What I don't get is why MS doesn't maintain a standalone "Windows Update" tool that resets/fixes the built-in Windows update client. I would imagine that MS probably knows the top 25 reasons it craps out and could fix them pretty easily.
I think this is right, my question is why? I've run across this more than once with really smart people from public school backgrounds who have made it in technology and decide that their kids should go to some touchy-feely alternative school.
An overly romantic view of education tied to some kind of idyllic liberal fantasy?
A kind of bias that assumes technology is inherently easy (because they succeeded in the tech field)?
Some kind of political bias? Nearly all those kinds of schools are about a half-step from a hippie commune. Around here they only really attract the kind of well off liberal cognoscenti, with the traditional high-end private schools capturing the usual rich and corporate up and comers.
It's hard to understand if this is Epic finding a convenient whipping boy for their problems or an actual problem associated with the patch. There's always complaining about gaming server performance, outages, etc, so it's not like they couldn't have other problems and that this is just being used as an excuse.
Nominally maybe, but I'd wager it makes sense for MS to hold some quantity of BTC to manage transactions.
The fluctuating price may cause them to need to buy BTC at elevated prices and increase their risk if the price goes down. I'm sure it's an accounting mess, too.
I won't argue he's wrong, but I think as fast as CPUs change you'd have to have across the board reductions in workload capacity by a significant number (ie, the 30% touted initially) to be able to claim harm and justify a recall.
So far what I've read is that performance in some storage applications has taken a small hit, but generally it's not a meaningful hit overall in CPU performance.
And even if you could prove a performance hit, how reliable are the numbers? Workloads vary a lot. And if you're not operating at the limit of your hardware, is going from 45% idle CPU to 25% idle CPU really a performance "loss"? It's arguable that you had surplus capacity to begin with and that unless you frequently max out your CPUs, you didn't really lose any capacity.
Because you sound like you know what you're talking about, what is the point of diminishing returns in heavy lift rocketry? Is there a point where it stops making sense throwing up increasingly large single payloads?
What about risk management? In our lifetimes, rocket launches will never reach five-9s reliability, and losing some fraction of a finished project (space station, etc) is better than losing an entire large project. I'd imagine that super-heavy lift rocketry will also be generally less reliable due to the cost/launch leading to lower frequency and greater complexity.
I think it's pretty localized. Where I live -- and I mean my immediate neighborhood -- property crime was non-existent 20 years ago. Now I hear about nuisance property crime all the time, garage break-ins, mail & package theft, car break-ins (including use of high-tech keybob repeaters). The city councillor even has started to acknowledge it.
I believe that crime may be down nationally, but IMHO that's a useless statistic for individual locations where people live most of the time. It's badly skewed by large population centers and their localized trends as well.
The real question is how did they know Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay was her name?
They didn't, and of course if her entire population was lost to history, it also seems unlikely that whatever language she spoke it isn't the same as the contemporary native language being used to translate her name, either.
I'm not sure why the article chose to provide us a name in a language her people didn't speak or to give her a name in the style of a contemporary native group, either.
My guess is that it's part of some multiculturalist agenda to elevate native cultures beyond the status of stone age semi-nomadic hunter gatherers and put them on the same footing as more advanced cultures and civilizations with written languages of their own.
My guess is that the broadest explanation is that Google, Microsoft and Amazon largely want x86 compatibility because of the efficiencies associated with the network effect of a widely adopted processor, both in terms of software availability and in terms of platform stability.
As AMD (and failed competitors) have shown, a competing platform to Intel's CPUs isn't easy to pull off. Google, et al, could pay a subsidy to AMD to produce a competing product but there's no guarantee they would get one and they would probably rather spend that money investigating a competitive product they alone would benefit from (like a custom ARM design for their own data center use).
I think this would make sense if you had the vendors at rough sales parity and the virtualization vendors had healthy experience on both platforms so all the gotchas of moving live workloads between CPU vendors were understood and mitigated.
It might actually not work well or require heterogeneous vendor-specific clusters to avoid CPU feature masking that dumbed both vendor platforms to some lowest common denominator.
It's a more complex problem than you might think. I just listened to an interview with a farmer locally who outlined a problem with watershed protection -- property taxes. At least in this state, there's no way for the farmer to escape property taxes on land they take out of production to limit or inhibit runoff -- it's taxed as if it was productive farmland.
I think another element of this, which is much bigger, is of course commodity agriculture. Farmers don't use any more chemicals than they have to (they're not free), but they do use as much as is necessary to hit yield numbers, and much of this is driven by the prices that Cargill or ADM will pay.
The problem is this only makes it *more obvious* he's nothing more than a paid for stooge to telecom companies, possibly making the backlash worse. You would think he would need to show some moxie and stand up in public over this a couple of times to make it look more like a genuine policy issue.
I'd bet there are ways to convert a Tesla sale into a lease on paper for those people or businesses that need to lease it for tax purposes. Tesla might even offer this themselves, with the lease held by some third party leasing company.
The problem, though, is that these highly silo'd guys make all kinds of recommendations about things they know nothing about *and* they are the first to point fingers when their zillion dollar system doesn't work right. Their troubleshooting doesn't extend beyond the product's logging facility.
That's the thing. All out physical combat no longer underscores much of "winning" and "losing" in modern civilizations and women have been gradually gaining the financial independence necessary to remove their dependence on and subservience to men in our new, combat-free environment.
They're actually more similar to female royalty in older monarchies, using wealth and power to get men to perform combat on their behalf, like mercenaries.
We suffer from reverse pigeonholing -- everyone is expected to be a generalist on every subject *and* a specialist on particular subjects when tasked with it.
I'm not sure which is worse, really. I work with some people with EMC storage experience and their knowledge of closely related technologies is near zero (the guy who installs iSCSI storage couldn't configure the needed VLAN access or set jumbo frames in any switch if his life depended on it). They even say stupid things, the really hard-core EMC guy talks up fiber channel by talking about Ethernet as if shared-access hubs were still installed someplace.
I'm more on the enforced generalist, demanded specialist side and I'm sure I do equally stupid things, but it's unavoidable when training is "read these PDFs" and "watch this webinar".
I think it's unlikely but not impossible to imagine some kind of synthetic sperm further altering the male/female dynamic in Western countries where women have a significant amount of economic parity.
It's been hypothesized by many that the increasing economic independence of women has significantly altered the social landscape. Women marry later if at all due to well-paying careers. I even think the whole #metoo movement is something of a byproduct of increasing female financial power and a rejection of historical patterns of transactional sex to obtain economic or other influence.
What does a society look like where some significant minority of women simply decide they want to live a maternal family role without involving men at all? It's only an instinct, but I suspect there is a certain proportion of non-lesbian professional women who might find this tidy and efficient, especially with the burdens and obligations of a career.
I suspect that the impulses of evolutionary biology and a certain amount of existing social structure will keep the majority of women from completely eliminating men from their lives, but I also think it's possible men could become increasingly marginalized from women, occasional accessories rather than fixed partners.
It also makes me wonder if there would be a counter-reaction -- is there some portion of the female population that would see a kind of social power vacuum and become more interested in men as the more aggressive and competitive women split off? We might end up with two classes of men and women -- independent women and their male supplicants, and traditional men with women who are their supplicants?
How will it affect lesbianism? Will fewer women choose to live in long-term lesbian relationships if economic independence and free sexual choice are more easily available? This assumes that some proportion of lesbians are motivated by disdain of men rather than attraction to women.
Why did it get to the end of the comments to see something about thermal depolymerization?
I agree that less plastic and more glass and aluminum, which are more easily reusable and/or recyclable is the best way forward, but thermal depolymerization is a reasonable backup plan for plastics if straight burning isn't enough.
How does cold shock not kill if you are wearing a PFD or lifejacket? Either it kills you or it doesn't, the PFD isn't going to keep you dry or warm. The only thing the PFD will do is keep you from sinking under water and drowning if you lose your swimming ability.
I'm pretty sure democracy managed just fine with paper ballots for a couple hundred years. I'd say calling out the rare problem with them is as knee-jerk as going after big tech, if not worse.
The problem with initiatives like this from a for-profit company like Microsoft is that their number one goal is the short term enhancement of executive compensation, followed closely by fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
Any time an organization with those kinds of priorities calls for "working with democracies to safeguard elections" you have to wonder where the real agenda is.
I guarantee you neither Microsoft the corporation or its executives are willing to donate hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, software and expertise for the good of democracy. I'd imagine anything they would be willing to give away is motivated by some kind of lock-in to their platform and recurring revenue from constant updates and upgrades, tax deductions or influence peddling.
The day Carol Ann Browne is willing to turn over millions of her own wealth to safeguard democracy as an initial pledge, I might be willing to take MS at face value. Until then, it's all bullshit designed to make MS, its executives and shareholders wealthier and more influential.
We rode it a bunch one visit because we stayed at the Hilton way at one end of the strip and wanted to get to a bunch of different places. But it was a hellacious walk from the monorail to the strip, usually a maze-like walk through a casino.
I always thought it should have been built as a streetcar type system right on Los Vegas Boulevard in its own dedicated lane. Right at street level where people walk, and easy on/off for stopping up and down the strip.
The strip is an awful crush of traffic 24 hours a day. I've taken cab rides that took longer than walking would have because traffic was so bad. They really ought to consider closing it to only cabs and some kind of street car.
There was an interview on NPR where NPR's expert said the Kansas thing with pass through corporations wasn't going to happen with this tax bill. They discussed at some length, including interviewing an econ professor from Kansas.
I don't understand why the tax code even has "pass through corporations". I can see some consideration given to corporations with 5 or fewer employees to acknowledge that its a legal structure minus most of the economic structure of a corporation, but past that it just seems like a tax dodge or loophole-ism put in their because the principal beneficiary has lobbying strength (lawyers, accountants, etc).
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They do, but it's brain damaged and doesn't do many things necessary to reset Windows Update.
What I don't get is why MS doesn't maintain a standalone "Windows Update" tool that resets/fixes the built-in Windows update client. I would imagine that MS probably knows the top 25 reasons it craps out and could fix them pretty easily.
I think this is right, my question is why? I've run across this more than once with really smart people from public school backgrounds who have made it in technology and decide that their kids should go to some touchy-feely alternative school.
An overly romantic view of education tied to some kind of idyllic liberal fantasy?
A kind of bias that assumes technology is inherently easy (because they succeeded in the tech field)?
Some kind of political bias? Nearly all those kinds of schools are about a half-step from a hippie commune. Around here they only really attract the kind of well off liberal cognoscenti, with the traditional high-end private schools capturing the usual rich and corporate up and comers.
It's hard to understand if this is Epic finding a convenient whipping boy for their problems or an actual problem associated with the patch. There's always complaining about gaming server performance, outages, etc, so it's not like they couldn't have other problems and that this is just being used as an excuse.
Nominally maybe, but I'd wager it makes sense for MS to hold some quantity of BTC to manage transactions.
The fluctuating price may cause them to need to buy BTC at elevated prices and increase their risk if the price goes down. I'm sure it's an accounting mess, too.
I won't argue he's wrong, but I think as fast as CPUs change you'd have to have across the board reductions in workload capacity by a significant number (ie, the 30% touted initially) to be able to claim harm and justify a recall.
So far what I've read is that performance in some storage applications has taken a small hit, but generally it's not a meaningful hit overall in CPU performance.
And even if you could prove a performance hit, how reliable are the numbers? Workloads vary a lot. And if you're not operating at the limit of your hardware, is going from 45% idle CPU to 25% idle CPU really a performance "loss"? It's arguable that you had surplus capacity to begin with and that unless you frequently max out your CPUs, you didn't really lose any capacity.
Because you sound like you know what you're talking about, what is the point of diminishing returns in heavy lift rocketry? Is there a point where it stops making sense throwing up increasingly large single payloads?
What about risk management? In our lifetimes, rocket launches will never reach five-9s reliability, and losing some fraction of a finished project (space station, etc) is better than losing an entire large project. I'd imagine that super-heavy lift rocketry will also be generally less reliable due to the cost/launch leading to lower frequency and greater complexity.
I think it's pretty localized. Where I live -- and I mean my immediate neighborhood -- property crime was non-existent 20 years ago. Now I hear about nuisance property crime all the time, garage break-ins, mail & package theft, car break-ins (including use of high-tech keybob repeaters). The city councillor even has started to acknowledge it.
I believe that crime may be down nationally, but IMHO that's a useless statistic for individual locations where people live most of the time. It's badly skewed by large population centers and their localized trends as well.
The real question is how did they know Xach'itee'aanenh T'eede Gaay was her name?
They didn't, and of course if her entire population was lost to history, it also seems unlikely that whatever language she spoke it isn't the same as the contemporary native language being used to translate her name, either.
I'm not sure why the article chose to provide us a name in a language her people didn't speak or to give her a name in the style of a contemporary native group, either.
My guess is that it's part of some multiculturalist agenda to elevate native cultures beyond the status of stone age semi-nomadic hunter gatherers and put them on the same footing as more advanced cultures and civilizations with written languages of their own.
My guess is that the broadest explanation is that Google, Microsoft and Amazon largely want x86 compatibility because of the efficiencies associated with the network effect of a widely adopted processor, both in terms of software availability and in terms of platform stability.
As AMD (and failed competitors) have shown, a competing platform to Intel's CPUs isn't easy to pull off. Google, et al, could pay a subsidy to AMD to produce a competing product but there's no guarantee they would get one and they would probably rather spend that money investigating a competitive product they alone would benefit from (like a custom ARM design for their own data center use).
I think this would make sense if you had the vendors at rough sales parity and the virtualization vendors had healthy experience on both platforms so all the gotchas of moving live workloads between CPU vendors were understood and mitigated.
It might actually not work well or require heterogeneous vendor-specific clusters to avoid CPU feature masking that dumbed both vendor platforms to some lowest common denominator.
It's a more complex problem than you might think. I just listened to an interview with a farmer locally who outlined a problem with watershed protection -- property taxes. At least in this state, there's no way for the farmer to escape property taxes on land they take out of production to limit or inhibit runoff -- it's taxed as if it was productive farmland.
I think another element of this, which is much bigger, is of course commodity agriculture. Farmers don't use any more chemicals than they have to (they're not free), but they do use as much as is necessary to hit yield numbers, and much of this is driven by the prices that Cargill or ADM will pay.
I'm trying to understand the price/value issue in play here.
The problem is this only makes it *more obvious* he's nothing more than a paid for stooge to telecom companies, possibly making the backlash worse. You would think he would need to show some moxie and stand up in public over this a couple of times to make it look more like a genuine policy issue.
I'd bet there are ways to convert a Tesla sale into a lease on paper for those people or businesses that need to lease it for tax purposes. Tesla might even offer this themselves, with the lease held by some third party leasing company.
The problem, though, is that these highly silo'd guys make all kinds of recommendations about things they know nothing about *and* they are the first to point fingers when their zillion dollar system doesn't work right. Their troubleshooting doesn't extend beyond the product's logging facility.
That's the thing. All out physical combat no longer underscores much of "winning" and "losing" in modern civilizations and women have been gradually gaining the financial independence necessary to remove their dependence on and subservience to men in our new, combat-free environment.
They're actually more similar to female royalty in older monarchies, using wealth and power to get men to perform combat on their behalf, like mercenaries.
We suffer from reverse pigeonholing -- everyone is expected to be a generalist on every subject *and* a specialist on particular subjects when tasked with it.
I'm not sure which is worse, really. I work with some people with EMC storage experience and their knowledge of closely related technologies is near zero (the guy who installs iSCSI storage couldn't configure the needed VLAN access or set jumbo frames in any switch if his life depended on it). They even say stupid things, the really hard-core EMC guy talks up fiber channel by talking about Ethernet as if shared-access hubs were still installed someplace.
I'm more on the enforced generalist, demanded specialist side and I'm sure I do equally stupid things, but it's unavoidable when training is "read these PDFs" and "watch this webinar".
I think it's unlikely but not impossible to imagine some kind of synthetic sperm further altering the male/female dynamic in Western countries where women have a significant amount of economic parity.
It's been hypothesized by many that the increasing economic independence of women has significantly altered the social landscape. Women marry later if at all due to well-paying careers. I even think the whole #metoo movement is something of a byproduct of increasing female financial power and a rejection of historical patterns of transactional sex to obtain economic or other influence.
What does a society look like where some significant minority of women simply decide they want to live a maternal family role without involving men at all? It's only an instinct, but I suspect there is a certain proportion of non-lesbian professional women who might find this tidy and efficient, especially with the burdens and obligations of a career.
I suspect that the impulses of evolutionary biology and a certain amount of existing social structure will keep the majority of women from completely eliminating men from their lives, but I also think it's possible men could become increasingly marginalized from women, occasional accessories rather than fixed partners.
It also makes me wonder if there would be a counter-reaction -- is there some portion of the female population that would see a kind of social power vacuum and become more interested in men as the more aggressive and competitive women split off? We might end up with two classes of men and women -- independent women and their male supplicants, and traditional men with women who are their supplicants?
How will it affect lesbianism? Will fewer women choose to live in long-term lesbian relationships if economic independence and free sexual choice are more easily available? This assumes that some proportion of lesbians are motivated by disdain of men rather than attraction to women.
Why did it get to the end of the comments to see something about thermal depolymerization?
I agree that less plastic and more glass and aluminum, which are more easily reusable and/or recyclable is the best way forward, but thermal depolymerization is a reasonable backup plan for plastics if straight burning isn't enough.
How does cold shock not kill if you are wearing a PFD or lifejacket? Either it kills you or it doesn't, the PFD isn't going to keep you dry or warm. The only thing the PFD will do is keep you from sinking under water and drowning if you lose your swimming ability.
I'm pretty sure democracy managed just fine with paper ballots for a couple hundred years. I'd say calling out the rare problem with them is as knee-jerk as going after big tech, if not worse.
The problem with initiatives like this from a for-profit company like Microsoft is that their number one goal is the short term enhancement of executive compensation, followed closely by fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.
Any time an organization with those kinds of priorities calls for "working with democracies to safeguard elections" you have to wonder where the real agenda is.
I guarantee you neither Microsoft the corporation or its executives are willing to donate hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment, software and expertise for the good of democracy. I'd imagine anything they would be willing to give away is motivated by some kind of lock-in to their platform and recurring revenue from constant updates and upgrades, tax deductions or influence peddling.
The day Carol Ann Browne is willing to turn over millions of her own wealth to safeguard democracy as an initial pledge, I might be willing to take MS at face value. Until then, it's all bullshit designed to make MS, its executives and shareholders wealthier and more influential.
We rode it a bunch one visit because we stayed at the Hilton way at one end of the strip and wanted to get to a bunch of different places. But it was a hellacious walk from the monorail to the strip, usually a maze-like walk through a casino.
I always thought it should have been built as a streetcar type system right on Los Vegas Boulevard in its own dedicated lane. Right at street level where people walk, and easy on/off for stopping up and down the strip.
The strip is an awful crush of traffic 24 hours a day. I've taken cab rides that took longer than walking would have because traffic was so bad. They really ought to consider closing it to only cabs and some kind of street car.
I thought the taxi companies were getting killed by the Uber/Lyft ride hailing companies. How do they have any clout?
As far as airports not wanting it because of taxi fees, I don't think airports make enough on taxi fees to make it a game changer for them.
There was an interview on NPR where NPR's expert said the Kansas thing with pass through corporations wasn't going to happen with this tax bill. They discussed at some length, including interviewing an econ professor from Kansas.
I don't understand why the tax code even has "pass through corporations". I can see some consideration given to corporations with 5 or fewer employees to acknowledge that its a legal structure minus most of the economic structure of a corporation, but past that it just seems like a tax dodge or loophole-ism put in their because the principal beneficiary has lobbying strength (lawyers, accountants, etc).