I bought a PC in 2008 and have made one single upgrade of the video card. Its basically a Core2 E8400 (3GHz) with a Nvidia 275GTX. There have been exactly zero PC games in the last 5 years that have not run smoothly on this machine. Worrying about specs for PC games is more or less a thing of the past, these days if you can play one decent game you can play them all.
It's in anyone's self interest to use 50 free gigs of encrypted cloud storage.
See I thought the same thing but then discovered that "use" is a key word in this sentence. I've so far not even managed to successfully back up my photo collection and a few other odds and ends to the tune of a mighty 4GB. The upload speeds I'm getting are terrible, the interface makes it worse in that you must have the browser running to upload anything. It doesn't do jack shit in the background (like dropbox does).
I'm ready to give up on Mega, the browser only thing I can handle, but the upload speeds have just been atrocious rendering it unusable for me.
As the owner of two mechanical pocket watches and a smartphone, you're just whining. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade dude, buy whatever you want to use and use it.
Are you kidding me? NFC payments are exploding here in Australia. Pretty much every bank card is now an ATM/Visa debit/NFC card rolled into one. Its rare to encounter a store without NFC payments.
and you know how us Americans are with our Starbucks!
We Australians have no fucking idea how you are with Starbucks... Starbucks Australia went broke and had to basically exit the country almost as soon as it started opening stores, because compared to Australian coffee it was plain trash. You spent a week in Australia, I hope you realise how bad Starbucks coffee is now! Australia is renowned for having the highest standards for coffee.
You know there are open and free licenses for software which had nothing to do with Stallman, right? Many people, myself included, find that these often unencumbered OSS licenses are even better than GNU.
I think you just successfully demonstrated the viewpoint that the GP was referring to...
There's only solution I've found to the problem of people taking your disagreement as an insult, and that is to pose every concern as a question for more detail
I've personally adopted this strategy on internet 'discussions' and it works well a lot of the time. You do always get that one wingnut who dances around every question, quotes your every sentence and delivers a 100-page response though.
They both suck *as phones*, when compared to "dumb" phones. My old Philips had 3 weeks of battery life with my usage pattern and it took two pushes of a button (including unlocking) to call pretty much everybody I care about.
Many people (myself included) understand and accept this as a trade-off for the ability to carry an email/gps/web browser/media player comfortably in your pocket. I use all of the other features more than my actual phone anyway.
I think it takes way longer than that. If I remember correctly they open the shutter for a few minutes at a particular point in the telescope's orbit and catch a few photons. They then repeat this process every time the telescope swings around to that same spot, i.e. they can't just open the shutter for 2 million seconds otherwise there would just be a big smear of light. They actually add up small bit of a few seconds at a time, so it probably took more like months or maybe even years.
Previous high court rulings on the interpretation of the constitution mean we do in fact have free speech protections. We don't have this right through an act of parliament, but this is only one way we get laws in this country. Legal precedent is another.
For $30 I bought a media streaming device for my lounge room. I've been looking into a dedicated streaming box for a while now and there is nothing on the market which comes close to $30. I don't see how this isn't appealing?
No, I wouldn't really regard the Pi as a desktop replacement, but it can run one. I haven't really played around enough to see what happens when it starts swapping so I can't tell you I'm afraid. I would however imagine that this is heavily dependent on the read/write speeds of your SD card, which can be highly variable.
Well, mine was $35 plus I think $6 shipping, I plugged it into a spare phone charger I had lying around and it currently has no case, but I was planning on using a cardboard box. I haven't even had to buy a cable for it. So yeah I really honestly did spend a whopping $41, nothing like $85 (seriously is that even much money?).
Considering I was in the market for a HTPC and I was looking at AMD all-in-one fanless systems (~$150) with a nice case (~$150), I think I'm doing ok here.
Well mine is running XBMC very happily using raspbmc, and will output 1080p. It really wasn't that long ago that 256mb ram was decent. It isn't that snappy in a desktop environment, but really, we aren't talking about a particularly limited set of capabilities here.
I would hardly call ~10% market share a market which has 'yielded'. Windows is absolutely the dominant platform on desktops, don't kid yourself. Servers are also less clean cut than you might think, Microsoft has a significant presence in the server market. Linux wins out in high performance scientific computing (clusters and the like) by an extremely wide margin, and high frequency trading for that matter. Not only that but 90% of mac's you see are running the office suite. Microsoft is hardly doing it tough, despite what you might like to think.
Actually, watching that right now I notice that Ballmer actually mumbles "it may sell very well, or not...". Now I've seen that video many times and laughed at it before, but really this is just a CEO doing what a CEO should do: talking up his business model. He made a reasonable point (at the time) that it did not appeal to business customers. things had to change before that was the case.
I know, its a funny video, I just noticed that he wasn't really as dismissive as people seem to think when you look back at it.
Dude, that sounds awesome. As far as I'm concerned, published papers are innovation, that is where the action takes place. Products themselves are always just an implementation of ideas that have been put out in the research for years previously - not to denigrate the huge work that goes into commercialising products, not at all. People just do not understand research, and if you are not in close contact with a lot of published research, I can see how it would be easy to think technology was just the products on the shelves.
I hope you the very best in your time at Microsoft, I would love to be in your shoes. I'm doing an honours research project for a computational neuroscience lab at the moment, and all I can say is these experiences are important, and fantastic! Good luck.
I'm sorry but Microsoft research do some really amazing stuff, sure, most of it is not commercialised, but you really have to hand it to a company that runs a huge research division at a loss in this day and age. The Kinect is a great example of something good that came out of this, they also do a lot of work in tablet research.
I recently stumbled upon some free Matlab libraries which offer optimised replacements for certain built-in functions which underperform natively, courtesy of Microsoft research. Publishing papers is innovation, fuck Apple and their trinkets.
He's a career criminal, and even back then he was disdained in his original german hacker scene.
This does not exempt him from due process. If the US DOJ fucked up their case and have no legal grounds to continue what they are doing, then the fact that this guy is dodgey has no relevance to the situation.
When I read the comment I was thinking along the same lines, I mean dealing with uncertainty can be addressed quite easily actually, you can essentially seed a simple learning algorithm with random data and evaluate the best options. You could do this with simulated annealing and genetic algorithms extremely easily. The problem is these are computationally complex approaches but more importantly, how do you evaluate a `better' choice in a completely or sufficiently general way? Nobody knows the answer to this, and from what we know of neuroscience it takes many years of training, using a computer that is many orders of magnitude more powerful and efficient than anything we know of, to achieve this task in humans. And still it is questionable how well many individuals do this.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a PC in 2008 and have made one single upgrade of the video card. Its basically a Core2 E8400 (3GHz) with a Nvidia 275GTX. There have been exactly zero PC games in the last 5 years that have not run smoothly on this machine. Worrying about specs for PC games is more or less a thing of the past, these days if you can play one decent game you can play them all.
Here in Australia at least I believe a phone can be blocked from accessing a network via its IMEI. You can't change and IMEI through jailbreaking.
See I thought the same thing but then discovered that "use" is a key word in this sentence. I've so far not even managed to successfully back up my photo collection and a few other odds and ends to the tune of a mighty 4GB. The upload speeds I'm getting are terrible, the interface makes it worse in that you must have the browser running to upload anything. It doesn't do jack shit in the background (like dropbox does).
I'm ready to give up on Mega, the browser only thing I can handle, but the upload speeds have just been atrocious rendering it unusable for me.
As the owner of two mechanical pocket watches and a smartphone, you're just whining. Nobody is forcing you to upgrade dude, buy whatever you want to use and use it.
Are you kidding me? NFC payments are exploding here in Australia. Pretty much every bank card is now an ATM/Visa debit/NFC card rolled into one. Its rare to encounter a store without NFC payments.
We Australians have no fucking idea how you are with Starbucks... Starbucks Australia went broke and had to basically exit the country almost as soon as it started opening stores, because compared to Australian coffee it was plain trash. You spent a week in Australia, I hope you realise how bad Starbucks coffee is now! Australia is renowned for having the highest standards for coffee.
Debt is just an operating cost as long the company can afford it. I don't see how it changes the equation?
You know there are open and free licenses for software which had nothing to do with Stallman, right? Many people, myself included, find that these often unencumbered OSS licenses are even better than GNU.
I think you just successfully demonstrated the viewpoint that the GP was referring to...
I've personally adopted this strategy on internet 'discussions' and it works well a lot of the time. You do always get that one wingnut who dances around every question, quotes your every sentence and delivers a 100-page response though.
Many people (myself included) understand and accept this as a trade-off for the ability to carry an email/gps/web browser/media player comfortably in your pocket. I use all of the other features more than my actual phone anyway.
I think it takes way longer than that. If I remember correctly they open the shutter for a few minutes at a particular point in the telescope's orbit and catch a few photons. They then repeat this process every time the telescope swings around to that same spot, i.e. they can't just open the shutter for 2 million seconds otherwise there would just be a big smear of light. They actually add up small bit of a few seconds at a time, so it probably took more like months or maybe even years.
You missed the main point: Scientific research needs to be relevant in order to qualify for funding.
Previous high court rulings on the interpretation of the constitution mean we do in fact have free speech protections. We don't have this right through an act of parliament, but this is only one way we get laws in this country. Legal precedent is another.
Can't you just buy a powered USB hub?
For $30 I bought a media streaming device for my lounge room. I've been looking into a dedicated streaming box for a while now and there is nothing on the market which comes close to $30. I don't see how this isn't appealing?
No, I wouldn't really regard the Pi as a desktop replacement, but it can run one. I haven't really played around enough to see what happens when it starts swapping so I can't tell you I'm afraid. I would however imagine that this is heavily dependent on the read/write speeds of your SD card, which can be highly variable.
Well, mine was $35 plus I think $6 shipping, I plugged it into a spare phone charger I had lying around and it currently has no case, but I was planning on using a cardboard box. I haven't even had to buy a cable for it. So yeah I really honestly did spend a whopping $41, nothing like $85 (seriously is that even much money?).
Considering I was in the market for a HTPC and I was looking at AMD all-in-one fanless systems (~$150) with a nice case (~$150), I think I'm doing ok here.
Well mine is running XBMC very happily using raspbmc, and will output 1080p. It really wasn't that long ago that 256mb ram was decent. It isn't that snappy in a desktop environment, but really, we aren't talking about a particularly limited set of capabilities here.
I dunno, it sparked a pretty interesting flame war here on slashdot?
I would hardly call ~10% market share a market which has 'yielded'. Windows is absolutely the dominant platform on desktops, don't kid yourself. Servers are also less clean cut than you might think, Microsoft has a significant presence in the server market. Linux wins out in high performance scientific computing (clusters and the like) by an extremely wide margin, and high frequency trading for that matter. Not only that but 90% of mac's you see are running the office suite. Microsoft is hardly doing it tough, despite what you might like to think.
Actually, watching that right now I notice that Ballmer actually mumbles "it may sell very well, or not...". Now I've seen that video many times and laughed at it before, but really this is just a CEO doing what a CEO should do: talking up his business model. He made a reasonable point (at the time) that it did not appeal to business customers. things had to change before that was the case.
I know, its a funny video, I just noticed that he wasn't really as dismissive as people seem to think when you look back at it.
Dude, that sounds awesome. As far as I'm concerned, published papers are innovation, that is where the action takes place. Products themselves are always just an implementation of ideas that have been put out in the research for years previously - not to denigrate the huge work that goes into commercialising products, not at all. People just do not understand research, and if you are not in close contact with a lot of published research, I can see how it would be easy to think technology was just the products on the shelves.
I hope you the very best in your time at Microsoft, I would love to be in your shoes. I'm doing an honours research project for a computational neuroscience lab at the moment, and all I can say is these experiences are important, and fantastic! Good luck.
I'm sorry but Microsoft research do some really amazing stuff, sure, most of it is not commercialised, but you really have to hand it to a company that runs a huge research division at a loss in this day and age. The Kinect is a great example of something good that came out of this, they also do a lot of work in tablet research.
I recently stumbled upon some free Matlab libraries which offer optimised replacements for certain built-in functions which underperform natively, courtesy of Microsoft research. Publishing papers is innovation, fuck Apple and their trinkets.
This does not exempt him from due process. If the US DOJ fucked up their case and have no legal grounds to continue what they are doing, then the fact that this guy is dodgey has no relevance to the situation.
When I read the comment I was thinking along the same lines, I mean dealing with uncertainty can be addressed quite easily actually, you can essentially seed a simple learning algorithm with random data and evaluate the best options. You could do this with simulated annealing and genetic algorithms extremely easily. The problem is these are computationally complex approaches but more importantly, how do you evaluate a `better' choice in a completely or sufficiently general way? Nobody knows the answer to this, and from what we know of neuroscience it takes many years of training, using a computer that is many orders of magnitude more powerful and efficient than anything we know of, to achieve this task in humans. And still it is questionable how well many individuals do this.