What does this guy want to say? The tl;dr of the article: it's impossible to say who's best, and companies try to hire people for varied positions, because that's good, and yet some people hire based on tests, and that's self evidently not the best.
Or to put what the writer says another way: I'm not really one of those analytical types who intends to think of a solution, or actually get to the bottom of an issue, but I have a notion and some irrelevant anecdotes, that would make for a splendid article. And you know, even if I'm not the best, you should hire me, because hiring the best isn't the best.
Interesting that he went for a 2 year old version of Windows 10. Would have been much more interesting if he tested the latest patched versions of all OS's. If he did that for Windows 10, won't surprise me if he also used unpatched versions of Windows 8.1 and 7.
My favourite adaptation of the book. Personally, I agree that it's not a great book (I did finish it), and I thought what Verhoeven did with it was fitting, but also thought it was a little too over the top. The animated series reigns that in, taking it a little more seriously, showing (IMO) a decent take of military action without glorifying it the way Heinlein did or making fun of it the way Verhoeven did.
It's a really confusing article, where the numbers are handpicked to make it look like a serious problem. It's not at all clear what the losses were for (considering that the most prevalent 'crime' was virus infection, I imagine that most of the money went to PC/phone repair people), it's not at all clear how individuals in each country were affected (except for the time spent dealing with the aftermath), and the graph '53% of consumers experienced cybercrime...' is deliberately misleading by doubling each row by sticking the sum to the right of the first two bars.
It wasn't until 2010 that the Open Library started lending copyrighted books, and then only to people with library cards from specific libraries. I have no idea when this was opened to the public at large, with no need to be a member of a library.
Discussion of the legality of this have been around from 2010, and it indeed seems to me a thorny legal issue. One would hope that at some point this will reach court and an actual decision is made or the right to lend works. If that's indeed a right, it could transform the digital goods market, which so far is locked to a 'purchase only for yourself' paradigm.
So you agree that it's desirable if it works? If you're just arguing implementation, let the implementation speak for itself. All I'm saying is that if it works decently well, then I think there's a market for it.
OnLive isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA doesn't have to buy GPU's. It gets its chips at cost, and it doesn't need to have them installed in a good looking package produced by some OEM. It can put them in a rack with special cooling and special power supplies. I don't even fully trust NVIDIA that the GTX 1080 is what one would expect from a desktop PC (the Max-Q version is called that too, and has lower clocks and lower power), but regardless, NVIDIA's costs are much lower.
And although the Verge article claims that one GPU is dedicated per user, that doesn't mean that the CPU is dedicated, and certainly the storage isn't dedicated. So with no need for full size fully functional motherboards, cases, consumer PSU's and consumer level cooling, very little per-PC storage, CPU's bought more cheaply at bulk rates and perhaps shared between players, and GPU's at cost, the total price would be much lower than an actual gaming PC, even when factoring in the costs of a server farm (storage, cooling, electricity, network).
(Not to mention all the crypto they could mine when the GPU's are free.:)
Just because you don't want to stream, doesn't mean that others don't. I didn't want to stream movies and TV. Why would I have to pay a sub even when I don't watch that much or suffer downtimes, when I have a decent DVD/Blu-Ray library? But I tried Netflix recently, and it has quite a bit of content, that content is immediately available, things work well most of the time, and I carry on watching on different devices without having to load any content to the device or think about syncing. It's convenient. It's not perfect, but it's more convenient than what I had before.
Technical hurdles aside (and of course they matter, but not as a matter of concept), why wouldn't I want the same experience with games? If I could play a game without having to download and store dozens of GB, on any machine, without any special hardware requirements, and stop playing on one device and continue on another without any hassle, why wouldn't I want that?
Money-wise, it could be even be more worth it than Netflix. If I could play on a $100 PC-stick or $200 laptop what I now need a $500 PC or $1000 laptop for, then if the subscription price is right, I could even save money in the long run.
Looking at this, the best match is perhaps the Yoga 710. It's well specced enough and is the right size, and the M.2 SSD can be upgraded (with some work).
Depends on what you call 'capable'. A 2012 netbook was hardly 'capable', it was just usable. Current equivalents are somewhat better, but still fall in the same category. There are quite a few Atom based 2-in-1 laptop/tablets available on Chinese stores like GearBest, typically specced with 4GB RAM, 64GB storage and a 1080p screen. There are some with better CPU's and more storage (and a higher price), like the Cube Mix Plus. They aren't power laptops, but they're pretty much the evolution of old netbooks into something more modern.
There's a wide variety of products, and you won't find something that's exactly like the 701. Are you interested in something small? How small is too small? How big is too big? How much does weight matter vs. size? Does price matters?
For example the GPD Pocket is decently well specced, but it may be too small for you or too expensive. There are lots of Chinese notebooks or tablets + keyboard with low specs which should be a fit replacement for a netbook. Take a look at GearBest (store) and TechTablets (review site) as good places to start exploring that space.
A major problem IMO was that the Kinect is terrible at UI navigation, and Microsoft forced that, instead of allowing (and even forcing) controller use for UI segments. Kinect Party and Avengers: Battle for Earth are great partly because they allow navigating menus with the controllers, instead of struggling with the Kinect for that. Disneyland Adventures is terrible because most of the game is spent using the Kinect for avatar creation and navigation, so the actual fun minigames (and they are fun) become a small part of a generally frustrating experience.
But yes, the hate from hardcores is just because they're small minded.
Kinect is the only reason I own an Xbox 360, and the lack of backward compatibility for Kinect titles is the reason I haven't upgraded to a One. Sure, it's getting less use now, but when the kids were smaller, the Kinect got a lot of action. For controller based games I have an HTPC.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft never understood what could be done with it, and what shouldn't be done with it (UI navigation).
The major problem (IMO) isn't the incentive issue, but that works get lost to the public. A good example for this is old computer games. The companies, which held the copyright, have often closed, and the copyrights have reverted to the individual creators, which means that there's not just one person controlling them, and these people are not only hard to track down, but often have little interest in making the games available. In other cases it's not clear who owns the copyright, after mergers and acquisitions.
The end result is that games get lost to the public. Even when companies try to buy the rights in order to make the games available again, they often fail. Some games are made available as abandonware, but that's not legal, because they're still protected by copyright. So in effect the only way to make these games available is to go against the law.
If you write a creative work, you can keep it forever, just like the house you built. You can pass it forward, and nothing will stop you from doing that. You have the right to sell your house, and then you lose ownership of it. You can also sell your work and lose ownership of it.
However, with a creative work you get an extra right, and that right is to control the copying of it. As long as you own the copyright, you are the only one who can make copies, or give the right to make them, and this allows you to make money by making them.
If you own a house, someone else can build an identical house, and it will be theirs. If you own a creative work, nobody else is allowed to create the same work. (It's also possible to patent the design of objects, and that's another intellectual right that's somewhat similar to copyright, but again, it's an expansion of ownership rights.)
As you can hopefully understand now, this right gives the owner of a work a lot of power that isn't inherent in owning an object. You can only sell an object you make once, transferring the ownership, but you can sell a creative work as long as you keep the copyright, and nobody else is allowed to do that.
Which is why this is supposed to be a limited right. Copyright is meant to encourage creators to create, by allowing them to make money off a work. When copyright is limited, it encourages the creator to continue creating, instead of living off old hits from tens of years ago. There is no natural right to continually make money off a work, and certainly no right for descendants to make money off it. That totally goes against the intention. If someone makes money off the work of their ancestors, that in no way encourages further creation.
The problem is that our social narrative turned from 'man can achieve anything' to 'man can destroy anything'. People who don't believe in themselves can't achieve anything. They sink back into a comfortable, risk averse existence. I think it's perfectly okay to acknowledge mistakes and try to learn from them, but taking them as the soul of our existence is crippling.
If Pornhub went away, if people stopped watching porn, it would not save any energy. They'd just go watch something else. Then we'd get 6 million kWh spent on watching Netflix or cat videos.
In this case it's still real porn, just with modifications, but if we do get fully virtual and convincing porn, isn't that better than having a porn industry with real people?
What he says is: musicians aren't compensated enough, Facebook makes money off our information, and therefore we need to break up Google and Facebook for innovation.
Breaking up Google or Facebook might contribute to innovation, and breaking up some companies in the past helped in some ways, but that doesn't make musicians and innovation tied in any way.
Android is the perfect example. It tells users what permissions apps require, and that doesn't matter one bit to most people. Most people don't want control, they want convenience. 99.99% of people (probably more) use apps which request permissions to pretty much their entire phone: location, accounts, phone book, etc. Apps like WhatsApp or Facebook, and many where the permissions aren't even warranted (such as many games).
'Free' software, the way Richard Stallman thinks about it, does nothing to help. There have been many cases of malicious code being put into open source software, or specific distributions of it, and that's precisely because this code is open, because those who create it have no vested interest in protecting it, and because it's 'free as beer' and people love stuff that's free as beer, and don't look too closely into what it might do.
My Firefox is set to not auto-update. 56 performs quite well for my needs (better than other browsers and way better than Firefox versions up to 54), and I'm in no hurry to contend with massive changes. I'll wait until things settle down.
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What does this guy want to say? The tl;dr of the article: it's impossible to say who's best, and companies try to hire people for varied positions, because that's good, and yet some people hire based on tests, and that's self evidently not the best.
Or to put what the writer says another way: I'm not really one of those analytical types who intends to think of a solution, or actually get to the bottom of an issue, but I have a notion and some irrelevant anecdotes, that would make for a splendid article. And you know, even if I'm not the best, you should hire me, because hiring the best isn't the best.
Interesting that he went for a 2 year old version of Windows 10. Would have been much more interesting if he tested the latest patched versions of all OS's. If he did that for Windows 10, won't surprise me if he also used unpatched versions of Windows 8.1 and 7.
My favourite adaptation of the book. Personally, I agree that it's not a great book (I did finish it), and I thought what Verhoeven did with it was fitting, but also thought it was a little too over the top. The animated series reigns that in, taking it a little more seriously, showing (IMO) a decent take of military action without glorifying it the way Heinlein did or making fun of it the way Verhoeven did.
It's a really confusing article, where the numbers are handpicked to make it look like a serious problem. It's not at all clear what the losses were for (considering that the most prevalent 'crime' was virus infection, I imagine that most of the money went to PC/phone repair people), it's not at all clear how individuals in each country were affected (except for the time spent dealing with the aftermath), and the graph '53% of consumers experienced cybercrime...' is deliberately misleading by doubling each row by sticking the sum to the right of the first two bars.
In short, complete and utter FUD.
It wasn't until 2010 that the Open Library started lending copyrighted books, and then only to people with library cards from specific libraries. I have no idea when this was opened to the public at large, with no need to be a member of a library.
Discussion of the legality of this have been around from 2010, and it indeed seems to me a thorny legal issue. One would hope that at some point this will reach court and an actual decision is made or the right to lend works. If that's indeed a right, it could transform the digital goods market, which so far is locked to a 'purchase only for yourself' paradigm.
So you agree that it's desirable if it works? If you're just arguing implementation, let the implementation speak for itself. All I'm saying is that if it works decently well, then I think there's a market for it.
Windows 10 was a free update!
OnLive isn't NVIDIA. NVIDIA doesn't have to buy GPU's. It gets its chips at cost, and it doesn't need to have them installed in a good looking package produced by some OEM. It can put them in a rack with special cooling and special power supplies. I don't even fully trust NVIDIA that the GTX 1080 is what one would expect from a desktop PC (the Max-Q version is called that too, and has lower clocks and lower power), but regardless, NVIDIA's costs are much lower.
And although the Verge article claims that one GPU is dedicated per user, that doesn't mean that the CPU is dedicated, and certainly the storage isn't dedicated. So with no need for full size fully functional motherboards, cases, consumer PSU's and consumer level cooling, very little per-PC storage, CPU's bought more cheaply at bulk rates and perhaps shared between players, and GPU's at cost, the total price would be much lower than an actual gaming PC, even when factoring in the costs of a server farm (storage, cooling, electricity, network).
(Not to mention all the crypto they could mine when the GPU's are free. :)
Just because you don't want to stream, doesn't mean that others don't. I didn't want to stream movies and TV. Why would I have to pay a sub even when I don't watch that much or suffer downtimes, when I have a decent DVD/Blu-Ray library? But I tried Netflix recently, and it has quite a bit of content, that content is immediately available, things work well most of the time, and I carry on watching on different devices without having to load any content to the device or think about syncing. It's convenient. It's not perfect, but it's more convenient than what I had before.
Technical hurdles aside (and of course they matter, but not as a matter of concept), why wouldn't I want the same experience with games? If I could play a game without having to download and store dozens of GB, on any machine, without any special hardware requirements, and stop playing on one device and continue on another without any hassle, why wouldn't I want that?
Money-wise, it could be even be more worth it than Netflix. If I could play on a $100 PC-stick or $200 laptop what I now need a $500 PC or $1000 laptop for, then if the subscription price is right, I could even save money in the long run.
The Cube Mix Plus' SSD is M.2 so theoretically upgradeable. RAM isn't.
RAM prices are higher now than in 2012, so I'm not sure why you're expecting more for the price.
Looking at this, the best match is perhaps the Yoga 710. It's well specced enough and is the right size, and the M.2 SSD can be upgraded (with some work).
Depends on what you call 'capable'. A 2012 netbook was hardly 'capable', it was just usable. Current equivalents are somewhat better, but still fall in the same category. There are quite a few Atom based 2-in-1 laptop/tablets available on Chinese stores like GearBest, typically specced with 4GB RAM, 64GB storage and a 1080p screen. There are some with better CPU's and more storage (and a higher price), like the Cube Mix Plus. They aren't power laptops, but they're pretty much the evolution of old netbooks into something more modern.
There's a wide variety of products, and you won't find something that's exactly like the 701. Are you interested in something small? How small is too small? How big is too big? How much does weight matter vs. size? Does price matters?
For example the GPD Pocket is decently well specced, but it may be too small for you or too expensive. There are lots of Chinese notebooks or tablets + keyboard with low specs which should be a fit replacement for a netbook. Take a look at GearBest (store) and TechTablets (review site) as good places to start exploring that space.
A major problem IMO was that the Kinect is terrible at UI navigation, and Microsoft forced that, instead of allowing (and even forcing) controller use for UI segments. Kinect Party and Avengers: Battle for Earth are great partly because they allow navigating menus with the controllers, instead of struggling with the Kinect for that. Disneyland Adventures is terrible because most of the game is spent using the Kinect for avatar creation and navigation, so the actual fun minigames (and they are fun) become a small part of a generally frustrating experience.
But yes, the hate from hardcores is just because they're small minded.
Kinect is the only reason I own an Xbox 360, and the lack of backward compatibility for Kinect titles is the reason I haven't upgraded to a One. Sure, it's getting less use now, but when the kids were smaller, the Kinect got a lot of action. For controller based games I have an HTPC.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft never understood what could be done with it, and what shouldn't be done with it (UI navigation).
The major problem (IMO) isn't the incentive issue, but that works get lost to the public. A good example for this is old computer games. The companies, which held the copyright, have often closed, and the copyrights have reverted to the individual creators, which means that there's not just one person controlling them, and these people are not only hard to track down, but often have little interest in making the games available. In other cases it's not clear who owns the copyright, after mergers and acquisitions.
The end result is that games get lost to the public. Even when companies try to buy the rights in order to make the games available again, they often fail. Some games are made available as abandonware, but that's not legal, because they're still protected by copyright. So in effect the only way to make these games available is to go against the law.
If you write a creative work, you can keep it forever, just like the house you built. You can pass it forward, and nothing will stop you from doing that. You have the right to sell your house, and then you lose ownership of it. You can also sell your work and lose ownership of it.
However, with a creative work you get an extra right, and that right is to control the copying of it. As long as you own the copyright, you are the only one who can make copies, or give the right to make them, and this allows you to make money by making them.
If you own a house, someone else can build an identical house, and it will be theirs. If you own a creative work, nobody else is allowed to create the same work. (It's also possible to patent the design of objects, and that's another intellectual right that's somewhat similar to copyright, but again, it's an expansion of ownership rights.)
As you can hopefully understand now, this right gives the owner of a work a lot of power that isn't inherent in owning an object. You can only sell an object you make once, transferring the ownership, but you can sell a creative work as long as you keep the copyright, and nobody else is allowed to do that.
Which is why this is supposed to be a limited right. Copyright is meant to encourage creators to create, by allowing them to make money off a work. When copyright is limited, it encourages the creator to continue creating, instead of living off old hits from tens of years ago. There is no natural right to continually make money off a work, and certainly no right for descendants to make money off it. That totally goes against the intention. If someone makes money off the work of their ancestors, that in no way encourages further creation.
The problem is that our social narrative turned from 'man can achieve anything' to 'man can destroy anything'. People who don't believe in themselves can't achieve anything. They sink back into a comfortable, risk averse existence. I think it's perfectly okay to acknowledge mistakes and try to learn from them, but taking them as the soul of our existence is crippling.
If Pornhub went away, if people stopped watching porn, it would not save any energy. They'd just go watch something else. Then we'd get 6 million kWh spent on watching Netflix or cat videos.
In this case it's still real porn, just with modifications, but if we do get fully virtual and convincing porn, isn't that better than having a porn industry with real people?
Venting to the school staff is not going to change anything.
It's this defeatism that makes America great.
Great post. Much better to take the constructive way than cop out and find excuses.
What he says is: musicians aren't compensated enough, Facebook makes money off our information, and therefore we need to break up Google and Facebook for innovation.
Breaking up Google or Facebook might contribute to innovation, and breaking up some companies in the past helped in some ways, but that doesn't make musicians and innovation tied in any way.
Android is the perfect example. It tells users what permissions apps require, and that doesn't matter one bit to most people. Most people don't want control, they want convenience. 99.99% of people (probably more) use apps which request permissions to pretty much their entire phone: location, accounts, phone book, etc. Apps like WhatsApp or Facebook, and many where the permissions aren't even warranted (such as many games). 'Free' software, the way Richard Stallman thinks about it, does nothing to help. There have been many cases of malicious code being put into open source software, or specific distributions of it, and that's precisely because this code is open, because those who create it have no vested interest in protecting it, and because it's 'free as beer' and people love stuff that's free as beer, and don't look too closely into what it might do.
My Firefox is set to not auto-update. 56 performs quite well for my needs (better than other browsers and way better than Firefox versions up to 54), and I'm in no hurry to contend with massive changes. I'll wait until things settle down.