Psst. I heard this rumor that volunteers nurturing an enthusiasm for books in youngsters is what we call "free advertising" and "preserving the future of your market".
I'd bet you a considerable sum of money that whatever you'll manage to wring out of volunteer reading groups at public libraries won't amount to 2/5ths fuck-all compared to the amount you'll lose because the larval Belgians are going to be growing up with fewer books and more of whatever other entertainment is available.
There are times when being evil pays good money. This. Isn't. One. Of. Them. Dumbass.
It has come to our attention that some of our customers may not have purchased upgrades in a timely manner... We encourage them to remedy this situation as swiftly as their checkbooks allow.
I figured that the ridiculous tone of my post would make the fact that I was joking pretty obvious.
That said, the minimum requirements for jumping to eugenics are 1. Heritable variability in some ability(or, if one is feeling looser, stochastic variability and a willingness to overproduce and cull every generation. Not strictly eugenics; but similar) and 2. An incentive to improve the population level capability in that ability.
Ability to work long hours does fit, as do a wide variety of other work-related human attributes.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Ah, now you're talking! Manservant! My eugenics rifle! We shall see to it that the workingman of tomorrow is fit for a 50-hour week, and his offspring capable of 60! In time, perhaps even 80 or 100 shall not be beyond the glorious reach of Science!
SAIC is a highly evolved obligate parasite of government.
As with many highly evolved parasites, many capabilities are either vestigial or entirely absent; but the apparatus used to find, latch on to, and suck nutrients from, the host has been optimized to an impressive degree.
Even better! Now the somewhere-just-above-middle-of-bottom sheep get to feel more important than the sheep who weren't invited to enjoy shorter lines in Citizen+ class!
Nothing destroys somebody's motivation to deal with the torrent of shit flowing down the hill quite like the knowledge that there is somebody just a bit further down than he is. With any luck, we will soon be rolling the program out to cover traffic offenses, modest drug possession, and suspicion of tax fraud, making dealing with the justice system easier and more comfortable for the people who count.
Yes, let's use big power supply for all computers, so they all share the same exact point of failure.
Eh, depends on the scale of your operation: Single computers only usually have one or two PSUs. Blade cages might have three or four; but serving 10+ PCs. If your infrastructure is in the thousands of racks, the savings on redundant power supplies might make a rack-level point of failure acceptable. Depends on what you are running and how much you want to pay for it...
While it is true that AC can be voltage converted with nothing more than a transformer, it isn't really relevant: the old school AC transformer units have miserable efficiency and are both heavy and bulky. Basically all modern equipment is going to be using a switchmode power supply that is a great deal closer(in terms of complexity, cost, efficiency, and theory of operation) to a DC-DC converter.
Either way, you get to play the "let's balance transmission losses vs. redundancy vs. efficiency vs. component cost" game in terms of how many points of conversion you want and where you want them; but nothing that belongs in a datacenter is going to be using AC just for the ease of PSU construction.
It is my understanding that the WTO takes claims of the form "We are interfereing with trade because it suits our strategic interest, dumbass." Very badly. Their job is trade, not your strategic interest. However, when they were formed, there was a limited list of exceptions baked in, under which trade embargos and other market manipulations would be considered to be other sorts of policies with incidental effects on trade.
This is why everybody who goes to the WTO either goes to complain that somebody is being mean to Trade, or that their trade policy is purely a matter of protecting the children, not any sort of protectionism.
If memory serves, a ripping station that(in an ultimately doomed effort at compliance) ripped only bit-for-bit disk images(and yes, realistically, their price alone kept them away from most pirates).
Their theory of operation, not good enough to save them from the MFIAA, was that the rip was DMCA compliant because it didn't break any encryption at all, just made a bit-for-bit backup copy of the DVD in question. Then, upon user request, the encrypted bitstream from the disk image would be fed to an ordinary, licensed, decoder, same as any DVD player, with all the usual i's dotted and T's crossed(in terms of restricted outputs, macrovision, etc.)
Team content(for reasons unclear) declared a bitter war of attrition against a boutique luxury product purchased largely by cinemaphiles with huge movie collections that they used to enhance their enjoyment thereof, despite the fact that the pirate kiddies of the world weren't even inconvenienced in continuing to pile up multi-terabyte franken-NAS piracy servers.
Foolish, vindictive, and shortsighted. Not that that's a huge surprise.
At least doubly ridiculous in this case because Stratfor was 0wned after the FBI had infiltrated lulzsec, by the FBI's mole, using (in part) FBI provided server space to disseminate the goods...
Given lulzsec's generally loose-cannon approach, it isn't clear that the FBI had to put them up to it; but the FBI certainly did stand by and do some case building while they knowingly watched Stratfor and their customer lists burn... I'll be interested to see if that ends up being awkward for them in some way...
Based on the existing state of the tobacco market, it isn't obvious that the pot would start being any more offshore than it presently is.
I assume you'd have yuppie pot, that you have to go to farmers' markets to get, tended with love by authentic hippies. Below that you'd have Whole Foods pot, given something reasonably approaching the tending of yuppie pot, albeit on a contemporary agrobusiness scale.
Below that you'd have your basic convenience store brands, put together out what whatever mixture of canadian, american, and mexican happens to be cheap and reasonably consistent.
If you look at the current aircraft carrier deployment, you'll notice that 'hanging around the middle east' is a very popular activity among aircraft carriers, with 'maintenance' the runner up.
Further, given that it was CNV-72, the very much not obsolete yet, Abraham Lincoln that had the dubious honor of passing through the Strait of Hormuz(ie. within range of practically anything not classified as a 'small arm', the Enterprise certainly hasn't been obviously singled out as the sitting duck.
Given that aircraft carriers are there to carry aircraft which(along with crew) are Very. Much. Not. Cheap. I'd be inclined to check the allocation of those two things for the cruise. If normal, there's a bloody fortune in men and hardware loaded in the thing, even if it is an obsolete tub. If it mysteriously ends up being composed of all the EOL aircraft and enlisted na'er-do-wells, you might want to bring a life jacket...
That said, though, given the rather low standard of evidence required for questionably sensible invasions of dusty countries, the notion that 'They' would need to false-flag an entire aircraft carrier seems a bit curious. It would also be a slightly curious choice because aircraft carriers are the absolute finest in highly-visible nationalist force projection, and losing one would be terrible PR.
PowerVR hasn't shown their face on the PC side in years; but they are something of an 800lb gorilla in power-constrained GPU environments. Not the only player; but a lot of ARM SoCs of various flavors include them. Intel even enlisted them, rather than its in-house designs or the traditional PC guys, for a number of its very-low-power Atom parts...
Given Apple's (relative) hardware homogeneity(certainly more than Android; but the steadily accumulating pile of older iDevices is inevitable and not going away just yet...), I assume that iOS games will largely tax the GPU as hard as possible; but not try overshooting(just as console games generally push right to the edge, since the edge is a known quantity). It will be interesting to see if the new 'retina display' ipads end up seeing titles that sacrifice complexity in other areas to push native resolution, or whether we'll see a lot of 'well, it's smoothly upsampled; but fundamentally the same resolution as the iPad N-1' stuff...
One thing that I don't think has come up yet; but would be interesting to see, is whether Nvidia tries to turn their disadvantage into a bonus by doing more aggressive power scaling...
If, as TFA suggests, Tegra parts are held back by memory bandwidth; because faster busses are power hungry, this suggests that they might be able to substantially speed-bump their parts when the device is on AC power or otherwise not power constrained. So long as the switchover is handled reasonably elegantly, that could turn out to be an advantage in the various HDMI dock/computer replacement/etc. scenarios...
Just ask Intel about Apple's benchmarking strategy: For years, the finest in graphic design publicly asserted that PPC was so bitchin' that it was pretty much just letting Intel and x86 live because killing your inferiors is bad taste. Then, one design win, and x86 is suddenly eleventy-billion percent faster than that old-and-busted PPC legacy crap.
Or ask Amazon: Amazon releases 'Kindle' e-reader device. His Steveness declares "Nobody reads". And now Apple is pushing books, newspapers, and their own pet proprietary publishing platform...
Cheer up, emo Nvidia, all you have to do is sell Apple a Tegra N SoC, or even just the rights to include your GPU in their AN SoC, and Tim Cook will personally explain to the world that PowerVR GPUs are slow, weak, make you 30% less creative and are produced entirely from conflict minerals.
It would take a very comprehensive piece of surveying work to say whether this in fact holds across the board; but my anecdotal impression is that the utility of legally enforced compliance may vary depending on what sort of software you are dealing with.
The area that comes to mind is embedded systems: a substantial number of assorted plastic SoC boxes running linux are user-modifiable today because their sellers were forced to provide sources under the GPL. Their firmware was often of rather low quality; but contained vital architectural details about the hardware that would otherwise have had to be inferred by comparatively arduous reverse engineering. In those situations, motivation is still better(one presumes that the manufacturers who are shipping *WRT firmwares are probably more helpful than the ones who stash a passive_agressive_GPL_compliance_blob.rar file somewhere in the dark corner of their support site); but bad code that provided enough information to port the better mainline-based 3rd party firmware was still useful.
In something like the OGRE case, there doesn't seem to be the analogous vital information, bad code would just be bad code, making enforced contribution considerably less useful.
I'd be interested to see if this pattern in fact holds, or if I am simply mistaken, and if there are any other categories that push strongly in one direction or the other; but I don't really have enough information to say...
Mr. Ballmer wishes to believe that this will be the year of Bing On The Desktop.
I propose that we in the linux community dispatch a team of our disappointment-hardened counselors in order to help him work through the stages of the inevitable grieving process in an efficient and healthy manner...
Slashdot Mirror
Psst. I heard this rumor that volunteers nurturing an enthusiasm for books in youngsters is what we call "free advertising" and "preserving the future of your market".
I'd bet you a considerable sum of money that whatever you'll manage to wring out of volunteer reading groups at public libraries won't amount to 2/5ths fuck-all compared to the amount you'll lose because the larval Belgians are going to be growing up with fewer books and more of whatever other entertainment is available.
There are times when being evil pays good money. This. Isn't. One. Of. Them. Dumbass.
Perhaps they could hire SAIC to build the database for them!
It has come to our attention that some of our customers may not have purchased upgrades in a timely manner... We encourage them to remedy this situation as swiftly as their checkbooks allow.
I heard a rumor that if you send an SYN-ACK after SYN request from a certain IP, you die.
It totally happened to my cousin's friend.
I figured that the ridiculous tone of my post would make the fact that I was joking pretty obvious.
That said, the minimum requirements for jumping to eugenics are 1. Heritable variability in some ability(or, if one is feeling looser, stochastic variability and a willingness to overproduce and cull every generation. Not strictly eugenics; but similar) and 2. An incentive to improve the population level capability in that ability.
Ability to work long hours does fit, as do a wide variety of other work-related human attributes.
Don't worry. Our financial chicanery skills are way better polished than Greece's.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Ah, now you're talking! Manservant! My eugenics rifle! We shall see to it that the workingman of tomorrow is fit for a 50-hour week, and his offspring capable of 60! In time, perhaps even 80 or 100 shall not be beyond the glorious reach of Science!
SAIC is a highly evolved obligate parasite of government.
As with many highly evolved parasites, many capabilities are either vestigial or entirely absent; but the apparatus used to find, latch on to, and suck nutrients from, the host has been optimized to an impressive degree.
Because bribery would be illegal...
Even better! Now the somewhere-just-above-middle-of-bottom sheep get to feel more important than the sheep who weren't invited to enjoy shorter lines in Citizen+ class!
Nothing destroys somebody's motivation to deal with the torrent of shit flowing down the hill quite like the knowledge that there is somebody just a bit further down than he is. With any luck, we will soon be rolling the program out to cover traffic offenses, modest drug possession, and suspicion of tax fraud, making dealing with the justice system easier and more comfortable for the people who count.
Yes, let's use big power supply for all computers, so they all share the same exact point of failure.
Eh, depends on the scale of your operation: Single computers only usually have one or two PSUs. Blade cages might have three or four; but serving 10+ PCs. If your infrastructure is in the thousands of racks, the savings on redundant power supplies might make a rack-level point of failure acceptable. Depends on what you are running and how much you want to pay for it...
While it is true that AC can be voltage converted with nothing more than a transformer, it isn't really relevant: the old school AC transformer units have miserable efficiency and are both heavy and bulky. Basically all modern equipment is going to be using a switchmode power supply that is a great deal closer(in terms of complexity, cost, efficiency, and theory of operation) to a DC-DC converter.
Either way, you get to play the "let's balance transmission losses vs. redundancy vs. efficiency vs. component cost" game in terms of how many points of conversion you want and where you want them; but nothing that belongs in a datacenter is going to be using AC just for the ease of PSU construction.
It is my understanding that the WTO takes claims of the form "We are interfereing with trade because it suits our strategic interest, dumbass." Very badly. Their job is trade, not your strategic interest. However, when they were formed, there was a limited list of exceptions baked in, under which trade embargos and other market manipulations would be considered to be other sorts of policies with incidental effects on trade.
This is why everybody who goes to the WTO either goes to complain that somebody is being mean to Trade, or that their trade policy is purely a matter of protecting the children, not any sort of protectionism.
If memory serves, a ripping station that(in an ultimately doomed effort at compliance) ripped only bit-for-bit disk images(and yes, realistically, their price alone kept them away from most pirates).
Their theory of operation, not good enough to save them from the MFIAA, was that the rip was DMCA compliant because it didn't break any encryption at all, just made a bit-for-bit backup copy of the DVD in question. Then, upon user request, the encrypted bitstream from the disk image would be fed to an ordinary, licensed, decoder, same as any DVD player, with all the usual i's dotted and T's crossed(in terms of restricted outputs, macrovision, etc.)
Team content(for reasons unclear) declared a bitter war of attrition against a boutique luxury product purchased largely by cinemaphiles with huge movie collections that they used to enhance their enjoyment thereof, despite the fact that the pirate kiddies of the world weren't even inconvenienced in continuing to pile up multi-terabyte franken-NAS piracy servers.
Foolish, vindictive, and shortsighted. Not that that's a huge surprise.
At least doubly ridiculous in this case because Stratfor was 0wned after the FBI had infiltrated lulzsec, by the FBI's mole, using (in part) FBI provided server space to disseminate the goods...
Given lulzsec's generally loose-cannon approach, it isn't clear that the FBI had to put them up to it; but the FBI certainly did stand by and do some case building while they knowingly watched Stratfor and their customer lists burn... I'll be interested to see if that ends up being awkward for them in some way...
Based on the existing state of the tobacco market, it isn't obvious that the pot would start being any more offshore than it presently is.
I assume you'd have yuppie pot, that you have to go to farmers' markets to get, tended with love by authentic hippies. Below that you'd have Whole Foods pot, given something reasonably approaching the tending of yuppie pot, albeit on a contemporary agrobusiness scale.
Below that you'd have your basic convenience store brands, put together out what whatever mixture of canadian, american, and mexican happens to be cheap and reasonably consistent.
If you look at the current aircraft carrier deployment, you'll notice that 'hanging around the middle east' is a very popular activity among aircraft carriers, with 'maintenance' the runner up.
Further, given that it was CNV-72, the very much not obsolete yet, Abraham Lincoln that had the dubious honor of passing through the Strait of Hormuz(ie. within range of practically anything not classified as a 'small arm', the Enterprise certainly hasn't been obviously singled out as the sitting duck.
Given that aircraft carriers are there to carry aircraft which(along with crew) are Very. Much. Not. Cheap. I'd be inclined to check the allocation of those two things for the cruise. If normal, there's a bloody fortune in men and hardware loaded in the thing, even if it is an obsolete tub. If it mysteriously ends up being composed of all the EOL aircraft and enlisted na'er-do-wells, you might want to bring a life jacket...
That said, though, given the rather low standard of evidence required for questionably sensible invasions of dusty countries, the notion that 'They' would need to false-flag an entire aircraft carrier seems a bit curious. It would also be a slightly curious choice because aircraft carriers are the absolute finest in highly-visible nationalist force projection, and losing one would be terrible PR.
PowerVR hasn't shown their face on the PC side in years; but they are something of an 800lb gorilla in power-constrained GPU environments. Not the only player; but a lot of ARM SoCs of various flavors include them. Intel even enlisted them, rather than its in-house designs or the traditional PC guys, for a number of its very-low-power Atom parts...
Given Apple's (relative) hardware homogeneity(certainly more than Android; but the steadily accumulating pile of older iDevices is inevitable and not going away just yet...), I assume that iOS games will largely tax the GPU as hard as possible; but not try overshooting(just as console games generally push right to the edge, since the edge is a known quantity). It will be interesting to see if the new 'retina display' ipads end up seeing titles that sacrifice complexity in other areas to push native resolution, or whether we'll see a lot of 'well, it's smoothly upsampled; but fundamentally the same resolution as the iPad N-1' stuff...
One thing that I don't think has come up yet; but would be interesting to see, is whether Nvidia tries to turn their disadvantage into a bonus by doing more aggressive power scaling...
If, as TFA suggests, Tegra parts are held back by memory bandwidth; because faster busses are power hungry, this suggests that they might be able to substantially speed-bump their parts when the device is on AC power or otherwise not power constrained. So long as the switchover is handled reasonably elegantly, that could turn out to be an advantage in the various HDMI dock/computer replacement/etc. scenarios...
The irony in this is that this is coming from a company that presented chunks of wood as their next-gen graphics cards.
Hey! Some of us care about 'Green Computing' here, you earth-raping performance whore!
Just ask Intel about Apple's benchmarking strategy: For years, the finest in graphic design publicly asserted that PPC was so bitchin' that it was pretty much just letting Intel and x86 live because killing your inferiors is bad taste. Then, one design win, and x86 is suddenly eleventy-billion percent faster than that old-and-busted PPC legacy crap.
Or ask Amazon: Amazon releases 'Kindle' e-reader device. His Steveness declares "Nobody reads". And now Apple is pushing books, newspapers, and their own pet proprietary publishing platform...
Cheer up, emo Nvidia, all you have to do is sell Apple a Tegra N SoC, or even just the rights to include your GPU in their AN SoC, and Tim Cook will personally explain to the world that PowerVR GPUs are slow, weak, make you 30% less creative and are produced entirely from conflict minerals.
It would take a very comprehensive piece of surveying work to say whether this in fact holds across the board; but my anecdotal impression is that the utility of legally enforced compliance may vary depending on what sort of software you are dealing with.
The area that comes to mind is embedded systems: a substantial number of assorted plastic SoC boxes running linux are user-modifiable today because their sellers were forced to provide sources under the GPL. Their firmware was often of rather low quality; but contained vital architectural details about the hardware that would otherwise have had to be inferred by comparatively arduous reverse engineering. In those situations, motivation is still better(one presumes that the manufacturers who are shipping *WRT firmwares are probably more helpful than the ones who stash a passive_agressive_GPL_compliance_blob.rar file somewhere in the dark corner of their support site); but bad code that provided enough information to port the better mainline-based 3rd party firmware was still useful.
In something like the OGRE case, there doesn't seem to be the analogous vital information, bad code would just be bad code, making enforced contribution considerably less useful.
I'd be interested to see if this pattern in fact holds, or if I am simply mistaken, and if there are any other categories that push strongly in one direction or the other; but I don't really have enough information to say...
We refer to that as a 'from the other side'-channel attack...
Mr. Ballmer wishes to believe that this will be the year of Bing On The Desktop.
I propose that we in the linux community dispatch a team of our disappointment-hardened counselors in order to help him work through the stages of the inevitable grieving process in an efficient and healthy manner...