"Client/server" is some 70's academic hippie crap. We prefer to think of it as the "Consumer/Premium Content Provider" model. In the near future, we have high hopes for the "Serf/Lord" model.
-RIAA
Does the use of SQL(by default, transparently handled by a built-in SQLite implementation, optionally usable against a separate SQL backend for higher performance or multiple-computer-access setups) really bother you that much? More to the point, how is that different from iTunes' metadata storage, except for the whole "being comparatively standard" and "being optionally compatible with more powerful backend databases" stuff?
Western Union, obviously. The head of Fisrt National Trust Reserve Bank of Nigera, LLC, kindly offered to handle the whole matter in strictest confidence for them.
That was my point: in a substitute-for-credit-card scenario, both devices are powered, so any of these systems will work.
In myriad other scenarios, where one device is powered and the other isn't, QR codes are excellent for cheap, 'dumb' applications, and NFC is pricer but much more versatile, while sound-systems are basically useless outside of powered/powered situations.
If NFC is only a credit-card-substitute, that our lattes may appear upon our phone bills, then it is overkill. If one cares about other applications, it is rather more powerful.
The one serious deficiency(still ages ahead of just handing out the root password to everybody who needs to use su) with sudo is that the restrictions are on the level of what programs the user can run, rather than what they can do.
Given the number of *nix utilities that can be coaxed into functioning enough like a shell to invoke a full one, it is pretty easy to inadvertently assign permission for something that will let the user do anything they feel like...
Has NFC already been reduced to a glorified mag-stripe; but with more options for carriers to get their pound of flesh out of the transaction? If so, then yes, a cheaper way of communicating with the POS arguably threatens its relevance.
However, if that deplorable possibility hasn't come to pass, then this seems like only a partial replacement. With NFC, as with the prior RFID stuff, you get the handy option of having passive, antenna-powered tags that can interact with powered devices. You can also have two powered devices talk to each other, some combination depending on the circumstances. With this audio mechanism, and QR codes, and the like, you have the advantage of using hardware that is already there 'for free' because it has other uses; but your versatility is limited: The audio-based system, unless some very clever and likely not cheap piezo/MEMS system were to be hacked together, will only work between two powered devices. QR codes are tolerant of unpowered tags, indeed their tags are cheaper than RFID ones; but you are restricted to dumb tags only. No challenge/response authentication or anything unless two devices with screens and cameras are flashing QR codes at each other as a crude form of two-way communications interface, in which case both of the devices have to be fairly sophisticated and powered.
If a microphone couldn't pick it up, the system wouldn't work. Unless the designers are unbelievable morons, they will presumably keep in mind that the carrier is trivially sniff-able and encrypt the link.
I suspect that they will consider them, since the lesson here would appear to be "finish doing unto others a bit faster next time, or others will do unto you."
Ordinarily, even pathetic, abject failure verging on negligence isn't enough to get the People Who Matter sacked. These private equity guys must have some epic level suits on staff, if they are able to rightsize executives as though they were mere peons...
And only to deceptive use. Walk into a pharmacy or grocery store or something, pick up the nearest store-brand OTC medication or toothpaste or whatever and it will say "Compare to $COMPANY(r) $PRODUCT(r) active ingredients*"
"*This product is not manufactured or distributed by $COMPANY owner of the registered trademark $PRODUCT(r)."
If they can establish that the competing service is using a name(or name/branding/color scheme/etc. of which the Geek Squad has a fairly well-developed, if hideous, flavor) calculated to deceive the customer, the competing service is in for a world of hurt. If, on the other hand, "geeks" are a generic category of technical service providers, "Rent A Geek" and "Geek Squad" sound pretty much nothing alike. If an orange and black car containing a "Squad o'Geeks" wearing goofy uniforms pulls up, though, game over...
I'd say that the world's questionably-socially-adept technology enthusiasts have a much better defamation case against Best Buy's appropriation of the term for their "Geek Squad"...
Reasonable enough. The Greys only accept payment in Bitcoins or cattle mutilation, and the latter causes unfortunate political pushback in some of the early primary states...
It is true that GPUs have seen a lot of the excitement(particularly with their transition toward being general-purpose); but part of that is arguably definitional:
Because(contemporary, I'm sure SGI and Sun were doing cool stuff back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper...) multi-GPU tech started its life as a hardcore gamer feature, you can get "desktop" motherboards with support for 3 or 4 16x(physical, usually 8x electrical) PCIe graphics cards. The moment you add a second CPU socket, though, it becomes a "workstation" or "pedestal server" part. Especially now that the FSB is dead, removing one of the major bottlenecks that made older multi-socket systems scale like pure suck, multi-socket systems run like a bat out of hell, support huge amounts of RAM, and benefit as much as the single socket ones do from the number of cores per socket that are now available. However, all that is, by definition, "workstation" or "server".
With supercomputers, on the other hand, since that is a more or less nebulous category that simply refers to whatever is huge and fast at the time, you can add a whole additional row of floor-to-ceiling racks and the category doesn't change.
I'm not sure that you are being entirely fair to the desktops:
On the one hand, since a vast percentage of desktops are sold to budget-conscious users with fairly defined needs, the bottom end of the desktop market moves fairly sluggishly(of course, the bottom end of 'supercomputers' also moves more sluggishly; but nobody bothers to talk about the "250,000th fastest supercomputer!!"); but the top end has been moving at a reasonably steady clip.
Back in mid 2007, a Core2 quad was Pretty Serious Stuff, with maybe a Geforce 8800 or 9800 and 4-8 gigs of RAM if you were hardcore like that.
That will still go head to head with a contemporary budget to midrange box; but if you spent the same money today that you would have had to spend on that, you could be talking a high-end i7, a markedly more powerful graphics card(or 3 of them), and two or three times the RAM. Plus, the now-reasonably-cost-effective-even-when-large-enough-to-be-useful SSD that will have driven your I/O numbers through the roof.
Apathy and diminshing returns keep the desktop market boring; but if those are no object, you can still go nuts.
Except that all the goldfish are wearing dark glasses and shoulder holsters, and are trained to use their unnaturally bulbous eyes to tap fiber optic lines...
Hmm, the page worked just fine from my random residential Verizon IP. Anyway, it was of no serious importance, just a paper demonstrating that I am not, in fact, making up the existence of the "Manchurian hamster". A Manchurian candidate throwaway gag.
I imagine that their in-house fab churns out some very interesting niche designs; but it would be a real surprise if it has any terribly impressive capabilities in general-purpose compute applications. Staying on the bleeding edge of fabrication requires serious money, while just quietly gobbling up commodity stuff from Intel or Nvidia or whoever won't raise any eyebrows.
They probably have some cool specialized crypto-crunchers based on cryptoanalysis that hasn't officially been done yet, and I suspect that they are the chaps to talk to when you need a chip that absolutely hasn't been backdoored in china; but I suspect that their process density and clockspeed capabilities are middling at best.
My understanding is that there has been some work in that area as well(inhibiting the formation of, or reducing the affective salience of, memories of a traumatic experience, say, could be much easier and better for patient quality of life than trying to treat their PTSD after the fact); but that most of it was pharmacological. Given that people manage to black out with stuff you can buy over the counter at E-Z-Booze all the time, never mind the punchier anaesthetics and experimental compounds(and head injuries, and degenerative diseases), the demand for forgetting-through-invasive-neurosurgery just isn't all that high...(and, since it is invasive neurosurgery, it isn't all that useful for some kind of "We haf vays of making you forget... scenarios; because scarring and implanted electrodes tend to raise even more questions than do 'unfortunate accidents' which are far easier and more reliable).
Any research on the subject of deactivating and then, at a later time, reactivating memories embedded in the subject should have been done on Manchurian Hamsters, not rats...
This seems like a clear cut cases of defamation. Intentionally spreading malicious rumors, and then offering to clean up those same rumors for a price is pretty low, and if Valador is guilty, they absolutely should be sued.
"That's a nice launch vehicle you've got there. It'd be a real pity if NASA were to believe that it tends to catch fire..."
"The new program will not involve "monitoring, intercepting, or storing any private sector communications" by the DOD and DHS."
Of course not. Why do you think that the private defense contractors and ISPs are being brought in? They handle that and then pass on the bill and the 'intelligence product' on, and buying that isn't technically any of those things...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that that bothers you a great deal less when you are the sinister G-men in dark glasses...
"Client/server" is some 70's academic hippie crap. We prefer to think of it as the "Consumer/Premium Content Provider" model. In the near future, we have high hopes for the "Serf/Lord" model. -RIAA
Does the use of SQL(by default, transparently handled by a built-in SQLite implementation, optionally usable against a separate SQL backend for higher performance or multiple-computer-access setups) really bother you that much? More to the point, how is that different from iTunes' metadata storage, except for the whole "being comparatively standard" and "being optionally compatible with more powerful backend databases" stuff?
Western Union, obviously. The head of Fisrt National Trust Reserve Bank of Nigera, LLC, kindly offered to handle the whole matter in strictest confidence for them.
Unfortunately, they are still TVs, not monitors.
You can tell by the pixels.
That was my point: in a substitute-for-credit-card scenario, both devices are powered, so any of these systems will work.
In myriad other scenarios, where one device is powered and the other isn't, QR codes are excellent for cheap, 'dumb' applications, and NFC is pricer but much more versatile, while sound-systems are basically useless outside of powered/powered situations.
If NFC is only a credit-card-substitute, that our lattes may appear upon our phone bills, then it is overkill. If one cares about other applications, it is rather more powerful.
The one serious deficiency(still ages ahead of just handing out the root password to everybody who needs to use su) with sudo is that the restrictions are on the level of what programs the user can run, rather than what they can do.
Given the number of *nix utilities that can be coaxed into functioning enough like a shell to invoke a full one, it is pretty easy to inadvertently assign permission for something that will let the user do anything they feel like...
Has NFC already been reduced to a glorified mag-stripe; but with more options for carriers to get their pound of flesh out of the transaction? If so, then yes, a cheaper way of communicating with the POS arguably threatens its relevance.
However, if that deplorable possibility hasn't come to pass, then this seems like only a partial replacement. With NFC, as with the prior RFID stuff, you get the handy option of having passive, antenna-powered tags that can interact with powered devices. You can also have two powered devices talk to each other, some combination depending on the circumstances. With this audio mechanism, and QR codes, and the like, you have the advantage of using hardware that is already there 'for free' because it has other uses; but your versatility is limited: The audio-based system, unless some very clever and likely not cheap piezo/MEMS system were to be hacked together, will only work between two powered devices. QR codes are tolerant of unpowered tags, indeed their tags are cheaper than RFID ones; but you are restricted to dumb tags only. No challenge/response authentication or anything unless two devices with screens and cameras are flashing QR codes at each other as a crude form of two-way communications interface, in which case both of the devices have to be fairly sophisticated and powered.
If a microphone couldn't pick it up, the system wouldn't work. Unless the designers are unbelievable morons, they will presumably keep in mind that the carrier is trivially sniff-able and encrypt the link.
I suspect that they will consider them, since the lesson here would appear to be "finish doing unto others a bit faster next time, or others will do unto you."
Ordinarily, even pathetic, abject failure verging on negligence isn't enough to get the People Who Matter sacked. These private equity guys must have some epic level suits on staff, if they are able to rightsize executives as though they were mere peons...
And only to deceptive use. Walk into a pharmacy or grocery store or something, pick up the nearest store-brand OTC medication or toothpaste or whatever and it will say "Compare to $COMPANY(r) $PRODUCT(r) active ingredients*"
"*This product is not manufactured or distributed by $COMPANY owner of the registered trademark $PRODUCT(r)."
If they can establish that the competing service is using a name(or name/branding/color scheme/etc. of which the Geek Squad has a fairly well-developed, if hideous, flavor) calculated to deceive the customer, the competing service is in for a world of hurt. If, on the other hand, "geeks" are a generic category of technical service providers, "Rent A Geek" and "Geek Squad" sound pretty much nothing alike. If an orange and black car containing a "Squad o'Geeks" wearing goofy uniforms pulls up, though, game over...
I'd say that the world's questionably-socially-adept technology enthusiasts have a much better defamation case against Best Buy's appropriation of the term for their "Geek Squad"...
Reasonable enough. The Greys only accept payment in Bitcoins or cattle mutilation, and the latter causes unfortunate political pushback in some of the early primary states...
It is true that GPUs have seen a lot of the excitement(particularly with their transition toward being general-purpose); but part of that is arguably definitional:
Because(contemporary, I'm sure SGI and Sun were doing cool stuff back when I was knee-high to a grasshopper...) multi-GPU tech started its life as a hardcore gamer feature, you can get "desktop" motherboards with support for 3 or 4 16x(physical, usually 8x electrical) PCIe graphics cards. The moment you add a second CPU socket, though, it becomes a "workstation" or "pedestal server" part. Especially now that the FSB is dead, removing one of the major bottlenecks that made older multi-socket systems scale like pure suck, multi-socket systems run like a bat out of hell, support huge amounts of RAM, and benefit as much as the single socket ones do from the number of cores per socket that are now available. However, all that is, by definition, "workstation" or "server".
With supercomputers, on the other hand, since that is a more or less nebulous category that simply refers to whatever is huge and fast at the time, you can add a whole additional row of floor-to-ceiling racks and the category doesn't change.
I'm not sure that you are being entirely fair to the desktops:
On the one hand, since a vast percentage of desktops are sold to budget-conscious users with fairly defined needs, the bottom end of the desktop market moves fairly sluggishly(of course, the bottom end of 'supercomputers' also moves more sluggishly; but nobody bothers to talk about the "250,000th fastest supercomputer!!"); but the top end has been moving at a reasonably steady clip.
Back in mid 2007, a Core2 quad was Pretty Serious Stuff, with maybe a Geforce 8800 or 9800 and 4-8 gigs of RAM if you were hardcore like that.
That will still go head to head with a contemporary budget to midrange box; but if you spent the same money today that you would have had to spend on that, you could be talking a high-end i7, a markedly more powerful graphics card(or 3 of them), and two or three times the RAM. Plus, the now-reasonably-cost-effective-even-when-large-enough-to-be-useful SSD that will have driven your I/O numbers through the roof.
Apathy and diminshing returns keep the desktop market boring; but if those are no object, you can still go nuts.
Except that all the goldfish are wearing dark glasses and shoulder holsters, and are trained to use their unnaturally bulbous eyes to tap fiber optic lines...
I'm pretty sure that we've moved all our beowulf clusters to a cloud that runs linux in soviet russia...
Hmm, the page worked just fine from my random residential Verizon IP. Anyway, it was of no serious importance, just a paper demonstrating that I am not, in fact, making up the existence of the "Manchurian hamster". A Manchurian candidate throwaway gag.
I imagine that their in-house fab churns out some very interesting niche designs; but it would be a real surprise if it has any terribly impressive capabilities in general-purpose compute applications. Staying on the bleeding edge of fabrication requires serious money, while just quietly gobbling up commodity stuff from Intel or Nvidia or whoever won't raise any eyebrows.
They probably have some cool specialized crypto-crunchers based on cryptoanalysis that hasn't officially been done yet, and I suspect that they are the chaps to talk to when you need a chip that absolutely hasn't been backdoored in china; but I suspect that their process density and clockspeed capabilities are middling at best.
My understanding is that there has been some work in that area as well(inhibiting the formation of, or reducing the affective salience of, memories of a traumatic experience, say, could be much easier and better for patient quality of life than trying to treat their PTSD after the fact); but that most of it was pharmacological. Given that people manage to black out with stuff you can buy over the counter at E-Z-Booze all the time, never mind the punchier anaesthetics and experimental compounds(and head injuries, and degenerative diseases), the demand for forgetting-through-invasive-neurosurgery just isn't all that high...(and, since it is invasive neurosurgery, it isn't all that useful for some kind of "We haf vays of making you forget... scenarios; because scarring and implanted electrodes tend to raise even more questions than do 'unfortunate accidents' which are far easier and more reliable).
Any research on the subject of deactivating and then, at a later time, reactivating memories embedded in the subject should have been done on Manchurian Hamsters, not rats...
This seems like a clear cut cases of defamation. Intentionally spreading malicious rumors, and then offering to clean up those same rumors for a price is pretty low, and if Valador is guilty, they absolutely should be sued.
"That's a nice launch vehicle you've got there. It'd be a real pity if NASA were to believe that it tends to catch fire..."
Just spoof the user-agent string...
Oh, wait. Sorry. Enjoy the walled garden!
"The new program will not involve "monitoring, intercepting, or storing any private sector communications" by the DOD and DHS."
Of course not. Why do you think that the private defense contractors and ISPs are being brought in? They handle that and then pass on the bill and the 'intelligence product' on, and buying that isn't technically any of those things...