Most companies don't realize that AWS is amazing for "factory work" (stuff that's already done, you're just running on a grand scale for revenue generation). But it's terrible for R&D usage---especially the metered usage variety.
My team recently ran some exhaustive testing to be sure an algorithm would behave as expected - 30000 core-hours. We didn't have any servers just lying idle, but it was trivial (and cheap) to run the test overnight using servers from EC2 Spot. Much better than freeing a few high-end servers for a week.
Really, any sort of temporary usage, cloud is king. No pre-provisioning, six-week procurement delays, or budget arguments that "no really, we'll use these machines for a lot of different problems to come". This is why tech start-ups have shifted to doing everything that can in the cloud - nightly build and QA runs, test servers for whatever you're building. The nice upside for a start up is that if you build in in the could, even though you only have 3 customers, it's easy to tell a potential acquirer "sure it will scale to 3 million customers, cloud cloud cloud", and it might even be true.
If you haven't caught on to the theme yet: you don't keep those metered cloud serves just sitting around doing nothing - you automate launching everything as-needed, and only pay for servers when you have work for those servers to do.
This gets into semantics on "parallel". The CPU-intensive part isn't efficiently parallelized, but that rarely matters, as you spend most of your time I/O bound, and that parallelizes well.
Most applications are this way - more than 2 cores doesn't help very much, because you're not CPU-bound in the first place. There are noteworthy exceptions, like video transcoding, where CPU is entirely the limiting factor, but those exceptions tend to parallelize well, because people have put in the effort.
The main area where more cores could help, but the software isn't written for it, is games, because of the legacy of single-threaded game engines. This is slowly shifting, but it take a generation to completely change the way an industry thinks about a problem, and we're only half-way through that shift IMO.
Apple took away the headphone jack, and now $160 headphones are selling quite well? I can certainly believe that. I can believe it's the only reason they removed the headphone jack. I can believe that no matter how badly Apple treats it's faithful, they'll just keep giving Apple money.
The artist is not distributing two versions of his work. That's the entire cultural point here. Lucas's call is that there's only one version that can be distributed, and that's the special edition.
That's where I call bullshit. The artist has no moral right to prevent fan-edits, or any other case of someone distributing a modified version of his work. From Episode 1 sans JarJar, to Harry Potter with "wand" replaced by "wang" throughout (to quite humorous effect). There's just no good argument that society is better for such a restriction. Money is a different matter.
You're using the science fiction definition of AI, which is as bad as the constant misuse of "sentient" in SF. No one sane wants a sapient sexbot, which is why no one is working on one (well, no one with a budget, I'm sure somewhere in a basement in Japan...). A sapient sexbot is a SF premise, not something we'll deal with in the timeframe in TFA. People will try to marry their sexbots anyway, though, I believe that.
Even the ragged-ass so-called AI (it's not AI, there's decidedly no "I")
Don't confuse AI with MI. AI is the study of how to automate things that it currently takes intelligence to do - without needing intelligence. AI researchers frequently succeed at this. Almost everything on the wishlist of AI researches in the 60s and 70s is now a solved problem.
Machine intelligence is real intelligence/sapience/consciousness/self-awareness/whatever. Just running on metal instead of meat. It might happen by accident as a side-effect of AI research, though I'm highly skeptical. It might emerge spontaneously (the entirety of the internet is certainly as complex as the human brain). But almost no one is researching this, since there's no economic point in doing so.
Certainly for a sexbot you'd want AI, not MI. If you can't program it with a desired set of behaviors, then what's the point?
Corporations don't have any rights. That's not how the system works. Aggregates of people have rights. Corporations are bound by many laws in the way that people are -- almost all of contract law, for example -- but that's a different thing than a right.
Corporations don't have political rights. People have the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government, and they don't automatically lose that right if the manner they assemble is incorporated. However, a publicly traded corporation isn't the same thing as a group of people, for the reasons you highlight, and so can't legally participate in the political process. That's where the corruption comes in: this isn't enforced; the rules are openly gamed.
Here's the rub: the New York Times is a large, publicly traded corporation with vastly out-sized political influence. There's really no good way around this. There's no clear objective rules to say "MS can't participate in the political process, but MSNBC can" that aren't just as game-able as the current system.
Myphone also plays mp3s, audiobooks, and has an ebook reader. It might be useful to call an Uber. I find it sad that to get that minimal functionality, I have to get a smart phone, but it's an imperfect world.
I think you misunderstand the argument from conservatives about marriage: there's one pattern proven to work in western civilization for the continuance of society and culture, and so we confer social acceptance and recognition on people who follow that pattern. Watering that down in any way ruins the reward for following the pattern. Additionally, keeping society going is seen as more important than individual desires.
In that sense, marrying a robot is exactly the sort of thing they were worried about: yet another thing called "marriage" that isn't producing and raising slightly over 2 kids per woman.
Why would someone marry a robot? It doesn't strengthen the legal bonds between two entities because one entity already completely 100% owns the other
I think the argument here is about sapient robots, not sex toys. Sapient robots might not be property - but even if they are, marriage is a stronger bond than mere ownership, because the latter can be changed easily enough.
Corporations only have right because they are collections of people who have rights. Corporations own property as a proxy for the human owners of the corporation, and ultimately it's only the humans doing the owning.
On the other hand, machine entities may not put up with that kind of treatment. Which could be very, very interesting.
How can you say Han shot first, yet also say that Harmy had no right to distribute the unspecialized edition? Either you say the artist's "integrity" dominates, and no one has the moral right to make a DVD or BluRay where Han shot first, or you take the position that copyright is just about money.
More that they may just stop working one day due to a poor update somewhere in the system,. If you've replaced all your normal light switches, it might take a while to get working lights again. Same for internet connected anything else: it adds a risk similar to a lengthy power outage with no warning. And yet people will buy internet connected toilets.
Apple is only worth 25% more than MS. MS earnings grew in 2016, while Apple's shrank. MS has a clear path for growth: Azure might actually take off one day. Apple doesn't really: the mobile market is saturated, and they need a wholly new product line to return to fast growth (which, admittedly, they've done before, but it's not clear what that would be).
The thing is: "desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools" isn't a growing market any more, and MS is losing pricing power there as technology evolves. E.g., Word was one the killer app, but if you share documents online instead of in print, Word has no real value. XL and PPT have staying power, but MS is starting to offer them on other platforms, so the OS lock-in isn't what it was.
If MS has a future, it's in the server space, They're trying to make Azure competitive with AWS, but right now it's still small in comparison, and most of the Azure business is existing MS sever companies moving to Azure for a deep discount. Almost no one is starting new companies or projects with the back-end in Azure.
They might yet pull it out, thanks to all the market presence they have to work with, but unless something changes they're doomed to a gradually shrinking base of established customers, much like Oracle. I do expect they'll outlive Oracle, though, since MS only pisses off their customers, while Oracle pisses on them.
I see you don't read/. that often. There are constant stories about ad companies claiming that ad blockers are every kind of evil, and copyright is certainly one of their arguments. You remind me of those guys.
Are you seriously trying to claim that it is somehow morally wrong for someone to press the "skip 30" button on their DVD player? That an artist has some moral right to force you to watch the movie the way the artist wants, or not at all.
OK, enough dancing around the real issue here. There's only one real question in this debate: did Han Solo shoot first? Well?
Their model seems to be to limit the number of concurrent streams of a title to the number of DVDs they have. Whether they cheat is a different question.
So, you're saying you don't use an ad blocker in your browser, because copyright? This is exactly the same: a service that removes a few seconds of offensive or annoying "content" that matches some filters.
Different market. If your have to wake your phone up first, it's not voice activation. Time will tell if this new market goes beyond the hobby/enthusiast crowd, but for now the home automation geeks are going nuts for Alexa. Yes, the same crowd that sees no problem with internet-controlled light bulbs.
IMO, some killer app will emerge in the next couple of years to make it mainstream. The potential laziness-enablement of voice activation is just too high for it not to.
It used t be that you could plan on certain plights being overbooks, so some people did just that. These days, the airlines are counting on WalMart shoppers on vacation - be a few hours late for $200 in cash, sure thing! (Any time the flight is seriously overbooked, the airline does a reverse auction for a cash payout - they only need to find the cheapest people on the flight.)
OK, not to be all "the man", but you should seriously reduce your substance abuse if shit like that is an ongoing problem. Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, or so I'm told.
If there were demand for 1000, the airline would add more flights. It's the case where there's demand for a fractional extra flight that things get tricky.
They pretty much have to find volunteers. But remember, once they start offering cash to take a later flight, it's a reverse auction, and they only need to find the cheapest passenger on the flight. It's a pretty safe bet by the airline that even if all 110 show up, at least 10 shop at WalMart.
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Most companies don't realize that AWS is amazing for "factory work" (stuff that's already done, you're just running on a grand scale for revenue generation). But it's terrible for R&D usage---especially the metered usage variety.
My team recently ran some exhaustive testing to be sure an algorithm would behave as expected - 30000 core-hours. We didn't have any servers just lying idle, but it was trivial (and cheap) to run the test overnight using servers from EC2 Spot. Much better than freeing a few high-end servers for a week.
Really, any sort of temporary usage, cloud is king. No pre-provisioning, six-week procurement delays, or budget arguments that "no really, we'll use these machines for a lot of different problems to come". This is why tech start-ups have shifted to doing everything that can in the cloud - nightly build and QA runs, test servers for whatever you're building. The nice upside for a start up is that if you build in in the could, even though you only have 3 customers, it's easy to tell a potential acquirer "sure it will scale to 3 million customers, cloud cloud cloud", and it might even be true.
If you haven't caught on to the theme yet: you don't keep those metered cloud serves just sitting around doing nothing - you automate launching everything as-needed, and only pay for servers when you have work for those servers to do.
And yet people are shilling out that $160 for the upsell. Probably because it's annoying to juggle a dongle just to listen to music on your phone.
I should start a betting pool on the next port eliminated. Though I think it ends with no ports at all: wireless charging, Bluetooth, and courage.
This gets into semantics on "parallel". The CPU-intensive part isn't efficiently parallelized, but that rarely matters, as you spend most of your time I/O bound, and that parallelizes well.
Most applications are this way - more than 2 cores doesn't help very much, because you're not CPU-bound in the first place. There are noteworthy exceptions, like video transcoding, where CPU is entirely the limiting factor, but those exceptions tend to parallelize well, because people have put in the effort.
The main area where more cores could help, but the software isn't written for it, is games, because of the legacy of single-threaded game engines. This is slowly shifting, but it take a generation to completely change the way an industry thinks about a problem, and we're only half-way through that shift IMO.
I can also believe that Apple fans have mods points and can't accept honest criticism of their God.
Courage!
Apple took away the headphone jack, and now $160 headphones are selling quite well? I can certainly believe that. I can believe it's the only reason they removed the headphone jack. I can believe that no matter how badly Apple treats it's faithful, they'll just keep giving Apple money.
The artist is not distributing two versions of his work. That's the entire cultural point here. Lucas's call is that there's only one version that can be distributed, and that's the special edition.
That's where I call bullshit. The artist has no moral right to prevent fan-edits, or any other case of someone distributing a modified version of his work. From Episode 1 sans JarJar, to Harry Potter with "wand" replaced by "wang" throughout (to quite humorous effect). There's just no good argument that society is better for such a restriction. Money is a different matter.
You're using the science fiction definition of AI, which is as bad as the constant misuse of "sentient" in SF. No one sane wants a sapient sexbot, which is why no one is working on one (well, no one with a budget, I'm sure somewhere in a basement in Japan ...). A sapient sexbot is a SF premise, not something we'll deal with in the timeframe in TFA. People will try to marry their sexbots anyway, though, I believe that.
Even the ragged-ass so-called AI (it's not AI, there's decidedly no "I")
Don't confuse AI with MI. AI is the study of how to automate things that it currently takes intelligence to do - without needing intelligence. AI researchers frequently succeed at this. Almost everything on the wishlist of AI researches in the 60s and 70s is now a solved problem.
Machine intelligence is real intelligence/sapience/consciousness/self-awareness/whatever. Just running on metal instead of meat. It might happen by accident as a side-effect of AI research, though I'm highly skeptical. It might emerge spontaneously (the entirety of the internet is certainly as complex as the human brain). But almost no one is researching this, since there's no economic point in doing so.
Certainly for a sexbot you'd want AI, not MI. If you can't program it with a desired set of behaviors, then what's the point?
Corporations don't have any rights. That's not how the system works. Aggregates of people have rights. Corporations are bound by many laws in the way that people are -- almost all of contract law, for example -- but that's a different thing than a right.
Corporations don't have political rights. People have the right to peaceably assemble and petition the government, and they don't automatically lose that right if the manner they assemble is incorporated. However, a publicly traded corporation isn't the same thing as a group of people, for the reasons you highlight, and so can't legally participate in the political process. That's where the corruption comes in: this isn't enforced; the rules are openly gamed.
Here's the rub: the New York Times is a large, publicly traded corporation with vastly out-sized political influence. There's really no good way around this. There's no clear objective rules to say "MS can't participate in the political process, but MSNBC can" that aren't just as game-able as the current system.
Myphone also plays mp3s, audiobooks, and has an ebook reader. It might be useful to call an Uber. I find it sad that to get that minimal functionality, I have to get a smart phone, but it's an imperfect world.
I think you misunderstand the argument from conservatives about marriage: there's one pattern proven to work in western civilization for the continuance of society and culture, and so we confer social acceptance and recognition on people who follow that pattern. Watering that down in any way ruins the reward for following the pattern. Additionally, keeping society going is seen as more important than individual desires.
In that sense, marrying a robot is exactly the sort of thing they were worried about: yet another thing called "marriage" that isn't producing and raising slightly over 2 kids per woman.
Why would someone marry a robot? It doesn't strengthen the legal bonds between two entities because one entity already completely 100% owns the other
I think the argument here is about sapient robots, not sex toys. Sapient robots might not be property - but even if they are, marriage is a stronger bond than mere ownership, because the latter can be changed easily enough.
Corporations only have right because they are collections of people who have rights. Corporations own property as a proxy for the human owners of the corporation, and ultimately it's only the humans doing the owning.
On the other hand, machine entities may not put up with that kind of treatment. Which could be very, very interesting.
Meh, they'll just be programmed not to object.
How can you say Han shot first, yet also say that Harmy had no right to distribute the unspecialized edition? Either you say the artist's "integrity" dominates, and no one has the moral right to make a DVD or BluRay where Han shot first, or you take the position that copyright is just about money.
More that they may just stop working one day due to a poor update somewhere in the system,. If you've replaced all your normal light switches, it might take a while to get working lights again. Same for internet connected anything else: it adds a risk similar to a lengthy power outage with no warning. And yet people will buy internet connected toilets.
Apple is only worth 25% more than MS. MS earnings grew in 2016, while Apple's shrank. MS has a clear path for growth: Azure might actually take off one day. Apple doesn't really: the mobile market is saturated, and they need a wholly new product line to return to fast growth (which, admittedly, they've done before, but it's not clear what that would be).
The thing is: "desktop and laptop OSes, and office productivity tools" isn't a growing market any more, and MS is losing pricing power there as technology evolves. E.g., Word was one the killer app, but if you share documents online instead of in print, Word has no real value. XL and PPT have staying power, but MS is starting to offer them on other platforms, so the OS lock-in isn't what it was.
If MS has a future, it's in the server space, They're trying to make Azure competitive with AWS, but right now it's still small in comparison, and most of the Azure business is existing MS sever companies moving to Azure for a deep discount. Almost no one is starting new companies or projects with the back-end in Azure.
They might yet pull it out, thanks to all the market presence they have to work with, but unless something changes they're doomed to a gradually shrinking base of established customers, much like Oracle. I do expect they'll outlive Oracle, though, since MS only pisses off their customers, while Oracle pisses on them.
I see you don't read /. that often. There are constant stories about ad companies claiming that ad blockers are every kind of evil, and copyright is certainly one of their arguments. You remind me of those guys.
Are you seriously trying to claim that it is somehow morally wrong for someone to press the "skip 30" button on their DVD player? That an artist has some moral right to force you to watch the movie the way the artist wants, or not at all.
OK, enough dancing around the real issue here. There's only one real question in this debate: did Han Solo shoot first? Well?
Their model seems to be to limit the number of concurrent streams of a title to the number of DVDs they have. Whether they cheat is a different question.
So, you're saying you don't use an ad blocker in your browser, because copyright? This is exactly the same: a service that removes a few seconds of offensive or annoying "content" that matches some filters.
Different market. If your have to wake your phone up first, it's not voice activation. Time will tell if this new market goes beyond the hobby/enthusiast crowd, but for now the home automation geeks are going nuts for Alexa. Yes, the same crowd that sees no problem with internet-controlled light bulbs.
IMO, some killer app will emerge in the next couple of years to make it mainstream. The potential laziness-enablement of voice activation is just too high for it not to.
It used t be that you could plan on certain plights being overbooks, so some people did just that. These days, the airlines are counting on WalMart shoppers on vacation - be a few hours late for $200 in cash, sure thing! (Any time the flight is seriously overbooked, the airline does a reverse auction for a cash payout - they only need to find the cheapest people on the flight.)
Heh, most concise answer in this thread.
OK, not to be all "the man", but you should seriously reduce your substance abuse if shit like that is an ongoing problem. Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, or so I'm told.
If there were demand for 1000, the airline would add more flights. It's the case where there's demand for a fractional extra flight that things get tricky.
They pretty much have to find volunteers. But remember, once they start offering cash to take a later flight, it's a reverse auction, and they only need to find the cheapest passenger on the flight. It's a pretty safe bet by the airline that even if all 110 show up, at least 10 shop at WalMart.