It's happening in and around Detroit especially, but all over the country too. Google is your friend you lazy wanker. Three of the top five results from that properly constructed query relate to the subject at hand. Learn2Search.
If my company did that I would leave, and that isn't an idle threat. Nor am I some complete worthless slacker, in fact I'm the last person left in the group who actually understands how the databases work, and I'm already hanging by a thread in a group that has 200% yearly turnover (almost nobody stays around long enough to be trained to my level).
The simple fact is that in a lot of environments there would be a huge exodus, and it would include a lot of people that can easily find work elsewhere but cannot be easily replaced. It's better to allow talent a little recreation room than to lose years of experience and suffer through weeks (or in some environments, like mine, months) of training time for new people (not to mention my group is involved with a FedGov agency and it takes a bare minimum of a month to get people cleared through to do anything useful).
Unless something's changed since the last time I was messing with notebooks regularly, optical drives are already standardized: slim ATAPI and slimline SATA. Although a lot of manufacturers put their optical drives into proprietary housings/brackets/modules, the drives themselves follow a design standard and anybody with a screwdriver can usually swap them out regardless of laptop model.
There have also been (rather half-assed) attempts to standardize mobile graphics like nvidia's MXM and AMD/ATI's AXIOM.
I think you wildly conflate "support" with "acquiescence". A dictator can maintain power so long as the majority would rather not act against him. They don't have to like, let alone act positively toward, that administration.
Having seen some of Eben's lectures, I recall his angle is that the problem is that companies/government agencies control the servers, and thus control your data and data on you. He want's people to run their own email/document/media/social networking services on platforms that network with each other rather than monolithic, centrally controlled servers (be they in private or public hands). The idea is not some much a different 'network', that's still in the hands of ISPs, but a different, decentralized approach to services that handle personal data etc.
You're in love with a false dichotomy born of a monochromatic view of reality. I doubt I have the capacity to disillusion you of what is obviously a vigorously held perspective. I will try, once:
Thought experiment:
Of the thousands of people who call themselves Anonymous, one guy claiming to act in Anonymous' "name" assassinates a world leader. Does this act make all the others assassins, even though they had no knowledge, and the one acted with no conspiracy or direction? By your logic, it does. So, were all anarchists made evil assassins by the work of Leon Czolgosz?
It's really nothing more than bigotry at its core, attempting to assign blame by association to very large groups based on fringe actors. To return to the examples, it's like blaming the KKK on all white people or the Black Panthers on all black people. What made those organizations despicable was not simply that they killed innocents, but that was their organizations' stated mission. The KKK publicly called for innocent blacks to be lynched in the name of the defense of 'white American culture/society/values', and the Black Panthers publicly called for the murder of police in the name of black nationalist 'revolution'. That people then followed through with the mandates of these movements' platforms is then no surprise, and there is no grey area in denouncing both the actors and their organizations as a whole.
However, Anonymous is in the first place not a centralized organization and has neither leadership nor platform as such, but insofar as it is possible to assign analogs, Anonymous has no 'group mandate' to make death threats etc. and so transferring the culpability of a few people to a group of more than thousands is, quite frankly, an absurd stretch of ethics and logic beyond credibility. Anonymous must be judged on its majority principles and majority actions precisely because it is a (momentary) consensus driven movement.
To complete your analogy, bears like that get hunted and put down. I do not and will not advocate violence against the FBI, but the flip side of the coin of systemic, possibly criminal negligence in an agency empowered to enforce federal laws is not roll over and ignore it. That sort of cowardice will only encourage worse behavior from an organization that is supposed to be working for and accountable to the public.
Several have been imprisoned already. How much momentum has been lost? How much more momentum has been potentially gained by those acts fostering a vengeful sentiment? Unknowable, but it certainly hasn't stopped anything, that's for damn sure.
It does matter, because if you kill/capture "people calling themselves Anonymous" and the attacks don't stop because somebody completely new/different steps in to do the same things, you're creating martyrs that create more Anons. Anonymous is a headless horseman. You can't cut off its head because it doesn't have one.
Oversimplification. Gandhi may have never made death threats etc., but I can guaranty you that some of his followers did (and don't even think of rebutting that with some variant of 'no true Scotsman'). That's the challenge of any movement's leadership, to keep people both motivated and controlled. Where a group has little to no leadership but is based on momentary consensus/buy-in like Anonymous, this issue can't even be solved.
The question becomes how does one judge a movement. Was the civil rights movement evil because groups like the Black Panthers advocated violence? Was Dr. King somehow negligent in being unable to stop the formation of the Black Panthers or control their (wholly separate) activities? (Granted MLK was assassinated two years after the Black Panthers formed.) The point is you should judge a movement by its core values, not its fringe actors. The civil rights movement was validated by the millions who worked for positive change, not the handful who sought to murder police officers. Anonymous, while by nature not unified by a standing cause or principle, should at least be judged by a majority of its actors and its primary effects. So unless HBGary is getting threats from thousands of different actors instead of one or two, I think it is disingenuous at a minimum to be comparing them to the KKK.
You have to get to know the notebook ODM products and then search for the model with the features you want, or you can try finding the back channel equivalent of an OEM model depending on which ODM is their supplier. The latter is usually the harder method because the relationships keep changing. Easier to just get to know the ODMs.
Clevo for instance builds a lot of the chassis for Eurocomm, Sager, etc. They used to be involved with Alienware and Voodoo PC, but I think that has changed since those got bought out by Dell and HP. But you can just go to Clevo and browse their products for features. Of course all ODMs don't make it that easy (MSI does as well, and they would be my first choice for a mid-range system, but other big ODMs like Arima, Quanta, etc. don't care about B2C). Then find a good barebones seller like rjtech.com (they're the cheapest I know). The key is to find somebody who will give you the option not to buy all the drop in parts from them. That way you can get the highest quality memory/drives/etc. at the lowest cost somewhere else.
Honestly I think the only people who buy Dell for their personal use are idiots. Dell practically irrumates their corporate customers who are mid-size or better, not just because of the volume of systems, nor extended support packages, but because it's the corporate customers who buy the really big ticket items, the huge multicore servers with a dozen RAID SAS drives. They don't care about Joe Dipshit's $xxx budget desktop that has almost no margin, especially if he doesn't spring for some consumer-grade extended support package.
Computer consumers engaged the market in a race-to-the-bottom, and they won--a market of cheap crap that will last a year or two. They got what they deserved. They put all the mom and pop's that actually cared about the parts they used out of business. I have no respect for any consumer that buys a major brand COTS. Even with laptops the better stuff is a matter of finding a good whitebox chassis and pairing it with quality drives/memory. But (quality) local computer builders are mostly a memory, the few that are left are usually unscrupulous and compete in the same race-to-the-bottom with the addition of retail space overhead.
I have worked support at many "Dell only" enterprises. I don't agree what they provide is valuable, but that's not as important as whether IT directors, CTOs, VPs etc. believe that Dell's offers are valuable in that dimension. Their marketshare argues that those people making the decisions do perceive Dell as the best choice for these things.
Yeah, sorry if I don't refresh the thread a thousand times a minute like you apparently do. When I start a comment I write it until I finish it, and being at work sometimes that process is not continuous.
You already lied about the price by no less than 40%, you're probably lying about your unsourced benchmarks.
Re:Wow, that would be redonkulously profitable.
on
AMD Sale to Dell Rumored
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lies. Cheapest core i3 2100 is ~$140, and you'd have to be buying from some potentially unreliable outlet at that, and in no way is its performance equivalent to a Phenom 2 X6 1100T. Look at some real bench aggregates, fanboi. You'll see it can outperform an i7-920 in many applications for fully half the cost. Even though it's a bit slower in games, is 5-10% more speed worth 200% the price? Not to most people.
You do realize that Dell doesn't sell performance, they sell service and support, right? The whole reason most enterprises choose Dell is not because of the best hardware (it almost never is), but because Dell offers (generally) very efficient replacement of defective parts including but not limited to "free" (the cost is rolled into the retail and/or separate extended warranty) on-site service. It minimizes the enterprise's downtime and costs for internal IT support overhead. Corporate IT doesn't care that Intel offers 10% better performance than AMD at double the cost, they care whether they can keep all their systems up with minimal support overhead and downtime.
You do realize that Cyrix hasn't existed for more than a decade, right? And as much as I respect Via's approach to their products, they just can't produce a processor with performance equivalent to AMD or Intel.
If AMD's quality is reduced to Dell's level generally following a buyout I'll be forced to switch loyalties too.
Humans are hung up on their organics. I was reading a interesting perspective from Dr. Lin Yutang about the metaphysical comparison of men vs. spirits. He made a very important realization, all satisfactions imply wants. In order for me to be satisfied with a meal I must first be hungry, etc. Further, all senses imply the physicality of sensory organs. I must have a tongue to taste with, etc. He thought that the classical concept of spirits must be unbearable for them if it were possible, because the lacked the physicality to be satisfied or pleased by anything. However, eventually he theorized that these spirits if they existed must sense and be satisfied in completely different ways from the mortal. Which leads me to the point I would make: machine senses might be completely different in structure and operation, but how they are perceived by the mind, organic or inorganic, is really up to that mind. This can be seen with the experiments done with rat neurons being used to drive robots. The rat neurons are being stimulated by their mechanical sensors, in a way which is completely different from how they would be stimulated by their natural eyes/ears/etc., but the principle is the same, and they then act using structures completely different from legs, but again, with the same principle. Animal minds are clearly very adaptable. With the right interfaces they can see without eyes, hear without ears, move without legs, hold without hands, on and on. To make then the brain inorganic rather than organic is quite arbitrary.
And as for simulations, nobody besides Dr. Kurzweil himself seriously suggests simply simulating people (his idea of "reanimating" his father through strong AI and his own recollection is nothing more than pathetic desperation honestly). If I were given the option of creating what I would know to be a mere simulation of myself I would skip it. The key to machine consciousness is the same as the key to human consciousness: adaptability and the capacity for self-directed change. Once a simulation/AI is complex enough to change itself as quickly and effectively as a human being, it too will be effectively human, ethically equivalent in my mind, and beyond the label of 'simulation'.
Wow, you're an ass. Wanting to live is narcissistic? Never mind that the copy's enjoyment and experience are by definition the original's + n > the original's. The duration is what makes it acceptable or not? Fuck you.
At this point I resent having you "forced" on my world for your life span. Did that sound stupid? It should.
It's pretty simple, if you copy a consciousness, and that consciousness is aware and able to act, both are the person. MechaReagan would be, ethically, equivalent to Reagan himself. The legal issues are naught but dragons, essentially the law has never had to deal with that matter before, so new laws would have to be drafted. Most likely if the scenario ever becomes viable, provisions will prevent an individual from having multiple consciousnesses active at a given time, and it only would make sense for a consciousness copy to be able to inherit whatever station the original had, being, you know, identical.
And, to undercut your claim that we're biased for the viewpoint, most people -- idiot reporters and bad sci-fi excluded -- would see a physical clone of a person as not the actual same person as the one who was cloned.
Clones are mere biological copies. Identical twins might have similarly structured brains, that doesn't make them the same person *because* the consciousness is different. Where the consciousness is identical, they are functionally the same person at the moment of duplication. However, if the copied consciousnesses exist separately at the same time, they will begin to diverge as different experiences develop in different ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Fucking sweet. This should have been on the front page. Sure as hell would have been in /.'s first years.
It's happening in and around Detroit especially, but all over the country too. Google is your friend you lazy wanker. Three of the top five results from that properly constructed query relate to the subject at hand. Learn2Search.
If my company did that I would leave, and that isn't an idle threat. Nor am I some complete worthless slacker, in fact I'm the last person left in the group who actually understands how the databases work, and I'm already hanging by a thread in a group that has 200% yearly turnover (almost nobody stays around long enough to be trained to my level).
The simple fact is that in a lot of environments there would be a huge exodus, and it would include a lot of people that can easily find work elsewhere but cannot be easily replaced. It's better to allow talent a little recreation room than to lose years of experience and suffer through weeks (or in some environments, like mine, months) of training time for new people (not to mention my group is involved with a FedGov agency and it takes a bare minimum of a month to get people cleared through to do anything useful).
Unless something's changed since the last time I was messing with notebooks regularly, optical drives are already standardized: slim ATAPI and slimline SATA. Although a lot of manufacturers put their optical drives into proprietary housings/brackets/modules, the drives themselves follow a design standard and anybody with a screwdriver can usually swap them out regardless of laptop model.
There have also been (rather half-assed) attempts to standardize mobile graphics like nvidia's MXM and AMD/ATI's AXIOM.
I think you wildly conflate "support" with "acquiescence". A dictator can maintain power so long as the majority would rather not act against him. They don't have to like, let alone act positively toward, that administration.
Having seen some of Eben's lectures, I recall his angle is that the problem is that companies/government agencies control the servers, and thus control your data and data on you. He want's people to run their own email/document/media/social networking services on platforms that network with each other rather than monolithic, centrally controlled servers (be they in private or public hands). The idea is not some much a different 'network', that's still in the hands of ISPs, but a different, decentralized approach to services that handle personal data etc.
That's what she said.
...
Guess he shouldn't date geneticists.
You're in love with a false dichotomy born of a monochromatic view of reality. I doubt I have the capacity to disillusion you of what is obviously a vigorously held perspective. I will try, once:
Thought experiment: Of the thousands of people who call themselves Anonymous, one guy claiming to act in Anonymous' "name" assassinates a world leader. Does this act make all the others assassins, even though they had no knowledge, and the one acted with no conspiracy or direction? By your logic, it does. So, were all anarchists made evil assassins by the work of Leon Czolgosz?
It's really nothing more than bigotry at its core, attempting to assign blame by association to very large groups based on fringe actors. To return to the examples, it's like blaming the KKK on all white people or the Black Panthers on all black people. What made those organizations despicable was not simply that they killed innocents, but that was their organizations' stated mission. The KKK publicly called for innocent blacks to be lynched in the name of the defense of 'white American culture/society/values', and the Black Panthers publicly called for the murder of police in the name of black nationalist 'revolution'. That people then followed through with the mandates of these movements' platforms is then no surprise, and there is no grey area in denouncing both the actors and their organizations as a whole.
However, Anonymous is in the first place not a centralized organization and has neither leadership nor platform as such, but insofar as it is possible to assign analogs, Anonymous has no 'group mandate' to make death threats etc. and so transferring the culpability of a few people to a group of more than thousands is, quite frankly, an absurd stretch of ethics and logic beyond credibility. Anonymous must be judged on its majority principles and majority actions precisely because it is a (momentary) consensus driven movement.
I see what you did there, AC. That's actually pretty funny if you think about it.
To complete your analogy, bears like that get hunted and put down. I do not and will not advocate violence against the FBI, but the flip side of the coin of systemic, possibly criminal negligence in an agency empowered to enforce federal laws is not roll over and ignore it. That sort of cowardice will only encourage worse behavior from an organization that is supposed to be working for and accountable to the public.
Several have been imprisoned already. How much momentum has been lost? How much more momentum has been potentially gained by those acts fostering a vengeful sentiment? Unknowable, but it certainly hasn't stopped anything, that's for damn sure.
It does matter, because if you kill/capture "people calling themselves Anonymous" and the attacks don't stop because somebody completely new/different steps in to do the same things, you're creating martyrs that create more Anons. Anonymous is a headless horseman. You can't cut off its head because it doesn't have one.
Oversimplification. Gandhi may have never made death threats etc., but I can guaranty you that some of his followers did (and don't even think of rebutting that with some variant of 'no true Scotsman'). That's the challenge of any movement's leadership, to keep people both motivated and controlled. Where a group has little to no leadership but is based on momentary consensus/buy-in like Anonymous, this issue can't even be solved.
The question becomes how does one judge a movement. Was the civil rights movement evil because groups like the Black Panthers advocated violence? Was Dr. King somehow negligent in being unable to stop the formation of the Black Panthers or control their (wholly separate) activities? (Granted MLK was assassinated two years after the Black Panthers formed.) The point is you should judge a movement by its core values, not its fringe actors. The civil rights movement was validated by the millions who worked for positive change, not the handful who sought to murder police officers. Anonymous, while by nature not unified by a standing cause or principle, should at least be judged by a majority of its actors and its primary effects. So unless HBGary is getting threats from thousands of different actors instead of one or two, I think it is disingenuous at a minimum to be comparing them to the KKK.
You have to get to know the notebook ODM products and then search for the model with the features you want, or you can try finding the back channel equivalent of an OEM model depending on which ODM is their supplier. The latter is usually the harder method because the relationships keep changing. Easier to just get to know the ODMs.
Clevo for instance builds a lot of the chassis for Eurocomm, Sager, etc. They used to be involved with Alienware and Voodoo PC, but I think that has changed since those got bought out by Dell and HP. But you can just go to Clevo and browse their products for features. Of course all ODMs don't make it that easy (MSI does as well, and they would be my first choice for a mid-range system, but other big ODMs like Arima, Quanta, etc. don't care about B2C). Then find a good barebones seller like rjtech.com (they're the cheapest I know). The key is to find somebody who will give you the option not to buy all the drop in parts from them. That way you can get the highest quality memory/drives/etc. at the lowest cost somewhere else.
Perhaps, but some rogue hackers might have trouble resolving Ancient Domains of Mystery...
Honestly I think the only people who buy Dell for their personal use are idiots. Dell practically irrumates their corporate customers who are mid-size or better, not just because of the volume of systems, nor extended support packages, but because it's the corporate customers who buy the really big ticket items, the huge multicore servers with a dozen RAID SAS drives. They don't care about Joe Dipshit's $xxx budget desktop that has almost no margin, especially if he doesn't spring for some consumer-grade extended support package.
Computer consumers engaged the market in a race-to-the-bottom, and they won--a market of cheap crap that will last a year or two. They got what they deserved. They put all the mom and pop's that actually cared about the parts they used out of business. I have no respect for any consumer that buys a major brand COTS. Even with laptops the better stuff is a matter of finding a good whitebox chassis and pairing it with quality drives/memory. But (quality) local computer builders are mostly a memory, the few that are left are usually unscrupulous and compete in the same race-to-the-bottom with the addition of retail space overhead.
I have worked support at many "Dell only" enterprises. I don't agree what they provide is valuable, but that's not as important as whether IT directors, CTOs, VPs etc. believe that Dell's offers are valuable in that dimension. Their marketshare argues that those people making the decisions do perceive Dell as the best choice for these things.
Yeah, sorry if I don't refresh the thread a thousand times a minute like you apparently do. When I start a comment I write it until I finish it, and being at work sometimes that process is not continuous.
You already lied about the price by no less than 40%, you're probably lying about your unsourced benchmarks.
Lies. Cheapest core i3 2100 is ~$140, and you'd have to be buying from some potentially unreliable outlet at that, and in no way is its performance equivalent to a Phenom 2 X6 1100T. Look at some real bench aggregates, fanboi. You'll see it can outperform an i7-920 in many applications for fully half the cost. Even though it's a bit slower in games, is 5-10% more speed worth 200% the price? Not to most people.
You do realize that Dell doesn't sell performance, they sell service and support, right? The whole reason most enterprises choose Dell is not because of the best hardware (it almost never is), but because Dell offers (generally) very efficient replacement of defective parts including but not limited to "free" (the cost is rolled into the retail and/or separate extended warranty) on-site service. It minimizes the enterprise's downtime and costs for internal IT support overhead. Corporate IT doesn't care that Intel offers 10% better performance than AMD at double the cost, they care whether they can keep all their systems up with minimal support overhead and downtime.
You do realize that Cyrix hasn't existed for more than a decade, right? And as much as I respect Via's approach to their products, they just can't produce a processor with performance equivalent to AMD or Intel.
If AMD's quality is reduced to Dell's level generally following a buyout I'll be forced to switch loyalties too.
Humans are hung up on their organics. I was reading a interesting perspective from Dr. Lin Yutang about the metaphysical comparison of men vs. spirits. He made a very important realization, all satisfactions imply wants. In order for me to be satisfied with a meal I must first be hungry, etc. Further, all senses imply the physicality of sensory organs. I must have a tongue to taste with, etc. He thought that the classical concept of spirits must be unbearable for them if it were possible, because the lacked the physicality to be satisfied or pleased by anything. However, eventually he theorized that these spirits if they existed must sense and be satisfied in completely different ways from the mortal. Which leads me to the point I would make: machine senses might be completely different in structure and operation, but how they are perceived by the mind, organic or inorganic, is really up to that mind. This can be seen with the experiments done with rat neurons being used to drive robots. The rat neurons are being stimulated by their mechanical sensors, in a way which is completely different from how they would be stimulated by their natural eyes/ears/etc., but the principle is the same, and they then act using structures completely different from legs, but again, with the same principle. Animal minds are clearly very adaptable. With the right interfaces they can see without eyes, hear without ears, move without legs, hold without hands, on and on. To make then the brain inorganic rather than organic is quite arbitrary.
And as for simulations, nobody besides Dr. Kurzweil himself seriously suggests simply simulating people (his idea of "reanimating" his father through strong AI and his own recollection is nothing more than pathetic desperation honestly). If I were given the option of creating what I would know to be a mere simulation of myself I would skip it. The key to machine consciousness is the same as the key to human consciousness: adaptability and the capacity for self-directed change. Once a simulation/AI is complex enough to change itself as quickly and effectively as a human being, it too will be effectively human, ethically equivalent in my mind, and beyond the label of 'simulation'.
Wow, you're an ass. Wanting to live is narcissistic? Never mind that the copy's enjoyment and experience are by definition the original's + n > the original's. The duration is what makes it acceptable or not? Fuck you.
At this point I resent having you "forced" on my world for your life span. Did that sound stupid? It should.
And, to undercut your claim that we're biased for the viewpoint, most people -- idiot reporters and bad sci-fi excluded -- would see a physical clone of a person as not the actual same person as the one who was cloned.
Clones are mere biological copies. Identical twins might have similarly structured brains, that doesn't make them the same person *because* the consciousness is different. Where the consciousness is identical, they are functionally the same person at the moment of duplication. However, if the copied consciousnesses exist separately at the same time, they will begin to diverge as different experiences develop in different ways.