We recently moved (only a couple month ago), and while it's a small town we're in, I'm still discovering new things all the time. It feels a bit foolish for me to spend a lot of money traveling to distant places to explore them, when I can't even say I feel like I'm an expert on what's in my own home-town yet!
When you watch the latest ads, Microsoft is trying to communicate a message that the new Surface Pro 3 is a device for Mac users who own (and have to carry around) both an iPad and a Macbook Air.
Essentially, they're conceding that Apple is still the "one to beat" in the tablet market -- and they think their best shot at improved sales is cannibalizing sales to people who invested in the Mac ecosystem with multiple portable devices already.
To me, that says "niche player"!
I think almost everyone agrees that the Surface has good hardware specs. Essentially, you can order it configured with all of the same options you can get in an Macbook Air (up to 8GB of RAM and an Intel core i5 or i7 CPU), so it would be no surprise if it performed every bit as well as one of those.
The problem is, MS still wants you to believe you should pay the high price of a Surface Pro 3 (compared to an iPad at least), because it will do double duty as your tablet and your laptop computer. I'd say that's not so compelling! I own an iPad Air with wifi and cellular data, and I also own a Macbook Pro notebook (issued to me by my employer). I take the iPad Air with me all the time when commuting to/from work, but I use it for things like reading the digital version of the morning newspaper, checking my new email, and maybe playing a casual game like Words with Friends. My notebook stays in a dock at work unless I know I'm going to some destination where I want a full blown computer setup for some length of time (like a business trip or a vacation, where I'll use it in the hotel room).
I'd rather not carry around a device with a keyboard attached if I'm just using it for reading and a little bit of web browsing, and I like the fact that even if my iPad gets broken or stolen, I have all of the really important data back on the notebook computer -- so it's not a big problem.
In a scenario where I was really going to be doing a lot of mobile work? It'd also be a plus to own and have BOTH devices with me, since that means at least double the battery life available to me without a need to recharge.
There's probably also the question of how long before we can get reactors online which make use of the radioactive "waste" we're storing up now?
Considering the material is considered so hazardous, it implies it still has a lot of energy we're not harnessing very well (but could).
I'd tend to agree with you, although the problem here is often not the employee and his/her laziness or incompetence. The fear often comes from uncertainty that management recognizes the value in what you've done for them.
For example, I had a buddy who used to work for a company that installed and maintained point of sale systems. He found all sorts of time consuming processes that he could automate, by virtue of knowing how to code in languages like PHP or Perl, and did so wherever possible.
The problem is, his boss quickly got used to the idea that he was getting all of those tasks done in a much shorter time window, and began expecting it. When those "one off" situations happened where an automated script wasn't going to crank out a requested report, or make a big update easy to do -- he wasn't given any leeway. He was pushed into time crunches with unrealistic expectations and had to pull "all nighters" to meet the deadlines.
What you're suggesting is the logical course of action, but employers aren't always logical (or paying attention to what you've done). In that respect, I guess it may sometimes come down to your personal priorities. Do you want to leave "well enough alone" and keep getting your paycheck for doing things the traditional way? Do you want to automate everything in secret, so you can pretend tasks still take longer, while it secretly gives you free time to do something else? Or do you want to call attention to the improvements you've made and gamble that it gets you more pay or recognition, vs. a risk it will just land you more difficult work for the same salary?
I think you're missing the point, really?
Apple, historically, supports the current OS X and 2 versions back from it. Beyond that, it's unsupported by them. But they don't publish official "end of life" dates for OS X like Microsoft and others do for their OS's.
The reasoning is that quite a few people can and DO like to keep their old machines around, running older software they've invested in, even if the operating system itself isn't getting patches released for it anymore.
There are still people out there using OS X 10.4 Tiger, and 3rd. party products targeted specifically for them
It wasn't a purely arbitrary decision on Apple's part. I have a 2006 Macbook (the black plastic model) over here that allows me to upgrade to OS X Lion 10.7.5 but can't use Mountain Lion or Mavericks. It has a Core 2 (64-bit) processor, and with the 4GB of RAM I put in it, it more than meets the minimum RAM requirement. The sticking point is the Intel GMA950 video chipset, which Apple decided wasn't powerful enough to give a good user experience with the newer features they were adding.
Microsoft, by contrast, tends to include at least some sort of relatively generic video driver for a whole slew of video cards, to ensure a given version of Windows will still boot and run on far older machines. But is that really "better"? I was able to put Windows 8.1 on a circa 2006 Dell Latitude D430, not long ago, thanks to this sort of backwards compatibility -- yet the user experience was awful to unusable when trying to do such things as launching the free pinball game they had in the "Metro" UI.
In other cases, I've seen where you can make older hardware work in Windows, but it causes instability. Then people run around poking fun at Microsoft for the exception errors and blue screens of death that randomly pop up.
Apple markets their computer products as a whole ecosystem
Truthfully, between primarily using Mac OS X these days and the fact that Windows PCs have become such a commodity item, I haven't felt much need to build a PC clone from parts for a long time. But then I decided to dabble in litecoin mining - an endeavor requiring pretty customized machine configurations. I wound up putting together 3 altcoin mining rigs, which fully paid for themselves during the time I ran them -- and after retiring them, rebuilt one as a gaming PC for one of our kids.
I would have come out a few hundred bucks ahead, in fact, if it weren't for Micro Center selling me a dud Radeon R9280x card that I wasted even more time and money for return postage on, trying to get Gigabyte to repair or replace it under the factory warranty. (Bastards held onto the dud card for over a month, during the peak value of litecoin -- when it could have *really* been earning its purchase price, and then sent me the same card back, claiming it was repaired -- but no evidence they so much as touched the thing. Exact same issues it had when I shipped it off!)
Unfortunately, yes.... this is SO true. I blame some of this on the 2 party political system we've got in America. Although yes, you have a number of other party platforms out there that candidates can choose to run on, they're largely irrelevant. Everyone knows that if you want a real chance at getting elected, you have to run as either a Democrat or a Republican. If you join one of those parties but clearly have an agenda that's very far outside the parameters they've set - again, you won't make it very far.
Every so often, an exception happens, but most of the time when you see an independent candidate get elected to some office, it's because it's an uncontested position or the competition is so widely viewed as corrupt and incompetent, they win by virtue of being a different option available on the ticket.
The 2 major parties have no intentions of giving the people too much liberty or personal freedom, and neither one will ever decide that small government is better for the country! Their candidates are too hung up with delusions of making the nation stronger and better through some new/additional government organization, legislation, cabinet or office they can CREATE while in power.
This is just the latest blast of greed from Sony with this console.
I purchased a PS4 just a week or two ago, after holding out this long with our aging PS3 system -- under the assumption it would be a worth successor. In a few ways, it is. Certainly, the new DualShock controllers are one of the highlights. They're more comfortable to hold, have the ability to plug in headphones and route the game audio through them, have the touch-pad in the middle, different colored lights indicating player 1, 2, 3, etc. Good stuff. But then I discovered you couldn't even download your MP3 music to the PS4 from a memory stick to play it! The only way it seems to allow music playing is via a subscription service! Then you have to pay for the PSNetwork, or else you're pretty much locked out of playing games online. (That was always a reason I preferred PS3 to X-Box in the past... Don't like to pay subscription fees just for the privilege of online play of games I just paid $60 a pop for!)
I'm *almost* surprised Sony didn't tell me that like my satellite TV box, I'm simply renting it from them and must return it when my subscription with them expires!
I'm inclined to agree!
I worked for one place that tried to roll out a big ERP system and even though it was done in multiple stages, just the "stage 1" portion was an incredibly costly undertaking that enlightened the in-house I.T. staff as to just what a bloated kludge the software really was.
I remember we encountered certain system errors trying to run reports which stumped the support people for the software.... What finally got it fixed was my boss devoting an afternoon to looking at it himself. He was pretty savvy with Oracle databases and rewrote some buggy queries in the code, correcting it.
All of the money charged for maintenance and support and licensing for these systems is NOT necessarily equivalent to receiving a superior level of actual assistance with the software. So IMO, just spend your money more wisely on in-house developers.
Well, it's not *quite* like that....
What Apple does on the computer side of things is generally stocks 2 to 3 configurations for each product in the lineup. So you can choose from a "base model" or an all around upgraded form of that, or in some cases you get a "low", "mid spec" and "high spec" config. to pick from.
All of the other combinations would be custom orders that aren't stocked.
Right now, they actually have 5 product lines: Macbook Air or Macbook Pro for laptops, the Mac Mini, the iMac and the Mac Pro workstation.
That's why I said I was a little surprised the maxxed out configuration was in the store, ready to sell. It's not something you can select on the website without manually picking the highest end pre-configured model and then manually choosing several options to upgrade various components further.....
I don't know if I'd call the whole credit scoring system a scam, but it's certainly flawed - especially for people just starting out. Basically, they're saying that if they have no history on you and how you handle loaned money, they have no way to assign you a meaningful score. You're a ghost in the system. So anyone considering offering you credit checks the score, finds you basically have no score yet, and is afraid to be the first to take a chance on you.
I remember having this problem when I tried to get my first car loan. Basically, I couldn't do it without getting my dad to co-sign on the loan, even though I'd purchased 2 cars before that with straight cash.
I think once you're off and running with things like credit cards or a loan, though, the scoring system is generally pretty effective. A lot of people complain about all the oddities of what boosts your score or hurts it. But the flip side of that is, if they used a static formula, people would easily figure it out and it would making gaming the system much easier. That's why I suspect they regularly change things up in certain ways, deciding that a certain financial move will penalize you more for a while, and then less than something else for a while, etc.
You'd be surprised what Apple stores have in stock.
We use their products where I work and I occasionally have to run in to the local store to do a "grab and go" purchase on the corporate credit card when a new person is hired and needs to be issued a machine. I needed the highest spec custom configuration of their retina 15" Pro for a new graphics designer/video editor guy they hired, and it turned out the local store kept that config. in stock -- despite it not being shown anyplace on the shelves as an option.
In general, they apparently stock the "fully maxxed out" configuration of all of their machines in their high volume stores, but don't really advertise it. It's just there for the cases where people come in and request it, which seems to happen just often enough to justify stocking 1 or 2, vs. making people do a special order and wait an extra 1-2 days to receive it.
I'm wondering though if presenting one's own expired/cancelled cards for transactions wouldn't set up some kind of data trail leading back to you, with scams like this one? We don't really know how the guy was finally caught -- but I'd have to think repeatedly presenting a known cancelled card for a transaction and causing it to be rejected would set up red flags someplace?
I thought in many cases, the merchant would just receive a "capture card" notification when this was tried?
What's really such a big deal about this?
I mean, sure -- it's cool that he shrunk a hand-held game system concept down into something this tiny. But practically speaking, I can't see much marketability for something that just allows replaying the same old, relatively simplistic arcade games of the 80's (and "standards" like chess)?
Strikes me as more of a novelty, especially for Arduino fans. But again, just how many pieces of electronics do we need to run this stuff? Sure, you can suggest that other programmers take on the challenge of making the "coolest game able to run" on it -- but WHY should they bother? They'd have better luck even if they were targeting old PalmPilot devices rescued from some electronics recycling dump.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
