This has been discussed in many places like toms hardware. Essentially they found the cards volting is determined in the bios and the fan speeds can be altered. change the bios which many have released and the undervolting which occurs at lower temps is solved. Sapphire already released a new bios for the card to make these changes to keep them consistent yet keeping them from going above 95 degrees.

Not get molested at airports. Protest without being required to have a permit or sent off to a free speech zone. It's not something I'd personally like to do, but there are many drugs that are illegal. The fourth amendment is being consistently ignored. There are constitution-free zones around the border. Those are just some things that are a problem at the moment. You obviously didn't try very hard if you couldn't think of one problem.

I'd also like to not have my communications spied on by the government.

Carry a pocket knife into a government building. Ride the subway without being searched. Keep my fucking shoes on at the airport. Apply for a job without having to prove my citizenship. Not buy health insurance. Go to Canada without having to carry my passport like we could do for 99% of American history. Write DRM-cracking software. Smoke a joint if I feel like it (I don't actually want to do that, but many do, and who am I to deny them?)

Shall I go on?

How about the simplest and yet most important one?

Being able to have a conversation with a couple of people about highly controversial topics without fear of the government recording your conversations, creating files on all of you, and adding you to watch lists that strongly curtail your freedom of movement?

I seem to remember the Founding Fathers being pretty fucking excited about getting that one into the framework of the country....

Unless you are a few years older than I am, I doubt that you remember living in a "FREE AMERICA". During the McCarthy days, you were "free" to associate with card carrying communists, of course, but the moment any of the McCarthyites found out about it, you would be dragged through an ugly media trial. After your character had been thoroughly destroyed, you were then free to actually join the party. A lot of black folk might chime in here, to remind you of the many ways that they were "free". In my lifetime, black people were denied service in white restaurants, denied seating at the front of buses, and denied access to necessary public spaces such as restrooms.

I believe that what you actually mean is, you can remember a time when you were completely unaware of civil rights violations all around you. I also remember such a time. Life was wonderful when I was five years old, and my greatest achievements included learning to ride a two-wheeled bike, and passing the test to get into first grade.

In Boston, at every subway station, the police set up a checkpoint one day a year and search everyone who goes through it. They do this a) to remind the citizens who is really in charge b) to keep up the security theatre that brings them Federal dollars and c) to establish a history of conducting dragnet searches so a future plaintiff cannot claim a "reasonable expectation of privacy."

If there is an American city that has a subway system and does NOT perform this annual charade, please let me know. I would be surprised but please to hear about it.

Its not so much about being ok or not being ok....its about it being such a small amount that anyone making any sort of a deal over it is....kind of an asshole.

If I caught someone stealing 5 cents from me, it would be unlikely to garner more than a "hey what the fuck man".

There is being right, and there is being an asshole who is right.

IANAL but as I believe (as others have pointed out) it's not illegal for a police officer to enter a vehicle being used in the commission of a crime (at least in all the US municipalities I'm familiar with). However, that said, the more I think about it the more I believe you've just touched on the REAL reason for the absurd $0.05 theft of service charge. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the cop is using that as a way to legalize what would otherwise have been an illegal fishing expedition searching through the guy's car for more serious contraband. If he didn't charge the guy with SOMETHING, he risks becoming the criminal.

Did you get that out of your A$$, or thin air? You are quite incorrect.

I'm a BSEE-toting master electrician.

1) Commercial buildings, like that school, must have minimally 20 Amp minimally circuits- never 15.

2) A 20 Amp breaker trips at 20 amps. 16 amps is the max continuous load current allowed (80%) but NOT the trip current.

3) There certainly ARE 40 amp receptacles!! I've installed MANY! Go to your favorite hardware store and look for stove/dryer receptacles and you'll find them. There are several sizes and styles in 30, 40, and 50 amp range, including 3 and 4 prong (4 if neutral is needed - NEVER share ground with neutral!)

And then you have twist-lock connectors which can go to hundreds of amps...

Please don't write so authoritatively when you (obvious to me) don't know what you're talking about. You're misleading others who will easily believe you.

Chamblee Middle School (http://www.chambleems.dekalb.k12.ga.us/) is part of the Dekalb County (Georgia) School System. DCSS is the most fucked-up school district in the USA. The former Superintendent was arrested for theft by taking, the replacement Superintendent abandoned her job and the current Superintendent is a political hack who lacks the qualifications required to hold a teacher's license. The former COO was just found guilty of racketeering. The DCSS school board was removed by the state Governor and the school system is currently on "Accredited Probation", the only school system in the country with that status.

Some recent news coverage of Dekalb County School System:

Court upholds law used to suspend DeKalb school board members: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/court-upholds-law-used-to-suspend-dekalb-school-bo/nb4Cx/

Ex-DeKalb school official found guilty of racketeering: http://www.11alive.com/news/article/313666/40/Verdict-reached-in-DeKalb-corruption-trial

DeKalb teacher accused of beating special needs elementary student with stick: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/dekalb-teacher-accused-beating-special-needs-eleme/nb26M/

School superintendent negotiates settlement in expensive legal battle: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local-education/school-superintendent-negotiates-settlement-in-exp/nb89X/

DeKalb Schools placed on probation: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/dekalb-schools-placed-probation/nTYSp/

DeKalb’s graduation rate under the new state formula: 58.65% (Meaning that 42% of Dekalb Students DO NOT GRADUATE!) http://dekalbschoolwatch.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/dekalbs-graduation-rate-under-the-new-state-formula-58-65/

The Sea of Tranquility is not a sea in the normal sense, so seaweed doesn't really make sense.

Also FYI the octane requirement can be related to timing advance, where a lower-compression turbocharged engine with more advanced timing would need higher octane gas to make longer burns from each spark (higher octane gas burns longer than lower octane gas). The earlier spark sets off a longer-burn time of gas timed to the timing, needing the longer-burn ability of the 92+ octane. An old simple truck with 0 BDC timing would be happy with 87 octane, where a newer engine with 15 BDC timing advance would be better with 92+ octane.

Fuck this is way off topic from hard drives, sorry. Just needed to fill in some missing info.

As for hard drives, the more, the better. RAID is for safety now, and SSD's are for speed where we used to have RAID-0. ETC

All the newer shelves came preloaded with Coraid-approved drives. As I said, there's hundreds of drives involved here, a lot of SATA 1TB and 2TB and some SAS 600GB. I think out of the later drives, we've had two fail. Maybe three.

Asked about it, Coraid said, yes, the warranty is better on "Enterprise-class" or "RAID-class" drives, but also, the firmware is different. They claim that drives intended for the consumer / SOHO market spend a lot of time retrying marginal reads before declaring an unreadable sector and sparing it. They say that SAN-class drives limit the retry time, because the array controller handles it more efficiently, since it has the big-picture view.

The also say that the drives are optimized for close-quarters operation, all jammed together in an array, handling vibration and heat build-up slightly differently, and that they have minor differences to keep lubrication from migrating out of the spindle bearing under continuous operation. I don't know but I imagine loss of spindle bearing lube would add vibration and make any but the best reads more marginal.

I don't know for sure, but we've spent a great deal of US dollars on their products and our experience has borne out the fact that there's a definite difference in arrays.

As for corporate desktop and/or server use, well, I don't really know. Our servers that have one to four drives were mostly shipped with those drives, so we didn't choose them. I can't tell you if they are enterprise class drives, but I imagine they are, based on the replacement costs. And I know about what some of those costs are, or anyhow I know they were way more than I personally pay for drives for home desktop and server use. I know that because occasionally they fail, and I have to buy new ones.

But consumer hard drives are so much cheaper that it's not really cost effective anymore to buy Enterprise drives.

Do you actually do Enterprise Storage? Because I know people who do.

At the really high end, the machines automatically call home and report a fault to the vendor. The vendor then dispatches someone to replace the faulty bit within the SLA.

In my experience, and from what I've been told by people who do this for a living, the Enterprise class drives come with the benefit of a warranty in which the manufacturer is contractually obligated to get you a replacement within a fixed amount of time.

Anyone doing real enterprise class storage for real mission critical things -- using commercial SATA drives is just not done unless it's cheap/bulk storage. Sure, you pay through the nose to the vendor for that kind of support, but you also have guaranteed service time and availability.

I just don't see evidence of people who do this at an enterprise scale cheaping out on disks for the important stuff.

No difference between enterprise and home HDD's that I know of.

As for what "hammering and heavy use " of a drive is?

The biggest killer of HDD's is something called the CSS test cycle.

CSS = Contact Start Stop where the drive is booted up, spun up, and then shut down repetitively.

Generally, a HDD sitting there spinning away is not what kill them off,
however turning them on-off-on-off a lot is the most abusive thing that you can do.

I still think WD makes the best quality out there, but that's just my opinion.

just my 0.02 worth...

Consumer drives have this thing called being half the price, keep one spare, what the heck if it breaks go out and buy a new one, in 1 a hour, still faster than 4 hours. What kind of enterprise organization wouldn't have a few hard drives spare just in case a few failed. Send the old one back to replaced, in their own good time.

I don't see why you would have to pay 100% markup for what is basically insurance, for the manufactures defects.

Sort of like airline tickets that you can reschedule, more than 2x the price and still subject to availability (last time my company bought one), just buy the non refundable ticket, if your plans change then buy another one, the average cost is going to be less, unless you change your plans a lot, perhaps you need better planning? You also have travel insurance for such things which is not the cost of the plane ticket, and covers other things too.

Though I have to say that their announcements are 10 years too late, I feel that Valve's experience of their investing their system in this minority platform must be paying off. Why would they continue otherwise.

They get a viable console OS platform, for "free", with community support. They get a reputation as being "the" Linux gaming vendor (like transgaming etc. were). They get to bring their games to new platforms and push driver issues through Intel etc. cooperation to get themselves some influence in the industry from multiple angles.

And they are obviously seeing that their investment in Linux and even small things like SDL (which I believe is the backend of much of the Steam client, not to mention the browser components they use) is paying dividends for them.

Good on them, I say. It *is* a niche platform, but they are driving it hard and seeing what it can do for them, rather than just waiting until it has 25% market share before they do anything about it (which is the standard attitude among software and hardware companies). And they are doing lots of things they don't NEED to be doing. They've pretty much held off the Windows marketplace junk, so they don't need that 1% of Linux users jumping on board, nor would they make a huge difference even if they hadn't shielded themselves against the Windows Store.

I have used the Linux Steam client. It's just like Steam, but on Linux. I have played some of my games on Linux (88 supported out of 500+), and they work just like they do on Linux (even though that's much more dependent on the software developer, but the Valve titles are especially nice). Big picture mode was needed once we all started having widescreen TV's with HDMI, and it delivers. The next logical step is to make a box that just plays Steam and goes out on HDMI and if you have that kind of backing and prior success on Linux, why pay for Windows (even if that's only true for the first few revisions of the hardware)?

But they've taken it further - rather than just bash out a cheap PC-clone console, they are redesigning controllers, reprogramming their games around them, looking into the new VR trend, and trying to make it a machine that not just they can build. That's going above-and-beyond, as far as I'm concerned, so they deserve recognition for it, even if they are doing it purely for profit reasons.

The only downside is that people have been saying for 10 years how this should have been started on, and it took too long to get there. But we're there now.

Well done, Valve. Looking forward to buying a Steam console next Christmas when all these XBox and PS crap that I've never touched are just memories.

Make a good product, make a good customer out of your customers, and you don't have to pay people to advertise it.

Probably spent more on Steam than I have on my last few PC's combined. And my first purchase took nearly a year after they shut WON down, and I only created the account to carry on playing CS 1.6 online.

Fact is, make a good enough product and treat your customers well and you don't have to buy ANYONE, they'll give you a positive review and backing all of their own accord.

I kinda grew fond of it being on the Desktop.

Moreover, how about list such platforms usable in places other the US.

I've had people commit perjury against me in court. Judge didn't do shit. I was able to prove that they had forged a "sworn testimony" against me from a 3rd party by showing that the dates that it was dated outside the scope of when that 3rd party would have had any dealings or knowledge about the case. All the judge did was dismiss that single piece of evidence. You can get away with perjury all you want because judges don't care (they're used to being lied to) and juries will almost NEVER convict someone of perjury -- so good luck getting a DA to prosecute. There is no real defense for an honest man in court against a dishonest man.

How does a US federal court gain jurisdiction over a company located in Panama?

A ruling prior to this settlement held that Hotfile could be subject to vicarious liability for failing to comply with the DMCA (they allegedly ignored a bunch of DMCA takedown requests and failed to shut down a bunch of accounts despite repeat infringements), but the DMCA is US law, not Panama law. Unless copyright is somehow a special case (due to, say, international agreements), I fail to see why Hotfile should be subject to US copyright law anymore than US companies should be subject to Chinese or Iranian censorship laws.

What gives?

Yep... Dodd also has a different definition of "works" than a lot of people would find to be appropriate. His definition appears to refer to "a mechanism that closes off content until rich folks' palms are greased with enough silver". When he says "works" he's not saying that it does anything for content creators after their initial legal contact with publishers.

The MPAA message says that a federal court found Hotfile liable. The court didn't find anything because the parties settled before trial began. It seems a little disingenuous, but perfectly within the normal bounds of the MPAA playbook, to blatantly lie like that.

More prisons, more Randism, more upper class loathing of the "lazy", less food assistance, less of any financial assistance, removal of affordable housing, drastic anti-loitering laws, and finally really nasty anti-rioting weapons and roundup tactics against agitators.

I'm not describing the dystopic future - I'm describing the reaction right now. And the anti-poor crackdown will only intensify. The riots will be christened "terrorism" and all those lovely laws we've created since 2001 will finally find their real use.

Exactly what part of electronics manufacturing needs to be automated? The cheap prices and mass production of electronics we currently enjoy is partly due to widespread use of pick-and-place machines and wave soldering machines. I'm sure there are some manual steps in the assembly, but that is only the last 10 - 20% of the labor involved in manufacturing. The bulk of it has been automated for decades.

The sky did fall. The protestors of the 1800's were correct. The people displaced by technology in the 1800s fell into poverty and early death, and England, for instance, was home to immense poverty and despair. We don't want to remember, which is not the same thing as not-happened. We choose to remember the happy industrialist and middle-class lifestyles which came from impoverishing the workers, not the majority of miserable people they created by re-distributing the wealth from the majority of the working people to their own class.

thing to remember is that the people who were protesting their replacement by machines weren't really asking for history to be rolled back - they wanted to be *cut in on the profits* created by removing them from the books. They wanted some income redistribution. They lost. Since they didn't run university history courses, as industrialists did, they have been expunged from our collective memory and rendered into silly people who didn't want to stop making horse collars by hand.

The price of all this will be misery, violence, hunger and early death for hundreds of millions of people, eventually, if history repeats. Looks like "yes". And no one will want to take notice, other than intense coverage of the violence in the "bad" neighborhoods.

Seriously, what is our long term goal as humans?

Oh, I don't know -- maybe not having to spend half our waking hours, for over half our lives, doing something that we'd rather not be doing, except that we'll be homeless and starving otherwise?

Sure, there are some of us lucky enough to get paid for doing what we'd choose to do anyway. There are even a lot of us who would make terribly unwise choices about what to do with our time if we didn't have to work for a living. But if we have a grand refactoring that separates "earning a living" from "having a career", I'm not sure it's necessarily a catastrophe.

not everybody will be in the top 1%

In fact, I'd be willing to say about 1% of people will be in the top 1%

That's not justice at all, like the other one said. If police are too incompetent, or it is unfeasible to catch most people who commit a certain crime, they can't (or rather, shouldn't) punish those they do catch much more severely simply because they can't catch other people who commit said crime. Justice > security.

Oh, you're falling into the Austrian Economics trap of thinking of everything as a rational system.

People aren't rational. People who are violating the law especially aren't rational.

There is ample statistics that show increases in penalties do not have a linear impact on crime on any macro scale and in many cases, increases in punishment result in no net increase in compliance.

They do, however, from a utilitarian view, impact the overall good generated by the justice system.

Therefore increasing penalties shows a diminishing return (and a rather rapid one, in my view).

I view a 1 minute DoS attack as roughly akin to orchestrating one minute of blocking the entrance to a store (or maybe multiple stores). Such an act, while punishable by a trespassing fine, probably on the order of $100-$500, the "online" equivalent of $183,000 and two years probation does not match the act, especially when he was one of only several thousand people doing the same thing.

There are a few countries in the 1960s and 1970s that adopted the policy that there is no social justification for "making an example" of someone, and that the purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation and fair application of rules, rather than vindictive retribution, catharsis for victims, or the attempt to squash crime through draconian punishments.

Those countries (Norway, Denmark, Korea, New Zealand) stand in contrast to those countries who adopted a policy of "tough on crime" during the same period (the US, Britain, France). Looking back, the crime rates in these countries diverged, and today we find those countries with liberal justice systems having seen their crime rate drop much faster than those with draconian justice policy.

Sure, this is anecdote, but I don't buy vengance or harsh deterrence as justified reasons for rolling out the stocks on the few people who are caught at a relatively rare crime.

deterrence

Prove the deterrence exists, otherwise the equation is irrational: Based zero evidence, and on speculative bullshit instead.

...create civil disobedience and not get caught.

Then you are missing the point of civil disobedience. You are supposed to get caught, especially in places like the US where LEOs like to have a bit of theatricality in perp-walking someone out to the squad car. You want all the attention you can get, that's the point, you are calling attention to something you believe to be wrong.

That's the "Insightful" or "Interesting" option, which you don't have but I do. Oops!

Not to be confused with the [I Disagree] option, which is labelled "Troll" and/or "Flamebait."

Shouldn't the headline read: "With Secondary E-Ink Display YOTA Phone Launches"

"Smart phone wars begun they have."

When was the last time you found a cellphone case that wasn't custom shaped for the phone? It's not like they have uniform physical characteristics.

"Also nice to have, ditch the Google part of Android and gives us a clean Android install."

I'm not even going to comment on how dumb this is, I think it speaks for itself. Want to ditch the Microsoft part of Windows while you're at it?

I wonder if they bust OTHER hate groups, like the mosques that preach hate, or the other "* Power" groups? Wanna bet the answer is no?

You see THIS is the problem I have with so called "hate crimes" (like someone is gonna bash your head in because they like you) is because you ALWAYS seem to end up with "protected classes" and "acceptable racism", for examples see black power versus white power (Protip: Both are run by racists that incite violence) or how the Muslims in this country can burn bibles and American flags all day but that preacher said he was gonna burn a koran and got thrown in jail.

Either the law is the law, equal for all, or its just so much politically correct farce and sadly more and more in the west the law has become the latter,with certain groups being ignored when they are racists while others are punished. If racism is wrong then its wrong across the board, all this politically correct bullshit does is make old hatreds fester and give the racists plenty of recruitment fodder.

Yea so you do not just feel secure in ignoring them. Actually wanting to destroy someone that you do not fear just because you disagree with them is frankly evil. That is what Nazis do. Really think about it for a minute. If they are no threat why not just ignore them? Simple answer is you worry about them becoming a threat.
AKA there is no shame in not feeling secure in Germany about Neo-Nazis. In fact if you where just okay with it I would worry. It has happened before and that knowledge should keep you on your guard.
BTW my Uncle was reported killed in action twice in Europe during WWII and had a terrible scar on his arm from where his watch branded him his tank caught fire and helped liberate one of the camps. He was from Brooklyn his however his grandparents on both sides where from Germany. He died in the 1980s but I think he would for the most part be happy with how Germany is today.

For what it's worth, I think it's fair to say that in much of the rest of the world, Left and Right are about wealth distribution, and about who should be in control of means of production (investers or workers). Not saying this is better, or worse, just noting the difference. That said, it is probably also fair to say that most international observers, assuming they use this classical economic notion of left/right, would consider the US to be pretty far off to the right. Again, just saying.

embarrassing funny coloured people at an airport

Right. Happens a lot, doesn't it? Wrong! The TSA goes out of its way to bother people who don't fit the profile of an Arab or Muslim terrorist. My decrepit 85 yr. old white father has been selected for special scrutiny on several occasions. Political Correctness governs the TSA. Even if the TSA profiled Arabs and Muslims and gave them extra scrutiny, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that. It is the job of govt to keep people safe and given the practical limits on resources, it is reasonable to single out the ethnic groups which constitute the threat. A little "embarrassment" for the targeted groups is not that big a deal if you believe that the TSA actually enhances security which I do not. Airport security is mostly just theater.

nationals who descended from a small island in the pacific and putting them in forced camps?

Japan is hardly a small island and FDR's cronies saw an opportunity to use fear to steal a little property. FDR was nothing if not opportunistic. It's terrible that Japanese immigrants were rounded up and put in camps, but the camps housing the Japanese were hardly the same as the death camps of the Nazis.

Or setting up secret, legally questionable prisons to house those funny colored people you mentioned.

*sigh* There is nothing particularly secret, questionable, harsh or abusive about Guantanamo, no matter what your America-hating teacher may have told you. And the people detained there weren't detained because of their color.

Yeah, last 100 years have been pretty enlighted for us here in 'Merica.

Stalin murdered 15-40 million or so people, Mao 30-70 million or so, Hitler 16 million or so, Pol Pot ...

Yeah, I'd say 'Merica rounding up a few immigrants for a while is pretty enlightened by comparison.

Actually yeah, it was, though a different flavor of socialism than what you're used to.

But to be honest, I think sticking the terms right wing or left wing on these is stupid. It basically implies that there are two major schools of thought to politics when in reality there are many (infinite dare I say, because new ones spring up now and again.) Sure you can stick a compass for any one dimension on a particular ideology (e.g. freedom vs despotism) but you'll often find people traditionally identified as both left and right on either extreme of just about every dimension.

In fact, sticking a right or left label has the same effect as saying there's only one form of socialism. Marxist socialism is working for the betterment of the people, whereas national socialism is working for the betterment of the state (and part of building a strong national identity and pride.) Marxism might stress individual liberties with a collective identity, whereas national socialism is strictly a collective.

At least, this is what these things say on paper. Whether or not they actually do them is a whole other issue (for example, individual liberties never last under Marxism.)

That is what you get for using a Universal Schrodinger Bus connector.

Oh right, from Apple.

You mean the Apple who helped pioneer the first USB connector which everyone hates so much. Seriously people have been whining about the USB connector from about day 1 and reversible/rotationally symmetric connectors have existed for even longer.

To claim Apple "invented" the idea of a reversible USB connector is utterly just plain silly. Even if you claim it is invention to do something blindingly obvious, you'll be disappointed to hear that Nokia's DKU2 cable was (a) reversible (b) carried USB and (c) existed on the 2002 eara Nokia 6100, a full 5 years before even the first generation iPhone and a year before the iPod's reversible connector supported USB.

So no, it's not an invention and even if it was Nokia had it before Apple.

Seriously what is it with Apple Fanbois assuming they invented everything? You know it's possible to enjoy their products *without* having to make up random shit about how they did everything first.

Ruins the sanctity of cabling.

No, it's all natural when the cabling is born that way. If you want to see ruined sanctity, ram a current USB plug in the wrong way...

But I say this is only the first step. Next we must eradicate male - female difference, and have just one plug-socket which will fit, work and feel good no matter how you do the coupling.

Is the fact that the standard USB connection (rectangle) is not really 180 degrees symmetric (despite a shape that indicates it should be), usually takes 3+ attempts to get it in. Damn it, Jim, a spin-1/2 connector!

Protip: The USB emblem goes "up". The logo is trademarked, and without it the cables are too frustrating to use. An interesting feat of human engineering indeed.

Now, let us travel through time far enough into the future that we come to appreciate the greatest connector design possible:

First, consider the connector with zero lines of symmetry, such as USB, or a polarized pronged plug. There is a 2D plane that the connector travels orthogonal to and which it must breech in order to complete a connection docking sequence. Consider this plane slicing through your connector and receptacle's contacts. Note that there is one receptacle surface for one connector pin passing through the docking plane.

To the Future! Copy and rotate your receptor 180 degrees in place along the docking plane. Eliminate any conflicting isolation surfaces, and move the pins such that they do not interact with each the other's connection surfaces. Now you have a reversible connector with one line of symmetry in the receptacle. The connector pins can occupy both sets of receptacle contact surfaces, but need only occupy one position to complete the electrical circuits.

Advance! Now we will perform the same step again, but with a 90 degree increment. Behold! A square connector!

60 degrees? Hexagonal connectors! Note that just imagining it we can nearly taste the hex filled future!

Onward, to 45 degrees, and to victory! Octagonal connections even mirror our futurist desire to slice the corners from our square UI windows, and tabs.

Oh integration, you foul beast. Clearly to see furthest into the future we must have infinite lines of symmetry in our docking plane -- BUT HOW?! With all pins occupying all positions across the USB connector, the left side interacts with the right side. Since connector pins need only exist in one position we need only make the connector pins have zero lines of symmetry -- move all the connector pins to one side. Simultaneously we have a perfectly round receptacle -- Ah, but all intersecting isolation surfaces are removed, this leaves us with only a flat ring of contacts and several pins.

So, now we will enter a new Dimension! We can stretch the docking plane in the 3rd dimension along the orthogonal connection axis! BEHOLD! We have discovered the most futuristic connector of all time! The Head Phone Jack!

Now, what's old can finally be new again. Story time is over, now get off my lawn.

Let the British design the next standard. I have yet to see anyone pick up a BS 1363 and not figure out which way to insert it.

power users, developers and gamers: so the majority of users then? I think most people play games occasionally. It might be going the way of the cable package: you might hardly ever watch anything on your tv anymore (at least not something that isn't PVR'd, hulu, etc other equally available from the net content) but you won't cut the cord because well you might ... sometime + the occasional Star Trek marathon or sporting event. Similarly writing your resume, doing your taxes etc on a cell phone would suck so you need to have a desktop around even if you rarely use it.

I think a more realistic scenario will be that tablets/phones get powerful enough that people use docking stations when they need a bigger form factor, but to me that is still a desktop (not sure what the official categorization is) just like having a Mac Mini attached to a 30" screen and full sized keyboard would be a desktop. My guess would be that most corporate devices remain laptop desktop form factors for the next 10+ years. If they aren't portable they aren't getting lost/broken at bars. The hardware will remain likely cheaper but at worst the same cost as a smaller form factor, and likely will have a longer useable life (there is a cost to miniaturization and it is usually both performance and hardware faults both which lead to more rapid hardware churn).

They are in decline. They are dying.

That's the fallacy people fall for, including you: being in decline in no way or form means that it's dying. It just means it'll settle in at a different place than it was before, likely a smaller place, and then stabilize there. Dying would mean exactly that; the whole desktop-PC market disappearing altogether. Alas, there's plenty of people who still need desktop-PCs for all sorts of things and then there's the people who don't specifically need one, but who find mobile devices simply too clumsy and cumbersome to use.

I don't know where and why this keeps coming up, but at the end of the day, the death of the PC won't happen for a while, for many reasons:

1) Creation vs. Consumption
        I hear this bullshit a lot as the main driver for the death of the PC. This is a particularly specious argument. The whole creation vs. consumption aspect comes from creating content. While I can type on a tablet or other device, it is not as good (no matter the method) as a keyboard. I can type this entire post in 20 minutes on a keyboard but would take hours (and having fun with spell check, etc.) on some tablet device.

2) Ownership of content
        This a huge one. With a desktop I can own what I own, and it is mine. With any always connected, remotely managed device I never can control what they manage. Cloud apps just scare the hell out of me as you don't own anything. You buy a song on ITunes, it is yours until Apple says it is not. You buy a movie from Amazon, it is your until the movie studio sues Amazon and they get a take down notice. This is why if I buy something, it is a physical device. You can not take my Blu-Ray copy of Skyfall without a warrant and coming to my house.

3) Ownership of information
        The next thing is who owns your data. Have you read many of the EULA for software? Try turbo tax. You would think that your data is yours. Nope. Well I can control how the software works and how it calls home for information my data is stored locally. It never sends that information out. Now use the online (cloud) app from them, they store your information for you. Let me see my tax information is probably one of three things I never want anyone to see (for identity thief protection). This is stored somewhere where you trust them to keep it safe. This is why a desktop (or laptop) is best for this as it is stored local and you have control.

4) Form Factor
        Yes at the end of the day, you can consume any form of media on any form factor. I can watch netflix on my tablet or my phone, but is that the most enjoyable experience? Hell no, it is just the most convenient. If I am going to watch a netflix show I would rather watch it in all its glory on my 52" TV with dolby digital sound system. However when I am sitting at an airport, yes I have to watch it on my portable devices since pulling a 52" TV through an airport w/ associated 7.1 system would just be unfeasible.

5) Gaming
        While some stupid little game like candy crush or angry birds work on those form factors, you cannot tell me that a high FPS FPS (heh .. frame per second, first person shooter) will never work on your dinky 4.3" Iphone screen. Yeah games can be made for those form factors, but at the end of the day, are those the games which are going to be what you want to spend 60 dollars on and want to spend hours playing on a larger screen. Nope, that is a console or a desktop.

Try one man, 1200+ users, 500+ machines, and 8 servers. Public school. Less salary than you can shake a stick at. But I'm passionate about K-12 public education, and I love helping kids. Don't like it? Tell your superintendent why, then walk away.

I think both you and I know that a school environment is not a business environment. A business generally has income dependent on productivity. A school has generally a fixed income dependent on student enrollment. If the submitter can increase productivity by hiring another employee, it's worth money to the company. If a school can increase productivity by hiring another employee, it doesn't mean jack squat.

In terms of your ratios, I have little sympathy. And take your rants out someplace else. It's not productive to the conversation.

no.

just label 4 of the guys as part of the factory production team. that's what they are.

Yeah, this is the problem.

Programmers, while from a layman's point of view are "IT", they are not helping to complete to the IT work load. They may help build the business processes, but they aren't pulling cables or tracking down DNS issues. So as far as what they do in IT, it's "zero".

Submitter's description outlines ONE "IT person" in the organization. (him / her)

I would approach this with a two step process; first, get a ticketing system and get all desktop support on it. That will let you show the programmers don't do shit for it, and what the work load is.

THAT sets you up to add other tasks the programmers, the manager, and the subby do on the ticketing, and when the workload is high, just say "sorry, can't do that doing this" and it's all documented.

Then you just do what is important, mark off your hours of the day, and go home. When the shit stays broken and people get pissed about it, they go "why?" and they will see the answer is "not enough people for this." If it's YOUR idea, they won't do it. If it's THEIR idea, they will.

I assume the subby doesn't want to be the person to do the desktop support. So from there, you hire a local goon for a day / evening per week, or a local firm, or some place in India, or whatever. THEY work on the ticket backlog of desktop issues.

Also, you may find that when people have to articulate what is wrong, their problems suddenly go away. People who get help with computers are VERY VERY LAZY and will not learn something. Suddenly rebooting the computer will seem worthwhile compared to (ugh!) writing clear English. Lastly, you can find out which few people are causing the most problems and have evidence to get them to change their ways (or at least stop screwing up their computers). You know, that one guy that always gets the virus of the day (always the same guy, always "i don't know what happened!"), and that one person who's keyboard, monitor, mouse, or whatever needs replacing just because (as a status symbol).

Other than the fact that Walmart trucks will go back to the distribution center - with or without boxes in them. This would effectively make THIS postage free. Unless you think that they would UPS them?

IT is not a part of the business model -- you most likely don't.

You're considered a necessary but unwanted expense like keeping the lights on and are usually treated like the janitor.

No one cares who you are or what you are doing until there is a mess somewhere. Then it is your fault for not having cleaned it up already.

Welcome to IT.

If I had known years ago what I was getting myself into I would never have gotten into this industry or at least I would have had the sense to work in a business where IT *is* the business. Hopefully I will be able to make that transition in the future.