Obviously the proposal is nonserious(though it's probably good that I'm not given discretionary power over substantial numbers of people, that might end badly...); and the point moot; but the evolution of the PC audio subsystem, in whatever Intel is calling the successor standard to AC 97 these days, has really picked up some character.
Back in the good old days, you had your fixed-function jacks, hardwired to various ins and outs of the amplifiers and the ADCs, and physically-switched headphone jacks, with an actual little contact to detect insertion, and muting usually happening below the software level.
Now, not so much. Port assignment and presence detection are generally handled in software (the system will even try to guess correctly based on device impedance ).(doc warning, Microsoft did the exhaustive-classification-of-stuff-by-typical-impedance, and that's the format they put it in)
Unless the driver is in a good mood, and the details of the OEM's implementation up to snuff, failure to mute on headphone insert, massive confusion between mic-in and line-in, etc. are all to be expected. If the computer in question has an internal speaker, the fun will usually increase.
Obviously, not much to be done against somebody with a sharp object an no aversion to property damage; but authoritatively silencing a computer is substantially more complicated than it once was.
ICQ and AIM are both OSCAR-protocol based; but, to the best of my knowledge, the only common treatment was that AOL was a dick about any 3rd-party implementation of an OSCAR client. Aside from that, AIM basically pretended that ICQ didn't exist, and vice-versa. AOL always was a somewhat puzzling company.
...that someone who had been working on it "accidentally" leaks the source.
That might actually be a worse result. Unless there are Winamp-specific features/interfaces that are either difficult to clone or near-impossible to get full compatibility with, without the source, leaked-but-unlicensed source would just cast suspicion on any winamp-like projects, and fall into a difficult-to-develop for legal grey area (since the source leak itself would be hot, patchsets would presumably be legal; but actual compilation would require hanging out in warez circles and leave the resulting build illegal to distribute.)
Kind of like the issues XBMC had, back when they actually supported Xboxes. Their codebase was fine; but the SDK components required to actually do a build, and possibly the builds themselves, depending on exactly how hungry MS legal was feeling, were always illicit and kind of a pain to deal with.
I think that AOL may have reached the point where they've started outsourcing management to the same senile old people who are their core dialup subscriber base.
No it isn't. You collect pieces of Foobar and put them together to try to get something that acts sort of like a music player.
I think that we are seeing the fundamental collision between the "Freedom is good, freedom indistinguishable from Turing completeness is better!" camp and the "I've got a task to do here, Make It So." camp...
In the context of a relatively prosaic problem like music playing, I'm more inclined to sympathize with the latter camp (though not to the extent of some shit like iTunes); though my sympathy for the former camp leads me to desire an ideal solution that would consist of a sane set of default pieces of Foobar, more or less approximating WinAmp, with the option to go down to the basement and tamper with the advanced EQ settings, custom plugins, audio-oriented LISP implementation, etc.
" the challenges Elon has faced in Tesla are a clear demonstration of what MBAs (and Lawyers and Lobbyists) are good for - success in the real world."
While this is true, I suspect that what he sees (and dislikes) about the fact is that MBAs (and especially lawyers and lobbyists) are necessary tools in much the same way that soldiers are: they fight with the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists, laying waste to much real value in the process; because the alternative of having the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists march in unopposed is even worse.
Engineers, scientists, and the like, by contrast, get sent out to prod the obnoxiously complex and notoriously noncompliant laws of nature into enough semblance of obedience that they can be put to good use.
Obviously, there is value to having a good lawyer, or a good army, at your back; because there are others out there who have the same, and don't have your best interests at heart; but there is a certain tragedy in watching men, time, and money, get thrown into the meatgrinder in order to keep two adversaries off one another's backs; while there is a certain triumph in seeing the application of human effort bring new areas of nature within the scope of human understanding and utility.
But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
Well, I consulted with the IT department and the facilities department. Facilities says that, since it's a leased space, it would be pretty expensive to pull out all the cubes and make the necessary wiring changes.
IT said that all the PCs already have mics and built in speakers, and they can get the work-experience kid to hack together a system that samples background noise from all over the office, mixes it, and plays in continuously from all PCs (with the process running in a security context high enough that the peons can't turn it off) by next week for no money.
In light of that, we've decided that a simulation of the open-plan experience is the best way to go. Plus, those worthless non-team-players who "work from home" will love it when we roll it out to them.
Unless you're talking homeopathy, I'm pretty sure medicine falls under the category "science".
Until the surgical robots finally take over, there is a nontrivial element of skilled craftsmanship in the messier areas of medicine. You wouldn't exactly call a surgeon 'blue collar' (or pay one accordingly); but the surgeon is doing something surprisingly similar to sculpture, just inside your torso, and with years of school to instruct him in what parts are 'patient' and what parts are 'pathology' so that he cuts the correct ones...
They have no choice in the matter, since nobody makes 500GHz CPUs; but there is a reason why (many, not all) 'supercomputers' lay out a considerable amount of their budget for very fast, very low latency, interconnects (myrinet, infiniband, sometimes proprietary fabrics for single-system-image stuff), rather than just going GigE or 10GigE and calling it a day, like your generic datacenter-of-whitebox-1Us does.
There are problems where chatter between nodes is low, and separate system images are acceptable, and blessed are they, for they shall be cheap; but people don't buy the super fancy interconnects just for the prestige value.
The TSA are a 9/11 job; but the (domestic) rot really has earlier roots. The FBI has basically been a clusterfuck on rights and liberties since good old J. Edgar Hoover himself(COINTELPRO, etc.), and the 'War on Drugs'(formally declared by Nixon in '71, CDAPCA was a year earlier, DEA in '73, Bush Sr. helped push military and CIA involvement, and create the ONDCP in the '80s, though calling its direction 'the drug czar' was Biden, really turned up the heat), and the "Law Enforcement Support Office" (link uses a DoD signed cert, your browser may complain) that provides good, serious, killin' gear to domestic law enforcement dates to '97.
It's been a shamefully bipartisan exercise, for the most part, unfortunately. With the exception of a few, largely impotent, libertarians, who are kept out of sight except when environmental legislation inconveniences business, or Nacy Pelosi comes for your guns, the right wing (even the allegedly-skeptical-of-big-gummint-and-the-nanny-state aspects of it) has a hard-on that just won't quit for Our Troops and our Boys in Blue, so they can generally be relied upon to support it, and even the bluest of the left wing will wet themselves in terror at the thought of being seen as 'soft on crime', so they are totally useless (and far from all of them even start out with good intentions).
Oh, I'm hardly proclaiming their invulnerability (indeed, the tl;dr of the report I linked was 'the only thing keeping cheap-ass RPGs and the occasional MANPADS from being the leading killer is mechanical unreliability and controlled flight into terrain'); but just noting that AC's hypothesis is probably false. Helicopters are rather fragile, especially if they have the doors open in 'dropping the strike team because we can' or 'shooting up the place with door guns, because we can' modes; but post-Vietnam designs generally consider the possibility of some 3rd-world nuisance scoring a number of hits with rifle or light machine gun fire.
(In a sense, though, this is all irrelevant to that specific case, since shooting at a DHS helicopter either involves it shooting back, or you winning, and getting to go on to the challenge mode, which involves substantially more cops, with substantially more guns, swarming you in APCs and either levelling the place or breaking out the trusty 'who would have guessed that tear gas and flashbangs cause suspects to burn alive horribly, along with any tedious evidence we would otherwise have to waste our time with?' technique, as seen in that 'rogue-cop' case in California some time back.)
"Why would I want to discard my two million lines of MPI-only F95 code that only ten years ago was serial F77? The current code works "well enough" to get science done."
Out of genuine curiosity (I'm not nearly familiar enough with either the economics or the cultural factors involved), would the hardware vendors, rather than the scientists(who, are scientists, not computer scientists, and just want to get their jobs done, not become programmers, so aren't strongly motivated to change), be in a position to attack the legacy code problem?
While a lot of academic code isn't FOSS in the techie sense (it may be in some way encumbered, it may just never have been formally released at all, it may be a total wreck, etc.), I'd assume that most of it isn't so secret that a deal couldn't be arranged to get specific people a look at it, even if under NDA.
If I were somebody like Intel or Nvidia, would it ever be worth my time to attempt to juice hardware sales (especially someone like Nvidia, whose strongest product is rather unlike a standard-issue general-purpose CPU cluster) by selling the customer on a combined "We'll sell you 10,000 Tesla boards, and provide software engineers to rebuild 'cranky-oldschool-geophysics-sim' as an equivalent; but CUDA-aware, application."
Doable? Far too expensive? Faces serious pushback from the old timer who knows how to make that ol' fortran dance? Code considered too valuable to risk disclosure? People would rather be locked into a ghastly mess that is at least old enough to be widely supported, rather than some new and possibly proprietary ghastly-mess-in-10-years?
my intuition tells me that disruptive technologies are precisely that because people don't anticipate them coming along nor do they anticipate the changes that will follow their introduction. not that people can't see disruptive tech ramping up, but often they don't.
Arguably, there are at least two senses of 'disruptive' at play when people talk about 'disruptive technology'.
There's the business sense, where a technology is 'disruptive' because it turns a (usually pre-existing, even considered banal or cheap and inferior) technology into a viable, then superior, competitor to a nicer but far more expensive product put out by the fat, lazy, incumbent. This comment, and probably yours, was typed on one of those(or, really, a collection of those.)
Then there's the engineering/applied science sense, where it is quite clear to everybody that "If we could only fabricate silicon photonics/achieve stable entanglement of N QBits/grow a single-walled carbon nanotube as long as we want/synthesize a non-precious-metal substitute for platinum catalysts/whatever, we could change the world!"; but nobody knows how to do that yet.
Unlike the business case (where the implications of 'surprisingly adequate computers get unbelievably fucking crazy cheap' were largely unexplored, and before that happened people would have looked at you like you were nuts if you told them that, in the year 2013, we have no space colonies, people still live in mud huts and fight bush wars with slightly-post-WWII small arms; but people who have inadequate food and no electricity have cell phones), the technology case is generally fairly well planned out (practically every vendor in the silicon compute or interconnect space has a plan for, say, what the silicon-photonics-interconnect architecture of the future would look like; but no silicon photonics interconnects, and we have no quantum computers of useful size; but computer scientists have already studied the algorithms that we might run on them, if we had them); but application awaits some breakthrough in the lab that hasn't come yet.
(Optical fiber is probably a decent example of a tech/engineering 'disruptive technology' that has already happened. Microwave waveguides, because those can be tacked together with sheet metal and a bit of effort, were old news, and the logic and desireability of applying the same approach to smaller wavelengths was clear; but until somebody hit on a way to make cheap, high-purity, glass fiber, that was irrelevant. Once they did, the microwave-based infrastructure fell apart pretty quickly; but until they did, no amount of knowing that 'if we had optical fiber, we could shove 1000 links into that one damn waveguide!' made much difference.)
Arguably, WAN bandwidth (except wireless, where the physics are genuinely nasty) is mostly a political problem with a few technical standards committees grafted on, rather than a technical problem.
Even without much infrastructure improvement, merely scaring a cable company can, like magic, suddenly cause speeds to increase to whatever DOCSIS level the local hardware has been upgraded to, even as fees drop. Really scaring them can achieve yet better results, again without even driving them into insolvency, however much they might deserve it...
Even if you are willing to burn nigh unlimited power, thermals can still be a problem (barring some genuinely exotic approaches to cooling), because ye olde speed of light says that density is the only way to beat latency. There are, of course, ways to suck at latency even more than the speed of light demands; but there are no ways to suck less.
If your problem is absolutely beautifully parallel (and, while we're dreaming, doesn't even cache-miss very often), horrible thermals would be a problem that could be solved by money: build a bigger datacenter and buy more power. If there's a lot of chatter between CPUs, or between CPUs and RAM, distance starts to hurt. If memory serves, 850nm light over 62.5 micrometer fiber is almost 5 nanoseconds/meter. That won't hurt your BattleField4 multiplayer performance; but when even a cheap, nasty, consumer grade CPU is 3GHz, there go 15 clocks for every meter, even assuming everything else is perfect. Copper is worse, some fiber might be better.
Obviously, problems that can be solved by money are still problems, so they are a concern; but problems that physics tells us are insoluble are even less fun.
"If you need a cluster, Amazon and others will rent you time on theirs."
You come from the planet where all algorithms parallelize neatly, eh? I've heard that they've cured the common cold and the second law of thermodynamics there, too...
If the vendor made any sort of potentially-binding-on-them claims about accuracy (and I think some do provide assurances of the "If you didn't lie on any of the input fields, we stand behind the output fields, terms and conditions do apply" flavor), I'd expect them to be null and void the next year; but disabling printing, rather than putting up a few obnoxious warning banners, reeks of lock-in. What if this friend had wanted a paper backup of his returns from last year?
I wouldn't say that using last year's tax package to do this year's returns is a good strategy, just that tax-package vendors have done their best to enjoy 'software as a service' style economics even back when you were buying floppies in a big, sturdy, cardboard box at CompUSA, so the adjustment to online dystopia will be fairly small.
(It makes one wonder, though, why isn't there room in the market for some tax accountant to knock together an Excel template and sell it for $5? It's not as though tax or accounting software does much heavy lifting, in software terms, it's just a matter of having the right formulae in the right places. Piggibacking on software not written by crackheaded monkeys would make the stuff massively more endurable, in terms of things like 'UI' and 'actual testing and support' and the customer would still have a need to buy your new ruleset next year...)
They are only as strong as their weakest part, the rotors. Anybody with a sling and a large rock could knock one out of the sky.
It wouldn't be the first time that we got shafted by a contractor under-delivering; but the UH-60's design requirements were (among other things) formulated in response to the number of UH-1s that were lost to small arms fire in Vietnam. The body was given enough armor to (ideally) have some resistance to 20mm rounds; but survivability testing of external components included consideration of the (common) "what if some belligerent locals with 7.62mm eastern-bloc cheapies where shooting at us?" scenario.
Now, given the number of aircraft downed (not necessarily with any fatalities, since this tends to happen at low altitude for obvious reasons) by wire strikes, I suspect that a suitably clever 'entangling' fiber payload could make a considerable nuisance of itself even with very low impact speed; but that isn't exactly a household object.
"Fort Worth police earlier said they could not immediately find any record of officer involvement but police spokesman Sgt. Kelly Peel said Tuesday that the department's Traffic Division coordinated with the NHTSA on the use of off-duty officers after the agency asked for help with the survey."
The actual contractors doing the sampling weren't cops; but they were accompanied by cops (who, no doubt, made every effort to convey that they were off-duty and not involved in any sort of law-enforcement exercise or official capacity; but merely being used because a 100% voluntary sampling operation needed a security force punchier than generic rentacops, or um, something?)
A Gartner Analyst attacked something for 'lacking clarity' and 'claims that frequently don't line up with reality'? Please give me a moment to collect my jaw from the floor and restore it to its operating location.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a bold example of un-selfawareness...
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the proposal is nonserious(though it's probably good that I'm not given discretionary power over substantial numbers of people, that might end badly...); and the point moot; but the evolution of the PC audio subsystem, in whatever Intel is calling the successor standard to AC 97 these days, has really picked up some character.
Back in the good old days, you had your fixed-function jacks, hardwired to various ins and outs of the amplifiers and the ADCs, and physically-switched headphone jacks, with an actual little contact to detect insertion, and muting usually happening below the software level.
Now, not so much. Port assignment and presence detection are generally handled in software (the system will even try to guess correctly based on device impedance ).(doc warning, Microsoft did the exhaustive-classification-of-stuff-by-typical-impedance, and that's the format they put it in)
Unless the driver is in a good mood, and the details of the OEM's implementation up to snuff, failure to mute on headphone insert, massive confusion between mic-in and line-in, etc. are all to be expected. If the computer in question has an internal speaker, the fun will usually increase.
Obviously, not much to be done against somebody with a sharp object an no aversion to property damage; but authoritatively silencing a computer is substantially more complicated than it once was.
It's even stranger. They ordered him to do it.
Wow, good thing we've learned so much about how to run a country like a business(tm) since those dark days!
ICQ and AIM are both OSCAR-protocol based; but, to the best of my knowledge, the only common treatment was that AOL was a dick about any 3rd-party implementation of an OSCAR client. Aside from that, AIM basically pretended that ICQ didn't exist, and vice-versa. AOL always was a somewhat puzzling company.
...that someone who had been working on it "accidentally" leaks the source.
That might actually be a worse result. Unless there are Winamp-specific features/interfaces that are either difficult to clone or near-impossible to get full compatibility with, without the source, leaked-but-unlicensed source would just cast suspicion on any winamp-like projects, and fall into a difficult-to-develop for legal grey area (since the source leak itself would be hot, patchsets would presumably be legal; but actual compilation would require hanging out in warez circles and leave the resulting build illegal to distribute.)
Kind of like the issues XBMC had, back when they actually supported Xboxes. Their codebase was fine; but the SDK components required to actually do a build, and possibly the builds themselves, depending on exactly how hungry MS legal was feeling, were always illicit and kind of a pain to deal with.
I think that AOL may have reached the point where they've started outsourcing management to the same senile old people who are their core dialup subscriber base.
No it isn't. You collect pieces of Foobar and put them together to try to get something that acts sort of like a music player.
I think that we are seeing the fundamental collision between the "Freedom is good, freedom indistinguishable from Turing completeness is better!" camp and the "I've got a task to do here, Make It So." camp...
In the context of a relatively prosaic problem like music playing, I'm more inclined to sympathize with the latter camp (though not to the extent of some shit like iTunes); though my sympathy for the former camp leads me to desire an ideal solution that would consist of a sane set of default pieces of Foobar, more or less approximating WinAmp, with the option to go down to the basement and tamper with the advanced EQ settings, custom plugins, audio-oriented LISP implementation, etc.
How was he allowed to bid on a second defense procurement project after bringing one in successfully, early, and under budget?
I know that fraud and felonies and stuff aren't enough to exclude you from contracting; but that's just deviant...
No, no... Hire illegal Mexican janitorial contractors to rinse, then repeat. You don't want to get your hands dirty.
" the challenges Elon has faced in Tesla are a clear demonstration of what MBAs (and Lawyers and Lobbyists) are good for - success in the real world."
While this is true, I suspect that what he sees (and dislikes) about the fact is that MBAs (and especially lawyers and lobbyists) are necessary tools in much the same way that soldiers are: they fight with the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists, laying waste to much real value in the process; because the alternative of having the other guy's MBAs, lawyers, and lobbyists march in unopposed is even worse.
Engineers, scientists, and the like, by contrast, get sent out to prod the obnoxiously complex and notoriously noncompliant laws of nature into enough semblance of obedience that they can be put to good use.
Obviously, there is value to having a good lawyer, or a good army, at your back; because there are others out there who have the same, and don't have your best interests at heart; but there is a certain tragedy in watching men, time, and money, get thrown into the meatgrinder in order to keep two adversaries off one another's backs; while there is a certain triumph in seeing the application of human effort bring new areas of nature within the scope of human understanding and utility.
Are you saying that running society by pandering to my basest prejudices and whatever 'common sense' I pulled out of my ass isn't the best of ideas?
Fucking ivory tower elitists. Always spitting on the common man.
But then who's going to move you to open floor layouts to "improve collaboration"?
Well, I consulted with the IT department and the facilities department. Facilities says that, since it's a leased space, it would be pretty expensive to pull out all the cubes and make the necessary wiring changes.
IT said that all the PCs already have mics and built in speakers, and they can get the work-experience kid to hack together a system that samples background noise from all over the office, mixes it, and plays in continuously from all PCs (with the process running in a security context high enough that the peons can't turn it off) by next week for no money.
In light of that, we've decided that a simulation of the open-plan experience is the best way to go. Plus, those worthless non-team-players who "work from home" will love it when we roll it out to them.
Unless you're talking homeopathy, I'm pretty sure medicine falls under the category "science".
Until the surgical robots finally take over, there is a nontrivial element of skilled craftsmanship in the messier areas of medicine. You wouldn't exactly call a surgeon 'blue collar' (or pay one accordingly); but the surgeon is doing something surprisingly similar to sculpture, just inside your torso, and with years of school to instruct him in what parts are 'patient' and what parts are 'pathology' so that he cuts the correct ones...
After all these years, the Llama will finally have its vengeance...
They have no choice in the matter, since nobody makes 500GHz CPUs; but there is a reason why (many, not all) 'supercomputers' lay out a considerable amount of their budget for very fast, very low latency, interconnects (myrinet, infiniband, sometimes proprietary fabrics for single-system-image stuff), rather than just going GigE or 10GigE and calling it a day, like your generic datacenter-of-whitebox-1Us does.
There are problems where chatter between nodes is low, and separate system images are acceptable, and blessed are they, for they shall be cheap; but people don't buy the super fancy interconnects just for the prestige value.
The TSA are a 9/11 job; but the (domestic) rot really has earlier roots. The FBI has basically been a clusterfuck on rights and liberties since good old J. Edgar Hoover himself(COINTELPRO, etc.), and the 'War on Drugs'(formally declared by Nixon in '71, CDAPCA was a year earlier, DEA in '73, Bush Sr. helped push military and CIA involvement, and create the ONDCP in the '80s, though calling its direction 'the drug czar' was Biden, really turned up the heat), and the "Law Enforcement Support Office" (link uses a DoD signed cert, your browser may complain) that provides good, serious, killin' gear to domestic law enforcement dates to '97.
It's been a shamefully bipartisan exercise, for the most part, unfortunately. With the exception of a few, largely impotent, libertarians, who are kept out of sight except when environmental legislation inconveniences business, or Nacy Pelosi comes for your guns, the right wing (even the allegedly-skeptical-of-big-gummint-and-the-nanny-state aspects of it) has a hard-on that just won't quit for Our Troops and our Boys in Blue, so they can generally be relied upon to support it, and even the bluest of the left wing will wet themselves in terror at the thought of being seen as 'soft on crime', so they are totally useless (and far from all of them even start out with good intentions).
Oh, I'm hardly proclaiming their invulnerability (indeed, the tl;dr of the report I linked was 'the only thing keeping cheap-ass RPGs and the occasional MANPADS from being the leading killer is mechanical unreliability and controlled flight into terrain'); but just noting that AC's hypothesis is probably false. Helicopters are rather fragile, especially if they have the doors open in 'dropping the strike team because we can' or 'shooting up the place with door guns, because we can' modes; but post-Vietnam designs generally consider the possibility of some 3rd-world nuisance scoring a number of hits with rifle or light machine gun fire.
(In a sense, though, this is all irrelevant to that specific case, since shooting at a DHS helicopter either involves it shooting back, or you winning, and getting to go on to the challenge mode, which involves substantially more cops, with substantially more guns, swarming you in APCs and either levelling the place or breaking out the trusty 'who would have guessed that tear gas and flashbangs cause suspects to burn alive horribly, along with any tedious evidence we would otherwise have to waste our time with?' technique, as seen in that 'rogue-cop' case in California some time back.)
"Why would I want to discard my two million lines of MPI-only F95 code that only ten years ago was serial F77? The current code works "well enough" to get science done."
Out of genuine curiosity (I'm not nearly familiar enough with either the economics or the cultural factors involved), would the hardware vendors, rather than the scientists(who, are scientists, not computer scientists, and just want to get their jobs done, not become programmers, so aren't strongly motivated to change), be in a position to attack the legacy code problem?
While a lot of academic code isn't FOSS in the techie sense (it may be in some way encumbered, it may just never have been formally released at all, it may be a total wreck, etc.), I'd assume that most of it isn't so secret that a deal couldn't be arranged to get specific people a look at it, even if under NDA.
If I were somebody like Intel or Nvidia, would it ever be worth my time to attempt to juice hardware sales (especially someone like Nvidia, whose strongest product is rather unlike a standard-issue general-purpose CPU cluster) by selling the customer on a combined "We'll sell you 10,000 Tesla boards, and provide software engineers to rebuild 'cranky-oldschool-geophysics-sim' as an equivalent; but CUDA-aware, application."
Doable? Far too expensive? Faces serious pushback from the old timer who knows how to make that ol' fortran dance? Code considered too valuable to risk disclosure? People would rather be locked into a ghastly mess that is at least old enough to be widely supported, rather than some new and possibly proprietary ghastly-mess-in-10-years?
my intuition tells me that disruptive technologies are precisely that because people don't anticipate them coming along nor do they anticipate the changes that will follow their introduction. not that people can't see disruptive tech ramping up, but often they don't.
Arguably, there are at least two senses of 'disruptive' at play when people talk about 'disruptive technology'.
There's the business sense, where a technology is 'disruptive' because it turns a (usually pre-existing, even considered banal or cheap and inferior) technology into a viable, then superior, competitor to a nicer but far more expensive product put out by the fat, lazy, incumbent. This comment, and probably yours, was typed on one of those(or, really, a collection of those.)
Then there's the engineering/applied science sense, where it is quite clear to everybody that "If we could only fabricate silicon photonics/achieve stable entanglement of N QBits/grow a single-walled carbon nanotube as long as we want/synthesize a non-precious-metal substitute for platinum catalysts/whatever, we could change the world!"; but nobody knows how to do that yet.
Unlike the business case (where the implications of 'surprisingly adequate computers get unbelievably fucking crazy cheap' were largely unexplored, and before that happened people would have looked at you like you were nuts if you told them that, in the year 2013, we have no space colonies, people still live in mud huts and fight bush wars with slightly-post-WWII small arms; but people who have inadequate food and no electricity have cell phones), the technology case is generally fairly well planned out (practically every vendor in the silicon compute or interconnect space has a plan for, say, what the silicon-photonics-interconnect architecture of the future would look like; but no silicon photonics interconnects, and we have no quantum computers of useful size; but computer scientists have already studied the algorithms that we might run on them, if we had them); but application awaits some breakthrough in the lab that hasn't come yet.
(Optical fiber is probably a decent example of a tech/engineering 'disruptive technology' that has already happened. Microwave waveguides, because those can be tacked together with sheet metal and a bit of effort, were old news, and the logic and desireability of applying the same approach to smaller wavelengths was clear; but until somebody hit on a way to make cheap, high-purity, glass fiber, that was irrelevant. Once they did, the microwave-based infrastructure fell apart pretty quickly; but until they did, no amount of knowing that 'if we had optical fiber, we could shove 1000 links into that one damn waveguide!' made much difference.)
Arguably, WAN bandwidth (except wireless, where the physics are genuinely nasty) is mostly a political problem with a few technical standards committees grafted on, rather than a technical problem.
Even without much infrastructure improvement, merely scaring a cable company can, like magic, suddenly cause speeds to increase to whatever DOCSIS level the local hardware has been upgraded to, even as fees drop. Really scaring them can achieve yet better results, again without even driving them into insolvency, however much they might deserve it...
Even if you are willing to burn nigh unlimited power, thermals can still be a problem (barring some genuinely exotic approaches to cooling), because ye olde speed of light says that density is the only way to beat latency. There are, of course, ways to suck at latency even more than the speed of light demands; but there are no ways to suck less.
If your problem is absolutely beautifully parallel (and, while we're dreaming, doesn't even cache-miss very often), horrible thermals would be a problem that could be solved by money: build a bigger datacenter and buy more power. If there's a lot of chatter between CPUs, or between CPUs and RAM, distance starts to hurt. If memory serves, 850nm light over 62.5 micrometer fiber is almost 5 nanoseconds/meter. That won't hurt your BattleField4 multiplayer performance; but when even a cheap, nasty, consumer grade CPU is 3GHz, there go 15 clocks for every meter, even assuming everything else is perfect. Copper is worse, some fiber might be better.
Obviously, problems that can be solved by money are still problems, so they are a concern; but problems that physics tells us are insoluble are even less fun.
"If you need a cluster, Amazon and others will rent you time on theirs."
You come from the planet where all algorithms parallelize neatly, eh? I've heard that they've cured the common cold and the second law of thermodynamics there, too...
If the vendor made any sort of potentially-binding-on-them claims about accuracy (and I think some do provide assurances of the "If you didn't lie on any of the input fields, we stand behind the output fields, terms and conditions do apply" flavor), I'd expect them to be null and void the next year; but disabling printing, rather than putting up a few obnoxious warning banners, reeks of lock-in. What if this friend had wanted a paper backup of his returns from last year?
I wouldn't say that using last year's tax package to do this year's returns is a good strategy, just that tax-package vendors have done their best to enjoy 'software as a service' style economics even back when you were buying floppies in a big, sturdy, cardboard box at CompUSA, so the adjustment to online dystopia will be fairly small.
(It makes one wonder, though, why isn't there room in the market for some tax accountant to knock together an Excel template and sell it for $5? It's not as though tax or accounting software does much heavy lifting, in software terms, it's just a matter of having the right formulae in the right places. Piggibacking on software not written by crackheaded monkeys would make the stuff massively more endurable, in terms of things like 'UI' and 'actual testing and support' and the customer would still have a need to buy your new ruleset next year...)
They are only as strong as their weakest part, the rotors. Anybody with a sling and a large rock could knock one out of the sky.
It wouldn't be the first time that we got shafted by a contractor under-delivering; but the UH-60's design requirements were (among other things) formulated in response to the number of UH-1s that were lost to small arms fire in Vietnam. The body was given enough armor to (ideally) have some resistance to 20mm rounds; but survivability testing of external components included consideration of the (common) "what if some belligerent locals with 7.62mm eastern-bloc cheapies where shooting at us?" scenario.
Now, given the number of aircraft downed (not necessarily with any fatalities, since this tends to happen at low altitude for obvious reasons) by wire strikes, I suspect that a suitably clever 'entangling' fiber payload could make a considerable nuisance of itself even with very low impact speed; but that isn't exactly a household object.
According to news reports:
"Fort Worth police earlier said they could not immediately find any record of officer involvement but police spokesman Sgt. Kelly Peel said Tuesday that the department's Traffic Division coordinated with the NHTSA on the use of off-duty officers after the agency asked for help with the survey."
The actual contractors doing the sampling weren't cops; but they were accompanied by cops (who, no doubt, made every effort to convey that they were off-duty and not involved in any sort of law-enforcement exercise or official capacity; but merely being used because a 100% voluntary sampling operation needed a security force punchier than generic rentacops, or um, something?)
A Gartner Analyst attacked something for 'lacking clarity' and 'claims that frequently don't line up with reality'? Please give me a moment to collect my jaw from the floor and restore it to its operating location.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a bold example of un-selfawareness...