Mind telling me where in the wide, wide world of sports that rant fits into this thread of conversation?
Does it have ANY bearing on the discussion of NVidia's refusal to tell their customers how their product actually works? Does it even impinge in any way on what the fanboy I was taking to task was complaining about?
Sorry if you are in some field of work where you are stuck with a mandated vertical app, suck it up and either live with it or help fund a replacement. Odds are if it is on Windows it is insecure and sucks, am I right? But that is a topic for another thread so stop hijacking random ones to shill in.
> the graphics manufacturers (who really don't need the currently tiny linux market at all)
Eh? You mean every tablet without a fruit on it and most smartphones? The only platform that isn't fruit based that is growing? That tiny market? We have a different definition of tiny.
> available through wine, cedega, etc
Oh, I see your problem. You want to play games released for Windows but for unexplained reasons find dual booting unacceptable. You you have this expectation that until Linux becomes exactly like Windows, while not becoming whatever it is you find unacceptable about it of course, it is simply terrible.
> the PC at home is dying to the tablet and smart phone...
Not at all. The market is simply sorting itself out after a long nightmare of Microsoft's monopoly. Most people with a Windows PC should have never had one, they needed a simple game player and media consumption device, but that device was never allowed to be birthed. The people who actually need the power of a PC will still want it, but it will be at most 10-20% of the population.
> Living on minimum wage is hardly a living wage. It is hardly enough to cover the bare > necessities in the US. Most likely you will need to get a second job to make ends meet.
So? It is the MINIMUM. It isn't intended to allow you to live a fully independent existence and enjoy it. Yes, being poor sucks, been there and done that too and didn't get the t-shirt because I couldn't afford it. But you can survive. Minimum wage is low enough that there is still the possibility for a kid to get on the ladder in the first place. We have already sawed off most of the bottom rungs, lets not raise it again and saw some more off, unemployment amongst the youth is already shocking, doubly so for minority youth. Let people get A job, any job, and learn how to work. Anybody worth a damn won't be making minimum long.
And is it really too much to ask people, for whatever reason, earning at the bottom to work a second job, live with roomies, move back in with the parents, whatever until they can work their way up the skill level tree a bit or fix whatever problem other is keeping them in the low earning part of the job market?
> Increased availability of aid and loans may very well create some tuition inflation.... > When the state is short on cash, higher education funding seems to always > take the brunt of the damage in budget cuts, so public universities make up > the difference by hiking tuition and/or recruiting out-of-state students.
Interesting you don't see the connect there. In-state rates ARE student aid. Just because it isn't a line item on your invoice doesn't make it less so. And as long as the taxes are rolling in, you are right that the rates you saw were kept low. But the per pupil costs were skyrocketing for you just like for the out of state students, it was just being masked by the subsidies from the State. With the Great Recession that subsidy is being reduced and you are seeing more of the actual costs.
If the schools know exactly, to the penny, how much aid you are eligible for, and they process the paperwork for you so they do know, is it unreasonable to assume the bill is going to very closely match the max plus just a little bit more so you will still be a 'starving student' and thus available for slave labor?
> cost of a society that increasingly doesn't value education beyond the immediate "will this turn our kids into productive workers"
Count me in that group. I'm against all such aid on principle but if there is going to be ANY student aid it isn't unreasonable for me as one of the taxpayers being forced at gunpoint to donate to your education to insist in return that you at least use it toward something that has a reasonable chance of allowing you to a) pay off the loan and b) make you more a productive taxpayer so as to help with the burden of educating the generation which will follow. Discover yourself and take those * Studies on your own fracking dime.
Raise private funds and give scholarships if you believe it is that important. It is a certainty that you will do more good than the government would with the same resources.
I might pay for the 48fps 3D, but I would try 48fps 2D in an instant. It is about time 24fps went the way of B&W. Screw those old fart 'film buffs' who think that framerate makes movies look better' No, it looks wrong but you grew up watching movies that way are are simply used to it. Probablty also explains 90% of the fetish for tube amps amongst 'audiophiles'; their early impressions were formed with tube amps and they refuse to change.
But why not go all the way to 60? Would that be so wrong? It would make it compatible wirh HDTV without messy frame rate conversion. Plus I believe IMAX also runs at 60fps native. About the only advantage I can see with 48fps is that they can just merge pairs of frames for printing to normal 35mm and for the 1080p@24 BluRay release. (BluRay can't do 1080p@60, some players can but the format can't bless it.)
Maybe you missed the word 'production' because you are a gamer. And you might want to look up just how ancient a Radeon 9200 is, not likely to do much modern gaming on one even if you had top notch driver support. Now combine it with a Sempron and we are talking about a machine tat runs OO.o and Firefox nicely, but don't expect it to be confused for a gaming rig.
The point is it works and it works right out of the box well enough to put into production as a general purpose business class desktop. Nvidia will never be there with the closed driver and the reverse engineering effort isn't there yet. Intel graphics also tend to 'just work.' I can take my one system image and clone it from my devel vm onto real hardware with ATI video (currently a lot of R9250 and some newer X750? PCI-E boards) and the image just starts up and runs. Since I'm not admin for a 3D graphics house, if they can run a 3D accelerated desktop OK and get enough performance for YouTube everyone is happy.
> OMFG NOOOOO there is no possible way that NVIDIA could operate like every other chip maker on the face of the planet.
No, we want them TO operate like 'every other chip maker' and get with the program. Name another major chip vendor who hasn't figured out that getting into the Linux kernel is a required checkoff for market success. Doubly so for any product used in the enterprise vs the fanboi market. NVidia's CUDA is about the entire list these days, the last major holdout.
A few still maintain a desperate final stand in the embedded market but few new vendors go the closed route and every year brings another of the dead enders over to the open camp. First to fall were the storage products, then ethernet and cpu makers. Wifi is holding out on the blobs due to fear of the spectrum regulators but most now support an open driver for the kernel to firmware interface.
> They only support a narrow range of product before they fall off, and you get the 2D only version.
News to me. I have pre AMD buyout ATI 9200's on AGP slots still in production. The run Compiz pretty well. And they ran right out of the box, no futzing with odd repos, limiting to specific kernels etc. Just install and go.
Avoid the newest and AMD just works. Nvidia doesn't. Yet.
On the other hand I have an Nvidia in in my MythTV and I do have to futz with drivers in exchange for accelerated HD playback with GPU assisted deinterlacing.
It is stupid, keeping the specs secret is a lose/lose for everyone.
> So you can send the user 1GB of data to use for one time pads, but you have trust > that they keep it secure, but if they get a bit of malware on their system it could copy > all that data and thus the user's account is compromised.
If you are stupid enough to give the user the data, what you say is true. So don't be stupid.
The card itself has an epaper screen and a touchscreen. When you stick it on the front of the merchant's terminal it is powered from there and receives a request for a transaction. It displays upon it's face the amount being requested and a randomly placed pinpad (no wear patterns to spot this way) for the owner to punch in. It encrypts the PIN entered and the transaction details from the next block of OTP data and sends it out with a plaintext header containing a transaction ID identifying the card and the area of the OTP which was used. That is so brain damaged simple that no signal analysis of the card is going to leak key information. The card itself doesn't even know if the PIN is correct. New password/PIN methods can be rolled out on a per card issuer / customer basis since the merchant network need know nothing about the implementation details. You get the best practices in security, a combination of something you possess plus something you know. Still a little early to add a fingerprint reader to one, and there are some nasty attacks against most of those anyway so the additional security is debatable.
An interesting spin might be to put a solar cell on the rear and power it by shining a bright light onto the back from the merchant terminal and communicate via IR LEDs. Just to make it harder to try shocking it to evoke erratic behavior.
No method to update the software or key material need be provided, you mail out a new one. Use one time programmable roms. Since it doesn't know the PIN you can still change that if you suspect it to have been compromised. The interfacing terminal is simple enough you could give them away as USB gadgets until every keyboard and smartphone grew support for them. Smartphones might argue against the bright light idea above unless you could arrange to lay them atop the display and have the IR send/receive port in a standard spot right at the edge or something.
> send someone over with a flash drive full of random bits
No, they would just have to send a mailman over every few years with a new credit card which they already do. I just did some back of the envelope math and if you assume a transaction could be sent in 64 bytes and you store only 1Gib of random pad in the card you could almost make a transaction per minute with it and even with a 5year expiration date you wouldn't have to reuse the pad and break the security. The problem is Visa would need to retain that gigabit of data until the card expires and it might cost a bit to keep that much key material secure but it would be a very secure system. Apparently they believe the fraud losses are cheaper.
Something to keep in mind next time you hear em whining. Or hear a Lifelock ad. It is only cheaper for them because they offload so much of the expense for their being cheap bastards onto us.
> Y'all should spend a couple of days living the life of someone on welfare.
Why would I do that? I havta work, millions on welfare depend on me.:) Seriously, it does piss me off when I'm in the checkout line in Walmart behind people buying food I can't afford (snow crab!?!) and they whip out the ol Louisiana Purchase card. I'm buying Sam's Choice and these clowns wouldn't dream of settling for a store brand. Because they don't have to.
And it isn't anything new. My first job was bagging groceries way back in the late '70s and it was just as bad then. Loading up the trunk/bed of new Lincolns, Caddies and F100 Pickups (as in temp plates) with stuff I certainly didn't get to eat growing up as poor but not on the dole. But I was certainly 'rich' enough to be 'paying my fair share' to help fund that bull crap according to my pay stub.
> But... eBay isn't GIVING the seller any money. They are CHARGING the seller for their service.
There is a consignment store/flea market across the street from where I work. If you put stuff in there for them to sell you can bet it will get reported. At least in theory.... we all know reality often differs, especially in a down economy... it isn't as bad as Greece yet. Explain why should eBay be different? Especially when you consider that for all practical intents and purposes 'eBay' == eBay + Paypal. So they are bringing buyer and seller together, charging fees AND processing the exchange of money.
As for your specific objections, selling for a different price than what was finalized on eBay is a violation of eBay policy and voids your transaction protection. Making an additional sale doesn't involve eBay but is of course still a taxable transaction even if it is unreasonable for eBay to be involved in reporting it.
But! But! This is on the Internet! None of the meatspace rules are supposed to apply here!
Bullcrap. Avoiding sales tax across state lines in the US dates back to Sears Roebuck and even makes some sort of sense. But the idea of somehow being beyond the law just because of the Internet is barmy. eBay is involved in the transaction as a broker. Here in the U.S. they should be forced into at least filing a Form 1099 or something, getting the state taxes comes back to the same problem as sales tax. And I'm sure Austrailia has a similar procedure to report income for non-employee contactor/consignment/etc sitautions. The actual story here is that they haven't been reporting this sort of income for years. Sounds like they need a knot yanked in their asses.
I'm a conservative with so many libertarian leanings I's switch if the LP wasn't overrun with Idiotarian Libertarians who seem to only care about being worse surrender monkeys than than Dems and legalizing weed. But there must be taxes and nobody gets a pass on paying them. How high should the rates be I'll be happy to argue; too damned high! But ya gotta pay something. And to be raking in $20K+ free and clear while suckling at the public teat is right out.
Well that tears it; Classic was the only reason I could even tolerate Win7 as a dual boot option. So Microsoft has joined the GNOMEs in total tablet madness. Only Microsoft has now one upped them with this retro 'could have been done on 16 color VGA with no GPU' look.
XFCE for the win. Guys, computers aren't new virgin territory anymore! We just want to get work done, not spend all of our time relearning your latest reimagining of the OS. It is beyond that now, it is all about the apps.
> The representative's job is to represent the will of the people.
Not exactly and the difference is critical. We aren't supposed to be a Democracy, the Founders understood the idea and thought it was horrid. We were given a Constitutional Republic.... if we could keep it. We obviously didn't but getting back there should be our goal, not going farther into madness.
The idea is more that the people pick someone from their number of good character and who is 'representive' of their views. That person then goes off and participates in the legislative process, invests the time that an otherwise occupied citizen lacks into carefully understanding the issue at hand and votes. Then they have to be prepared to explain that decision come election time if it is unpopular. In other words they are supposed to be leaders, not just poll takers. That is the part that gets lost in a scheme such as this, it supposes that the average citizen can know, worse that an average citizen should be expected to know the details on each minor issue. On the one extreme rule by experts, i.e. the core notion driving the Progressive movement, leads to disaster but on the other rule by the clueless is equally bad. The Founders gave us a system that tries to balance the two. Combined with limited, divided and generally weak government the idea works. It clearly fails in our current everything driven by Washington DC system.
And only half of the legislature is even supposed to be representing the People directly. Remember the Senate was intended to represent the State governments and the POTUS was to be selected by a fairly complex (by design) method which was an attempt to ensure as many interests were merged as possible. We allowed the Progressives to convince us to discard those vital balances.
> Your "let the market (of ideas) decide" is just magical/wishful thinking.
Nope, it is in fact the only method with a proven track record. It doesn't take a genius to observe success and emulate it. And that is the point, by keeping most governmental decisions as local as practical you get thousands of different political subdivisions with a widely diverse set of notions of what 'good' is and how to achieve it. Some will succeed, most will fail. Then evolution kicks in because everyone can see the results of the first round. The people will decide, based on their varying notions of what 'the public good' even is, which experiments worked and will seek to emulate those. And again, some will succed and some will fail. Some will take the wrong lesson from the successes, some will be mush headed on what they actually want, every failure mode you can imagine and, most important, failure modes no central authority CAN imagine, will happen. Along with successes no central authority can imagine. Iterate a couple of generations and it is a certainty the average results will exceed anything a central authority could design.
The secret is the same as for evolution. Ensure a large population (small governmental units), diversity, and a strong selection pressure and you get progress. And since the governed decide what is 'progress' instead of being told by a tyrant/king what is good it is likely that longterm they will get good results.
Well ok, Google has better offerings than a lowly local government offers.:) None of the HSA pitches I have seen made sense if you were already diagnosed with anything serious, that yours is still competitive with three major illnesses to cover out of pocket is not typical.
Replying to myself.... Got distracted and hit submit, Forgetting to explicitly tie what I wrote to your chief complaint and I know that if I don't no prog has the reasoning skills to make the leap. (by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be a prog anymore)
> Except people were encouraged to take out second mortgages to pay off their bills, take trips, do some property improvement.
That was a obvious side effect of the policies I noted above. Ram a huge influx of new demand into the housing market and prices shoot up. Combine with the Fed pushing interest rates far below market in a different case of the goverment meddling and you get what happened. Home values didn't just go up, it was a moonshot, cash out refi very attractive and banks more than willing to write the paper and hand it off, making their money off the up front fees. And if thought they were a bit too willing to take risks when they only suspected they were 'too big to fail' just wait, now it is written into law.
Some of us knew better. I'm not underwater. In fact I'm not even mortgaged anymore.
> When a bank approves 40 applications without looking at what their > financial situation is or their income, that is a huge problem.
Yes it is. Now be bold enough to ask the right question. Why would they do something that dumb? Answer: It wasn't dumb because they got the fees up front and the taxpayers (through Freddie/Fannie) got the bill. They were playing the game by the rules Congress wrote.
> College tuition isn't going up because of easy loans, most states have raised tuition due to the financial crisis.
And why did they do that? Because they can. Because pretty much anyone qualifies for low interest loans underwritten by the Federal Government. Tuition has been going up faster than inflation for generations. Just like healthcare. Both for the same reason. Before the big crunch tuition was so insane the taxpayers were kicking in along with the grants and loans. But where the money comes from doesn't change the fact that the number of dollars per pupil being spent is going up, up and up. Because it can.
> You can't blame the government for these scandals when it is the banks...
Yes I can. Because I know who drove those policies. Freddie and Fannie along with Congress and Presidents from Carter to Bush II. The insane push for 'affordable housing' and the idea that renting == bad, mortgage == good. They looked at stats that showed homeowners to have several socially desirable qualities and confused cause and effect in an epic fail for the ages.
The banks were in a no-win scenario so they cheated.
The government was demanding they make an ever growing percentage of their loans to politically preferred customers regardless of ability to repay. But it was ok because if you just made sure they could probably pay for the first year you could push the paper off on Freddie or Fannie and it was all going to be good. Because otherwise the banks wouldn't have done something that stupid regardless of how much political and regulatory pressure was applied to them. But then Freddie and Fannie had to do something with all that dodgy paper and so did the banking industry. Hmm, what to do, what to do. Mortgage backed securities! Except most people started figuring out the game of hot potatoe (nod to Quayle..) going on and started hedging those with derivatives thinking they were so clever. But when it ALL goes boom at once there ain't nobody can collect on those contracts because everybody gets boned at the same time. Short version, things that can't go on forever don't.
Nope. Not even close. Go look up the numbers and you will see that going back to 1965 the rate only touches 15% from time to time. In fact it would be more accurate to state it as the government redefines the 'poverty line' as needed to ensure that 10-15% of the population will always be in 'poverty' and thus in need of handouts from Democrats.
Sorry, I'm about to be assaulted as a horrible mean person for saying these things. But screw it. As a general rule we don't even know what 'poor' is.
If you live in most of the country, where several HD multiplexes are available OTA, if you can pay for cable TV you are NOT poor. Being generous here and granting some very rural places where the choice would be cable/sat or nothing and nothing would be kinda harsh.
If you have a contract cell phone, you are NOT poor.
If you own an Apple product you are NOT poor. (ok, perhaps a nano.) Or unless you had it and fell on hard times. My computer would probably be the last thing I'd sell off so I won't hold it against anyone else either.
But in the same vein, with the same caveat of preexisting exclusion; if you own a PC that isn't second hand you probably aren't poor. Out of work IT workers obviously excepted. Keep the skills sharp guys.
If you own an XBox360 or Playstation 3 you are NOT poor. (same exclusion)
If your household owns more vehicles than members with full time jobs, you are NOT poor. In a city with mass transit that number should probably be ONE vehicle.
If you are making payments on a new vehicle, you are NOT poor.
If you can afford a pair of shoes that cost more than $100 you are NOT poor. (work footwear excluded)
If you can afford admission to any major league sporting event, you are probably not poor.
> that is sometimes easier said then done when you have kids with expensive condition
You are failing to understand the products offered and have selected the wrong one. You want traditional 'insurance' if you have expensive preexisting conditions. An HSA is for generally healthy people who can come out ahead paying out of pocket for their basic checkups and a prescription drug or two and just need the fairly inexpensive insurance policy part to cover them against a sudden unexpected health emergency. I.e. they need insurance, not 'insurance'. You need 'insurance' which should be more accurately labeled a maint agreement or extended warranty.
Or housing. Flood the market with cheap financing and a governement directive to put everyone into a mortaged home and prices went on a moonshot. Right up until they didn't.
Just like the other reply already mentioned, college tuition and low interest government loans are again creating a moonshot effect.
And you are almost certainly correct on the same effect causing hearing aids coverable by insurance/medicare/etc. to be priced like nobody actually has to pay... because if you are asking the price you are paying for it yourself and realize that if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Happens every time but we fall for the same trick over and over. Intelligence seems to be in short supply.
A publicly traded corporation has two paths to success.
1. Growth. But you have to give the shareholders regular good news to drive the share price up and up. This was MSFT up to the.bomb crash.
2. Dividends. A utility type. A monopoly with a saturated market like Microsoft currently exists as is a perfect example of one. Everyone needs em, they rake in nice healthy revenue and.... they aren't handing out utility company dividends. WTF? But if things stay as they are they will and it would be a good midlife for a corporation that could go on and on. Until the market changes. And they see it changing.
No corporation is going to face the shareholders and announce a plan for a controlled implosion, to make the company half it's current size over the next decade. There must be, if not growth, at least preservation of capital and dividends.
Of what use is migrating to tablets if they make less money? Making the same money is almost as bad, a huge risk with no potential reward?
> one just gets the impression that they don't really want to sell this particular product...
I think you are confused by trying to understand behavior that doesn't appear to make sense. Usually means we are missing part of the decision process. So lets toss theories around until one makes sense.
Here is mine. Microsoft has a couple of long term problems. They have a monopoly on the desktop. It produces a shedload of cash. How much per unit is a secret somehow, odd that a large publicly traded corporation's flagship revenue stream's details are a closely guarded secret. (just an aside that may be significant) They fear the desktop might not stay so important and produce the revenue. But they have a second, equally important problem. They can't even stay the same, they have around 90% of the market and PC sales are flat, shareholders have been waiting patiently for a decade to see some share appreciation on MSFT and there doesn't appear to be a lot of upside on the Windows PC. They see Linux as a threat and we know shutting off the oxygen supply is a tactic that has worked for them. The open PC is the air supply.
So Windows RT is designed to address all those needs. It answers the threat to the platform. It will produce Apple like per unit revenue which will make the pension fund managers smile. And it ends the Linux threat by carefully locking the platform and keeping a very tight leash on the OEMs.
The question is whether the marketplace will allow them to get away with it. A lot of people have wanted to make insanely great margins on consumer electronics. Only one has succeeded. The chains are even questionable, phone vendors are removing them, not building stronger ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Mind telling me where in the wide, wide world of sports that rant fits into this thread of conversation?
Does it have ANY bearing on the discussion of NVidia's refusal to tell their customers how their product actually works? Does it even impinge in any way on what the fanboy I was taking to task was complaining about?
Sorry if you are in some field of work where you are stuck with a mandated vertical app, suck it up and either live with it or help fund a replacement. Odds are if it is on Windows it is insecure and sucks, am I right? But that is a topic for another thread so stop hijacking random ones to shill in.
> the graphics manufacturers (who really don't need the currently tiny linux market at all)
Eh? You mean every tablet without a fruit on it and most smartphones? The only platform that isn't fruit based that is growing? That tiny market? We have a different definition of tiny.
> available through wine, cedega, etc
Oh, I see your problem. You want to play games released for Windows but for unexplained reasons find dual booting unacceptable. You you have this expectation that until Linux becomes exactly like Windows, while not becoming whatever it is you find unacceptable about it of course, it is simply terrible.
> the PC at home is dying to the tablet and smart phone...
Not at all. The market is simply sorting itself out after a long nightmare of Microsoft's monopoly. Most people with a Windows PC should have never had one, they needed a simple game player and media consumption device, but that device was never allowed to be birthed. The people who actually need the power of a PC will still want it, but it will be at most 10-20% of the population.
> Living on minimum wage is hardly a living wage. It is hardly enough to cover the bare
> necessities in the US. Most likely you will need to get a second job to make ends meet.
So? It is the MINIMUM. It isn't intended to allow you to live a fully independent existence and enjoy it. Yes, being poor sucks, been there and done that too and didn't get the t-shirt because I couldn't afford it. But you can survive. Minimum wage is low enough that there is still the possibility for a kid to get on the ladder in the first place. We have already sawed off most of the bottom rungs, lets not raise it again and saw some more off, unemployment amongst the youth is already shocking, doubly so for minority youth. Let people get A job, any job, and learn how to work. Anybody worth a damn won't be making minimum long.
And is it really too much to ask people, for whatever reason, earning at the bottom to work a second job, live with roomies, move back in with the parents, whatever until they can work their way up the skill level tree a bit or fix whatever problem other is keeping them in the low earning part of the job market?
> Increased availability of aid and loans may very well create some tuition inflation ....
> When the state is short on cash, higher education funding seems to always
> take the brunt of the damage in budget cuts, so public universities make up
> the difference by hiking tuition and/or recruiting out-of-state students.
Interesting you don't see the connect there. In-state rates ARE student aid. Just because it isn't a line item on your invoice doesn't make it less so. And as long as the taxes are rolling in, you are right that the rates you saw were kept low. But the per pupil costs were skyrocketing for you just like for the out of state students, it was just being masked by the subsidies from the State. With the Great Recession that subsidy is being reduced and you are seeing more of the actual costs.
If the schools know exactly, to the penny, how much aid you are eligible for, and they process the paperwork for you so they do know, is it unreasonable to assume the bill is going to very closely match the max plus just a little bit more so you will still be a 'starving student' and thus available for slave labor?
> cost of a society that increasingly doesn't value education beyond the immediate "will this turn our kids into productive workers"
Count me in that group. I'm against all such aid on principle but if there is going to be ANY student aid it isn't unreasonable for me as one of the taxpayers being forced at gunpoint to donate to your education to insist in return that you at least use it toward something that has a reasonable chance of allowing you to a) pay off the loan and b) make you more a productive taxpayer so as to help with the burden of educating the generation which will follow. Discover yourself and take those * Studies on your own fracking dime.
Raise private funds and give scholarships if you believe it is that important. It is a certainty that you will do more good than the government would with the same resources.
I might pay for the 48fps 3D, but I would try 48fps 2D in an instant. It is about time 24fps went the way of B&W. Screw those old fart 'film buffs' who think that framerate makes movies look better' No, it looks wrong but you grew up watching movies that way are are simply used to it. Probablty also explains 90% of the fetish for tube amps amongst 'audiophiles'; their early impressions were formed with tube amps and they refuse to change.
But why not go all the way to 60? Would that be so wrong? It would make it compatible wirh HDTV without messy frame rate conversion. Plus I believe IMAX also runs at 60fps native. About the only advantage I can see with 48fps is that they can just merge pairs of frames for printing to normal 35mm and for the 1080p@24 BluRay release. (BluRay can't do 1080p@60, some players can but the format can't bless it.)
Maybe you missed the word 'production' because you are a gamer. And you might want to look up just how ancient a Radeon 9200 is, not likely to do much modern gaming on one even if you had top notch driver support. Now combine it with a Sempron and we are talking about a machine tat runs OO.o and Firefox nicely, but don't expect it to be confused for a gaming rig.
The point is it works and it works right out of the box well enough to put into production as a general purpose business class desktop. Nvidia will never be there with the closed driver and the reverse engineering effort isn't there yet. Intel graphics also tend to 'just work.' I can take my one system image and clone it from my devel vm onto real hardware with ATI video (currently a lot of R9250 and some newer X750? PCI-E boards) and the image just starts up and runs. Since I'm not admin for a 3D graphics house, if they can run a 3D accelerated desktop OK and get enough performance for YouTube everyone is happy.
> OMFG NOOOOO there is no possible way that NVIDIA could operate like every other chip maker on the face of the planet.
No, we want them TO operate like 'every other chip maker' and get with the program. Name another major chip vendor who hasn't figured out that getting into the Linux kernel is a required checkoff for market success. Doubly so for any product used in the enterprise vs the fanboi market. NVidia's CUDA is about the entire list these days, the last major holdout.
A few still maintain a desperate final stand in the embedded market but few new vendors go the closed route and every year brings another of the dead enders over to the open camp. First to fall were the storage products, then ethernet and cpu makers. Wifi is holding out on the blobs due to fear of the spectrum regulators but most now support an open driver for the kernel to firmware interface.
> They only support a narrow range of product before they fall off, and you get the 2D only version.
News to me. I have pre AMD buyout ATI 9200's on AGP slots still in production. The run Compiz pretty well. And they ran right out of the box, no futzing with odd repos, limiting to specific kernels etc. Just install and go.
Avoid the newest and AMD just works. Nvidia doesn't. Yet.
On the other hand I have an Nvidia in in my MythTV and I do have to futz with drivers in exchange for accelerated HD playback with GPU assisted deinterlacing.
It is stupid, keeping the specs secret is a lose/lose for everyone.
> So you can send the user 1GB of data to use for one time pads, but you have trust
> that they keep it secure, but if they get a bit of malware on their system it could copy
> all that data and thus the user's account is compromised.
If you are stupid enough to give the user the data, what you say is true. So don't be stupid.
The card itself has an epaper screen and a touchscreen. When you stick it on the front of the merchant's terminal it is powered from there and receives a request for a transaction. It displays upon it's face the amount being requested and a randomly placed pinpad (no wear patterns to spot this way) for the owner to punch in. It encrypts the PIN entered and the transaction details from the next block of OTP data and sends it out with a plaintext header containing a transaction ID identifying the card and the area of the OTP which was used. That is so brain damaged simple that no signal analysis of the card is going to leak key information. The card itself doesn't even know if the PIN is correct. New password/PIN methods can be rolled out on a per card issuer / customer basis since the merchant network need know nothing about the implementation details. You get the best practices in security, a combination of something you possess plus something you know. Still a little early to add a fingerprint reader to one, and there are some nasty attacks against most of those anyway so the additional security is debatable.
An interesting spin might be to put a solar cell on the rear and power it by shining a bright light onto the back from the merchant terminal and communicate via IR LEDs. Just to make it harder to try shocking it to evoke erratic behavior.
No method to update the software or key material need be provided, you mail out a new one. Use one time programmable roms. Since it doesn't know the PIN you can still change that if you suspect it to have been compromised. The interfacing terminal is simple enough you could give them away as USB gadgets until every keyboard and smartphone grew support for them. Smartphones might argue against the bright light idea above unless you could arrange to lay them atop the display and have the IR send/receive port in a standard spot right at the edge or something.
> send someone over with a flash drive full of random bits
No, they would just have to send a mailman over every few years with a new credit card which they already do. I just did some back of the envelope math and if you assume a transaction could be sent in 64 bytes and you store only 1Gib of random pad in the card you could almost make a transaction per minute with it and even with a 5year expiration date you wouldn't have to reuse the pad and break the security. The problem is Visa would need to retain that gigabit of data until the card expires and it might cost a bit to keep that much key material secure but it would be a very secure system. Apparently they believe the fraud losses are cheaper.
Something to keep in mind next time you hear em whining. Or hear a Lifelock ad. It is only cheaper for them because they offload so much of the expense for their being cheap bastards onto us.
> Y'all should spend a couple of days living the life of someone on welfare.
Why would I do that? I havta work, millions on welfare depend on me. :) Seriously, it does piss me off when I'm in the checkout line in Walmart behind people buying food I can't afford (snow crab!?!) and they whip out the ol Louisiana Purchase card. I'm buying Sam's Choice and these clowns wouldn't dream of settling for a store brand. Because they don't have to.
And it isn't anything new. My first job was bagging groceries way back in the late '70s and it was just as bad then. Loading up the trunk/bed of new Lincolns, Caddies and F100 Pickups (as in temp plates) with stuff I certainly didn't get to eat growing up as poor but not on the dole. But I was certainly 'rich' enough to be 'paying my fair share' to help fund that bull crap according to my pay stub.
> But... eBay isn't GIVING the seller any money. They are CHARGING the seller for their service.
There is a consignment store/flea market across the street from where I work. If you put stuff in there for them to sell you can bet it will get reported. At least in theory.... we all know reality often differs, especially in a down economy... it isn't as bad as Greece yet. Explain why should eBay be different? Especially when you consider that for all practical intents and purposes 'eBay' == eBay + Paypal. So they are bringing buyer and seller together, charging fees AND processing the exchange of money.
As for your specific objections, selling for a different price than what was finalized on eBay is a violation of eBay policy and voids your transaction protection. Making an additional sale doesn't involve eBay but is of course still a taxable transaction even if it is unreasonable for eBay to be involved in reporting it.
But! But! This is on the Internet! None of the meatspace rules are supposed to apply here!
Bullcrap. Avoiding sales tax across state lines in the US dates back to Sears Roebuck and even makes some sort of sense. But the idea of somehow being beyond the law just because of the Internet is barmy. eBay is involved in the transaction as a broker. Here in the U.S. they should be forced into at least filing a Form 1099 or something, getting the state taxes comes back to the same problem as sales tax. And I'm sure Austrailia has a similar procedure to report income for non-employee contactor/consignment/etc sitautions. The actual story here is that they haven't been reporting this sort of income for years. Sounds like they need a knot yanked in their asses.
I'm a conservative with so many libertarian leanings I's switch if the LP wasn't overrun with Idiotarian Libertarians who seem to only care about being worse surrender monkeys than than Dems and legalizing weed. But there must be taxes and nobody gets a pass on paying them. How high should the rates be I'll be happy to argue; too damned high! But ya gotta pay something. And to be raking in $20K+ free and clear while suckling at the public teat is right out.
Well that tears it; Classic was the only reason I could even tolerate Win7 as a dual boot option. So Microsoft has joined the GNOMEs in total tablet madness. Only Microsoft has now one upped them with this retro 'could have been done on 16 color VGA with no GPU' look.
XFCE for the win. Guys, computers aren't new virgin territory anymore! We just want to get work done, not spend all of our time relearning your latest reimagining of the OS. It is beyond that now, it is all about the apps.
> The representative's job is to represent the will of the people.
Not exactly and the difference is critical. We aren't supposed to be a Democracy, the Founders understood the idea and thought it was horrid. We were given a Constitutional Republic.... if we could keep it. We obviously didn't but getting back there should be our goal, not going farther into madness.
The idea is more that the people pick someone from their number of good character and who is 'representive' of their views. That person then goes off and participates in the legislative process, invests the time that an otherwise occupied citizen lacks into carefully understanding the issue at hand and votes. Then they have to be prepared to explain that decision come election time if it is unpopular. In other words they are supposed to be leaders, not just poll takers.
That is the part that gets lost in a scheme such as this, it supposes that the average citizen can know, worse that an average citizen should be expected to know the details on each minor issue. On the one extreme rule by experts, i.e. the core notion driving the Progressive movement, leads to disaster but on the other rule by the clueless is equally bad. The Founders gave us a system that tries to balance the two. Combined with limited, divided and generally weak government the idea works. It clearly fails in our current everything driven by Washington DC system.
And only half of the legislature is even supposed to be representing the People directly. Remember the Senate was intended to represent the State governments and the POTUS was to be selected by a fairly complex (by design) method which was an attempt to ensure as many interests were merged as possible. We allowed the Progressives to convince us to discard those vital balances.
> Your "let the market (of ideas) decide" is just magical/wishful thinking.
Nope, it is in fact the only method with a proven track record. It doesn't take a genius to observe success and emulate it. And that is the point, by keeping most governmental decisions as local as practical you get thousands of different political subdivisions with a widely diverse set of notions of what 'good' is and how to achieve it. Some will succeed, most will fail. Then evolution kicks in because everyone can see the results of the first round. The people will decide, based on their varying notions of what 'the public good' even is, which experiments worked and will seek to emulate those. And again, some will succed and some will fail. Some will take the wrong lesson from the successes, some will be mush headed on what they actually want, every failure mode you can imagine and, most important, failure modes no central authority CAN imagine, will happen. Along with successes no central authority can imagine. Iterate a couple of generations and it is a certainty the average results will exceed anything a central authority could design.
The secret is the same as for evolution. Ensure a large population (small governmental units), diversity, and a strong selection pressure and you get progress. And since the governed decide what is 'progress' instead of being told by a tyrant/king what is good it is likely that longterm they will get good results.
Well ok, Google has better offerings than a lowly local government offers. :) None of the HSA pitches I have seen made sense if you were already diagnosed with anything serious, that yours is still competitive with three major illnesses to cover out of pocket is not typical.
Replying to myself.... Got distracted and hit submit, Forgetting to explicitly tie what I wrote to your chief complaint and I know that if I don't no prog has the reasoning skills to make the leap. (by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be a prog anymore)
> Except people were encouraged to take out second mortgages to pay off their bills, take trips, do some property improvement.
That was a obvious side effect of the policies I noted above. Ram a huge influx of new demand into the housing market and prices shoot up. Combine with the Fed pushing interest rates far below market in a different case of the goverment meddling and you get what happened. Home values didn't just go up, it was a moonshot, cash out refi very attractive and banks more than willing to write the paper and hand it off, making their money off the up front fees. And if thought they were a bit too willing to take risks when they only suspected they were 'too big to fail' just wait, now it is written into law.
Some of us knew better. I'm not underwater. In fact I'm not even mortgaged anymore.
> When a bank approves 40 applications without looking at what their
> financial situation is or their income, that is a huge problem.
Yes it is. Now be bold enough to ask the right question. Why would they do something that dumb? Answer: It wasn't dumb because they got the fees up front and the taxpayers (through Freddie/Fannie) got the bill. They were playing the game by the rules Congress wrote.
> College tuition isn't going up because of easy loans, most states have raised tuition due to the financial crisis.
And why did they do that? Because they can. Because pretty much anyone qualifies for low interest loans underwritten by the Federal Government. Tuition has been going up faster than inflation for generations. Just like healthcare. Both for the same reason. Before the big crunch tuition was so insane the taxpayers were kicking in along with the grants and loans. But where the money comes from doesn't change the fact that the number of dollars per pupil being spent is going up, up and up. Because it can.
> You can't blame the government for these scandals when it is the banks...
Yes I can. Because I know who drove those policies. Freddie and Fannie along with Congress and Presidents from Carter to Bush II. The insane push for 'affordable housing' and the idea that renting == bad, mortgage == good. They looked at stats that showed homeowners to have several socially desirable qualities and confused cause and effect in an epic fail for the ages.
The banks were in a no-win scenario so they cheated.
The government was demanding they make an ever growing percentage of their loans to politically preferred customers regardless of ability to repay. But it was ok because if you just made sure they could probably pay for the first year you could push the paper off on Freddie or Fannie and it was all going to be good. Because otherwise the banks wouldn't have done something that stupid regardless of how much political and regulatory pressure was applied to them. But then Freddie and Fannie had to do something with all that dodgy paper and so did the banking industry. Hmm, what to do, what to do. Mortgage backed securities! Except most people started figuring out the game of hot potatoe (nod to Quayle..) going on and started hedging those with derivatives thinking they were so clever. But when it ALL goes boom at once there ain't nobody can collect on those contracts because everybody gets boned at the same time. Short version, things that can't go on forever don't.
Nope. Not even close. Go look up the numbers and you will see that going back to 1965 the rate only touches 15% from time to time. In fact it would be more accurate to state it as the government redefines the 'poverty line' as needed to ensure that 10-15% of the population will always be in 'poverty' and thus in need of handouts from Democrats.
Sorry, I'm about to be assaulted as a horrible mean person for saying these things. But screw it. As a general rule we don't even know what 'poor' is.
If you live in most of the country, where several HD multiplexes are available OTA, if you can pay for cable TV you are NOT poor. Being generous here and granting some very rural places where the choice would be cable/sat or nothing and nothing would be kinda harsh.
If you have a contract cell phone, you are NOT poor.
If you own an Apple product you are NOT poor. (ok, perhaps a nano.) Or unless you had it and fell on hard times. My computer would probably be the last thing I'd sell off so I won't hold it against anyone else either.
But in the same vein, with the same caveat of preexisting exclusion; if you own a PC that isn't second hand you probably aren't poor. Out of work IT workers obviously excepted. Keep the skills sharp guys.
If you own an XBox360 or Playstation 3 you are NOT poor. (same exclusion)
If your household owns more vehicles than members with full time jobs, you are NOT poor. In a city with mass transit that number should probably be ONE vehicle.
If you are making payments on a new vehicle, you are NOT poor.
If you can afford a pair of shoes that cost more than $100 you are NOT poor. (work footwear excluded)
If you can afford admission to any major league sporting event, you are probably not poor.
> that is sometimes easier said then done when you have kids with expensive condition
You are failing to understand the products offered and have selected the wrong one. You want traditional 'insurance' if you have expensive preexisting conditions. An HSA is for generally healthy people who can come out ahead paying out of pocket for their basic checkups and a prescription drug or two and just need the fairly inexpensive insurance policy part to cover them against a sudden unexpected health emergency. I.e. they need insurance, not 'insurance'. You need 'insurance' which should be more accurately labeled a maint agreement or extended warranty.
Or housing. Flood the market with cheap financing and a governement directive to put everyone into a mortaged home and prices went on a moonshot. Right up until they didn't.
Just like the other reply already mentioned, college tuition and low interest government loans are again creating a moonshot effect.
And you are almost certainly correct on the same effect causing hearing aids coverable by insurance/medicare/etc. to be priced like nobody actually has to pay... because if you are asking the price you are paying for it yourself and realize that if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Happens every time but we fall for the same trick over and over. Intelligence seems to be in short supply.
> Microsoft really needs to come to its senses..
It is trying to survive. It will do ANYTHING.
A publicly traded corporation has two paths to success.
1. Growth. But you have to give the shareholders regular good news to drive the share price up and up. This was MSFT up to the .bomb crash.
2. Dividends. A utility type. A monopoly with a saturated market like Microsoft currently exists as is a perfect example of one. Everyone needs em, they rake in nice healthy revenue and.... they aren't handing out utility company dividends. WTF? But if things stay as they are they will and it would be a good midlife for a corporation that could go on and on. Until the market changes. And they see it changing.
No corporation is going to face the shareholders and announce a plan for a controlled implosion, to make the company half it's current size over the next decade. There must be, if not growth, at least preservation of capital and dividends.
Of what use is migrating to tablets if they make less money? Making the same money is almost as bad, a huge risk with no potential reward?
> one just gets the impression that they don't really want to sell this particular product...
I think you are confused by trying to understand behavior that doesn't appear to make sense. Usually means we are missing part of the decision process. So lets toss theories around until one makes sense.
Here is mine. Microsoft has a couple of long term problems. They have a monopoly on the desktop. It produces a shedload of cash. How much per unit is a secret somehow, odd that a large publicly traded corporation's flagship revenue stream's details are a closely guarded secret. (just an aside that may be significant) They fear the desktop might not stay so important and produce the revenue. But they have a second, equally important problem. They can't even stay the same, they have around 90% of the market and PC sales are flat, shareholders have been waiting patiently for a decade to see some share appreciation on MSFT and there doesn't appear to be a lot of upside on the Windows PC. They see Linux as a threat and we know shutting off the oxygen supply is a tactic that has worked for them. The open PC is the air supply.
So Windows RT is designed to address all those needs. It answers the threat to the platform. It will produce Apple like per unit revenue which will make the pension fund managers smile. And it ends the Linux threat by carefully locking the platform and keeping a very tight leash on the OEMs.
The question is whether the marketplace will allow them to get away with it. A lot of people have wanted to make insanely great margins on consumer electronics. Only one has succeeded. The chains are even questionable, phone vendors are removing them, not building stronger ones.