Everyone knows this is an overreach by the prosecutor and an abuse of the very intent of the law. All the Judges need to do is read up on the history of what lead to it's creation to understand that it was developed purely as a way to ensure that publicly traded corporations weren't reporting fictional financial statements. There is no way that this should have EVER reached the Supreme court, let alone this fisherman being convicted under this law. But, of course, we now have a legal system that prizes conviction over justice.
I also love the argument for why this conviction should be upheld. "The government replies that the "records only" argument would make it a crime for a murderer to destroy his victim's diary, but not the murder weapon." Um... The destruction of evidence to cover up a crime is already against the law (Tampering, Obstruction, etc.). Saying that the Sarbanes-Oxley law is needed for this is just plain silly..... I guess it's a good thing that I am not a Supreme court justice. If I were I would have laughed my head off at the pure stupidity...
FYI: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV... The above are my personal opinions...
I moved to the Boston area in 2000. Flipping through the local radio stations I found WEEI (local sports radio) and Click and Clack on NPR.
Whenever Click and Clack was on I had to listen all the way through. No matter how small the car problem, Tom and Ray found ways of making it interesting, entertaining, and funny while teaching us how cars work along the way.
The Bay of Fundy has the most powerful tides in the world. "The estimated potential of the Fundy region alone is upwards of 60,000 megawatts of energy, of which up to 2,500 megawatts may be safely extracted."
Nova Scotia had a trail running in Nov. 2009 with OpenHydro and they ended up having to remove their turbine when, "20 days later, all 12 turbine rotor blades were destroyed by tidal flows that were two and a half times stronger than for what the turbine was designed."
That's the great thing about Obamacare, now those people pay for health insurance coverage and can't get care. Whereas before, they didn't pay for health insurance, but were able to get health care when they needed it. Isn't Obamacare great?
Yeah, cause emergency rooms are turning away people in droves.... try again...
You are right that the end point connection isn't one sided. That's why we all pay monthly fees to our provider to pay for bandwidth. Our provider, though, has peering agreements with other providers. If this peering is unequal, some of the money that we pay our provider goes to pay for peering fees. In the case of Netflix, their provider refused to pay the peering fees. If our provider screws up, we suffer. We then have a choice to change providers. Netflix chose to pay Comcast instead (probably the cheaper option, factoring termination fees, etc.). But... they did have other options...
Think twice next time you wonder why you aren't getting your advertised speed...
And another article about Comcast throttling Netflix without any background or context.
Backbone providers have peering agreements. Usually, if both backbone providers (i.e. Comcast & Verizon) are sending close to the same traffic between each other, the peering agreement is free for both parties. In the Netflix case, Netflix went with a small backbone provider, likely due to cost. The problem is that the backbone provider they chose sends way more traffic than they accept. Typically, this type of peering agreement means that the smaller backbone provider (i.e. Cogent) pays fees to the larger backbone provider (Comcast). It's my understanding that Cogent wouldn't or couldn't pay these fees, so Comcast throttled them.
Because Cogent couldn't or wouldn't pay the fees and customers were complaining, Neflix agreed to pay the peering fees for Cogent. Though, this isn't how the media or Netflix presents it.
I hate Comcast as much as anyone. I think that they are essentially a monopoly that takes advantage of their customers by increasing prices where there is little to no competition (a toothless FCC doesn't help). But, in this one instance, it's my opinion that Comcast had a good case against the provider used by Netflix and that, by selecting the lowest cost provider and possible knowingly selecting one that is a bit sketchy on the peering side, Netflix had some responsibility.
5) You can have class and style and look a hell of a lot better for a lot less money. You just won't look like a trendy fanboi.
This.... Anyone attributing a smart watch from Apple, or any other company for that matter, to class or style just do not understand class or style. Some people easily confuse popularity or celebrity with class and style. It's been my experience that people who have true class and style do not wear gadgets or toys that can distract from enjoying people and the event, whether intimate or in public.
Personally, as a geek I think that gadgets are cool but very few actually have class or style...
For the last winter Olympics I ended up watching the CBC streaming feed as it was MUCH better than NBC.
I also subscribe to NHL Game Center Live for hockey game streaming but there is no equivalent option for the NFL. I see that CBS is launching a streaming service (CBS All Access) but NFL games won't be a part of the service (http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2014/10/16/6987707/cbs-streaming-online-nfl-games). Yes, you can get local games using an over-the-air antenna but I like to watch out of market games which are not always broadcast over-the-air.
To make a long story short, the day that the NFL begins a streaming service is the day I'll cancel my cable subscription.
Very little of the technology we have today was developed due to emergency needs.
The only thing that matters is that someone develops the technology, and it is good enough.
However, on the subject of automated cars, the real difficulties is how to introduce them on roads where you still have "manual" drivers around (I don't mean stick here).
Computer driven cars can be totally predictable. Manual cars, less so - people forget to use their signals, people make late lane changes, fall asleep and drift into other lanes etc.
In theory, a self driving car should have enough sensors, sensor data gathering speed, processing speed, etc. to be able to "see" objects moving towards them and take appropriate action to avoid an accident.
If an automated car cannot deal with manual drivers, I shudder to think how it would deal with stuff falling off of trucks, animals running into the street, sudden downpours or snow squalls, mechanical problems, etc....
He mostly just shouldn't be there in the first place, all this assignation of military honor guards merely celebrates war. We should be ashamed, not proud, of our war dead.
It doesn't celebrate war, it gives people a way to remember the horrors of war and the people who gave their lives to make ours a bit freer.
Anyone who thinks that we should be ashamed of our war dead doesn't have a CLUE as to what they did to ensure our freedom.
I agree that war should be vilified and as well as any politician who puts troops into harms way without a major verified threat. But to put this on the war dead is just plain immaturity in understanding.
"A government MP offers the scant assurance that this legislation is not "trauma tainted," as it was drafted well prior to this week's instigating incidents"
Of course it was drafted some time ago. Harper was just waiting for something like this to get a way to quickly get it passed into legislation without all that pesky complaining that he got last time he tried doing it.
Some Background: The original bill was C-30 which had warrant-less information gathering. The Canadian public became very outspoken about how much they disliked the bill to the point where it was dropped. The current bill, Bill C-13 is supposed to combat cyber bullying, but some of the provisions from C-30 were tacked on with minor wording changes to include voluntary disclosure with immunity and to require warrants for certain things. Most Canadians are just as outraged with this bill as with C-30. A poll done in June found that 73% of Canadians are against it.
That's amusing, since the summary is nothing more than the last paragraph of the article copypasta'd. English Comp 101 says it should be a concise summary of the preceding essay's main points.
At least this fluff piece was worth a good laugh...
We have a script that automatically boots off all the users on the weekend. That fixes half the problems. The other half of the problem is all the systems that didn't come back up from the reboot.
The other half are laptops that people took home with them.... Who has desktops any more...
Apple hasn't really innovated much since Steve left the scene.
Other products of note were the Apple LaserWriter (first desktop laser printer - Apple dropped the ball on that one) in 1985
Wrong... HP developed the first desktop laser printer in 1983. "The first laser printer intended for mass-market sales was the HP LaserJet, released in 1984" So, no, Apple didn't drop the ball on the LaserWriter. HP was already in the market and other manufacturers released products around the same time as Apple.
This is not going to suddenly "change everything". First off, there's so little info here you can't even see through the hype. There's nothing to get an idea of how hard this would be to commercialize, what its energy density would be, or any of tons of other things that make a big difference. And secondly, these are hardly the first lab-scale batteries to have properties like this. Heck, there have even been lithium titanate batteries commercialized before. Crazy charge / discharge times, but they were largely a flop except in niche applications - the cost was way too high and the energy density too low.
There is every week or two some great research breakthrough in battery storage. Most of them you'll never read about. Most of them will never go anywhere. But a few will. And they will slowly, inevitably make their way into the battery technology of tomorrow. Silicon anodes, for example, were once among those crazy lab future battery techs. Now they're in commercial cells. People never stop to think about how little the batteries in their phones have gotten in an area of increasing computing power, larger screens, greater demands on lifespan, etc. Energy density continues its inevitable march.... in the background. But the odds that any one tech that you read about is going to carry the industry is very small. And these things take half a decade to go from the lab to stores.
Battery tech slowly evolves and gradually gets better. There have been few leaps in battery tech over the last 20 or so years, despite other such announcements. Like you, I am also skeptical that this is a true breakthrough. However, it would be amazing if it can be scaled up.
The one thing that I disagree with in your comment is the premise that batteries in cell phones have gotten smaller due to battery tech. It is partially true. However, the majority of energy gains in cell phones have been the huge leaps in low power ever-shrinking electronics and battery saving technologies (components being able to go to sleep).
If battery tech had kept pace with electronics, we would be able to power our cell phones for weeks instead of just a couple of days.
Certainly in the west nobody has heard anything about the young girl since she was released from hospital after her recovery. I'm interested to know the real world changing accomplishments she has personally brought to fruition? In addition, Satyarthi "accomplishments" appear to be limited to one country. Is this then the Peace prize for India? I've seen Mother Teresa's name bounced around in justification because of her work in Calcutta but she worked in tends (if not more) nations around the world.
This is another Nobel fail. Nice people but not worthy of the prize.
I agree.
I admire both for standing up for their convictions and working hard to spread a message of a world with equal access to education and without child labour, However, their message, while relevant globally, seems to be limited to India and Pakastan.
Perhaps giving them the Nobel prize was a way that the committee thought to draw more global attention to the these human rights issues. I do agree that the achievement of global human rights and education can lead to world peace.
That being said, just preaching a message should not qualify for a Nobel Peace prize. Neither of these fit the criteria of having "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
The worst part is that the Nobel Peace prize used to mean something and it gave the person awarded a little bit of extra gravitas in working towards peace. Now, it has been cheapen to be a political award give to people with little actual accomplishments.
As someone pointed out a couple weeks ago in a Win8 thread, today's PCs are now so powerful that even Windows can't slow them down. Now that's impressive!
Actually, a better saying is that PCs are so fast these days that even JAVA can't slow them down....
Windows would run just fine on a Pentium computer with a decent amount of RAM. Try running a java applet on it, though, and you may as well go for a long coffee break...
Pascal was/is a much better language than Fortran or Cobol. I would be shocked if it completely died out. The one I wonder about is Java. It has sort of replaced Cobol as the language that you use to write programs that no one ever sees but will it keep that place now that Oracle bought it. I know that it is the language of choice for Android and that IBM and other people have their own JVMs but will Oracles lawyers kill it.
I'm not sure that you know FORTRAN or COBOL very well or you wouldn't be comparing them to Pascal.
Pascal and, it's less popular cousin, Modula-2, were meant to be general purpose programming languages.
FORTRAN is primarily a programming language mean for engineers and scientists because of built-in high precision mathematics. It's still quite popular in both fields.
COBOL was designed to be a business language that accountants and business people could use to write reports, etc. Java did not replace COBOL, nor was it meant to. COBOL has largely been replaced by SQL.
The point is that it would be difficult to argue that Pascal is a "better" language than FORTRAN or COBOL. Both FORTRAN and COBOL have unique features which allows them to be better than Pascal for certain functions. It's also why Pascal, which can be replaced with C, etc., will die out long before either COBOL or FORTRAN.
That's not "conspiracy". It's just all-too-common, unethical, anti-competitive business practice. If you want to call lobbying and expensive presents "conspiracy", then you're saying that most of Congress are conspirators.
Yes, businesses try to gain monopolies, and they try to gain it by lobbying, and politicians let them succeed. That's obvious. Now what are you going to do about it?
You cannot fix that by railing at the businesses, they are never going to be any more ethical, and they don't give a f*ck what you think. You cannot fix it by voting better politicians into office; we tried that, and even Obama and Warren have succumbed (as have all previous politicians who have tried). And you cannot fix it by passing more regulation to punish businesses or politicians, because the new regulations will fall prey to regulatory capture just like the old ones.
What businesses fear most is competition and deregulation. Of course, even "deregulation" is subject to regulatory capture, in the sense that a lot of "deregulation" simply amounts to giving away public property at bargain basement prices without actually leading to more competition. But true deregulation is the only way we can fix regulatory capture; none of the other approaches work.
Right.... cause deregulation worked soooo well for the banking and mortgage industries and the economy... oh, wait...
Industries need a certain amount of regulation to keep them somewhat honest. I agree that regulations and laws have been passed that benefit specific companies but the the way to fix it is to roll back regulations to the basic stuff and get ride of all of the rules that add barriers to entry. However, the biggest barrier to entry in the ISP/cable space is fair access to the infrastructure.
financial transactions will eventually “be digital, universal and almost free.”
Not so much an endorsement of cryptocurrency as an opinion that physical currency is obsolete. Until security gets a whole lot better I'll continue to carry small amounts of cash when I go out. Of course Gates probably hasn't used any cash in decades.
Physical currency will become obsolete when either digital currency can't be tracked or having physical currency is considered a crime, which is coming....
As it is, there have been recent cases in the southern US where people have been stopped on the highway by police, found to have more than $200 in cash, and have had it confiscated on suspicion of being used for the drug trade without any trial, evidence, or judicial process. So, if you plan on buying a used car or boat, don't bring cash with you or you could have it seized by the police...
Looking at the snowflake diagram with the linked to article I'm not seeing any partial loops in the snowflake diagram. In fact, it only shows single connectivity back to one core hub. Maybe it's just a poor drawing or I'm missing something in the translation. Also, there doesn't seem to be any redundancy. By not having access to the full article, maybe I'm not understanding the use-case for this.
Your server isn't getting games installed on it, which put all kinds of settings in the registry, then removed later when the game is old and tired, leaving behind cruft (including DRM bullsit) in the registry.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Having leftover files and registry entries from apps that have been removed does not slow down Windows. Like any other OS, they just sit there doing nothing.
What does slow down Windows is disk fragmentation and lack of RAM.
Windows tends to have a lot of patches. Over time, these patches spread OS files across the hard disk. This leads to file fragmentation. When you are running a 5400 RPM drive, have a lot of apps installed and removed, and a lot of OS updates load files from the hard-disk slows down as the disk head has to travel a lot. Background disk defragging was first enabled by default in Windows 7. Of course, the ultimate solution for disk fragmentation is to use SSD drives as there is little penalty for fragmentation due to the high random memory access speeds.
Most Windows boxes today have at least 4GB of RAM but older Windows systems ran on 2GB of RAM. Even so, as you install more apps that have background components, they take up memory. When Windows needs more memory than what is available, it will cache unused parts of the OS and idle apps. This was accomplished by storing the cache data in the Windows page file on hard disk. When an idle app is clicked on, the cached data has to be reloaded and the previously active app needs to be cached back to disk. This whole process is really slow.
There are two ways to solve low memory issues:
1. Install additional memory: Windows Vista/7/8 32-bit recognizes a maximum of 4Gb of RAM. To install and use more than 4GB, you need to install the 64bit version of Windows. Most systems sold in the last 5 years run Windows 32-bit with 4GB of RAM or less. Only recently have systems been sold with Windows 64bit and 8GB of RAM. In my opinion, 8GB should be the minimum.
2. SSD: It might, at first, seem weird that I'm mentioning SSD in the memory section. The OS caches memory when it runs out of physical memory. SSD drives are really fast, much faster than physical drives. So, even with a system with low memory you would see a big difference using a SSD for your OS drive.
The point is that a combination of Windows improvements (background defrag on hard drives, 64-bit OS), technical improvements (SSD), and cost improvements (8GB RAM vs 4GB RAM) have contributed to eliminate the gradual performance degradation that we've seen in the past. It could be argued that adding better components to the system is just masking the limitations or design issues of the OS. But, as long as it works do we really care....
In my opinion, a Windows 7 64bit, or higher, system with 8GB of RAM and a SSD OS drive will not experience any performance issues over time for the average user. Windows performance degradation is a thing of the past....
Is it a question of worth watching or of worth watching in a stadium for $XXX? I'll never understand why someone pays that kind of money to sit in bad seats in the cold, wet etc. when they should be able to watch it from home. It's hard to fathom that ticket sales are worth more than TV rights any more. IMHO, all blackouts do is punish the fans who weren't going to buy a ticket anyway.
People spend $$$ because it's a social event for most people who enjoy sports. Getting there early, setting up the BBQ, handing out with existing or new friends, talking about the sport team, etc... On top of that, it's a much more engaging when you are actually experiencing the event. Much like a live concert is a completely different experience than listening to it on Palladium.
It's a fringe brand in that Ferrari is a fringe brand. I don't think most people wouldn't want one but I don't know a soul who has one. Very few have seen them. They aren't exactly a larger brand. IF they can mass produce a model in a reasonable price range comparable to a modern model of car it will take off. Right now it is in the fringe but I don't think it will stay there. That's exactly what the guy in the article said. He didn't say Tesla was a bad idea or that it won't take off, he said it's not there yet but this next model could very well take it there.
It will be exciting to see where we go from here.
There is a difference... Ferrari isn't a "fringe" brand, it's a luxury brand. Ferrari never set out to be a daily driver. Tesla, however, has always stated that they were going to first target the luxury/sports car market and then use profits to develop a commuter vehicle with a much larger mass appeal. Based on their own vision, they are still a fringe brand.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows this is an overreach by the prosecutor and an abuse of the very intent of the law. All the Judges need to do is read up on the history of what lead to it's creation to understand that it was developed purely as a way to ensure that publicly traded corporations weren't reporting fictional financial statements. There is no way that this should have EVER reached the Supreme court, let alone this fisherman being convicted under this law. But, of course, we now have a legal system that prizes conviction over justice.
I also love the argument for why this conviction should be upheld. "The government replies that the "records only" argument would make it a crime for a murderer to destroy his victim's diary, but not the murder weapon." Um... The destruction of evidence to cover up a crime is already against the law (Tampering, Obstruction, etc.). Saying that the Sarbanes-Oxley law is needed for this is just plain silly..... I guess it's a good thing that I am not a Supreme court justice. If I were I would have laughed my head off at the pure stupidity...
FYI: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV... The above are my personal opinions...
I moved to the Boston area in 2000. Flipping through the local radio stations I found WEEI (local sports radio) and Click and Clack on NPR.
Whenever Click and Clack was on I had to listen all the way through. No matter how small the car problem, Tom and Ray found ways of making it interesting, entertaining, and funny while teaching us how cars work along the way.
My condolences to the family.
The Bay of Fundy has the most powerful tides in the world. "The estimated potential of the Fundy region alone is upwards of 60,000 megawatts of energy, of which up to 2,500 megawatts may be safely extracted."
Nova Scotia had a trail running in Nov. 2009 with OpenHydro and they ended up having to remove their turbine when, "20 days later, all 12 turbine rotor blades were destroyed by tidal flows that were two and a half times stronger than for what the turbine was designed."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
That's the great thing about Obamacare, now those people pay for health insurance coverage and can't get care. Whereas before, they didn't pay for health insurance, but were able to get health care when they needed it. Isn't Obamacare great?
Yeah, cause emergency rooms are turning away people in droves.... try again...
No, I'm not confusing transit and endpoints.
You are right that the end point connection isn't one sided. That's why we all pay monthly fees to our provider to pay for bandwidth. Our provider, though, has peering agreements with other providers. If this peering is unequal, some of the money that we pay our provider goes to pay for peering fees. In the case of Netflix, their provider refused to pay the peering fees. If our provider screws up, we suffer. We then have a choice to change providers. Netflix chose to pay Comcast instead (probably the cheaper option, factoring termination fees, etc.). But... they did have other options...
Think twice next time you wonder why you aren't getting your advertised speed...
And another article about Comcast throttling Netflix without any background or context.
Backbone providers have peering agreements. Usually, if both backbone providers (i.e. Comcast & Verizon) are sending close to the same traffic between each other, the peering agreement is free for both parties. In the Netflix case, Netflix went with a small backbone provider, likely due to cost. The problem is that the backbone provider they chose sends way more traffic than they accept. Typically, this type of peering agreement means that the smaller backbone provider (i.e. Cogent) pays fees to the larger backbone provider (Comcast). It's my understanding that Cogent wouldn't or couldn't pay these fees, so Comcast throttled them.
Because Cogent couldn't or wouldn't pay the fees and customers were complaining, Neflix agreed to pay the peering fees for Cogent. Though, this isn't how the media or Netflix presents it.
I hate Comcast as much as anyone. I think that they are essentially a monopoly that takes advantage of their customers by increasing prices where there is little to no competition (a toothless FCC doesn't help). But, in this one instance, it's my opinion that Comcast had a good case against the provider used by Netflix and that, by selecting the lowest cost provider and possible knowingly selecting one that is a bit sketchy on the peering side, Netflix had some responsibility.
5) You can have class and style and look a hell of a lot better for a lot less money. You just won't look like a trendy fanboi.
This.... Anyone attributing a smart watch from Apple, or any other company for that matter, to class or style just do not understand class or style. Some people easily confuse popularity or celebrity with class and style. It's been my experience that people who have true class and style do not wear gadgets or toys that can distract from enjoying people and the event, whether intimate or in public.
Personally, as a geek I think that gadgets are cool but very few actually have class or style...
One reason only for me... Sports...
For the last winter Olympics I ended up watching the CBC streaming feed as it was MUCH better than NBC.
I also subscribe to NHL Game Center Live for hockey game streaming but there is no equivalent option for the NFL. I see that CBS is launching a streaming service (CBS All Access) but NFL games won't be a part of the service (http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2014/10/16/6987707/cbs-streaming-online-nfl-games). Yes, you can get local games using an over-the-air antenna but I like to watch out of market games which are not always broadcast over-the-air.
To make a long story short, the day that the NFL begins a streaming service is the day I'll cancel my cable subscription.
Very little of the technology we have today was developed due to emergency needs.
The only thing that matters is that someone develops the technology, and it is good enough.
However, on the subject of automated cars, the real difficulties is how to introduce them on roads where you still have "manual" drivers around (I don't mean stick here).
Computer driven cars can be totally predictable. Manual cars, less so - people forget to use their signals, people make late lane changes, fall asleep and drift into other lanes etc.
In theory, a self driving car should have enough sensors, sensor data gathering speed, processing speed, etc. to be able to "see" objects moving towards them and take appropriate action to avoid an accident.
If an automated car cannot deal with manual drivers, I shudder to think how it would deal with stuff falling off of trucks, animals running into the street, sudden downpours or snow squalls, mechanical problems, etc....
He mostly just shouldn't be there in the first place, all this assignation of military honor guards merely celebrates war. We should be ashamed, not proud, of our war dead.
It doesn't celebrate war, it gives people a way to remember the horrors of war and the people who gave their lives to make ours a bit freer.
Anyone who thinks that we should be ashamed of our war dead doesn't have a CLUE as to what they did to ensure our freedom.
I agree that war should be vilified and as well as any politician who puts troops into harms way without a major verified threat. But to put this on the war dead is just plain immaturity in understanding.
"A government MP offers the scant assurance that this legislation is not "trauma tainted," as it was drafted well prior to this week's instigating incidents"
Of course it was drafted some time ago. Harper was just waiting for something like this to get a way to quickly get it passed into legislation without all that pesky complaining that he got last time he tried doing it.
Some Background: The original bill was C-30 which had warrant-less information gathering. The Canadian public became very outspoken about how much they disliked the bill to the point where it was dropped. The current bill, Bill C-13 is supposed to combat cyber bullying, but some of the provisions from C-30 were tacked on with minor wording changes to include voluntary disclosure with immunity and to require warrants for certain things. Most Canadians are just as outraged with this bill as with C-30. A poll done in June found that 73% of Canadians are against it.
Sorry, cannot understand summary.
That's amusing, since the summary is nothing more than the last paragraph of the article copypasta'd.
English Comp 101 says it should be a concise summary of the preceding essay's main points.
At least this fluff piece was worth a good laugh...
We have a script that automatically boots off all the users on the weekend. That fixes half the problems. The other half of the problem is all the systems that didn't come back up from the reboot.
The other half are laptops that people took home with them.... Who has desktops any more...
Apple hasn't really innovated much since Steve left the scene.
Other products of note were the Apple LaserWriter (first desktop laser printer - Apple dropped the ball on that one) in 1985
Wrong... HP developed the first desktop laser printer in 1983. "The first laser printer intended for mass-market sales was the HP LaserJet, released in 1984" So, no, Apple didn't drop the ball on the LaserWriter. HP was already in the market and other manufacturers released products around the same time as Apple.
This is not going to suddenly "change everything". First off, there's so little info here you can't even see through the hype. There's nothing to get an idea of how hard this would be to commercialize, what its energy density would be, or any of tons of other things that make a big difference. And secondly, these are hardly the first lab-scale batteries to have properties like this. Heck, there have even been lithium titanate batteries commercialized before. Crazy charge / discharge times, but they were largely a flop except in niche applications - the cost was way too high and the energy density too low.
There is every week or two some great research breakthrough in battery storage. Most of them you'll never read about. Most of them will never go anywhere. But a few will. And they will slowly, inevitably make their way into the battery technology of tomorrow. Silicon anodes, for example, were once among those crazy lab future battery techs. Now they're in commercial cells. People never stop to think about how little the batteries in their phones have gotten in an area of increasing computing power, larger screens, greater demands on lifespan, etc. Energy density continues its inevitable march.... in the background. But the odds that any one tech that you read about is going to carry the industry is very small. And these things take half a decade to go from the lab to stores.
Battery tech slowly evolves and gradually gets better. There have been few leaps in battery tech over the last 20 or so years, despite other such announcements. Like you, I am also skeptical that this is a true breakthrough. However, it would be amazing if it can be scaled up.
The one thing that I disagree with in your comment is the premise that batteries in cell phones have gotten smaller due to battery tech. It is partially true. However, the majority of energy gains in cell phones have been the huge leaps in low power ever-shrinking electronics and battery saving technologies (components being able to go to sleep).
If battery tech had kept pace with electronics, we would be able to power our cell phones for weeks instead of just a couple of days.
Horton... Because he heard a WHO!
Certainly in the west nobody has heard anything about the young girl since she was released from hospital after her recovery. I'm interested to know the real world changing accomplishments she has personally brought to fruition? In addition, Satyarthi "accomplishments" appear to be limited to one country. Is this then the Peace prize for India? I've seen Mother Teresa's name bounced around in justification because of her work in Calcutta but she worked in tends (if not more) nations around the world.
This is another Nobel fail. Nice people but not worthy of the prize.
I agree.
I admire both for standing up for their convictions and working hard to spread a message of a world with equal access to education and without child labour, However, their message, while relevant globally, seems to be limited to India and Pakastan.
Perhaps giving them the Nobel prize was a way that the committee thought to draw more global attention to the these human rights issues. I do agree that the achievement of global human rights and education can lead to world peace.
That being said, just preaching a message should not qualify for a Nobel Peace prize. Neither of these fit the criteria of having "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
The worst part is that the Nobel Peace prize used to mean something and it gave the person awarded a little bit of extra gravitas in working towards peace. Now, it has been cheapen to be a political award give to people with little actual accomplishments.
As someone pointed out a couple weeks ago in a Win8 thread, today's PCs are now so powerful that even Windows can't slow them down. Now that's impressive!
Actually, a better saying is that PCs are so fast these days that even JAVA can't slow them down....
Windows would run just fine on a Pentium computer with a decent amount of RAM. Try running a java applet on it, though, and you may as well go for a long coffee break...
Pascal was/is a much better language than Fortran or Cobol.
I would be shocked if it completely died out.
The one I wonder about is Java. It has sort of replaced Cobol as the language that you use to write programs that no one ever sees but will it keep that place now that Oracle bought it. I know that it is the language of choice for Android and that IBM and other people have their own JVMs but will Oracles lawyers kill it.
I'm not sure that you know FORTRAN or COBOL very well or you wouldn't be comparing them to Pascal.
Pascal and, it's less popular cousin, Modula-2, were meant to be general purpose programming languages.
FORTRAN is primarily a programming language mean for engineers and scientists because of built-in high precision mathematics. It's still quite popular in both fields.
COBOL was designed to be a business language that accountants and business people could use to write reports, etc. Java did not replace COBOL, nor was it meant to. COBOL has largely been replaced by SQL.
The point is that it would be difficult to argue that Pascal is a "better" language than FORTRAN or COBOL. Both FORTRAN and COBOL have unique features which allows them to be better than Pascal for certain functions. It's also why Pascal, which can be replaced with C, etc., will die out long before either COBOL or FORTRAN.
Yes, businesses try to gain monopolies, and they try to gain it by lobbying, and politicians let them succeed. That's obvious. Now what are you going to do about it?
You cannot fix that by railing at the businesses, they are never going to be any more ethical, and they don't give a f*ck what you think. You cannot fix it by voting better politicians into office; we tried that, and even Obama and Warren have succumbed (as have all previous politicians who have tried). And you cannot fix it by passing more regulation to punish businesses or politicians, because the new regulations will fall prey to regulatory capture just like the old ones.
What businesses fear most is competition and deregulation. Of course, even "deregulation" is subject to regulatory capture, in the sense that a lot of "deregulation" simply amounts to giving away public property at bargain basement prices without actually leading to more competition. But true deregulation is the only way we can fix regulatory capture; none of the other approaches work.
Right.... cause deregulation worked soooo well for the banking and mortgage industries and the economy... oh, wait...
Industries need a certain amount of regulation to keep them somewhat honest. I agree that regulations and laws have been passed that benefit specific companies but the the way to fix it is to roll back regulations to the basic stuff and get ride of all of the rules that add barriers to entry. However, the biggest barrier to entry in the ISP/cable space is fair access to the infrastructure.
FTFA:
financial transactions will eventually “be digital, universal and almost free.”
Not so much an endorsement of cryptocurrency as an opinion that physical currency is obsolete. Until security gets a whole lot better I'll continue to carry small amounts of cash when I go out. Of course Gates probably hasn't used any cash in decades.
Physical currency will become obsolete when either digital currency can't be tracked or having physical currency is considered a crime, which is coming....
As it is, there have been recent cases in the southern US where people have been stopped on the highway by police, found to have more than $200 in cash, and have had it confiscated on suspicion of being used for the drug trade without any trial, evidence, or judicial process. So, if you plan on buying a used car or boat, don't bring cash with you or you could have it seized by the police...
Looking at the snowflake diagram with the linked to article I'm not seeing any partial loops in the snowflake diagram. In fact, it only shows single connectivity back to one core hub. Maybe it's just a poor drawing or I'm missing something in the translation. Also, there doesn't seem to be any redundancy. By not having access to the full article, maybe I'm not understanding the use-case for this.
Not really. It's just bad design.
Your server isn't getting games installed on it, which put all kinds of settings in the registry, then removed later when the game is old and tired, leaving behind cruft (including DRM bullsit) in the registry.
When a program is UNinstalled, all traces of it should be gone. Apple took a different approach, which arguably works far better. Even if stuff is left behind, it just takes up a bit of disk space, and doesn't affect the system at all.
Having leftover files and registry entries from apps that have been removed does not slow down Windows. Like any other OS, they just sit there doing nothing.
What does slow down Windows is disk fragmentation and lack of RAM.
Windows tends to have a lot of patches. Over time, these patches spread OS files across the hard disk. This leads to file fragmentation. When you are running a 5400 RPM drive, have a lot of apps installed and removed, and a lot of OS updates load files from the hard-disk slows down as the disk head has to travel a lot. Background disk defragging was first enabled by default in Windows 7. Of course, the ultimate solution for disk fragmentation is to use SSD drives as there is little penalty for fragmentation due to the high random memory access speeds.
Most Windows boxes today have at least 4GB of RAM but older Windows systems ran on 2GB of RAM. Even so, as you install more apps that have background components, they take up memory. When Windows needs more memory than what is available, it will cache unused parts of the OS and idle apps. This was accomplished by storing the cache data in the Windows page file on hard disk. When an idle app is clicked on, the cached data has to be reloaded and the previously active app needs to be cached back to disk. This whole process is really slow.
There are two ways to solve low memory issues:
1. Install additional memory: Windows Vista/7/8 32-bit recognizes a maximum of 4Gb of RAM. To install and use more than 4GB, you need to install the 64bit version of Windows. Most systems sold in the last 5 years run Windows 32-bit with 4GB of RAM or less. Only recently have systems been sold with Windows 64bit and 8GB of RAM. In my opinion, 8GB should be the minimum.
2. SSD: It might, at first, seem weird that I'm mentioning SSD in the memory section. The OS caches memory when it runs out of physical memory. SSD drives are really fast, much faster than physical drives. So, even with a system with low memory you would see a big difference using a SSD for your OS drive.
The point is that a combination of Windows improvements (background defrag on hard drives, 64-bit OS), technical improvements (SSD), and cost improvements (8GB RAM vs 4GB RAM) have contributed to eliminate the gradual performance degradation that we've seen in the past. It could be argued that adding better components to the system is just masking the limitations or design issues of the OS. But, as long as it works do we really care....
In my opinion, a Windows 7 64bit, or higher, system with 8GB of RAM and a SSD OS drive will not experience any performance issues over time for the average user. Windows performance degradation is a thing of the past....
Is it a question of worth watching or of worth watching in a stadium for $XXX? I'll never understand why someone pays that kind of money to sit in bad seats in the cold, wet etc. when they should be able to watch it from home. It's hard to fathom that ticket sales are worth more than TV rights any more. IMHO, all blackouts do is punish the fans who weren't going to buy a ticket anyway.
People spend $$$ because it's a social event for most people who enjoy sports. Getting there early, setting up the BBQ, handing out with existing or new friends, talking about the sport team, etc... On top of that, it's a much more engaging when you are actually experiencing the event. Much like a live concert is a completely different experience than listening to it on Palladium.
It's a fringe brand in that Ferrari is a fringe brand. I don't think most people wouldn't want one but I don't know a soul who has one. Very few have seen them. They aren't exactly a larger brand. IF they can mass produce a model in a reasonable price range comparable to a modern model of car it will take off. Right now it is in the fringe but I don't think it will stay there. That's exactly what the guy in the article said. He didn't say Tesla was a bad idea or that it won't take off, he said it's not there yet but this next model could very well take it there.
It will be exciting to see where we go from here.
There is a difference... Ferrari isn't a "fringe" brand, it's a luxury brand. Ferrari never set out to be a daily driver. Tesla, however, has always stated that they were going to first target the luxury/sports car market and then use profits to develop a commuter vehicle with a much larger mass appeal. Based on their own vision, they are still a fringe brand.