From personal experience, your weeding photos suck compared to the professional photographers ones. It is probably in the newly weds best interest not to have your bad photos make it into the Facebook borg hive mind.
Having recently had our teenage niece visit, I want these for the dinner table. Kids these days can't unhook from them, but really don't have the multitasking skills they seem to think they do. You can't listen to music in one ear, Instagram with your right hand, eat with your left and carry on a conversation with your other ear. You become a babbling pile of "Huh? What mom? Justa sec... Huh?".
My wife ended up realizing a couple months back that she had to leave her phone totally in silent and non-vibrate mode and out of reach or she could not help herself checking on it every time a text or alert came in. We had let things slide and let our 4 year old kid occasionally watch TV while eating dinner for a while, but we learned our lesson when it was clear he was tuning us and his dinner out and instituted a no-electronics policy at meal time. It is very cliche, but it has really made meals be enjoyable family time where we actually talk to each other. I really have turned into my parents...
Or if you make the DRM obnoxious for legit users it will tip towards piracy or just lower sales.
DVD's and Blu-Rays have been obnoxious for years. If I have access to it on Netflix or similar I watch it that way with somewhat inferior quality just to avoid the couple minutes of button mashing and increased blood pressure to get past the previews and menu sequences to be able to actually play the damn movie. I no longer look forward to buying and opening a new movie, as who knows how awful the crap is at the start. Half the time after I suffer through that I find the movie is so badly written and overly CGI'ed that I never watch it again. I am amazed how awful of a product and packaging the studios can make after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sadly you are correct. A lot of the BIG ROUND NUMBER settlements come out to rounding error per plaintiff, and 20-50% going to the lawyers. Somehow there need to be ethics and rules to assure that the actual damage is roughly remedied and in a timely fashion. There is too far of a gap between what a law firm can readily settle for quickly to maximize their profit per hour of effort, and what will actually make things right for their clients.
Years back near my old neighborhood there was a train wreck, leading to a damaged high pressure gasoline line, leading to a massive fireball that killed folks and burnt out many houses. The ensuing lawsuit was fought tooth and nail, drawn out, and eventually the plaintiff's lawyer ran into money issues. So he settled for an amount that went entirely to "legal fees" and he skipped town. Many residents were left with nothing. There are countless examples across this range where justice is excruciatingly slow, with unjust results at the end. It becomes punitive to hold out hope for a remedy. There are a couple suits we didn't even know about that sent us $20 checks, and others we lost track of and stopped updating our address with because any settlement would be worth less than the time needed to possibly get something at the back end.
Outside of the telecom industry this is called fraud, and should result in jail time for those who are responsible.
Comcast and its ilk own too many congressmen, so they have to pay back a small percentage of the profits if they get caught. Usually no admission of guilt is even needed.
Most of these are not on any administrated system. These are baby monitors, home security cameras, "smart" toasters, and similar junk. We are selling piles of internet connected junk to the masses, but with no responsibility for anyone to make them secure after the fact. It is in fact getting harder to find widgets that are NOT internet connected just for the sake of being able to label it "smart".
Smart toilet paper that tells you when the roll is about empty and automatically re-orders from Amazon will be the next BIG thing!!!
The hassles with just getting all the connected crap in a typical house to work are too much, getting random fly-by-night electronic gizmo's to be secure against state sponsored hackers with nearly unlimited resources? Fugetaboutit...
Years back it was completely legal to record FM radio to a cassette for personal use. I can see the argument that this is the 21st century extension of that.
I still remember the day I found out just how little of the ~15-20 bucks I spent on a CD actually went to the band. I felt robbed. I felt bad for the bands. I hate rent seekers who use their position of power and influence to take far more than their fair share as an fiefdom tax.
Translation: DRM and forced ads suck donkey balls.
I am really tired of all the DVD's and Blu-Rays making it hard to just play my movie without obnoxious previews and introduction animation crap, or get it onto an iPad for my kid/wife/me to watch on a long trip. I don't pirate, but I have come really close to giving up the legit route for even the movies we bought. Pirated content stripped of all the BS gives a far better experience than legit buyers get. WTF?
Totally tone deaf given that many treatable and manageable diseases today go untreated thanks to strong profit motives and broken healthcare systems. It is more profitable to squeeze every penny out of the richest half of the desperate and sick people than to set a price that provides modest profit and widespread availability for virtually everyone with the need.
Today there would be a lot more bang for your buck spending the $3B to fight shady patents in medicine, and to bribe politicians into doing the right by the population than finding more treatments that will get sucked into the Wall Street and DC maelstroms of greed and corruption. Until medicine is working primarily for the patient's good with profit secondary (not zero) I don't see our current frigged up mess getting better no matter how many cures we have.
Current insurance prices cover actual payouts, plus a profit margin. Why would prices skyrocket for non-autonmous cars suddenly? I only pay about $800 a year for 2 drivers and three cars, and I would expect that if half the cars were autonomous the number of accidents even for regular cars should go down (fast reflexive defensive actions by HAL). So if there is even a modest amount of competition for business insurance should get CHEAPER, not fo up to $25k/year like you pulled out of your butt.
Yep. 2 out of 3 family members in my household get motion sickness. My kid can watch movies on an ipad if we are on straight highway, even that can be a problem for my wife. Yet even when I am a passenger I never feel like I want to whip out a laptop or surf the web. I only get online if we need directions or check the weather. Maybe 1-2% of my time as a passenger on a road trip is spent being "productive". I cannot even sleep in a car or airplane, so that possible bonus is out.
Frankly I see autonomous cars as a truly cool solution in search of a need. The case for these being mainstream still seems weak and way over hyped and optimistic. My $0.02.
I find that riding my bike as my daily commuter provides health and mental benefits that exceed what an autonomous car ever has a chance to provide.
I thought that intentionally circumventing these things was illegal. Did the FBI arrest the owners of the company after they demonstrated the ability to hack the phone?
I pay only what I am legally required to. I also have no sway on politicians and committees who write those taxes.
Apple and its ilk regularly threaten to leave areas areas if they don't get special treatment. Taxes get written with specific corporations in mind (often written by them or their lobby groups actually), often to the detriment of the country as a whole.
I'll take my own local example. Nike's headquarters (which I ride by on my bicycle every day) is surrounded by the city of Beaverton, but is not technically in it, saving Nike paying several taxes to the city that maintains every road into the campus. Everytime it comes up they threaten to leave and tak all the worker's tax base with them. Smaller companies who get annexed into the city get no such special treatment.
The other way from my house is Intel. They similarly flexed their muscles to get tax breaks on the $5B of capital equipment that when into their new fab a couple years ago. Other local companies get no such breaks.
It is not like taxes laws come from some higher power, they are written by politicians (well often written by corporations and voted into law by politicians). So until I get to write my own tax loopholes I don't find it fair to compare how I follow the tax law to how large corporations follow it.
These large corporations have use the power to influence governements and the tax rules they operate under. As such I find it disingenuous for a corporation to argue that they follow all applicable laws and pay all legally required taxes while simultaneously tearing open numerous new loopholes to use to further dodge taxes, and fighting like hell to keep the old ones open.
As a society we all need to pay our fair share. I don't mind paying my taxes, as long as everyone else is roughly paying their fair share too (low earning folks who pay 0% are indeed paying their fair share). My taxes are too low (12% federal net income tax last year, 7% state), and I'd be happy paying more. I am not happy when a wickedly rich company like Apple pays far less, or when hedge funders and CEO's use loopholes they bribed into law to pay a far lower percentage than me despite making far more.
Those making $1M or more a year really should be taxed at a 70+% incremental rate. Frankly we have shown that leaving too much idle cash in the hands of the rich allows them to overly influence our democracy (I cringe using that word for what we actually have). Nobody should have as much influence on a democratic system as a Koch brother does.
Why make better value for our customers with more cores and/or lower prices when we can just barf alphanumeric soup all over the box?
Seriously, all the naming obsfucation has taken the fun out of building a new PC, and Win10 has sucked the fun out of owning one. You have to do a lot of searching around to dig through all the marketing BS to figure out what components actually do and whether they are worth the change to buy them
Yep, only a couple people in my office are even on Win8, virtually every machine is in Win7. Corporate customers move on slowly, and mostly want every machine to be the same until EVERY important application has been well tested on the new OS. Win10 is such a moving target that I am really curious how many IT departments have even gotten an itch to start playing with it.
The main use of my work machine is to remote into our Unix boxes for "real" work anyway. Our design group really would be better off with redhat or CentOS machines on each desk with a Windows virtual machine or laptop for email, word, excel, and powerpoint (20% of our computer use).
I want more cores. If every machine shipped with 8 cores today, software would find a way to use them before too long. Most higher end Skylakes have 40% dead silicon in the form of a crappy GPU that is never used. Why not use that space for more cores, a bigger caches, or virtually ANYTHING else.
9-12% improvement per year is a giant yawn, as we Skylake, and so on. Intel is mired in molasses, their prices stay high while their improvements are awesomely negligible.
I think one of the frustrations people will have with autonomous cars is the lack of mind-reading for their specific preferences. Do you prefer to park in a particular section of the parking lot? Do you want to park in the shade today? Which entrance to the store/mall/school/etc do you want to go into today? Even with perfect maps it is not possible to fully know, or easily get at the subtle desires of the occupant.
The autonomous future might be rather frustrating as HAL drives past the parking spot you would have chosen, or that you have to wade through infotainment selections to pinpoint which level of the parking garage you want to go to. How about the joy of finding a way to tell a fully autonomous car to dart into a gap at the airport arrivals/departure scrum? Even having to sit in the drive way for just 1-2 minutes to key in your destination will drive a lot of folks batty. Most of us don't fire up the navigation for any routine bit of travel. Infotainment systems largely suck today, why should be expect them to get better in the future?
Call me a skeptic, but I see this as a novelty that will mostly get shut off in-town where most of the traffic is.
Seriously, Tech is bit too wild west to trust over the long term. Live frugal and save like mad. Once you have enough money stashed away to guarantee you won't starve, then work if you want to and it all becomes extra FU money. You can't trust tech as a career beyond 50, and maybe not even to 45 in certain specialties.
Yeah I honestly am curious if simply reflowing the board is adequate to fix it, or if there is damage to the IC/PCB as well that makes rework a bad idea?
We've seen these issues with many other BGA parts (Macbook Pro 2009 is a prime example), especially since RoHS compliance resulted in lead-free BGA balls being phased in. Lead BGA balls had more give and self-annealed, but these lead-free ones seem to need more babying and fatigue due to temperature cycling and flexure much more than before.
Same chipset, but pretty much just a minor polishing job. SAD. The lack of claims about speed makes me guess they got 10% power savings and nothing else of consequence.
If 8 cores were standard, I think you would see game engines putting a lot of effort into making use of them. I wish the dead silicon of the GPU in my skylake was 2 more cores, it would be more value than a disabled crappy GPU in a high'ish end machine.
The current pricing for a 6 or 8 core CPU is obscene, highway robbery at its worst.
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From personal experience, your weeding photos suck compared to the professional photographers ones. It is probably in the newly weds best interest not to have your bad photos make it into the Facebook borg hive mind.
Having recently had our teenage niece visit, I want these for the dinner table. Kids these days can't unhook from them, but really don't have the multitasking skills they seem to think they do. You can't listen to music in one ear, Instagram with your right hand, eat with your left and carry on a conversation with your other ear. You become a babbling pile of "Huh? What mom? Justa sec... Huh?".
My wife ended up realizing a couple months back that she had to leave her phone totally in silent and non-vibrate mode and out of reach or she could not help herself checking on it every time a text or alert came in. We had let things slide and let our 4 year old kid occasionally watch TV while eating dinner for a while, but we learned our lesson when it was clear he was tuning us and his dinner out and instituted a no-electronics policy at meal time. It is very cliche, but it has really made meals be enjoyable family time where we actually talk to each other. I really have turned into my parents...
Or if you make the DRM obnoxious for legit users it will tip towards piracy or just lower sales.
DVD's and Blu-Rays have been obnoxious for years. If I have access to it on Netflix or similar I watch it that way with somewhat inferior quality just to avoid the couple minutes of button mashing and increased blood pressure to get past the previews and menu sequences to be able to actually play the damn movie. I no longer look forward to buying and opening a new movie, as who knows how awful the crap is at the start. Half the time after I suffer through that I find the movie is so badly written and overly CGI'ed that I never watch it again. I am amazed how awful of a product and packaging the studios can make after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars.
End rant.
Sadly you are correct. A lot of the BIG ROUND NUMBER settlements come out to rounding error per plaintiff, and 20-50% going to the lawyers. Somehow there need to be ethics and rules to assure that the actual damage is roughly remedied and in a timely fashion. There is too far of a gap between what a law firm can readily settle for quickly to maximize their profit per hour of effort, and what will actually make things right for their clients.
Years back near my old neighborhood there was a train wreck, leading to a damaged high pressure gasoline line, leading to a massive fireball that killed folks and burnt out many houses. The ensuing lawsuit was fought tooth and nail, drawn out, and eventually the plaintiff's lawyer ran into money issues. So he settled for an amount that went entirely to "legal fees" and he skipped town. Many residents were left with nothing. There are countless examples across this range where justice is excruciatingly slow, with unjust results at the end. It becomes punitive to hold out hope for a remedy. There are a couple suits we didn't even know about that sent us $20 checks, and others we lost track of and stopped updating our address with because any settlement would be worth less than the time needed to possibly get something at the back end.
Outside of the telecom industry this is called fraud, and should result in jail time for those who are responsible.
Comcast and its ilk own too many congressmen, so they have to pay back a small percentage of the profits if they get caught. Usually no admission of guilt is even needed.
Carry on, business as usual.
Most of these are not on any administrated system. These are baby monitors, home security cameras, "smart" toasters, and similar junk. We are selling piles of internet connected junk to the masses, but with no responsibility for anyone to make them secure after the fact. It is in fact getting harder to find widgets that are NOT internet connected just for the sake of being able to label it "smart".
Smart toilet paper that tells you when the roll is about empty and automatically re-orders from Amazon will be the next BIG thing!!!
The hassles with just getting all the connected crap in a typical house to work are too much, getting random fly-by-night electronic gizmo's to be secure against state sponsored hackers with nearly unlimited resources? Fugetaboutit...
I'm curious about the legal arguments pro/con.
Years back it was completely legal to record FM radio to a cassette for personal use. I can see the argument that this is the 21st century extension of that.
I still remember the day I found out just how little of the ~15-20 bucks I spent on a CD actually went to the band. I felt robbed. I felt bad for the bands. I hate rent seekers who use their position of power and influence to take far more than their fair share as an fiefdom tax.
Translation: DRM and forced ads suck donkey balls.
I am really tired of all the DVD's and Blu-Rays making it hard to just play my movie without obnoxious previews and introduction animation crap, or get it onto an iPad for my kid/wife/me to watch on a long trip. I don't pirate, but I have come really close to giving up the legit route for even the movies we bought. Pirated content stripped of all the BS gives a far better experience than legit buyers get. WTF?
Totally tone deaf given that many treatable and manageable diseases today go untreated thanks to strong profit motives and broken healthcare systems. It is more profitable to squeeze every penny out of the richest half of the desperate and sick people than to set a price that provides modest profit and widespread availability for virtually everyone with the need.
Today there would be a lot more bang for your buck spending the $3B to fight shady patents in medicine, and to bribe politicians into doing the right by the population than finding more treatments that will get sucked into the Wall Street and DC maelstroms of greed and corruption. Until medicine is working primarily for the patient's good with profit secondary (not zero) I don't see our current frigged up mess getting better no matter how many cures we have.
Current insurance prices cover actual payouts, plus a profit margin. Why would prices skyrocket for non-autonmous cars suddenly? I only pay about $800 a year for 2 drivers and three cars, and I would expect that if half the cars were autonomous the number of accidents even for regular cars should go down (fast reflexive defensive actions by HAL). So if there is even a modest amount of competition for business insurance should get CHEAPER, not fo up to $25k/year like you pulled out of your butt.
Yep. 2 out of 3 family members in my household get motion sickness. My kid can watch movies on an ipad if we are on straight highway, even that can be a problem for my wife. Yet even when I am a passenger I never feel like I want to whip out a laptop or surf the web. I only get online if we need directions or check the weather. Maybe 1-2% of my time as a passenger on a road trip is spent being "productive". I cannot even sleep in a car or airplane, so that possible bonus is out.
Frankly I see autonomous cars as a truly cool solution in search of a need. The case for these being mainstream still seems weak and way over hyped and optimistic. My $0.02.
I find that riding my bike as my daily commuter provides health and mental benefits that exceed what an autonomous car ever has a chance to provide.
I thought that intentionally circumventing these things was illegal. Did the FBI arrest the owners of the company after they demonstrated the ability to hack the phone?
I pay only what I am legally required to. I also have no sway on politicians and committees who write those taxes.
Apple and its ilk regularly threaten to leave areas areas if they don't get special treatment. Taxes get written with specific corporations in mind (often written by them or their lobby groups actually), often to the detriment of the country as a whole.
I'll take my own local example. Nike's headquarters (which I ride by on my bicycle every day) is surrounded by the city of Beaverton, but is not technically in it, saving Nike paying several taxes to the city that maintains every road into the campus. Everytime it comes up they threaten to leave and tak all the worker's tax base with them. Smaller companies who get annexed into the city get no such special treatment.
The other way from my house is Intel. They similarly flexed their muscles to get tax breaks on the $5B of capital equipment that when into their new fab a couple years ago. Other local companies get no such breaks.
It is not like taxes laws come from some higher power, they are written by politicians (well often written by corporations and voted into law by politicians). So until I get to write my own tax loopholes I don't find it fair to compare how I follow the tax law to how large corporations follow it.
These large corporations have use the power to influence governements and the tax rules they operate under. As such I find it disingenuous for a corporation to argue that they follow all applicable laws and pay all legally required taxes while simultaneously tearing open numerous new loopholes to use to further dodge taxes, and fighting like hell to keep the old ones open.
As a society we all need to pay our fair share. I don't mind paying my taxes, as long as everyone else is roughly paying their fair share too (low earning folks who pay 0% are indeed paying their fair share). My taxes are too low (12% federal net income tax last year, 7% state), and I'd be happy paying more. I am not happy when a wickedly rich company like Apple pays far less, or when hedge funders and CEO's use loopholes they bribed into law to pay a far lower percentage than me despite making far more.
Those making $1M or more a year really should be taxed at a 70+% incremental rate. Frankly we have shown that leaving too much idle cash in the hands of the rich allows them to overly influence our democracy (I cringe using that word for what we actually have). Nobody should have as much influence on a democratic system as a Koch brother does.
Why make better value for our customers with more cores and/or lower prices when we can just barf alphanumeric soup all over the box?
Seriously, all the naming obsfucation has taken the fun out of building a new PC, and Win10 has sucked the fun out of owning one. You have to do a lot of searching around to dig through all the marketing BS to figure out what components actually do and whether they are worth the change to buy them
Yep, only a couple people in my office are even on Win8, virtually every machine is in Win7. Corporate customers move on slowly, and mostly want every machine to be the same until EVERY important application has been well tested on the new OS. Win10 is such a moving target that I am really curious how many IT departments have even gotten an itch to start playing with it.
The main use of my work machine is to remote into our Unix boxes for "real" work anyway. Our design group really would be better off with redhat or CentOS machines on each desk with a Windows virtual machine or laptop for email, word, excel, and powerpoint (20% of our computer use).
The blue wall of silence similarly degrades my trust in police and law enforcement.
I fear our police, FBI, NSA, CIA, TSA, ATF, ICE, etc more than criminals these days, and by a decent margin.
I want more cores. If every machine shipped with 8 cores today, software would find a way to use them before too long. Most higher end Skylakes have 40% dead silicon in the form of a crappy GPU that is never used. Why not use that space for more cores, a bigger caches, or virtually ANYTHING else.
9-12% improvement per year is a giant yawn, as we Skylake, and so on. Intel is mired in molasses, their prices stay high while their improvements are awesomely negligible.
Maybe in 50 years, when all manual cars are banned. Until then the meatbags will be in the mix.
I think one of the frustrations people will have with autonomous cars is the lack of mind-reading for their specific preferences. Do you prefer to park in a particular section of the parking lot? Do you want to park in the shade today? Which entrance to the store/mall/school/etc do you want to go into today? Even with perfect maps it is not possible to fully know, or easily get at the subtle desires of the occupant.
The autonomous future might be rather frustrating as HAL drives past the parking spot you would have chosen, or that you have to wade through infotainment selections to pinpoint which level of the parking garage you want to go to. How about the joy of finding a way to tell a fully autonomous car to dart into a gap at the airport arrivals/departure scrum? Even having to sit in the drive way for just 1-2 minutes to key in your destination will drive a lot of folks batty. Most of us don't fire up the navigation for any routine bit of travel. Infotainment systems largely suck today, why should be expect them to get better in the future?
Call me a skeptic, but I see this as a novelty that will mostly get shut off in-town where most of the traffic is.
Seriously, Tech is bit too wild west to trust over the long term. Live frugal and save like mad. Once you have enough money stashed away to guarantee you won't starve, then work if you want to and it all becomes extra FU money. You can't trust tech as a career beyond 50, and maybe not even to 45 in certain specialties.
Yeah I honestly am curious if simply reflowing the board is adequate to fix it, or if there is damage to the IC/PCB as well that makes rework a bad idea?
We've seen these issues with many other BGA parts (Macbook Pro 2009 is a prime example), especially since RoHS compliance resulted in lead-free BGA balls being phased in. Lead BGA balls had more give and self-annealed, but these lead-free ones seem to need more babying and fatigue due to temperature cycling and flexure much more than before.
Same chipset, but pretty much just a minor polishing job. SAD. The lack of claims about speed makes me guess they got 10% power savings and nothing else of consequence.
If 8 cores were standard, I think you would see game engines putting a lot of effort into making use of them. I wish the dead silicon of the GPU in my skylake was 2 more cores, it would be more value than a disabled crappy GPU in a high'ish end machine.
The current pricing for a 6 or 8 core CPU is obscene, highway robbery at its worst.