We have this issue at my company, and have resolved it through the use of "bypass codes" with OpenDNS as a web site filter. We have a basic access which has blocks by category, which OpenDNS does pretty well. We have some special company-wide exceptions for some customer sites which would fall under specific categories (A few gun catalogs or swimsuit catalogs that we print for customers fall in their weapons or lingerie categories) For this that may need access to some sites outside this, we have bypass codes that can be entered which allow access to a wider set of categories, but still block the porn and hate sites, etc. Finally we have a master code which is kept in IT which we can enter to allow access to any site, but it is valid only until they close the browser, at which point they are allowed only the standard level of access again.
There is one issue with OpenDNS and SSL sites, as you are essentially using them as a proxy and the SSL certificate match fails, so it is not a perfect solution, but potentially a good for for the OP's needs.
Photovoltaic is what most people think of immediately when talking about "Solar Energy", and it does hold significant promise. Government programs are overlooking a couple of really high-payback, lower cost solar technologies in the big push for electrics that deserve much more support. Passive solar design for heating and cooling has almost immediate impact in significantly reducing the energy cost of a space, not just in the extreme cases where the design is so heavily skewed into support of the solar energy that no one would want to live there, but in much more modest but effective measures to be incorporated into more conventional designs. Requiring building code standards that require all new home construction to incorporate passive technologies to provide a minimum of 25% of a building's heating and cooling load, or perhaps 30-40% in commercial structures would provide work in the design and construction technologies, as well as making a very significant reduxction in the demand on outside power generation. Solar hot water units for residential and commercial spaces can provide very significant returns, often reaching a full payback of the investment in as little as 3 to 4 years. Combined with on-demand technology for water heating drawing from a tank or reservoir of solar pre-heated water and adding only the necessary supplimental heating to achieve the desired temperature if the solar heating had not already reached the desired temperatures could supply nearly 1/3 of a household's energy demand. Putting our focus on Photovoltaic is a limited strategy that needs to be broadened to include the available, proven and effective solar energy usage that will make the difference in a timely manner.
Back in the late 70's to mid 80's, this was a common enough technique that the US developed a secret system known as Tempest Shielding. In simple terms it was an active radio/electronic field around a sensitive device that was designed to block such electronic snooping. Georgia Tech has successfully recreated a technique used long before any of the researches existed.
Microsoft returns to the delusion that they can drop nearly 25 years of desktop productivity and working style with a wave of their magic wand and everyone will fall happily in line. Changes have to make sense, an offer an advantage, or they will never be adopted. Has Microsoft decided to completely concede the desktop space to Macintosh and Linux? The biggest strength of Windows for years has been that when you start a program, you know how to use it, even if you do not know what it actually does - F1 for help, File > open to get whatever you're working with as material,and other similar conventions that allowed users to go from one program to the next with a modicum of understanding of the tools, if not the functions. The Microsoft design team has gone deaf to the actual user, and it all about the science fiction interface. Funny how you never see anyone in those scifi images do anything for more than a minute at a time.
Please show me the average bicycle rider doing an 80 mile trip in under 90 minutes. Bike have their place. But comparing them to to vehicles meant for multipassenger transport over a reasonable distance in an equally reasonable period of time is not reasonable.
BMW has long been a company with superior engineering, and their efforts in the electric car market may set a standard that will require significant effort to match. While they have become more "market driven" in recent years, they still have a solid record of uncompromising engineering and design that is willing to ignore convention for a focus on effectiveness and reliability. Their motorcycle sector in particular is still in many ways years ahead of its competitors and they make some of the very few cars that can go from showroom to track/course and be competitive in their class. Looking at the design in the I series vehicles, I believe they will establish a solid place in the top of the electric vehicle market, though their pricing will undoubtedly reflect it. They are one of the few "you get what you pay for" high quality vehicles on the market.
If you take a video it is admissible, but the voice portion of it cannot be used. Unfortunately, while we all agree the kid was trying to do the right thing, the law the protects our right to speak includes rules in how our speech can be used by others. While it is hard to understand in context, the police were correct in their reaction to the recording under the law.
Recording a conversation without the consent of the other party even for the purpose of providing evidence requires a warrant, under the first amendment and the laws governing free speech. While I understand the intentions and agree that attempting to resolve it by providing clear evidence is reasonable, the simple truth is that under US law recording conversations is prohibited without the oversight of a judge who can determine whether or not it is an appropriate exception to the right of free speech. The worst part is that even though the officer probably has a very clear understanding of the circumstances that led to the desire to record the evidence, he cannot act on it if the evidence is gathered in an illegal manner. Without that safeguard, we have no right to control the content and audience of our self-expression, and no protection for our right to speak.
There are systems and processes that we run on a 24x7 basis on equipment that was built when NT was current, for which XP has been the final upgrade. The company is unlikely to replace a 25 million dollar machine so that its controllers can be front-ended with Windows 7 or anything of the kind, given that it still does half a million dollars worth of work for us a day. Some of the specialized software to drive the components and controllers is still 16 bit, and nothing beyond XP supports it.
I've heard all the well meaning advice, and the folks that betray their lack of experience and understanding by declaring that we should have made these changes ages ago - the costs of designing new controllers for systems that were designed and built in the late 80's is prohibitive and the expertise and understanding of the processes necessary to replicate is for the most part lost to the ravages of time. Maintaining the most stable alternative is the only choice many companies have.
I don't see the exceptions as to running desktop configurations like the one described as essential- there are current alternatives and it is only personal preference that keep people using systems like that; the desktop environment has progressed and there is little reason to stay behind. The control and process environment however, will probably keep XP running well into the 30's just because there are no solid, universally supported alternatives to running 16 bit systems for essential processes.
As consumers, we pay for internet access to get the content we are interested in, not the content the ISP can make the most money delivering. If AT&T wants the content providers which are what drives consumers to subscribe to pay for the bandwidth it takes to provide than content, then AT&T should not be charging the consumer for delivering the content at the same time. It is quite simple, the telecom providers want to be paid twice for delivering the content; by the consumer and by the provider. It is purely greed and until the regulatory agencies are given the power to correct it, it will get worse for both provider and consumer.
Backers that provide fund for the production of the film expect to receive a share of the return on the investment in the form of a share of the earnings of the film. There should be a class action suit to establish the kickstarter contributors as essentially the same class of backers, and a share equivalent to the portion represented by the kickstarter funding should be divided among the participants, Make Warner Brothers treat the people that funded the film through kickstarter the same as any other investor.
Buy a basic PC chassis and a MB that has multiple SATA ports, with a raid bios. Add 5 3T or 4T drives in a simple raid5 config, and use a dedupe program and some basic backup / sync software to run an incremental backup. It will take a while to initially get it all into the baseline, but a job will pull whatever has changed (at the file level, but that isn't too bad for this) and any decent dedupe application should get the files to under 50% and leave plenty of space for the offline de-dupe to work. Given the deals on drives you could run this pretty reasonably for under $600 or so with a little careful shopping. Set up the machine bios with a wake time and power down time to minimize power demand, or just leave it running. Not free, but compared to the cost of replaying 20T of files, music and pictures, a lot better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
I have seen a massive number of comments from well meaning people telling the OP that giving the toddler a phone is wrong. Please consider this advice to ignore those well meaning but short sighted comments. We gave our daughter her first cell phone at age 8, 20 years ago. She had specific requirements: it was to be in her locker during the day at school, or if she forgot, she was to leave it with the teacher for the class and get it back at the end of class. It was to be on, but set to silent/vibrate only to avoid disturbing others. It was a voice phone- the smartphones are a bit more of a distraction. Calls at that time were always charged against airtime minutes, and 1 hour on the phone was as much as one horseback riding lesson an easy choice for her to make. If she went to an event and we would have to pick her up, she was to have the phone with her and answer it immediately when we called to see where she was so we could find her. She had our cell phone numbers programmed into it, and if she went on a school trip, the chaperone's number and anyone else "in charge" were added. Her mom traveled 3 - 4 days a week for work and I ran IT for a 7 x 24 company which sometimes meant staying late or being heavily in demand, and she knew she could always reach me, and always be reached. The "right" parenting is what works for you, not what everyone else tells you is the way to do it. You will need to manage the use of the phone the same as we did, and set the rules appropriate to their use, the same as we set rules appropriate for our time and our daughter. Interspersed with the "don't do it" comments have been a few with decent suggestions on what to use, and I would agree - Lock in a contacts list and allow calls from the list. Teach them how to call you and make it easy to find with an icon/smartkey on the screen. Lock down the "play store" or Itunes store to parental consent, and teach the child never to accept a call from someone they do not know, or that is not in their contacts list, with a picture on the contact so they can identify the caller. Handle the phone and set their understanding of how it is to be used with the same concern you do any of the other parenting tasks, and tailor it to the child's needs and your plan for what they will be allowed to do with it.
HP Laptops with the fingerprint scanner, and kronos timeclocks with similar scanners can be defeated with two pieces of play-doh and 2 minutes careful molding. Make a finger impression in the first piece, fill it with the second, and allow it to dry a but before lifting the newly molded "finger". I am sure a better material for making the "finger" could easily be found, but this works well enough to defeat the biometrics on both of these devices so far.
I can forsee a state where older drivers who can no longer safely drive themselves can maintain a portion of their independence by using these to be able to get around without requiring someone else to taxi them from place to place. Simple destinations such as family member's homes, stores, doctor and medical offices, and other common destinations could be pre-programmed into the vehicle's memory, with a simple menu to select a destination. A "specify your destination" feature could be used for those who retain the ability to decide where they wish to go, and either locked out or require an authoritative OK when the elder gets beyond being certain of being able to specify new destinations safely. Combine this with a search feature that would allow stores, restaurants and other destinations to provide their coordinates to the driverless car network, and it would go a long way to making the elder but still active population safer while still more independent.
There's a fundamental perception that Qualcomm is missing; Multicore processors are not x times as good at doing a task, unless that task can be threaded to multiple components, but most business and consumer computing devices at this point ar not doing one thing at a time. As long as the OS has the capability of dropping a task into a memory space and assigning that to a processor, the muti-core processors will always offer a benefit to the user with more than one thing at a time going on (which includes the OS itself, and all of the myriad of drivers, checkers, updaters and such we have running in the background while we do the "oe thing" on our desktop.
Considering that I built an altair 88 from a kit, a kim1 from the board and sourcing parts myself (anyone rememeber hamilton-avnet?) and both repaired and modified TRS-80 (article on putting the full 48k of RAM in the keyboard with a circuit I developed published in 80 Micro back then) I find the idea that stuff that was developed LONG after I started with these as antique tobe humorous as well, but since the definition as far as vehicles for "classic" is 20 years and "antique" is 25, it fits:)
Migration is not always a simple matter when you are talking multi-million dollar installations which would require months of redesign, wiring, programming and timing to replace the PLC hardware with newer versions. I am talking equipment with multiple feeder stations on a manufacturing chain that include as many as 500 conditions and timings based on conditions both up and down the line each, which were purchased as much as 20 years ago for some of them. If you're interested in the actual devices, they are used to select and assemble multiple groups of pages to build catalogs, from as many as 32 different "pockets" based on criterion for each individual catalog at a rate of about 250 books per minute (different page groups, covers, wraps and inserts for different versions of the catalog, as many as 20 or 30 different combinations in a single run. The techs need to be able to access and adjust embedded plcs to keep the lines running accurately,
some of the plcs I need to support are no longer supported by the allen-bradley software, and some never were, In some cases, the software the techs are using is the very last version of whatever was developed to manage the plcs, and we're talking 3-4 million dollar systems that would require months of redesign, wiring and tuning to handle a newer PLC so the options are limited.
I use toughbooks now, and the used ones and refurbs are possible, but they have specific issues with XP SP3 and serial hardware, and difficulty with some direct hardware access to the serial port. Some of this controller management software dates back to dos/win95 and is at best touchy on the toughbooks. Used hardware is often a grab-bag and has a lot of variations in port availability too.
Tools have their limits in some things, and what they do, they may do well but hit the wall on some specifics, and their code may not be optimized for performance. That being said, hand coding is VERY limited, for several reasons. First, self taught people tend to have gaps in the knowledge and practices of the areas they have studied, no matter how talented. There will be things that any hand-coder will try to do a specific way that is familiar to them, where better, if more complex, options exist through the tools. The most important thing about hand-coding is this: it is virtually unsustainable over time. I know that is a very broad statement, and will raise the hackles of some excellent and talented coders, but anyone that has done any long term support will tell you than out of the hands of the original coder, hand-coded systems fail in one important area - no one else can go in and fix them when they break, and even the original programmer will find it difficult to support a site he hasn't touched in a year or more.
If he wants to hand code, teach him to comment everything, period. External documentation, commented code, clear process identification and threading are as essential to the success of a hand coded site as the code itself, but most coders will admit that this is something they do as an afterthought at best, and they consider a nuisance and a distraction from the project. The simple truth is this; if you cannot explain it on paper well enough that someone with no access to you or your thought processes can see what you have done and make the necessary changes or repairs, what you have built is, in the long run, a throwaway.
Talent means a lot in creating a good site, with or without the tools. Tools provide a level of "documentation by process" that enables someone using that tool to look at a site and understand its internal processes. Very few hand coders, in my 30+ years of experience, can or do provide the same level of sustainability and the problem of the essential application or process that the developer has long since moved on from is an axiom in the IT world. It is not that tools or hand coding are either one better than the other in the end; the result is much more than the page view, and that needs to be addressed, either by using the tool, or doing the documentation the hard way. Without that, great work becomes great problems over time.
90% of what I do often is on the taskbar. 90% of what I do is on the start menu, as there is simply not room nor reason to pin everything I use once a week, or even perhaps once a day for 5 minutes, to the taskbar. Dropping the start menu simply make Windows 8's desktop harder to use and forces cluttering the screen with tiles, as badly as the people who covered their screens with shortcuts anc could not find anything that wasn't on their desktop for them to click.
It is a poor and very limiting design, and will significantly slow the adoption of Windows 8 in complex business environments where there are multiple applications that simply don't fit, or belong, on the taskbar. Big indicator of the difficulty inherent in managing by numbers vs common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought Slashdot's posts were primarily in English.
We have this issue at my company, and have resolved it through the use of "bypass codes" with OpenDNS as a web site filter. We have a basic access which has blocks by category, which OpenDNS does pretty well. We have some special company-wide exceptions for some customer sites which would fall under specific categories (A few gun catalogs or swimsuit catalogs that we print for customers fall in their weapons or lingerie categories) For this that may need access to some sites outside this, we have bypass codes that can be entered which allow access to a wider set of categories, but still block the porn and hate sites, etc. Finally we have a master code which is kept in IT which we can enter to allow access to any site, but it is valid only until they close the browser, at which point they are allowed only the standard level of access again. There is one issue with OpenDNS and SSL sites, as you are essentially using them as a proxy and the SSL certificate match fails, so it is not a perfect solution, but potentially a good for for the OP's needs.
Photovoltaic is what most people think of immediately when talking about "Solar Energy", and it does hold significant promise. Government programs are overlooking a couple of really high-payback, lower cost solar technologies in the big push for electrics that deserve much more support. Passive solar design for heating and cooling has almost immediate impact in significantly reducing the energy cost of a space, not just in the extreme cases where the design is so heavily skewed into support of the solar energy that no one would want to live there, but in much more modest but effective measures to be incorporated into more conventional designs. Requiring building code standards that require all new home construction to incorporate passive technologies to provide a minimum of 25% of a building's heating and cooling load, or perhaps 30-40% in commercial structures would provide work in the design and construction technologies, as well as making a very significant reduxction in the demand on outside power generation. Solar hot water units for residential and commercial spaces can provide very significant returns, often reaching a full payback of the investment in as little as 3 to 4 years. Combined with on-demand technology for water heating drawing from a tank or reservoir of solar pre-heated water and adding only the necessary supplimental heating to achieve the desired temperature if the solar heating had not already reached the desired temperatures could supply nearly 1/3 of a household's energy demand. Putting our focus on Photovoltaic is a limited strategy that needs to be broadened to include the available, proven and effective solar energy usage that will make the difference in a timely manner.
Back in the late 70's to mid 80's, this was a common enough technique that the US developed a secret system known as Tempest Shielding. In simple terms it was an active radio/electronic field around a sensitive device that was designed to block such electronic snooping. Georgia Tech has successfully recreated a technique used long before any of the researches existed.
Microsoft returns to the delusion that they can drop nearly 25 years of desktop productivity and working style with a wave of their magic wand and everyone will fall happily in line. Changes have to make sense, an offer an advantage, or they will never be adopted. Has Microsoft decided to completely concede the desktop space to Macintosh and Linux? The biggest strength of Windows for years has been that when you start a program, you know how to use it, even if you do not know what it actually does - F1 for help, File > open to get whatever you're working with as material,and other similar conventions that allowed users to go from one program to the next with a modicum of understanding of the tools, if not the functions. The Microsoft design team has gone deaf to the actual user, and it all about the science fiction interface. Funny how you never see anyone in those scifi images do anything for more than a minute at a time.
Wasn't this the major plot line of the movie Toys?
Please show me the average bicycle rider doing an 80 mile trip in under 90 minutes. Bike have their place. But comparing them to to vehicles meant for multipassenger transport over a reasonable distance in an equally reasonable period of time is not reasonable.
BMW has long been a company with superior engineering, and their efforts in the electric car market may set a standard that will require significant effort to match. While they have become more "market driven" in recent years, they still have a solid record of uncompromising engineering and design that is willing to ignore convention for a focus on effectiveness and reliability. Their motorcycle sector in particular is still in many ways years ahead of its competitors and they make some of the very few cars that can go from showroom to track/course and be competitive in their class. Looking at the design in the I series vehicles, I believe they will establish a solid place in the top of the electric vehicle market, though their pricing will undoubtedly reflect it. They are one of the few "you get what you pay for" high quality vehicles on the market.
If you take a video it is admissible, but the voice portion of it cannot be used. Unfortunately, while we all agree the kid was trying to do the right thing, the law the protects our right to speak includes rules in how our speech can be used by others. While it is hard to understand in context, the police were correct in their reaction to the recording under the law.
Recording a conversation without the consent of the other party even for the purpose of providing evidence requires a warrant, under the first amendment and the laws governing free speech. While I understand the intentions and agree that attempting to resolve it by providing clear evidence is reasonable, the simple truth is that under US law recording conversations is prohibited without the oversight of a judge who can determine whether or not it is an appropriate exception to the right of free speech. The worst part is that even though the officer probably has a very clear understanding of the circumstances that led to the desire to record the evidence, he cannot act on it if the evidence is gathered in an illegal manner. Without that safeguard, we have no right to control the content and audience of our self-expression, and no protection for our right to speak.
There are systems and processes that we run on a 24x7 basis on equipment that was built when NT was current, for which XP has been the final upgrade. The company is unlikely to replace a 25 million dollar machine so that its controllers can be front-ended with Windows 7 or anything of the kind, given that it still does half a million dollars worth of work for us a day. Some of the specialized software to drive the components and controllers is still 16 bit, and nothing beyond XP supports it. I've heard all the well meaning advice, and the folks that betray their lack of experience and understanding by declaring that we should have made these changes ages ago - the costs of designing new controllers for systems that were designed and built in the late 80's is prohibitive and the expertise and understanding of the processes necessary to replicate is for the most part lost to the ravages of time. Maintaining the most stable alternative is the only choice many companies have. I don't see the exceptions as to running desktop configurations like the one described as essential- there are current alternatives and it is only personal preference that keep people using systems like that; the desktop environment has progressed and there is little reason to stay behind. The control and process environment however, will probably keep XP running well into the 30's just because there are no solid, universally supported alternatives to running 16 bit systems for essential processes.
As consumers, we pay for internet access to get the content we are interested in, not the content the ISP can make the most money delivering. If AT&T wants the content providers which are what drives consumers to subscribe to pay for the bandwidth it takes to provide than content, then AT&T should not be charging the consumer for delivering the content at the same time. It is quite simple, the telecom providers want to be paid twice for delivering the content; by the consumer and by the provider. It is purely greed and until the regulatory agencies are given the power to correct it, it will get worse for both provider and consumer.
Backers that provide fund for the production of the film expect to receive a share of the return on the investment in the form of a share of the earnings of the film. There should be a class action suit to establish the kickstarter contributors as essentially the same class of backers, and a share equivalent to the portion represented by the kickstarter funding should be divided among the participants, Make Warner Brothers treat the people that funded the film through kickstarter the same as any other investor.
Buy a basic PC chassis and a MB that has multiple SATA ports, with a raid bios. Add 5 3T or 4T drives in a simple raid5 config, and use a dedupe program and some basic backup / sync software to run an incremental backup. It will take a while to initially get it all into the baseline, but a job will pull whatever has changed (at the file level, but that isn't too bad for this) and any decent dedupe application should get the files to under 50% and leave plenty of space for the offline de-dupe to work. Given the deals on drives you could run this pretty reasonably for under $600 or so with a little careful shopping. Set up the machine bios with a wake time and power down time to minimize power demand, or just leave it running. Not free, but compared to the cost of replaying 20T of files, music and pictures, a lot better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
The 80's called - they want their web technology back.
I have seen a massive number of comments from well meaning people telling the OP that giving the toddler a phone is wrong. Please consider this advice to ignore those well meaning but short sighted comments. We gave our daughter her first cell phone at age 8, 20 years ago. She had specific requirements: it was to be in her locker during the day at school, or if she forgot, she was to leave it with the teacher for the class and get it back at the end of class. It was to be on, but set to silent/vibrate only to avoid disturbing others. It was a voice phone- the smartphones are a bit more of a distraction. Calls at that time were always charged against airtime minutes, and 1 hour on the phone was as much as one horseback riding lesson an easy choice for her to make. If she went to an event and we would have to pick her up, she was to have the phone with her and answer it immediately when we called to see where she was so we could find her. She had our cell phone numbers programmed into it, and if she went on a school trip, the chaperone's number and anyone else "in charge" were added. Her mom traveled 3 - 4 days a week for work and I ran IT for a 7 x 24 company which sometimes meant staying late or being heavily in demand, and she knew she could always reach me, and always be reached. The "right" parenting is what works for you, not what everyone else tells you is the way to do it. You will need to manage the use of the phone the same as we did, and set the rules appropriate to their use, the same as we set rules appropriate for our time and our daughter. Interspersed with the "don't do it" comments have been a few with decent suggestions on what to use, and I would agree - Lock in a contacts list and allow calls from the list. Teach them how to call you and make it easy to find with an icon/smartkey on the screen. Lock down the "play store" or Itunes store to parental consent, and teach the child never to accept a call from someone they do not know, or that is not in their contacts list, with a picture on the contact so they can identify the caller. Handle the phone and set their understanding of how it is to be used with the same concern you do any of the other parenting tasks, and tailor it to the child's needs and your plan for what they will be allowed to do with it.
HP Laptops with the fingerprint scanner, and kronos timeclocks with similar scanners can be defeated with two pieces of play-doh and 2 minutes careful molding. Make a finger impression in the first piece, fill it with the second, and allow it to dry a but before lifting the newly molded "finger". I am sure a better material for making the "finger" could easily be found, but this works well enough to defeat the biometrics on both of these devices so far.
I can forsee a state where older drivers who can no longer safely drive themselves can maintain a portion of their independence by using these to be able to get around without requiring someone else to taxi them from place to place. Simple destinations such as family member's homes, stores, doctor and medical offices, and other common destinations could be pre-programmed into the vehicle's memory, with a simple menu to select a destination. A "specify your destination" feature could be used for those who retain the ability to decide where they wish to go, and either locked out or require an authoritative OK when the elder gets beyond being certain of being able to specify new destinations safely. Combine this with a search feature that would allow stores, restaurants and other destinations to provide their coordinates to the driverless car network, and it would go a long way to making the elder but still active population safer while still more independent.
There's a fundamental perception that Qualcomm is missing; Multicore processors are not x times as good at doing a task, unless that task can be threaded to multiple components, but most business and consumer computing devices at this point ar not doing one thing at a time. As long as the OS has the capability of dropping a task into a memory space and assigning that to a processor, the muti-core processors will always offer a benefit to the user with more than one thing at a time going on (which includes the OS itself, and all of the myriad of drivers, checkers, updaters and such we have running in the background while we do the "oe thing" on our desktop.
Considering that I built an altair 88 from a kit, a kim1 from the board and sourcing parts myself (anyone rememeber hamilton-avnet?) and both repaired and modified TRS-80 (article on putting the full 48k of RAM in the keyboard with a circuit I developed published in 80 Micro back then) I find the idea that stuff that was developed LONG after I started with these as antique tobe humorous as well, but since the definition as far as vehicles for "classic" is 20 years and "antique" is 25, it fits :)
Migration is not always a simple matter when you are talking multi-million dollar installations which would require months of redesign, wiring, programming and timing to replace the PLC hardware with newer versions. I am talking equipment with multiple feeder stations on a manufacturing chain that include as many as 500 conditions and timings based on conditions both up and down the line each, which were purchased as much as 20 years ago for some of them. If you're interested in the actual devices, they are used to select and assemble multiple groups of pages to build catalogs, from as many as 32 different "pockets" based on criterion for each individual catalog at a rate of about 250 books per minute (different page groups, covers, wraps and inserts for different versions of the catalog, as many as 20 or 30 different combinations in a single run. The techs need to be able to access and adjust embedded plcs to keep the lines running accurately,
some of the plcs I need to support are no longer supported by the allen-bradley software, and some never were, In some cases, the software the techs are using is the very last version of whatever was developed to manage the plcs, and we're talking 3-4 million dollar systems that would require months of redesign, wiring and tuning to handle a newer PLC so the options are limited.
I use toughbooks now, and the used ones and refurbs are possible, but they have specific issues with XP SP3 and serial hardware, and difficulty with some direct hardware access to the serial port. Some of this controller management software dates back to dos/win95 and is at best touchy on the toughbooks. Used hardware is often a grab-bag and has a lot of variations in port availability too.
Tools have their limits in some things, and what they do, they may do well but hit the wall on some specifics, and their code may not be optimized for performance. That being said, hand coding is VERY limited, for several reasons. First, self taught people tend to have gaps in the knowledge and practices of the areas they have studied, no matter how talented. There will be things that any hand-coder will try to do a specific way that is familiar to them, where better, if more complex, options exist through the tools. The most important thing about hand-coding is this: it is virtually unsustainable over time. I know that is a very broad statement, and will raise the hackles of some excellent and talented coders, but anyone that has done any long term support will tell you than out of the hands of the original coder, hand-coded systems fail in one important area - no one else can go in and fix them when they break, and even the original programmer will find it difficult to support a site he hasn't touched in a year or more. If he wants to hand code, teach him to comment everything, period. External documentation, commented code, clear process identification and threading are as essential to the success of a hand coded site as the code itself, but most coders will admit that this is something they do as an afterthought at best, and they consider a nuisance and a distraction from the project. The simple truth is this; if you cannot explain it on paper well enough that someone with no access to you or your thought processes can see what you have done and make the necessary changes or repairs, what you have built is, in the long run, a throwaway. Talent means a lot in creating a good site, with or without the tools. Tools provide a level of "documentation by process" that enables someone using that tool to look at a site and understand its internal processes. Very few hand coders, in my 30+ years of experience, can or do provide the same level of sustainability and the problem of the essential application or process that the developer has long since moved on from is an axiom in the IT world. It is not that tools or hand coding are either one better than the other in the end; the result is much more than the page view, and that needs to be addressed, either by using the tool, or doing the documentation the hard way. Without that, great work becomes great problems over time.
90% of what I do often is on the taskbar. 90% of what I do is on the start menu, as there is simply not room nor reason to pin everything I use once a week, or even perhaps once a day for 5 minutes, to the taskbar. Dropping the start menu simply make Windows 8's desktop harder to use and forces cluttering the screen with tiles, as badly as the people who covered their screens with shortcuts anc could not find anything that wasn't on their desktop for them to click. It is a poor and very limiting design, and will significantly slow the adoption of Windows 8 in complex business environments where there are multiple applications that simply don't fit, or belong, on the taskbar. Big indicator of the difficulty inherent in managing by numbers vs common sense.