Its only the TENSOR cores for Machine Learning and AI tasks that supposedly deliver 120 TFlops per GPU card. The card itself does just 15 TFlops for general computation tasks. So unless you can figure out how to mine Bitcoin using the Tensor cores, these Volta V100 GPUs are basically just like the GTX 1080 GPU, just with about 5000 CUDA cores and more RAM capacity.
The Nvidia V100 is a 15 TeraFlops capable GPU at 32 Bit accuracy, and half that at 64 Bit accuracy. You'd need a whopping 134 of these GPUs in a box with perfect parallelization between them to hit 2 TeraFlops for general GPGPU compute tasks. Nvidia claims that the TENSOR cores in a V100 deliver about 120 TeraFlops of MACHINE LEARNING performance. How they measured this is an open question - did they take a machine learning task that was 120 times faster than a 1 TeraFlop CPU with no AI optimization could do, and magically arrive at 120 TFLOPS? What AI tasks these TENSOR core TeraFlops can be used for is the next question. So for anyone thinking "I can get 2000 GPGPU TeraFlops in 1 box", sorry that isn't the case here. For specific AI tasks, this may be the machine to get. For general GPGPU, this thing is just a casing with a couple of 15 TFLOP GPUs crammed together.
If this guy had hacked British government computers all around Britain and had been caught, he would easily have been looking at 10+ years or so in jail from a UK court. Hacking a foreign country overseas, apparently, is perfectly allowed though.
1) Can NOBODY out of 7 Billion human brains in the world figure out how to turn sea water into useable water without requiring huge amounts of energy or breaking the bank? 2) Can NOBODY out of 7 Billion human brains in the world figure out how to capture, neutralize or reverse-combust the CO2 that is in Earth's atmosphere? All these scientists, universities, large companies, government laboratories and other R&D capable outfits around the world, and we keep hearing about how these "huge problems" will ruin humanity by 2050 or 2100? Can NOTHING at all be done? Or are we not TRYING HARD ENOUGH to actually solve this shit?
This seems like an awfully convenient way of manipulating the vote count, throwing the manipulated data in a "blockchain", and then telling people "hey look - the blockchain says votes were counted correctly, so they really WERE counted correctly". Who even says that currency blockchains CANNOT be manipulated? What if the creator(s) of Bitcoin and so forth can pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the blockchain they have created, but the blockchain appears "intact" when examined? That would be one hell of a reason to spend years creating a cryptocurrency, right? Put the whole show on the road, swell the c-currency to tens of billions of Dollars by making people around the world do something stupid called "mining", and syphon off money from that blockchain whenever you want without anyone noticing - because YOU designed the system powering the whole show and can game it whenever you want. Congratulations, you now have access to the biggest Free-Cash-Dispenser virtual ATM in the world. (Sorry, but I don't quite buy the whole hype about Blockchains being super-secure and so forth...)
If the mark left were shaped like Steve Jobs's visage, Apple users would be jumping for joy around the world. "My God! Steve has appeared in my living room!" The furniture would then be worth 10 times what it was worth before - because Apple users would buy it when sold. What Apple should go for in V 2.0 of the Homepod is leaving more than just a "mark". The Homepod should blast the wood it sits on in pieces, then send you to Apple's iFurniture website for a replacement, which is again blasted to pieces by your Homepod, and so on and so forth. The economics of this gets even more fantastic than you might think, because when the furniture gets blasted to pieces, the Homepod lands on the floor. So you need new furniture AND a new Homepod each time. Homepod V 3.0 may also blast your children to pieces. You can then go to the iChildren website and order robot children made by Apple. Those children will in turn play with the Homepod V 3.0, blasting the furniture, themselves and the Homepod to pieces. You can then go to iEverythingHasGoneToShit website and order replacements. Apple are geniuses.
On your furniture. It could have been worse. Now oil it, or take your furniture to the nearest and let an Apple genius do it for you for only 149 Dollars.
... I'll list a few things that I think ARE missing in tech. One thing that I would love is a programming language that can automatically compile to multiple OSs - Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS - without any sort of adjustment or porting happening. Hit Compile, and your software runs on a number of supported OSs. I would also love for someone to invent something like GPU BASIC, a programming language that is as easy as BASIC, but can be used to write code that runs fully parallelized on modern GPUs. In the 3D content creation space, the biggest problem right now is that different 3D apps cannot read each other's 3D scene files at all. For example, LibreOffice can read and write Word or Excel files just fine. But 3D software that costs many thousands of Dollars a license cannot pull this feat off. Maya cannot read 3DMax files, Cinema4D cannot read LightWave3D files, Houdini cannot read Blender files and so on. Its a huge pain in the ass. Nothing is compatible with each other in the 3D space. I would like more work done on visual coding interfaces like DataFlow languages, where you basically program using nodes or flowchart-like visual paradigms. DataFlow languages exist. But most are for specialized applications. I would love a DataFlow language that has all of the power and flexibility of something like C or C++. A DataFlow language that could be used to code just about anything, even an Operating System Kernel if you are so inclined. In programming, one of the things I miss is automatic porting/translation to another language and syntax, and multi-syntax programming languages. Imagine writing an algorithm in BASIC, and being able to see that algorithm instantly as C, Python or Rust code. There are a few language-to-language auto translation tools out there. But I'd love to have this built into my programming IDE. In terms of electronics and gadgets, I'd love to have a camera that can capture the world in both Stereo 3D and Volumetric 3D. Companies like Lytro are doing some pioneering work here. But the resulting film camera is huge, heavy and expensive. I'd love to have a camera like that shaped like a handycam or GoPro camera. And to finish on a more domestic note, the number one most requested domestic robot helper is a dishwashing robot. You throw your dirty dishes on a counter. The robot takes care of them. A robot that irons clothes, mops floors and clears crap off your table would be cool as well.
Zuckerberg wants the best for you. In his heart of hearts he is like Steven Spielberg, you know? He makes movies, and YOU get to be the actor in those movies, by putting everything you do with people you know through Facebook's servers. This results in what we Hollywood insiders call a "script". Don't worry if you don't know what a script is. It is something that Movies come from, kind of like the whole business of where babies come from. Once Zuckerberg makes mone... er.... a film about you, YOU get to have your 15 minutes of fame. You too can be like Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. All you gotta do is... drumroll... watch.
No, not another shiny disk. Perhaps retail store purchases of music albums, books, films, computer games and other digital content could come on a cheap-to-manufacture read-only memory (ROM) card that holds the relevant data and is about the size of an SD card, or larger, if that is cheaper to manufacture (data-density et cetera). You would get the feeling of "buying and owning something physical" that you can take home with you, loan to others, sell second-hand and so forth. But it would be a little ROM card, not a larger CD, DVD or Bluray disk that takes up a lot of shelf space and packaging. Of course you could just as easily put digital kiosks into a store that you insert a USB thumbdrive into to get your content data when you have paid for it. But a small ROM card would allow you to pick up the product, pay and leave like in the old days. It would also be kind of cool to collect such ROMs, like we used to collect floppies, especially if they are built to last - say - 50 years without losing the data. A major bonus would be PC and console game distribution in developing countries. Internet connections are seriously slow in developing countries, and many people have internet with a 25 - 50 GB a month data download cap. Downloading 30 - 50 GB games in such countries takes many hours - sometimes more than a day - and often results in blowing your monthly download cap, causing the ISP to throttle your internet speed until the beginning of the next month, leaving you with slow internet. So if somebody COULD make cheap ROMs that hold 20 - 30 GB of data a piece, game buyers in a lot of countries would definitely go for that. Another bonus could be games that don't require installing at all - just pop the ROM card into your laptop's card slot and play the game immediately. Steam downloads are horrendously painful if you have 2 - 8 MBPS internet only. ROMs would be a much quicker way to play the game you have bought. What would you rather do? Wait 22 hours for DOOM to download on a slow connection, or pop over to the local game store to get it on Mini-ROM, taking perhaps an hour and a half of your time? ROMs also solve the problem of buying an ever-growing quantity of digital content data for your home. After a few years of digital games, digital films, digital photos and smartphone video, you wind up having to keep Terabytes of data somewhere - on multiple USB harddrives for example. It might be neat to instead have a little plastic box with all your game, music, film, TV show and other ROMs in it, just as we used to have for Amiga disks or PC floppy disks for example. What you want on your PC, you copy from ROM. What you only access occasionally, you just keep in ROM form, and pop the ROM card in when needed.
Youtube has the largest collection of video content in recorded human history, and only provides a basic search box and a very half-baked suggestions algorithm to access them. There is no good index, by alphabet, by content type, by content subject or by or any other good way to really explore and sift through content on the site that you do not already know. I've been listening to a bunch of good music artists on Youtube the last few months, and the suggestions algorithm has completely boxed me in both on Youtube.com in the browser and in the Youtube Android app. I keep seeing the same artists and same types of songs being suggested over and over, as if the rest of the musical world doesn't exist at all. The only way to "break out of the box" is to start searching for a completely different type of artist whose name you already know. So from a technical/engineering/UX design standpoint, Youtube is NOT a well designed site at all. Maybe if you search for simple stuff like "Rihanna" or "SNL", the site will work for you. But if you want a text-based or better visual network-graph based UI that really lets you explore the site, that just doesn't exist on Youtube. I bet Alphabet see Youtube that way in their offices, but we ordinary Tubelings only get the search box and the -15 IQ suggestions algorithm that was probably put together by 3 programmers. THIS is what Youtube should be focusing their efforts on. A better UI, especially for the mobile app.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot with the clusterfuck that was the Windows 8 "no start button" UI - nobody using Windows wanted the Win 7 interface changed significantly, and certainly not in the horrible way Win 8 did it. Win 7 was a good OS, and worked fine for just about any task. Windows 8 was, to put it bluntly, unusable. Almost like somebody sat down and said "lets inflict as much pain and inconvenience on the user as possible". Then, MS wanted everybody to pay again for Windows 10, and imposed all sorts of crap on people with Win 10 - upgrades that happen on their own, telemetry that can't be switched off, privacy settings that seem to do nothing - and so on and so forth. All while giving people a release 10 that was inferior in many ways to release 7, which by this time ran lightning fast on current hardware. Microsoft's CEO comes from a cloud-engineering background and is an "all cloud all the time" sort of guy. Is this good for consumers? No. But it is good for OSX and Linux. I've been on Windows for 20+ years, and I'm also considering going over to Linux. I also don't want my office documents or other personal stuff in anybody's datacenter. So Office 365 is totally unattractive to me, whereas LibreOffice for example is looking better and better to me all the time. Perhaps MS should get a new CEO who isn't cloud-crazy.
Megaupload was a service (deliberately) overflowing with cracked copies of commercial software ranging in price from a few hundred Dollars to a few tens of thousands of Dollars - high end CAD software for example. THAT is largely what attracted millions of people to Megaupload - it was an online place where Kim Dotcom gave away thousands of software companies' products for free and people and also businesses in 196 countries could just "click and download for free". If you were to add together the monetary value of the software downloaded from Megaupload over the years and the financial damage caused, you might end up with far more than the "10 Billion Dollars" Kim claims Megaupload would have been worth today. Kim tried to make himself a billionaire businessmen by nonchalantly giving away other people's property without their permission. That does not excuse the nature of the police action against him, but I suspect that a strong message was intended to be sent to hundreds of other would-be-Kim-Dotcoms who wanted to hole themselves up in poorly governed countries with lax laws and build their very own "Megaupload". Kim Dotcom probably banked on the fact that if sued for piracy, he could claim "I just provide the servers - I'm not responsible for what people upload to them or download from them", and depending on the laws in New Zealand that might actually have worked for him. Kim was in New Zealand because there was no way his native Germany would have allowed the creation of something like Megaupload in the first place - German police would have shut the site down in weeks.
I submitted as "French Songwriter Composes Album With AI, Result As Bad As Today's Pop Music". The songwriter is Frenchman Carre. Canadian singer Kiesza just sings vocals on the album. The submission and submitted text was rewritten by the Slashdot editors and is now slightly misleading - Kiesza is not French and not the composer of this album.
To combust fossil fuels, or not combust fossil fuels? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to cherish
The Dollars and cents of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of electrical Tesla cars,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That environmentalism is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to make profit—ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this drilling site,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes dogshit of everybody's life.
I just type in LOAD "LINUX" , 8 , 1 and off the C64 goes. Booting requires some "disc swapping" of course, and is sometimes hard on the Datasettte unit, but it works. Most impressive is that is that I've managed to solder a current Nvidia Titan GPU to the underside of the Commodore as well. This lets me run C64 games like The Last Ninja, International Karate II and Infernal Runner at 8K UHD 144Hz. I can also run all Playstation Pro 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch games on the unit. Even games that haven't been developed and released yet, like Grand Theft Auto 6 run great on this souped up Linux 64 unit. Oh, and the unit can time travel as well. I had coffee with Leonardo Da Vinci just this morning. He told me that he was painting a portrait of an Italian lady who hit her head recently and has a strange smile frozen on her visage. Amazing what a few beers before going on Slashdot can achieve, right? =) (The idiocy in this post is released under the GNU GPL 3.0 License)
No, not veteran coders at Microsoft. People who have wrestled with various MS products starting back with MS-DOS and are now... erm... "slightly damaged" by that experience. Config.sys and autoexec.bat come to mind. 640 Kb memory limit as well. Blue screens of death. Constant rebooting and restarting and reformatting of PCs. Flaky Windows installers. Viruses and malware in their tens of thousands. Plug and play that just did not work properly for years. Printers that wouldn't print. Soundblaster cards that couldn't be configured properly. Modems and other devices that Windows had to be beaten into seeing by turning them on and off and pluging them in and out 20 times over. Office files that aren't backwards compatible. The clusterfuck that is the Excel GUI. A lot of Windows 8 veterans for example have mental issues now. They walk the empty hallways of eerie mental institutions muttering "someone took my Start Button... someone took my Start Button..." or "Windows 8 hates me, Windows 8 hates me". A lot of people took bad shrapnel wounds from using Internet Exploder as well. Then there was MS Visual Studio with its ultra-funky GUI design, where you spend more time trying to understand what in God's name VS is showing you in its GUI than actually writing working code. Give generously, Billy G. We veterans need it.
Interviewer: You are in a desert.
You: Ok.
Interviewer: Bill Gates is also there. He's torturing a little turtle.
You: Ok.
Interviewer: What do you do?
You: I help Bill Gates torture the turtle.
Interviewer: Welcome to Microsoft!
Germany, and by extension Europe, has over the last decades tried very hard to project an image of a decent, honest, open, rule-bound democracy with integrity, good laws, yada yada yada. Listening to the Germans and Europeans in general, you'd think that its always the U.S. Corporations that are doing horrible things in the name of profit. This has been used very, very successfully to mask the fact that German and other powerful European companies are incredibly aggressive when it comes to making money/profit, especially in developing world markets where they are very strong, and there are no rules for them to play by. Its not just German companies either. The French, Belgians, Dutch and so forth aren't any better. If there is money to be grabbed, they'll grab it, decency and rules be damned. So its not just VW and the other automakers that are doing this sort of stuff. This is a system problem in a European Union that seems "super decent" image-wise, but is anything but in reality. Also, there is no way the German and other European governments didn't know this kind of cheating was happening. They knew, but turned a blind eye to it until there was no hiding it anymore.
Smart enough to pioneer Facebook and grow it into the biggest thing on the Internet. Dumb enough to make one wrong choice after another with Facebook. Facebook, after so many years, does not even have a well laid out UI/UX design. This is a man who keeps repeating the not very sensible mantra that "all our lives should be more transparent". Then he tapes over the webcam and USB port on his own laptop and razes homes adjoining his huge new property so that his "family and kids can have some privacy growing up".
Slashdot Mirror
Its only the TENSOR cores for Machine Learning and AI tasks that supposedly deliver 120 TFlops per GPU card. The card itself does just 15 TFlops for general computation tasks. So unless you can figure out how to mine Bitcoin using the Tensor cores, these Volta V100 GPUs are basically just like the GTX 1080 GPU, just with about 5000 CUDA cores and more RAM capacity.
... if you order enough shipping containers with the solution to the Chinese demographics problem in it, you'll get a 6% discount as well.
The Nvidia V100 is a 15 TeraFlops capable GPU at 32 Bit accuracy, and half that at 64 Bit accuracy. You'd need a whopping 134 of these GPUs in a box with perfect parallelization between them to hit 2 TeraFlops for general GPGPU compute tasks. Nvidia claims that the TENSOR cores in a V100 deliver about 120 TeraFlops of MACHINE LEARNING performance. How they measured this is an open question - did they take a machine learning task that was 120 times faster than a 1 TeraFlop CPU with no AI optimization could do, and magically arrive at 120 TFLOPS? What AI tasks these TENSOR core TeraFlops can be used for is the next question. So for anyone thinking "I can get 2000 GPGPU TeraFlops in 1 box", sorry that isn't the case here. For specific AI tasks, this may be the machine to get. For general GPGPU, this thing is just a casing with a couple of 15 TFLOP GPUs crammed together.
If this guy had hacked British government computers all around Britain and had been caught, he would easily have been looking at 10+ years or so in jail from a UK court. Hacking a foreign country overseas, apparently, is perfectly allowed though.
EA executives, horrified, immediately unplug the AI. EA is saved.
Only Safari, the only moral browser in the world must be used! (Tim Cook: Can I have my free Apple stylus now?)
1) Can NOBODY out of 7 Billion human brains in the world figure out how to turn sea water into useable water without requiring huge amounts of energy or breaking the bank? 2) Can NOBODY out of 7 Billion human brains in the world figure out how to capture, neutralize or reverse-combust the CO2 that is in Earth's atmosphere? All these scientists, universities, large companies, government laboratories and other R&D capable outfits around the world, and we keep hearing about how these "huge problems" will ruin humanity by 2050 or 2100? Can NOTHING at all be done? Or are we not TRYING HARD ENOUGH to actually solve this shit?
This seems like an awfully convenient way of manipulating the vote count, throwing the manipulated data in a "blockchain", and then telling people "hey look - the blockchain says votes were counted correctly, so they really WERE counted correctly". Who even says that currency blockchains CANNOT be manipulated? What if the creator(s) of Bitcoin and so forth can pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the blockchain they have created, but the blockchain appears "intact" when examined? That would be one hell of a reason to spend years creating a cryptocurrency, right? Put the whole show on the road, swell the c-currency to tens of billions of Dollars by making people around the world do something stupid called "mining", and syphon off money from that blockchain whenever you want without anyone noticing - because YOU designed the system powering the whole show and can game it whenever you want. Congratulations, you now have access to the biggest Free-Cash-Dispenser virtual ATM in the world. (Sorry, but I don't quite buy the whole hype about Blockchains being super-secure and so forth...)
In Soviet Russia YOU are the chalk applied to the bottom of speakers. =)
If the mark left were shaped like Steve Jobs's visage, Apple users would be jumping for joy around the world. "My God! Steve has appeared in my living room!" The furniture would then be worth 10 times what it was worth before - because Apple users would buy it when sold. What Apple should go for in V 2.0 of the Homepod is leaving more than just a "mark". The Homepod should blast the wood it sits on in pieces, then send you to Apple's iFurniture website for a replacement, which is again blasted to pieces by your Homepod, and so on and so forth. The economics of this gets even more fantastic than you might think, because when the furniture gets blasted to pieces, the Homepod lands on the floor. So you need new furniture AND a new Homepod each time. Homepod V 3.0 may also blast your children to pieces. You can then go to the iChildren website and order robot children made by Apple. Those children will in turn play with the Homepod V 3.0, blasting the furniture, themselves and the Homepod to pieces. You can then go to iEverythingHasGoneToShit website and order replacements. Apple are geniuses.
On your furniture. It could have been worse. Now oil it, or take your furniture to the nearest and let an Apple genius do it for you for only 149 Dollars.
... I'll list a few things that I think ARE missing in tech. One thing that I would love is a programming language that can automatically compile to multiple OSs - Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS - without any sort of adjustment or porting happening. Hit Compile, and your software runs on a number of supported OSs. I would also love for someone to invent something like GPU BASIC, a programming language that is as easy as BASIC, but can be used to write code that runs fully parallelized on modern GPUs. In the 3D content creation space, the biggest problem right now is that different 3D apps cannot read each other's 3D scene files at all. For example, LibreOffice can read and write Word or Excel files just fine. But 3D software that costs many thousands of Dollars a license cannot pull this feat off. Maya cannot read 3DMax files, Cinema4D cannot read LightWave3D files, Houdini cannot read Blender files and so on. Its a huge pain in the ass. Nothing is compatible with each other in the 3D space. I would like more work done on visual coding interfaces like DataFlow languages, where you basically program using nodes or flowchart-like visual paradigms. DataFlow languages exist. But most are for specialized applications. I would love a DataFlow language that has all of the power and flexibility of something like C or C++. A DataFlow language that could be used to code just about anything, even an Operating System Kernel if you are so inclined. In programming, one of the things I miss is automatic porting/translation to another language and syntax, and multi-syntax programming languages. Imagine writing an algorithm in BASIC, and being able to see that algorithm instantly as C, Python or Rust code. There are a few language-to-language auto translation tools out there. But I'd love to have this built into my programming IDE. In terms of electronics and gadgets, I'd love to have a camera that can capture the world in both Stereo 3D and Volumetric 3D. Companies like Lytro are doing some pioneering work here. But the resulting film camera is huge, heavy and expensive. I'd love to have a camera like that shaped like a handycam or GoPro camera. And to finish on a more domestic note, the number one most requested domestic robot helper is a dishwashing robot. You throw your dirty dishes on a counter. The robot takes care of them. A robot that irons clothes, mops floors and clears crap off your table would be cool as well.
Zuckerberg wants the best for you. In his heart of hearts he is like Steven Spielberg, you know? He makes movies, and YOU get to be the actor in those movies, by putting everything you do with people you know through Facebook's servers. This results in what we Hollywood insiders call a "script". Don't worry if you don't know what a script is. It is something that Movies come from, kind of like the whole business of where babies come from. Once Zuckerberg makes mone... er.... a film about you, YOU get to have your 15 minutes of fame. You too can be like Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. All you gotta do is... drumroll... watch.
No, not another shiny disk. Perhaps retail store purchases of music albums, books, films, computer games and other digital content could come on a cheap-to-manufacture read-only memory (ROM) card that holds the relevant data and is about the size of an SD card, or larger, if that is cheaper to manufacture (data-density et cetera). You would get the feeling of "buying and owning something physical" that you can take home with you, loan to others, sell second-hand and so forth. But it would be a little ROM card, not a larger CD, DVD or Bluray disk that takes up a lot of shelf space and packaging. Of course you could just as easily put digital kiosks into a store that you insert a USB thumbdrive into to get your content data when you have paid for it. But a small ROM card would allow you to pick up the product, pay and leave like in the old days. It would also be kind of cool to collect such ROMs, like we used to collect floppies, especially if they are built to last - say - 50 years without losing the data. A major bonus would be PC and console game distribution in developing countries. Internet connections are seriously slow in developing countries, and many people have internet with a 25 - 50 GB a month data download cap. Downloading 30 - 50 GB games in such countries takes many hours - sometimes more than a day - and often results in blowing your monthly download cap, causing the ISP to throttle your internet speed until the beginning of the next month, leaving you with slow internet. So if somebody COULD make cheap ROMs that hold 20 - 30 GB of data a piece, game buyers in a lot of countries would definitely go for that. Another bonus could be games that don't require installing at all - just pop the ROM card into your laptop's card slot and play the game immediately. Steam downloads are horrendously painful if you have 2 - 8 MBPS internet only. ROMs would be a much quicker way to play the game you have bought. What would you rather do? Wait 22 hours for DOOM to download on a slow connection, or pop over to the local game store to get it on Mini-ROM, taking perhaps an hour and a half of your time? ROMs also solve the problem of buying an ever-growing quantity of digital content data for your home. After a few years of digital games, digital films, digital photos and smartphone video, you wind up having to keep Terabytes of data somewhere - on multiple USB harddrives for example. It might be neat to instead have a little plastic box with all your game, music, film, TV show and other ROMs in it, just as we used to have for Amiga disks or PC floppy disks for example. What you want on your PC, you copy from ROM. What you only access occasionally, you just keep in ROM form, and pop the ROM card in when needed.
Youtube has the largest collection of video content in recorded human history, and only provides a basic search box and a very half-baked suggestions algorithm to access them. There is no good index, by alphabet, by content type, by content subject or by or any other good way to really explore and sift through content on the site that you do not already know. I've been listening to a bunch of good music artists on Youtube the last few months, and the suggestions algorithm has completely boxed me in both on Youtube.com in the browser and in the Youtube Android app. I keep seeing the same artists and same types of songs being suggested over and over, as if the rest of the musical world doesn't exist at all. The only way to "break out of the box" is to start searching for a completely different type of artist whose name you already know. So from a technical/engineering/UX design standpoint, Youtube is NOT a well designed site at all. Maybe if you search for simple stuff like "Rihanna" or "SNL", the site will work for you. But if you want a text-based or better visual network-graph based UI that really lets you explore the site, that just doesn't exist on Youtube. I bet Alphabet see Youtube that way in their offices, but we ordinary Tubelings only get the search box and the -15 IQ suggestions algorithm that was probably put together by 3 programmers. THIS is what Youtube should be focusing their efforts on. A better UI, especially for the mobile app.
Microsoft shot itself in the foot with the clusterfuck that was the Windows 8 "no start button" UI - nobody using Windows wanted the Win 7 interface changed significantly, and certainly not in the horrible way Win 8 did it. Win 7 was a good OS, and worked fine for just about any task. Windows 8 was, to put it bluntly, unusable. Almost like somebody sat down and said "lets inflict as much pain and inconvenience on the user as possible". Then, MS wanted everybody to pay again for Windows 10, and imposed all sorts of crap on people with Win 10 - upgrades that happen on their own, telemetry that can't be switched off, privacy settings that seem to do nothing - and so on and so forth. All while giving people a release 10 that was inferior in many ways to release 7, which by this time ran lightning fast on current hardware. Microsoft's CEO comes from a cloud-engineering background and is an "all cloud all the time" sort of guy. Is this good for consumers? No. But it is good for OSX and Linux. I've been on Windows for 20+ years, and I'm also considering going over to Linux. I also don't want my office documents or other personal stuff in anybody's datacenter. So Office 365 is totally unattractive to me, whereas LibreOffice for example is looking better and better to me all the time. Perhaps MS should get a new CEO who isn't cloud-crazy.
Megaupload was a service (deliberately) overflowing with cracked copies of commercial software ranging in price from a few hundred Dollars to a few tens of thousands of Dollars - high end CAD software for example. THAT is largely what attracted millions of people to Megaupload - it was an online place where Kim Dotcom gave away thousands of software companies' products for free and people and also businesses in 196 countries could just "click and download for free". If you were to add together the monetary value of the software downloaded from Megaupload over the years and the financial damage caused, you might end up with far more than the "10 Billion Dollars" Kim claims Megaupload would have been worth today. Kim tried to make himself a billionaire businessmen by nonchalantly giving away other people's property without their permission. That does not excuse the nature of the police action against him, but I suspect that a strong message was intended to be sent to hundreds of other would-be-Kim-Dotcoms who wanted to hole themselves up in poorly governed countries with lax laws and build their very own "Megaupload". Kim Dotcom probably banked on the fact that if sued for piracy, he could claim "I just provide the servers - I'm not responsible for what people upload to them or download from them", and depending on the laws in New Zealand that might actually have worked for him. Kim was in New Zealand because there was no way his native Germany would have allowed the creation of something like Megaupload in the first place - German police would have shut the site down in weeks.
Can it?
I submitted as "French Songwriter Composes Album With AI, Result As Bad As Today's Pop Music". The songwriter is Frenchman Carre. Canadian singer Kiesza just sings vocals on the album. The submission and submitted text was rewritten by the Slashdot editors and is now slightly misleading - Kiesza is not French and not the composer of this album.
To combust fossil fuels, or not combust fossil fuels? That is the question— Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to cherish The Dollars and cents of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of electrical Tesla cars, And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep— No more—and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That environmentalism is heir to—’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to make profit—ay, there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this drilling site, Must give us pause. There’s the respect That makes dogshit of everybody's life.
I just type in LOAD "LINUX" , 8 , 1 and off the C64 goes. Booting requires some "disc swapping" of course, and is sometimes hard on the Datasettte unit, but it works. Most impressive is that is that I've managed to solder a current Nvidia Titan GPU to the underside of the Commodore as well. This lets me run C64 games like The Last Ninja, International Karate II and Infernal Runner at 8K UHD 144Hz. I can also run all Playstation Pro 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch games on the unit. Even games that haven't been developed and released yet, like Grand Theft Auto 6 run great on this souped up Linux 64 unit. Oh, and the unit can time travel as well. I had coffee with Leonardo Da Vinci just this morning. He told me that he was painting a portrait of an Italian lady who hit her head recently and has a strange smile frozen on her visage. Amazing what a few beers before going on Slashdot can achieve, right? =) (The idiocy in this post is released under the GNU GPL 3.0 License)
No, not veteran coders at Microsoft. People who have wrestled with various MS products starting back with MS-DOS and are now... erm... "slightly damaged" by that experience. Config.sys and autoexec.bat come to mind. 640 Kb memory limit as well. Blue screens of death. Constant rebooting and restarting and reformatting of PCs. Flaky Windows installers. Viruses and malware in their tens of thousands. Plug and play that just did not work properly for years. Printers that wouldn't print. Soundblaster cards that couldn't be configured properly. Modems and other devices that Windows had to be beaten into seeing by turning them on and off and pluging them in and out 20 times over. Office files that aren't backwards compatible. The clusterfuck that is the Excel GUI. A lot of Windows 8 veterans for example have mental issues now. They walk the empty hallways of eerie mental institutions muttering "someone took my Start Button... someone took my Start Button..." or "Windows 8 hates me, Windows 8 hates me". A lot of people took bad shrapnel wounds from using Internet Exploder as well. Then there was MS Visual Studio with its ultra-funky GUI design, where you spend more time trying to understand what in God's name VS is showing you in its GUI than actually writing working code. Give generously, Billy G. We veterans need it.
Interviewer: You are in a desert. You: Ok. Interviewer: Bill Gates is also there. He's torturing a little turtle. You: Ok. Interviewer: What do you do? You: I help Bill Gates torture the turtle. Interviewer: Welcome to Microsoft!
Germany, and by extension Europe, has over the last decades tried very hard to project an image of a decent, honest, open, rule-bound democracy with integrity, good laws, yada yada yada. Listening to the Germans and Europeans in general, you'd think that its always the U.S. Corporations that are doing horrible things in the name of profit. This has been used very, very successfully to mask the fact that German and other powerful European companies are incredibly aggressive when it comes to making money/profit, especially in developing world markets where they are very strong, and there are no rules for them to play by. Its not just German companies either. The French, Belgians, Dutch and so forth aren't any better. If there is money to be grabbed, they'll grab it, decency and rules be damned. So its not just VW and the other automakers that are doing this sort of stuff. This is a system problem in a European Union that seems "super decent" image-wise, but is anything but in reality. Also, there is no way the German and other European governments didn't know this kind of cheating was happening. They knew, but turned a blind eye to it until there was no hiding it anymore.
Smart enough to pioneer Facebook and grow it into the biggest thing on the Internet. Dumb enough to make one wrong choice after another with Facebook. Facebook, after so many years, does not even have a well laid out UI/UX design. This is a man who keeps repeating the not very sensible mantra that "all our lives should be more transparent". Then he tapes over the webcam and USB port on his own laptop and razes homes adjoining his huge new property so that his "family and kids can have some privacy growing up".