Many people will have switched to Nexium and will not understand what's going on. If they were suggested to go back to Losec, they'd say "Why, it's a new drug that replaced the old one, why would I take the old stuff? The new stuff must be better." or "Those old drugs are generics, I don't trust generics."
As far as big pharma's concerned, that tactic most likely works very, very well. By the time generics are on the market, few people will want to take it, even if it's superior and cheaper. Remember that people also tie cost into their evaluation of value, such that cheaper drugs are considered "cheap" in the pejorative sense.
I prefer not being murdered at all, thanks. It's much harder to murder someone with a knife or a baseball bat or whatever else you want to imagine than it is with a gun.
What we also could use is more accountability. Who greenlit this? Who convinced the administration that it was going to work? People would perhaps be less likely to go out and try fancy expensive crap that's unproven if their job was on the line for it, and I don't mean the little guys who're only following orders. The administrators who take the decision should be held accountable for the money lost over an ineffective system.
Hell, in an ideal world, the contract with the provider would have performance clauses. That'd help with a *lot* of issues we're seeing right now with contractors. Overdue, overbudget? Performance clause means you get penalties for that. Fails to deliver what was agreed upon? Same thing. It'd make the contractors more cautious when promising stuff because what they'd say could be held against them later on. If they say a lot of crap but aren't willing to put their money where their mouth is about it, it should raise all sorts of warnings.
Um, what? It most certainly is machine learning. Your "simulation" is an offline machine learning algorithm which, given input parameters, finds the best algorithm in the situation provided. Machine learning isn't strictly online algorithms, and it most certainly isn't "systems that learn from and adapt to real world networks of networks", which I'm having a hard time even parsing.
Thing is, they wouldn't know either. This is basically taking a computer, giving it a set of parameters to test, and letting it loose on most/all of the possible combinations. The "AI" doesn't know anything about what it's doing; it's just taking a sample, running it and getting a performance value out of it, which it then uses to classify that sample. Re-run for millions or billions of samples and you end up with the best system out of all the systems the computer tested. Obviously I'm dramatically oversimplifying here (there are many ways of achieving this result without testing all the possibilities exhaustively, which would be prohibitively expensive in most cases), but the principle is just that.
You're asking for long-term thinking from corporations? Ha! They can't think long-term even when it'd benefit them, imagine when they don't give a shit about it.
Many large stores have a 30-day price match guarantee over here, whereby if the price gets lowered within the 30 days following your purchase you can go to the store and get a price match. I'm sure if you'd asked you might've gotten the lower price. This doesn't mean it isn't shitty for people who bought it full price, but in many cases a bit of complaining to the store or to your telco or to Microsoft can go a long way.
I've never heard of any of this, and that's after writing numerous reports in high school/early college chemistry and physics classes, full of equations, graphs and such. I also have a Word document that's lived through for over 5 years now (including a conversion from 2007 to 2013) and contains about 150,000 words and it's just as fast to open as ever, without any issue reading or printing it. I'd blame this on bad installs or people making a mistake and trying to cover up by saying it's Word's fault.
Well, the way I see it, Apple gets to try it and see if it actually works. If it does, as soon as Liquidmetal's patents have expired, you'll see a bunch of other companies start developing the same tech and just go around their patents. If it doesn't, Apple's wasted money (not that they care or anything, considering how much they have).
Respect, even when faced with inexperience or incompetence, does exist in workplaces "where work is actually being done". If you have never experienced this, I'd suggest taking a good hard look at your own attitude. You reap what you sow, as they say.
It's definitely one of them. Here's a little piece of insight: most problems have more than one cause, and fixing one cause is better than not fixing any. Sometimes you can't fix all the causes, so your best bet is to fix the ones that you can.
Over here, we've been having issues with public construction works. Due to budget slashing, more and more engineering is being outsourced to private firms. What this ended up doing is that at one point cities didn't have the internal knowledge and skills required to determine whether bids were realistic and weren't cutting corners or overcharging, which has led to a LOT of projects overrunning budgets (both time and money) dramatically or costing more than they should've. All of this to shave off what amounts to a few pennies in the grand scheme of things.
Obviously, when students aren't allowed to fail, they never really learn. The good ones will go through, but the ones that would've greatly benefited from taking more time to understand something will end up lagging behind and getting dragged on by the system. Instead of trying to be gentle to them, all it does is catapult them to university, where all of a sudden we don't give a shit whether your feelings are hurt and you need to pass the courses to move on.
At my uni, the three major thinners were, in order of appearance, classical mechanics, electromagnetics and relativity. If you managed to go through all three, you only had to suffer through EM 2 and 3 was optional (if very very recommended). It doesn't help that for some bizarre reason EM professors seemed to like having a different definition of what an exam is: instead of being a test to review your knowledge and see if you understood what was shown in class, it was used as a way of introducing brand new concepts and seeing if you could use your existing knowledge to grasp the new ones. All in a 2 to 3 hours test which usually was worth half your grade.
Gamers have always been the fastest to upgrade, but the reason they've been less inclined to do so is that consoles are on a much longer cycle these days. Since games are multiplatform and designed for consoles first, you're guaranteed that a slightly beefier (to account for porting and OS overhead) computer than the console's specs will be able to play just about every game of the generation, which last 5+ years now. With a new generation coming, I'd expect a bump in gaming PC sales as people are finally forced to upgrade their old machines to play the latest games at comparative quality to consoles.
I didn't know Android and iOS ran Blender or Photoshop. Plus, if you're buying an expensive large tablet with a mouse, speakers, keyboard, probably a USB hub so you can plug more than one peripheral, you might as well buy a computer with a touch screen, it's going to be less cumbersome...
You don't have to dig far. Oil is an extremely visible and still problematic example. There are very few oil companies and they are known to maintain an oligopoly so that they can set prices to what they desire. Many times, you'll see prices at the pump increase for no apparent reason, you'll even hear regulatory agencies ask the oil companies and only be answered by shrugs. The answer is that they'll jack up price ahead of things like vacation weekends in order to make more money off people going out. Fuel competes against nothing; for most Americans, you NEED fuel to do just about everything. Even with rising gas prices, you still get the fuel.
Another recent example is construction works, particularly public sector. There are massive collusion networks that artificially raise prices by 5-15% (perhaps even more) and buy the silence of politicians and government workers. They set prices together, they decide who is going to get which contract, and if a newcomer decides not to play ball, they suffocate it until they leave or go bankrupt.
In both cases, the practices are unhealthy. They raise prices for consumers with them having no alternatives. The free market is based on competition, so if there is no competition, then you're suddenly not in a free market anymore. Collusion is basically instituting oligopolies, which are only slightly less problematic than monopolies.
You don't understand what collusion is, do you? The sellers specifically conspired together to artificially raise prices, which bypasses the normal supply and demand pricing and allows them to do whatever the hell they wish. If we'd actually allow such a thing, you'd see a lot of goods suddenly inflate in price for no reason whatsoever because by colluding corporations can lock you out of any alternative. Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
An e-book is a specially formatted text document which includes additional metadata making it easier to use on specialized e-book readers. Nothing more, nothing less. If you actually shop around, as opposed to just grabbing a Kindle, you'll notice that a lot of stores (and certain publishers in particular) do not put DRM on some books (I'm particularly impressed by Tor, who almost always have DRM-free copies available). DRM isn't fundamentally part of the "e-book", even though your post implies that publishers have successfully convinced you that it is.
The actual quote is "Les logiciels libres sont utilisés en priorité.", which is unambiguously referring to free as in speech. Most languages don't have the very annoying ambiguity English does with regards to "free" as in freedom vs no cost.
Google's distributed it to the manufacturers, Samsung was the first to implement and push it. Doesn't mean they're the only ones with the ability to do it, only that they're the only ones to have done it thus far. I'd also expect this fix to be in the stock Android distributions.
Old devices running on 2.3 will never see updates as they're already considered long out of support. 2.3.x devices might see something due to GB still being widely used by cheaper and older devices. 3.x devices are dead and buried. 4.x devices will almost certainly see the update in one form or another, though this may be dependent on (usually terrible) manufacturer support.
Wait, you do realize your free speech right only means you have the right to say it, right? It doesn't shield you from the consequences of saying it. The guy was indeed allowed to say it, and wasn't necessarily punished for it, but in any normal society being an asshole isn't going to positively influence the people around you. You can still do it, but don't whine about the consequences.
Either you allow second market sales, or you provide sales on the level of Steam (>=75% off). Steam caught on because of price, convenience is a secondary concern. Microsoft wanted to double dip with restrictions on second hand and no major sales (at least, they've never mentioned any of it, and you can bet they would've if they'd planned it to shield themselves from the backlash).
Actually, Firefox handily beats Chrome (and everything else) for memory efficiency everywhere except memory release after closing tabs. They've done a lot of work there in the past few years and it shows.
It's also interesting to look at the breakdown of the score for things like the HTML5 test. Firefox loses points for not supporting MPEG-4 videos, which probably has a lot to do with ideology as well as implementation. There's also points removed for iframes, which I sincerely think are a terrible blight that should be removed. The biggest black mark is the lack of support for a lot of "advanced" form types like datetime.
For the CSS3 test, I'm noticing a few bits and bobs which are still tagged as "-moz-" properties, usually because the standard wasn't finalized when implemented. These aren't a problem in practice since web developers always prepend vendor-specific attributes for such properties.
Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that Firefox's biggest strength is its addons. NoScript and AdBlock+ together make Firefox the most secure browser I have ever used, and also dramatically speed up loading times on a lot of otherwise junk-ridden sites. No other browser can match its feature level there right now.
My Firefox is hovering at 700mb right now, which is higher than usual, but honestly? RAM is cheap. I have 16gb, I don't give a damn about it. Empty RAM is wasted RAM, so even if FF uses a few gigs I won't complain if it means it's faster/smoother/better.
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Many people will have switched to Nexium and will not understand what's going on. If they were suggested to go back to Losec, they'd say "Why, it's a new drug that replaced the old one, why would I take the old stuff? The new stuff must be better." or "Those old drugs are generics, I don't trust generics."
As far as big pharma's concerned, that tactic most likely works very, very well. By the time generics are on the market, few people will want to take it, even if it's superior and cheaper. Remember that people also tie cost into their evaluation of value, such that cheaper drugs are considered "cheap" in the pejorative sense.
I prefer not being murdered at all, thanks. It's much harder to murder someone with a knife or a baseball bat or whatever else you want to imagine than it is with a gun.
What we also could use is more accountability. Who greenlit this? Who convinced the administration that it was going to work? People would perhaps be less likely to go out and try fancy expensive crap that's unproven if their job was on the line for it, and I don't mean the little guys who're only following orders. The administrators who take the decision should be held accountable for the money lost over an ineffective system.
Hell, in an ideal world, the contract with the provider would have performance clauses. That'd help with a *lot* of issues we're seeing right now with contractors. Overdue, overbudget? Performance clause means you get penalties for that. Fails to deliver what was agreed upon? Same thing. It'd make the contractors more cautious when promising stuff because what they'd say could be held against them later on. If they say a lot of crap but aren't willing to put their money where their mouth is about it, it should raise all sorts of warnings.
Um, what? It most certainly is machine learning. Your "simulation" is an offline machine learning algorithm which, given input parameters, finds the best algorithm in the situation provided. Machine learning isn't strictly online algorithms, and it most certainly isn't "systems that learn from and adapt to real world networks of networks", which I'm having a hard time even parsing.
Thing is, they wouldn't know either. This is basically taking a computer, giving it a set of parameters to test, and letting it loose on most/all of the possible combinations. The "AI" doesn't know anything about what it's doing; it's just taking a sample, running it and getting a performance value out of it, which it then uses to classify that sample. Re-run for millions or billions of samples and you end up with the best system out of all the systems the computer tested. Obviously I'm dramatically oversimplifying here (there are many ways of achieving this result without testing all the possibilities exhaustively, which would be prohibitively expensive in most cases), but the principle is just that.
You're asking for long-term thinking from corporations? Ha! They can't think long-term even when it'd benefit them, imagine when they don't give a shit about it.
Many large stores have a 30-day price match guarantee over here, whereby if the price gets lowered within the 30 days following your purchase you can go to the store and get a price match. I'm sure if you'd asked you might've gotten the lower price. This doesn't mean it isn't shitty for people who bought it full price, but in many cases a bit of complaining to the store or to your telco or to Microsoft can go a long way.
I've never heard of any of this, and that's after writing numerous reports in high school/early college chemistry and physics classes, full of equations, graphs and such. I also have a Word document that's lived through for over 5 years now (including a conversion from 2007 to 2013) and contains about 150,000 words and it's just as fast to open as ever, without any issue reading or printing it. I'd blame this on bad installs or people making a mistake and trying to cover up by saying it's Word's fault.
Well, the way I see it, Apple gets to try it and see if it actually works. If it does, as soon as Liquidmetal's patents have expired, you'll see a bunch of other companies start developing the same tech and just go around their patents. If it doesn't, Apple's wasted money (not that they care or anything, considering how much they have).
Respect, even when faced with inexperience or incompetence, does exist in workplaces "where work is actually being done". If you have never experienced this, I'd suggest taking a good hard look at your own attitude. You reap what you sow, as they say.
It's definitely one of them. Here's a little piece of insight: most problems have more than one cause, and fixing one cause is better than not fixing any. Sometimes you can't fix all the causes, so your best bet is to fix the ones that you can.
Over here, we've been having issues with public construction works. Due to budget slashing, more and more engineering is being outsourced to private firms. What this ended up doing is that at one point cities didn't have the internal knowledge and skills required to determine whether bids were realistic and weren't cutting corners or overcharging, which has led to a LOT of projects overrunning budgets (both time and money) dramatically or costing more than they should've. All of this to shave off what amounts to a few pennies in the grand scheme of things.
Obviously, when students aren't allowed to fail, they never really learn. The good ones will go through, but the ones that would've greatly benefited from taking more time to understand something will end up lagging behind and getting dragged on by the system. Instead of trying to be gentle to them, all it does is catapult them to university, where all of a sudden we don't give a shit whether your feelings are hurt and you need to pass the courses to move on.
The step is very steep and many just give up.
At my uni, the three major thinners were, in order of appearance, classical mechanics, electromagnetics and relativity. If you managed to go through all three, you only had to suffer through EM 2 and 3 was optional (if very very recommended). It doesn't help that for some bizarre reason EM professors seemed to like having a different definition of what an exam is: instead of being a test to review your knowledge and see if you understood what was shown in class, it was used as a way of introducing brand new concepts and seeing if you could use your existing knowledge to grasp the new ones. All in a 2 to 3 hours test which usually was worth half your grade.
Let's just say it caused a lot of people to fail.
Gamers have always been the fastest to upgrade, but the reason they've been less inclined to do so is that consoles are on a much longer cycle these days. Since games are multiplatform and designed for consoles first, you're guaranteed that a slightly beefier (to account for porting and OS overhead) computer than the console's specs will be able to play just about every game of the generation, which last 5+ years now. With a new generation coming, I'd expect a bump in gaming PC sales as people are finally forced to upgrade their old machines to play the latest games at comparative quality to consoles.
I didn't know Android and iOS ran Blender or Photoshop. Plus, if you're buying an expensive large tablet with a mouse, speakers, keyboard, probably a USB hub so you can plug more than one peripheral, you might as well buy a computer with a touch screen, it's going to be less cumbersome...
You don't have to dig far. Oil is an extremely visible and still problematic example. There are very few oil companies and they are known to maintain an oligopoly so that they can set prices to what they desire. Many times, you'll see prices at the pump increase for no apparent reason, you'll even hear regulatory agencies ask the oil companies and only be answered by shrugs. The answer is that they'll jack up price ahead of things like vacation weekends in order to make more money off people going out. Fuel competes against nothing; for most Americans, you NEED fuel to do just about everything. Even with rising gas prices, you still get the fuel.
Another recent example is construction works, particularly public sector. There are massive collusion networks that artificially raise prices by 5-15% (perhaps even more) and buy the silence of politicians and government workers. They set prices together, they decide who is going to get which contract, and if a newcomer decides not to play ball, they suffocate it until they leave or go bankrupt.
In both cases, the practices are unhealthy. They raise prices for consumers with them having no alternatives. The free market is based on competition, so if there is no competition, then you're suddenly not in a free market anymore. Collusion is basically instituting oligopolies, which are only slightly less problematic than monopolies.
You don't understand what collusion is, do you? The sellers specifically conspired together to artificially raise prices, which bypasses the normal supply and demand pricing and allows them to do whatever the hell they wish. If we'd actually allow such a thing, you'd see a lot of goods suddenly inflate in price for no reason whatsoever because by colluding corporations can lock you out of any alternative. Collusion breaks the principle of a free market by removing competition.
An e-book is a specially formatted text document which includes additional metadata making it easier to use on specialized e-book readers. Nothing more, nothing less. If you actually shop around, as opposed to just grabbing a Kindle, you'll notice that a lot of stores (and certain publishers in particular) do not put DRM on some books (I'm particularly impressed by Tor, who almost always have DRM-free copies available). DRM isn't fundamentally part of the "e-book", even though your post implies that publishers have successfully convinced you that it is.
The actual quote is "Les logiciels libres sont utilisés en priorité.", which is unambiguously referring to free as in speech. Most languages don't have the very annoying ambiguity English does with regards to "free" as in freedom vs no cost.
Google's distributed it to the manufacturers, Samsung was the first to implement and push it. Doesn't mean they're the only ones with the ability to do it, only that they're the only ones to have done it thus far. I'd also expect this fix to be in the stock Android distributions.
Old devices running on 2.3 will never see updates as they're already considered long out of support. 2.3.x devices might see something due to GB still being widely used by cheaper and older devices. 3.x devices are dead and buried. 4.x devices will almost certainly see the update in one form or another, though this may be dependent on (usually terrible) manufacturer support.
Wait, you do realize your free speech right only means you have the right to say it, right? It doesn't shield you from the consequences of saying it. The guy was indeed allowed to say it, and wasn't necessarily punished for it, but in any normal society being an asshole isn't going to positively influence the people around you. You can still do it, but don't whine about the consequences.
Either you allow second market sales, or you provide sales on the level of Steam (>=75% off). Steam caught on because of price, convenience is a secondary concern. Microsoft wanted to double dip with restrictions on second hand and no major sales (at least, they've never mentioned any of it, and you can bet they would've if they'd planned it to shield themselves from the backlash).
Actually, Firefox handily beats Chrome (and everything else) for memory efficiency everywhere except memory release after closing tabs. They've done a lot of work there in the past few years and it shows.
It's also interesting to look at the breakdown of the score for things like the HTML5 test. Firefox loses points for not supporting MPEG-4 videos, which probably has a lot to do with ideology as well as implementation. There's also points removed for iframes, which I sincerely think are a terrible blight that should be removed. The biggest black mark is the lack of support for a lot of "advanced" form types like datetime.
For the CSS3 test, I'm noticing a few bits and bobs which are still tagged as "-moz-" properties, usually because the standard wasn't finalized when implemented. These aren't a problem in practice since web developers always prepend vendor-specific attributes for such properties.
Finally, it's worth keeping in mind that Firefox's biggest strength is its addons. NoScript and AdBlock+ together make Firefox the most secure browser I have ever used, and also dramatically speed up loading times on a lot of otherwise junk-ridden sites. No other browser can match its feature level there right now.
I don't believe other browsers use DirectX acceleration for text rendering like Firefox does.
My Firefox is hovering at 700mb right now, which is higher than usual, but honestly? RAM is cheap. I have 16gb, I don't give a damn about it. Empty RAM is wasted RAM, so even if FF uses a few gigs I won't complain if it means it's faster/smoother/better.