Whether something is illegal or not has no bearing on whether it is ethical or moral. And there are also shades of illegality. It is, for example, illegal to be publicly intoxicated, and yet if you go downtown you are sure to spot drunk people parading about, along with many police officers watching them do so. There's a reason why public intoxication is illegal, just as there are equally compelling reasons why the officers don't give a damn. Morality and ethics is the short answer.
You know part of this is him trying to keep his ass out of hot water in the mainstream press.
Do you mean the corpse, or the attorney general? I'm going to go with attorney general: His ass isn't in hot water. It's his job to ensure that the laws are applied fairly, and that the laws themselves are fair. As long as he's doing his job, he should have nothing to fear. So if his ass is in the proverbial hot water, then it's because he wasn't doing his job properly, which in turn means myself, and many others, are quite pleased to see him get a thorough roasting for causing a situation so repugnant.
If we change how we as a people view crime and justice, there wouldn't be this snap call to be "tough on crime."
You're assuming that an enhanced understanding of the problem will solve it. That illusion is one of mankind's oldest.
Rationality has left our culture.
That implies it was ever present. Even tracing back to the very foundations of our society, we can find plenty of examples of how irrationality dragged us forward. One might even argue that a dose of irrationality is exactly what's needed sometimes -- if you are known for having a strongly vindictive nature, then even though someone may be stronger than you and able to beat you up, they may leave you alone because you're simply not worth the effort. Is being vindictive rational? No of course not: It could earn you an ass pounding! And yet, counterintuitively, that's exactly what it prevents.
Someone died because a prosecutor turned the screw over an incident where no money was lost, no lives were lost and by all measure, relatively harmless.
No, someone committed suicide because society had no place for them. What he was doing may have had value to him, but society as a whole has, through its legal system, has made it so even in cases where there is no financial or physical harm to others, said that what he was doing had no value. Since what he was doing was at the core of who he was (obviously, since it drove him to kill himself when he was deprived of it), it is more accurate to say society had no place for him. Whether that's moral, or ethical, right, or wrong, I leave to you. But that is why he died.
To blame Holder or the prosecutor specifically ignores the bigger social context at work.
The larger social context here is that nobody gives a damn. It's apathy and indifference on a mass scale. There's no need to make vague motions towards a "larger social context", as though that means something more than "people are fucking self-centered, lazy assholes." It doesn't sound as academic, as intellectual, to say that, but it's closer to the truth.
There should be a law requiring to pursue existing charges against everyone and not based on prosecutor discretion. That would cut down on ridiculous laws overnight.
There wouldn't be anyone left then, except perhaps newborns... who would promptly starve to death since any adult capable of taking care of them would be in jail. It would, quite literally, be the end of human life in this country -- there is no person alive who doesn't commit a crime deserving of jail every week in the course of his/her everyday activities.
And you don't need vague laws for prosecutors to go after anyone they want... it just makes it easier. All you need is a big helping of the just world hypothesis and a side of Milgram's obedience experiments to clean up anyone who doesn't get suckered by the first one.
This is the morality sieve in every culture that has allowed freedom and liberty to de-evolve into tyranny and abuse of power: Anyone hurt by it deserved it and anyone who disagrees vocally enough to start convincing others this is not the case will be punished, and naturally then, they deserved it too. As far as why people go along with things they clearly know are wrong or hurtful... it's because they're afraid of being punished by The Authorities. But here's the real interesting thing... when you add in a helping of Bureaucracy, then you can have an abstract authority where no one person is responsible. When you divide responsibility amongst even a small number of people, then nobody takes responsibility, nobody is at fault, and the process continues on its merry, eating people left and right. "I was just following orders."
The case included hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was passed in 1984 to enhance the government's ability to
... be so overly vague as to make anyone who uses a computer for any reason, by any method, a felon? Because that act is the quintessential example of how not to do it, and it's quoted by law professors all over the country as a shining example of the problems caused by strict liability laws.
8GB might be sufficient for those who care about how quickly they boot up (assuming the bulk of the kernel etc ends up in the flash cache and stays there until shutdown) but I only reboot about once a month at most.
you can buy a USB 3.0 stick and put your OS on it if you care about it that much. 8GB is nothing. Without any drivers so the OS can be aware, it's basically an HDD with one duct taped to it anyway...
Are there any places that pay for someone to get an industry certificate?
Not really. This industry is routinely and repeatedly gutted by idiot lawmakers on behalf of greedy corporations who have managed to turn most IT positions into contract positions without benefits. Before the dot com bubble burst, contract positions paid more than salaried positions, with the understanding you'd be responsible for covering benefits. This was because the multitude of startups didn't have the resources for proper HR. But once the bubble burst, the bottom fell out of the market. Naturally, the lower salaries being offered drove many into other fields. Those that stayed endured high rates of unemployment, because businesses anticipated this and claimed to Congress that there were no qualified workers. In truth, there were -- they just redefined "qualified" to mean "paid shit". So now there's about a million immigrants here on visas getting no benefits on the promise of earning citizenship someday... while the domestic workers who were already here continue to languish in unemployment or have switched into alternative fields. But this isn't news to anyone in the industry, just anyone outside of it.
You won't find many businesses investing in their workers. But if you want to look, you're welcome to it. I suggest starting by pulling their IRS records and finding out what percentage of their workforce is under contract and going from there. Small businesses won't invest in you. Eating the other end of the spectrum is our soaring rates of tuition; Nobody can afford a degree in this country now. Naturally, this means there are "no qualified people", and thus, more immigrants. Because it's a lot cheaper for them to meet the HR demands for certification and have dozens of cheap (but valid) degrees than you are.
Bottom line: If you're dead set on getting on the job certification, get out of this field, or get out of this country. Those are your two options.
The cache on your CPU is "stupid-caching" everything too, making it compatible with different OSes. Think about that. You're stupider than you think.
*facepalm* One of the major design decisions in CPU architecture is cache optimization. Over half of the silicon in your CPU chip is cache. Saying that CPU caching strategies are as optimized as the drive referenced above is so stupid that God probably had to kill a kitten.
Unlike other NAND caching solutions, Seagate's tech requires no software or drivers, making it compatible with any OS."
Yes, which means the drive is basically stupid-caching everything. There's a reason you want block-level access to devices. It's called performance. What's the point in having a SSD hung on the side that can't be independently accessed? Stupid-caching means it can't predict what I want next, and since it looks just like any other HDD, the OS' own cache optimization routines are going to be totally fucked because there's no way for the device to talk to the OS intelligently... or vice versa.
But now that they will be forced to work at their HQ, no user will ever complain anymore!
Yeah, the shock change in the corporate culture as thousands of telecommuters either relocate, lose their job, or suddenly start seeing people in real life that they'd largely only interacted with online will surely not have any significant impact on business process.
Reminds me of another company I worked at where an executive declared that 2/3rds of all IT must be outsourced, and then fled for "unspecified personal reasons" from their position nine months later. Meanwhile, the IT infrastructure fell down around everyone's heads, and the replacement workers, having been suddenly thrust into positions without any knowledge transfer or documentation by the previous crew, struggled to reinvent the wheel to disasterous effect.
Whenever you see an executive make a bold and unseasonable move in the company that promises to have far-reaching implications, and there isn't a clear and unambiguous reason for it beyond "I read it in a trade mag!" or "everyone else is doing it!" I have one word for you: Run. Run fast. Run very fast. Run like you're in Pompeii on volcano day, because baby, shit's about to get hot and explosive in short order and you don't wanna be one of the screaming villagers on fire n shit when it happens.
What about a sexbot? Surely you don't want your robot ghost `maid' to look like an industrial meat grinder....
No, but change a few lines of code and it can look perfectly safe for your, er, sausage... and yet still be a meat grinder. Are you going to check the firmware?
I wouldn't trust a robot for the same reason I don't trust a computer: Because I don't believe for a second that the things that are ethical and moral for me are at all even close to the values held by the designers, who were informed by their profit-seeking masters, what to do, how to do it, where to cut corners, etc.
The problem with trusting robots isn't robots: The problem is trusting the people who build the robots. Because afterall, an automaton is only as good as its creator.
Maybe. It seems to me that if the engineers have let the manager become powerful enough to be a single point of failure, they've designed the system wrong.
You're fired. Anyone else have a problem with the manager?
You can't magically change your behavior and habits with a piece of software.
Nope, but you'd be surprised what a consultation and psychological evaluation by a competent psychiatrist would accomplish. Specifically, the high rates of ADHD amongst computer geeks. And when I say high, I mean I know more people who have it than don't. There's probably a pound of Adderall XR sitting in desks on the floor I work on alone. No, I really to mean a pound. And yes, I do know how much a single pill weighs. I was bored, and I did the math one night.
You're on the right track, which is that you're looking for external structure to do what internal structure cannot; Namely, anything to do with time or sequence. Computers, counter-intuitively, are probably the only thing that's kept you employed up until now. You want a software solution to what is a wetware problem, but you probably don't realize how much you already rely on its enforced structural constants to maintain any level of productivity. Without a computer, I doubt you could even bag groceries for an hour or two without wandering off. I know: I did, many times.
Please don't take this as a criticism... but you need professional help to solve this. A computer can only do so much, and you've reached the maximum potential for it to help you at this point. You need to go outside yourself on this one.
(when I say you, I am referring to the abstract Other, the author and reader(s) who will see this and identify with it.)
I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.
A wise decision.
RPM is about access times, not about data rate.
And now you've gone retarded. Faster RPMs reduce latency, but because the sectors are also moving past the heads faster, it increases bandwidth as well. Sorry you flunked physics, man.
Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion.
Thanks for that, captain obvious. We didn't know.
For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.
I can see a very simple reason. It was the reason in my original post: It's called the They Stopped Making Them theory. It goes a little like this: You can't find them anymore, and because they're complex electromechanical devices, we can't just bang rocks together and have a 7200 RPM drive with a SATA connector plop down next to the fire.
Yes, I can do sarcasm too. Unlike you, however, I also realized that when you're writing something to disk at 20mbit/s times however many channels you want to watch, if you also want to re-encode those so you don't, say, run out of HDD space after watching a few weeks of your favorite shows, you'll need to be reading that data back off again, then doing all your "turing" operations on it, since as you so eloquently put it, your HDD isn't turing complete, and then writing it back to disk.
The PVR needs to not just write out 1 or more streams, but it also needs to be able to read it out (so you can watch stuff! Amazing!)... and while this is happening, also be able to do an encode/decode, which represents another pair of I/O streams.
Very quickly, you find that you're running out of bandwidth, and that your freshly minted computer science degree has not prepared you for this elementary realworld example. You'll then promptly core dump, catch fire, and no longer be a source of future snark for thousands of slashdotters who wasted precious minutes of their life reading your comment.
DVRs do not need 7200 RPM drives. 5400 RPM is plenty.
An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.
I don't think that's true. Microsoft office offers a rather good feature set at a lowish cost. There are better solutions for much more money. There are slightly worse solutions for an individual that lack the integration features for $0. They might just be at the right compromise point.
Okay, Mr. Paid To Post This, please provide a list of features that (a) the average user is aware of and has used in the last 18 months and (b) is not available in any of the free Office clones out there.
I'm willing to bet I can count on one hand what you come up with, and it won't be worth the $635 per seat cost that most businesses pay.
They're not just for notebooks. Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV, etc. If all the manufacturers bail out, we'll have to build larger devices like this to fill that niche. Unless, of course, SSDs suddenly drop in price... which they should have done by now, but hey... p-p-profit!
If the castle sinks, you build another one on top of it. Repeat until it stands. (Then, marry a princess with huge...tracts of land.)
Move to Minnesota. It's the most geologically stable location on the planet. There's a reason it's called the Iron Range. We have no earthquakes, hurricanes, and our buildings don't mysteriously vanish into holes in the ground. We have access to the largest reservoir of fresh water in the world as well. Global warming? Not a problem up here. Fertile farmland? Got that in spades too. Everything you need to survive just about any natural or man-made disaster is abundant here. We can survive the apocalypse. And we do, for three months out of the year, every year.
Our state budget has been balanced nearly every year. Ever. We have contributed far, far more to the federal government than we've gotten back. We're not number one in murders, shootings, rapes... or worst of all, politicians and lawyers. Every now and then one of the major parties gets the idea in their head of hosting their national convention up here. We make sure to kill 'em with nice, and they don't come back for a good long time after.
I gotta say, the things you people go through because you're afraid of a little snow is unbelieveable. Malaria. Hook worms. Giant mouths full of teeth attached to a hide thick enough to repel small arms fire (it's called an alligator). Your buildings are routinely eaten by nature, sometimes quite suddenly. Your summers are so scorching hot they're having to invent new colors to describe exactly how long you have to live once the air conditioning goes out. You don't have enough water, and fight with each other over it.
Be a little cold, or risk every other malady known to man. Apparently... it's a defect in our DNA. We'll tolerate anything as long as it doesn't make us shiver, or obstruct the free flow of traffic...
Al Qaeda is perhaps the most brilliant organization on this planet. With such limited resources, they sure have crippled this great, free country to a common dictatorship.
People blame the terrorists for our plight, but let's look at this objectively: How much damage is this organization directly responsible for? A few buildings? Few thousand people dead? Whatever answer you come up with, even if you declare large swaths of the general population malignant, you can't approach the damage caused by our reaction.
If America fell, it wasn't because of the terrorists, but us. We allowed our elected representatives to do this to us. We voted them into office repeatedly, and willfully. There is no "it just fell from the sky and killed our country" option here. We did this to ourselves.
Point the finger in the right direction: Right back at you. Terrorists didn't do this, we did.
All that costs money and time, and I definitely don't blame businesses for not wanting to upgrade...
The only reason why Microsoft Office sells is because that's what people are used to. If you've ever attempted to retrain your workforce to use a new technology, you'll realize that those costs dwarf anything that can be saved in the short-term by switching to a lower per-unit cost solution.
That's the only thing keeping Microsoft Office alive, really: Retraining costs. If you could build a clone of Office that looked like it and had everything in the same place, and was cheaper, that would be the end of Office in a second. Which is precisely why copyright law was extended to software: User interface makes up a smaller percentage of code than the stuff that goes on behind it, often by a considerable margin. If you could just "Xerox" the interface, you'd side-step the re-training costs.
Companies would be forced to compete based on feature set, reliability, and cost, instead of looks.
Ah, copyright... protecting innovation. Yup. Mmm-hmm. Has nothing to do with "our customers would bail like a sinking ship on fire with shit raining from above" if not for these "look and feel" laws. See also: China. They don't have a problem with copying interfaces... and as a result, things there sell for pennies on the dollar to comparable products here.
The malware also compromised the computers of a prominent research foundation in Hungary, two thinktanks, and an unnamed healthcare provider in the US.
Yes, because anywhere but in the United States, there's no harm in publishing the names of those harmed by malware attacks. I, for one, would be interested in knowing which healthcare provider managed has been infiltrated, since, you know, it could be a life or death kind of thing, unlike research foundations and think tanks.
I'm sure there are plenty out there trying to force a false positive right now.
Hi. I've got three trials running right now:
One is downloading off The Pirate Bay's top 100 list, and then dumping the torrents on a scratch disk. No encryption, all in the clear.
The second is doing the same thing, but all encryption options are enabled, and torrents/DHT are pulled through Tor, so only the (encrypted) bittorrent traffic is being relayed through.
The third is to previously-uploaded torrents that have the naming convention of the same top-100s, and the same apparent contents (file sizes, etc., ) but are public domain video.
And yes, I do plan on suing the pants off my ISP if they flag the third -- and then getting a petition passed around my neighborhood asking our local representatives to demand the system be turned off, or the permits for our cable providers be yanked with immediate effect. And yes, I know the Public Utilities Commissioner is supposed to be in charge of such things, but the PUC will wipe their arse with any petition... this is going straight to the city and state representatives, with the words "We will vote your sorry ass to the curb if you allow this." It tends to get better results.
The petitions are already printed off and sitting next to me.
Everyone who buys an iPhone knows exactly what they are getting in to. Nobody is conned or tricked or forced to buy an iPhone.
And you think it's reasonable for the average person to read and understand a 325 page EULA? You can try foisting the blame back on the user, but I think it is, at best, misrepresenting the situation to suggest that people know "exactly" what they are getting into when they purchase an iPhone. The average person thinks they're getting a phone. A phone that they own, and can use without unreasonable restriction, and that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now, this isn't true, not by a long-shot, but that's what the average person thinks. The average person is, afterall, a rather trusting, and stupid, sort.
I won't address the rest of your post, other than to say SARCASM! Anyone who hasn't had their sense of humor surgically removed and replaced with a floating point coprocessor can see that my entire previous post contained generous helpings of it.
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What he did was really illegal.
Whether something is illegal or not has no bearing on whether it is ethical or moral. And there are also shades of illegality. It is, for example, illegal to be publicly intoxicated, and yet if you go downtown you are sure to spot drunk people parading about, along with many police officers watching them do so. There's a reason why public intoxication is illegal, just as there are equally compelling reasons why the officers don't give a damn. Morality and ethics is the short answer.
You know part of this is him trying to keep his ass out of hot water in the mainstream press.
Do you mean the corpse, or the attorney general? I'm going to go with attorney general: His ass isn't in hot water. It's his job to ensure that the laws are applied fairly, and that the laws themselves are fair. As long as he's doing his job, he should have nothing to fear. So if his ass is in the proverbial hot water, then it's because he wasn't doing his job properly, which in turn means myself, and many others, are quite pleased to see him get a thorough roasting for causing a situation so repugnant.
If we change how we as a people view crime and justice, there wouldn't be this snap call to be "tough on crime."
You're assuming that an enhanced understanding of the problem will solve it. That illusion is one of mankind's oldest.
Rationality has left our culture.
That implies it was ever present. Even tracing back to the very foundations of our society, we can find plenty of examples of how irrationality dragged us forward. One might even argue that a dose of irrationality is exactly what's needed sometimes -- if you are known for having a strongly vindictive nature, then even though someone may be stronger than you and able to beat you up, they may leave you alone because you're simply not worth the effort. Is being vindictive rational? No of course not: It could earn you an ass pounding! And yet, counterintuitively, that's exactly what it prevents.
Someone died because a prosecutor turned the screw over an incident where no money was lost, no lives were lost and by all measure, relatively harmless.
No, someone committed suicide because society had no place for them. What he was doing may have had value to him, but society as a whole has, through its legal system, has made it so even in cases where there is no financial or physical harm to others, said that what he was doing had no value. Since what he was doing was at the core of who he was (obviously, since it drove him to kill himself when he was deprived of it), it is more accurate to say society had no place for him. Whether that's moral, or ethical, right, or wrong, I leave to you. But that is why he died.
To blame Holder or the prosecutor specifically ignores the bigger social context at work.
The larger social context here is that nobody gives a damn. It's apathy and indifference on a mass scale. There's no need to make vague motions towards a "larger social context", as though that means something more than "people are fucking self-centered, lazy assholes." It doesn't sound as academic, as intellectual, to say that, but it's closer to the truth.
There should be a law requiring to pursue existing charges against everyone and not based on prosecutor discretion. That would cut down on ridiculous laws overnight.
There wouldn't be anyone left then, except perhaps newborns... who would promptly starve to death since any adult capable of taking care of them would be in jail. It would, quite literally, be the end of human life in this country -- there is no person alive who doesn't commit a crime deserving of jail every week in the course of his/her everyday activities.
And you don't need vague laws for prosecutors to go after anyone they want... it just makes it easier. All you need is a big helping of the just world hypothesis and a side of Milgram's obedience experiments to clean up anyone who doesn't get suckered by the first one.
This is the morality sieve in every culture that has allowed freedom and liberty to de-evolve into tyranny and abuse of power: Anyone hurt by it deserved it and anyone who disagrees vocally enough to start convincing others this is not the case will be punished, and naturally then, they deserved it too. As far as why people go along with things they clearly know are wrong or hurtful... it's because they're afraid of being punished by The Authorities. But here's the real interesting thing... when you add in a helping of Bureaucracy, then you can have an abstract authority where no one person is responsible. When you divide responsibility amongst even a small number of people, then nobody takes responsibility, nobody is at fault, and the process continues on its merry, eating people left and right. "I was just following orders."
The puppy sitting next to a big poo on the carpet also claims that it wasn't his fault...
Yes, but a puppy is too young to know better. Puppies can be trained not to shit on everything, unlike US Attorney Generals.
The case included hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that was passed in 1984 to enhance the government's ability to
... be so overly vague as to make anyone who uses a computer for any reason, by any method, a felon? Because that act is the quintessential example of how not to do it, and it's quoted by law professors all over the country as a shining example of the problems caused by strict liability laws.
8GB might be sufficient for those who care about how quickly they boot up (assuming the bulk of the kernel etc ends up in the flash cache and stays there until shutdown) but I only reboot about once a month at most.
you can buy a USB 3.0 stick and put your OS on it if you care about it that much. 8GB is nothing. Without any drivers so the OS can be aware, it's basically an HDD with one duct taped to it anyway...
Are there any places that pay for someone to get an industry certificate?
Not really. This industry is routinely and repeatedly gutted by idiot lawmakers on behalf of greedy corporations who have managed to turn most IT positions into contract positions without benefits. Before the dot com bubble burst, contract positions paid more than salaried positions, with the understanding you'd be responsible for covering benefits. This was because the multitude of startups didn't have the resources for proper HR. But once the bubble burst, the bottom fell out of the market. Naturally, the lower salaries being offered drove many into other fields. Those that stayed endured high rates of unemployment, because businesses anticipated this and claimed to Congress that there were no qualified workers. In truth, there were -- they just redefined "qualified" to mean "paid shit". So now there's about a million immigrants here on visas getting no benefits on the promise of earning citizenship someday... while the domestic workers who were already here continue to languish in unemployment or have switched into alternative fields. But this isn't news to anyone in the industry, just anyone outside of it.
You won't find many businesses investing in their workers. But if you want to look, you're welcome to it. I suggest starting by pulling their IRS records and finding out what percentage of their workforce is under contract and going from there. Small businesses won't invest in you. Eating the other end of the spectrum is our soaring rates of tuition; Nobody can afford a degree in this country now. Naturally, this means there are "no qualified people", and thus, more immigrants. Because it's a lot cheaper for them to meet the HR demands for certification and have dozens of cheap (but valid) degrees than you are.
Bottom line: If you're dead set on getting on the job certification, get out of this field, or get out of this country. Those are your two options.
The cache on your CPU is "stupid-caching" everything too, making it compatible with different OSes. Think about that. You're stupider than you think.
*facepalm* One of the major design decisions in CPU architecture is cache optimization. Over half of the silicon in your CPU chip is cache. Saying that CPU caching strategies are as optimized as the drive referenced above is so stupid that God probably had to kill a kitten.
Unlike other NAND caching solutions, Seagate's tech requires no software or drivers, making it compatible with any OS."
Yes, which means the drive is basically stupid-caching everything. There's a reason you want block-level access to devices. It's called performance. What's the point in having a SSD hung on the side that can't be independently accessed? Stupid-caching means it can't predict what I want next, and since it looks just like any other HDD, the OS' own cache optimization routines are going to be totally fucked because there's no way for the device to talk to the OS intelligently... or vice versa.
Fail.
R/C model planes are much harder to legislate against. So it's drone, dammit!
As long as it didn't have more than 3.4 ounces of liquid, or nail clippers mounted to it, I don't see the problem.
But now that they will be forced to work at their HQ, no user will ever complain anymore!
Yeah, the shock change in the corporate culture as thousands of telecommuters either relocate, lose their job, or suddenly start seeing people in real life that they'd largely only interacted with online will surely not have any significant impact on business process.
Reminds me of another company I worked at where an executive declared that 2/3rds of all IT must be outsourced, and then fled for "unspecified personal reasons" from their position nine months later. Meanwhile, the IT infrastructure fell down around everyone's heads, and the replacement workers, having been suddenly thrust into positions without any knowledge transfer or documentation by the previous crew, struggled to reinvent the wheel to disasterous effect.
Whenever you see an executive make a bold and unseasonable move in the company that promises to have far-reaching implications, and there isn't a clear and unambiguous reason for it beyond "I read it in a trade mag!" or "everyone else is doing it!" I have one word for you: Run. Run fast. Run very fast. Run like you're in Pompeii on volcano day, because baby, shit's about to get hot and explosive in short order and you don't wanna be one of the screaming villagers on fire n shit when it happens.
What about a sexbot? Surely you don't want your robot ghost `maid' to look like an industrial meat grinder....
No, but change a few lines of code and it can look perfectly safe for your, er, sausage... and yet still be a meat grinder. Are you going to check the firmware?
I wouldn't trust a robot for the same reason I don't trust a computer: Because I don't believe for a second that the things that are ethical and moral for me are at all even close to the values held by the designers, who were informed by their profit-seeking masters, what to do, how to do it, where to cut corners, etc.
The problem with trusting robots isn't robots: The problem is trusting the people who build the robots. Because afterall, an automaton is only as good as its creator.
Maybe. It seems to me that if the engineers have let the manager become powerful enough to be a single point of failure, they've designed the system wrong.
You're fired. Anyone else have a problem with the manager?
It may be built with redundancy in mind, but apparently it still has at least one single point of failure.
Yeah. It's the same single point of failure present in every IT project: It's called The Manager, and it goes something like this:
Engineer: "I sent you the e-mail!"
Manager: "Oh? I never got it."
Users: "Oh f---."
You can't magically change your behavior and habits with a piece of software.
Nope, but you'd be surprised what a consultation and psychological evaluation by a competent psychiatrist would accomplish. Specifically, the high rates of ADHD amongst computer geeks. And when I say high, I mean I know more people who have it than don't. There's probably a pound of Adderall XR sitting in desks on the floor I work on alone. No, I really to mean a pound. And yes, I do know how much a single pill weighs. I was bored, and I did the math one night.
You're on the right track, which is that you're looking for external structure to do what internal structure cannot; Namely, anything to do with time or sequence. Computers, counter-intuitively, are probably the only thing that's kept you employed up until now. You want a software solution to what is a wetware problem, but you probably don't realize how much you already rely on its enforced structural constants to maintain any level of productivity. Without a computer, I doubt you could even bag groceries for an hour or two without wandering off. I know: I did, many times.
Please don't take this as a criticism... but you need professional help to solve this. A computer can only do so much, and you've reached the maximum potential for it to help you at this point. You need to go outside yourself on this one.
(when I say you, I am referring to the abstract Other, the author and reader(s) who will see this and identify with it.)
I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.
A wise decision.
RPM is about access times, not about data rate.
And now you've gone retarded. Faster RPMs reduce latency, but because the sectors are also moving past the heads faster, it increases bandwidth as well. Sorry you flunked physics, man.
Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion.
Thanks for that, captain obvious. We didn't know.
For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.
I can see a very simple reason. It was the reason in my original post: It's called the They Stopped Making Them theory. It goes a little like this: You can't find them anymore, and because they're complex electromechanical devices, we can't just bang rocks together and have a 7200 RPM drive with a SATA connector plop down next to the fire.
Yes, I can do sarcasm too. Unlike you, however, I also realized that when you're writing something to disk at 20mbit/s times however many channels you want to watch, if you also want to re-encode those so you don't, say, run out of HDD space after watching a few weeks of your favorite shows, you'll need to be reading that data back off again, then doing all your "turing" operations on it, since as you so eloquently put it, your HDD isn't turing complete, and then writing it back to disk.
The PVR needs to not just write out 1 or more streams, but it also needs to be able to read it out (so you can watch stuff! Amazing!)... and while this is happening, also be able to do an encode/decode, which represents another pair of I/O streams.
Very quickly, you find that you're running out of bandwidth, and that your freshly minted computer science degree has not prepared you for this elementary realworld example. You'll then promptly core dump, catch fire, and no longer be a source of future snark for thousands of slashdotters who wasted precious minutes of their life reading your comment.
DVRs do not need 7200 RPM drives. 5400 RPM is plenty.
An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.
I don't think that's true. Microsoft office offers a rather good feature set at a lowish cost. There are better solutions for much more money. There are slightly worse solutions for an individual that lack the integration features for $0. They might just be at the right compromise point.
Okay, Mr. Paid To Post This, please provide a list of features that (a) the average user is aware of and has used in the last 18 months and (b) is not available in any of the free Office clones out there.
I'm willing to bet I can count on one hand what you come up with, and it won't be worth the $635 per seat cost that most businesses pay.
They're not just for notebooks. Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV, etc. If all the manufacturers bail out, we'll have to build larger devices like this to fill that niche. Unless, of course, SSDs suddenly drop in price... which they should have done by now, but hey... p-p-profit!
If the castle sinks, you build another one on top of it. Repeat until it stands. (Then, marry a princess with huge...tracts of land.)
Move to Minnesota. It's the most geologically stable location on the planet. There's a reason it's called the Iron Range. We have no earthquakes, hurricanes, and our buildings don't mysteriously vanish into holes in the ground. We have access to the largest reservoir of fresh water in the world as well. Global warming? Not a problem up here. Fertile farmland? Got that in spades too. Everything you need to survive just about any natural or man-made disaster is abundant here. We can survive the apocalypse. And we do, for three months out of the year, every year.
Our state budget has been balanced nearly every year. Ever. We have contributed far, far more to the federal government than we've gotten back. We're not number one in murders, shootings, rapes... or worst of all, politicians and lawyers. Every now and then one of the major parties gets the idea in their head of hosting their national convention up here. We make sure to kill 'em with nice, and they don't come back for a good long time after.
I gotta say, the things you people go through because you're afraid of a little snow is unbelieveable. Malaria. Hook worms. Giant mouths full of teeth attached to a hide thick enough to repel small arms fire (it's called an alligator). Your buildings are routinely eaten by nature, sometimes quite suddenly. Your summers are so scorching hot they're having to invent new colors to describe exactly how long you have to live once the air conditioning goes out. You don't have enough water, and fight with each other over it.
Be a little cold, or risk every other malady known to man. Apparently... it's a defect in our DNA. We'll tolerate anything as long as it doesn't make us shiver, or obstruct the free flow of traffic...
Al Qaeda is perhaps the most brilliant organization on this planet. With such limited resources, they sure have crippled this great, free country to a common dictatorship.
People blame the terrorists for our plight, but let's look at this objectively: How much damage is this organization directly responsible for? A few buildings? Few thousand people dead? Whatever answer you come up with, even if you declare large swaths of the general population malignant, you can't approach the damage caused by our reaction.
If America fell, it wasn't because of the terrorists, but us. We allowed our elected representatives to do this to us. We voted them into office repeatedly, and willfully. There is no "it just fell from the sky and killed our country" option here. We did this to ourselves.
Point the finger in the right direction: Right back at you. Terrorists didn't do this, we did.
All that costs money and time, and I definitely don't blame businesses for not wanting to upgrade...
The only reason why Microsoft Office sells is because that's what people are used to. If you've ever attempted to retrain your workforce to use a new technology, you'll realize that those costs dwarf anything that can be saved in the short-term by switching to a lower per-unit cost solution.
That's the only thing keeping Microsoft Office alive, really: Retraining costs. If you could build a clone of Office that looked like it and had everything in the same place, and was cheaper, that would be the end of Office in a second. Which is precisely why copyright law was extended to software: User interface makes up a smaller percentage of code than the stuff that goes on behind it, often by a considerable margin. If you could just "Xerox" the interface, you'd side-step the re-training costs.
Companies would be forced to compete based on feature set, reliability, and cost, instead of looks.
Ah, copyright... protecting innovation. Yup. Mmm-hmm. Has nothing to do with "our customers would bail like a sinking ship on fire with shit raining from above" if not for these "look and feel" laws. See also: China. They don't have a problem with copying interfaces... and as a result, things there sell for pennies on the dollar to comparable products here.
The malware also compromised the computers of a prominent research foundation in Hungary, two thinktanks, and an unnamed healthcare provider in the US.
Yes, because anywhere but in the United States, there's no harm in publishing the names of those harmed by malware attacks. I, for one, would be interested in knowing which healthcare provider managed has been infiltrated, since, you know, it could be a life or death kind of thing, unlike research foundations and think tanks.
I'm sure there are plenty out there trying to force a false positive right now.
Hi. I've got three trials running right now:
One is downloading off The Pirate Bay's top 100 list, and then dumping the torrents on a scratch disk. No encryption, all in the clear.
The second is doing the same thing, but all encryption options are enabled, and torrents/DHT are pulled through Tor, so only the (encrypted) bittorrent traffic is being relayed through.
The third is to previously-uploaded torrents that have the naming convention of the same top-100s, and the same apparent contents (file sizes, etc., ) but are public domain video.
And yes, I do plan on suing the pants off my ISP if they flag the third -- and then getting a petition passed around my neighborhood asking our local representatives to demand the system be turned off, or the permits for our cable providers be yanked with immediate effect. And yes, I know the Public Utilities Commissioner is supposed to be in charge of such things, but the PUC will wipe their arse with any petition... this is going straight to the city and state representatives, with the words "We will vote your sorry ass to the curb if you allow this." It tends to get better results.
The petitions are already printed off and sitting next to me.
Everyone who buys an iPhone knows exactly what they are getting in to. Nobody is conned or tricked or forced to buy an iPhone.
And you think it's reasonable for the average person to read and understand a 325 page EULA? You can try foisting the blame back on the user, but I think it is, at best, misrepresenting the situation to suggest that people know "exactly" what they are getting into when they purchase an iPhone. The average person thinks they're getting a phone. A phone that they own, and can use without unreasonable restriction, and that they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Now, this isn't true, not by a long-shot, but that's what the average person thinks. The average person is, afterall, a rather trusting, and stupid, sort.
I won't address the rest of your post, other than to say SARCASM! Anyone who hasn't had their sense of humor surgically removed and replaced with a floating point coprocessor can see that my entire previous post contained generous helpings of it.