The idea that "IT" itself has changed seems to underlie your post. I would agree with that entirely. Today, measuring by volume of jobs, IT typically means something like Geek Squad or a call center where you walk 60 ungrateful people each day through how to use Outlook. That type of work is not interesting or stimulating, or even a neutral get-'er-done laboring experience. It's straight up maddening. The atmosphere at the office is impersonal or non-existent. Your time is micromanaged to the extent that 100% of your shift is spent dealing with BS, apart from your legally-mandated breaks. Your supervisor isn't much better off, he hardly has time to exchange a couple of words as you walk by, much less an actual meeting. And forget about being promoted anywhere better yourself, because all those opportunities dried up after the corporate buyout.
Then there's the other stuff that people bring up all the time in these articles: stagnant wages, offshoring, and generally treating employees like shit. Being at the same company for 30 years is unheard of now. If you managed to get a foot in the door somewhere back in the 80s, and that company is still around and still valuing their employees, that's like having won the Powerball. The majority of IT jobs these days aren't designed to be liveable; it's only a matter of months before burnout sets in. Virtually no one makes it past single-digit years at the same job - low single digits. At my last employer of several hundred people, I could count the guys who had been there more than 3 years on one hand. "IT" has gone mainstream now that computers have crept into every aspect of every life. IT is the new fast food.
This is certainly true. The last job I had was at a company just getting out of the startup phase. The company wasn't doomed in the sense that it was going under, but that it got bought out by a large tech conglomerate that started making it a shitty place to work (don't even get me started on what they did to our customers.) It's disheartening to watch a company change before your very eyes - promotion opportunities drying up, good people fired for fabricated reasons and replaced with corporate drones, the rest of the good people jumping ship, a general atmosphere of shittiness around the office, and so many other changes (big and small) to let you know the new overlords don't care about the employees or even fully understand the services the company sells.
The subscription model is exactly what it is, but you can be sure they won't word it that way. Of course they are marketing it as "the last version of Windows", because generally people have been pissed with the new versions. They're not going to quit making money from their flagship product. I'm sure they will structure the pricing to make more. They will release smaller, more frequent updates, hitting you up for money each time - more like the Mac OS release schedule. You can bet they'll play fast and loose with the support cycles too. "Oh, you haven't renewed your subscription for 18 months? Sorry, no more security updates." Forget 12 years of extended support like they did with XP. They might make an exception for businesses that have hundreds of licenses, if they have any sense left in them. But regardless of if you're a business or home user, the OS isn't something that should be changing in radical ways often, or need to be "subscribed" to... it should be a stable platform, a known quantity for you to run your applications on, or develop for, or whatever your use case is.
(Personally I think 7 is great, and that 10 is a step in the right direction, but in the public mind new Windows = bad. Remember how people shat all over XP when it came out, but by 2010 it had gained a reputation as the best version of Windows ever?)
It might be easy compared to, say, a stage 2 Gentoo install, but it sounds like you're minimizing the problem. Having to install the OS with a trial license then using a third-party utility to determine the correct license are steps that shouldn't need to be taken with a Windows install.
Overall I think Windows 7 is a great OS, but I had install problems with it too. My motherboard has SATA and IDE for disks (on the board, not separate cards), and I use both. For some reason, Windows 7 will refuse to install on any disk unless the IDE bus is disabled in the BIOS first. XP didn't have this problem, neither does Debian. I still don't know what would happen if I wanted to install it to one of the IDE disks...
Honestly, these DJs should have seen it coming - especially the ones that post on Slashdot. There are articles here all the time about some cloud-based service going under, oftentimes without warning, leaving the users high and dry. Recently I've heard more and more people say things like "I don't download music anymore, I just use [insert streaming service of the month]." I've been warning them that while these services provide a good alternative to radio, they are not a substitute for a music collection. Even if they are doing it legally, the whole thing is a house of cards that can get knocked down at any time when someone tries to re-negotiate a licensing deal (or any number of other scenarios).
It'd be like the DJs of yore showing up at a party with an FM radio instead of a crate of records. "But it was playing the songs I wanted yesterday!" Well, now it isn't. I'd expect a DJ, of all people, to recognize the value of a permanent music collection.
Whenever there's a shooting people start talking about gun control more than the underlying problem. It's just one more manifestation of intellectual laziness. It's a lot easier to say "Well, let's just take all the weapons away" (as if that genie can be put back in the bottle), than it is to look at the economic/societal/personal problems that caused the attack and come up with a way to fix that.
U-Verse is basically just branding for AT&Ts various services, similar to Comcast and "Xfinity". Their speed tiers will of course vary by location, but when I used it, it was 25/5. If I'm not mistaken, fiber connections are also sold under the U-verse name.
How is this different from any other kind of ad? Do you think newspapers or billboard owners investigate all their clients to determine if their products are "legitimate"? How do you determine legitimacy? Should they probe all their clients' accounting and business practices to make sure they aren't doing anything shady? I imagine they'd be out of clients pretty fast. Moreover, why is this the responsibility of the advertising agency in the first place? There are already laws regarding false advertising that rightly put the blame on the organization that actually created the ad. Anyone running a false ad is opening themselves up to a lawsuit.
To take an entire country "off the internet" would require the cooperation of every country they're peering with. I don't know the details of China's network infrastructure, but I'm willing to bet they have direct connections to quite a few countries. It would be much easier for whichever country is being targeted to have their ISPs blackhole everything coming from China. But then you start risking a trade war scenario. The United States, as you may know, has a particularly large amount of trade with China. Not just physical goods going back and forth, but companies with branches in both countries, and online/remote services of all kinds. If email and web contact between the US and China got broken, there would be major disruption to all sorts of businesses. Neither side wants that. GitHub going down for a few days is nothing compared to the disruption that closing all US-China data exchange would cause.
The feds have written policies now about not enforcing those laws in states that have legalized. "But they said they wouldn't" probably won't hold up in court, but the average stoner doesn't need to worry about the feds.
Some games like Morrowind and SimCity 4, you could just delete the video files. This also saved a significant amount of space. To this day my archival copies of both of those games are ZIP files of the game folder after installing the desired expansions and mods, and ripping out the intro videos. (And the nocd patches of course.) The games are almost "portable" like that, in that you can just copy the folder to a new computer and run it. I think the latter game has a couple of registry entris in a.reg file, that's it as far as installation goes.
This type of thing is de facto legal as a final sentence. Far more restrictive travel bans are commonplace in certain situations, such as when someone is sentenced to probation. It's usually laid out in terms like "You are not allowed to leave the State of X, and must notify the court if you plan to travel outside of County Y". That's a lot more restrictive than banning a Floridian from traveling within D.C.
Do you have a source for that? Certainly there are narcs, but I've never heard of any of them enrolling in high schools undercover. Cops threatening high school kids who got caught anyway to cough up some names, sure. But when they invest an undercover agent (= lots of money), it's going to be for a big investigation, not to find out which high school kid sold a dimebag to which other high school kid.
Maybe the terrorists aren't as fixated on planes as the westerners are after 9/11? I've noticed that when you add "...on a plane" or "...at an airport" to things that people otherwise wouldn't care about, suddenly it's a huge issue. While there are certainly special considerations that need to be made for safety in the context of air travel, there's many easier ways for terrorists to make a statement and kill a bunch of people. Fill a U-Haul with a couple tons of explosive. Fill smaller containers with explosive and distribute them around a city. Walk into a crowd and open fire. Let out poisonous gas in a subway or other enclosed space. Car bombs in particular happen on an almost monthly basis in the middle east, and there have been quite a few high-profile terrorist attacks in the west since 9/11, none of them have involved planes. Boston bombing, Madrid bombing, London bombing, Charlie Hebdo, Ft. Hood. Terrorists aren't looking at planes.
I'm with you in doubting that you could get hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a single exchange. But it's valuable enough for the darknet drug dealers to rely on. There are several exchanges that you could pull USD out of, so that adds a multiplier. There are also goods you can buy directly with BTC, computer equipment and Tesla cars at least, maybe more that I'm unaware of.
If you know your virtual and meatspace markets well enough, you can also make "withdrawals" from your BTC wallet by buying and selling drugs, quintupling or more the "face value" of your BTC on a legal exchange. This, of course, involves significant risk.
The Hindenburg always gets brought up here - I'm sure it was a big thing half a century ago. Now, much of the general public probably doesn't know what "Hindenburg" is, and the ones who are scared of airships are the same group who are scared of normal aircraft. I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car. Legally too, in many places. 747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC. There's no reason to take this airship for long distance travel unless your goal is chillin' on the ship and looking out the window.
Usually I'm against nanny-stating, but in this case there is a clear and immediate problem, and there is a quick way to mitigate it. What I hope will happen is that this will (1) put more focus on pollution in France, and (2) teach the people there alternate ways to go about their day that won't pump gobs of pollution into the air.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that "IT" itself has changed seems to underlie your post. I would agree with that entirely. Today, measuring by volume of jobs, IT typically means something like Geek Squad or a call center where you walk 60 ungrateful people each day through how to use Outlook. That type of work is not interesting or stimulating, or even a neutral get-'er-done laboring experience. It's straight up maddening. The atmosphere at the office is impersonal or non-existent. Your time is micromanaged to the extent that 100% of your shift is spent dealing with BS, apart from your legally-mandated breaks. Your supervisor isn't much better off, he hardly has time to exchange a couple of words as you walk by, much less an actual meeting. And forget about being promoted anywhere better yourself, because all those opportunities dried up after the corporate buyout.
Then there's the other stuff that people bring up all the time in these articles: stagnant wages, offshoring, and generally treating employees like shit. Being at the same company for 30 years is unheard of now. If you managed to get a foot in the door somewhere back in the 80s, and that company is still around and still valuing their employees, that's like having won the Powerball. The majority of IT jobs these days aren't designed to be liveable; it's only a matter of months before burnout sets in. Virtually no one makes it past single-digit years at the same job - low single digits. At my last employer of several hundred people, I could count the guys who had been there more than 3 years on one hand. "IT" has gone mainstream now that computers have crept into every aspect of every life. IT is the new fast food.
This is certainly true. The last job I had was at a company just getting out of the startup phase. The company wasn't doomed in the sense that it was going under, but that it got bought out by a large tech conglomerate that started making it a shitty place to work (don't even get me started on what they did to our customers.) It's disheartening to watch a company change before your very eyes - promotion opportunities drying up, good people fired for fabricated reasons and replaced with corporate drones, the rest of the good people jumping ship, a general atmosphere of shittiness around the office, and so many other changes (big and small) to let you know the new overlords don't care about the employees or even fully understand the services the company sells.
Born in 1989, if it makes any difference.
The subscription model is exactly what it is, but you can be sure they won't word it that way. Of course they are marketing it as "the last version of Windows", because generally people have been pissed with the new versions. They're not going to quit making money from their flagship product. I'm sure they will structure the pricing to make more. They will release smaller, more frequent updates, hitting you up for money each time - more like the Mac OS release schedule. You can bet they'll play fast and loose with the support cycles too. "Oh, you haven't renewed your subscription for 18 months? Sorry, no more security updates." Forget 12 years of extended support like they did with XP. They might make an exception for businesses that have hundreds of licenses, if they have any sense left in them. But regardless of if you're a business or home user, the OS isn't something that should be changing in radical ways often, or need to be "subscribed" to... it should be a stable platform, a known quantity for you to run your applications on, or develop for, or whatever your use case is.
(Personally I think 7 is great, and that 10 is a step in the right direction, but in the public mind new Windows = bad. Remember how people shat all over XP when it came out, but by 2010 it had gained a reputation as the best version of Windows ever?)
It might be easy compared to, say, a stage 2 Gentoo install, but it sounds like you're minimizing the problem. Having to install the OS with a trial license then using a third-party utility to determine the correct license are steps that shouldn't need to be taken with a Windows install.
Overall I think Windows 7 is a great OS, but I had install problems with it too. My motherboard has SATA and IDE for disks (on the board, not separate cards), and I use both. For some reason, Windows 7 will refuse to install on any disk unless the IDE bus is disabled in the BIOS first. XP didn't have this problem, neither does Debian. I still don't know what would happen if I wanted to install it to one of the IDE disks...
"Putting a bullet in someone" doesn't necessarily follow "getting angry".
Take away religion and people will create other outlets to express their idiocy - veganism, neo-feminism, politics, etc...
Honestly, these DJs should have seen it coming - especially the ones that post on Slashdot. There are articles here all the time about some cloud-based service going under, oftentimes without warning, leaving the users high and dry. Recently I've heard more and more people say things like "I don't download music anymore, I just use [insert streaming service of the month]." I've been warning them that while these services provide a good alternative to radio, they are not a substitute for a music collection. Even if they are doing it legally, the whole thing is a house of cards that can get knocked down at any time when someone tries to re-negotiate a licensing deal (or any number of other scenarios).
It'd be like the DJs of yore showing up at a party with an FM radio instead of a crate of records. "But it was playing the songs I wanted yesterday!" Well, now it isn't. I'd expect a DJ, of all people, to recognize the value of a permanent music collection.
I believe specific Wikipedia pages actually have been banned in the UK. That album cover with the naked chick.
Whenever there's a shooting people start talking about gun control more than the underlying problem. It's just one more manifestation of intellectual laziness. It's a lot easier to say "Well, let's just take all the weapons away" (as if that genie can be put back in the bottle), than it is to look at the economic/societal/personal problems that caused the attack and come up with a way to fix that.
U-Verse is basically just branding for AT&Ts various services, similar to Comcast and "Xfinity". Their speed tiers will of course vary by location, but when I used it, it was 25/5. If I'm not mistaken, fiber connections are also sold under the U-verse name.
How is this different from any other kind of ad? Do you think newspapers or billboard owners investigate all their clients to determine if their products are "legitimate"? How do you determine legitimacy? Should they probe all their clients' accounting and business practices to make sure they aren't doing anything shady? I imagine they'd be out of clients pretty fast. Moreover, why is this the responsibility of the advertising agency in the first place? There are already laws regarding false advertising that rightly put the blame on the organization that actually created the ad. Anyone running a false ad is opening themselves up to a lawsuit.
Ding ding, zoom! Mr. Saturn font!
To take an entire country "off the internet" would require the cooperation of every country they're peering with. I don't know the details of China's network infrastructure, but I'm willing to bet they have direct connections to quite a few countries. It would be much easier for whichever country is being targeted to have their ISPs blackhole everything coming from China. But then you start risking a trade war scenario. The United States, as you may know, has a particularly large amount of trade with China. Not just physical goods going back and forth, but companies with branches in both countries, and online/remote services of all kinds. If email and web contact between the US and China got broken, there would be major disruption to all sorts of businesses. Neither side wants that. GitHub going down for a few days is nothing compared to the disruption that closing all US-China data exchange would cause.
That's only 50% misleading.
The feds have written policies now about not enforcing those laws in states that have legalized. "But they said they wouldn't" probably won't hold up in court, but the average stoner doesn't need to worry about the feds.
Right, smoking bud is so much nicer and less damaging. I hear you don't even have to worry about the legal issues in some states anymore.
Some games like Morrowind and SimCity 4, you could just delete the video files. This also saved a significant amount of space. To this day my archival copies of both of those games are ZIP files of the game folder after installing the desired expansions and mods, and ripping out the intro videos. (And the nocd patches of course.) The games are almost "portable" like that, in that you can just copy the folder to a new computer and run it. I think the latter game has a couple of registry entris in a .reg file, that's it as far as installation goes.
Probably; it's California.
This type of thing is de facto legal as a final sentence. Far more restrictive travel bans are commonplace in certain situations, such as when someone is sentenced to probation. It's usually laid out in terms like "You are not allowed to leave the State of X, and must notify the court if you plan to travel outside of County Y". That's a lot more restrictive than banning a Floridian from traveling within D.C.
CoD and FIFA mentioned in the same breath... I never thought I'd see the day.
Do you have a source for that? Certainly there are narcs, but I've never heard of any of them enrolling in high schools undercover. Cops threatening high school kids who got caught anyway to cough up some names, sure. But when they invest an undercover agent (= lots of money), it's going to be for a big investigation, not to find out which high school kid sold a dimebag to which other high school kid.
Maybe the terrorists aren't as fixated on planes as the westerners are after 9/11? I've noticed that when you add "...on a plane" or "...at an airport" to things that people otherwise wouldn't care about, suddenly it's a huge issue. While there are certainly special considerations that need to be made for safety in the context of air travel, there's many easier ways for terrorists to make a statement and kill a bunch of people. Fill a U-Haul with a couple tons of explosive. Fill smaller containers with explosive and distribute them around a city. Walk into a crowd and open fire. Let out poisonous gas in a subway or other enclosed space. Car bombs in particular happen on an almost monthly basis in the middle east, and there have been quite a few high-profile terrorist attacks in the west since 9/11, none of them have involved planes. Boston bombing, Madrid bombing, London bombing, Charlie Hebdo, Ft. Hood. Terrorists aren't looking at planes.
I'm with you in doubting that you could get hundreds of thousands of dollars out of a single exchange. But it's valuable enough for the darknet drug dealers to rely on. There are several exchanges that you could pull USD out of, so that adds a multiplier. There are also goods you can buy directly with BTC, computer equipment and Tesla cars at least, maybe more that I'm unaware of.
If you know your virtual and meatspace markets well enough, you can also make "withdrawals" from your BTC wallet by buying and selling drugs, quintupling or more the "face value" of your BTC on a legal exchange. This, of course, involves significant risk.
The Hindenburg always gets brought up here - I'm sure it was a big thing half a century ago. Now, much of the general public probably doesn't know what "Hindenburg" is, and the ones who are scared of airships are the same group who are scared of normal aircraft. I think the bigger thing here, in terms of travel, is that it only goes 80 knots. You can do 80 knots easily in an economy car. Legally too, in many places. 747s cruise at several hundred knots, around 250 IIRC. There's no reason to take this airship for long distance travel unless your goal is chillin' on the ship and looking out the window.
Usually I'm against nanny-stating, but in this case there is a clear and immediate problem, and there is a quick way to mitigate it. What I hope will happen is that this will (1) put more focus on pollution in France, and (2) teach the people there alternate ways to go about their day that won't pump gobs of pollution into the air.