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Comment Re:IBM will outlive both, but it doesn't do PCs no (Score 1) 417

That's weird, my work machine is a 15" MBP... and I don't see the BSoDs (black, not blue), frequent reboots, dropped wifi, or the cursing in general that the 'doze users commonly do.

It's also easier to have an OS that does both the necessary evil of MS Office/Outlook, and at the same time gives me a usable bash shell without having to use PuTTY, Cygwin, or something similar.

But you know, YMMV...

Comment Re:Dell, HP, Panasonic (Score 2) 417

Do not underestimate Dell. Their ability to sell laptops by the pallet to corporations is impressive.

Their ability to sell servers by the truckload to corporations is even more impressive... until a decent blade solution arrives that isn't so rectum-stretching expensive (*cough*CiscoUCS*cough*), I suspect that Dell will be around for a *very* long time...

(same with HP, come to think of it.)

Comment Re:"Full responsibilty?" (Score 1) 334

This is simply Congress saying they aren't important enough or don't want to be bothered with doing their job. Such a law is only good when quick action is needed to be taken. We are well beyond that point.

Actually, the original rationale was to give the president full legal authority to retaliate in the case of a nuclear attack on the US (at the time it was a real enough possibility). It made sense at the time, since requiring Congress to quickly convene at least a quorum and declare war, then have everyone scramble for the fallout shelter... all within 30 minutes? Yeah, no, that would be stupid.

Not saying that the power hasn't been abused (every single president since Johnson has done so), but it had a real reason for existing in the first place.

Comment Re:Not a Piece of Shit (Score 1) 128

One of the requirements of PCI compliance with the credit card companies is that you don't use default passwords in any equipment tied to the card transaction.

True, but...

1) Does PCI compliance/certification even go near individual retailers/businesses, or does it stop cold at the merchant card processor that the retailer/PoS dials into with each transaction? I'm not quite seeing a small Mom-n-Pop store undergoing a PCI audit anytime soon...

2) For folks who do their own in-house processing, how many auditors do you know of that painstakingly test each and every PoS machine in every store (e.g. Wal-Mart, whenever they recertify)? Hell - they barely sample servers, which you tell them the hostnames for...

Comment Re:please, Mod Parent up (Score 1) 407

It is a self-correcting problem - only the time-to-correction variable is in question.

A company that burns itself hot with drugs will find mistakes creeping into its products, workers that burn out and crash in spectacular ways, or simply see a mass exodus from its ranks and a big, fat black-mark with recruiters. It also eventually destroys productivity.

I used to work for a company whose culture could best be described as a boiler-room. No drugs were involved, yet in the space of two years, one of the sysadmins had a literal heart attack, and the lead developer and network engineer both suffered strokes - the network guy recovered fairly quickly and quit, while the developer is still, even today, trying to re-learn that whole talking thing. One of the IT managers suffered so much stress, that he eventually wound up in prison for abusing one of his kids.

Again - no performance-enhancing drugs were involved. It took the global parent company (In Germany) to step in and fix the mess, because it was destroying the company financially (due to turnover, downtime due to sloppy work caused by over-committal, etc) It took the act of publicly firing the company's CEO, a few other board members and the IT Director, and basically hitting the big corporate culture reset button. I was long gone by then (as were many others), but many of my former colleagues who remained behind tell me that things improved vastly, and the company actually has improved by quite a bit since then.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 407

and then the worker comp attorneys come out of wood work and sue when some in a job uses drugs like this and things go bad and they end up in rehab

...or worse, someone has a psychotic reaction to over-using a stimulant and decides that he really needs to go postal...

Comment Re:You no longer own a car (Score 1) 649

They were likely the only third-party dealer to actually ask.

OWC (Other World Computing)/MacSales is a company specializes on selling Apple-tuned products. It makes perfect sense for them to have tight integration with Apple hardware.

By contrast, pretty much all other HDD manufacturers and resellers make/sell parts for "PCs" - that is, they make stuff that is fairly generic, and if those parts happen to fit a Mac, then okay, but otherwise they really don't concern themselves with that bit.

Comment Re: You no longer own a car (Score 1) 649

Quoted for visibility:

Ugh, I think you need to actually work on cars before saying anything like that.

Only the Nissan GTR has an engine mated and tuned directly to the transmission. Other high end (150+k) cars would have this even remotely possible. Cars are mass produced. The transmission your car can be replaced with any of the like car transmissions without being disabled.

Seriously - even if they did pull something stupid like GP insists, parts have to be replaced somehow, and therein lies the loophole. After all, how else do you think you can currently buy computer readers/chip-programmers/performance-enhancing chips/etc in aftermarket right now?

Comment Re:You no longer own a car (Score 3, Insightful) 649

You'll have to try harder than that for an example, because that's already been defeated very handily.

Oh, and these guys will happily sell you shiny new SSD's with native OSX TRIM support.

(...besides, even without TRIM support there's no real difference for the average user in longevity or performance on an SSD. I've gone without it the whole time I've had mine; by the time the SSD wears out, I'll just go out and buy one twice the size - probably for the same price I paid for the 512GB Crucial SSD that I have shoved into my MBP right now.)

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