or 2 claims over the life of that ext. warranty plan and they total up to, say, $800-1500 less than you paid for the plan? You essentially paid for peace of mind that beyond that initially agreed-upon monthly finance payment, you wouldn't get stuck having to come up with $1000 or more all at once or have a disabled vehicle you were STILL paying the bank for until you could come up with it.
With a laptop computer, you likely paid under $1,000 for it from Best Buy in the first place, right? If it lasts through the 1 year factory warranty period (and if not, will get fixed free by the manufacturer, presumably), you're probably in a good position to either A) resell it while it's still in good working order, and just over 1 year old, so you can recoup enough cash to put towards another new model, or B) use it until something DOES break and find out how much that repair costs. It may be possible to buy another identical (broken with a different problem) laptop off eBay or Craigslist and use parts from it to fix yours inexpensively. If it's just a failed hard drive or bad RAM -- no big deal. $100 or less in most cases to replace that stuff. If it's serious like a bad motherboard, just eBay it for parts (screen might still be good in that case, for example) and buy a new machine.
I'm betting that if you always stick to my above strategy, you'll come out ahead of trying to hang onto an older system that has extended warranty left on it. There's some value in having a new (likely faster) machine that you miss out on if you keep fixing that older one, and disadvantages of waiting to get a broken one back from the shop if and when it does break and you use that extended warranty on it.
I've been in I.T. long enough to have a few guesses.
IMHO, the "cloud" push will largely turn out to be little more than a fad or phase. I'm not saying it will go away; rather, businesses will go through initiatives to move as much as possible into the cloud, only to discover some serious disadvantages over time which cause most of them to pull back. Eventually, I think you'll see it stabilize into a situation where many people have at least ONE application (Exchange being a really good candidate) in the cloud, while still maintaining local I.T. infrastructure and servers for other things.
I know where I work now, for example, one of our issues is limited bandwidth. We can't get cable Internet without paying close to $15,000 in expenses to roll the cable out to our location first, and high speed DSL isn't an option either. We're stuck with T1 circuits, and currently, a 3mbit bonded T1 pair is around $700 per month (even higher if I didn't really shop around for the lowest price). Given that, it makes no sense to put our mission critical apps out in the cloud, where everyone would vie for that 3mbit of bandwidth to run them, AND still need it for regular Internet downloads and surfing.
But even if you HAVE cheap broadband, there are always questions like data security. (Say your cloud provider goes out of business. What guarantee do you have they'll really wipe all the hard drives and backups holding your data when they liquidate all their equipment?) Furthermore, as the cloud gets more popular, I think you'll see more instances of outages/downtime to go with it. Whether it's really warranted or not, businesses are going to get nervous when the execs read about the latest outage someplace, and start asking what their I.T. departments are doing to ensure it doesn't impact them. The most cost-effective and practical answer is going to involve replication and running some local hardware, IMO -- again ensuring your I.T. staff has to be retained.
But ultimately, I think the BIGGEST reasons most companies need to retain some I.T. staff is the user training and support/hand-holding that's expected. The vast majority of employees are NOT that computer-savvy, yet they're asked to spend a lot of time using a computer in their workplace. That demand comes with a hidden cost. Either they pay a premium up-front to only hire people with a high level of computer skills, or they pay by way of retaining I.T. "help desk" and "support specialist" staffers who come running when Lisa in accounting jams up the laser printer trying to run checks, or Joe needs to know how to sum several columns in an Excel spreadsheet. None of that is going to change if the apps are hosted off-site instead of on-site.
Not everyone is a good novelist. Some people are outstanding when they limit themselves to writing only short stories, but they'd get completely bogged down attempting a "War and Peace".
The video game industry, by and large, has a problem because they've set expectations of how long a game "should be". Game writers should quit worrying about hitting any targets of a specific length of time to complete a game, and just concentrate on making everything in it as FUN as possible. When you run out of creative ideas, maybe it's time to end the game there and focus on cleaning up the details of what you already wrote!
Replay value is another factor to consider. If a game can be completed quickly, that doesn't necessarily mean it lacks value for its price. If it's designed the right way, some people who finish it will still enjoy it enough to go back through it again (just like some people will re-read a really good book). It helps if the game allows completion with different classes of characters, and is flexible enough to make things play out in very different ways when it is played through with different characters. That's a potential advantage a book author doesn't have, with books being static.
I'm *so* tired of this "ban cellphones in the car" crusade!
This guy's behavior was obviously reckless and stupid - but that doesn't mean the ANSWER is to ban the devices. I've regularly used a cellphone in my vehicle for YEARS and never really had an issue with it. I've had a total of two accidents in the last 5 years,and you know what? Both times, people rear-ended me and it was clearly not my fault whatsoever. (The first time, I simply came to a stop on a 30MPH road where a guy was making a left turn into a shopping plaza entrance and a woman behind me in her minivan didn't stop. The second time, traffic came to a sudden stop on the interstate, and I stopped in time, but a guy behind me in a pickup truck had worn tires and wasn't able to stop completely.)
I always use bluetooth hands-free kits these days, but I used to simply hold the handset in one hand and that was doable too, though admittedly slightly less safe than a hands-free kit, simply because you can't keep both hands on the wheel while holding one. I don't text while driving, since that's pretty clearly a bad idea.
This whole problem comes down to people needing to use some common sense, and perhaps needing some awareness training. One has to develop a subconscious awareness that anything related to the cellphone is of only secondary priority to driving the vehicle. EG. If I suddenly run into a difficult traffic situation, I tend to tune out the person I was talking to for a little while, to focus on the road instead. Afterwards, I'll simply apologize, telling them I had to deal with some traffic and ask if they could please repeat whatever they were saying. If I'm holding a cellphone and suddenly find it's hindering me from making a turn I need to make, I'll just let go of the phone. It's better to interrupt a phone call suddenly and have to hassle with finding where the phone fell under your seat, after you pull over to the side, than get in a wreck because you didn't want to let go of it!
I suspect if this was actually taught as part of drivers' ed, the cellphone problem would cease to be a real problem.
A while ago, I tried to tackle a similar project with an Acer 486 class notebook I was given for free. (It was in practically new condition, other than its battery not holding much of a charge any more. The owner took immaculate care of it and then stuffed it in a carrying bag, in a coat closet, for years before giving it to me.)
I thought it was a shame not to try to get it running something useful. (It had Windows '95 on it, which didn't run very well. Even if I wanted to keep '95 on it, I would have needed the restore/recovery media which was missing.) Linux seemed like the obvious answer, but after wasting several days downloading and trying out various distros, I found that the only ones providing good performance were VERY stripped down obscure versions designed for old/obsolete hardware.
In the end, I wound up with a machine that had a working Linux OS on it, but nobody would ever really use for anything. I mean, why bother when the typical smartphone was WAY more functional and user-friendly? Not to mention, replacement battery packs for this old laptop were still selling for upwards of $70 new, which would REALLY make no sense to invest in it. Yet without one, it didn't even offer the level of portability a laptop was supposed to provide.
If you step back to something even OLDER like this 386 machine? You're really reaching a point where you're simply being foolish to waste your time with it. Even the article's author struggled to justify a possible use for the computer he going working with Debian. Basically, all he could come up with is that it might work as something you didn't care if you screwed up, just to poke around and learn the basics on Linux on. Well, let's stop and think about that one a minute. With all the hassle it was setting it up in the FIRST place, would it really be "no big deal" if you screwed up the installation messing around with it? I think, as slow as it was doing the install on it, it would be a rather big headache, actually. And you'd really want to use an ancient 386 laptop as a Linux learning tool? You couldn't find SOMEONE who'd give you a free Dell or HP desktop/mini tower that had at least a generation or two newer CPU in it?? (I think I have at least 4 or 5 such systems out in my garage collecting dust as we speak.)
About the only real nugget of interest I gleaned from this whole article is the fact that pretty much everyone has removed the 386 support from their Linux distros these days. (I doubt I would have ever spent the time to verify that fact myself.)
I like computer history as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean a feel a duty to be curator of my own computer hardware museum. If you can't find a good dedicated job for an ancient machine of this type to do (say a controller for a model railroad layout or a dedicated machine to program phone PBX systems or high-end routers or switches with?), I think you're probably best sending it off for recycling and looking for something a little newer.
The problem here, as I see it, is that all of these tablets and smartphones started appealing to the crowd that never really took to the computer in the first place. That means you've suddenly got another big wave of people discovering things like Twitter, Facebook, personal email accounts and Google's various services, or finally getting on-board with shopping for things online. Some of them are even getting hooked on casual gaming (Angry Birds, etc.).
If you ask THOSE folks, sure - they're very likely to believe the "end of the desktop PC is upon us", because they think they've got something "better" with their tablet or smartphone, netbook or e-reader. And hey, it always feels good to be able proclaim a device "dead" or "dying" when you never liked it in the first place.
If there really is such a thing as the "post PC age", it will consist of a COMBINATION of desktop PCs and notebooks, PLUS all of these new devices. As usual, the content CREATORS usually want/need a system more powerful than what you can cram into a super-portable container, suitable for consumption of that content. And ergonomics aren't changing any time soon either. It's harder on the eyes looking at a tiny screen and less comfortable for one's back working for long periods of time on a portable devices that you typically sit on furniture not designed specifically for that purpose (unlike a computer desk). By the time you make all the compromises needed to attach a tablet or netbook to a full size LCD display, link it with a standard size keyboard and pointing device, and attach a power source so it can run for an extended time without batteries running out? You might as well just get a regular desktop PC to leave set up in that space permanently, most of the time!
More and more people are waking up to the reality of things. Politicians play politics, period. It doesn't really matter which side you happen to be on. The "game" has the same goals for either party, really. It's all about getting enough votes to get into and stay in power. I blame just about everyone in the Senate, in Congress, our current and past few presidents, and the rest of the folks more concerned about their short-term political success than the long-term welfare of the nation.
It's immensely clear when you look at the lies spread, all around, about the entire issue. EG. Threatening the American people with the fear of a default if the debt ceiling legislation wasn't passed by a specific time? Pure B.S.! If the debt ceiling wasn't raised, government would simply have to prioritize who it paid first and who had to wait longer.
Heck, we spent most of the debt limit increase in a DAY:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/3/us-eats-most-debt-limit-one-day/
Though I've never even attempted to write any content for Wikipedia, I can easily believe your story. Just yesterday, a buddy of mine found an old photo of me playing electric guitar in a band we formed back around the 1990 time-frame. In it, I had a red Charvette branded guitar (part of Charvel's cheaper line of electric guitars at the time). I'd forgotten all about it until seeing the pic, so I thought to look it up on Wikipedia and learn a little more about the brand. Oddly enough, they had an entry for Charvel with quite a bit of info on their products, not nothing about Charvette whatsoever!
When I did a Google search, though, a cached copy of the same Charvel entry apparently did. It looked to me like someone decided Charvette didn't belong in the Charvel entry (for who knows what reason?) and deleted mention of it in a revision.
IMHO, if you don't have enough info about a specific product or product line to justify its own independent entry, there's *nothing* wrong with referencing it under a parent manufacturer or in some article where it could be related to the primary topic. It's better to have the info accessible than to have nothing at all about it, simply because nobody collected enough info to meet some editor's standards for a separate entry.
I am using a 2010 Macbook Pro 17" with Lion as we speak, and so far, no sign of any graphics driver issues? The kernel panics and black screens described sound pretty typical of an overheating video chip to me, and we've certainly seen it before with a defective batch of nVidia mobile GPUs across many product lines.
Did they release some defective GPUs again in the 2010 Macbook Pros, perhaps? Or maybe some of them just have too much heatsink paste applied, causing inefficient cooling? Lots of possibilities here, but as others have said -- this definitely is NOT a major issue that Lion users are running up against. This is the first I've heard of it despite combing Apple related forums on a daily basis.
That's actually my biggest concern about these super tall structures. It seems like the more occupants you place in a single structure, the more you risk accidents that cause a need for evacuation (fire most obviously, but also such things as flooding from burst pipes or carelessness). If a far more efficient system of elevators isn't put together than what I normally see used, I'd worry about the safety of such buildings. I know we've got a pretty basic 22 story apartment building (former hotel) here in town that I occasionally get called out to for computer service calls, and quite a few older people in relatively poor health have moved in there. It only has 2 regular passenger elevators (and I believe a 3rd. freight elevator on an opposite wall), and at least one of the two primary elevators is often shut down for maintenance or repairs. You can expect to spend a good 4-5 minutes getting from an upper floor apartment to the lobby, in most cases, with all the people constantly going in and out. It already seems to me like it pushes the boundaries of "safe", as "run of the mill" as it is in height.
Plus, despite all the talk about real-estate becoming so scare we need these structures? I'm not sure there aren't diminishing returns past a certain number of floors. How much extra money does it cost to construct buildings like this to withstand high winds and to run utilities that far up and down to each room that needs them? Wouldn't you be better off building all of the buildings in the area with, say, 15 or 20 floors, vs. trying to have a few mega-structures like this?
Yeah, but that's actually kind of my point in my original message.... These systems should be INDEPENDENT of the ECU in most cases. Vehicle remotes for starting the engine, opening the trunk, etc. don't worry me as a huge problem. I can't really see why they require any direct communications with the ECU (though they probably do simply for cost-savings reasons in many cases)? But really, those things are fairly basic; System listens for command and does ONE specific function of turning a switch on/off. If you succeed in hacking into it, what does that get you? Remote starts should be essentially disabled/non-functional while the engine is actually running and the car is in gear, so you shouldn't be able to just shut the engine off while someone's driving. Being able to open their locks means you can physically get into the vehicle while it's not moving -- but that's just a security issue, no different than being able to make a skeleton key that opens the doors/trunk.
Things like On-Star? Yeah, much more of a potential issue since they do implement "kill switches" that can be triggered remotely. So far though, I've never heard of one being mis-used -- only positive stories of killing engines to recover stolen vehicles. So I'm not sure exactly how much or little security they already use in that particular system? (Hyundai is coming out with "Blue Link" on some of their vehicles, which implements something similar.)
Again, I'm not suggesting that Enterprise uses of PC rack-mount hardware should consider a switch to Mac Pros if they fit in 4U of rack space!
I'm simply saying that realistically, most people considering a Mac as their server are already an all-Mac shop, or at least have an all-Mac department. In these situations, you're not typically worried about packing as many servers as possible into a given amount of rack space. A single Mac Pro server is probably all they'd ever want to rack mount for a departmental server (plus a disk storage cabinet, perhaps, like a Promise V-Trak or something).
The 1U XServes simply weren't selling well, and I think it's largely for my reason above. They were never price-competitive with 1U Linux servers out there, and Windows shops certainly wouldn't bother to take notice of them, since they ship with OS X on them, not Windows Server. They served a niche purpose, which is further whittled away at by facilities that get by just fine rack-mounting groups of Mac Minis with special mounting kits and places that don't want/need to rack mount their server equipment in the first place.
OS X Lion Server does have a few interesting niche capabilities, BTW, that justify using it. For example, it easily functions as a document interchange server for iOS devices (iPad or iPhone running Apple iWork suite, for example), so those users have a network location to load/save documents. It also has a podcast server built in, and can function as the Mac equivalent of Active Directory (even supplementing an existing Microsoft Active Directory server in what Apple calls "Golden Triangle" mode, so it will handle only the Mac-specific directory info that AD doesn't deal with itself).
It seems to me there's really no inherent danger in adding wireless networking and other new electronics technologies to our vehicles. A big part of the potential problem stems from the insistence of auto-makers to integrate everything into ONE common system. For example, my 2007 Jeep Patriot 4x4 uses a CANBUS interface as the central communications bus for practically all of the electronics in the vehicle. If you try to swap out something like the factory headlights with an aftermarket set of HID lamps? You're likely to run into problems, because the system senses less electrical resistance on the headlight circuit than it expects, so it makes lights blink on and off in an "error" pattern. You can't successfully change out the factory stereo with an aftermarket one either, without spending $150+ more for a CANBUS module to plug in behind it, so the computer system communicates with it as it expects to see it. Other factory accessories won't work properly either, until the Jeep is taken in to the dealer and the firmware re-flashed with a version that has those features "enabled" in it.
If things like wi-fi in the car are only interfaced with the stereo/media center, and that system is independent of the computer handling the engine, transmission, etc.? Hackers won't be able to do a single thing that directly affects the safety or performance of the vehicle. They'll only be able to mess up your in-dash entertainment system.
It's only conjecture, mind you, but it's also a definite possibility that when the next revision of the Mac Pro arrives (should be around the September 2011 time-frame), Apple will redesign the case so you can actually flip it on its side and rack-mount it. It's *almost* doable right now, except the case has those arched "handles" on the top and bottom that aren't removable and it's not exactly the right height for a perfect fit. It wouldn't be hard to design it with optional rack rails you could attach to the top and bottom, swapping out removable handles, and making sure it has the appropriate case dimensions to span the width of a rack perfectly.
That would make a lot of sense from their point-of-view. No more need to maintain a product that's a relatively poor/slow seller, while allowing flexibility for Pro users to run the towers as servers in rack installations, where applicable.