If notices had to be signed as accurate by an officer of the company that sent them under threat of perjury, and if it was possible for someone who was affected by a bogus notice to then start the wheels on a process that would see said officer of the company end up doing a few days in jail for that perjury I would think we'd see bogus notices drop to near zero.
But of course that would only happen in a world where the lawmakers actually cared about doing what was right, not what their donors wanted.
Don't worry so much. This stuff is going to gradually come along, not show up one day out of the blue which will allow many people to transition to different roles.
On the practical side, firstly this is Microsoft so I'll be amazed if they have anything remotely usable in 10 years. Secondly, even after several years of iterations of this type of software being released it's still not going to be magic. We're not talking 24th century Star Trek computer AI here where you walk into the holodeck and tell the computer to make you a Victorian London simulation and it fills in everything from that one sentence.
Take any software you can think of, even a simple phone app and describe to yourself what it does and the workflows and data flows involved. That's the bare minimum of what you'd need to define for this software, then it would take a stab at it, probably get an alarmingly large chunk of it wrong and then you'd need to go through an iterative process with it to fix everything it got wrong. Sounds rather like what programmers do now, but with a different set of tools, no?
It really depends on how much money we're talking here. One person in the article earned at 16x multiplier on unspecified bonuses, and large salaries to boot. I personally do love my job in IT, but if I was moved to a position where I was doing the same type of work but earning 2x what I do today and earning crazy bonuses to boot, it would only take me about 5-6 years to acquire enough money to have everything paid off and enough alternate passive revenue coming in to never need to work another minute in my life. And again even though I love my job, when that moment happened I'd be out the door. And off to work on something else, or volunteer, or take a 6 month trip around the world on the cheap, or (fill in the blank).
There's a massive difference between liking what liking what you do for a living (with good people at the place of work), and doing what you want when you don't have to make a living.
> removing the possibility that their ideas could be challenged in an open forum.
You really believe that was what was happening there instead of it just being an echo chamber where dissenting opinion was downvoted to oblivion? You still believe in Santa too?
Easy. You get to be one of the guys they hire to fix that crap code and process. EVERY project I have ever worked on with overseas code resources has had massive problems with the quality of code that is returned.
The same cycle always holds true: First the overseas resources are given full tasks to complete. Then the returned code is total shit and doesn't do what was asked. So the tasks are broken down into smaller chunks, and those still don't work. Then the resources are asked to provide procedures and subroutines written to a rigid spec, and 70% of those finally work. Then the company realizes that they're paying experienced software engineers over here to spend hours a day breaking things into small enough chunks that the overseas people will *probably* not screw up and the amount of time wasted is enormous, plus those software engineers could just do it themselves in a fraction of the time.
So the company stops offshoring after wasting a couple of years of time and god knows how much money.
Oh go pound sand, Anonymous COWARD. We went through the anti-facts, don't bother with data stylings of The Harper Conservatives in Canada and we're still undoing the damage more than a year after he was shown the door. This sounds like it's going to be considerably worse than what Steve-O could get away with up here.
On the plus side, Canada will probably be able to reverse that STEM brain drain to the US at last. So we got that going for us.
Or at least I've been seeing these headlines for that long. Guess what? Still here, and not going anywhere. Tablets, phones, etc, are CONSUMPTION devices for information and media. People still need PCs to make things. Or even type long emails. Seriously, try typing a couple of paragraphs on a tablet, it's torture. If I have to send an email for work and it'll be longer than a quick note or reply I wait until I get to my desk to do it instead of trying my patience on my tablet.
> in practice takes roughly 10 years for the savings to materialize... and by then, you've already swapped your CPU 3 times
Actually these days, not so much. I've got an i5 2500K that I bought in early 2011 in my home workstation, and I have no plans to replace it any time soon. My general rule is that I won't replace a processor unless it's both old and I will get around twice the performance of the old one. Looking at what I'd replace it with if I was to build the same machine today - an i5 6600K - there's just no point. I'd get about a 50% boost over what I have, and what I have is already more processor than I need for just about anything I do with the exception of gaming. And for that the money is better spent on a new video card, and that's what I do replace every 2-3 years.
In the past with Moore's Law that was around every 2 years, but Intel's been stagnant on progress for so long, they're now running ads like this:
http://www.ncix.com/article/intel_kabylake.htm
Oooo... up to 28% better performance than a 3 year old part! And all you need to do is replace your chip, motherboard and probably RAM. Pass. Instead of spending $600 on all that I'll just drop $200 on last year's hot high end video card.
It is possible to get the best of both worlds. I picked up some inexpensive but solid August headphones on Amazon last year for $50. They are wireless but also have a jack to plug in a 3.5mm plug to make them wired, which I use when I fly. The battery lasts at least a week of my normal use on the train as well so it's not like I need to charge it often.
Sailor? I'm talking about the guys who designed and built the ship. You can have the best captain and crew in the known universe but they're useless as tits on a mule if they're sitting on logs on a beach staring at an empty dock.
> Don't be jealous because someone else makes more money than you. You sound like one of those feminists who got a degree in Women's Studies yet complains that there's a paucity of women in STEM.
Awfully judge-y aren't we? You sound like one of those salestwats who used to sit in the cubicles across the hall whining about my group not working fast enough to push the next rev out before the end of quarter and you might miss your bonuses. While we worked 12-14 hour days for weeks on end and didn't get bonuses.
> Why don't you go do what Tim Cook does?
Hey, that's a great idea. Every single person in the world should go do what Tim Cook does and do nothing else. Surely that will never be a problem as all those products he sells just magically come into existence and replicate themselves, then transport themselves to packaging and to stores! Brilliant!
Which highlights another tragedy of business. Behind every great company that has massive success and beloved products, you'll find a cadre of engineers that actually created the products who get paid relative peanuts compared to the suits.
I think it's complete overkill on anything less than a 27" personally. Even then, I have a 2560x1440 32" I use and find that's pretty much the perfect balance for me.
> Basically it does not matter if the battery pack for my house weighs 500kg or 10 tonnes
Sure it does. You think 4 tons of lead is cheap? Not to mention all of the racking and support structure you're going to need to build to properly house that much battery capacity in an easily maintainable fashion? Or were you just planning on covering your basement floor with dozens of lead acid batteries? Got a proper ventilation system for that if you're not using sealed cells?
That's not really what the "question" in the article was implying though. I completely agree that desktops are going to be a thing for ages to come yet (and I have 2), but the question was lazily trying to point out that performance increases on the desktop are seemingly coming to a halt for newer chips. This isn't really a surprise for me, as I've got a 5 year old i5 2500K in my home machine that is keeping pace with even the newer games just fine as long as I spend a couple hundred bucks every 2-3 years on a new video card. Same at the office. We went to assess our 3 year upgrade cycle for workstations and realized we'd only get a 20-25% boost in peak processing power by spending our full per-person budget on new machines and instead decided to keep what we have, switch all boot OS drives to SSD, max out the RAM and get 32" monitors and we STILL have money left over.
I'm not sure if AMD's got anything in the pipeline that can shake things up, but if they do, this is their chance (again).
That's a terrible analogy. When you go to a restaurant you only "own" the food on your plate and your body gets rid of it a few hours later. A TV isn't a single serving electronic you have around for a few hours.
More like you bought a car so maybe you should be able to do with it as you please, and even have the right to repair it yourself?
But this isn't Atari 2600 graphics.... It's a Tegra X1, which was quite frankly beating the piss out of cheap Intel onboard graphics in desktops the same year it was released. Nintendo's consoles also cost considerably less than the competition and part of that is the price of the hardware because they use mature hardware that can be had cheap instead of bleeding edge tech that they'll pay a prince's ransom on and maybe even lose money on each console sold until the tech moves lower in the food chain, like Sony did last time around. Sony lost money on each PS3 sold for 4 YEARS. And if you look at Sony The Company as a whole right now, that probably wasn't a great idea in the long run. Nintendo doesn't want to be in a position of burning money like that.
Ah well then. Color me a bit disillusioned as when I saw these showing up a couple of years ago I thought it was new tech for them. Kind of depressing to hear it was in (beta?) in the 90s so they have a 20 year rollout window.
I think some people will still own self-driving cars, but the percentage is going to be waaaaay lower than current ownership stats. I myself have a car that I bought when I lived at a house that I'm still paying off, but now I live right next to very effective mass transit. Between payments, insurance, maintenance and (occasional) fillups, I am paying about $600 a month for a car I drive maybe 1-2 hours (actual behind the wheel time) a week on the weekend. If there was a self driving car service that cost $20 a month to subscribe and then $10/hr thereafter for actual use, I'd sell my car and jump on that like a lawyer at a plane crash.
I think it has, I remember the old machines would fill the cup but not much else. Now they can do a whole order's drinks all autonomously, at least for the drive thrus. You can see it when you drive up, there's a machine that automatically drops a cup onto a conveyer, adds ice, then fills the drink and has it ready for the attendant to put a lid on and hand it out. It seems to be able to queue up several drinks at once as well on the conveyer, so it'll do a whole car's order in about 30 seconds.
So people who intend to cause harm to an epileptic should be protected by companies? Interesting. What if you got a letterbomb via UPS and UPS was refusing to hand over info on the sender to the FBI, would you laud them for that?
Horseshit. In my company we spend the same money on a "workstation" for a user, be it a desktop of a laptop. My desktop has way more performance and functionality than its equivalent priced laptop counterpart.
> a laptop may let you remain productive during the commute, which ideally should let you cut an hour off your time at the office.
Ha. Ha. HAAAA! Pull the other one, it plays Jingle Bells. I do some work on transit but try to avoid it unless necessary. Going home is time to relax, not put in more unpaid time.
Slashdot Mirror
If notices had to be signed as accurate by an officer of the company that sent them under threat of perjury, and if it was possible for someone who was affected by a bogus notice to then start the wheels on a process that would see said officer of the company end up doing a few days in jail for that perjury I would think we'd see bogus notices drop to near zero.
But of course that would only happen in a world where the lawmakers actually cared about doing what was right, not what their donors wanted.
Don't worry so much. This stuff is going to gradually come along, not show up one day out of the blue which will allow many people to transition to different roles.
On the practical side, firstly this is Microsoft so I'll be amazed if they have anything remotely usable in 10 years. Secondly, even after several years of iterations of this type of software being released it's still not going to be magic. We're not talking 24th century Star Trek computer AI here where you walk into the holodeck and tell the computer to make you a Victorian London simulation and it fills in everything from that one sentence.
Take any software you can think of, even a simple phone app and describe to yourself what it does and the workflows and data flows involved. That's the bare minimum of what you'd need to define for this software, then it would take a stab at it, probably get an alarmingly large chunk of it wrong and then you'd need to go through an iterative process with it to fix everything it got wrong. Sounds rather like what programmers do now, but with a different set of tools, no?
It really depends on how much money we're talking here. One person in the article earned at 16x multiplier on unspecified bonuses, and large salaries to boot. I personally do love my job in IT, but if I was moved to a position where I was doing the same type of work but earning 2x what I do today and earning crazy bonuses to boot, it would only take me about 5-6 years to acquire enough money to have everything paid off and enough alternate passive revenue coming in to never need to work another minute in my life. And again even though I love my job, when that moment happened I'd be out the door. And off to work on something else, or volunteer, or take a 6 month trip around the world on the cheap, or (fill in the blank).
There's a massive difference between liking what liking what you do for a living (with good people at the place of work), and doing what you want when you don't have to make a living.
> removing the possibility that their ideas could be challenged in an open forum.
You really believe that was what was happening there instead of it just being an echo chamber where dissenting opinion was downvoted to oblivion? You still believe in Santa too?
Easy. You get to be one of the guys they hire to fix that crap code and process. EVERY project I have ever worked on with overseas code resources has had massive problems with the quality of code that is returned.
The same cycle always holds true: First the overseas resources are given full tasks to complete. Then the returned code is total shit and doesn't do what was asked. So the tasks are broken down into smaller chunks, and those still don't work. Then the resources are asked to provide procedures and subroutines written to a rigid spec, and 70% of those finally work. Then the company realizes that they're paying experienced software engineers over here to spend hours a day breaking things into small enough chunks that the overseas people will *probably* not screw up and the amount of time wasted is enormous, plus those software engineers could just do it themselves in a fraction of the time.
So the company stops offshoring after wasting a couple of years of time and god knows how much money.
Oh go pound sand, Anonymous COWARD. We went through the anti-facts, don't bother with data stylings of The Harper Conservatives in Canada and we're still undoing the damage more than a year after he was shown the door. This sounds like it's going to be considerably worse than what Steve-O could get away with up here.
On the plus side, Canada will probably be able to reverse that STEM brain drain to the US at last. So we got that going for us.
Or at least I've been seeing these headlines for that long. Guess what? Still here, and not going anywhere. Tablets, phones, etc, are CONSUMPTION devices for information and media. People still need PCs to make things. Or even type long emails. Seriously, try typing a couple of paragraphs on a tablet, it's torture. If I have to send an email for work and it'll be longer than a quick note or reply I wait until I get to my desk to do it instead of trying my patience on my tablet.
> in practice takes roughly 10 years for the savings to materialize... and by then, you've already swapped your CPU 3 times
Actually these days, not so much. I've got an i5 2500K that I bought in early 2011 in my home workstation, and I have no plans to replace it any time soon. My general rule is that I won't replace a processor unless it's both old and I will get around twice the performance of the old one. Looking at what I'd replace it with if I was to build the same machine today - an i5 6600K - there's just no point. I'd get about a 50% boost over what I have, and what I have is already more processor than I need for just about anything I do with the exception of gaming. And for that the money is better spent on a new video card, and that's what I do replace every 2-3 years.
In the past with Moore's Law that was around every 2 years, but Intel's been stagnant on progress for so long, they're now running ads like this:
http://www.ncix.com/article/intel_kabylake.htm
Oooo... up to 28% better performance than a 3 year old part! And all you need to do is replace your chip, motherboard and probably RAM. Pass. Instead of spending $600 on all that I'll just drop $200 on last year's hot high end video card.
It is possible to get the best of both worlds. I picked up some inexpensive but solid August headphones on Amazon last year for $50. They are wireless but also have a jack to plug in a 3.5mm plug to make them wired, which I use when I fly. The battery lasts at least a week of my normal use on the train as well so it's not like I need to charge it often.
300K range? Peasant.
Sailor? I'm talking about the guys who designed and built the ship. You can have the best captain and crew in the known universe but they're useless as tits on a mule if they're sitting on logs on a beach staring at an empty dock.
> Don't be jealous because someone else makes more money than you. You sound like one of those feminists who got a degree in Women's Studies yet complains that there's a paucity of women in STEM.
Awfully judge-y aren't we? You sound like one of those salestwats who used to sit in the cubicles across the hall whining about my group not working fast enough to push the next rev out before the end of quarter and you might miss your bonuses. While we worked 12-14 hour days for weeks on end and didn't get bonuses.
> Why don't you go do what Tim Cook does?
Hey, that's a great idea. Every single person in the world should go do what Tim Cook does and do nothing else. Surely that will never be a problem as all those products he sells just magically come into existence and replicate themselves, then transport themselves to packaging and to stores! Brilliant!
> Woz was a great engineer,
Which highlights another tragedy of business. Behind every great company that has massive success and beloved products, you'll find a cadre of engineers that actually created the products who get paid relative peanuts compared to the suits.
I think it's complete overkill on anything less than a 27" personally. Even then, I have a 2560x1440 32" I use and find that's pretty much the perfect balance for me.
> 4 tons of lead is relatively cheap if you buy it as scrap.
Yes, but it's not being bought as scrap, it's being bought as part of batteries.
As for the racking, you'd need a lot of racks. These would do:
https://www.grainger.com/product/EDSAL-Bulk-Storage-Rack-Starter-WP110458/_/N-mk0/Ntt-wire+racks?sst=subset&ts_optout=true&s_pp=false&picUrl=//static.grainger.com/rp/s/is/image/Grainger/12M959_AS01?$smthumb$&breadcrumbCatId=4572
But fitting 15 batteries per rack @170 lbs each, we're looking at 12 60" racks. I'll take a couple of powerwalls instead, thanks.
> Basically it does not matter if the battery pack for my house weighs 500kg or 10 tonnes
Sure it does. You think 4 tons of lead is cheap? Not to mention all of the racking and support structure you're going to need to build to properly house that much battery capacity in an easily maintainable fashion? Or were you just planning on covering your basement floor with dozens of lead acid batteries? Got a proper ventilation system for that if you're not using sealed cells?
Actually knowing Musk I am sure it's on the radar, but whether he plans on steering toward that blip any time soon is another matter.
That's not really what the "question" in the article was implying though. I completely agree that desktops are going to be a thing for ages to come yet (and I have 2), but the question was lazily trying to point out that performance increases on the desktop are seemingly coming to a halt for newer chips. This isn't really a surprise for me, as I've got a 5 year old i5 2500K in my home machine that is keeping pace with even the newer games just fine as long as I spend a couple hundred bucks every 2-3 years on a new video card. Same at the office. We went to assess our 3 year upgrade cycle for workstations and realized we'd only get a 20-25% boost in peak processing power by spending our full per-person budget on new machines and instead decided to keep what we have, switch all boot OS drives to SSD, max out the RAM and get 32" monitors and we STILL have money left over.
I'm not sure if AMD's got anything in the pipeline that can shake things up, but if they do, this is their chance (again).
That's a terrible analogy. When you go to a restaurant you only "own" the food on your plate and your body gets rid of it a few hours later. A TV isn't a single serving electronic you have around for a few hours.
More like you bought a car so maybe you should be able to do with it as you please, and even have the right to repair it yourself?
But this isn't Atari 2600 graphics.... It's a Tegra X1, which was quite frankly beating the piss out of cheap Intel onboard graphics in desktops the same year it was released. Nintendo's consoles also cost considerably less than the competition and part of that is the price of the hardware because they use mature hardware that can be had cheap instead of bleeding edge tech that they'll pay a prince's ransom on and maybe even lose money on each console sold until the tech moves lower in the food chain, like Sony did last time around. Sony lost money on each PS3 sold for 4 YEARS. And if you look at Sony The Company as a whole right now, that probably wasn't a great idea in the long run. Nintendo doesn't want to be in a position of burning money like that.
Ah well then. Color me a bit disillusioned as when I saw these showing up a couple of years ago I thought it was new tech for them. Kind of depressing to hear it was in (beta?) in the 90s so they have a 20 year rollout window.
I think some people will still own self-driving cars, but the percentage is going to be waaaaay lower than current ownership stats. I myself have a car that I bought when I lived at a house that I'm still paying off, but now I live right next to very effective mass transit. Between payments, insurance, maintenance and (occasional) fillups, I am paying about $600 a month for a car I drive maybe 1-2 hours (actual behind the wheel time) a week on the weekend. If there was a self driving car service that cost $20 a month to subscribe and then $10/hr thereafter for actual use, I'd sell my car and jump on that like a lawyer at a plane crash.
I think it has, I remember the old machines would fill the cup but not much else. Now they can do a whole order's drinks all autonomously, at least for the drive thrus. You can see it when you drive up, there's a machine that automatically drops a cup onto a conveyer, adds ice, then fills the drink and has it ready for the attendant to put a lid on and hand it out. It seems to be able to queue up several drinks at once as well on the conveyer, so it'll do a whole car's order in about 30 seconds.
Video of one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=310pa2k8ja0
So people who intend to cause harm to an epileptic should be protected by companies? Interesting. What if you got a letterbomb via UPS and UPS was refusing to hand over info on the sender to the FBI, would you laud them for that?
Horseshit. In my company we spend the same money on a "workstation" for a user, be it a desktop of a laptop. My desktop has way more performance and functionality than its equivalent priced laptop counterpart.
> a laptop may let you remain productive during the commute, which ideally should let you cut an hour off your time at the office.
Ha. Ha. HAAAA! Pull the other one, it plays Jingle Bells. I do some work on transit but try to avoid it unless necessary. Going home is time to relax, not put in more unpaid time.