Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures.
Wrong, unless you are talking about localized records, in which case that will always be true.
Its been cooling a bit for the last 8 years... the trend began in 2002. You are either making things up, or repeating what you heard from someone else who was making things up.
I believe that what he is saying is that there wont be much improvement for spinning platters because they are being quickly outpaced by solid state alternatives.
All that is left for the magnetics is capacity and price, and while we are just tripping over 2TB on the platters, solid state isnt far behind. There are 512GB SATA SSD's on the market right now, and at least one 1TB PCIe solution.
It was only a few years ago that the spinners tripped over 1TB while SSD's were only 64GB on the high end. Now the spinners are 2TB while the SSD's are 512GB. SSD's are doubling 3 times faster, and all other things bring equal.. performance is king.
So the next platter iteration gets us to 4TB, or maybe 5TB?
Mark my words. SSD's will be there to meet them, grinning... "What took you so long?"... The platters will survive on the price niche for a decade or more, so the development focus will be on cost cutting instead of capacity. Cheap storage for backup purposes only.
You have forgotten that what developers are willing to invest time in is a form of artificial selection that does not reflect what the market-at-large wants or needs.
Developers are a breed unto themselves and you can plainly see the effect that this has on (for example) GIMP, where there is a very big market for a decent photo editing and manipulation package (as Photoshop will attest), but GIMP falls way short on the usability/accessibility department. It is because GIMP is written FOR developers, rather than FOR industry professionals or grandma.
The 32-bit Adobe Flash 10 plugin for Firefox on x86 Linux is closed-source if I'm not mistaken and it doesn't have different versions for different distros either.
You are right, it doesnt have different versions for different distros. Instead it flat out doesnt work correctly or not at all on many distros.
I have never encountered an open source desktop linux application that would not run on any desktop linux distribution.
Have you ever encountered a closed-source linux application that could be thrown at an arbitrary linux distribution? No? How about an arbitrary version of a single distribution?
Portability is something you actually have to do. It doesn't just happen.
It has always been true that portability is hard and thats actually the point of the article. This Android stuff is a portability nightmare. Device X has feature F, but android didnt have an API for F, so device X has proprietary F library. Device Y has similar feature F, but android didn't have an API for F, so device Y has its own proprietary F library.
So X and Y have their own library ecosystems, and applications which use F's need to be ported and tested, and there remains no clear route to that feature ever being API-standardized so the future remains a hard porting problem.
Contrast this with the iPhone, where by definition there is a standard API, where if something in the API changes due to revisions.. then there is a simple line in the sand: library pre-revision and library post-revision. A fairly simple "porting" issue compared to dealing with X's library and Y's library, with their own revisions, and speculating on Z's library down the road.
I am no iPhone fan. I will never own an iPhone. That does not mean that I don't recognize how much easier it is to target.
That doesn't wash. Sure, your math is good, but to attain a "20 times more random" effect, the bias would have to be greater than 97.5% predictable, which is completely ridiculous. Even a 60% predictability is ridiculous. Nobody is making such RNG hardware.
The argument that you're missing is that even though there is some arguable loss of freedom by paying taxes to help with the health of society, you are buying into a system...
You are not buying into anything. Stop pretending that there is a market when its tax dollars, which have been taken by force, being spent on "everyones" behalf. There is no market here. You are not buying.
No, thats not correct. You are confusing health care with health insurance. Proponents of universal health care often confuse the two things.
He is not looking for health care. He is looking for health insurance.
What kind of insurance does he need? Why its a high deductible plan.. the kind people buy when they only want or need catastrophic coverage. You will note that he is only concerned about major medical expenses. By getting this sort of plan, he cuts out all the profit from the middle man (be it private or public) until he reaches his limit.
Middle men don't make things cheaper. The kind of insurance you envision make things cheaper for some, but more expensive for most. Requiring that people buy that kind of coverage is a violation of their liberties.
So if Google goes out and picks up a patent essential to H.264, then they will avoid (or offset) the licensing fees on H.264 forever.
But this doesnt give what that poster wanted, which was Google picking up all the H.264 patents and freeing them. Thats never going to happen, and as is Google seems very willing to use H.264 anyways.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Theora cannot win. H.264 is here to stay and this fact really doesnt effect the end user much, because most end users already have H.264 licenses. Its pretty much just Linux and BSD that have a playback issue as far as end-users are concerned, and with the availability of "illegal" H.264 codecs, that just doesnt matter.
What Mozilla and Opera are doing is trying to make it an end-user problem when it actually isn't. The end users have the codecs. Use them. Giving users the choice is far superior to steadfastly refusing to give them a choice.
You are making the assumption that caching only applies to disk drives. You will remain a second rate programmer until you learn that algorithms dont apply to single problems. Sometimes you will cache data from a drive, sometimes you will cache data from a network, and sometimes you will cache pure computation.
100% agree. If your goal is to get HIRED as a programmer, then its databases databases databases.
Nearly every programming job out there required database programming. Sure, a lucky few get to bang out libraries, or write games.. but for every one of them there are HUNDREDS of programmers working for private firms writing custom programs which manipulate in-house databases.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what works. Viruses and trojans.
I don't pirate because I don't want viruses or trojans.
Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures.
Wrong, unless you are talking about localized records, in which case that will always be true.
Its been cooling a bit for the last 8 years... the trend began in 2002. You are either making things up, or repeating what you heard from someone else who was making things up.
THE PAPER WAS OVER 3000 PAGES LONG.
The dramatization of the number of pages is mooted by the dramatization of the number of peer reviewers, which is "thousands of scientists"
The sun is the primary source of the far strongest greenhouse gas.. water vapor.
I believe that what he is saying is that there wont be much improvement for spinning platters because they are being quickly outpaced by solid state alternatives.
... "What took you so long?" ... The platters will survive on the price niche for a decade or more, so the development focus will be on cost cutting instead of capacity. Cheap storage for backup purposes only.
All that is left for the magnetics is capacity and price, and while we are just tripping over 2TB on the platters, solid state isnt far behind. There are 512GB SATA SSD's on the market right now, and at least one 1TB PCIe solution.
It was only a few years ago that the spinners tripped over 1TB while SSD's were only 64GB on the high end. Now the spinners are 2TB while the SSD's are 512GB. SSD's are doubling 3 times faster, and all other things bring equal.. performance is king.
So the next platter iteration gets us to 4TB, or maybe 5TB?
Mark my words. SSD's will be there to meet them, grinning
You have forgotten that what developers are willing to invest time in is a form of artificial selection that does not reflect what the market-at-large wants or needs.
Developers are a breed unto themselves and you can plainly see the effect that this has on (for example) GIMP, where there is a very big market for a decent photo editing and manipulation package (as Photoshop will attest), but GIMP falls way short on the usability/accessibility department. It is because GIMP is written FOR developers, rather than FOR industry professionals or grandma.
Grandma isn't going to fork the project.
The 32-bit Adobe Flash 10 plugin for Firefox on x86 Linux is closed-source if I'm not mistaken and it doesn't have different versions for different distros either.
You are right, it doesnt have different versions for different distros. Instead it flat out doesnt work correctly or not at all on many distros.
You are missing the forest.
I have never encountered an open source desktop linux application that would not run on any desktop linux distribution.
Have you ever encountered a closed-source linux application that could be thrown at an arbitrary linux distribution? No? How about an arbitrary version of a single distribution?
Portability is something you actually have to do. It doesn't just happen.
It has always been true that portability is hard and thats actually the point of the article. This Android stuff is a portability nightmare. Device X has feature F, but android didnt have an API for F, so device X has proprietary F library. Device Y has similar feature F, but android didn't have an API for F, so device Y has its own proprietary F library.
So X and Y have their own library ecosystems, and applications which use F's need to be ported and tested, and there remains no clear route to that feature ever being API-standardized so the future remains a hard porting problem.
Contrast this with the iPhone, where by definition there is a standard API, where if something in the API changes due to revisions.. then there is a simple line in the sand: library pre-revision and library post-revision. A fairly simple "porting" issue compared to dealing with X's library and Y's library, with their own revisions, and speculating on Z's library down the road.
I am no iPhone fan. I will never own an iPhone. That does not mean that I don't recognize how much easier it is to target.
This is essentially the same problem that desktop linux has.
That doesn't wash. Sure, your math is good, but to attain a "20 times more random" effect, the bias would have to be greater than 97.5% predictable, which is completely ridiculous. Even a 60% predictability is ridiculous. Nobody is making such RNG hardware.
The argument that you're missing is that even though there is some arguable loss of freedom by paying taxes to help with the health of society, you are buying into a system...
You are not buying into anything. Stop pretending that there is a market when its tax dollars, which have been taken by force, being spent on "everyones" behalf. There is no market here. You are not buying.
No, thats not correct. You are confusing health care with health insurance. Proponents of universal health care often confuse the two things.
He is not looking for health care. He is looking for health insurance.
What kind of insurance does he need? Why its a high deductible plan.. the kind people buy when they only want or need catastrophic coverage. You will note that he is only concerned about major medical expenses. By getting this sort of plan, he cuts out all the profit from the middle man (be it private or public) until he reaches his limit.
Middle men don't make things cheaper. The kind of insurance you envision make things cheaper for some, but more expensive for most. Requiring that people buy that kind of coverage is a violation of their liberties.
Doesn't sound like the guy asking the original question is feeling too liberated though.
The guy asking the original question is seeking the best way provide coverage for his family. He did not ask how to make others provide it for him.
Frankly, I want to know why you think Mozilla will make the same boneheaded decision
(A) Because they have said that they wont support H.264
(B) Because they release a press release every week, sometimes more often, crying about H.264
20 times more random?
umm.. errr... wha?
Only a raging sociopath, or completely greedy asshole is against paying higher taxes to make sure everyone around him is in good health.
Only brainwashed socialists ask questions like this, formulated in this way.
We call the concept Liberty, the freedom of the individual from outside compulsion or coercion.
THey say that the costs AND INSURANCE PROFITS are not being passed directly to the consumer. Instead, the general taxes pay for it.
So its indirectly passed directly to the consumer.
Opera already has gstreamer backend support...
..oh, they only allow the decoding of Theora via gstreamer? Damnit!
Why do you think Mozilla is going to be any different?
Didn't you know that codecs can come in separate binaries, and one for H.264 is already included in most OS's?
Didn't you know that mozilla *already* interfaces with proprietary binary blobs, and in fact one of them can play back H.264?
What were you arguing again? I can't remember because I just shot it down.
Basically what you are saying is that you have no use for caching algorithms even though you don't know anything about caching algorithms.
Thanks for proving my point.
It allows them to swap patent rights.
So if Google goes out and picks up a patent essential to H.264, then they will avoid (or offset) the licensing fees on H.264 forever.
But this doesnt give what that poster wanted, which was Google picking up all the H.264 patents and freeing them. Thats never going to happen, and as is Google seems very willing to use H.264 anyways.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Theora cannot win. H.264 is here to stay and this fact really doesnt effect the end user much, because most end users already have H.264 licenses. Its pretty much just Linux and BSD that have a playback issue as far as end-users are concerned, and with the availability of "illegal" H.264 codecs, that just doesnt matter.
What Mozilla and Opera are doing is trying to make it an end-user problem when it actually isn't. The end users have the codecs. Use them. Giving users the choice is far superior to steadfastly refusing to give them a choice.
You are making the assumption that caching only applies to disk drives. You will remain a second rate programmer until you learn that algorithms dont apply to single problems. Sometimes you will cache data from a drive, sometimes you will cache data from a network, and sometimes you will cache pure computation.
Trillions of rocks on the planet and you seem to think that it would be impossible for random chance to create "distinctive wear patterns"
100% agree. If your goal is to get HIRED as a programmer, then its databases databases databases.
Nearly every programming job out there required database programming. Sure, a lucky few get to bang out libraries, or write games.. but for every one of them there are HUNDREDS of programmers working for private firms writing custom programs which manipulate in-house databases.