Excellent point. It's also worth pointing out that the 8800 survived for five years as a very viable card. Released in 2006, it's still listed as a minimum requirement for many games today (including Battlefield 3). That's quite a feat considering how fast technology matures in this market. In 2009 the 8800-class cards were still selling north of $120, and while not mind blowing by today's standards, were pretty much the gold standard until mid-2008. It's hard to compete against that kind of technology.
Because the first OS with a unified Desktop/Laptop/Netbook/Tablet/Smartphone interface wins the horizontal integration race. Nobody's sure what that means, but if you look at where Chrome/Android, Windows, OSX and Ubuntu are headed, that is the strategy they're headed for. It's just that nobody knows how to monetize that early lead... yet. But theyr'e doing it at the cost of crippling desktop users, who traditionally do 99% of the work, to appease the tablet users, who only consume information... not make it.
Welp, it's not flamebait, it's my opinion, and more than a few people feel the same way. You need someone with a vision. Fumbling around in the dark for a solution besides the status quo is not a vision.
I'm sorry my opinion clashes with yours, Mr. moderator, but it's not flamebait by any stretch of the imagination.
Caffeine is ruthlessly addictive. Doubly so when paired with sugar. I don't ever recall my parents or grandparents mentioning cigarettes being handed out for free in the employee break room, or seeing it on old TV reruns.
Caffeine also has nasty physical withdrawl for heavy users - significant mood change and often terrible headaches.
I wouldn't classify marijuana as addictive by any measure. People find hobbies such as TV, Movies or Music equally "addicting" and time consuming.
I can't tell if you're a deluded Unity developer, or a Microsoft shill trying to push popular opinion towards a truly terrible GUI to Keep the Linux Man Down.
Unity is a fucking terrible interface, they took the dock interface from Apple, and forgot to put in any of the features that make it worthwhile. What a mess. What a waste of time, money and effort, and what a huge step backwards for Linux usability.
i5-750 and it's replacement, the i5-2500k both scream when paired with a GTX 460 1GB or above. I am seeing in the 50-70s at "medium", 40-50s at "high" and high 20s-mid30s at "ultra". the i5-750 stays around 93% through pretty much all of the various multiplayer maps for me. the i5-2500k is about 25% more CPU
Police were intended to keep the peace and provide security for their citizens. In Japan and England police need special certification to carry guns, let alone fire them. They're a pretty friendly bunch, and very approachable from what I understand. At what point did we decide that they needed to wage war against our citizens? This is sort of like escalating the TSA from running the metal detectors at airports to searching trucks on the highway - when have you outgrown your intended purpose?
I understand the need to escalate things to the SWAT team, but beyond that, perhaps we should consider mobilizing the state's National Guard? There's a reason why we have a separation of State Police and State Army. Modern drug wars are getting too big for the local police and perhaps we should assign that task to the national guard? There needs to be some sort of separation in power between the two, or perhaps we should just merge them.
There's very little if any reason not to include a mini/micro USB port on the ipod these days.
Unless you're willing to fuck around with constantly updating software to keep your ipod working with whatever non-itunes software you're using, yeah, it's vendor lockin with software. Not all of us have that kind of time anymore, unfortunately:(
Yup, first thing I did on my laptop after downloading Firefox. (Well, first thing if you count "the four hours I spent un-installing garbage that came with it and tweaking things" as the first thing I did).
How much is your time worth to you? At $25/hr you might as well just install a fresh retail copy of Win7 on there and avoid the trouble of possibly having missed something, and also having a physical disc backup of the OS on the off chance something goes horribly wrong (very likely on a fragile laptop)
Well if all they're doing is matching up IP addresses between two databases, what does it matter what protocol they're using? For that matter, why is this even newsworthy? The encrypted payload, and how they're tracking encrypted BT (or perhaps, more imporantly how they know the encrypted packet is a BT packet) packets without violating the DMCA is what I'm curious about.
This feels like one of those "dog poop fines" legislative bills. Everyone is for it, and everyone in the end benefits from it. You get to look like a hero legislator without tackling any difficult (or controversial) problems.
Seriously though, how dangerous is Mercury. Before you fire up Wikipedia to tell me about how mercury causes brain damage and birth abnormalities, let me ask you these questions:
1. What are the symptoms of mercury poisoning 2. What is the treatment for acute mercury poisoning 3. Who do you know, or have heard of who has experienced mercury poisoning?
Seriously, can you answer those off the top of your head? What about for poison ivy? Getting sprayed by a skunk? A snake bite.
Those are things that actually happen in real life. Dwight Shrute can tell you how to handle a bear attack depending on the time of day, and I'm sure many astute movie watchers can tell you how to wrestle an alligator/crocodile, but nobody can tell you anything about mercury other than that it's bad for you.
While yes, I'm sure Mercury is very bad for you, I think we've successfully legislated away the problem. Between the mercury in my "silver" fillings (quite a bit! stop googling about how "wrong I am and check out the amount of mercury you ingest via tooth fillings) and the fish I eat, I am a rather healthy individual. I think we've solved the mercury problem.
I've been running the developer preview in a VM for about two months now, more or less around the clock with 5-6 mainstream apps (steam, chrome, VLC, mumble) installed for a sort of web service I'm testing. I've been more than happy with it and even exclaimed once or twice to my buddies that I might even consider buying this version of windows before SP1 comes out. Win8 on a VM (Virtual Box, in my case) just screams for basic apps. Even in a VM, Win8 developers figured out how to include "the snappy" in this release.... let's hope it stays that way to release.
One thing I'd like to see is the new zune style start bar overlay cut down to about 25% of the screen, and maybe making it transparent, instead of taking up 100% of it. The man who writes that plugin is going to be a very wealthy one.
Which is why I used them as an example. Texas, Louisiana and other surrounding states would be importing awful polluting used cars as a result. For such a tiny state, it seems wasteful for them to have an entire department handling vehicle emissions when the feds are probably a better way to outsource that sort of legislation. Perhaps it would be better if larger states (pick your way of determining what counts as large) could opt out of the federal system, and in turn opt out of funding those federal departments. These days it seems that the federal government needs large states much more than large states need them (discounting the national defense argument).
While I agree wholeheartedly with you that this should be handled on the state level, I think it's worth pointing out that some states exhibit stronger leadership than others.Where California leads the nation in many things, smaller states like Idaho and Wyoming might be slower to adopt vehicle emissions laws, if at all. This makes it expensive for some companies to compete in all 50 states. I wouldn't mind a sort of acceptably low minimum for all 50 states, with a sort of federal funding incentive to small businesses for exceeding the minimum by 75, 100, 150% etc. Something just tells me that Mississippi and rural Kentucky just aren't as concerned about vehicle emissions as California, Texas and New York are.
I generally alternate between Barbados and Sweden. Your line of work shows up in your public profile (I think) which is the first thing potential employers look at.
I had a weird notification this morning. Facebook wanted me to confirm that someone else said my hometown was X city. So now if you don't list this information, they're asking others to rat you out, despite your best efforts to keep that information off of the web. I'm not sure you can opt out of other people's disclosures in the same way you can opt out of listing your city/state/employer etc.
I'm thinking IP geolocation on google's end. My search results page ended up as google.com.br, google.com.ar, google.com.ur etc etc each time I logged in at a different location and then had to sign back in to gmail. My point was that google was overthinking the solution and ended up causing more problems than it solved.
I was traveling through South America for a month, hit most of the major countries. It's bigger than you think. Five countries in four weeks is a lot. Anyways, I was using Ubuntu (9.10 UNR) and Gmail on a netbook to handle most of my affairs while I was out of the country.
I'm not sure what it was exactly, either the system clock or on google's end, but when I crossed from Brazil in to Uruguay, my system clock, gmail and gcalendar got royally screwed up, to the point that I was 3 hours early to my international ferry, and despite being an hour "early" to the airport on my trip home, I barely made my flight by 10 minutes.
I doubt many people have much use for a calendar system that auto-updates the correct time depending on country/timezone you're in on a regular basis, but if your calendar says "4pm local time" and then changes it six times based on where you're viewing it, and screws up, it can be disastrous and very costly. I'm sure that's an outlier problem, but having a standardized database might give developers more time to work on kinks like what I experienced.
For the record, yes I own and wear a watch, but pilots don't always give you the local time when you land, and not always in English(!). Free wifi in airports is a blessing, but when your computer doesn't know what the actual time is, it can cause scheduling problems, especially when you're trying to catch a connecting/transfer flight.
Long story short, time zones screwed up my computer and took almost a week of use stateside before it sorted itself out again.
At least one other instance of this sort of testing has been shown to customers before. Years ago there was a TV show showcasing how cell companies tested not only their networks, but their competitor's as well. The test vehicle was a station wagon loaded to capacity with testing equipment and antennas.
You can't test your system using wired methods; running a $100 billion dollar annual revenue company, one might say 100 such vehicles (2 per state! have you seen how big Texas, California and Alaska are?) is almost criminally negligent in terms of measuring quality of service of both your and your competitor's service, both to your customers, and to your shareholders.
While it's recorded on film, it's edited on a computer, and then duplicated back on to "film", which really is just a long strip of color laser printer transparency paper. The edited digital film is transferred at 4096x2000 give or take. The only films shot in 1080p were independent films. You'd be shocked at how many films are distributed this way. Something like 90%.
The end result is that the picture you see in the theater isn't as clear as the image you saw in the 1980s, but it's still ultra sharp for the purpose it's used for.
I think the Apple TV project got seriously de-funded. It's now just a shadow of it's former glory. Old models were thin client PCs, new Apple TVs are just a cable box with wifi and eithernet built in. That's not to say they aren't great devices; I bought one for my mom and she loves it - but at this juncture the Apple TV is just a placeholder product.
People definitely read these things differently! He might have had an axe to grind, but I think the colorful descriptions point out that he does care about the company, and, in the end wants it to succeed. He's spent a lot of time figuring out what is wrong with the system and has a plan, or at least a direction he would like to explore. This reads much differently than someone with an eye focused on the next quarter's profits or their next promotion to senior project manager, because they got their product out the door on time. I have to respect what he did and why he wrote it. If you're unhappy and you don't speak up, you deserve your misery.
It's worth pointing out that PCs are, and have been a commodity market for quite some time now. The only way to be profitable is to be in the top 3. To do that means selling at razor thin margins, practically selling your product at cost. Which means that if there's a downturn in the market (likely, given the economy) or you overproject for the quarter, you run a very real risk of operating at a loss for the quarter. You can't consistently guarantee your shareholders a profit, so it's definitely worth looking at what could be called an "underperforming" division and considering axing it. It's not like HP desktops and laptops have a golden reputation (though I enjoy my 3 year old hp mini 110 netbook quite a bit).
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Excellent point. It's also worth pointing out that the 8800 survived for five years as a very viable card. Released in 2006, it's still listed as a minimum requirement for many games today (including Battlefield 3). That's quite a feat considering how fast technology matures in this market. In 2009 the 8800-class cards were still selling north of $120, and while not mind blowing by today's standards, were pretty much the gold standard until mid-2008. It's hard to compete against that kind of technology.
Because the first OS with a unified Desktop/Laptop/Netbook/Tablet/Smartphone interface wins the horizontal integration race. Nobody's sure what that means, but if you look at where Chrome/Android, Windows, OSX and Ubuntu are headed, that is the strategy they're headed for. It's just that nobody knows how to monetize that early lead... yet. But theyr'e doing it at the cost of crippling desktop users, who traditionally do 99% of the work, to appease the tablet users, who only consume information... not make it.
Welp, it's not flamebait, it's my opinion, and more than a few people feel the same way. You need someone with a vision. Fumbling around in the dark for a solution besides the status quo is not a vision.
I'm sorry my opinion clashes with yours, Mr. moderator, but it's not flamebait by any stretch of the imagination.
Caffeine is ruthlessly addictive. Doubly so when paired with sugar. I don't ever recall my parents or grandparents mentioning cigarettes being handed out for free in the employee break room, or seeing it on old TV reruns.
Caffeine also has nasty physical withdrawl for heavy users - significant mood change and often terrible headaches.
I wouldn't classify marijuana as addictive by any measure. People find hobbies such as TV, Movies or Music equally "addicting" and time consuming.
I can't tell if you're a deluded Unity developer, or a Microsoft shill trying to push popular opinion towards a truly terrible GUI to Keep the Linux Man Down.
Unity is a fucking terrible interface, they took the dock interface from Apple, and forgot to put in any of the features that make it worthwhile. What a mess. What a waste of time, money and effort, and what a huge step backwards for Linux usability.
i5-750 and it's replacement, the i5-2500k both scream when paired with a GTX 460 1GB or above. I am seeing in the 50-70s at "medium", 40-50s at "high" and high 20s-mid30s at "ultra". the i5-750 stays around 93% through pretty much all of the various multiplayer maps for me. the i5-2500k is about 25% more CPU
Police were intended to keep the peace and provide security for their citizens. In Japan and England police need special certification to carry guns, let alone fire them. They're a pretty friendly bunch, and very approachable from what I understand. At what point did we decide that they needed to wage war against our citizens? This is sort of like escalating the TSA from running the metal detectors at airports to searching trucks on the highway - when have you outgrown your intended purpose?
I understand the need to escalate things to the SWAT team, but beyond that, perhaps we should consider mobilizing the state's National Guard? There's a reason why we have a separation of State Police and State Army. Modern drug wars are getting too big for the local police and perhaps we should assign that task to the national guard? There needs to be some sort of separation in power between the two, or perhaps we should just merge them.
There's very little if any reason not to include a mini/micro USB port on the ipod these days.
:(
Unless you're willing to fuck around with constantly updating software to keep your ipod working with whatever non-itunes software you're using, yeah, it's vendor lockin with software. Not all of us have that kind of time anymore, unfortunately
How much is your time worth to you? At $25/hr you might as well just install a fresh retail copy of Win7 on there and avoid the trouble of possibly having missed something, and also having a physical disc backup of the OS on the off chance something goes horribly wrong (very likely on a fragile laptop)
Well if all they're doing is matching up IP addresses between two databases, what does it matter what protocol they're using? For that matter, why is this even newsworthy? The encrypted payload, and how they're tracking encrypted BT (or perhaps, more imporantly how they know the encrypted packet is a BT packet) packets without violating the DMCA is what I'm curious about.
Are there any BT clients out there that don't encrypt their packets these days?
This feels like one of those "dog poop fines" legislative bills. Everyone is for it, and everyone in the end benefits from it. You get to look like a hero legislator without tackling any difficult (or controversial) problems.
Seriously though, how dangerous is Mercury. Before you fire up Wikipedia to tell me about how mercury causes brain damage and birth abnormalities, let me ask you these questions:
1. What are the symptoms of mercury poisoning
2. What is the treatment for acute mercury poisoning
3. Who do you know, or have heard of who has experienced mercury poisoning?
Seriously, can you answer those off the top of your head? What about for poison ivy? Getting sprayed by a skunk? A snake bite.
Those are things that actually happen in real life. Dwight Shrute can tell you how to handle a bear attack depending on the time of day, and I'm sure many astute movie watchers can tell you how to wrestle an alligator/crocodile, but nobody can tell you anything about mercury other than that it's bad for you.
While yes, I'm sure Mercury is very bad for you, I think we've successfully legislated away the problem. Between the mercury in my "silver" fillings (quite a bit! stop googling about how "wrong I am and check out the amount of mercury you ingest via tooth fillings) and the fish I eat, I am a rather healthy individual. I think we've solved the mercury problem.
Unless the "product performance" group is headed by some VP's nephew who has no managerial experience, no clout, no budget, and no staff...
I've been running the developer preview in a VM for about two months now, more or less around the clock with 5-6 mainstream apps (steam, chrome, VLC, mumble) installed for a sort of web service I'm testing. I've been more than happy with it and even exclaimed once or twice to my buddies that I might even consider buying this version of windows before SP1 comes out. Win8 on a VM (Virtual Box, in my case) just screams for basic apps. Even in a VM, Win8 developers figured out how to include "the snappy" in this release.... let's hope it stays that way to release.
One thing I'd like to see is the new zune style start bar overlay cut down to about 25% of the screen, and maybe making it transparent, instead of taking up 100% of it. The man who writes that plugin is going to be a very wealthy one.
Which is why I used them as an example. Texas, Louisiana and other surrounding states would be importing awful polluting used cars as a result. For such a tiny state, it seems wasteful for them to have an entire department handling vehicle emissions when the feds are probably a better way to outsource that sort of legislation. Perhaps it would be better if larger states (pick your way of determining what counts as large) could opt out of the federal system, and in turn opt out of funding those federal departments. These days it seems that the federal government needs large states much more than large states need them (discounting the national defense argument).
While I agree wholeheartedly with you that this should be handled on the state level, I think it's worth pointing out that some states exhibit stronger leadership than others.Where California leads the nation in many things, smaller states like Idaho and Wyoming might be slower to adopt vehicle emissions laws, if at all. This makes it expensive for some companies to compete in all 50 states. I wouldn't mind a sort of acceptably low minimum for all 50 states, with a sort of federal funding incentive to small businesses for exceeding the minimum by 75, 100, 150% etc. Something just tells me that Mississippi and rural Kentucky just aren't as concerned about vehicle emissions as California, Texas and New York are.
I generally alternate between Barbados and Sweden. Your line of work shows up in your public profile (I think) which is the first thing potential employers look at.
I had a weird notification this morning. Facebook wanted me to confirm that someone else said my hometown was X city. So now if you don't list this information, they're asking others to rat you out, despite your best efforts to keep that information off of the web. I'm not sure you can opt out of other people's disclosures in the same way you can opt out of listing your city/state/employer etc.
I'm thinking IP geolocation on google's end. My search results page ended up as google.com.br, google.com.ar, google.com.ur etc etc each time I logged in at a different location and then had to sign back in to gmail. My point was that google was overthinking the solution and ended up causing more problems than it solved.
I was traveling through South America for a month, hit most of the major countries. It's bigger than you think. Five countries in four weeks is a lot. Anyways, I was using Ubuntu (9.10 UNR) and Gmail on a netbook to handle most of my affairs while I was out of the country.
I'm not sure what it was exactly, either the system clock or on google's end, but when I crossed from Brazil in to Uruguay, my system clock, gmail and gcalendar got royally screwed up, to the point that I was 3 hours early to my international ferry, and despite being an hour "early" to the airport on my trip home, I barely made my flight by 10 minutes.
I doubt many people have much use for a calendar system that auto-updates the correct time depending on country/timezone you're in on a regular basis, but if your calendar says "4pm local time" and then changes it six times based on where you're viewing it, and screws up, it can be disastrous and very costly. I'm sure that's an outlier problem, but having a standardized database might give developers more time to work on kinks like what I experienced.
For the record, yes I own and wear a watch, but pilots don't always give you the local time when you land, and not always in English(!). Free wifi in airports is a blessing, but when your computer doesn't know what the actual time is, it can cause scheduling problems, especially when you're trying to catch a connecting/transfer flight.
Long story short, time zones screwed up my computer and took almost a week of use stateside before it sorted itself out again.
At least one other instance of this sort of testing has been shown to customers before. Years ago there was a TV show showcasing how cell companies tested not only their networks, but their competitor's as well. The test vehicle was a station wagon loaded to capacity with testing equipment and antennas.
You can't test your system using wired methods; running a $100 billion dollar annual revenue company, one might say 100 such vehicles (2 per state! have you seen how big Texas, California and Alaska are?) is almost criminally negligent in terms of measuring quality of service of both your and your competitor's service, both to your customers, and to your shareholders.
While it's recorded on film, it's edited on a computer, and then duplicated back on to "film", which really is just a long strip of color laser printer transparency paper. The edited digital film is transferred at 4096x2000 give or take. The only films shot in 1080p were independent films. You'd be shocked at how many films are distributed this way. Something like 90%.
The end result is that the picture you see in the theater isn't as clear as the image you saw in the 1980s, but it's still ultra sharp for the purpose it's used for.
I think the Apple TV project got seriously de-funded. It's now just a shadow of it's former glory. Old models were thin client PCs, new Apple TVs are just a cable box with wifi and eithernet built in. That's not to say they aren't great devices; I bought one for my mom and she loves it - but at this juncture the Apple TV is just a placeholder product.
People definitely read these things differently! He might have had an axe to grind, but I think the colorful descriptions point out that he does care about the company, and, in the end wants it to succeed. He's spent a lot of time figuring out what is wrong with the system and has a plan, or at least a direction he would like to explore. This reads much differently than someone with an eye focused on the next quarter's profits or their next promotion to senior project manager, because they got their product out the door on time. I have to respect what he did and why he wrote it. If you're unhappy and you don't speak up, you deserve your misery.
It's worth pointing out that PCs are, and have been a commodity market for quite some time now. The only way to be profitable is to be in the top 3. To do that means selling at razor thin margins, practically selling your product at cost. Which means that if there's a downturn in the market (likely, given the economy) or you overproject for the quarter, you run a very real risk of operating at a loss for the quarter. You can't consistently guarantee your shareholders a profit, so it's definitely worth looking at what could be called an "underperforming" division and considering axing it. It's not like HP desktops and laptops have a golden reputation (though I enjoy my 3 year old hp mini 110 netbook quite a bit).