Last time I replaced my both my desktop and my laptop is when both of them were knackered from punishing overuse (9 years and 5 years respectively). Same goes for my last phone, and my last TV. If the only replacement computers available were essentially the same as my old ones, I'd still have replaced them, the same as I would a broken oven with a new (but not substantially improved) oven. And incidentally, the biggest difference between my new CPUs and the old CPUs were in the number of cores- something which Moore's Law doesn't specifically deal with- the computers of the future might be 32 core monstrosities, with 8 bits or silicone wired up with optical connectors.
The industry won't collapse, although it might have to slow down as the replacement cycle eases up. And there are lots of other components (internal connectors and whatnot) that can be incrementally improved for the computerphiles. Alas, computerphiles might even end up down the same dark route as audiophiles, with their magic-coated copper wiring.
I wonder if he can sue Brian Aitken (and other defendants) for causing him to be fired? Surely the grounding for such a suit is on no shakier ground than the one in TFA.
It's probably more fair to say that Apple / Google got moms, sisters, grandfathers, and jocks & cheerleaders, executives, and preachers playing, by giving each and every one of them a games console in their pocket. Its far easier to sell a game to someone if they already own the console than it is to sell them specialist equipment (a la Nintendo or Sony) first.
Well yeah, but I doubt anynoe would disagree with "overhyped". Its essentially the same catapult-the-castle game that's been around for years. Its pretty, polished, funny, and very long- worth every penny I think. But its hardly groundbreaking.
Talking about it like its going to be the "next generation of gaming" is almost as stupid as the Guitar Hero execs claiming their game was "the future of listening to music" (and we all know how that one worked out).
This is essentially the same as those patents that go "[anything] on a computer" or "[anything] over the internet".
Libel (or it's close relative slander) is what you're doing if you say something untrue and damaging about another person in a way that will cause them negative effects. It doesn't matter if its in a newspaper, or on the radio, on Twitter or in fucking sky writing- libel is libel.
It certainly doesn't need a new word for every branded product its possible to libel with.
If it takes one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded to knock a nuclear plant over, I think we're still relatively in the clear. Oil refineries seem to go pop the moment someone sets a firework off too close to one (and that smoke isn't exactly clean you know)- and do you want to know what's happened to the Japanese sewage processing system? Coal power plants throw out more carcinogenic toxins in a regular working day than those plants have since this disaster- and that sewage gets routinely dumped in the sea even when the sewers aren't dealing with a 10 meter tsunami.
It will truly suck if those nuclear plants turn into a major disaster- but then you can throw it on the pile of hundreds of other major disasters Japan is currently faced with.
Presumably the company who actually programmed and maintained the service needs a cut of the profits to make it worth their while. More so, I'd say, than the company that just alllows your programme to be installed on their computer.
But the point is, if the service wants 30%, and Apple wants 30%, you quickly reach a point where the service isn't profitable. That's certainly true of the wafer thin margins in daily news publishing.
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software. Using OO Writer instead of Word for example. Sure, sounds simple, the nerds can probably fgure it out without blinking, but it is all the NON-NERDS who make it a very expensive idea to test. They all have to be trained, they lose some productivity for a while, they have to learn how to do new tricks that might be application specific and the like.
That is the problem with migrating to any new software, regardless of whether it's open or proprietary.
Unless we're really suggesting that UK government (and the rest) should never consider changing to a new software package, even a far cheaper and superior one, ever again (which I'm guessing is not what a business lobby group like the BSA wants) then that line of argument is moot.
The hope is that the LHC not only doesn't see supersymmetry but *does* see something utterly unexpected. That's what I want from it. (Actually I want specifically no Higg's boson, and no supersymmetry.) Something unpredicted would rule out supersymmetry not least because any supersymmetric model that could account for it would be a posteriori -- constructed purely to do that and most likely grossly ugly as a result. By definition something unexpected is not a straight prediction of supersymmetric theories, and any model constructed purely to explain it will be under suspicion.
Two scientists are shipwrecked in a distant land, one a biologist and the other a physicist. They encounter a strange creature with the body of an otter, the beak of a duck, spurs like viper's fangs, and feet like a seal's. The biologist exclaims "My word, we've discovered a whole new species!" "Don't be ridiculous", the physicist replies, "you've just decided that to fit your observations- if you were a real scientist, you would have predicted it!"
The "sling shots" are to lose momentum, rather than gain it. As far as I understand it, MESSENGER used a (relatively distant) orbital pass of Mecury to slow down, allowing it to enter it's lower altitude orbit on a later pass.
More of a fenced garden- you can see the borders where you'll find pretty, well tended stuff, but you're free to wander off somewhere else at any time.
The point of a walled garden is that you can't get over the walls.
I wonder what the yearly profts are on 8-track sales these days?
When a new, better format is launched, people tend to abandon the old format. CDs killed off cassettes (and to a lesser extent vinyl), and now digital audio is killing of CDs.
Digital music is a game changer. The majority of the costs of old-style formats dissapears, for one. People simply won't be willing to spend £15 on a newly released album in digital format, whereas they would on CD.
The music industry cocked up at the start of the digital revolution by failing to get with the programme and producing decen revenue strams. Instead of HMV or Sony being as dominant in internet sales as they were in conventional sales, instead we've got a whole bunch of new-media companies controlling the market (Google, Apple, Spotify, etc,). They now control the price and distribution (and are making tidy profits, in their own ways), and there's no way for the old-media companies to wrest back control.
No-one cried when the buggy-whip manufacturers finally went under- capitalism should polish off these dinosaurs too, and leave the way clear for companies that know how to play the new games.
NATO could act alone, using oil interests as a motive.
In theory, NATO is supposed to act in defence of its members and their stability. Disrupting the oild supply of most of the members could be weasled as an excuse to act. They're unlikely to sotrm in to oust Gaddafi (or, for that matter, crush the revolutionaries) as that would be a legal headache orders of magnitude more painful than the Iraq fiasco. But there might be a role for NATO if the country descends into blood-soaked chaos, with their "peacekeeper" hat on.
Although to be honest, if the place goes that far down the drain, China/Russia/etc. would probably remove the blocks. They don't like what they see as meddling in a dictator's affairs, but they're not monsters and have backed peacekeeping taskforces in the past.
For the record, Libya's UN ambassadors have already quit the Gadaffi regime- they did so as soon as he committed warcrimes against the Libyan populace. And looking at the list of members, they probably are about as low as it goes (there are a few other unsavoury characters, such as Saudi or China, but none that I would really call worse).
Not that I'm really trying to defend the UNHRC; even as a (moderate, hopelessly optimistic) supporter of the UN, I think it's a religion-plugging, Israel-obsessed, ineffective joke.
The damned place is on the brink of civil war, with angry mobs and half the army on one side, smaller mobs with the rest of the army and some foreign mercenaries on the other. Do you realy think handing out assult rifles at the dockside to whoever wants one is really the best idea? Are you the kind of person who thinkgs the best way to clear up a petrol spill at a filling station is with matches?
The state has a "profit motive" too. If they can do what they want to do cheaply, they'll have more money to spend. Each department has a motive for paying their employees less, working them harder, skimping on office maintenance, etc.
RE:TFA; in my last job, every single external website was blocked by default EXCEPT for the union site. But as I've posted before, attitudes to union membership seems very different here in the UK to the impression I get of it from the US.
Google is still untouchably dominant in search (their bread and butter). They're still the number one in online advertising (their juicy, profit making sandwich filling). Their mobile OS is now outselling most of their rivals (er... their sturdy lunchbox? yeah, I'm going to leave this analogy now). One of their executives arguably just triggered the overthrow of the Egyptian dictatorship (how many Silicon Valley firms can say that?). They're incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful, and have (moderately succesful) toes in almost every aspect of online life (with the possible exception of social networking).
So they've not crushed Facebook or Twitter under their thumb, and Apple are still making a killing in the mobile space, and Microsoft are still stubbornly clinging to their share of the web search market. They're still doing pretty darned well, by most standards.
That is, alas, not true. The suggestion is to move all times forward an hour, putting the UK in line with Central European Time (GMT+1 in winter, GMT+2 in summer). An interesting comparison of the "new" sunrise and sunset times for peaks of summer and winter is on the BBC site:
They're not, they're talking about moving the whole shebang forward an hour to match Central European Time (so winter would be GMT+1, summer GMT+2).
The main complaints are coming from the north of the country (Scotland especially, but north England and Northern Ireland too), where sunrise in winter starts heading into Arctic Circle territory. Sunrise in Edinburgh starts looking close to 10 o'clock at the peak of winter. Not a great deal of fun. And while we're on the subject, sunset in summer for Edinburgh would end up the wrong side of 11 o'clock at night, which is less important but still weird.
I'm not really convinced of the benefits either. I'm not sure I understand how they think tourism would be improved by an extra hour of evening daylight. I mean, it's not like the people curtail the kind of activities they get up to at 10 o'clock at night just because the sun's gone down...
I'm in the sunny south, so it doesn't profoundly affect me personally really. But still, colour me sceptical.
Admittedly it's been a while since college, but I seem to remember that that's incorrect.
At the time, there was no notion of intellectual property. The playwright would deliver a manuscript to the playhouse owner, and that manuscript would be protected by all the normal laws of physical property (theft,destruction of property, etc.). However making copies would be fine (if you could get access to the thing without breaking any laws, obviously), copying out verbatim after watching a performance wasn't against any rules, and there was no reason not to make derivative works (indeed, all the best works WERE derivative works).
Shakespeare operated in an environment where copyright rules as we know them today didn't exist, and he still created beautiful works prolifically, as did vast swathes of contempories. Bearing in mind the world's near total illiteracy and lack of printing or communication technologies, that period created perhaps disproportionately more great works in the English language than any other since.
The currency in the US (or UK, Germany, Japan, etc.) is controlled (to whatever extent it is possible to control it) by some guys who act on behalf of the guys that have been democratically elected. You might have complaints about how democratic any of those systems really are, but that's somewhat a different and deeper problem, not specifically related to currencies.
Gold-backed currencies are still able to be manipulated- you just don't get to decide who does the manipulating. Lets say the US dollar were gold-backed. What happens if someone like China finds a colossal gold deposit; if they so choose, they could flood the market and crash the value of the dollar. Or alternatively hoard gold / scale back mining and watch as the value of the dollar sky-rockets. Do you really think that the Chinese government are a better bunch to have in control of the US currency than the US government?
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I replaced my both my desktop and my laptop is when both of them were knackered from punishing overuse (9 years and 5 years respectively). Same goes for my last phone, and my last TV. If the only replacement computers available were essentially the same as my old ones, I'd still have replaced them, the same as I would a broken oven with a new (but not substantially improved) oven. And incidentally, the biggest difference between my new CPUs and the old CPUs were in the number of cores- something which Moore's Law doesn't specifically deal with- the computers of the future might be 32 core monstrosities, with 8 bits or silicone wired up with optical connectors.
The industry won't collapse, although it might have to slow down as the replacement cycle eases up. And there are lots of other components (internal connectors and whatnot) that can be incrementally improved for the computerphiles. Alas, computerphiles might even end up down the same dark route as audiophiles, with their magic-coated copper wiring.
I wonder if he can sue Brian Aitken (and other defendants) for causing him to be fired? Surely the grounding for such a suit is on no shakier ground than the one in TFA.
It's probably more fair to say that Apple / Google got moms, sisters, grandfathers, and jocks & cheerleaders, executives, and preachers playing, by giving each and every one of them a games console in their pocket. Its far easier to sell a game to someone if they already own the console than it is to sell them specialist equipment (a la Nintendo or Sony) first.
Well yeah, but I doubt anynoe would disagree with "overhyped". Its essentially the same catapult-the-castle game that's been around for years. Its pretty, polished, funny, and very long- worth every penny I think. But its hardly groundbreaking.
Talking about it like its going to be the "next generation of gaming" is almost as stupid as the Guitar Hero execs claiming their game was "the future of listening to music" (and we all know how that one worked out).
This is essentially the same as those patents that go "[anything] on a computer" or "[anything] over the internet".
Libel (or it's close relative slander) is what you're doing if you say something untrue and damaging about another person in a way that will cause them negative effects. It doesn't matter if its in a newspaper, or on the radio, on Twitter or in fucking sky writing- libel is libel.
It certainly doesn't need a new word for every branded product its possible to libel with.
If it takes one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded to knock a nuclear plant over, I think we're still relatively in the clear. Oil refineries seem to go pop the moment someone sets a firework off too close to one (and that smoke isn't exactly clean you know)- and do you want to know what's happened to the Japanese sewage processing system? Coal power plants throw out more carcinogenic toxins in a regular working day than those plants have since this disaster- and that sewage gets routinely dumped in the sea even when the sewers aren't dealing with a 10 meter tsunami.
It will truly suck if those nuclear plants turn into a major disaster- but then you can throw it on the pile of hundreds of other major disasters Japan is currently faced with.
Does the panic button flood the chamber with magma?
Apple (dare I say it) markets to an even less tech-savvy demographic than MS, and they've rarely ever had "misses" as painful as some of the MS ones.
Not that I'm an MS hater, mind- they've produced some good nuggets over the years. It'd be much easier to like them if it weren't for all the evil.
Presumably the company who actually programmed and maintained the service needs a cut of the profits to make it worth their while. More so, I'd say, than the company that just alllows your programme to be installed on their computer.
But the point is, if the service wants 30%, and Apple wants 30%, you quickly reach a point where the service isn't profitable. That's certainly true of the wafer thin margins in daily news publishing.
The problem is all about training people on how to use the new software. Using OO Writer instead of Word for example. Sure, sounds simple, the nerds can probably fgure it out without blinking, but it is all the NON-NERDS who make it a very expensive idea to test. They all have to be trained, they lose some productivity for a while, they have to learn how to do new tricks that might be application specific and the like.
That is the problem with migrating to any new software, regardless of whether it's open or proprietary.
Unless we're really suggesting that UK government (and the rest) should never consider changing to a new software package, even a far cheaper and superior one, ever again (which I'm guessing is not what a business lobby group like the BSA wants) then that line of argument is moot.
The hope is that the LHC not only doesn't see supersymmetry but *does* see something utterly unexpected. That's what I want from it. (Actually I want specifically no Higg's boson, and no supersymmetry.) Something unpredicted would rule out supersymmetry not least because any supersymmetric model that could account for it would be a posteriori -- constructed purely to do that and most likely grossly ugly as a result. By definition something unexpected is not a straight prediction of supersymmetric theories, and any model constructed purely to explain it will be under suspicion.
Two scientists are shipwrecked in a distant land, one a biologist and the other a physicist. They encounter a strange creature with the body of an otter, the beak of a duck, spurs like viper's fangs, and feet like a seal's. The biologist exclaims "My word, we've discovered a whole new species!" "Don't be ridiculous", the physicist replies, "you've just decided that to fit your observations- if you were a real scientist, you would have predicted it!"
Yep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MESSENGER#Launch_and_trajectory
The "sling shots" are to lose momentum, rather than gain it. As far as I understand it, MESSENGER used a (relatively distant) orbital pass of Mecury to slow down, allowing it to enter it's lower altitude orbit on a later pass.
IANARocketScientist, though.
More of a fenced garden- you can see the borders where you'll find pretty, well tended stuff, but you're free to wander off somewhere else at any time.
The point of a walled garden is that you can't get over the walls.
I wonder what the yearly profts are on 8-track sales these days?
When a new, better format is launched, people tend to abandon the old format. CDs killed off cassettes (and to a lesser extent vinyl), and now digital audio is killing of CDs.
Digital music is a game changer. The majority of the costs of old-style formats dissapears, for one. People simply won't be willing to spend £15 on a newly released album in digital format, whereas they would on CD.
The music industry cocked up at the start of the digital revolution by failing to get with the programme and producing decen revenue strams. Instead of HMV or Sony being as dominant in internet sales as they were in conventional sales, instead we've got a whole bunch of new-media companies controlling the market (Google, Apple, Spotify, etc,). They now control the price and distribution (and are making tidy profits, in their own ways), and there's no way for the old-media companies to wrest back control.
No-one cried when the buggy-whip manufacturers finally went under- capitalism should polish off these dinosaurs too, and leave the way clear for companies that know how to play the new games.
NATO could act alone, using oil interests as a motive.
In theory, NATO is supposed to act in defence of its members and their stability. Disrupting the oild supply of most of the members could be weasled as an excuse to act. They're unlikely to sotrm in to oust Gaddafi (or, for that matter, crush the revolutionaries) as that would be a legal headache orders of magnitude more painful than the Iraq fiasco. But there might be a role for NATO if the country descends into blood-soaked chaos, with their "peacekeeper" hat on.
Although to be honest, if the place goes that far down the drain, China/Russia/etc. would probably remove the blocks. They don't like what they see as meddling in a dictator's affairs, but they're not monsters and have backed peacekeeping taskforces in the past.
For the record, Libya's UN ambassadors have already quit the Gadaffi regime- they did so as soon as he committed warcrimes against the Libyan populace. And looking at the list of members, they probably are about as low as it goes (there are a few other unsavoury characters, such as Saudi or China, but none that I would really call worse).
Not that I'm really trying to defend the UNHRC; even as a (moderate, hopelessly optimistic) supporter of the UN, I think it's a religion-plugging, Israel-obsessed, ineffective joke.
The damned place is on the brink of civil war, with angry mobs and half the army on one side, smaller mobs with the rest of the army and some foreign mercenaries on the other. Do you realy think handing out assult rifles at the dockside to whoever wants one is really the best idea? Are you the kind of person who thinkgs the best way to clear up a petrol spill at a filling station is with matches?
Actually, don't answer that.
Oddly, I believe Ubuntu will do you full commercial support for UltraSPARC.
Slim pickings, admittedly, but still.
Politicians are full of shit.
As, coincidentally, is your main cavity.
The state has a "profit motive" too. If they can do what they want to do cheaply, they'll have more money to spend. Each department has a motive for paying their employees less, working them harder, skimping on office maintenance, etc.
RE:TFA; in my last job, every single external website was blocked by default EXCEPT for the union site. But as I've posted before, attitudes to union membership seems very different here in the UK to the impression I get of it from the US.
It's a troll, and not a particularly clever one.
Google is still untouchably dominant in search (their bread and butter). They're still the number one in online advertising (their juicy, profit making sandwich filling). Their mobile OS is now outselling most of their rivals (er... their sturdy lunchbox? yeah, I'm going to leave this analogy now). One of their executives arguably just triggered the overthrow of the Egyptian dictatorship (how many Silicon Valley firms can say that?). They're incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful, and have (moderately succesful) toes in almost every aspect of online life (with the possible exception of social networking).
So they've not crushed Facebook or Twitter under their thumb, and Apple are still making a killing in the mobile space, and Microsoft are still stubbornly clinging to their share of the web search market. They're still doing pretty darned well, by most standards.
That is, alas, not true. The suggestion is to move all times forward an hour, putting the UK in line with Central European Time (GMT+1 in winter, GMT+2 in summer). An interesting comparison of the "new" sunrise and sunset times for peaks of summer and winter is on the BBC site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12523164
They're not, they're talking about moving the whole shebang forward an hour to match Central European Time (so winter would be GMT+1, summer GMT+2).
The main complaints are coming from the north of the country (Scotland especially, but north England and Northern Ireland too), where sunrise in winter starts heading into Arctic Circle territory. Sunrise in Edinburgh starts looking close to 10 o'clock at the peak of winter. Not a great deal of fun. And while we're on the subject, sunset in summer for Edinburgh would end up the wrong side of 11 o'clock at night, which is less important but still weird.
I'm not really convinced of the benefits either. I'm not sure I understand how they think tourism would be improved by an extra hour of evening daylight. I mean, it's not like the people curtail the kind of activities they get up to at 10 o'clock at night just because the sun's gone down...
I'm in the sunny south, so it doesn't profoundly affect me personally really. But still, colour me sceptical.
Admittedly it's been a while since college, but I seem to remember that that's incorrect.
At the time, there was no notion of intellectual property. The playwright would deliver a manuscript to the playhouse owner, and that manuscript would be protected by all the normal laws of physical property (theft,destruction of property, etc.). However making copies would be fine (if you could get access to the thing without breaking any laws, obviously), copying out verbatim after watching a performance wasn't against any rules, and there was no reason not to make derivative works (indeed, all the best works WERE derivative works).
Shakespeare operated in an environment where copyright rules as we know them today didn't exist, and he still created beautiful works prolifically, as did vast swathes of contempories. Bearing in mind the world's near total illiteracy and lack of printing or communication technologies, that period created perhaps disproportionately more great works in the English language than any other since.
The currency in the US (or UK, Germany, Japan, etc.) is controlled (to whatever extent it is possible to control it) by some guys who act on behalf of the guys that have been democratically elected. You might have complaints about how democratic any of those systems really are, but that's somewhat a different and deeper problem, not specifically related to currencies.
Gold-backed currencies are still able to be manipulated- you just don't get to decide who does the manipulating. Lets say the US dollar were gold-backed. What happens if someone like China finds a colossal gold deposit; if they so choose, they could flood the market and crash the value of the dollar. Or alternatively hoard gold / scale back mining and watch as the value of the dollar sky-rockets. Do you really think that the Chinese government are a better bunch to have in control of the US currency than the US government?