While I'm sure getting a terabit to the home would be wonderful, the real-world situation is most people are going to continue to have copper to the home for years/decades due to regulatory capture.
Is the Probabilistic Constellation Shaping concept also applicable to twisted pair/coax copper? Because being able to get some people decent DSL would be a major advance. My parents still can't get 1990's-vintage 200 kbs DSL because in 20 years, AT&T still hasn't run fiber *to their own fucking cabinets*, much less the home.
I know AT&T already has g.fast, but that's one of those things that's mostly only useful for short distances and "demonstrations", the actual real-world speed isn't much better than DSL after so many hundred feet, and it would have required the same AT&T who has refused to spend money on fiber to spend money to upgrade their existing cabinets.
... making phones with replaceable batteries? The 6 year old Evo 4G I gave to my mother has a replaceable battery, and is still in use (with a fresh install of Cyanogen Mod) today.
With Moore's Law rapidly dying, there is less need to upgrade for a "faster" phone, since CPU's aren't getting faster anymore. And I just want to make calls, texts, emails, and occasional FB with my phone. I'm not trying to play Crysis 3 on it.
But that's only half the problem. Apple and Google/Android need to start supporting their phone OS's for longer than 2/3 years. Otherwise, it opens a niche for a competitor who will.
I spent a few hours trying to get Chromecast working on a TV on a 10.0.0.0/8 subnet at a large university, and it simply cannot do it. Chrome cast will only work on a/24. Miracast will, but Google disabled it on their Nexus line, for no greater reason than trying to push Chromecast.
So Google, do you care about making your customers happy, or some random mid-level MBA at the Googleplex who thought they were Dr. Evil when they came with the idea of reducing functionality?
Plus, I haven't read about the US government spending a few trillion dollars to invade a foreign country to secure their supply of sunlight. I'd rather waste some money on solar than a fark-ton on oil.
That goes a bit in hand with my #3 theory. I suspect that once a species is capable of interstellar traffic, they may have a different definition of "prime real estate" than a planet orbiting a star. Maybe they start congregating near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy for abundant energy, materials, and easy gravity slingshots to anyplace/anytime they want.
So we only have evidence that life started only one time in earth's 4.5 billion years of existence. To me this is profound.
I don't believe it's as profound as you think. Life probably evolved quickly once it was created, and any subsequently created life was quickly out-competed by earlier lifeforms who had a better foothold.
For all we know, new life may be arising on earth today, but it would have a hard time surviving, let alone dominating, against bacterial and viral species who were survivors of a few billion years of survival of the fittest.
Bacterial life appeared on this planet basically the instant asteroids stopped bombarding the planet. For all we know, life was created and destroyed several times before the Late Heavy Bombardment ceased. So it appears that simple bacterial/viral life may be commonplace throughout the cosmos. Indeed, there are tantalizing signs that Mars and Titan may harbor some form of life.
On the other hand, complex multicellular life only appeared in the last billion years, which suggests that the leap from single-cell -> multicellular life is somewhat difficult. Our sun won't be conducive to life in another billion years, so complex life "barely" made it here.
I would love to be wrong, but given the fact that planets appear to be commonplace throughout the cosmos, and we have yet to hear from anyone, it starts to shift the odds towards one or more of:
1) Complex life is relatively rare and widely separated in space and time. 2) Complex life doesn't survive long-term (nuclear war, grey goo) 3) Complex life does survive, but for some reason doesn't communicate or colonize other worlds (a "Prime Directive", or perhaps they "sublime" in the Ian Banks/Culture sense)
I actually lean a bit towards 3 myself, but humanity will eventually find out, one way or the other.
The people I know who are holding out are doing so because of the lack of Media Center. How hard can it be for a corporation with Microsoft's resources to just recompile the thing and slipstream it in?
Instead of getting the Government to fund computer science education, how about we just require computer companies to pay competitive salary? It doesn't require any tax dollars, and it's just crazy enough to work.
The problem is, the past 30 years have taught MBA's that *they're* the ones who are supposed to get the $200k salary, and the computer engineer is the one who's supposed to have a Masters and 20 years of experience in a 3 year old language and work for $60k until their job gets outsourced to India.
The problem will largely go away once the computer geek's biggest problem is "Do I buy the BMW or the Mercedes", and the MBA's are crying themselves to sleep, praying they can pay their student loans off before they hit 40 and are too old to spreadsheet.
Today, doing nothing really isn't an option. You *have* to work somehow. By offering a basic income, you are, in effect, creating competition for those jobs. If I have the leverage to say "no", if some people find "nothing" a competitive alternative, then supply-and-demand for workers says that prices (ie, salary) will have to go up to match.
It's a double-whammy against the wealthy, in that they will have to pay a large chunk of *both* the basic income and the delta in salaries. On the other hand, they have benefited the most from income/wealth inequality over the last 3 decades, and increased automation will only make a basic income more necessary.
I'm not sure *anyone* has fully thought through the action-and-reaction of basic income, so I can't honestly say that it's "good", but one way or another its time may be coming.
Seriously, *every* business by law should be required to be cancellable by one-click or similar. There are a number of them that want to spend an hour on the phone listening to the pretty music, hoping to wait you out.
Moore's Law isn't completely dead, it's just metamorphosing into a new form.
If Intel is moving into spintronics (as rumor suggests), then next-generation chips should use millions of times less power (like, run your CPU for a month on a AAA).
If so, it becomes possible to start stacking CPU layers like memory/flash is today. Imagine a next-generation Moore's law stating the number of transistors in a 3D stack doubling every X months.
You misspelled "idiots". Idiots are always the last person to realize they are wrong, and they rarely have a moment of clarity. They usually just move on to being idiots about some other topic.
There are two types of rich people: The economic value creators (Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, etc) and the lucky ones (Wall Street, Koch Bros).
The former don't care about higher taxes precisely *because* they generate economic value. If you take their money, it will go to teachers, police, etc, and will eventually filter through the economy to someone who wants to buy more Shaw carpet or Acme brick. What the tax man taketh from Warren Buffet, a slightly wealthier poor and middle class give back.
Meanwhile, if you're "lucky", if you got your fortune because you were in the right place at the right time, knew the right hands to shake and palms to grease, taxing them takes away the money forever. It isn't coming back.
So when you see the rich say we need higher taxes, it's usually people who actually generate value, and the ones who complain about higher taxes are usually the leeches on society.
Microsoft is also apparently working on increasing the XBox's graphical capabilities. According to rumor, the improved XBox will come with support for up to 16 hardware sprites on screen at a time, and the ability to free up more memory for developers by turning off the BIOS mapped into $A000...
If you look up "regulatory capture" in the dictionary, it has a picture of our state legislature...
There are *so* many things which a majority of Tennesseans are clamoring for (wine in supermarkets, medical marijuana, fiber broadband) but we can't get passed the legislature because some random dumb-ass politician feels it "violates their morals" (or the wallet of their big campaign contributors).
We desperately need a public referendum system which the legislature *must* act upon, because Tennessee is being held hostage by some seriously stupid politicians.
Fellow Tennesseans, anybody feel like going together and putting a full page "Please vote for anyone but Patsy Hazlewood because..." ad in the Chattanooga Times Free Press? Because she just tossed a buttload of her constituents who are clamoring for EPB fiber under the bus to make her corporate masters happy. I think they should be reminded of that come next election.
... to just take that $4 billion, and cut a "bonus" check to every IT worker in America.
The problem isn't that women don't know how to program as well as men, it's that the field just isn't as attractive to them. Woman tend to value job stability over income, and it's hard to find that kind of stability in IT. IT requires a lot of brains, a lot of hard work, isn't very social, has a lot of guys with behavioral issues, and their job might get outsourced to India so the MBA middle manager can get his quarterly bonus and afford some more blow.
IT and the medical field require similar levels of intelligence and work, yet medical jobs don't often get outsourced to China, the demand for medical skills is relatively constant, and while there are behavioral issues, they usually fall along the Doogie Howser Dipshit Doc/Nurse axis rather than the male/female axis.
Do you want to attract women to IT? The best way to do it would be to change it in ways which also make it more attractive to men too: 40 hour work weeks, reasonable pay for the work/brainpower involved, job security, etc.
I bought the Intel i5-4960 because, having done high-performance computing for over a decade, current Intel CPU's absolutely maul AMD CPU's when it comes to numerical work. It was my first new computer in almost a decade, and I wanted a "no excuses" gaming box. Games *can* be good on AMD, but many top tier games require various trade-offs.
And I'm not an AMD hater. Once upon a time, we had 100's of AMD Opteron's in our compute cluster. But it's been several years since they have put out a competitive chip. I am hopeful that 16nm + Zen will make them competitive again, if only to make Intel more competitive on pricing.
My work desktop is AMD, my home fileserver is AMD, and both my parent's desktops are AMD. That's because in those use cases, AMD is "good enough". Web browsing and email don't require a lot of horsepower.
That said, my gaming/transcoding PC is an Intel i5-4690, because AMD's top line CPU can barely compete with Intel's I3 line. CMT didn't pan out, and they've been held hostage by TSMC/GloFo's failure to produce a sub-28nm lithographic process.
I love AMD's engineers, they have some impressively smart people working for them, and I hope Zen + 16nm heralds a new beginning for them. But today, they aren't "competitive", merely "good enough".
I'm curious why my previous post was marked a troll. I *have* worked in academic HPC for over a decade, have assembled dozens of server motherboards over the years, and over two dozen for myself and family. I'm not exactly a newb here.
Intel consumer-grade OEM heatsinks (as of Haswell at least, perhaps they fixed the issue on Skylake OEM heatsinks and I'm unaware) are boat anchors. On two quality Haswell motherboards (Asus H97M and H97I) I have, the OEM heatsink fails to mount sturdily in the motherboard, and pops out with only the slightest jarring.
Third-party heatsinks would be much less necessary if the OEM heatsink would actually do its job.
This would matter less if Intel would include a usable heatsink with their CPU's. I have worked in high performance computing for over a decade, so putting a heat sink on isn't exactly some exotic task to me, but I couldn't get either of my home OEM Haswell heatsinks to hold onto the motherboard, they would both pop off after the slightest bump. So I *had* to use third-party heatsinks.
Intel should make backplates with threaded mounts mandatory, and should ensure that their OEM heatsink is capable of actually staying on the motherboard and keeping the CPU from thermally throttling during a Prime95 run. If the user needs a third-party heat sink due to overclocking or unusual case geometry, that's fine, but their OEM heatsink should work properly for 95% of users. But it doesn't.
Doing the right thing at Intel's scale couldn't cost more than a dollar (a little extra aluminum/steel in the right spots), yet they mysteriously cheap out. Even AMD's stock heatsink is better.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm sure getting a terabit to the home would be wonderful, the real-world situation is most people are going to continue to have copper to the home for years/decades due to regulatory capture.
Is the Probabilistic Constellation Shaping concept also applicable to twisted pair/coax copper? Because being able to get some people decent DSL would be a major advance. My parents still can't get 1990's-vintage 200 kbs DSL because in 20 years, AT&T still hasn't run fiber *to their own fucking cabinets*, much less the home.
I know AT&T already has g.fast, but that's one of those things that's mostly only useful for short distances and "demonstrations", the actual real-world speed isn't much better than DSL after so many hundred feet, and it would have required the same AT&T who has refused to spend money on fiber to spend money to upgrade their existing cabinets.
This is what happens when you use Apple Maps for directions...
... making phones with replaceable batteries? The 6 year old Evo 4G I gave to my mother has a replaceable battery, and is still in use (with a fresh install of Cyanogen Mod) today.
With Moore's Law rapidly dying, there is less need to upgrade for a "faster" phone, since CPU's aren't getting faster anymore. And I just want to make calls, texts, emails, and occasional FB with my phone. I'm not trying to play Crysis 3 on it.
But that's only half the problem. Apple and Google/Android need to start supporting their phone OS's for longer than 2/3 years. Otherwise, it opens a niche for a competitor who will.
I spent a few hours trying to get Chromecast working on a TV on a 10.0.0.0/8 subnet at a large university, and it simply cannot do it. Chrome cast will only work on a /24. Miracast will, but Google disabled it on their Nexus line, for no greater reason than trying to push Chromecast.
So Google, do you care about making your customers happy, or some random mid-level MBA at the Googleplex who thought they were Dr. Evil when they came with the idea of reducing functionality?
Plus, I haven't read about the US government spending a few trillion dollars to invade a foreign country to secure their supply of sunlight. I'd rather waste some money on solar than a fark-ton on oil.
That goes a bit in hand with my #3 theory. I suspect that once a species is capable of interstellar traffic, they may have a different definition of "prime real estate" than a planet orbiting a star. Maybe they start congregating near the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy for abundant energy, materials, and easy gravity slingshots to anyplace/anytime they want.
So we only have evidence that life started only one time in earth's 4.5 billion years of existence. To me this is profound.
I don't believe it's as profound as you think. Life probably evolved quickly once it was created, and any subsequently created life was quickly out-competed by earlier lifeforms who had a better foothold.
For all we know, new life may be arising on earth today, but it would have a hard time surviving, let alone dominating, against bacterial and viral species who were survivors of a few billion years of survival of the fittest.
Bacterial life appeared on this planet basically the instant asteroids stopped bombarding the planet. For all we know, life was created and destroyed several times before the Late Heavy Bombardment ceased. So it appears that simple bacterial/viral life may be commonplace throughout the cosmos. Indeed, there are tantalizing signs that Mars and Titan may harbor some form of life.
On the other hand, complex multicellular life only appeared in the last billion years, which suggests that the leap from single-cell -> multicellular life is somewhat difficult. Our sun won't be conducive to life in another billion years, so complex life "barely" made it here.
I would love to be wrong, but given the fact that planets appear to be commonplace throughout the cosmos, and we have yet to hear from anyone, it starts to shift the odds towards one or more of:
1) Complex life is relatively rare and widely separated in space and time.
2) Complex life doesn't survive long-term (nuclear war, grey goo)
3) Complex life does survive, but for some reason doesn't communicate or colonize other worlds (a "Prime Directive", or perhaps they "sublime" in the Ian Banks/Culture sense)
I actually lean a bit towards 3 myself, but humanity will eventually find out, one way or the other.
I tried my first veggie burger about 20 years ago, and I remember wondering when the FDA started considering sawdust a vegetable...
Now, I eat Gardein teriyaki chick'n and a few others quite regularly. I'm still waiting for the whole "cheaper than meat" part to kick in though.
If you haven't had them yet, give them a try, you'll be surprised, and once they get costs down, it'll change the world.
...as if millions of progressives suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
I suspect this is just manufactured controversy to generate a bit of buzz for Star Trek Beyond in 2 weeks.
The people I know who are holding out are doing so because of the lack of Media Center. How hard can it be for a corporation with Microsoft's resources to just recompile the thing and slipstream it in?
Instead of getting the Government to fund computer science education, how about we just require computer companies to pay competitive salary? It doesn't require any tax dollars, and it's just crazy enough to work.
The problem is, the past 30 years have taught MBA's that *they're* the ones who are supposed to get the $200k salary, and the computer engineer is the one who's supposed to have a Masters and 20 years of experience in a 3 year old language and work for $60k until their job gets outsourced to India.
The problem will largely go away once the computer geek's biggest problem is "Do I buy the BMW or the Mercedes", and the MBA's are crying themselves to sleep, praying they can pay their student loans off before they hit 40 and are too old to spreadsheet.
Today, doing nothing really isn't an option. You *have* to work somehow. By offering a basic income, you are, in effect, creating competition for those jobs. If I have the leverage to say "no", if some people find "nothing" a competitive alternative, then supply-and-demand for workers says that prices (ie, salary) will have to go up to match.
It's a double-whammy against the wealthy, in that they will have to pay a large chunk of *both* the basic income and the delta in salaries. On the other hand, they have benefited the most from income/wealth inequality over the last 3 decades, and increased automation will only make a basic income more necessary.
I'm not sure *anyone* has fully thought through the action-and-reaction of basic income, so I can't honestly say that it's "good", but one way or another its time may be coming.
Seriously, *every* business by law should be required to be cancellable by one-click or similar. There are a number of them that want to spend an hour on the phone listening to the pretty music, hoping to wait you out.
Moore's Law isn't completely dead, it's just metamorphosing into a new form.
If Intel is moving into spintronics (as rumor suggests), then next-generation chips should use millions of times less power (like, run your CPU for a month on a AAA).
If so, it becomes possible to start stacking CPU layers like memory/flash is today. Imagine a next-generation Moore's law stating the number of transistors in a 3D stack doubling every X months.
> This is why AGW pseudo-skeptics are...
You misspelled "idiots". Idiots are always the last person to realize they are wrong, and they rarely have a moment of clarity. They usually just move on to being idiots about some other topic.
There are two types of rich people: The economic value creators (Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, etc) and the lucky ones (Wall Street, Koch Bros).
The former don't care about higher taxes precisely *because* they generate economic value. If you take their money, it will go to teachers, police, etc, and will eventually filter through the economy to someone who wants to buy more Shaw carpet or Acme brick. What the tax man taketh from Warren Buffet, a slightly wealthier poor and middle class give back.
Meanwhile, if you're "lucky", if you got your fortune because you were in the right place at the right time, knew the right hands to shake and palms to grease, taxing them takes away the money forever. It isn't coming back.
So when you see the rich say we need higher taxes, it's usually people who actually generate value, and the ones who complain about higher taxes are usually the leeches on society.
Microsoft is also apparently working on increasing the XBox's graphical capabilities. According to rumor, the improved XBox will come with support for up to 16 hardware sprites on screen at a time, and the ability to free up more memory for developers by turning off the BIOS mapped into $A000...
If you look up "regulatory capture" in the dictionary, it has a picture of our state legislature...
There are *so* many things which a majority of Tennesseans are clamoring for (wine in supermarkets, medical marijuana, fiber broadband) but we can't get passed the legislature because some random dumb-ass politician feels it "violates their morals" (or the wallet of their big campaign contributors).
We desperately need a public referendum system which the legislature *must* act upon, because Tennessee is being held hostage by some seriously stupid politicians.
Fellow Tennesseans, anybody feel like going together and putting a full page "Please vote for anyone but Patsy Hazlewood because..." ad in the Chattanooga Times Free Press? Because she just tossed a buttload of her constituents who are clamoring for EPB fiber under the bus to make her corporate masters happy. I think they should be reminded of that come next election.
... to just take that $4 billion, and cut a "bonus" check to every IT worker in America.
The problem isn't that women don't know how to program as well as men, it's that the field just isn't as attractive to them. Woman tend to value job stability over income, and it's hard to find that kind of stability in IT. IT requires a lot of brains, a lot of hard work, isn't very social, has a lot of guys with behavioral issues, and their job might get outsourced to India so the MBA middle manager can get his quarterly bonus and afford some more blow.
IT and the medical field require similar levels of intelligence and work, yet medical jobs don't often get outsourced to China, the demand for medical skills is relatively constant, and while there are behavioral issues, they usually fall along the Doogie Howser Dipshit Doc/Nurse axis rather than the male/female axis.
Do you want to attract women to IT? The best way to do it would be to change it in ways which also make it more attractive to men too: 40 hour work weeks, reasonable pay for the work/brainpower involved, job security, etc.
I bought the Intel i5-4960 because, having done high-performance computing for over a decade, current Intel CPU's absolutely maul AMD CPU's when it comes to numerical work. It was my first new computer in almost a decade, and I wanted a "no excuses" gaming box. Games *can* be good on AMD, but many top tier games require various trade-offs.
And I'm not an AMD hater. Once upon a time, we had 100's of AMD Opteron's in our compute cluster. But it's been several years since they have put out a competitive chip. I am hopeful that 16nm + Zen will make them competitive again, if only to make Intel more competitive on pricing.
My work desktop is AMD, my home fileserver is AMD, and both my parent's desktops are AMD. That's because in those use cases, AMD is "good enough". Web browsing and email don't require a lot of horsepower.
That said, my gaming/transcoding PC is an Intel i5-4690, because AMD's top line CPU can barely compete with Intel's I3 line. CMT didn't pan out, and they've been held hostage by TSMC/GloFo's failure to produce a sub-28nm lithographic process.
I love AMD's engineers, they have some impressively smart people working for them, and I hope Zen + 16nm heralds a new beginning for them. But today, they aren't "competitive", merely "good enough".
I'm curious why my previous post was marked a troll. I *have* worked in academic HPC for over a decade, have assembled dozens of server motherboards over the years, and over two dozen for myself and family. I'm not exactly a newb here.
Intel consumer-grade OEM heatsinks (as of Haswell at least, perhaps they fixed the issue on Skylake OEM heatsinks and I'm unaware) are boat anchors. On two quality Haswell motherboards (Asus H97M and H97I) I have, the OEM heatsink fails to mount sturdily in the motherboard, and pops out with only the slightest jarring.
Third-party heatsinks would be much less necessary if the OEM heatsink would actually do its job.
This would matter less if Intel would include a usable heatsink with their CPU's. I have worked in high performance computing for over a decade, so putting a heat sink on isn't exactly some exotic task to me, but I couldn't get either of my home OEM Haswell heatsinks to hold onto the motherboard, they would both pop off after the slightest bump. So I *had* to use third-party heatsinks.
Intel should make backplates with threaded mounts mandatory, and should ensure that their OEM heatsink is capable of actually staying on the motherboard and keeping the CPU from thermally throttling during a Prime95 run. If the user needs a third-party heat sink due to overclocking or unusual case geometry, that's fine, but their OEM heatsink should work properly for 95% of users. But it doesn't.
Doing the right thing at Intel's scale couldn't cost more than a dollar (a little extra aluminum/steel in the right spots), yet they mysteriously cheap out. Even AMD's stock heatsink is better.