Yes, but what happens when someone childishly changes the p's for t's?
$ echo "Shippy McShipface" | sed -e s/p/t/g My brain does that without even trying.
why should we pay attentition to the failures of the NK rocket program
Because the rocket program has far more significance than the nuclear program. All the nukes in the world don't mean a thing if you can't deliver them. NK may be trying to fuck up Japan and China (the South has kinda learned to live with this shit) so they might ease up on the sanctions and/or take them seriously as a regional power.
But NK's rockets and nukes are more posturing than tactical. To mean anything, they would have to have the capability to mass-produce these devices (turn them out like sausages, to paraphrase Kruschev back in the day), which NK will never be able to do with their economy. That leaves them with a capacity to, at worst, blow their wad one time, then sit defenseless and receive a crushing retaliation from whatever country their wayward missile fell upon (be a real thing if a missile flew by to mistake China).
OTOH, the regime needs regularly-scheduled holidays and ceremonies to keep all but its hungriest citizens busy and engaged in non-subversive activities. I offer this as an amusing, admittedly biased, but actual footage of a visit to NK and their weird cultish every-day required devotion to the founder and the great leader, particularly on their birthdays. They also need to maintain the narrative that they have the strongest army in the world, and that foreign invasion will happen at any time. Indeed, they have a million-man standing army to maintain each day from falling apart under its own weight. Thus, the dog-and-pony show of missiles and parades and nuke tests and two TV channels showing documentaries of how great their country is, until the power gets cut at nightfall.
"Catastrophic" does seem a little over the top. Although technically correct, it's the kinda thing the NK's would pronounce about us if something blew up. But the NK make everything so much about theater (founder's birthday and all), it's hard not to get sucked into it and take a jab at 'em. Objectively, though, each failure is a baby-step toward getting to something that works, so long as they don't shoot or hard-labor the failure engineers (to show the great leader's displeasure), and whenever they can black-market together the parts and funding to put another one together.
...bouncers. That's right, gorilla-sized bouncers with sharp eyes and authority to deny admission or throw you the fuck out if you text, talk, film, fart, kick seats, throw food, twitch, got bad B.O., or attempt to sneak a toddler into an R-rated movie or any movie after 8 PM.
This. I've had movies ruined by non-parental parents bringing their children as tag-alongs to late-night R-rated movies that children have no business seeing. These idiot-parents act all surprised and hurt that their sleepy kid goes into a screaming fit, kicking the seat in front and puking on a stomach-full of candy and artificial popcorn butter. And just think... if it survives, that kid's part of the future of America!
The last time I heard about texting in a theater, someone got shot. Imagine the guy at AMC doing a late Google search on theater texting and finding this. Uh, Boss, maybe this really isn't such a great idea.
Yeah, imagine if it was actually available. Normal flight, and express. Once you got used to flights five hours or less where ever you're going, it would be really hard going back to "slow" planes no matter how far back the business-seat reclines.
If you never have to fly long distances, obviously you won't care. But if you do, particularly if you have to for business or family, paying up to save time becomes a real thing. In the day, business travelers loved the Concorde, 'cause they could fly to London hold a meeting and be back in NY the same day and no jet lag. If LA to Tokyo or Shanghai or Sydney were available as a 5 hour option over the typical 12+, people would pay the premium.
What killed the Concorde was not that it didn't have passengers. Never mind the sunk costs for R&D, it died because of the weird way Britain and France built it: no supply chain was established for new planes, upgrades, or even spare parts. Airbus didn't exist then, and Boeing had nothing to do with it. When Airbus was approached later to make replacement parts, they declined because with maybe 12 planes in the entire fleet, there just wasn't any money in it, nor did they have any interest in building a replacement if they're only going to make a dozen planes for two routes. The fleet was kept in the air by cannibalizing parts from retired Concordes until this simply became unsustainable.
Things might be different now. If Airbus or Boeing committed to a viable SST that could fly over land, you can bet airlines serving Dubai and Qatar would place orders, as well as Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo and Johannesburg. That might add up to enough planes to actually make economic sense. Fly to Dubai in 5 hours instead of 18? You might actually want to go there.
the engine efficiency is most not the problem, engines are actually slightly more efficient at higher speeds due to the relatively efficient ram-compression (concorde olympus is I think the most efficient aero-engine ever). The real problem is that the lift to drag ratio of supersonic aircraft is only 7-10 which is only 30-40% of high subsonic commercial jets taht are now in range 20-22. That means (all other things being equal) that you need ~3x the fuel to travel the same distance.
This supersonic L/D deficit is pretty fundamental, and even the best possible configurations (oblique flying wings that are basically unworkable due to massive wing spans needed) will only bring supersonic L/D up to perhaps low teens. While subsonic jets are eventually targeting 30:1 L/D with strut braced wings or blended wing bodies.
But fuel is typically only 20-40% of ticket costs, so this is not necessarily a show stopper for commercial service. And if we can do cheap nuclear power synthesized fuels gradually increasing wealth of world should eventually make supersonic flight in 1-4 person pilotless aircraft (to eliminate noise issue) ubiquitous.
At the same time, all jet engines are terrifically inefficient at low speeds. Even modern subsonic planes lose a comparably huge amount of fuel when taxiing around the airport. Swept-wing SST's would be worse, because they have to accelerate to a higher speed before they can take off (unless you rig them with folding wings like the F-14, but that would weigh too much if scaled up for a commercial aircraft).
Thinking F-14's leads to an idea, though... rig airports with catapults to save a little fuel and make air travel more exciting.
No one should still be running XP unless it's on a specialized system
Does "XP Mode" in Windows 7 count? I use it because it's a free (semi)supported virtual machine (semi)built-in to Windows 7, including features like Undo Disk with rollback (free VMware doesn't offer this, IIRC).
I'd love to replace it, but I don't know of anything else that's free. There's VirtualBox, but I've had difficulty with the cut-and-paste to and from the host, and in any case I'd have to pay for another license for the copy of Windows I run in there. XP Mode is basically a free XP license built-in to every Pro version of Windows 7. Apple users are permitted to legally run copies of OS X in VM's (if the underlying hardware is Apple hardware), but AFAIK Microsoft makes you license everything.
Unfortunately, there IS a reason some people may not want to upgrade OS X: some older Macbook Pros have a hardware flaw in their GPUs, and later versions of OS X panic (i.e., crash) with these machines where the older versions don't. Then there are the poor souls who just can't bring themselves to retire their PPC-based models. I mean, c'mon - the Luxor Lamp iMacs still look pretty damn cool. Generally, OS X upgrades are very worthwhile, but some people with hardware that's 5+ years old but otherwise working fine are getting the pinch.
with the big fat fucking D after her name, the media sweeps it under the rug.
What planet do you live on? A big fat fucking D is a goddamn media target on your back. Swiftboat. Gary Hart. Willie Horton. The Starr Investigation. Scandal does not and can not stay buried, not in this century. If there was anything that could stick to the Hillary wall, Fox (and then the rest of the media, because big-story=money) would have long ago thrown her to the dogs. Roger Ailes would love nothing more than to be the man who scandaled Hillary out the door, but he doesn't because he can't because there ain't nothing there.
Fresh meat does not go uneaten, any more than $100 will sit for long on a park bench. If cold fusion worked, we'd be fucking using it, and if Hillary did anything of any consequence, she'd be gone like Anthony Weiner... remember him? The big fat fucking D didn't do a damn thing for him, so why did the big fat fucking R give Mark Sanford a break?
Dunno... let's ask them. 'cause women had little part in producing this cheap-ass, smoke-screen, dog-whistle law (women make up only 22% of the NC legislature, sponsors Dan Bishop and Paul Stam are men, and, of course, the governor is a dick). In fact, this law pre-empts a local Charlotte law that was passed by that city's elected officials... so it looks like all that GOP noise about respectin' the people's will is a load of shite when a state politician sees a tax-free chance to get himself some TV time and name-recognition.
Seriously, with losses like that, how do they pay their employees? and who are these employees, anyway, engineering these ingenious malwa^H^H^H^H^H property-protection products? and hey! if this works to lock-up your system, and you hack to remove it, have you violated DMCA? liable for criminal charges? what a fun way to make a living!
Obligatory loosely-related Monty Python bit: Now I know some hospitals where you get the patients lying around in bed... well that's not how we do things here, right!
Once, CNN had huge potential, back when cable was only about 25 channels and the idea of switching on news any time of the day sounded like such a great thing (this was pre-Internet, for all you young'uns out there). How long did it take for them to figure out that, with 24-hours of time to fill, you run out of interesting content REALLY QUICK. All it takes is a slow news day, and CNN is stuck with nothing to broadcast except panda videos and big-breasted anchor-women looking bored and wondering whether they'd be better paid at Fox. Now, they're little more than bottom-feeders desperately in wait for another OJ Bronco chase, while Fox has given up news altogether in favor of whatever makes its viewers crazy.
...and in related news, a researcher notices people's brains light up when they watch porn, Ren N Stimpy cartoons, cat videos, houseplants, and videos of focus group participants with electrode caps strapped onto their heads....further research found strapping electrode caps on focus group participants makes their brains light up, because focus group participants like having electrode caps strapped onto their heads.
Researcher says that if anyone is interested in having the brains of focus groups light up for them, he accepts Paypal, cash, buds and bitcoin.
That's kinda the problem. The public is so uneducated that they make it hard to fund nuclear, which leads to engineers becoming less educated as old-timers retire and universities shut down their nuclear engineering programs because nuclear engineers can't find jobs (unless they go into the Navy, or are some of the very very few that make it into Los Alamos).
So, nuclear gets caught in a Catch-22 where it doesn't get enough funding to support the advancement of technology that would make it safe and reliable enough to compete. Instead, our collective knowledge of nuclear slips as, again, old-timers retire and youngsters pursue something more likely to pay those hideous education loans.
It's good that the stars have aligned to invest R&D into solar and wind. But it's not a good thing to allow nuclear to slip away... there's a lot of research yet to be done, with potentially great payoffs, if it wasn't so politicized by way of a public where a high-school education is becoming more and more worthless, again because of politics. A dumb electorate can be convinced of anything, like how supersonic transport causes skin cancer, and that was back in 1975. Today, politicians earn their pork-fat living by dumbing down science education, I figure to better guarantee re-election by the time the kids turn 21. These are the people who'll turn on Fox News and see "nuclear... bad ; fossil fuel subsidies... good", all because of fancy wine and caviar shared between the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The problem with nuclear is it requires smart people not only for design and build-out, but also for for day-to-day operation and maintenance. A poorly educated public is bad for all of this. But fail to keep educating and innovating in this technology, and it slips away (or goes overseas), and that sucks for us all.
No, not the TV show. In The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven proposes a future where we can get a wire put in our heads to "tickle" the pleasure center of our brains whenever we want. The only danger, besides it being habit-forming, is that a wirehead can starve to death being so euphoric all the time, so the power supply (it literally plugs into a socket on the skull) is typically rigged with a timer.
Have a good friend with a last-generation 17" MBP, and it's awesome. A little big and heavy (however thin considering how wide it is), but it's glory becomes apparent when you open it up on the desk and the display fills your field of vision. Not everybody needs something this big, but for those who do, there's just nothing like it. With an SSD upgrade, it's pure goodness.
I think Apple retired the 17" model because they were going retina, and a large retina display would have been pricey for a model that was already pricey. The 17" would always have a price premium anyway simply due to its size and because, well, you know marketers, they just have to charge more because it's bigger than the others. I think this doomed the 17" into a death spiral because the higher price scared people off who might have considered it, which led to fewer and fewer sales compared to smaller models, until it wound up on the chopping block.
But some professionals, like musicians, really benefit from that extra screen space and don't worry about an extra pound or two. I'd be curious how the re-sale value of the 17-incher holds up. As long as it can still run the latest OS X, I think the machine will be in-demand for people who benefit from the screen space. And seriously, if they bring it back, and don't charge a ridiculous price for it, I'd give it a real serious look.
Got a Phenom X4 chugging happily since 2009. Got a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K purring along since 2010. Even my Macbook Pro is a 2010 model, doing great since I swapped out the drive for a Samsung SSD, and my iPad is from 2012, the first to use retina and the last to use the wide (non-lightning) connector.
Sorry, Apple marketing guy. Got nothing against Apple products... they're pretty and work well. But my shit's working just fine, thank you very much, and I'll take no compulsion to trade up before I'm damn good and ready. Don't piss on me just because I know how to source reliable equipment and maintain it well.
Crap like this is the reason Steve Jobs used to snub his investors, as well as all those so-called "analysts" who get paid to talk shite about stuff they proclaim themselves to be "experts" of.
It's a strange business, "market analyst" (sometimes known as "tech writer"). Too often, it's that guy who dropped out of CS and transferred to the humanities department. They convince their editors that they're computer geniuses, because they can write a macro in Word. But ultimately, they're paid to talk or write shit that sounds just reasonable enough that people say, "oh yeah, that must be true". Even if it isn't. and it don't even matter if it isn't. Today's shocking article is completely forgotten the next day, as long as it got the clicks.
So here we have this "last chance to save the iPad" click-bait. WHAT "last chance", Dingleberry? Like the investors are going to fire Cook and close down iPad production forever? because the iPad has reached a bit of market saturation and isn't shitting Tiffany diamonds like it once was? Shee ittt. It's a damn good product, better built than any Android alternative I've seen out there, and is even giving Microsoft's Surface a run for its money (damn, Satya, make the keyboard cheaper, huh?) and profit margins remain high. Every year, more students and parents and old people will buy one, probably at the expense of some shitty HP laptop at Best Buy.
This article is monkey-shite click-bait. Here's the real story: some fuckwad editor at BGR ordered Yoni Heisler to write some rain-on-the-parade Apple article just in time for the press-announcement, knowing it will generate a bunch of clicks. And the net gets its undies bunched over how it must be true, 'cause somebody wrote an article! On the Internet! Well, douche my asshole with ginger juice! Next thing you know, they'll be talking about it on Fox and Friends, and if they're talking about it, it's all over the the iPad! Shee-da-Dip-da-Dee... itt. All this does is show how stupid so-called analysts are, as well as the media and the investors who listen to them, going all chicken-little when some gold-mine product starts to level-off a bit. These are the same asshats who wrote the iMac will never sell, and wrote nobody would ever want to buy a phone with a touch screen and no buttons that surfs the internet.
Yes! For a moment my foolish mind imagined all Xfinity channels streaming in HD over Amazon Prime for like, what, $9/mo? Plus free shipping on all Amazon purchases?!!??
Then, reality checked-in like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. Fuck you, Comcast. They suck harder than a black hole, within which all information of your account requests are destroyed and no fees or customer services can escape.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but what happens when someone childishly changes the p's for t's?
$ echo "Shippy McShipface" | sed -e s/p/t/g
My brain does that without even trying.
why should we pay attentition to the failures of the NK rocket program
Because the rocket program has far more significance than the nuclear program. All the nukes in the world don't mean a thing if you can't deliver them. NK may be trying to fuck up Japan and China (the South has kinda learned to live with this shit) so they might ease up on the sanctions and/or take them seriously as a regional power.
But NK's rockets and nukes are more posturing than tactical. To mean anything, they would have to have the capability to mass-produce these devices (turn them out like sausages, to paraphrase Kruschev back in the day), which NK will never be able to do with their economy. That leaves them with a capacity to, at worst, blow their wad one time, then sit defenseless and receive a crushing retaliation from whatever country their wayward missile fell upon (be a real thing if a missile flew by to mistake China).
OTOH, the regime needs regularly-scheduled holidays and ceremonies to keep all but its hungriest citizens busy and engaged in non-subversive activities. I offer this as an amusing, admittedly biased, but actual footage of a visit to NK and their weird cultish every-day required devotion to the founder and the great leader, particularly on their birthdays. They also need to maintain the narrative that they have the strongest army in the world, and that foreign invasion will happen at any time. Indeed, they have a million-man standing army to maintain each day from falling apart under its own weight. Thus, the dog-and-pony show of missiles and parades and nuke tests and two TV channels showing documentaries of how great their country is, until the power gets cut at nightfall.
the need to trash talk North Korea so hard
"Catastrophic" does seem a little over the top. Although technically correct, it's the kinda thing the NK's would pronounce about us if something blew up. But the NK make everything so much about theater (founder's birthday and all), it's hard not to get sucked into it and take a jab at 'em.
Objectively, though, each failure is a baby-step toward getting to something that works, so long as they don't shoot or hard-labor the failure engineers (to show the great leader's displeasure), and whenever they can black-market together the parts and funding to put another one together.
...bouncers. That's right, gorilla-sized bouncers with sharp eyes and authority to deny admission or throw you the fuck out if you text, talk, film, fart, kick seats, throw food, twitch, got bad B.O., or attempt to sneak a toddler into an R-rated movie or any movie after 8 PM.
This. I've had movies ruined by non-parental parents bringing their children as tag-alongs to late-night R-rated movies that children have no business seeing. These idiot-parents act all surprised and hurt that their sleepy kid goes into a screaming fit, kicking the seat in front and puking on a stomach-full of candy and artificial popcorn butter. And just think... if it survives, that kid's part of the future of America!
The last time I heard about texting in a theater, someone got shot. Imagine the guy at AMC doing a late Google search on theater texting and finding this. Uh, Boss, maybe this really isn't such a great idea.
Then we need better body scanners.
Yeah, imagine if it was actually available. Normal flight, and express. Once you got used to flights five hours or less where ever you're going, it would be really hard going back to "slow" planes no matter how far back the business-seat reclines.
If you never have to fly long distances, obviously you won't care. But if you do, particularly if you have to for business or family, paying up to save time becomes a real thing. In the day, business travelers loved the Concorde, 'cause they could fly to London hold a meeting and be back in NY the same day and no jet lag. If LA to Tokyo or Shanghai or Sydney were available as a 5 hour option over the typical 12+, people would pay the premium.
What killed the Concorde was not that it didn't have passengers. Never mind the sunk costs for R&D, it died because of the weird way Britain and France built it: no supply chain was established for new planes, upgrades, or even spare parts. Airbus didn't exist then, and Boeing had nothing to do with it. When Airbus was approached later to make replacement parts, they declined because with maybe 12 planes in the entire fleet, there just wasn't any money in it, nor did they have any interest in building a replacement if they're only going to make a dozen planes for two routes. The fleet was kept in the air by cannibalizing parts from retired Concordes until this simply became unsustainable.
Things might be different now. If Airbus or Boeing committed to a viable SST that could fly over land, you can bet airlines serving Dubai and Qatar would place orders, as well as Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo and Johannesburg. That might add up to enough planes to actually make economic sense. Fly to Dubai in 5 hours instead of 18? You might actually want to go there.
the engine efficiency is most not the problem, engines are actually slightly more efficient at higher speeds due to the relatively efficient ram-compression (concorde olympus is I think the most efficient aero-engine ever). The real problem is that the lift to drag ratio of supersonic aircraft is only 7-10 which is only 30-40% of high subsonic commercial jets taht are now in range 20-22. That means (all other things being equal) that you need ~3x the fuel to travel the same distance.
This supersonic L/D deficit is pretty fundamental, and even the best possible configurations (oblique flying wings that are basically unworkable due to massive wing spans needed) will only bring supersonic L/D up to perhaps low teens. While subsonic jets are eventually targeting 30:1 L/D with strut braced wings or blended wing bodies.
But fuel is typically only 20-40% of ticket costs, so this is not necessarily a show stopper for commercial service. And if we can do cheap nuclear power synthesized fuels gradually increasing wealth of world should eventually make supersonic flight in 1-4 person pilotless aircraft (to eliminate noise issue) ubiquitous.
At the same time, all jet engines are terrifically inefficient at low speeds. Even modern subsonic planes lose a comparably huge amount of fuel when taxiing around the airport. Swept-wing SST's would be worse, because they have to accelerate to a higher speed before they can take off (unless you rig them with folding wings like the F-14, but that would weigh too much if scaled up for a commercial aircraft).
Thinking F-14's leads to an idea, though... rig airports with catapults to save a little fuel and make air travel more exciting.
No one should still be running XP unless it's on a specialized system
Does "XP Mode" in Windows 7 count? I use it because it's a free (semi)supported virtual machine (semi)built-in to Windows 7, including features like Undo Disk with rollback (free VMware doesn't offer this, IIRC).
I'd love to replace it, but I don't know of anything else that's free. There's VirtualBox, but I've had difficulty with the cut-and-paste to and from the host, and in any case I'd have to pay for another license for the copy of Windows I run in there. XP Mode is basically a free XP license built-in to every Pro version of Windows 7. Apple users are permitted to legally run copies of OS X in VM's (if the underlying hardware is Apple hardware), but AFAIK Microsoft makes you license everything.
Unfortunately, there IS a reason some people may not want to upgrade OS X: some older Macbook Pros have a hardware flaw in their GPUs, and later versions of OS X panic (i.e., crash) with these machines where the older versions don't. Then there are the poor souls who just can't bring themselves to retire their PPC-based models. I mean, c'mon - the Luxor Lamp iMacs still look pretty damn cool. Generally, OS X upgrades are very worthwhile, but some people with hardware that's 5+ years old but otherwise working fine are getting the pinch.
with the big fat fucking D after her name, the media sweeps it under the rug.
What planet do you live on? A big fat fucking D is a goddamn media target on your back. Swiftboat. Gary Hart. Willie Horton. The Starr Investigation. Scandal does not and can not stay buried, not in this century. If there was anything that could stick to the Hillary wall, Fox (and then the rest of the media, because big-story=money) would have long ago thrown her to the dogs. Roger Ailes would love nothing more than to be the man who scandaled Hillary out the door, but he doesn't because he can't because there ain't nothing there.
Fresh meat does not go uneaten, any more than $100 will sit for long on a park bench. If cold fusion worked, we'd be fucking using it, and if Hillary did anything of any consequence, she'd be gone like Anthony Weiner... remember him? The big fat fucking D didn't do a damn thing for him, so why did the big fat fucking R give Mark Sanford a break?
Dunno... let's ask them. 'cause women had little part in producing this cheap-ass, smoke-screen, dog-whistle law (women make up only 22% of the NC legislature, sponsors Dan Bishop and Paul Stam are men, and, of course, the governor is a dick). In fact, this law pre-empts a local Charlotte law that was passed by that city's elected officials... so it looks like all that GOP noise about respectin' the people's will is a load of shite when a state politician sees a tax-free chance to get himself some TV time and name-recognition.
Seriously, with losses like that, how do they pay their employees?
and who are these employees, anyway, engineering these ingenious malwa^H^H^H^H^H property-protection products?
and hey! if this works to lock-up your system, and you hack to remove it, have you violated DMCA? liable for criminal charges?
what a fun way to make a living!
They were investigating the potential for bomb-sniffing schoolchildren.
Obligatory loosely-related Monty Python bit: Now I know some hospitals where you get the patients lying around in bed... well that's not how we do things here, right!
The 80's called... they want their prank back.
Once, CNN had huge potential, back when cable was only about 25 channels and the idea of switching on news any time of the day sounded like such a great thing (this was pre-Internet, for all you young'uns out there). How long did it take for them to figure out that, with 24-hours of time to fill, you run out of interesting content REALLY QUICK. All it takes is a slow news day, and CNN is stuck with nothing to broadcast except panda videos and big-breasted anchor-women looking bored and wondering whether they'd be better paid at Fox. Now, they're little more than bottom-feeders desperately in wait for another OJ Bronco chase, while Fox has given up news altogether in favor of whatever makes its viewers crazy.
...and in related news, a researcher notices people's brains light up when they watch porn, Ren N Stimpy cartoons, cat videos, houseplants, and videos of focus group participants with electrode caps strapped onto their heads. ...further research found strapping electrode caps on focus group participants makes their brains light up, because focus group participants like having electrode caps strapped onto their heads.
Researcher says that if anyone is interested in having the brains of focus groups light up for them, he accepts Paypal, cash, buds and bitcoin.
turns out most people are too uneducated
That's kinda the problem. The public is so uneducated that they make it hard to fund nuclear, which leads to engineers becoming less educated as old-timers retire and universities shut down their nuclear engineering programs because nuclear engineers can't find jobs (unless they go into the Navy, or are some of the very very few that make it into Los Alamos).
So, nuclear gets caught in a Catch-22 where it doesn't get enough funding to support the advancement of technology that would make it safe and reliable enough to compete. Instead, our collective knowledge of nuclear slips as, again, old-timers retire and youngsters pursue something more likely to pay those hideous education loans.
It's good that the stars have aligned to invest R&D into solar and wind. But it's not a good thing to allow nuclear to slip away... there's a lot of research yet to be done, with potentially great payoffs, if it wasn't so politicized by way of a public where a high-school education is becoming more and more worthless, again because of politics. A dumb electorate can be convinced of anything, like how supersonic transport causes skin cancer, and that was back in 1975. Today, politicians earn their pork-fat living by dumbing down science education, I figure to better guarantee re-election by the time the kids turn 21. These are the people who'll turn on Fox News and see "nuclear... bad ; fossil fuel subsidies... good", all because of fancy wine and caviar shared between the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
The problem with nuclear is it requires smart people not only for design and build-out, but also for for day-to-day operation and maintenance. A poorly educated public is bad for all of this. But fail to keep educating and innovating in this technology, and it slips away (or goes overseas), and that sucks for us all.
No, not the TV show. In The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven proposes a future where we can get a wire put in our heads to "tickle" the pleasure center of our brains whenever we want. The only danger, besides it being habit-forming, is that a wirehead can starve to death being so euphoric all the time, so the power supply (it literally plugs into a socket on the skull) is typically rigged with a timer.
Ain't the future gonna be grand?
Have a good friend with a last-generation 17" MBP, and it's awesome. A little big and heavy (however thin considering how wide it is), but it's glory becomes apparent when you open it up on the desk and the display fills your field of vision. Not everybody needs something this big, but for those who do, there's just nothing like it. With an SSD upgrade, it's pure goodness.
I think Apple retired the 17" model because they were going retina, and a large retina display would have been pricey for a model that was already pricey. The 17" would always have a price premium anyway simply due to its size and because, well, you know marketers, they just have to charge more because it's bigger than the others. I think this doomed the 17" into a death spiral because the higher price scared people off who might have considered it, which led to fewer and fewer sales compared to smaller models, until it wound up on the chopping block.
But some professionals, like musicians, really benefit from that extra screen space and don't worry about an extra pound or two. I'd be curious how the re-sale value of the 17-incher holds up. As long as it can still run the latest OS X, I think the machine will be in-demand for people who benefit from the screen space. And seriously, if they bring it back, and don't charge a ridiculous price for it, I'd give it a real serious look.
Got a Phenom X4 chugging happily since 2009. Got a Sandy Bridge i5 2500K purring along since 2010. Even my Macbook Pro is a 2010 model, doing great since I swapped out the drive for a Samsung SSD, and my iPad is from 2012, the first to use retina and the last to use the wide (non-lightning) connector.
Sorry, Apple marketing guy. Got nothing against Apple products... they're pretty and work well. But my shit's working just fine, thank you very much, and I'll take no compulsion to trade up before I'm damn good and ready. Don't piss on me just because I know how to source reliable equipment and maintain it well.
Crap like this is the reason Steve Jobs used to snub his investors, as well as all those so-called "analysts" who get paid to talk shite about stuff they proclaim themselves to be "experts" of.
It's a strange business, "market analyst" (sometimes known as "tech writer"). Too often, it's that guy who dropped out of CS and transferred to the humanities department. They convince their editors that they're computer geniuses, because they can write a macro in Word. But ultimately, they're paid to talk or write shit that sounds just reasonable enough that people say, "oh yeah, that must be true". Even if it isn't. and it don't even matter if it isn't. Today's shocking article is completely forgotten the next day, as long as it got the clicks.
So here we have this "last chance to save the iPad" click-bait. WHAT "last chance", Dingleberry? Like the investors are going to fire Cook and close down iPad production forever? because the iPad has reached a bit of market saturation and isn't shitting Tiffany diamonds like it once was? Shee ittt. It's a damn good product, better built than any Android alternative I've seen out there, and is even giving Microsoft's Surface a run for its money (damn, Satya, make the keyboard cheaper, huh?) and profit margins remain high. Every year, more students and parents and old people will buy one, probably at the expense of some shitty HP laptop at Best Buy.
This article is monkey-shite click-bait. Here's the real story: some fuckwad editor at BGR ordered Yoni Heisler to write some rain-on-the-parade Apple article just in time for the press-announcement, knowing it will generate a bunch of clicks. And the net gets its undies bunched over how it must be true, 'cause somebody wrote an article! On the Internet! Well, douche my asshole with ginger juice! Next thing you know, they'll be talking about it on Fox and Friends, and if they're talking about it, it's all over the the iPad! Shee-da-Dip-da-Dee... itt. All this does is show how stupid so-called analysts are, as well as the media and the investors who listen to them, going all chicken-little when some gold-mine product starts to level-off a bit. These are the same asshats who wrote the iMac will never sell, and wrote nobody would ever want to buy a phone with a touch screen and no buttons that surfs the internet.
Yes! For a moment my foolish mind imagined all Xfinity channels streaming in HD over Amazon Prime for like, what, $9/mo? Plus free shipping on all Amazon purchases?!!??
Then, reality checked-in like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. Fuck you, Comcast. They suck harder than a black hole, within which all information of your account requests are destroyed and no fees or customer services can escape.