Workflow: which job type would benefit from which computer?
I still prefer to work with the PowerBook. It simply fits my workflow better.
I knew that as soon as I saw the original mention of "workflow" that you were a Mac user and going down to the last paragraph it was confirmed. I hope this doesn't come across as hostile... WTF is it with the workflow meme and Mac users? Is it some sort of graphic design jargon that is now "in" among the ultra-hip Mac user community? The rest of the computer world simply does their "job" or follows their "process." OSX users are always going on about their "work flows" and how their computer needs to support their "work flow". Why don't you guys just go ahead and rename it your iJob and get it over with?;)
The Panasonics are nice laptops and are very sturdy. I like the built in carrying handle. You could totally beat someone to death with the laptop, or use it to stop some small caliber bullets. I have a problem with the high cost of them though. For the price of a Panasonic Toughbook you can afford to break two or three Thinkpads. I'm not talking about these $3000 ultra-light MacBook Air-like Thinkpads... but the normal, every day T-series Thinkpads.
My only gripe with trackpoints is how they seem to start drifting over time. It has happened on notebooks from a whole slew of vendors (IBM, Toshiba and HP in my experience). The mouse pointer just starts moving on its own. The solution seems to be the same on all of them... squeeze the case together to reseat whatever has come loose. I still prefer the trackpoint over the touchpad any day.
A week or two ago Buy.com was blowing out T41 Thinkpads for $400. If my focus wasn't currently on completely eliminating all of my debt, I would have scooped one up simply because it was such a great deal.
I agree with you on the Toshibas. I still have my Satellite Pro 4200 with the P3 running Win2K. It runs like a champ. All of the newer Toshibas that I've seen just aren't the same.
Right. So much for free association. Associate with who the government thinks you should be associating with is good enough.
I think it comes down to associate with people who aren't violent. I've never had any problems going to 2600 meetings or going to Defcon. I sure that the government isn't exactly cool with what is going on at either of those places.
Obedience is a useful skill; you'll need it in the coming years.
If the time ever comes where the government is carting people off to internment camps I will be right there with SKS along with everyone else who understands what is going on. Up until that point, I don't have any problems staying in the good graces of the law enforcement community. I have friends on various levels of both local, state and Federal law enforcement agencies and they are good people. They really are working to make sure that America is a good, safe place. They're just doing the best with the cards that they've been dealt. Obviously in a perfect world we wouldn't be citizens of a country whose government has decided that military dominance of strategic resources was a good way to do things, but the fact of the matter is that we are. All things considered, although we might not have the moral high ground when it comes to our position in the world, our position as Americans is a damn good one. We have the resources to live happy, content, violence free lives.
Ahh, you mean stronger controls that can't actually be put into place. Unless you're talking about having an armed guard or camera every 20 ft. around the ENTIRE border of the US? Ya, feasible.
There is a Chinese proverb. "The person who says it can't be done shouldn't get in the way of the person who is doing it." There is an American saying, "Where there is a will, there is a way." If border security were a huge priority, it would happen. As it is, I don't see it happening. We're going to get an open border via something like the NAU long before we see a closed border. That is a political issue and not an issue of it being unfeasible.
Yet gated communities with active patrols still have burglaries. Do you have evidence that it lowers crime in any significate way? There are some Dateline episodes that say "no." So, is all that extra expense worth it? Nope.. all it buys you is the fact that you can say "I'm better than you because I live in a gated community."
I'll tell you what. Compare the figures between Coto de Caza, CA and any of the surrounding neighborhoods (Rancho Santa Margarita, Aliso Viejo, Laguna Nigel, etc) and see what the differences are.
Sounds like you've had some bad experiences with the cops. Every single time I've dealt with the cops I've just done what I was told and never had any problems. I know that cops love to escalate force and as soon as you fail to comply they are going to make your life hell. The time to argue with the legal system is in the court room in front of the judge, not on the side of the street with the officer. Call me a sheep or whatever you want, but I've never pissed off the cops to the point where they pepper sprayed me. Although I did walk towards a police line once and had some rubber bullets fly past me.
You want to deprive someone of their rights, there's already a process, called a "criminal trial", and it's a lot more difficult than an injunction, even an injunction with a lot of hoops.
I once again think that you don't understand what a gang injunction is. The only time a gang injunction comes into play is when a convicted felon on parole is hanging out with other identified gang members. A person doesn't become an identified gang member by random bad luck and they don't end up on parole without the process called a "criminal trial". Sure someone might be in the files as a gang "associate" if they spend a lot of time hanging out with the homies, but that's their bad. They can find better friends to associate with. And even if that "associate" is hanging out with the homies, it isn't enough justification to arrest them. They don't get arrested until they've gone through the system and come out on parole or probation. Maybe it's different where you live. I'm talking about Los Angeles County, CA.
Gang injunctions? Oh, right, an attack on the first amendment right of free association.
Like I've implied elsewhere... If you're some white kid living in the safe suburbs, yes... something like a gang injunction looks like an attack on your first amendment rights. If you're living in the hood with a bunch of home boys who have nothing better to do than hang out in front of liquor stores and on the corners harassing everyone who passes by, a gang injunction is a good idea. I mean, seriously... where do you get off on posting your crap? Have you ever been in a neighborhood where you simply can't walk down the street without getting hassled? Who would you rather be hassled by? A bunch of home boys with guns and knives, or a bunch of cops who are trying to keep the other guys with guns and knives out of the neighborhood? Do you even know what a gang injunction is? Do you know how many legal hoops the DA and the police department have to jump through to prove that a particular group of individuals is a street gang that needs to have an injunction passed against them? I mean I realize that this is/. and the closest most people come to a gang fight is an IRC flood attack, but really? Are you really that naive about what really happens out in the real world?
Pretty much. I can see it now. "What's all of this highly optimized assembly code doing in here?! We need to re-write it in Visual Crap 2.0 so that it is fully Web 3.0 buzzword extensible and slow as molassas on a cold day if you try to run it on anything less than a quad-core Intel chip."
I call BS on this one. I've done a couple of POS implementations for restaurants and all they all used WPA encryption on the devices and the access points were setup to only accept connections from a pre-defined list of MAC addresses. Ya ya, MAC addresses can be spoofed but it is going to take an attacker a long time to hit a restaurant wireless network. The majority of restaurants still swipe the card at the hard wired terminal anyway. The restaurant industry has been dealing with confidential credit card information for a long time. The major POS vendors are up to date on what it takes to keep the data safe.
If the programmer is low paid their work is being reviewed via the QA process. Now say what you will and laugh all you want about the idea of Microsoft QA, but I can assure you that the odds of one single programmer being bribed and inserting malicious code into a core library is pretty low.
If we had stronger controls over who comes in and out of the country, we'd have an easier time tracking criminals who jump back and forth across the border.
The stronger controls that I am talking about are border security and good identification systems. Not only did I think before I posted, I already addressed your gripe on a meta level that you managed to miss.
"But, there will always be people who sneak across the border no matter what!" You might say.
There will always be residental burglaries. Does that mean you shouldn't lock your doors and install a monitored alarm system if you can afford one? Does that mean you shouldn't move into a gated community with active patrols if you can afford the luxury?
On the other hand if you're a felon, you are mandated by the court to tell the police officers that at any time that you are on probation. If you are a gang member, you have to follow the rules of gang injunctions. I hate to support profiling, but if you're over twenty-five years old and have nothing better to do than collect a welfare check and ride around the neighborhood at 2:00 in the afternoon while most people your age are working and contributing to society, you probably deserve to be stopped and questioned about what you're up to.
A friend of mine who was a sherrif in Lynwood, CA said once that, "It's really easy being a cop in Lynwood. Everyone is on probation." The brutal reality of life in America is that there are a lot of criminals out there, and the criminals don't exactly learn their lessons when they are put in jail. Those who are in gangs come right out of jail and hook back up with the gang. The gangs are in the jails too. The best that the police can do in "bad neighborhoods" is to keep the gang bangers off of the streets so that good citizens can have some sembelance of a normal daily routine.
I find it funny that you can come here on Slashdot and talk about how bad it is. The reality is that you don't live in the neighborhoods where you have to deal with gang problems. If you did, you'd have a completely different view on how intrusive the cops are. Your complaints would be that the cops don't show up fast enough, or that they don't show up at all, or that when they do show up they don't do anything. Or maybe you'd be a "big man" who shoots one of the gangsters and then gets to deal with doing 15 to life in a prison filled with the friends of the guy who you shot.
It's one thing to exercise your right to bear arms. It is another thing to have raging gun battles in the street with your neighbors. It could be said that groups out there are already exercising their right to bear arms, and they are using that right to eliminate their rivals and to intimidate the population. It's one thing to have a right to bear arms. It is another thing to have immunity from prosecution for using the arms that you are allowed to bear. Maybe we should follow the Iraqi model here in America, the one where armed militas are shooting it out in the streets.
It'd be much too simple to just incarcerate those who commit crimes. Let's instead waste our money and time trying to guard thousands of miles of border while trying to keep the "bad people" out.
We've already tried incarcerating them. The prisons are overcrowded. It costs about ~$45,000 a year to incarcerate one person in prison. So are you saying that we should be wasting our money guarding ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS because they've committed crimes here in America?
Is a safe border really a waste of money? Do you consider the locks on your front door to be a waste of money? The waste of money is Iraq. The waste of money is the war on drugs. Having a secure border isn't a waste of money... it is intrinsic to having a stable society.
Or to look at it another way, you have a choice. Either you get one world government without any borders, or you get nation states with borders. Which one do you want?
I don't see people getting up in arms because the laws and the police are preventing your neighbors from walking into your living room whenever they feel like it. Yet people get bent out of shape whenever the issue of securing the border comes up. It doesn't make any sense.
That sounds to me like a perfect example of a case in which the police should be doing a better job of keeping track of those convicted criminals rather than taking the opportunity to show off their power by harassing innocent passers-by.
Just how exactly do you think the police should be "keeping track" of the criminals on probation? Maybe we should put cameras on every corner and implant GPS tracking devices in everyone ever convicted of a felony? Is that what you're proposing?
Have you ever lived in any high crime neighborhoods? Have you spent any prolonged periods of time in one? Hell, have you ever just had to go meet a friend who lives in one and been there at the wrong time when the wrong group of people was hanging out near where you had to be? The residents there, the legitimate, hard working, law abiding citizens who live in those neighborhoods appreciate the increased police presence. They realize that after they talk to the police officers a couple of times, the cops know who they are and they don't get "harassed" anymore.
The funding for the gangs could be severely impacted by ending the war on the drugs. I'm not sure that the gang problem would be largely solved though. It has to do with a lot of things like poverty, joblessness, single parent households and a couple other factors. The drug trade just provides large amounts of money to the gangsters.
And you really think they cross the borders at dedicated check-points?
Most of them came here originally when their families were granted amnesty by Reagan because of all the shady stuff his administration was up to with the Iran-Contra nonsense. In the case of MS13, a lot of the original members actually got their military training through the School of the Americas program ironically enough.
I'm starting to see the other side of the equation. I was watching a show on television the other night and the subject was MS13, the gang that started in Los Angeles and is now spreading across Central America (El Savador, Guatamela and Honduras). One of the big problems that the police are encountering when dealing with the gang is that when they arrest the guys here in America, they deport them. Once deported they join the gang in Central America. When they get into trouble in Central America they flee back to the United States. If we had stronger controls over who comes in and out of the country, we'd have an easier time tracking criminals who jump back and forth across the border.
I think that a lot of people (myself included) who have problems with these "intrusive programs" aren't dealing with the realities of the situations that they are implemented to deal with. We're all worried about these frightful "what if" scenarios. We don't realize that there are some situations in which "intrusive" tactics are required. For example I do some community service in Long Beach, CA. The place where I do community service is a "very bad" neighborhood. The police are actively doing what they can to deal with the problems (drug dealing, auto burglaries, gang intimidation, etc.) Part of what the police do is they stop anybody who they see riding around on bikes. They stop the people to figure out who they are and what they are doing in the neighborhood. On one hand, doing so is probably a violation of some "inherent rights." On the other hand, the police are doing what they need to do to reduce the number of convincted criminals running around the neighborhood.
I don't really buy into the whole War on Terror crap that is being shoved down our throats because I am well read enough and educated enough to realize that our government created al Qaeda and our government actively supports governments that oppress their people to the point where they become "terrorists." So although "terrorist" might not be a good label to put on freedom fighters actively resisting the new world order, the label definitely does fit some organizations that are terrorizing communities right now, right here in the United States. Organizations like MS13, the Mexican mafia, etc.
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I still prefer to work with the PowerBook. It simply fits my workflow better.
I knew that as soon as I saw the original mention of "workflow" that you were a Mac user and going down to the last paragraph it was confirmed. I hope this doesn't come across as hostile... WTF is it with the workflow meme and Mac users? Is it some sort of graphic design jargon that is now "in" among the ultra-hip Mac user community? The rest of the computer world simply does their "job" or follows their "process." OSX users are always going on about their "work flows" and how their computer needs to support their "work flow". Why don't you guys just go ahead and rename it your iJob and get it over with? ;)
Thank you for saving me the time of having to type up a similar response, but you forgot the external 1TB NAS device. ;)
The Panasonics are nice laptops and are very sturdy. I like the built in carrying handle. You could totally beat someone to death with the laptop, or use it to stop some small caliber bullets. I have a problem with the high cost of them though. For the price of a Panasonic Toughbook you can afford to break two or three Thinkpads. I'm not talking about these $3000 ultra-light MacBook Air-like Thinkpads... but the normal, every day T-series Thinkpads.
My only gripe with trackpoints is how they seem to start drifting over time. It has happened on notebooks from a whole slew of vendors (IBM, Toshiba and HP in my experience). The mouse pointer just starts moving on its own. The solution seems to be the same on all of them... squeeze the case together to reseat whatever has come loose. I still prefer the trackpoint over the touchpad any day.
In this case you're comparing Apples to Apples and strangely enough that isn't applicable. How does the Apple compare to the Thinkpad?
A week or two ago Buy.com was blowing out T41 Thinkpads for $400. If my focus wasn't currently on completely eliminating all of my debt, I would have scooped one up simply because it was such a great deal.
I agree with you on the Toshibas. I still have my Satellite Pro 4200 with the P3 running Win2K. It runs like a champ. All of the newer Toshibas that I've seen just aren't the same.
Exactly. I went from Datsun 510s to Volvo 940s.
Exactly. Long live the HK USP. ;)
I think it comes down to associate with people who aren't violent. I've never had any problems going to 2600 meetings or going to Defcon. I sure that the government isn't exactly cool with what is going on at either of those places.
Obedience is a useful skill; you'll need it in the coming years.
If the time ever comes where the government is carting people off to internment camps I will be right there with SKS along with everyone else who understands what is going on. Up until that point, I don't have any problems staying in the good graces of the law enforcement community. I have friends on various levels of both local, state and Federal law enforcement agencies and they are good people. They really are working to make sure that America is a good, safe place. They're just doing the best with the cards that they've been dealt. Obviously in a perfect world we wouldn't be citizens of a country whose government has decided that military dominance of strategic resources was a good way to do things, but the fact of the matter is that we are. All things considered, although we might not have the moral high ground when it comes to our position in the world, our position as Americans is a damn good one. We have the resources to live happy, content, violence free lives.
There is a Chinese proverb. "The person who says it can't be done shouldn't get in the way of the person who is doing it." There is an American saying, "Where there is a will, there is a way." If border security were a huge priority, it would happen. As it is, I don't see it happening. We're going to get an open border via something like the NAU long before we see a closed border. That is a political issue and not an issue of it being unfeasible.
Yet gated communities with active patrols still have burglaries. Do you have evidence that it lowers crime in any significate way? There are some Dateline episodes that say "no." So, is all that extra expense worth it? Nope.. all it buys you is the fact that you can say "I'm better than you because I live in a gated community."
I'll tell you what. Compare the figures between Coto de Caza, CA and any of the surrounding neighborhoods (Rancho Santa Margarita, Aliso Viejo, Laguna Nigel, etc) and see what the differences are.
You want to deprive someone of their rights, there's already a process, called a "criminal trial", and it's a lot more difficult than an injunction, even an injunction with a lot of hoops.
I once again think that you don't understand what a gang injunction is. The only time a gang injunction comes into play is when a convicted felon on parole is hanging out with other identified gang members. A person doesn't become an identified gang member by random bad luck and they don't end up on parole without the process called a "criminal trial". Sure someone might be in the files as a gang "associate" if they spend a lot of time hanging out with the homies, but that's their bad. They can find better friends to associate with. And even if that "associate" is hanging out with the homies, it isn't enough justification to arrest them. They don't get arrested until they've gone through the system and come out on parole or probation. Maybe it's different where you live. I'm talking about Los Angeles County, CA.
Like I've implied elsewhere... If you're some white kid living in the safe suburbs, yes... something like a gang injunction looks like an attack on your first amendment rights. If you're living in the hood with a bunch of home boys who have nothing better to do than hang out in front of liquor stores and on the corners harassing everyone who passes by, a gang injunction is a good idea. I mean, seriously... where do you get off on posting your crap? Have you ever been in a neighborhood where you simply can't walk down the street without getting hassled? Who would you rather be hassled by? A bunch of home boys with guns and knives, or a bunch of cops who are trying to keep the other guys with guns and knives out of the neighborhood? Do you even know what a gang injunction is? Do you know how many legal hoops the DA and the police department have to jump through to prove that a particular group of individuals is a street gang that needs to have an injunction passed against them? I mean I realize that this is /. and the closest most people come to a gang fight is an IRC flood attack, but really? Are you really that naive about what really happens out in the real world?
Pretty much. I can see it now. "What's all of this highly optimized assembly code doing in here?! We need to re-write it in Visual Crap 2.0 so that it is fully Web 3.0 buzzword extensible and slow as molassas on a cold day if you try to run it on anything less than a quad-core Intel chip."
I call BS on this one. I've done a couple of POS implementations for restaurants and all they all used WPA encryption on the devices and the access points were setup to only accept connections from a pre-defined list of MAC addresses. Ya ya, MAC addresses can be spoofed but it is going to take an attacker a long time to hit a restaurant wireless network. The majority of restaurants still swipe the card at the hard wired terminal anyway. The restaurant industry has been dealing with confidential credit card information for a long time. The major POS vendors are up to date on what it takes to keep the data safe.
If the programmer is low paid their work is being reviewed via the QA process. Now say what you will and laugh all you want about the idea of Microsoft QA, but I can assure you that the odds of one single programmer being bribed and inserting malicious code into a core library is pretty low.
Exactly. At some point the data has to be decrypted to be consumed.
If we had stronger controls over who comes in and out of the country, we'd have an easier time tracking criminals who jump back and forth across the border.
The stronger controls that I am talking about are border security and good identification systems. Not only did I think before I posted, I already addressed your gripe on a meta level that you managed to miss.
"But, there will always be people who sneak across the border no matter what!" You might say.
There will always be residental burglaries. Does that mean you shouldn't lock your doors and install a monitored alarm system if you can afford one? Does that mean you shouldn't move into a gated community with active patrols if you can afford the luxury?
A friend of mine who was a sherrif in Lynwood, CA said once that, "It's really easy being a cop in Lynwood. Everyone is on probation." The brutal reality of life in America is that there are a lot of criminals out there, and the criminals don't exactly learn their lessons when they are put in jail. Those who are in gangs come right out of jail and hook back up with the gang. The gangs are in the jails too. The best that the police can do in "bad neighborhoods" is to keep the gang bangers off of the streets so that good citizens can have some sembelance of a normal daily routine.
I find it funny that you can come here on Slashdot and talk about how bad it is. The reality is that you don't live in the neighborhoods where you have to deal with gang problems. If you did, you'd have a completely different view on how intrusive the cops are. Your complaints would be that the cops don't show up fast enough, or that they don't show up at all, or that when they do show up they don't do anything. Or maybe you'd be a "big man" who shoots one of the gangsters and then gets to deal with doing 15 to life in a prison filled with the friends of the guy who you shot.
It's one thing to exercise your right to bear arms. It is another thing to have raging gun battles in the street with your neighbors. It could be said that groups out there are already exercising their right to bear arms, and they are using that right to eliminate their rivals and to intimidate the population. It's one thing to have a right to bear arms. It is another thing to have immunity from prosecution for using the arms that you are allowed to bear. Maybe we should follow the Iraqi model here in America, the one where armed militas are shooting it out in the streets.
We've already tried incarcerating them. The prisons are overcrowded. It costs about ~$45,000 a year to incarcerate one person in prison. So are you saying that we should be wasting our money guarding ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS because they've committed crimes here in America?
Is a safe border really a waste of money? Do you consider the locks on your front door to be a waste of money? The waste of money is Iraq. The waste of money is the war on drugs. Having a secure border isn't a waste of money... it is intrinsic to having a stable society.
Or to look at it another way, you have a choice. Either you get one world government without any borders, or you get nation states with borders. Which one do you want?
I don't see people getting up in arms because the laws and the police are preventing your neighbors from walking into your living room whenever they feel like it. Yet people get bent out of shape whenever the issue of securing the border comes up. It doesn't make any sense.
Just how exactly do you think the police should be "keeping track" of the criminals on probation? Maybe we should put cameras on every corner and implant GPS tracking devices in everyone ever convicted of a felony? Is that what you're proposing?
Have you ever lived in any high crime neighborhoods? Have you spent any prolonged periods of time in one? Hell, have you ever just had to go meet a friend who lives in one and been there at the wrong time when the wrong group of people was hanging out near where you had to be? The residents there, the legitimate, hard working, law abiding citizens who live in those neighborhoods appreciate the increased police presence. They realize that after they talk to the police officers a couple of times, the cops know who they are and they don't get "harassed" anymore.
The funding for the gangs could be severely impacted by ending the war on the drugs. I'm not sure that the gang problem would be largely solved though. It has to do with a lot of things like poverty, joblessness, single parent households and a couple other factors. The drug trade just provides large amounts of money to the gangsters.
Most of them came here originally when their families were granted amnesty by Reagan because of all the shady stuff his administration was up to with the Iran-Contra nonsense. In the case of MS13, a lot of the original members actually got their military training through the School of the Americas program ironically enough.
I think that a lot of people (myself included) who have problems with these "intrusive programs" aren't dealing with the realities of the situations that they are implemented to deal with. We're all worried about these frightful "what if" scenarios. We don't realize that there are some situations in which "intrusive" tactics are required. For example I do some community service in Long Beach, CA. The place where I do community service is a "very bad" neighborhood. The police are actively doing what they can to deal with the problems (drug dealing, auto burglaries, gang intimidation, etc.) Part of what the police do is they stop anybody who they see riding around on bikes. They stop the people to figure out who they are and what they are doing in the neighborhood. On one hand, doing so is probably a violation of some "inherent rights." On the other hand, the police are doing what they need to do to reduce the number of convincted criminals running around the neighborhood.
I don't really buy into the whole War on Terror crap that is being shoved down our throats because I am well read enough and educated enough to realize that our government created al Qaeda and our government actively supports governments that oppress their people to the point where they become "terrorists." So although "terrorist" might not be a good label to put on freedom fighters actively resisting the new world order, the label definitely does fit some organizations that are terrorizing communities right now, right here in the United States. Organizations like MS13, the Mexican mafia, etc.