Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data.
Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.
My impression(from friends who use them) is that they aim pretty heavily at home-user backup scenarios who are likely to be comparatively light users and have severely limited upstream bandwidth. They also don't do Big Serious SLAs and similar. Nor do they support things like backing up mounted NAS volumes or non Windows/OSX systems(I haven't check to see if the client is smart enough to recognize a mounted iSCSI device... It isn't exactly rocket surgery to distinguish a block device hanging from the Windows iSCSI initiatior from a block device hanging off the Intel whateverchipset SATA 2 port; but if you go with 'NAS = SMB/AFP" you'd miss it.
Still, convenient and cheap, if not as robust as solutions that cost more.
What disturbs me about this case is that the legal theory being advanced is that any private copyright holder has the power to veto arbitrage attempts purely because they don't like them(since, obviously, the better the price discrimination, the more of the surplus value they walk away with).
Border tariffs and regulations are... shall we say... mixed when it comes to 'impartially administered source of revenue and set of meaningful protections against imported pests, pathogens, and dangerous articles' vs. 'blatant tool of protectionism and handout for influential industries'; but they are, at least, not a novel legal construct and are (theoretically) answerable to representative governments and equally binding upon men and multinationals both.
The case that the supreme court will be hearing(unlike, say, that of the Canadian cheese smugglers or a cocaine importer) alleges no improprieties related to customs declarations, duties, import restrictions, etc.; but rather claims that rights of first sale simply don't exist for articles not manufactured within the US. That's so much crazier than any mere dodgy tariff policy(and those get pretty crazy).
Mr. Cheney's fuel cask is rated for 1 decade of operation under normal circumstances, and does not require replacement at the present time.
Please consult an executive maintenance technician at your nearest undisclosed location for further information regarding cask replacement schedules, procedures, and disposal regulations.
For those device firmwares, the entire "RADEON" directory, covering all supported models(list is in the debian package, I won't clutter this post) is 260k across 41 different firmware files.
As you note, though, fglrx and Nvidia's equivalent modules(plus all the non-kernel stuff that goes into X or elsewhere) is a comparatively gigantic mass, much of which is running on the host CPU and in host memory.
I was referring only to the firmware required to make the free drivers work, which is a nasty surprise the first time you see the message on startup; but does not appear to do what the proprietary drivers do.
At the level of a graphics driver, a driver for Android is pretty much necessarily a Linux driver. It is vanishingly unlikely to be an Xorg driver(which is presumably why so many of these 'run stock arm distribution on android device!' schemes end up doing something ghastly with VNC), but it will have to interact with a kernel that is largely-though-not-100% a Linux kernel.
It will, unless very cautiously written, soon enough be supplying precedent for shutdowns on individual ebayers and whatnot.
Also, isn't 'illegal importing' more usually what we call "Arbitrage" or "Trade", unless the goods imported are themselves illegal or relevant laws concerning customs duties and declarations were not adhered to?
As much as I dislike binary blobs, the dirty little not-terribly-secret is that most 'peripherals' of any significant complexity have firmware, it's just a question of whether they store it onboard or have just enough in nonvolatile storage to have the blob transferred to them by their driver on power-up.
In the video case, Intel's "Video BIOS" shares flash space with the rest of the (proprietary and not very replaceable unless your board is one of the rare birds supported by coreboot) goo in your motherboard's BIOS flash chip. For whatever reason, presumably board cost, AMD's parts load firmware from their driver on power-up.
Honestly, there are really only two dividing lines that seem worth drawing: 1. If you are a true purist, you could insist 'no proprietary blobs, period.' I wish you luck; but it's a perfectly ethically cogent position. 2. If you are of a pragmatic bent, you should insist that binary blobs be redistributable with the drivers that they support. There've been some vendors, from time to time, who forbade 3rd parties(like, say, linux distributions) from redistributing unaltered copies of their device firmware in order to support the vendor's device when you first booted up. You would have to resort to ridiculous little runarounds "Download the Windows driver from foocorp.com/drivers/xyzPCI and run frmextrct.sh then copy firmware.bin..." that would eventually end up being scripted and done for you on request. That's just nonsense. There is no reason to put up with vendors who won't allow redistribution of firmware blobs to make the lives of people who own their hardware easier and more convenient...
I get the impression(whether this is better or worse is another question) that makers of video chipsets understand that Linux support is necessary to win certain markets(embedded Android stuff, *nix graphic workstations, compute clusters, etc.); but that "support" does not need to mean anything other than 'set of binary blobs that work with the one blessed kernel version and system configuration. If you are the purchaser of a consumer product, suck it up. If you have a suitably large enterprise support account, please contact our engineering/integration team.'
In the 'appliance' market, you aren't even supposed to touch the software, just twiddle the 'apps' on top of it, and much of the hardware(even when the components are well understood and fairly standard) is overtly hostile to tinkering. Yes, the chipset vendor had better have a Linux BSP if they want to make a sale; but(based on the state of 3rd-party Android ROMs), they definitely don't have to do it in a way that is overly helpful to 3rd parties.
In the expensive Workstation and Compute Stuff market, you have customers who will pay good money, sometimes excellent money, to Make It Work; but you also have customers used to the fact that 'Product X is only supported on RHEL Antiquated Edition with Nvidia Drivers v.Y'.
What "technical solution" do you see to visible light being shown through a window? And how could you make it commercially viable to every aircraft in the sky? Brainstorm it. If you find something, great, but that's a pretty damned huge problem.
Personally, I'd start taking stock of what the preferred color of laser-strikers is and look into the possibility of having protective eyewear available. If you are looking at strikes on numerous frequencies, you have a real problem; but if it's 95% cheapie solid-state greens a $30 pair of glasses will substantially attenuate that color without knocking out your ability to see things. Standard safety equipment in laser-using environments.
Which is why I'm asking the question, in order to obtain data:
Of the X thousands of fertility clinic patients, what percentage would expect to see a better outcome thanks to this egg synthesis technique, if it were refined for human use?
Well, part of its actual application might be finally shutting up the misandrists* who cheerfully brag that men will eventually be useless when they can engineer artificial sperm, etc, etc. This serves as a neat little reminder that if that's truly the case, we don't need THEM, either.
*: Note, NOT feminists. There is a difference. Learn it.
You'd still need some sort of artificial uterus apparatus to complete that project, otherwise you fall back to the life of brian "We're it going to gestate, in a box?" problem.
(More broadly, though, measuring 'utility' by gamete production is a pretty weird thing to do. "Utility" doesn't even have a cogent meaning unless you define it with respect to the goals of one or more agents. There's nothing in the known universe that is more 'useful' than a screensaver on an LCD unless you make the background assumption(as people generally do) that satisfying human interests is a form of utility. At that point, the only thing you have to do to be 'useful' is satisfy your on interest in existence. Where things get ugly, naturally, is deciding who counts as an 'agent' that gets to set goals...
Until they invent robotic congressmen pandering to robotic constituents, expect human spaceflight to continue to happen even in situations where machines would make more sense.
This result is certainly cool in itself, and will probably (eventually) find application in squicking the moralists when an egg produced from a gay man's stem cells is united with sperm synthesized from a transexual woman or something(and will those fireworks ever be worth watching...); but what percentage of the more prosaic fertility-clinic cases are ultimately caused by defective eggs?
I've heard of some cases where the mitochondrial DNA is defective, so the only way to produce a healthy child is by slapping 3rd-party mitochondria into the maternal egg cell before fertilization, and lots of cases where sperm defects end up requiring IVF, sometimes with donor sperm. Are there also a fairly large number of cases where defective eggs are the cause of infertility that just can't be addressed at present by anything other than using donor gametes?
We still need Axlotl tanks in which to nurture the human larvae before they are ready to face harsh external conditions; but(mid to long term) it might well be overwhelmingly more efficient to ship a few blobs of tissue on ice and let the robots build some colonists when they've finished building a colony for them.
(Ooh, boy, though, is Colony Gen. 1 going to have some fucked up parent-issues or what?)
I suspect that the scale of any processor/peripheral level weirdness(particularly if you are willing to accept values of 'works' that are closer to 'boots' than to 'runs with native performance') is relatively minor compared to the "designed only to run code signed by somebody other than you" problem. Bootloader locks aren't perfect, and have been circumvented on at least the older iDevices; but they certainly make portability a challenge.
Wasn't their bold plan for not sucking supposed to be offering 'enterprise' IT consulting? And now they admit that their own organization couldn't change its own asses toner cartridge with both hands and a map?
Social warfare is getting to be bad enough. We don't need to further relegate people into different classes. Do we really want some sort of Hindu caste system? Klout needs to be Klobbered.
Empirically speaking, it appears that we(in the aggregate) practically live for the chance to build absurd little social hierarchies, even when circumstances are such that the hierarchy won't significantly affect resource allocation... It's like we are just a few service packs away from being damn dirty apes or something.
Unfortunately, that will leave us with the old guard: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax... And if you think that facebook is a screwjob run by sociopathic weasels...
Clearly, if we were just allowed to dump wastewater into local rivers and streams, none of these earthquakes would have had to happen. Why are environmentalists objectively pro-earthquake?
You could think of Klout as performing the valuable public service of identifying the sort of people who would take Klout seriously, sort of like those chemical attractant baits used on flypaper and similar insect traps.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlimited storage for $5/mo? I have to get on this shit.
Website says $3.96/m for unlimited data.
Something tells me this business model will not survive without some serious bandwidth limitations. After all, if you upload is limited to 100mb then you ability to (non commercially) fill Terabytes of data is limited.
My impression(from friends who use them) is that they aim pretty heavily at home-user backup scenarios who are likely to be comparatively light users and have severely limited upstream bandwidth. They also don't do Big Serious SLAs and similar. Nor do they support things like backing up mounted NAS volumes or non Windows/OSX systems(I haven't check to see if the client is smart enough to recognize a mounted iSCSI device... It isn't exactly rocket surgery to distinguish a block device hanging from the Windows iSCSI initiatior from a block device hanging off the Intel whateverchipset SATA 2 port; but if you go with 'NAS = SMB/AFP" you'd miss it.
Still, convenient and cheap, if not as robust as solutions that cost more.
What disturbs me about this case is that the legal theory being advanced is that any private copyright holder has the power to veto arbitrage attempts purely because they don't like them(since, obviously, the better the price discrimination, the more of the surplus value they walk away with).
Border tariffs and regulations are... shall we say... mixed when it comes to 'impartially administered source of revenue and set of meaningful protections against imported pests, pathogens, and dangerous articles' vs. 'blatant tool of protectionism and handout for influential industries'; but they are, at least, not a novel legal construct and are (theoretically) answerable to representative governments and equally binding upon men and multinationals both.
The case that the supreme court will be hearing(unlike, say, that of the Canadian cheese smugglers or a cocaine importer) alleges no improprieties related to customs declarations, duties, import restrictions, etc.; but rather claims that rights of first sale simply don't exist for articles not manufactured within the US. That's so much crazier than any mere dodgy tariff policy(and those get pretty crazy).
Mr. Cheney's fuel cask is rated for 1 decade of operation under normal circumstances, and does not require replacement at the present time.
Please consult an executive maintenance technician at your nearest undisclosed location for further information regarding cask replacement schedules, procedures, and disposal regulations.
I think that we are talking about two different things:
If you use the Free AMD/ATI graphics drivers, you get only the most basic functions unless you provide a proprietary firmware blob. (debian package containing those firmware blobs, among others).
For those device firmwares, the entire "RADEON" directory, covering all supported models(list is in the debian package, I won't clutter this post) is 260k across 41 different firmware files.
As you note, though, fglrx and Nvidia's equivalent modules(plus all the non-kernel stuff that goes into X or elsewhere) is a comparatively gigantic mass, much of which is running on the host CPU and in host memory.
I was referring only to the firmware required to make the free drivers work, which is a nasty surprise the first time you see the message on startup; but does not appear to do what the proprietary drivers do.
At the level of a graphics driver, a driver for Android is pretty much necessarily a Linux driver. It is vanishingly unlikely to be an Xorg driver(which is presumably why so many of these 'run stock arm distribution on android device!' schemes end up doing something ghastly with VNC), but it will have to interact with a kernel that is largely-though-not-100% a Linux kernel.
It will, unless very cautiously written, soon enough be supplying precedent for shutdowns on individual ebayers and whatnot.
Also, isn't 'illegal importing' more usually what we call "Arbitrage" or "Trade", unless the goods imported are themselves illegal or relevant laws concerning customs duties and declarations were not adhered to?
You mean using the proprietary firmware?
(captcha: depress)
As much as I dislike binary blobs, the dirty little not-terribly-secret is that most 'peripherals' of any significant complexity have firmware, it's just a question of whether they store it onboard or have just enough in nonvolatile storage to have the blob transferred to them by their driver on power-up.
In the video case, Intel's "Video BIOS" shares flash space with the rest of the (proprietary and not very replaceable unless your board is one of the rare birds supported by coreboot) goo in your motherboard's BIOS flash chip. For whatever reason, presumably board cost, AMD's parts load firmware from their driver on power-up.
Honestly, there are really only two dividing lines that seem worth drawing: 1. If you are a true purist, you could insist 'no proprietary blobs, period.' I wish you luck; but it's a perfectly ethically cogent position. 2. If you are of a pragmatic bent, you should insist that binary blobs be redistributable with the drivers that they support. There've been some vendors, from time to time, who forbade 3rd parties(like, say, linux distributions) from redistributing unaltered copies of their device firmware in order to support the vendor's device when you first booted up. You would have to resort to ridiculous little runarounds "Download the Windows driver from foocorp.com/drivers/xyzPCI and run frmextrct.sh then copy firmware.bin..." that would eventually end up being scripted and done for you on request. That's just nonsense. There is no reason to put up with vendors who won't allow redistribution of firmware blobs to make the lives of people who own their hardware easier and more convenient...
I get the impression(whether this is better or worse is another question) that makers of video chipsets understand that Linux support is necessary to win certain markets(embedded Android stuff, *nix graphic workstations, compute clusters, etc.); but that "support" does not need to mean anything other than 'set of binary blobs that work with the one blessed kernel version and system configuration. If you are the purchaser of a consumer product, suck it up. If you have a suitably large enterprise support account, please contact our engineering/integration team.'
In the 'appliance' market, you aren't even supposed to touch the software, just twiddle the 'apps' on top of it, and much of the hardware(even when the components are well understood and fairly standard) is overtly hostile to tinkering. Yes, the chipset vendor had better have a Linux BSP if they want to make a sale; but(based on the state of 3rd-party Android ROMs), they definitely don't have to do it in a way that is overly helpful to 3rd parties.
In the expensive Workstation and Compute Stuff market, you have customers who will pay good money, sometimes excellent money, to Make It Work; but you also have customers used to the fact that 'Product X is only supported on RHEL Antiquated Edition with Nvidia Drivers v.Y'.
What "technical solution" do you see to visible light being shown through a window? And how could you make it commercially viable to every aircraft in the sky? Brainstorm it. If you find something, great, but that's a pretty damned huge problem.
Personally, I'd start taking stock of what the preferred color of laser-strikers is and look into the possibility of having protective eyewear available. If you are looking at strikes on numerous frequencies, you have a real problem; but if it's 95% cheapie solid-state greens a $30 pair of glasses will substantially attenuate that color without knocking out your ability to see things. Standard safety equipment in laser-using environments.
Does anybody have stats on strikes by color?
You are woefully ignorant.
Which is why I'm asking the question, in order to obtain data:
Of the X thousands of fertility clinic patients, what percentage would expect to see a better outcome thanks to this egg synthesis technique, if it were refined for human use?
Well, part of its actual application might be finally shutting up the misandrists* who cheerfully brag that men will eventually be useless when they can engineer artificial sperm, etc, etc. This serves as a neat little reminder that if that's truly the case, we don't need THEM, either.
*: Note, NOT feminists. There is a difference. Learn it.
You'd still need some sort of artificial uterus apparatus to complete that project, otherwise you fall back to the life of brian "We're it going to gestate, in a box?" problem.
(More broadly, though, measuring 'utility' by gamete production is a pretty weird thing to do. "Utility" doesn't even have a cogent meaning unless you define it with respect to the goals of one or more agents. There's nothing in the known universe that is more 'useful' than a screensaver on an LCD unless you make the background assumption(as people generally do) that satisfying human interests is a form of utility. At that point, the only thing you have to do to be 'useful' is satisfy your on interest in existence. Where things get ugly, naturally, is deciding who counts as an 'agent' that gets to set goals...
Until they invent robotic congressmen pandering to robotic constituents, expect human spaceflight to continue to happen even in situations where machines would make more sense.
Just remind her what Einstein thought of spooky action at a distance, the behavior should subside.
This result is certainly cool in itself, and will probably (eventually) find application in squicking the moralists when an egg produced from a gay man's stem cells is united with sperm synthesized from a transexual woman or something(and will those fireworks ever be worth watching...); but what percentage of the more prosaic fertility-clinic cases are ultimately caused by defective eggs?
I've heard of some cases where the mitochondrial DNA is defective, so the only way to produce a healthy child is by slapping 3rd-party mitochondria into the maternal egg cell before fertilization, and lots of cases where sperm defects end up requiring IVF, sometimes with donor sperm. Are there also a fairly large number of cases where defective eggs are the cause of infertility that just can't be addressed at present by anything other than using donor gametes?
We still need Axlotl tanks in which to nurture the human larvae before they are ready to face harsh external conditions; but(mid to long term) it might well be overwhelmingly more efficient to ship a few blobs of tissue on ice and let the robots build some colonists when they've finished building a colony for them.
(Ooh, boy, though, is Colony Gen. 1 going to have some fucked up parent-issues or what?)
I suspect that the scale of any processor/peripheral level weirdness(particularly if you are willing to accept values of 'works' that are closer to 'boots' than to 'runs with native performance') is relatively minor compared to the "designed only to run code signed by somebody other than you" problem. Bootloader locks aren't perfect, and have been circumvented on at least the older iDevices; but they certainly make portability a challenge.
I cannot comprehend why he is still allowed near movies in any capacity...
Eh, the kids were asking for it...
In the spirit of charity, I'd be happy to offer them the services of a magic 8-ball with an MBA from an online degree mill.
It won't offer appreciably worse leadership, and it is happy to work for only 50k/year.
Just give me a call, HP, you know this one is a win-win!
Their firmware and driver teams need adequate room in which to explore the wide variety of vexing bugs that you can get away with shipping...
Wasn't their bold plan for not sucking supposed to be offering 'enterprise' IT consulting? And now they admit that their own organization couldn't change its own asses toner cartridge with both hands and a map?
Social warfare is getting to be bad enough. We don't need to further relegate people into different classes. Do we really want some sort of Hindu caste system? Klout needs to be Klobbered.
Empirically speaking, it appears that we(in the aggregate) practically live for the chance to build absurd little social hierarchies, even when circumstances are such that the hierarchy won't significantly affect resource allocation... It's like we are just a few service packs away from being damn dirty apes or something.
Unfortunately, that will leave us with the old guard: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax... And if you think that facebook is a screwjob run by sociopathic weasels...
Clearly, if we were just allowed to dump wastewater into local rivers and streams, none of these earthquakes would have had to happen. Why are environmentalists objectively pro-earthquake?
You could think of Klout as performing the valuable public service of identifying the sort of people who would take Klout seriously, sort of like those chemical attractant baits used on flypaper and similar insect traps.