I'm going out on a limb and guessing that something made of 3mm of polyurethane and described in TFA as " the experience is definitely closer to typing on glass than it is to typing on a standard keyboard. Just as there was a learning curve when we first began typing on glass smartphone screens, typing on soft-touch polyurethane will take some getting used to." will be pretty damn non-tactile, even by the relaxed standards of laptop keyboards...
They definitely will love the groundbreaking "no, you cannot bind it to a domain or control it with AD policies, not even with the purchase of some CAL or extra license" feature...
In general, if the SSD in question has a well-designed controller (Intel, SandForce), then write performance will begin to drop off as bad blocks start to accumulate on the drive. Eventually, wear levelling and write cycles have taken their toll, and the disk can no longer write at all. At this point, the controller does all it can: it effectively becomes a read-only disk. It should operate in this mode until else something catastrophic (tin migration, capacitor failure, etc.) keeps the entire drive from working.
BTW - I haven't seen this either, but that's the degradation profile that's been presented to me in several presentations by the folks making SSD drives and controllers. (Intel had a great one a few years back - don't have a link to it handy, though...)
That's the theoretical death trajectory. For whatever reasons(presumably relative newness and high cost sensitivity among non-enterprise customers), the 'just dropping off the bus, dead as a stone' and a variety of more peculiar firmware errors seem to be surprisingly common.
I understand that flash, by its nature, degrades with use; but SSDs seem to have a bad habit of failing more and faster than you'd expect from solid state electronics, especially solid state electronics that don't operate under alarming thermal conditions or include a bunch of shoddy electrolytic capacitors or similar. It's very odd.
It's far too early to be predicting the death of Nokia or Windows phone. It hasn't gained popularity, but that could easily change.
TFA's thesis, though, is that Nokia was actually doing well before it went Windows and is now bleeding out. If true, that makes Elop a fuckup whether Nokia pulls out of it dive or not; the only possible vindication would be survival and some sort of mid/long term strategic gain that validates the present losses.
Address the root causes, and the market for the drugs evaporates. The last thing drug companies want is for you to take responsibility for your lifestyle and actually be healthy.
Given the popularity of performance enhancing stimulants even at the schools preferred by those with functionally unlimited educational resources, I'm not sure that is usefully true in this case. Yes, drug companies want your money. And yes, symptom management for lifestyle diseases is a major market; but the idea that there is actually a state of human affairs without a market for drugs? If so, that'd be a first in human history...
While I'd be hard pressed to say nice things about the cheap seats of US educational policy, isn't it a trifle hyperbolic to equate ritalin and friends with the genuinely hardcore pharmaceuticals you'd find in a '60s psych ward(or even a present-day one, antipsychotics are not a pleasant bunch, on the whole)?
It certainly seems like a bad plan to make psychiatrists(or GPs and nurses forced to fill in because real psychiatrists are expensive) the first-line people for problems that often have social fixes; but are the common psychostimulants really serious enough to fill the role of terrifying bogey-man here?
I suspect that the telco desire to resist moving intelligence to the edges of the network has something to do with it. Ye olde intertubes are not so dumb as they seem; but they are rather closer to just carrying packets and leaving the rest to consenting adults than the cell networks are.
Who cares? Adblock; Ghostery; RandomUserAgent; and always, always, ALWAYS lie when asked for things like your DOB or zip code.
Have fun fulling your DB with useless crap trying to "track" me, Marketers.
Be careful that, in your efforts to resist tracking, you do not accidentally make your browser far more atypical than it would otherwise have been...
I've personally found the EFF's little http://panopticlick.eff.org/ test to be quite eye-opening(and probably not representative of the state of the art in tracking, since the guys you really have to worry about get paid for coming up with clever new techniques). Doing unusual things can substantially increase the unusualness of your browser's signature and behavior and make it more likely that you'll stand out of the crowd, albeit not quite as easily as if you just have a doubleclick cookie with a GUID embedded.
Team Marketing is on tactical thermonuclear crack. I don't know where the hell they got it; but damn if it isn't the good stuff. Consider the below, from a 'Rachel Thomas' working on behalf of the "Direct Marketing Association":
"Marketing fuels the world. It is as American as apple pie and delivers relevant advertising to consumers about products they will be interested at a time they are interested. DNT should permit it as one of the most important values of civil society. Its byproduct also furthers democracy, free speech, and – most importantly in these times – JOBS. It is as critical to society – and the economy – as fraud prevention and IP protection and should be treated the same way.
Marketing as a permitted use would allow the use of the data to send relevant offers to consumers through specific devices they have used. The data could not be used for other purposes, such as eligibility for employment, insurance, etc. Thus, we move to a harm consideration. Ads and offers are just offers – users/consumers can simply not respond to those offers – there is no associated harm.
Further, DNT can stop all unnecessary uses of data using choice and for those consumers who do not want relevant marketing the can use the persistent Digital Advertising Alliance choice mechanism. This mechanism has been in place for 2 years."
The 'social API' stuff sounds like utter nonsense; but plugin blocking is both a logical evolution of a previous feature(the https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/ link in the part of the interface for viewing plugins) and a very good idea for security.
Between Flash and Java, though not exclusive to them, browsing the internet with outdated plugins is about as safe as picking up used needles from a shooting gallery floor and injecting yourself in the hopes of scoring free heroin...
Thankfully there are no examples of 'inter-networking' actually working in the wild, much less crazy stuff like hardware that can connect easily to almost any of those 'inter-networked' networks through standardized interfaces and protocols, so we can cut them some slack for failing to achieve such an absurdly difficult task...
One imagines that there might be some differences once we cook up an interface with latency approaching that of another region of the brain.
We don't know enough to actually do anything outside of rough sampling or rather brutal nudging of the existing system; but that might be a solvable problem.
What I've always found impressive is how there are no trivially idle chunks to be seen; but from time to time somebody will grow a tumor or catch a bullet with their face and then recover from losing notrivial chunks of the brain with surprisingly few major losses(and, on the other hand, you've got the people with no gross anatomical defects visible at all; but major cognitive deficiencies or crippling psychological issues)...
Kurzweil seems to be following the proud tradition of very sharp people who have illustrious careers which then provide them the freedom to go a bit off the rails...
His speech and music synthesis stuff is solid. After he found nerd jesus and decided that he would live forever through the power of the internet...
I don't know if the project has any legal obligation to actually come out and say that; but those are just US export restrictions, not the project team's choice whether they want that to be there or not.
Maybe if they focused more on issues that actually mattered and stopped acting like god damn babies people would take them seriously. Right now they're trying to attack every non-free thing at once, flagging everyone who doesn't suck RMS' dick and releases every line of code ever written under the GPL as evil fuckers who should basically go die just because they disagree with the FSF philosophy.
Being pragmatic about the GPL is what accomplishes things. FSF just leads the example of what not to do, except sometimes it occasionally works. The other times, the rest of the community does the real work by looking at things with a practical approach rather than asslicking inducing religiousness.
I think that you need to consider them in context:
Specifically, it is the positions of the 'extremists' that help define the range that counts as 'pragmatic'. If you only have extremists on one side, your 'pragmatic' window drifts toward them one half-step at a time; because compromising and following the past of least effort is what 'pragmatists' tend to do. Extremists get less done, because there aren't as many of them; but their presence has a strong effect on what counts as 'moderate' opinion(and, please note, there are extremists of the opposite bent and they do the same thing. Consider, for instance, the incredible upsurge in the respectability of devices cryptographically locked from running anything not blessed by their vendor...)
It's especially amusing if you remember back to the... entertaining... role that RSA played in the (to the best of my knowledge still unsolved) breach of a number of big name defense contractors. RSA retained copies of all the seeds used to fill RSA fobs shippped to customers, and then got cracked by parties unknown, who were subsequently able to compromise RSA's customers.
He's about the last person in the world who should be opening his mouth about how companies keeping more information on us can make us safer...
There wouldn't be anything stopping you; but you'd really have to hate handling binaries with git to respond by getting all Gentoo on the problem. Unless you have something specific in mind, compiling something exactly the same way that everybody else has already compiled it is a bit of a waste of time...
I would tend to suspect that(unless you have very competent admins who actually screen the incoming updates in some way deeper than mere bug-checking, in which case you run your own damn update server and vet before anything gets sent out to the clients) the version control system would merely need to be not pathologically bad at handling binaries.
Yes, the binaries do change; but the trajectory of a production box is, most of the time: 1. Start 2. Update available. Apply? 3. Yes. 4. Goto 1. As long as Git isn't a zillion percent worse than rsync for that, it doesn't much matter.
Where the beauty of the revision control system comes in is with the config files, that are mostly text and should integrate readily with the strengths of a versioning system. You can track changes, have different branches for different purposes, roll back issues fairly trivially, all quite handy.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing that something made of 3mm of polyurethane and described in TFA as " the experience is definitely closer to typing on glass than it is to typing on a standard keyboard. Just as there was a learning curve when we first began typing on glass smartphone screens, typing on soft-touch polyurethane will take some getting used to." will be pretty damn non-tactile, even by the relaxed standards of laptop keyboards...
They definitely will love the groundbreaking "no, you cannot bind it to a domain or control it with AD policies, not even with the purchase of some CAL or extra license" feature...
I've always wanted to pay over $100 for the pure pleasure of typing on one of those rubbery keypads with a lot of squish and almost no travel!
In general, if the SSD in question has a well-designed controller (Intel, SandForce), then write performance will begin to drop off as bad blocks start to accumulate on the drive. Eventually, wear levelling and write cycles have taken their toll, and the disk can no longer write at all. At this point, the controller does all it can: it effectively becomes a read-only disk. It should operate in this mode until else something catastrophic (tin migration, capacitor failure, etc.) keeps the entire drive from working.
BTW - I haven't seen this either, but that's the degradation profile that's been presented to me in several presentations by the folks making SSD drives and controllers. (Intel had a great one a few years back - don't have a link to it handy, though...)
That's the theoretical death trajectory. For whatever reasons(presumably relative newness and high cost sensitivity among non-enterprise customers), the 'just dropping off the bus, dead as a stone' and a variety of more peculiar firmware errors seem to be surprisingly common.
I understand that flash, by its nature, degrades with use; but SSDs seem to have a bad habit of failing more and faster than you'd expect from solid state electronics, especially solid state electronics that don't operate under alarming thermal conditions or include a bunch of shoddy electrolytic capacitors or similar. It's very odd.
They teach this in every management course studies... Have an exit strategy.
"Hey, I've got my golden parachute right here, just like you said."
"Oh, I see, you meant an exist strategy that saves the company. Haha, I'm off to apply 'lessons learned' elsewhere, enjoy!"
It's far too early to be predicting the death of Nokia or Windows phone. It hasn't gained popularity, but that could easily change.
TFA's thesis, though, is that Nokia was actually doing well before it went Windows and is now bleeding out. If true, that makes Elop a fuckup whether Nokia pulls out of it dive or not; the only possible vindication would be survival and some sort of mid/long term strategic gain that validates the present losses.
Address the root causes, and the market for the drugs evaporates. The last thing drug companies want is for you to take responsibility for your lifestyle and actually be healthy.
Given the popularity of performance enhancing stimulants even at the schools preferred by those with functionally unlimited educational resources, I'm not sure that is usefully true in this case. Yes, drug companies want your money. And yes, symptom management for lifestyle diseases is a major market; but the idea that there is actually a state of human affairs without a market for drugs? If so, that'd be a first in human history...
While I'd be hard pressed to say nice things about the cheap seats of US educational policy, isn't it a trifle hyperbolic to equate ritalin and friends with the genuinely hardcore pharmaceuticals you'd find in a '60s psych ward(or even a present-day one, antipsychotics are not a pleasant bunch, on the whole)?
It certainly seems like a bad plan to make psychiatrists(or GPs and nurses forced to fill in because real psychiatrists are expensive) the first-line people for problems that often have social fixes; but are the common psychostimulants really serious enough to fill the role of terrifying bogey-man here?
I suspect that the telco desire to resist moving intelligence to the edges of the network has something to do with it. Ye olde intertubes are not so dumb as they seem; but they are rather closer to just carrying packets and leaving the rest to consenting adults than the cell networks are.
Who cares? Adblock; Ghostery; RandomUserAgent; and always, always, ALWAYS lie when asked for things like your DOB or zip code.
Have fun fulling your DB with useless crap trying to "track" me, Marketers.
Be careful that, in your efforts to resist tracking, you do not accidentally make your browser far more atypical than it would otherwise have been...
I've personally found the EFF's little http://panopticlick.eff.org/ test to be quite eye-opening(and probably not representative of the state of the art in tracking, since the guys you really have to worry about get paid for coming up with clever new techniques). Doing unusual things can substantially increase the unusualness of your browser's signature and behavior and make it more likely that you'll stand out of the crowd, albeit not quite as easily as if you just have a doubleclick cookie with a GUID embedded.
Team Marketing is on tactical thermonuclear crack. I don't know where the hell they got it; but damn if it isn't the good stuff. Consider the below, from a 'Rachel Thomas' working on behalf of the "Direct Marketing Association":
"Marketing fuels the world. It is as American as apple pie and delivers relevant advertising to consumers about products they will be interested at a time they are interested. DNT should permit it as one of the most important values of civil society. Its byproduct also furthers democracy, free speech, and – most importantly in these times – JOBS. It is as critical to society – and the economy – as fraud prevention and IP protection and should be treated the same way.
Marketing as a permitted use would allow the use of the data to send relevant offers to consumers through specific devices they have used. The data could not be used for other purposes, such as eligibility for employment, insurance, etc. Thus, we move to a harm consideration. Ads and offers are just offers – users/consumers can simply not respond to those offers – there is no associated harm.
Further, DNT can stop all unnecessary uses of data using choice and for those consumers who do not want relevant marketing the can use the persistent Digital Advertising Alliance choice mechanism. This mechanism has been in place for 2 years."
Yes, she actually said that. In public.
The 'social API' stuff sounds like utter nonsense; but plugin blocking is both a logical evolution of a previous feature(the https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/ link in the part of the interface for viewing plugins) and a very good idea for security.
Between Flash and Java, though not exclusive to them, browsing the internet with outdated plugins is about as safe as picking up used needles from a shooting gallery floor and injecting yourself in the hopes of scoring free heroin...
thankfully, we'd just be able to redirect the URL in question to a blank database somewhere else, and print whatever we want.
That blank database of yours has the correct SSL cert, right?
Thankfully there are no examples of 'inter-networking' actually working in the wild, much less crazy stuff like hardware that can connect easily to almost any of those 'inter-networked' networks through standardized interfaces and protocols, so we can cut them some slack for failing to achieve such an absurdly difficult task...
If you actually think of yourself as having a 'personal brand', I'd say that existing is all the punishment you could ever require...
One imagines that there might be some differences once we cook up an interface with latency approaching that of another region of the brain.
We don't know enough to actually do anything outside of rough sampling or rather brutal nudging of the existing system; but that might be a solvable problem.
What I've always found impressive is how there are no trivially idle chunks to be seen; but from time to time somebody will grow a tumor or catch a bullet with their face and then recover from losing notrivial chunks of the brain with surprisingly few major losses(and, on the other hand, you've got the people with no gross anatomical defects visible at all; but major cognitive deficiencies or crippling psychological issues)...
If you want to expand your Redundant Array of Interdependent Neurons, a cloud seems appropriate enough...
Kurzweil seems to be following the proud tradition of very sharp people who have illustrious careers which then provide them the freedom to go a bit off the rails...
His speech and music synthesis stuff is solid. After he found nerd jesus and decided that he would live forever through the power of the internet...
I don't know if the project has any legal obligation to actually come out and say that; but those are just US export restrictions, not the project team's choice whether they want that to be there or not.
Maybe if they focused more on issues that actually mattered and stopped acting like god damn babies people would take them seriously. Right now they're trying to attack every non-free thing at once, flagging everyone who doesn't suck RMS' dick and releases every line of code ever written under the GPL as evil fuckers who should basically go die just because they disagree with the FSF philosophy.
Being pragmatic about the GPL is what accomplishes things. FSF just leads the example of what not to do, except sometimes it occasionally works. The other times, the rest of the community does the real work by looking at things with a practical approach rather than asslicking inducing religiousness.
I think that you need to consider them in context:
Specifically, it is the positions of the 'extremists' that help define the range that counts as 'pragmatic'. If you only have extremists on one side, your 'pragmatic' window drifts toward them one half-step at a time; because compromising and following the past of least effort is what 'pragmatists' tend to do. Extremists get less done, because there aren't as many of them; but their presence has a strong effect on what counts as 'moderate' opinion(and, please note, there are extremists of the opposite bent and they do the same thing. Consider, for instance, the incredible upsurge in the respectability of devices cryptographically locked from running anything not blessed by their vendor...)
It's especially amusing if you remember back to the... entertaining... role that RSA played in the (to the best of my knowledge still unsolved) breach of a number of big name defense contractors. RSA retained copies of all the seeds used to fill RSA fobs shippped to customers, and then got cracked by parties unknown, who were subsequently able to compromise RSA's customers.
He's about the last person in the world who should be opening his mouth about how companies keeping more information on us can make us safer...
There wouldn't be anything stopping you; but you'd really have to hate handling binaries with git to respond by getting all Gentoo on the problem. Unless you have something specific in mind, compiling something exactly the same way that everybody else has already compiled it is a bit of a waste of time...
Indeed. here's an article about some rocket surgeons.
I would tend to suspect that(unless you have very competent admins who actually screen the incoming updates in some way deeper than mere bug-checking, in which case you run your own damn update server and vet before anything gets sent out to the clients) the version control system would merely need to be not pathologically bad at handling binaries.
Yes, the binaries do change; but the trajectory of a production box is, most of the time: 1. Start 2. Update available. Apply? 3. Yes. 4. Goto 1. As long as Git isn't a zillion percent worse than rsync for that, it doesn't much matter.
Where the beauty of the revision control system comes in is with the config files, that are mostly text and should integrate readily with the strengths of a versioning system. You can track changes, have different branches for different purposes, roll back issues fairly trivially, all quite handy.