But where the data is "kept" isn't the question. Has Microsoft America accessed the data from America? If so, then at least a decade of precedent says a copy of that data is in America and is subject to American law and jurisdiction
Sure, but why would e.g. hotmail data for some random user be accessed by MS America?
Data is kept close to users, as there's no getting around the speed-of-light delay. Data for US users is going to be in one of MS's many US datacenters. I'm sure the Irish DC has quite a mix of British and continental EU citizen data, not just Irish citizen data, but that doesn't make it any better.
Microsoft operates a major data center in Ireland, like all the cloud providers do, and l'd bet they have a large tech support presence there as well, as many major tech companies do. It's not like they just have a PO Box: quite a bit of their EU business really is done from Ireland. It's the mix of low labor cost and tax incentives that works for many companies.
The NSA has everything compromised, though, so that doesn't differentiate cloud from non-cloud. That's very different from, say, the Sony hack, where everything becomes public.
Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization
People still think this? There's no performance downside to virtualization any more, unless you overload the host, and you get the ability to make snapshots if nothing else.
And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue
Always read your SLA. Many cloud-provided services are well supported, with people oncall 24/7 if the service itself goes down. Amazon is infamous for putting all its devs on pager duty, and the cloudy parts of MS as well (haven't heard about Google - anyone know who gets the pager duty there?). But you can't assume anything, and if you want someone to call, of course you'll need a support contract, just like anything else in IT.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
The cloud is just a colo all grown up. What only the cloud offers is "I need 1000 new servers tomorrow, but I only want to pay for them for a week". (And capital depreciation is not a feature. It's when you spend all the money this year, but for taxes you must spread the cost over several years - it's almost always better to count the cost ASAP.)
being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
But not a particularly valuable one - it's a blue-collar job now, like pulling cable.
When a game is $2, and it looks like it might be fun, why not try it? If I get a few hours of fun, it's money well spent, even if I never see it again.
As for price, it took Half Life 2 well over 5 years before the price dropped to $10.
Sure, but how many years would you project before Steam somehow goes under? At least 5? Then the games you're buying today will be under $10 if you need to re-buy them. Heck, I think I've bought Master or Orion II 3 or 4 times now, and since I spent several addicted weekends each time, I can hardly regret the $10 or whatever.
For awhile they had DLC for Skyrim that still costs more than the cost of Legendary Edition of Skyrim
DLC is an attempt to make gaming cost as much as the movies. Screw that.
Ahh, so your "solution" is simply to throw away money.
Yes, you understand! In fact, beyond basic food, shelter, and clothing, most of what I do with money is pay for convenience. If I had a yard, I'd pay someone to mow it for me, and in just a few months that would add up to more than the potential I've "wasted" if Steam ever shuts down.
You already had to opt-out of "customer experience improvement program", or Microsoft was already sending a list of all your creditcard numbers, sexual fetishes, any embarrassing medical history, and social security number back home to the mothership, unencrypted no doubt. That's the setting this will apparently ignore.
I've really been surprised by all this. Maybe that's silly of me, but for the first year or so of the new CEO he really seemed customer-focused, walking back a bunch of stupid anti-customer decisions. I guess that was temporary.
Yeah, but Jobs didn't invent any technology either. Ron Popeil did invent products himself - cheap plastic products but still, creative. Jobs was a salesdrone, through and through.
Frankly, with your low-ish userID, I'm shocked you had look up Ron Popeil - did you not have a TV as a kid or something? Have a strict early bedtime and so never had the TV on when the late-night infomercials started?
do they have a contingency for when they go out of business
Does it really matter? OK, probably there will be a hack --- almost certainly there will be a hack -- but, seriously, this is a set of games. Buy em again if you have to - by the time Steam ever goes under, you won't be a broke student, and the expense will be trivial.
Don't get me wrong, I always check GOG first, but if GOG doesn't have it I shrug and pay Steam. Of the ~300 Steam games I own, there are ~20 I'd bother to buy again, and by that time they'd be in the $5 price range, at most (heck, most of them were less than that on Steam). GOG sales can be eye-opening "huh, 15 games that were big hits in their day and look worth checking out for a total of $20".
But then, that's PC gaming, and not "$60 and maybe it's worth playing" console gaming. Never understood that scene.
If something has worked fine for 30 years, why the fuck would you change it? Windows is the OS that pointlessly moves around all the administrative tools with every release; Linux is the OS that doesn't. That's not to say the OS can't change, but the new pieces must be backwards compatible with the basic system debugging techniques everyone knows. All it takes is software developers who don't actively hate their userbase and find joy in punishing them.
So, what you're saying is: you must first elaborately troubleshoot system just to just freaking stderr so you can troubleshoot what you actually care about? Truly a step forward!
it just tries to resolve the AMPS (Polchinksi et al.) firewall paradox
Sure, I understand that's where it started.
ER=EPR not only is a huge reversal of the "no hair" conjectures of black holes, it adds wormholes *everywhere*,
And that sure seems likely to end up resolving the information-loss paradox, given the "no hair" theory is the cause of that.
it adds wormholes *everywhere*, and embraces this by suggesting (without much explanation so far) that these ER wormhole networks can provide a post-semiclassical gravity theory that is worth the calculational and conceptual burden of wormholes everywhere.
Well, I think the point of that is to try to explain where geometry comes from, in space. Once you ask that question, it's a Hell of a mystery. Where does the geometry of space come from? It's not clear it even existed until the universe cooled to the point there were slower-than-light particles, and thus time and distance. Saying entanglement between "adjacent loci" is the same as wormholes purports to be capable of explaining that - I'm not sure I get that, but intuitively it seems OK - points plus connections between points could give rise to geometry, but above a certain temperature you don't have the entanglement and it all breaks down.
We're both technically correct (the best kind of correct). Entanglement means you can know everything (everything it's possible to know) about a system and yet know nothing about it's individual parts. As systems evolve they become entangled, and the information about the individual components is lost. Sure the total "count of bits of information" is conserved, but that's just a constraint on the allowed states of the system, and the actual details become increasingly vague.
Obvious non-physicist here, but in absolute terms, information theory says that the original systems' (ice sculptures) information -- every particle's directions etc. was not destroyed, though it may be terribly difficult to ascertain by us at a later time.
I don't pretend to understand why, but the fundamental premise is that information is a conserved property.
This is just not true in quantum mechanics, at least if we're talking about what it's possible to observe (not merely practical). The QM definition of entropy is information loss (or that's my best attempt to translate the math to English - I've only studied QM a bit). QM entropy is a bit different from thermo and statistical entropy, though at large enough scales it all works out the same.
There's a remarkable new idea linking black holes to quantum entanglement, going under the name ER=EPR that, if true, will change how we think about both and may finally be a stepping stone to a quantum gravity theory that's actually useful. YouTube has several lectures by Leonard Susskind on the idea, as he and Stanford have been awesome about brining his lectures to the public.
That idea changes how we'd even state the black hole paradox, because in QM the only way you measure anything is to become entangled with it. So it may be that the information isn't lost, it's just unavailable to those not entangled with the black hole (but what exactly that means as the black hole evaporates is anyone's guess, and perhaps my favorite open question in physics).
Doctor Who is getting preachy. When Capelli's Doctor tells that woman that it's too bad she's a soldier and the blatant disgust with PE, I get little turned off
Doctor Who has been preachy since color (early on it was written more as a kids show, but oddly wasn't preachy). Thing was, the shows were (almost) always solidly, competently written. Some were uninspired, but the plots made sense, the characters were understandable, the scenes hung together, and so on. As social issues we care about change, the preachy-ness becomes hard to spot, because it was never central to the plot.
The problem with the most recent doctor is that the episodes are a chaotic mess. They seem thrown together at random - scenes that are individually well shot and acted, but don't tell a coherent story. Attention-grabbing story elements that never pay off, and afterwards you wonder why they weren't just cut. The writing has become dreck. Too bad, too, I really like the cast.
It's not for life - it's just until your next job change and ability to negotiate. I've almost never had a meaningful raise working at the same company (after my first year, and once in the 20 years following). IME, you get meaningful raises when someone really needs what you already know.
There's a trap there though - it's important to alternate between jobs that pay a lot better for your current skills, and jobs that force you to learn more modern, in-demand skills. Otherwise you'll suddenly find yourself laid off and unemployable when your niche gets too small.
Even if you managed the unobtanium cable, there's another fun problem. By the calculations above that's 250 MW for 200 seconds, which is about 10^7 kcal if all converted to thermal energy in braking. So even given some 95% efficient energy storage flywheel, you just dumped 5*10^5 kcal into a 1000 kg probe in three minutes (or 2.5 GJ if you prefer). That will end quickly, and not well (though maybe a 10 ton probe without cryogenic fuel could manage it - better upgrade that cable to uberite).
Well, if by "trees" we mean large swaths of Douglas Fir or Poplar monoculture, sure. If we mean a mature and diverse climax forest, no.
And so what? Why should any non-hippie care. It's not a theme park for your amusement.
If, by "renewable", we mean "we grow as many board feet as we harvest", again, no. Not even close,
Yes, 90%+ of all wood used in the US comes from tree farms now, and basically all paper (it's just cheaper for paper).
is nowhere near actually replacing what was lost.
Sure, that's not the job of the paper company anyhow. Most forest land lost over the centuries, and with farms now being very small compared to "peak farmland", forests are coming back (the natural process isn't quick, but more every decade since the 50s).
Thing of it is, it's not the phone that's interpreting the voice, it's servers at the other end of a long network connection that take the recorded sound bite and convert it into text.
So no, right now it's not terribly feasible because there are not enough servers to handle more than specific requests.
We know the NSA records every phone call, transcribes everything, and has a searchable DB, for multiple countries including the US, thanks to the Snowden leaks. Voice just isn't that much data, when you buy drives and servers in billion-dollar lots. Your tax dollars at work.
Not sure about the seashells, however I wonder if there might not be benefit in using say bamboo instead of traditional trees for paper products such as bumwad. It grows substantially faster and by my reckoning would translate into a smaller footprint required to produce.
No, it's not even relevant. As much as hippies like to pretend there's something you can do in your home to help the environment, this is not a US problem. Forest coverage in the US has grown substantially since the 50s, as crop yields increase there is simply less farmland, and more forest.
Almost all paper used in the US comes from tree farms, which are just a different kind of cropland, raised and harvested on a longer cycle than corn, but still a normal-ish cash crop.
At this point, increased paper use in the US likely increases forest coverage, as more land is used for tree farms to meet demand.
Most forest loss is simply not about paper use, but about clearing land for people to live and (mostly) farm, and we've seen that the pendulum eventually swings the other way, with high-tech farming taking so much less land.
But there'd be no reason to. Industrial power is different because you're paying for infrastructure built just for you, so you pay based on peak usage, not KWh. Water hookups just for outdoor use may have non-potable water, or more commonly, you pay normally for the water but you don't pay for sewer (which costs 3x in some places).
For data, the only difference is "upstream" vs "downstream", which is quite significant. Charging based on the of the data shouldn't fly (that should be the whole point of net neutrality regs, reality aside). Backhaul is all price-per-GB anyhow as I understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
don't know, maybe they ran whatever analytics on everyone's email or something
ike I said, if they've never accessed the data in America, then Microsoft ought to win
I doubt the technical details will really come up - perhaps we're still a nation of laws, and MS will win out on the merits, but color me dubious.
But where the data is "kept" isn't the question. Has Microsoft America accessed the data from America? If so, then at least a decade of precedent says a copy of that data is in America and is subject to American law and jurisdiction
Sure, but why would e.g. hotmail data for some random user be accessed by MS America?
Data is kept close to users, as there's no getting around the speed-of-light delay. Data for US users is going to be in one of MS's many US datacenters. I'm sure the Irish DC has quite a mix of British and continental EU citizen data, not just Irish citizen data, but that doesn't make it any better.
Microsoft operates a major data center in Ireland, like all the cloud providers do, and l'd bet they have a large tech support presence there as well, as many major tech companies do. It's not like they just have a PO Box: quite a bit of their EU business really is done from Ireland. It's the mix of low labor cost and tax incentives that works for many companies.
The NSA has everything compromised, though, so that doesn't differentiate cloud from non-cloud. That's very different from, say, the Sony hack, where everything becomes public.
Not every workload is appropriate for virtualization
People still think this? There's no performance downside to virtualization any more, unless you overload the host, and you get the ability to make snapshots if nothing else.
And for these "we need this up 110% of the time" applications, they'll find that if the "cloud vendor" has a problem there's nobody they can call to fix the issue
Always read your SLA. Many cloud-provided services are well supported, with people oncall 24/7 if the service itself goes down. Amazon is infamous for putting all its devs on pager duty, and the cloudy parts of MS as well (haven't heard about Google - anyone know who gets the pager duty there?). But you can't assume anything, and if you want someone to call, of course you'll need a support contract, just like anything else in IT.
Finally, you can't really depreciate cloud assets like you can capital expenses. So really, again, you're ultimately just comparing the cost of operating a datacenter versus the cloud technology. And you can already not worry about operating your own datacenter by simply using a colocated one.
The cloud is just a colo all grown up. What only the cloud offers is "I need 1000 new servers tomorrow, but I only want to pay for them for a week". (And capital depreciation is not a feature. It's when you spend all the money this year, but for taxes you must spread the cost over several years - it's almost always better to count the cost ASAP.)
being able to swap a drive or add some ram will still be a necessary skill.
But not a particularly valuable one - it's a blue-collar job now, like pulling cable.
That's not a problem, that's somebody else's fault, which is the first thing and CIO looks for in any solution.
Though, really, have we ever seen the clouds from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft get compromised?
When a game is $2, and it looks like it might be fun, why not try it? If I get a few hours of fun, it's money well spent, even if I never see it again.
As for price, it took Half Life 2 well over 5 years before the price dropped to $10.
Sure, but how many years would you project before Steam somehow goes under? At least 5? Then the games you're buying today will be under $10 if you need to re-buy them. Heck, I think I've bought Master or Orion II 3 or 4 times now, and since I spent several addicted weekends each time, I can hardly regret the $10 or whatever.
For awhile they had DLC for Skyrim that still costs more than the cost of Legendary Edition of Skyrim
DLC is an attempt to make gaming cost as much as the movies. Screw that.
Ahh, so your "solution" is simply to throw away money.
Yes, you understand! In fact, beyond basic food, shelter, and clothing, most of what I do with money is pay for convenience. If I had a yard, I'd pay someone to mow it for me, and in just a few months that would add up to more than the potential I've "wasted" if Steam ever shuts down.
You already had to opt-out of "customer experience improvement program", or Microsoft was already sending a list of all your creditcard numbers, sexual fetishes, any embarrassing medical history, and social security number back home to the mothership, unencrypted no doubt. That's the setting this will apparently ignore.
I've really been surprised by all this. Maybe that's silly of me, but for the first year or so of the new CEO he really seemed customer-focused, walking back a bunch of stupid anti-customer decisions. I guess that was temporary.
Yeah, but Jobs didn't invent any technology either. Ron Popeil did invent products himself - cheap plastic products but still, creative. Jobs was a salesdrone, through and through.
Frankly, with your low-ish userID, I'm shocked you had look up Ron Popeil - did you not have a TV as a kid or something? Have a strict early bedtime and so never had the TV on when the late-night infomercials started?
Heck, Weird Al did a song about him. Please tell me you know who Weird Al is?
do they have a contingency for when they go out of business
Does it really matter? OK, probably there will be a hack --- almost certainly there will be a hack -- but, seriously, this is a set of games. Buy em again if you have to - by the time Steam ever goes under, you won't be a broke student, and the expense will be trivial.
Don't get me wrong, I always check GOG first, but if GOG doesn't have it I shrug and pay Steam. Of the ~300 Steam games I own, there are ~20 I'd bother to buy again, and by that time they'd be in the $5 price range, at most (heck, most of them were less than that on Steam). GOG sales can be eye-opening "huh, 15 games that were big hits in their day and look worth checking out for a total of $20".
But then, that's PC gaming, and not "$60 and maybe it's worth playing" console gaming. Never understood that scene.
If something has worked fine for 30 years, why the fuck would you change it? Windows is the OS that pointlessly moves around all the administrative tools with every release; Linux is the OS that doesn't. That's not to say the OS can't change, but the new pieces must be backwards compatible with the basic system debugging techniques everyone knows. All it takes is software developers who don't actively hate their userbase and find joy in punishing them.
So, what you're saying is: you must first elaborately troubleshoot system just to just freaking stderr so you can troubleshoot what you actually care about? Truly a step forward!
it just tries to resolve the AMPS (Polchinksi et al.) firewall paradox
Sure, I understand that's where it started.
ER=EPR not only is a huge reversal of the "no hair" conjectures of black holes, it adds wormholes *everywhere*,
And that sure seems likely to end up resolving the information-loss paradox, given the "no hair" theory is the cause of that.
it adds wormholes *everywhere*, and embraces this by suggesting (without much explanation so far) that these ER wormhole networks can provide a post-semiclassical gravity theory that is worth the calculational and conceptual burden of wormholes everywhere.
Well, I think the point of that is to try to explain where geometry comes from, in space. Once you ask that question, it's a Hell of a mystery. Where does the geometry of space come from? It's not clear it even existed until the universe cooled to the point there were slower-than-light particles, and thus time and distance. Saying entanglement between "adjacent loci" is the same as wormholes purports to be capable of explaining that - I'm not sure I get that, but intuitively it seems OK - points plus connections between points could give rise to geometry, but above a certain temperature you don't have the entanglement and it all breaks down.
Ehh, or it could all be BS. We'll see.
We're both technically correct (the best kind of correct). Entanglement means you can know everything (everything it's possible to know) about a system and yet know nothing about it's individual parts. As systems evolve they become entangled, and the information about the individual components is lost. Sure the total "count of bits of information" is conserved, but that's just a constraint on the allowed states of the system, and the actual details become increasingly vague.
Obvious non-physicist here, but in absolute terms, information theory says that the original systems' (ice sculptures) information -- every particle's directions etc. was not destroyed, though it may be terribly difficult to ascertain by us at a later time.
I don't pretend to understand why, but the fundamental premise is that information is a conserved property.
This is just not true in quantum mechanics, at least if we're talking about what it's possible to observe (not merely practical). The QM definition of entropy is information loss (or that's my best attempt to translate the math to English - I've only studied QM a bit). QM entropy is a bit different from thermo and statistical entropy, though at large enough scales it all works out the same.
There's a remarkable new idea linking black holes to quantum entanglement, going under the name ER=EPR that, if true, will change how we think about both and may finally be a stepping stone to a quantum gravity theory that's actually useful. YouTube has several lectures by Leonard Susskind on the idea, as he and Stanford have been awesome about brining his lectures to the public.
That idea changes how we'd even state the black hole paradox, because in QM the only way you measure anything is to become entangled with it. So it may be that the information isn't lost, it's just unavailable to those not entangled with the black hole (but what exactly that means as the black hole evaporates is anyone's guess, and perhaps my favorite open question in physics).
Doctor Who is getting preachy. When Capelli's Doctor tells that woman that it's too bad she's a soldier and the blatant disgust with PE, I get little turned off
Doctor Who has been preachy since color (early on it was written more as a kids show, but oddly wasn't preachy). Thing was, the shows were (almost) always solidly, competently written. Some were uninspired, but the plots made sense, the characters were understandable, the scenes hung together, and so on. As social issues we care about change, the preachy-ness becomes hard to spot, because it was never central to the plot.
The problem with the most recent doctor is that the episodes are a chaotic mess. They seem thrown together at random - scenes that are individually well shot and acted, but don't tell a coherent story. Attention-grabbing story elements that never pay off, and afterwards you wonder why they weren't just cut. The writing has become dreck. Too bad, too, I really like the cast.
It's not for life - it's just until your next job change and ability to negotiate. I've almost never had a meaningful raise working at the same company (after my first year, and once in the 20 years following). IME, you get meaningful raises when someone really needs what you already know.
There's a trap there though - it's important to alternate between jobs that pay a lot better for your current skills, and jobs that force you to learn more modern, in-demand skills. Otherwise you'll suddenly find yourself laid off and unemployable when your niche gets too small.
Even if you managed the unobtanium cable, there's another fun problem. By the calculations above that's 250 MW for 200 seconds, which is about 10^7 kcal if all converted to thermal energy in braking. So even given some 95% efficient energy storage flywheel, you just dumped 5*10^5 kcal into a 1000 kg probe in three minutes (or 2.5 GJ if you prefer). That will end quickly, and not well (though maybe a 10 ton probe without cryogenic fuel could manage it - better upgrade that cable to uberite).
Well, if by "trees" we mean large swaths of Douglas Fir or Poplar monoculture, sure. If we mean a mature and diverse climax forest, no.
And so what? Why should any non-hippie care. It's not a theme park for your amusement.
If, by "renewable", we mean "we grow as many board feet as we harvest", again, no. Not even close,
Yes, 90%+ of all wood used in the US comes from tree farms now, and basically all paper (it's just cheaper for paper).
is nowhere near actually replacing what was lost.
Sure, that's not the job of the paper company anyhow. Most forest land lost over the centuries, and with farms now being very small compared to "peak farmland", forests are coming back (the natural process isn't quick, but more every decade since the 50s).
Thing of it is, it's not the phone that's interpreting the voice, it's servers at the other end of a long network connection that take the recorded sound bite and convert it into text.
So no, right now it's not terribly feasible because there are not enough servers to handle more than specific requests.
We know the NSA records every phone call, transcribes everything, and has a searchable DB, for multiple countries including the US, thanks to the Snowden leaks. Voice just isn't that much data, when you buy drives and servers in billion-dollar lots. Your tax dollars at work.
Not sure about the seashells, however I wonder if there might not be benefit in using say bamboo instead of traditional trees for paper products such as bumwad. It grows substantially faster and by my reckoning would translate into a smaller footprint required to produce.
No, it's not even relevant. As much as hippies like to pretend there's something you can do in your home to help the environment, this is not a US problem. Forest coverage in the US has grown substantially since the 50s, as crop yields increase there is simply less farmland, and more forest.
Almost all paper used in the US comes from tree farms, which are just a different kind of cropland, raised and harvested on a longer cycle than corn, but still a normal-ish cash crop.
At this point, increased paper use in the US likely increases forest coverage, as more land is used for tree farms to meet demand.
Most forest loss is simply not about paper use, but about clearing land for people to live and (mostly) farm, and we've seen that the pendulum eventually swings the other way, with high-tech farming taking so much less land.
Fair point. But then, I think that every "dot-com" company name with "OO" in it is a kids name to begin with. Stupid branding fads.
But there'd be no reason to. Industrial power is different because you're paying for infrastructure built just for you, so you pay based on peak usage, not KWh. Water hookups just for outdoor use may have non-potable water, or more commonly, you pay normally for the water but you don't pay for sewer (which costs 3x in some places).
For data, the only difference is "upstream" vs "downstream", which is quite significant. Charging based on the of the data shouldn't fly (that should be the whole point of net neutrality regs, reality aside). Backhaul is all price-per-GB anyhow as I understand it.