I can't agree more. I have trouble understanding how people don't get that students don't come with all of the knowledge they need to be 'safe.' They are there to learn. Many lessons are from making mistakes - often bad ones.
The number of ways to produce surprisingly harmful substances by accident is large, as is the number of students whom haven't discovered their own mortality yet.
There's no problem installing any browser I like on my Mac.
And as for iOS? Let's see... Google Chrome and, Opera are both available on iOS.
Microsoft (unsurprisingly) doesn't make a browser for Mac/iOS, nor for Linux/Android.
As for Microsoft putting IE in their OS - that was the least of their crimes. The only thing you're doing is proving your rank ignorance in Microsoft's behavior in the 1990's. Microsoft had a nasty tendency to change entire API's so a competitor's product wouldn't run. A popular saying was "Windows ain't done until (Lotus, WordPerfect) won't run." Microsoft was fond of extorting any non-Microsoft software vendors, and creating entirely new Windows-only proprietary technologies (DirectX, Windows Audio, Windows Video, Active Directory... the list is huge) to thwart adoption of standards. Microsoft was (and still is) famously hostile to open source software, even going so far as lobbying politicians to make open source software illegal.
In contrast, Apple supports many major open source projects: CUPS, WebKit, LLVM, and Clang. Apple also has released the source code (ie. their modifications) for over 200 other projects they use. Apple even releases the source for the OS Kernel, and other technologies such as Launchd, Grand Central Dispatch, mDNS/Bonjour, Apple Lossless Audio Codec, and their calendar and contacts server.
Apple is a lot better than Microsoft, even now that Microsoft has "reformed" somewhat. But claiming that Apple is worse than Microsoft only shows you have no fraking clue what you're talking about.
It's fairly common for companies to have required IT products, such as RSA. Then they send their employees out to improve their knowledge of the "blessed" product(s).
The employees are often obligated to attend the conference, and are also (due to corporate policy) unable to say much, just in case those comments can be construed as company opinion.
So yeah... you have these poor attendees who are pretty much like "Look, I don't know anything anyway, my attendance was mandated by someone else. Why are you harassing me?"
He's saying that businesses should buy more expensive property at higher tax rates, in a slum, tear it all down, and rebuild everything new.
In other words: these companies should take it upon themselves to finance urban renewal.
Now I'm all for corporations being better citizens, and giving more back to the communities, but it is laughable to take an area the city can't take care of, and expect a corporation to somehow improve the area by moving in. Corporations aren't in business to make the area's neighborhoods better; that's the job of the city government.
I've seen a number of big, respected corporations in slums. (The Prudential is HQ'd at Broad & Market in Newark - hardly a shining pillar of civilization). The proximity of the company did nothing for the area.
Oklahoma's teachers had better use shorter words in their curriculum than their lobbyists used for the press.
Though I also think high schoolers should be required to work a minimum wage job before graduation, for at least a few months. That way, instead of abstract concepts, they know "it feels like this to earn $100.00."
WTF are you talking about? I'm in the continental US, and it's been the WARMEST winter in at least 20 years. We've been breaking record highs daily for almost two months.
Just because it's cold where you live doesn't mean it is cold everywhere.
Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
Das doesn't make the switches; Cherry does. Nearly every mechanical keyboard manufacturer these days uses Cherry MX switches, which are rated for 50 million cycles. Whether you're buying a mechanical keyboard from Das, WASD, Ducky, Razer, or any of a host of others, you're getting the exact same 50-million cycle switches.
In contrast, a membrane keyboard's switches are generally only rated for 3-5 million cycles.
To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like complaining that because the car's manufacturer didn't put in a premium audio system, the engine will only last for 10,000 miles.
I see no reason that insurance history could provide insight into the cause - be it fossil fuels, freon,
History is simply a record of observations; a dataset.
By itself, it doesn't provide much of anything. It's data.
Combined with our understanding of physics and chemistry, however, and the story changes significantly. We are able to chart what we know about the materials against what we see in the data, and tease out very relevant data.
Measured data over a period of time + physical and chemical knowledge = simulation. Whether it's a flight simulator, racing game, crash simulation, or fluid dynamics - the principles are the same. Over time, the simulations become more and more complex, and more and more accurate.
The process is along the lines of:
Take what we know, and create a computer model that accurately models previously obtained data (ie. matches known data as closely as possible)
Next, get a new slice of reality - such as crash two real cars together and film and instrument it to collect the desired data
We input the same initial conditions into the simulation, and run the simulation
We compare the results between the two, and improve the simulation model
It's a simple feedback system that improves over time.
High quality simulations are not simple, but they are based on simple building blocks, just like all human knowledge. Over time, the models become very accurate (and peer reviewed, often by a competing company whose interest is in disproving your model to their gain). Eventually, the simulation becomes close enough to reality that we base our decisions on the simulation, and tool up for production using simulated data. Verifying the simulation's accuracy is often little more than a formality with an already expected outcome. (And if the outcome is different, then it's an opportunity to improve the simulation model - and profit from that knowledge).
Modern simulations have reached the point where nearly everything that happens on a human scale (be it vehicle design, structures, radio transmission, or even diaper packaging) not only can be simulated with nearly perfect accuracy, but is routine to the point of being almost boring.
This was not always so. Only a couple of decades ago, simulations were crude affairs with very approximate results. Yet these crude simulations were more than sufficient to get us to the moon and back, as well as build the most powerful heavy lift rockets ever made.
While the order of complexity for simulating the climate is many, many orders of magnitude higher than what is required to simulate the structural and aerodynamic performance of the Saturn V or N1 rockets, our ability to perform such simulations has also increased many, many orders of magnitude.
A great deal of the academic papers with respect to climate science are about finding problems (and solutions) in the simulations. While it may sound like that means the model isn't any good, the reality is the discussion has reached the point of minutiae that increase the overall accuracy, but don't actually change the overall result (or prediction) significantly.
Also fire zones... more than a few people build their dream home in a wooded foothill, where they can't see their neighbors through the trees. There's a lot of prestige in building your home higher up the hill than the next person.
The problem is such areas are tinderboxes, and are poorly maintained from a land management perspective Irrigation, landscaping, and pesticides tends to increase the amount of overgrowth. The presence of humans (and our cars, electricity, and tendency to cook food) greatly increases the number of opportunities for a fire to start. It's not uncommon for a car's breaks to throw out sparks that start a fire, to say nothing of backyard fires and tobacco smoking.
Wildfires eventually strike, and destroy everything. It's a very common pattern in the Western US, where drought is common. The firefighters often call such areas the "stupid zone," as you have to be pretty thoughtless to build your house in the middle of a tinderbox. All it takes is one of your neighbors (miles away) to be either thoughtless or unlucky, and the whole area is torched.
In my experience, it's not that there aren't safe places to build. It's that the safe places are so... pedestrian; so conventional; so... bourgeoisie.
So these geniuses build their homes are built on cliffs, mountainsides, floodplains (near the river/creek), or in the wooded foothills.
BTRFS has a large number of features that are still in the "being implemented", or "planning" stages. In contrast, those features are already present, well tested, and in production for half a decade on ZFS. Many touted "future" features (such as encryption) of BTRFS are documented as "maybe in the future, if the planets are right, we'll implement this. But not anytime soon"
Comparing the two is like making up an imaginary timeline where ReiserFS 3 was 4-5 years old and in wide deployment while ext2 was being developed, with plans to implement journaling (ie. ext3) and extents (ie. ext4) still in the "TODO" stage.
My own BTRFS system is appallingly slow compared to running ext4 on the same hardware; in contrast zfsonlinux is amazing.
Xbox Live Gold is required for everything except downloading patches. It sounds like a fanboi who really knows nothing about the Xbox is proving his ignorance/making an ass of himeself.
There's nothing new here; the Xbox Live Gold has been a thing since the original Xbox.
And yet the incumbents enjoy something like an 80-90% reelection rate. That's the part that I don't understand. If Congress is doing such a lousy job, how do any of them last beyond one term?
While the actual election is relatively free of corruption, the selection process for candidates is anything but democratic. There are few primaries, and caucuses are easily (and regularly) stacked in a way to exclude participation; most citizens are locked out of the caucus process entirely.
Both caucuses and primaries have another overall problem: They are not about supporting a candidate; it's about supporting the party. As a result, instead of getting the most qualified and capable candidate, or even the candidate most likely to win the general election, you get the party favorite.
Once the general election comes around, you have two wing nuts, and you have to pick which one you hate less.
The whole system is set up to effectively shut out everyone but D's and the R's. It's considered a moral victory when a third party gets more than 2% of the vote...
* Not having to deal with endless driver updates * Consoles "just work". No maintenance, no constant fiddling with the system.
Oh, come on now. "The console has new upgrade. Upgrade now or be forever offline".
"This game has update too. Apply now or be forever alone."
That's hyperbole.
How many people complain about Steam forcing them to upgrade?
It's not a case of "upgrade now or be forever offline". You can always choose to upgrade at a later date.
There are very valid reasons for either a console manufacturer or game publisher from refusing to accept non-updated clients. The first one that comes to mind is cheating in online games; you patch the problem and refuse to allow unpatched clients. The game publishers and console makers both have a vested interest in removing cheaters from their ecosystem. It spoils the game for everyone else, which generally means the gamer will spend their money elsewhere.
Most MMO games on PC's have similar policies: You must keep your game upgraded, or you can't play. "Oh, you wanted to play today? Sorry, you have to download this 2.9 GiB patch first. See you tomorrow."
Gaming ecosystem issues aside, think of the upgrade process on the various platforms:
From a user's perspective:
* with a console, you get a popup window telling you it will install updates -- for both hardware and software. Users don't have to keep track of anything. The user just presses one button on the paddle to manage the entire update process. One click, 15-20 seconds, no problems at all.
* Touchscreen phones & tablets are another very popular gaming platform, and they are also painless to use or upgrade. Whether it's an OS upgrade, a driver upgrade, or an application upgrade, users automatically receive a notification that there are updates, and can tap to upgrade automatically and painlessly.
Now, let's look at the way a user would have to update a driver on the PC: * Know exactly what hardware is in your machine * Determining if you need to update the driver (news of some sort) * Launching the web browser * Visiting the driver site * Find & Download the correct driver * Opening the download folder * Unzipping the driver * Executing the driver installer
All of that takes dozens of mouse clicks, launching several different programs, and several minutes of time.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with PC gaming. I'm only saying you can't gloss over the additional complexity and overhead gamers have to deal with on a PC.
After 20 years of being a hardcore PC gamer, my tune towards consoles has changed dramatically. Consoles have become a perfectly adequate platform for gaming, and have always been a lot less trouble to use.
The following are things console users don't have to deal with: * Variable hardware platform - different CPU's, GPU's, memory, disks, etc, etc.
* This gives developers the ability to tune very tightly to the hardware, instead of having to support everything.
* Users don't have to mess with "detail" settings to tune for performance & appearance. * No constant upgrade march (that ends up being more expensive than buying several consoles) * Not having to deal with endless driver updates * Consoles "just work". No maintenance, no constant fiddling with the system. * I have yet to hear of malware on a console
If you're willing to pay the maintenance and administrative overhead that you have to deal with a PC, then sure, it's fine.
Consoles, however, just work and don't require constant fiddling. It's a gaming appliance. You plug it in, it works. No advanced knowledge required.
I'm not arguing about whether it's right or wrong.
I'm just pointing out that in a number of ways, forcing someone to decrypt an encrypted disk isn't that dissimilar from compelling a defendant from unlocking a combination safe. In both cases, it unlocks a trove of data, and can give the prosecution evidence to help them ruin the defendant's life.
Local governments (including city, county, and state) are far more sovereign than most non-Americans know. The US is more tightly integrated than the EU, but one principle is the same: the idea of allowing for, and preserving differences that are valued by an individual state.
Nevada and California are different states, just as Germany and France are different states. Each has its own culture, law, traditions, and so forth, but share a common currency, and cede some control to their respective unions.
With such a government, you have an escalation process that must be followed before you make a ruling that affects everyone.
Obstruction of justice? It'd be hard for the prosecution to screw that one up.
As they already appear to have enough evidence to incarcerate him for possession of CP, it's hard to see what sort of good pissing off the judge and adding further penalties would do.
The far better course of action is to comply with the court's orders, and then contest that any data obtained is inadmissible as evidence as the order to decrypt it violated his 5th amendment right against self-incrimination. Then he can get the conviction thrown out entirely.
As the FBI has already shown it is proficient enough to crack one of the guy's disks, there's a good reason for the accused worry they'll decrypt more data.
Anything the FBI decrypts on their own will be used to screw him to the wall.
Honestly, I'd prefer to contest all the way to the Supreme Court that being forced to decrypt a disk is a violation of the 5th Amendment.
I'd rather have a meaningful 5th Amendment as my shield than a faith in my ability to misunderstand and misuse encryption.
ARM is quite capable of competing with Intel, but it is no magic bullet.
CPU Core power usage is only part of the overall system power usage.
What you want is a number of web requests served per second. You can have a fast quad-core x86_64 chip do the job, or you can have many more (considerably slower) ARM cores do the job.
In the end, the number of requests/second is similar, as is the power consumption.
You can't get around the laws of physics - there is a minimal amount of power to perform an operation. Intel chips use more power because they perform more operations.
75% of the performance for 25% of the power compared to x86
The problem is they don't provide anything approaching that sort of efficiency.
I've had the, um, privilege of benchmarking a few of the new up-and-coming ARM server systems and chips. It's pretty neat to be able to have four quad-core servers, each with 4GB of memory, pulling a total of 40W or so. That's a great system for a web server farm.
The problem is when you compare the throughput vs performance for high performance computing. For a few workloads, the new ARM systems compare favorably - giving a small edge in work done per watt. The performance advantage per watt in these workloads is usually less than 5%.
The best-case for the ARM systems, under workloads that are most ideal for the ARM systems in question: 105% of the performance for the same power draw.
If your workload doesn't scale to a large number of cores easily, or has a large amount of inter-process communication, the current ARM systems are hopeless. Even with a supposedly high-performance backplane in a chassis hosting around 40 ARM nodes, it was soundly trounced by one x86_64 node.
Note this is for a cluster system, so many x86_64 and ARM nodes are being used for the benchmark.
One node X86-64 can handle the workload of 40+ ARM nodes. Granted, you can fit 40+ ARM nodes in a 3U chassis, but it's still a lower overall compute density than with 1U x86_64 nodes. Simply throwing more cores at the problem doesn't necessarily give you the gains you'd think.
While ARM is theoretically capable of better performance/watt, it's impossible to get anything resembling theoretical in a supercomputing application. Any advantage ARM has in performance/watt is eaten up by the overhead of having to use so many (slower) cores. Very few workloads scale linearly as you throw in more cores, as various overheads (MPI, network, etc.) decrease the overall efficiency dramatically.
Currently, you can't use ARM for memory-hungry applications, as you'll hit the 4GB limit. 64-bit ARM is promising, but it's also not for sale.
The best performance per watt for supercomputing workloads is still found in accelerators, such as GPU's or Intel's Xeon Phi.
ARM is very promising for many datacenter type workloads, where there are a large number of unrelated, independent processes, such as a farm of web servers. (Any database backend is, however, a different matter).
While slightly OT (as it's a non-supercomputing application): What if you want to use an application that uses Java server-side? Forget it. The current ARM JVM's (both openJDK as well as Oracle's) both appear to lack JIT; the only way to get Java to have a similar performance/watt between ARM and x86_64 is to disable JIT on x86_64. This is largely a software issue, but until it's fixed, forget about Java on an ARM server.
Read the actual report and see if you really think a few chemicals could really do what you suggest -- keep the temperature steady and glowing hot for 100 hours. If so, that would be amazing.. especially since the weight of the reactor did not change!
I don't only think a few chemical could really do what I'm suggesting, I know they can.
The "Glowing hot" reaction was, by their own admission, a very short term reaction, to "prove' that it can generate a lot of heat - in fact, enough to melt the steel and ceramic device. This was an earlier test, and had no part in either of the tests that lasted around 100 hours. In fact, there's no indication in the paper of the duration of the "glowing hot" test at all.
The 100 hour "long term" test in their report is an entirely different device, "purposely" running the device cooler. There's no evidence it's even the same design.
Chemical reactions can easily be used to melt the steel and ceramics used in the E-Cat. Thermite will melt through steel, concrete, and a few feet of dirt underneath. Thermite is self-oxidizing, the reaction is Fe2O3 + 2 Al 2 Fe + Al2O3 -- note that the resulting compounds aren't gaseous and therefore won't exhaust into the atmosphere - so the weight before and after the reaction is the same. That's only one of many reactions that can produce the same effect.
When the test is prepared beforehand, and/or you're not allowed to monitor the whole process, it's quite easy for a charlatan to adulterate the test.
Generating a lower level of heat for 100 hours isn't particularly difficult either, though not necessarily by chemical means this time.
Notable is the fact that Rossi would not let anyone disconnect the power cables, instead demanding they use an ammeter to "prove' the cables weren't drawing any power.
I've seen such a demonstration by an EE professor - the working meter read zero current. The purpose was to demonstrate that you really should understand how the meters work before infer anything from their readings. Otherwise, you end up with a meter reading zero on a circuit with enough electricity flowing to kill. Rossi could easily be using one of several methods to deliver power through the wire such that an ammeter still shows zero.
Putting too much trust in a measuring instrument you don't understand has been the source of a lot of scientific embarrassment over the centuries.
Similarly, Rossi will not allow any chemical analysis after the fact that would prove his claims (such as analysis for the type of copper isotopes that would result from the proposed reaction). Trying to claim that it would give away his "trade secret" catalyst is a joke: If he ever plans on selling this thing commercially, he will be required by law to provide an MSDS which details exactly what is in the catalyst.
Even Coca-Cola has to list its ingredients on the can. The difference is the laws are a bit more lenient towards "natural and artificial flavorings" in foods than they are towards industrial reagents.
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I can't agree more. I have trouble understanding how people don't get that students don't come with all of the knowledge they need to be 'safe.' They are there to learn. Many lessons are from making mistakes - often bad ones.
The number of ways to produce surprisingly harmful substances by accident is large, as is the number of students whom haven't discovered their own mortality yet.
There's no problem installing any browser I like on my Mac.
And as for iOS? Let's see... Google Chrome and, Opera are both available on iOS.
Microsoft (unsurprisingly) doesn't make a browser for Mac/iOS, nor for Linux/Android.
As for Microsoft putting IE in their OS - that was the least of their crimes. The only thing you're doing is proving your rank ignorance in Microsoft's behavior in the 1990's. Microsoft had a nasty tendency to change entire API's so a competitor's product wouldn't run. A popular saying was "Windows ain't done until (Lotus, WordPerfect) won't run." Microsoft was fond of extorting any non-Microsoft software vendors, and creating entirely new Windows-only proprietary technologies (DirectX, Windows Audio, Windows Video, Active Directory... the list is huge) to thwart adoption of standards. Microsoft was (and still is) famously hostile to open source software, even going so far as lobbying politicians to make open source software illegal.
In contrast, Apple supports many major open source projects: CUPS, WebKit, LLVM, and Clang. Apple also has released the source code (ie. their modifications) for over 200 other projects they use. Apple even releases the source for the OS Kernel, and other technologies such as Launchd, Grand Central Dispatch, mDNS/Bonjour, Apple Lossless Audio Codec, and their calendar and contacts server.
Apple is a lot better than Microsoft, even now that Microsoft has "reformed" somewhat. But claiming that Apple is worse than Microsoft only shows you have no fraking clue what you're talking about.
+1 to this.
It's fairly common for companies to have required IT products, such as RSA. Then they send their employees out to improve their knowledge of the "blessed" product(s).
The employees are often obligated to attend the conference, and are also (due to corporate policy) unable to say much, just in case those comments can be construed as company opinion.
So yeah... you have these poor attendees who are pretty much like "Look, I don't know anything anyway, my attendance was mandated by someone else. Why are you harassing me?"
He's saying that businesses should buy more expensive property at higher tax rates, in a slum, tear it all down, and rebuild everything new.
In other words: these companies should take it upon themselves to finance urban renewal.
Now I'm all for corporations being better citizens, and giving more back to the communities, but it is laughable to take an area the city can't take care of, and expect a corporation to somehow improve the area by moving in. Corporations aren't in business to make the area's neighborhoods better; that's the job of the city government.
I've seen a number of big, respected corporations in slums. (The Prudential is HQ'd at Broad & Market in Newark - hardly a shining pillar of civilization). The proximity of the company did nothing for the area.
Oklahoma's teachers had better use shorter words in their curriculum than their lobbyists used for the press.
Though I also think high schoolers should be required to work a minimum wage job before graduation, for at least a few months. That way, instead of abstract concepts, they know "it feels like this to earn $100.00."
WTF are you talking about? I'm in the continental US, and it's been the WARMEST winter in at least 20 years. We've been breaking record highs daily for almost two months.
Just because it's cold where you live doesn't mean it is cold everywhere.
The fact that Timecube exists doesn't automatically discount everything else on the internet.
You obviously haven't actually spent much time reading Timecube. After Timecube, everything else on the internet can easily be discounted.
Even companies that used to make good stuff, like das, now have cut costs so that you are going to get more life out of a random membrane keyboard.
Das doesn't make the switches; Cherry does. Nearly every mechanical keyboard manufacturer these days uses Cherry MX switches, which are rated for 50 million cycles. Whether you're buying a mechanical keyboard from Das, WASD, Ducky, Razer, or any of a host of others, you're getting the exact same 50-million cycle switches.
In contrast, a membrane keyboard's switches are generally only rated for 3-5 million cycles.
To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like complaining that because the car's manufacturer didn't put in a premium audio system, the engine will only last for 10,000 miles.
I see no reason that insurance history could provide insight into the cause - be it fossil fuels, freon,
History is simply a record of observations; a dataset.
By itself, it doesn't provide much of anything. It's data.
Combined with our understanding of physics and chemistry, however, and the story changes significantly. We are able to chart what we know about the materials against what we see in the data, and tease out very relevant data.
Measured data over a period of time + physical and chemical knowledge = simulation. Whether it's a flight simulator, racing game, crash simulation, or fluid dynamics - the principles are the same. Over time, the simulations become more and more complex, and more and more accurate.
The process is along the lines of:
It's a simple feedback system that improves over time.
High quality simulations are not simple, but they are based on simple building blocks, just like all human knowledge. Over time, the models become very accurate (and peer reviewed, often by a competing company whose interest is in disproving your model to their gain). Eventually, the simulation becomes close enough to reality that we base our decisions on the simulation, and tool up for production using simulated data. Verifying the simulation's accuracy is often little more than a formality with an already expected outcome. (And if the outcome is different, then it's an opportunity to improve the simulation model - and profit from that knowledge).
Modern simulations have reached the point where nearly everything that happens on a human scale (be it vehicle design, structures, radio transmission, or even diaper packaging) not only can be simulated with nearly perfect accuracy, but is routine to the point of being almost boring.
This was not always so. Only a couple of decades ago, simulations were crude affairs with very approximate results. Yet these crude simulations were more than sufficient to get us to the moon and back, as well as build the most powerful heavy lift rockets ever made.
While the order of complexity for simulating the climate is many, many orders of magnitude higher than what is required to simulate the structural and aerodynamic performance of the Saturn V or N1 rockets, our ability to perform such simulations has also increased many, many orders of magnitude.
A great deal of the academic papers with respect to climate science are about finding problems (and solutions) in the simulations. While it may sound like that means the model isn't any good, the reality is the discussion has reached the point of minutiae that increase the overall accuracy, but don't actually change the overall result (or prediction) significantly.
Also fire zones... more than a few people build their dream home in a wooded foothill, where they can't see their neighbors through the trees. There's a lot of prestige in building your home higher up the hill than the next person.
The problem is such areas are tinderboxes, and are poorly maintained from a land management perspective Irrigation, landscaping, and pesticides tends to increase the amount of overgrowth. The presence of humans (and our cars, electricity, and tendency to cook food) greatly increases the number of opportunities for a fire to start. It's not uncommon for a car's breaks to throw out sparks that start a fire, to say nothing of backyard fires and tobacco smoking.
Wildfires eventually strike, and destroy everything. It's a very common pattern in the Western US, where drought is common. The firefighters often call such areas the "stupid zone," as you have to be pretty thoughtless to build your house in the middle of a tinderbox. All it takes is one of your neighbors (miles away) to be either thoughtless or unlucky, and the whole area is torched.
In my experience, it's not that there aren't safe places to build. It's that the safe places are so... pedestrian; so conventional; so... bourgeoisie.
So these geniuses build their homes are built on cliffs, mountainsides, floodplains (near the river/creek), or in the wooded foothills.
BTRFS has a large number of features that are still in the "being implemented", or "planning" stages. In contrast, those features are already present, well tested, and in production for half a decade on ZFS. Many touted "future" features (such as encryption) of BTRFS are documented as "maybe in the future, if the planets are right, we'll implement this. But not anytime soon"
Comparing the two is like making up an imaginary timeline where ReiserFS 3 was 4-5 years old and in wide deployment while ext2 was being developed, with plans to implement journaling (ie. ext3) and extents (ie. ext4) still in the "TODO" stage.
My own BTRFS system is appallingly slow compared to running ext4 on the same hardware; in contrast zfsonlinux is amazing.
I'd mod you up if I could.
Xbox Live Gold is required for everything except downloading patches. It sounds like a fanboi who really knows nothing about the Xbox is proving his ignorance/making an ass of himeself.
There's nothing new here; the Xbox Live Gold has been a thing since the original Xbox.
And yet the incumbents enjoy something like an 80-90% reelection rate. That's the part that I don't understand. If Congress is doing such a lousy job, how do any of them last beyond one term?
While the actual election is relatively free of corruption, the selection process for candidates is anything but democratic. There are few primaries, and caucuses are easily (and regularly) stacked in a way to exclude participation; most citizens are locked out of the caucus process entirely.
Both caucuses and primaries have another overall problem: They are not about supporting a candidate; it's about supporting the party. As a result, instead of getting the most qualified and capable candidate, or even the candidate most likely to win the general election, you get the party favorite.
Once the general election comes around, you have two wing nuts, and you have to pick which one you hate less.
The whole system is set up to effectively shut out everyone but D's and the R's. It's considered a moral victory when a third party gets more than 2% of the vote...
Wrong! It's "By the way iFarted."
* Not having to deal with endless driver updates
* Consoles "just work". No maintenance, no constant fiddling with the system.
Oh, come on now. "The console has new upgrade. Upgrade now or be forever offline".
"This game has update too. Apply now or be forever alone."
That's hyperbole.
How many people complain about Steam forcing them to upgrade?
It's not a case of "upgrade now or be forever offline". You can always choose to upgrade at a later date.
There are very valid reasons for either a console manufacturer or game publisher from refusing to accept non-updated clients. The first one that comes to mind is cheating in online games; you patch the problem and refuse to allow unpatched clients. The game publishers and console makers both have a vested interest in removing cheaters from their ecosystem. It spoils the game for everyone else, which generally means the gamer will spend their money elsewhere.
Most MMO games on PC's have similar policies: You must keep your game upgraded, or you can't play. "Oh, you wanted to play today? Sorry, you have to download this 2.9 GiB patch first. See you tomorrow."
Gaming ecosystem issues aside, think of the upgrade process on the various platforms:
From a user's perspective:
* with a console, you get a popup window telling you it will install updates -- for both hardware and software. Users don't have to keep track of anything. The user just presses one button on the paddle to manage the entire update process. One click, 15-20 seconds, no problems at all.
* Touchscreen phones & tablets are another very popular gaming platform, and they are also painless to use or upgrade. Whether it's an OS upgrade, a driver upgrade, or an application upgrade, users automatically receive a notification that there are updates, and can tap to upgrade automatically and painlessly.
Now, let's look at the way a user would have to update a driver on the PC:
* Know exactly what hardware is in your machine
* Determining if you need to update the driver (news of some sort)
* Launching the web browser
* Visiting the driver site
* Find & Download the correct driver
* Opening the download folder
* Unzipping the driver
* Executing the driver installer
All of that takes dozens of mouse clicks, launching several different programs, and several minutes of time.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with PC gaming. I'm only saying you can't gloss over the additional complexity and overhead gamers have to deal with on a PC.
After 20 years of being a hardcore PC gamer, my tune towards consoles has changed dramatically. Consoles have become a perfectly adequate platform for gaming, and have always been a lot less trouble to use.
"Better" is a relative term
The following are things console users don't have to deal with:
* Variable hardware platform - different CPU's, GPU's, memory, disks, etc, etc.
* This gives developers the ability to tune very tightly to the hardware, instead of having to support everything.
* Users don't have to mess with "detail" settings to tune for performance & appearance.
* No constant upgrade march (that ends up being more expensive than buying several consoles)
* Not having to deal with endless driver updates
* Consoles "just work". No maintenance, no constant fiddling with the system.
* I have yet to hear of malware on a console
If you're willing to pay the maintenance and administrative overhead that you have to deal with a PC, then sure, it's fine.
Consoles, however, just work and don't require constant fiddling. It's a gaming appliance. You plug it in, it works. No advanced knowledge required.
I'm not arguing about whether it's right or wrong.
I'm just pointing out that in a number of ways, forcing someone to decrypt an encrypted disk isn't that dissimilar from compelling a defendant from unlocking a combination safe. In both cases, it unlocks a trove of data, and can give the prosecution evidence to help them ruin the defendant's life.
You're correct to a degree, but...
Local governments (including city, county, and state) are far more sovereign than most non-Americans know. The US is more tightly integrated than the EU, but one principle is the same: the idea of allowing for, and preserving differences that are valued by an individual state.
Nevada and California are different states, just as Germany and France are different states. Each has its own culture, law, traditions, and so forth, but share a common currency, and cede some control to their respective unions.
With such a government, you have an escalation process that must be followed before you make a ruling that affects everyone.
It's probably more like the court ordering you to unlock a safe when they have a warrant to search its contents.
That will be a tough one to prove
Obstruction of justice? It'd be hard for the prosecution to screw that one up.
As they already appear to have enough evidence to incarcerate him for possession of CP, it's hard to see what sort of good pissing off the judge and adding further penalties would do.
The far better course of action is to comply with the court's orders, and then contest that any data obtained is inadmissible as evidence as the order to decrypt it violated his 5th amendment right against self-incrimination. Then he can get the conviction thrown out entirely.
As the FBI has already shown it is proficient enough to crack one of the guy's disks, there's a good reason for the accused worry they'll decrypt more data.
Anything the FBI decrypts on their own will be used to screw him to the wall.
Honestly, I'd prefer to contest all the way to the Supreme Court that being forced to decrypt a disk is a violation of the 5th Amendment.
I'd rather have a meaningful 5th Amendment as my shield than a faith in my ability to misunderstand and misuse encryption.
Such systems exist.
Even Dell sells them.
ARM is quite capable of competing with Intel, but it is no magic bullet.
CPU Core power usage is only part of the overall system power usage.
What you want is a number of web requests served per second. You can have a fast quad-core x86_64 chip do the job, or you can have many more (considerably slower) ARM cores do the job.
In the end, the number of requests/second is similar, as is the power consumption.
You can't get around the laws of physics - there is a minimal amount of power to perform an operation. Intel chips use more power because they perform more operations.
75% of the performance for 25% of the power compared to x86
The problem is they don't provide anything approaching that sort of efficiency.
I've had the, um, privilege of benchmarking a few of the new up-and-coming ARM server systems and chips. It's pretty neat to be able to have four quad-core servers, each with 4GB of memory, pulling a total of 40W or so. That's a great system for a web server farm.
The problem is when you compare the throughput vs performance for high performance computing. For a few workloads, the new ARM systems compare favorably - giving a small edge in work done per watt. The performance advantage per watt in these workloads is usually less than 5%.
The best-case for the ARM systems, under workloads that are most ideal for the ARM systems in question: 105% of the performance for the same power draw.
If your workload doesn't scale to a large number of cores easily, or has a large amount of inter-process communication, the current ARM systems are hopeless. Even with a supposedly high-performance backplane in a chassis hosting around 40 ARM nodes, it was soundly trounced by one x86_64 node.
Note this is for a cluster system, so many x86_64 and ARM nodes are being used for the benchmark.
One node X86-64 can handle the workload of 40+ ARM nodes. Granted, you can fit 40+ ARM nodes in a 3U chassis, but it's still a lower overall compute density than with 1U x86_64 nodes. Simply throwing more cores at the problem doesn't necessarily give you the gains you'd think.
While ARM is theoretically capable of better performance/watt, it's impossible to get anything resembling theoretical in a supercomputing application. Any advantage ARM has in performance/watt is eaten up by the overhead of having to use so many (slower) cores. Very few workloads scale linearly as you throw in more cores, as various overheads (MPI, network, etc.) decrease the overall efficiency dramatically.
Currently, you can't use ARM for memory-hungry applications, as you'll hit the 4GB limit. 64-bit ARM is promising, but it's also not for sale.
The best performance per watt for supercomputing workloads is still found in accelerators, such as GPU's or Intel's Xeon Phi.
ARM is very promising for many datacenter type workloads, where there are a large number of unrelated, independent processes, such as a farm of web servers. (Any database backend is, however, a different matter).
While slightly OT (as it's a non-supercomputing application): What if you want to use an application that uses Java server-side? Forget it. The current ARM JVM's (both openJDK as well as Oracle's) both appear to lack JIT; the only way to get Java to have a similar performance/watt between ARM and x86_64 is to disable JIT on x86_64. This is largely a software issue, but until it's fixed, forget about Java on an ARM server.
Read the actual report and see if you really think a few chemicals could really do what you suggest -- keep the temperature steady and glowing hot for 100 hours. If so, that would be amazing.. especially since the weight of the reactor did not change!
I don't only think a few chemical could really do what I'm suggesting, I know they can.
The "Glowing hot" reaction was, by their own admission, a very short term reaction, to "prove' that it can generate a lot of heat - in fact, enough to melt the steel and ceramic device. This was an earlier test, and had no part in either of the tests that lasted around 100 hours. In fact, there's no indication in the paper of the duration of the "glowing hot" test at all.
The 100 hour "long term" test in their report is an entirely different device, "purposely" running the device cooler. There's no evidence it's even the same design.
Chemical reactions can easily be used to melt the steel and ceramics used in the E-Cat. Thermite will melt through steel, concrete, and a few feet of dirt underneath. Thermite is self-oxidizing, the reaction is Fe2O3 + 2 Al 2 Fe + Al2O3 -- note that the resulting compounds aren't gaseous and therefore won't exhaust into the atmosphere - so the weight before and after the reaction is the same. That's only one of many reactions that can produce the same effect.
When the test is prepared beforehand, and/or you're not allowed to monitor the whole process, it's quite easy for a charlatan to adulterate the test.
Generating a lower level of heat for 100 hours isn't particularly difficult either, though not necessarily by chemical means this time.
Notable is the fact that Rossi would not let anyone disconnect the power cables, instead demanding they use an ammeter to "prove' the cables weren't drawing any power.
I've seen such a demonstration by an EE professor - the working meter read zero current. The purpose was to demonstrate that you really should understand how the meters work before infer anything from their readings. Otherwise, you end up with a meter reading zero on a circuit with enough electricity flowing to kill. Rossi could easily be using one of several methods to deliver power through the wire such that an ammeter still shows zero.
Putting too much trust in a measuring instrument you don't understand has been the source of a lot of scientific embarrassment over the centuries.
Similarly, Rossi will not allow any chemical analysis after the fact that would prove his claims (such as analysis for the type of copper isotopes that would result from the proposed reaction). Trying to claim that it would give away his "trade secret" catalyst is a joke: If he ever plans on selling this thing commercially, he will be required by law to provide an MSDS which details exactly what is in the catalyst.
Even Coca-Cola has to list its ingredients on the can. The difference is the laws are a bit more lenient towards "natural and artificial flavorings" in foods than they are towards industrial reagents.
I stand corrected.
TOTP is still very much outside the realm of Kim's patent.
Minor fix: Replace "Rossi does none of this" with "Rossi does all of this".