I always thought the print magazine format would have done well on a tablet that could display at least one full page of a magazine at a size identical to the print edition. I don't find the app versions of magazines nearly as satisfying as paging through a physical magazine and the reduce-and-zoom stuff like Zinio does isn't very appealing either.
Do they have a model that says what the minimum price they can charge and actually attract enough drivers for the service to work?
It seems to me there's a price floor they really can't go below without driving away so many drivers that you can't reasonably get a ride, risking losing customer interest.
Bid/ask sounds interesting, but it also sounds like it has too many transaction costs in the near term. Now, if I want to go to the airport I just request a car with a set price. Would I have to risk making my flight or set aside a bunch of additional time for a price negotiation if I did bid/ask?
Bid/ask seems like it would work better for planned trips or trips of a longer distance where there was likely to be more time involved in planning.
I can't remember the class details, but I think the Compellent defaulted to 5 and 10 (10 for writes, 5 for reads) although I think there were ways to define specific volumes as double parity (aka 6) and double mirroring, although IIRC there was some penalty beyond just extra disk consumption.
The Equallogics will do 5, 10, 50 and 6. 5 supposedly is not recommended for NLSAS and SATA disks over 1 TB due to risk of secondary disk failures during a rebuild and I'd swear the SSD caching models only allow 6. 10 almost never gets used unless the customer asks for it explicitely or they bought such a giant amont of disk space that 10 would accomodate their needs for the near term and they were willing to restripe which the EQLs will do online. Older units repuporsed often get 10 to crank up performance a little, although dual 1 GB ethernet is the real bottleneck.
IIRC 50 and 6 end up being pretty close in capacity and that's what most devices end up formatted as because customers always need maximum capacity -- sales and marketing throw around unformatted capacity numbers, and customers don't account for redundancy formatting, snapshot space and so on.
I've only played with it a little via nas4free (which probably limits what I know further), but what would have seemed to make more sense to me would be just add disks/LUNs to the pool without any specific redundancy assignments and create vdevs as device block-level parity sets across all pool members.
These virtual vdevs could be restriped on demand to change RAID levels and adding a disk to the pool would cause it to rebalance the stripes across all pool members. Removing a disk would be the opposite, provided you had enough pool capacity and devices to support the stripe level. In theory, a virtual vdev should be something you could then move between pools.
It's hard to escape limitations, but obviously mixing RAID levels in a pool would have some performance penalty if you had a busy parity vdev while trying to use a mirror or simple stripe for performance, but I think this is where you wave your hand about having enough devices/IOPS in your pool or create dedicated pools.
From my exposure to commercial SANs, many do things this way. Compellent block-level stripes RAID-10 and RAID-5 across disk pools (in training, they never explain why there's no performance penalty or why there's a performance benefit to block level striping, but IIRC they dedicate RAID-10 for writes and move them to RAID-5 for reads and don't want you to dedicate a RAID level to your volumes).
Equallogic members only have one RAID level, but you can pick what RAID level you use for the member. Adding members to the same pool balances all volumes across all pool members based on performance. You can also create separate pools and add members to individual pools and volumes can be moved between pools.
An important difference is that a "non-lethal" weapon is much more likely to be used than a lethal weapon.
This is probably the line of thinking going into ban them, although I question if it would make much difference in everyday outcomes.
The fact that firearms kill people doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent to their use, and there's a whole universe of blunt force weapons which are (statistically, anyway) less lethal, and many of them, like baseball bats, can be carried pretty much anywhere without anyone objecting.
People inclined to use a firearm probably wouldn't switch to a Taser, anyway -- mostly because it IS less lethal and not competitive with a firearm. Don't bring AA batteries to a gunfight.
You might even argue that allowing them might possibly have a tiny positive effect on firearms deaths, since there will likely be someone who will get zapped instead of shot. If you ban them outright, whatever the sliver of population that makes the decision that less lethal is a better idea will most likely just fall back to a firearm anyway.
It's the same sort of thing with firearm noise suppressors. They're tightly controlled because it's assumed that if you make a gun silent, people will just start killing people and getting away with it because their guns aren't loud. So far, we haven't seen much in the way of people unwilling to shoot somebody because the noise was a troublesome indicator they had been shooting somebody.
Or restrict the info to only the auto theft squad.
My guess is how it works out is that the data goes directly to the "intelligence" squad and they don't even share it with the auto theft squad for fear that it will be used to deduce the Mayor's car is parked at his girlfriend's or something.
I'd say yes, it is that difficult for people to be that honest with their life partner. If it was so easy we probably wouldn't have an entire marital therapy industry, complete with entire sections at bookstores devoted to relationship advice, various professional qualifications and so on.
Even people who want to monogamous and only want to sleep with their partners find sex a total emotional minefield, difficult to discuss and so on. I don't know a married man over the age of 30 who hasn't complained about his sex life. And even a few who have made an honest effort with their spouses to be honest with their partners and not made improvements. And none of them have otherwise broken relationships.
Other than pathological personality types and totally broken relationships, I'd bet most sex driven affairs are started by men who are unhappy with the quantity or quality of their sex lives, or at least that's my personal perception and the general opinion of most other married men I've talked to.
Of course so many things contribute you can't hardly list them all -- children, careers, money, appearance (your partner's or your own self image), boredom, emotional engagement, stress, cultural messages, booze, and the fact that people just plain change over time and the person you're married to today isn't identical to the person you married 10, 20, 30 or more years ago.
I'd also wager there's an evolutionary biology component, where women's libidos fade as they approach menopause and/or after having kids and simply lose interest. I think it's probably an evolutionary biology kind of thing because the risk of birth defects rise with the age of the mother and childbearing (and rearing) is more physically and emotionally straining as they age. Couple this with an evolutionary biology angle to partner selection by men (young, fertile, etc) and you have a built-in recipe for male-initiated affairs.
There's a lot more work for us to do in the ease of use of communications privacy
Why is there? Why hasn't private key ala GPG/PGP become a totally integrated feature in mail clients? Even years ago when there was still a decent free Windows PGP with all the add-ons they had it integrated pretty well into Outlook and basic clipboard operations.
Why isn't it just a completely vendor-integrated feature, with address books having default fields for public keys, smartphone integration, etc. On a phone it could be totally automated to send PGP encrypted mail by default with only a prompt for your thumbprint to authenticate access to your private key. (This may or may not be a great security practice, but it's already widespread and well integrated and the post was about ease of use to begin with.)
Is it patents on PGP? "Meh" public attitude? Vendors pushing other solutions (S/MIME) or other certificate-driven solutions or "enterprise" authentication systems not wanting to give any room for what could be a free cross-platform solution?
11,811.03 for 300 dpi. I had to do the math for the hell of it just to see how absurd it would look to talk about 11,811 dpm as a display/print resolution.
Then I started thinking maybe it would be a semi-practical metric for comparing larger monitors. Right now you have the physical display size, the physical device's display panel and then the video encoding resolution all being talked about as being, say, "4K".
It's not a measure of physical size (although I have had people tell me that got a new TV and when I asked how big they said 4K). Video can be encoded for 4K but doesn't mean the source was. A display could theoretically even have a sub-4k panel but automagically downsample 4K content for it's screen so it's "4k compatible".
DPM isn't much better but at least it would use a ratio of the device's physical size to the actual number of pixels in its panel.
Usually I would consider HuffPo to not buy into government policies which seem to only benefit corporations.
Immigration is one of those strange issues where liberals support it for reasons involving being pro-multicultural and businesses supports it for its supply of cheap, wage-suppressing labor.
I can't decide if this article was posted for the usual left-wing pro multiculturalism reasons or just as more liberal sniping at Donald Trump. The latter alone is a phenomenon I don't understand as it seems like a waste of energy when there are more likely Republicans to actually win the nomination.
I've heard someplace that they plan to put Siri-like voice response into them in addition to all the almost-not-uncanny valley stuff they do now to make it more "real". It wouldn't surprise me if something like a sex doll didn't become a more compelling home android than any general purpose one.
They're focused on a single use case, which means they focus on enhancing just the things that enhance that versus doing many things clumsily, They're also focused on realism in looks, touch and appearance. Doing those things right doesn't help with marginal avancement of other abilities but I think it does make them more believable and appear more advanced which has a psychological value. (In the case of a sex doll, looking good is an inherent value).
Sex, for all of its theatrical acrobatics, really isn't a very compelling physical movement problem to solve, (especially if you're the bottom) either, and mastering a limited range of needed motion well is a whole lot easier than getting a wider range of motion mostly right.
It's not that a sex doll would be a better general purpose "robot" but that it could be a much more compelling one because it does its one job much better.
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) I can't pay no doctor bills. (but Whitey's on the moon) Ten years from now I'll be payin' still While Whitey's on the moon. You know, the man jus' upped my rent las' night, 'cause Whitey's on the moon. No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but Whitey's on the moon. I wonder why he's uppi' me? 'cause Whitey's on the moon? Well I wuz already givin' 'im fifty a week And now Whitey's on the moon. Taxes takin' my whole damn check, The junkies make me a nervous wreck, The price of food is goin' up, An' as if all that crap wuzn't enough, A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face an' arms began to swell And Whitey's on the moon. Was all that money I made las' year For Whitey on the moon? How come I ain't got no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon. Y'know I jus' about had my fill Of Whitey on the moon. I think I'll sen' these doctor bills, Airmail special
I remember it being pretty tolerable through most of the 90s, although I think it really varied by newsgroup as the decade moved on. There really wasn't a ton of non-IT access to the Internet before 1995 or so. It was a big deal when the university I worked for in 1992 got us MacSLIP and IP dialup. Did MSDOS have dialup IP access prior to Win95? Most of those technology obstacles would have prevented most people from even getting access to USENET.
It was easy to complain about Slashdot or any web based forum in 1998. Most experienced users were used to USENET where many newsgroups were virtually spam free and kill files could easily suppress asshats and trolls. Plus, if you had any familiarity with newsgroups, web based discussion seemed awful. Terrible navigation, no reading tools and so on. It took a lot of patience to tolerate internet discussion on a web page if you were used to Usenet.
I keep waiting for newsgroups to get rediscovered somehow.
For consumers, price, speed and reliability are pretty much solved problems for basic installations. The write-them-until-they-die endurance tests that have been posted here and elsewhere have demonstrated that most consumer flash drives have much more endurance than is generally assumed.
At scale, they're still kind of problems. Enterprise flash is super expensive which is why you usually see it coupled with tiering software at the SAN that uses enterprise flash as a cache for spinning platters to achieve scale and durability.
If (and this is a big if) these Optane disks have enterprise endurance at consumer-ish prices, it's enterprise storage systems they would shake up. A vendor like Compellent makes their tiering system about 80% of their sales pitch. A few years ago, this was like 15k sas, 10k sas and 7.2k disk with magic algorithms to keep active blocks at higher tiers and quiet blocks at lower tiers. This requires expensive software and complex controllers to manage, plus the write-durable flash disks are very expensive.
With the ability to price these disks like 10k sas platters and fill a storage system with them, you eliminate the need for tiering completely which makes controllers far simpler and less expensive while making the entire storage system run at pure flash speeds.
I think ripping out a lot of the software complexity will have a big impact on enterprise storage prices.
I read the TFA for a change and it said that the drives would be available in lightweight laptops. There was a Slashdot article about this technology when it was announced and there was speculation about whether it was a cache technology or a direct storage medium.
TFA said it would be for enterprise storage *and* laptops, so its likely means it's a "drive" and that it will likely be more or less affordable or it wouldn't go into laptops. The only question is how fast, TFA said the demo was only 7x current flash but maybe faster at introduction in 2016.
I think the original story said it was far more durable than flash now, and if TFA article is to be believed about use in enterprise storage it could really shake things up. Vendors now make a big deal out of fancy tiering schemes, charging two arms and a leg for a few SSDs and fancy software to keep quiet data on their only slightly cheaper nearline disks. What's the point if you can do 100% of this with drives faster than flash but cheap enough to go into laptops?
...is kind of interesting. Have we had any candidate outsdie of the far left who's done anything besides outright supporting the H1B program as big business likes it, quietly going along with it or ignoring it? It sure seems like the most common reactions among both parties are to either vigorously support H1B programs because they want support from big business or dot-com, pretend it isn't an issue or stake out some kind of multiculturist pro-immigration position claiming we need the world's best and brightest. The latter is at least a position that sounds rational but seldom includes changes to the program to eliminate abuses and usually just ends up being an entity that didn't get the visas they wanted for the people they wanted.
To me that Trump is critical of this in at least a somewhat thoughtful way shows an interesting policy position. Either it shows Trump is more intelligent than he seems or at least is far savvier in staking out positions than might be expected from his bellicose pronouncements.
It's too easy to say he's just pandering to natvist sentiments because I don't think the H1B visa program has the kind of visibility among the kinds of people who hate immigration because immigrants are brown and talk funny.
One way to look at it is that Trump is already one of the richest people in the world -- he doesn't need to use the office to become rich, which is generally what happens when someone elected to office isn't yet rich. When rich CEOs come calling for favors he may not be impressed by their rich CEO status or feel the need to genuflect to them for money.
I think another reasonable narrative is that Trump has been on the buying side of government payola long enough to understand it better than most politicians who have on the payee side their entire careers. He's pragmatic enough to understand that if you want to get along, you have to go along, but smart enough to know that this is a crazy system that's not sustainable.
I have a friend who is a history professor. One of the subjects he occasionally teaches is WW II.
He has a very well practiced spiel he does about how Germany actually achieved its goals and won the war. It's deliberately argumentative and he's knowledgeable and persuasive enough to make you believe it for a minute or two. German economic domination of Europe and global economic leadership, Germany in critical leadership role in Europe, border countries basically German satellites, a nearly insignificant Jewish population, a close military alliance with the United States against Russian domination, etc.
He does it to make a point about the course of history and how long and short term historical outcomes are often paradoxical.
Yeah, but about $65 of that $100 throwaway phone are costs unrelated to the cellular data hardware. The screen, battery, housing and most of the software aren't needed to get a car to phone home. Plus, somebody's making a profit on that $100 phone, too.
If the purpose is just to send data (not accept configuration changes) I doubt there would be any requirement to safety harden it beyond what they already do for the general electronics of the car. This is just data collection, not fly by wire. So it really wouldn't add that much to the cost of the device.
I think you're probably right that they're not quite ready to toss this into every Kia Rio but it wouldn't surprise me if every trim with some kind of a dashboard screen wouldn't have it and that's a ton of new cars these days.
My wife's Acura MDX has the Honda/Acura version of OnStar installed and her car is far from the top end. We bought it used so I don't think we have a subscription, but it's definitely all over the infotainment menu system.
The network manager who runs around busy all day is one who's doing a shitty job. The one that looks bored and takes long lunches? If you're network does what it's supposed to, that's the one who's doing his job right.
So no "OnStar" or other such convenience services that involve data connections to your car.
Isn't the trend to just lump all that hardware in with the car even if the owner doesn't subscribe to the service? That way it can be a "safety feature" (ie, you can hit the button in an emergency) or they call sell it as an immediate upgrade direct to consumer.
Even if there's no button to press to call the service, how do we know that economies of scale (TM) haven't reached the point where it's just cheaper and easier to add that hunk of silicon and most/all of its software to the base electronics and that connectivity is actually lurking inside, phoning home and being "active" even though you don't know its there?
I'm actually fairly surprised that network phone home isn't absolutely integrated into every car anymore. When throwaway smartphones are $100 or less and come with a whole lot more crap that adds to the cost (GUI, box, charger, cord, etc) I would think that the hardware cost and network usage fees for scheduled data uploads would be trivial next to the basically real-time service data they would report. Engineering wants to make part #2525662 2mm thinner, 3 grams lighter and save $10 million a year in parts cost? No need to wait a couple of years to see if that part's failure rate is better than average, just poll your data for the cars on the road to see if you have any pattern of trouble for that part.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought the print magazine format would have done well on a tablet that could display at least one full page of a magazine at a size identical to the print edition. I don't find the app versions of magazines nearly as satisfying as paging through a physical magazine and the reduce-and-zoom stuff like Zinio does isn't very appealing either.
Do we know what Uber's price floor is?
Do they have a model that says what the minimum price they can charge and actually attract enough drivers for the service to work?
It seems to me there's a price floor they really can't go below without driving away so many drivers that you can't reasonably get a ride, risking losing customer interest.
Bid/ask sounds interesting, but it also sounds like it has too many transaction costs in the near term. Now, if I want to go to the airport I just request a car with a set price. Would I have to risk making my flight or set aside a bunch of additional time for a price negotiation if I did bid/ask?
Bid/ask seems like it would work better for planned trips or trips of a longer distance where there was likely to be more time involved in planning.
I can't remember the class details, but I think the Compellent defaulted to 5 and 10 (10 for writes, 5 for reads) although I think there were ways to define specific volumes as double parity (aka 6) and double mirroring, although IIRC there was some penalty beyond just extra disk consumption.
The Equallogics will do 5, 10, 50 and 6. 5 supposedly is not recommended for NLSAS and SATA disks over 1 TB due to risk of secondary disk failures during a rebuild and I'd swear the SSD caching models only allow 6. 10 almost never gets used unless the customer asks for it explicitely or they bought such a giant amont of disk space that 10 would accomodate their needs for the near term and they were willing to restripe which the EQLs will do online. Older units repuporsed often get 10 to crank up performance a little, although dual 1 GB ethernet is the real bottleneck.
IIRC 50 and 6 end up being pretty close in capacity and that's what most devices end up formatted as because customers always need maximum capacity -- sales and marketing throw around unformatted capacity numbers, and customers don't account for redundancy formatting, snapshot space and so on.
I've only played with it a little via nas4free (which probably limits what I know further), but what would have seemed to make more sense to me would be just add disks/LUNs to the pool without any specific redundancy assignments and create vdevs as device block-level parity sets across all pool members.
These virtual vdevs could be restriped on demand to change RAID levels and adding a disk to the pool would cause it to rebalance the stripes across all pool members. Removing a disk would be the opposite, provided you had enough pool capacity and devices to support the stripe level. In theory, a virtual vdev should be something you could then move between pools.
It's hard to escape limitations, but obviously mixing RAID levels in a pool would have some performance penalty if you had a busy parity vdev while trying to use a mirror or simple stripe for performance, but I think this is where you wave your hand about having enough devices/IOPS in your pool or create dedicated pools.
From my exposure to commercial SANs, many do things this way. Compellent block-level stripes RAID-10 and RAID-5 across disk pools (in training, they never explain why there's no performance penalty or why there's a performance benefit to block level striping, but IIRC they dedicate RAID-10 for writes and move them to RAID-5 for reads and don't want you to dedicate a RAID level to your volumes).
Equallogic members only have one RAID level, but you can pick what RAID level you use for the member. Adding members to the same pool balances all volumes across all pool members based on performance. You can also create separate pools and add members to individual pools and volumes can be moved between pools.
An important difference is that a "non-lethal" weapon is much more likely to be used than a lethal weapon.
This is probably the line of thinking going into ban them, although I question if it would make much difference in everyday outcomes.
The fact that firearms kill people doesn't seem to be much of a deterrent to their use, and there's a whole universe of blunt force weapons which are (statistically, anyway) less lethal, and many of them, like baseball bats, can be carried pretty much anywhere without anyone objecting.
People inclined to use a firearm probably wouldn't switch to a Taser, anyway -- mostly because it IS less lethal and not competitive with a firearm. Don't bring AA batteries to a gunfight.
You might even argue that allowing them might possibly have a tiny positive effect on firearms deaths, since there will likely be someone who will get zapped instead of shot. If you ban them outright, whatever the sliver of population that makes the decision that less lethal is a better idea will most likely just fall back to a firearm anyway.
It's the same sort of thing with firearm noise suppressors. They're tightly controlled because it's assumed that if you make a gun silent, people will just start killing people and getting away with it because their guns aren't loud. So far, we haven't seen much in the way of people unwilling to shoot somebody because the noise was a troublesome indicator they had been shooting somebody.
Or restrict the info to only the auto theft squad.
My guess is how it works out is that the data goes directly to the "intelligence" squad and they don't even share it with the auto theft squad for fear that it will be used to deduce the Mayor's car is parked at his girlfriend's or something.
I'd say yes, it is that difficult for people to be that honest with their life partner. If it was so easy we probably wouldn't have an entire marital therapy industry, complete with entire sections at bookstores devoted to relationship advice, various professional qualifications and so on.
Even people who want to monogamous and only want to sleep with their partners find sex a total emotional minefield, difficult to discuss and so on. I don't know a married man over the age of 30 who hasn't complained about his sex life. And even a few who have made an honest effort with their spouses to be honest with their partners and not made improvements. And none of them have otherwise broken relationships.
Other than pathological personality types and totally broken relationships, I'd bet most sex driven affairs are started by men who are unhappy with the quantity or quality of their sex lives, or at least that's my personal perception and the general opinion of most other married men I've talked to.
Of course so many things contribute you can't hardly list them all -- children, careers, money, appearance (your partner's or your own self image), boredom, emotional engagement, stress, cultural messages, booze, and the fact that people just plain change over time and the person you're married to today isn't identical to the person you married 10, 20, 30 or more years ago.
I'd also wager there's an evolutionary biology component, where women's libidos fade as they approach menopause and/or after having kids and simply lose interest. I think it's probably an evolutionary biology kind of thing because the risk of birth defects rise with the age of the mother and childbearing (and rearing) is more physically and emotionally straining as they age. Couple this with an evolutionary biology angle to partner selection by men (young, fertile, etc) and you have a built-in recipe for male-initiated affairs.
There's a lot more work for us to do in the ease of use of communications privacy
Why is there? Why hasn't private key ala GPG/PGP become a totally integrated feature in mail clients? Even years ago when there was still a decent free Windows PGP with all the add-ons they had it integrated pretty well into Outlook and basic clipboard operations.
Why isn't it just a completely vendor-integrated feature, with address books having default fields for public keys, smartphone integration, etc. On a phone it could be totally automated to send PGP encrypted mail by default with only a prompt for your thumbprint to authenticate access to your private key. (This may or may not be a great security practice, but it's already widespread and well integrated and the post was about ease of use to begin with.)
Is it patents on PGP? "Meh" public attitude? Vendors pushing other solutions (S/MIME) or other certificate-driven solutions or "enterprise" authentication systems not wanting to give any room for what could be a free cross-platform solution?
I thought of this, too. Is there a way to recover some of the waste heat and turn it back into electricity?
11,811.03 for 300 dpi. I had to do the math for the hell of it just to see how absurd it would look to talk about 11,811 dpm as a display/print resolution.
Then I started thinking maybe it would be a semi-practical metric for comparing larger monitors. Right now you have the physical display size, the physical device's display panel and then the video encoding resolution all being talked about as being, say, "4K".
It's not a measure of physical size (although I have had people tell me that got a new TV and when I asked how big they said 4K). Video can be encoded for 4K but doesn't mean the source was. A display could theoretically even have a sub-4k panel but automagically downsample 4K content for it's screen so it's "4k compatible".
DPM isn't much better but at least it would use a ratio of the device's physical size to the actual number of pixels in its panel.
Is it dots per millimeter or dots per centimeter?
Sounds like The Villages Florida. That place is busier than most non-retirement towns!
Usually I would consider HuffPo to not buy into government policies which seem to only benefit corporations.
Immigration is one of those strange issues where liberals support it for reasons involving being pro-multicultural and businesses supports it for its supply of cheap, wage-suppressing labor.
I can't decide if this article was posted for the usual left-wing pro multiculturalism reasons or just as more liberal sniping at Donald Trump. The latter alone is a phenomenon I don't understand as it seems like a waste of energy when there are more likely Republicans to actually win the nomination.
I've heard someplace that they plan to put Siri-like voice response into them in addition to all the almost-not-uncanny valley stuff they do now to make it more "real". It wouldn't surprise me if something like a sex doll didn't become a more compelling home android than any general purpose one.
They're focused on a single use case, which means they focus on enhancing just the things that enhance that versus doing many things clumsily, They're also focused on realism in looks, touch and appearance. Doing those things right doesn't help with marginal avancement of other abilities but I think it does make them more believable and appear more advanced which has a psychological value. (In the case of a sex doll, looking good is an inherent value).
Sex, for all of its theatrical acrobatics, really isn't a very compelling physical movement problem to solve, (especially if you're the bottom) either, and mastering a limited range of needed motion well is a whole lot easier than getting a wider range of motion mostly right.
It's not that a sex doll would be a better general purpose "robot" but that it could be a much more compelling one because it does its one job much better.
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bills.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still
While Whitey's on the moon.
You know, the man jus' upped my rent las' night,
'cause Whitey's on the moon.
No hot water, no toilets, no lights,
but Whitey's on the moon.
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
'cause Whitey's on the moon?
Well I wuz already givin' 'im fifty a week
And now Whitey's on the moon.
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
The junkies make me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that crap wuzn't enough,
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arms began to swell
And Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made las' year
For Whitey on the moon?
How come I ain't got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.
Y'know I jus' about had my fill
Of Whitey on the moon.
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
To Whitey on the moon
I remember it being pretty tolerable through most of the 90s, although I think it really varied by newsgroup as the decade moved on. There really wasn't a ton of non-IT access to the Internet before 1995 or so. It was a big deal when the university I worked for in 1992 got us MacSLIP and IP dialup. Did MSDOS have dialup IP access prior to Win95? Most of those technology obstacles would have prevented most people from even getting access to USENET.
It was easy to complain about Slashdot or any web based forum in 1998. Most experienced users were used to USENET where many newsgroups were virtually spam free and kill files could easily suppress asshats and trolls. Plus, if you had any familiarity with newsgroups, web based discussion seemed awful. Terrible navigation, no reading tools and so on. It took a lot of patience to tolerate internet discussion on a web page if you were used to Usenet.
I keep waiting for newsgroups to get rediscovered somehow.
For consumers, price, speed and reliability are pretty much solved problems for basic installations. The write-them-until-they-die endurance tests that have been posted here and elsewhere have demonstrated that most consumer flash drives have much more endurance than is generally assumed.
At scale, they're still kind of problems. Enterprise flash is super expensive which is why you usually see it coupled with tiering software at the SAN that uses enterprise flash as a cache for spinning platters to achieve scale and durability.
If (and this is a big if) these Optane disks have enterprise endurance at consumer-ish prices, it's enterprise storage systems they would shake up. A vendor like Compellent makes their tiering system about 80% of their sales pitch. A few years ago, this was like 15k sas, 10k sas and 7.2k disk with magic algorithms to keep active blocks at higher tiers and quiet blocks at lower tiers. This requires expensive software and complex controllers to manage, plus the write-durable flash disks are very expensive.
With the ability to price these disks like 10k sas platters and fill a storage system with them, you eliminate the need for tiering completely which makes controllers far simpler and less expensive while making the entire storage system run at pure flash speeds.
I think ripping out a lot of the software complexity will have a big impact on enterprise storage prices.
I read the TFA for a change and it said that the drives would be available in lightweight laptops. There was a Slashdot article about this technology when it was announced and there was speculation about whether it was a cache technology or a direct storage medium.
TFA said it would be for enterprise storage *and* laptops, so its likely means it's a "drive" and that it will likely be more or less affordable or it wouldn't go into laptops. The only question is how fast, TFA said the demo was only 7x current flash but maybe faster at introduction in 2016.
I think the original story said it was far more durable than flash now, and if TFA article is to be believed about use in enterprise storage it could really shake things up. Vendors now make a big deal out of fancy tiering schemes, charging two arms and a leg for a few SSDs and fancy software to keep quiet data on their only slightly cheaper nearline disks. What's the point if you can do 100% of this with drives faster than flash but cheap enough to go into laptops?
...is kind of interesting. Have we had any candidate outsdie of the far left who's done anything besides outright supporting the H1B program as big business likes it, quietly going along with it or ignoring it? It sure seems like the most common reactions among both parties are to either vigorously support H1B programs because they want support from big business or dot-com, pretend it isn't an issue or stake out some kind of multiculturist pro-immigration position claiming we need the world's best and brightest. The latter is at least a position that sounds rational but seldom includes changes to the program to eliminate abuses and usually just ends up being an entity that didn't get the visas they wanted for the people they wanted.
To me that Trump is critical of this in at least a somewhat thoughtful way shows an interesting policy position. Either it shows Trump is more intelligent than he seems or at least is far savvier in staking out positions than might be expected from his bellicose pronouncements.
It's too easy to say he's just pandering to natvist sentiments because I don't think the H1B visa program has the kind of visibility among the kinds of people who hate immigration because immigrants are brown and talk funny.
One way to look at it is that Trump is already one of the richest people in the world -- he doesn't need to use the office to become rich, which is generally what happens when someone elected to office isn't yet rich. When rich CEOs come calling for favors he may not be impressed by their rich CEO status or feel the need to genuflect to them for money.
I think another reasonable narrative is that Trump has been on the buying side of government payola long enough to understand it better than most politicians who have on the payee side their entire careers. He's pragmatic enough to understand that if you want to get along, you have to go along, but smart enough to know that this is a crazy system that's not sustainable.
I have a friend who is a history professor. One of the subjects he occasionally teaches is WW II.
He has a very well practiced spiel he does about how Germany actually achieved its goals and won the war. It's deliberately argumentative and he's knowledgeable and persuasive enough to make you believe it for a minute or two. German economic domination of Europe and global economic leadership, Germany in critical leadership role in Europe, border countries basically German satellites, a nearly insignificant Jewish population, a close military alliance with the United States against Russian domination, etc.
He does it to make a point about the course of history and how long and short term historical outcomes are often paradoxical.
Yeah, but about $65 of that $100 throwaway phone are costs unrelated to the cellular data hardware. The screen, battery, housing and most of the software aren't needed to get a car to phone home. Plus, somebody's making a profit on that $100 phone, too.
If the purpose is just to send data (not accept configuration changes) I doubt there would be any requirement to safety harden it beyond what they already do for the general electronics of the car. This is just data collection, not fly by wire. So it really wouldn't add that much to the cost of the device.
I think you're probably right that they're not quite ready to toss this into every Kia Rio but it wouldn't surprise me if every trim with some kind of a dashboard screen wouldn't have it and that's a ton of new cars these days.
My wife's Acura MDX has the Honda/Acura version of OnStar installed and her car is far from the top end. We bought it used so I don't think we have a subscription, but it's definitely all over the infotainment menu system.
I used to make that argument to my old boss.
The network manager who runs around busy all day is one who's doing a shitty job. The one that looks bored and takes long lunches? If you're network does what it's supposed to, that's the one who's doing his job right.
So no "OnStar" or other such convenience services that involve data connections to your car.
Isn't the trend to just lump all that hardware in with the car even if the owner doesn't subscribe to the service? That way it can be a "safety feature" (ie, you can hit the button in an emergency) or they call sell it as an immediate upgrade direct to consumer.
Even if there's no button to press to call the service, how do we know that economies of scale (TM) haven't reached the point where it's just cheaper and easier to add that hunk of silicon and most/all of its software to the base electronics and that connectivity is actually lurking inside, phoning home and being "active" even though you don't know its there?
I'm actually fairly surprised that network phone home isn't absolutely integrated into every car anymore. When throwaway smartphones are $100 or less and come with a whole lot more crap that adds to the cost (GUI, box, charger, cord, etc) I would think that the hardware cost and network usage fees for scheduled data uploads would be trivial next to the basically real-time service data they would report. Engineering wants to make part #2525662 2mm thinner, 3 grams lighter and save $10 million a year in parts cost? No need to wait a couple of years to see if that part's failure rate is better than average, just poll your data for the cars on the road to see if you have any pattern of trouble for that part.