And that's 100% legal for you to do as long as you don't use trademarked terms in the process, so fire up the IDE and start coding your "Legend of Melda" today without fear.
Not break. Steal data from an adjacent one? Yes. And even then it's a bit of a crapshoot as to what you get, not at all the same as busting in and taking what you want.
In this day and age, 8GB *is* nothing for a phone. That barely holds the OS. I have a 16GB Android tablet and the damn thing only had 6GB free after the OS and the non-removable apps when it came out of the package. These days for an Android device 32GB is what I would consider bare minimum if you intend to use it for anything other than phone calls and texts.
> Credit unions are required to charge an opening fee of some sort.
That's not a *fee*. That's buying shares in the Union. When you close your account you have to sell the shares and you get money back for it. In my case when I joined a credit union I paid I think it was around $20 to purchase those shares. Through the last 20+ years with dividends and the share price rise, splits, new issues, etc, my credit union shares are now worth just over $300. Makes me wish I could have bought more as an investment!
The 10G was during the escape capsule emergency escape sequence so it's not expected on a normal flight. And the escape rockets only fire for a few seconds. Even someone reasonably un-fit should be able to handle 10Gs for less than 5 seconds. Wouldn't be pleasant but beats dying because of a problem with the booster.
For a similar reference, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8
is the SpaceX Dragon capsule testing its escape system. The heavy G is only felt while the engines fire, and in that video you can see it's only about 5-6 seconds' worth.
> CBS spent around 8 million dollars an episode for their star trek series.. and then didn't even put it on TV.
In the US, perhaps. Around the world, lots of channels had it on. Space in Canada for example. Ironically in the UK, Australia and most of Europe, it's on Netflix. So much for CBS All Access getting international traction it would seem.
If you think that's bad, try using some DVDs with their unskippable commercials and warnings for 5 minutes before you can watch what you want... Netflix is still a massive improvement over most other forms of consumption of media.
Why be sorry? I'm just saying you definitely didn't get all of them. We have a mainframe here that sends data on a daily basis to some of my processes and there's no plan to get rid of it in the next decade. So yes, some mainframes were retired, but there are still a large number of them out there quietly chugging along.
> if they're redundant. That's what killed mainframes.
When did that happen? My company and a ton of others that I know of still have mainframes and have zero desire to replace them with anything but another mainframe because of how entrenched the mainframes are to certain business processes. Mainframes still have an advantage in certain areas, plus in many niche applications are the only things that run 2-3 decades worth of custom business logic that would cost more in recoding and testing than just buying more mainframes.
But that's sort of apples to oranges, I was more concerned with the Xserver line where the failure rate I've observed is more like 1 in 10 over a disturbingly short timeframe of a couple of years. I shouldn't be paying more to get less reliable hardware than a whitebox server builder like Supermicro. And that's why I'll not be buying any more Lenovo Xservers.
> How come if I have a power-strip with 8 sockets I can only ever plug-in 3 damn things?
I have 11 things to plug in for all my living room multimedia... stuff. Most of them have the damn spreading wall-warts, and I have only a single standard pair outlet behind the entertainment unit for it all so it led to an octopus abomination of power bars, until I had salvation and tidiness visit me in the form factor of a 3 foot long shop power strip that I attached to the back of the entertainment unit. At last all is clean, tidy and off the floor. But NONE of that would have been necessary if I could have plugged 11 things into the standard 12 plug powerbar I had. Seriously, people shouldn't need to buy a shop power strip with 4 inches of separation between each outlet to be able to use them all.
> Cheap Chinese hardware and cheap Linux boxes made their old model obsolete.
Actually, no that did not. Them selling off their Xserver and PC/laptop lines did that. Part of the issue is quality, the same problem HP now has because of the disastrous tenure of Carly Fiorina. Companies were willing to pay more for IBM servers because of the high quality, durability and prompt/proactive service they provided on the equipment. That was their competitive advantage. You'd buy a rack of IBM boxes and you knew they'd work. When they sold off those lines to Lenovo, Lenovo cheaped out on components and now their failure rates are as high or higher than cheaper products from competitors. At this point I'd actually rate Supermicro servers from Taiwan as being superior in reliability to Lenovo Xservers, and at a fraction of the cost.
The same story went for their laptops. Thinkpads were ubiquitous with execs at the companies I worked at because they'd practically stop a bullet and keep going for years. Lenovo takes over and things get crappy, the laptops that used to last 5-7 years now last 2-4 and are flimsy in construction by comparison, despite the premium price. Then to muddy the waters further Lenovo introduces a cheaply priced line of Thinkpads which are cheap crap. The Thinkpad = quality equation no longer applies and people take their business elsewhere.
IBM had a lock in on a large chunk of the higher end server and laptop markets until their beancounters decided that a quick sale would make the year's numbers look way better. And now IBM has 2 less things going for it. At the rate they're going I wouldn't be surprised if they sell off their mainframe and Watson businesses to someone in the next couple of years. And then at that point they'll be no different from a dozen other software/consulting firms.
I've dealt with IBM on various projects for the past 20 years and what I see is they aren't retaining people any more, unlike 10-15 years ago. Each time I meet with someone from there now for even a similar piece of hardware it seems half the team I dealt with has moved on and now it's a couple of new kids in suits fresh out of college who I probably won't ever see again after this transaction. Other people I've spoken to report the same in other lines of IBM's business.
IBM is a pale shadow of their former selves, now a software and hardware reseller/consulting firm run by beancounters chasing the next quarter's numbers, institutional knowledge, experience and dependable products be damned.
> Make no mistake about it, Amazon will dole packages out to the lowest bidder
No they won't. That would require additional analysis and work on Amazon's part. What they will do instead is pay per piece at a set rate, and it's up to the companies to figure out how to make money on that. Much easier for Amazon.
> According to a person familiar with the process, the workers who fail to make their case and get their job back can still choose between severance pay or a performance-improvement plan.
So if that piece of information is true, sounds to me like there's no real harm in trying the Thunderdome as you can still choose option 1 or 2. Worth a Hail Mary, you never know, it might land.
The oversight or lack thereof that's birthed such a process though is insane.
> Hiding it in Developer Options after a big, fat disclaimer should be enough, frankly.
You'd think, but then you haven't dealt with some end users. A percentage of them would happily follow a tutorial on disabling that in order to install this "cool new book reader/movie streamer/whatever" if asked by a popup.
As for the disclaimer, I used to work at a software company for a packaged software product. The type of database the application used destroyed records immediately so unless you had a backup, the records were GONE. In order to prevent people from accidentally deleting records in this application, when you clicked delete or hit the delete key on the keyboard, the application would pop a dialog asking to confirm that you were sure you wanted to delete the selected record(s). If the user hit yes, a second bigger more scary looking dialog popped up and said effectively "This is irreversible and the records will be fucking GONE GONE GONE. Are you REALLY SURE?" *and* we moved the default focus on the button from 'yes' in the first dialog to 'no' for the second, so if someone just mindlessly rammed the enter key twice, it would back out of the delete instead of killing the records. You want to guess how many calls a day we got from distraught users frantic about restoring deleted records? A lot.
What fucking reality are you living in? Because it's not the one where the Trump administration's FCC just approved the merger in the FA over the objections of the Justice Department on the grounds it'll hurt consumers. Or the one where the Trump administration gave 1.5 Trillion in tax breaks to corporations that are busy using it to consolidate, buy up outstanding stock, buy smaller companies and gear up automation to lay people off.
For general purpose/lightweight stuff sure, but there are exceptions. I had a 2500K as my main desktop for almost 7 years, just replaced it with a Ryzen 1600 and kept my existing video card. For most stuff there was little difference, but throwing something demanding at it like running Sins of a Solar Empire with a few hundred ships going at it at once onscreen and the Ryzen blew the old 2500K away. No more stuttering, everything smoothed out. In other games it made some difference, but most of those the limit was the video card, not the processor for the underlying game code.
Another thing I notice is older boxes are OK watching 1080p content, but 4k doesn't work so well, even downscaled.
> You guys don't get it: 4 cores at 3.4Ghz vs 6 cores at 3.6Ghz makes no difference.
Horse pucky. There's a LOT of shitty bloated software out there, and for the average end user running a browser with 20 tabs open and a mail client and a music player and half dozen other things those two extra cores definitely come into play. If developers today optimized like we used to back in the 80s and early 90s, then yeah even a 5 year old processor would be overkill, but that's not the case. Each release of most software out there packs more features at the expense of efficiency. Hell, even website redesigns do that - replacing slim and fast with flashy/pretty and bloated.
> Those types of "improvements" don't matter for consumers and aren't worth the redesign
If they don't matter, why do all the other companies do them - and especially in the laptop space - get better power consumption? Plus, there are more people out there than you think who still like casual gaming who aren't going to go build a gaming rig so having those extra cores and a better IGP do make a tangible difference.
> What is different from 2016 technology from 2018?
A few things. If you buy a Skylake (2015-2016) i5 8600k you get 4 cores clocked at 3.5GHz. The Coffee Lake (2017-2018) 8600k gives you 6 cores clocked at 3.6GHz. Not earth shattering on the speed bump, but the 2 extra cores on the "same" part is nice. The Coffee Lake chip also supports a higher turbo clock speed, faster RAM, and has the next bump up in onboard graphics. And generally speaking the mobile chips of each generation usually get more energy efficient over their predecessors while keeping the same or better performance.
So while you're not getting 2-3x the performance in 2 years like the olden days of Moore, you still get improvements and better battery life. Why should consumers be happy leaving that on the table with Apple when they don't from other vendors?
> Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly.
Absolutely. We have seen this, or at least I did when I visited family in Alberta during the mid 2000s boom times. Jobs everywhere and nobody to fill them so Wendys and McDonalds were offering $15 an hour with $1000 SIGNING BONUSES on big advertising boards out in front of the stores.
I'm thinking a good chunk of these so called jobs are in reality so poorly paying and/or unstable that nobody qualified will consider bothering to apply.
The warming effect of these "immersion heaters" on the oceans is insignificant even if all datacenters in the world were already sunk in the ocean. Every second of every day, the Earth is hit by 1.74 x 10^17 watts of energy from the sun. So even 100 gigawatts of "immersion heaters" in the ocean would be less than 0.001% of the heating effect that the oceans already get from solar radiation.
The real benefit is that 15-20% reduction in electricity use for cooling, especially if that's 15-20% less fossil fuel generated electricity, which contributes to greenhouse gases.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's 100% legal for you to do as long as you don't use trademarked terms in the process, so fire up the IDE and start coding your "Legend of Melda" today without fear.
Not break. Steal data from an adjacent one? Yes. And even then it's a bit of a crapshoot as to what you get, not at all the same as busting in and taking what you want.
In this day and age, 8GB *is* nothing for a phone. That barely holds the OS. I have a 16GB Android tablet and the damn thing only had 6GB free after the OS and the non-removable apps when it came out of the package. These days for an Android device 32GB is what I would consider bare minimum if you intend to use it for anything other than phone calls and texts.
> Credit unions are required to charge an opening fee of some sort.
That's not a *fee*. That's buying shares in the Union. When you close your account you have to sell the shares and you get money back for it. In my case when I joined a credit union I paid I think it was around $20 to purchase those shares. Through the last 20+ years with dividends and the share price rise, splits, new issues, etc, my credit union shares are now worth just over $300. Makes me wish I could have bought more as an investment!
The 10G was during the escape capsule emergency escape sequence so it's not expected on a normal flight. And the escape rockets only fire for a few seconds. Even someone reasonably un-fit should be able to handle 10Gs for less than 5 seconds. Wouldn't be pleasant but beats dying because of a problem with the booster.
For a similar reference, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8
is the SpaceX Dragon capsule testing its escape system. The heavy G is only felt while the engines fire, and in that video you can see it's only about 5-6 seconds' worth.
> CBS spent around 8 million dollars an episode for their star trek series.. and then didn't even put it on TV.
In the US, perhaps. Around the world, lots of channels had it on. Space in Canada for example. Ironically in the UK, Australia and most of Europe, it's on Netflix. So much for CBS All Access getting international traction it would seem.
If you think that's bad, try using some DVDs with their unskippable commercials and warnings for 5 minutes before you can watch what you want... Netflix is still a massive improvement over most other forms of consumption of media.
Why be sorry? I'm just saying you definitely didn't get all of them. We have a mainframe here that sends data on a daily basis to some of my processes and there's no plan to get rid of it in the next decade. So yes, some mainframes were retired, but there are still a large number of them out there quietly chugging along.
> if they're redundant. That's what killed mainframes.
When did that happen? My company and a ton of others that I know of still have mainframes and have zero desire to replace them with anything but another mainframe because of how entrenched the mainframes are to certain business processes. Mainframes still have an advantage in certain areas, plus in many niche applications are the only things that run 2-3 decades worth of custom business logic that would cost more in recoding and testing than just buying more mainframes.
But that's sort of apples to oranges, I was more concerned with the Xserver line where the failure rate I've observed is more like 1 in 10 over a disturbingly short timeframe of a couple of years. I shouldn't be paying more to get less reliable hardware than a whitebox server builder like Supermicro. And that's why I'll not be buying any more Lenovo Xservers.
> How come if I have a power-strip with 8 sockets I can only ever plug-in 3 damn things?
I have 11 things to plug in for all my living room multimedia... stuff. Most of them have the damn spreading wall-warts, and I have only a single standard pair outlet behind the entertainment unit for it all so it led to an octopus abomination of power bars, until I had salvation and tidiness visit me in the form factor of a 3 foot long shop power strip that I attached to the back of the entertainment unit. At last all is clean, tidy and off the floor. But NONE of that would have been necessary if I could have plugged 11 things into the standard 12 plug powerbar I had. Seriously, people shouldn't need to buy a shop power strip with 4 inches of separation between each outlet to be able to use them all.
> Cheap Chinese hardware and cheap Linux boxes made their old model obsolete.
Actually, no that did not. Them selling off their Xserver and PC/laptop lines did that. Part of the issue is quality, the same problem HP now has because of the disastrous tenure of Carly Fiorina. Companies were willing to pay more for IBM servers because of the high quality, durability and prompt/proactive service they provided on the equipment. That was their competitive advantage. You'd buy a rack of IBM boxes and you knew they'd work. When they sold off those lines to Lenovo, Lenovo cheaped out on components and now their failure rates are as high or higher than cheaper products from competitors. At this point I'd actually rate Supermicro servers from Taiwan as being superior in reliability to Lenovo Xservers, and at a fraction of the cost.
The same story went for their laptops. Thinkpads were ubiquitous with execs at the companies I worked at because they'd practically stop a bullet and keep going for years. Lenovo takes over and things get crappy, the laptops that used to last 5-7 years now last 2-4 and are flimsy in construction by comparison, despite the premium price. Then to muddy the waters further Lenovo introduces a cheaply priced line of Thinkpads which are cheap crap. The Thinkpad = quality equation no longer applies and people take their business elsewhere.
IBM had a lock in on a large chunk of the higher end server and laptop markets until their beancounters decided that a quick sale would make the year's numbers look way better. And now IBM has 2 less things going for it. At the rate they're going I wouldn't be surprised if they sell off their mainframe and Watson businesses to someone in the next couple of years. And then at that point they'll be no different from a dozen other software/consulting firms.
I've dealt with IBM on various projects for the past 20 years and what I see is they aren't retaining people any more, unlike 10-15 years ago. Each time I meet with someone from there now for even a similar piece of hardware it seems half the team I dealt with has moved on and now it's a couple of new kids in suits fresh out of college who I probably won't ever see again after this transaction. Other people I've spoken to report the same in other lines of IBM's business.
IBM is a pale shadow of their former selves, now a software and hardware reseller/consulting firm run by beancounters chasing the next quarter's numbers, institutional knowledge, experience and dependable products be damned.
> Hey, remember all those Google hardware initiatives that were runaway smash hits?
> Me neither...
Chromecast, Nexus, Pixel, Chromebooks, Google Home, Google wifi? None of those ring a bell? To say nothing of what they've bought such as Nest?
Easier said than done. Valve is privately held and as far as I know GabeN is more than happy with the amount of $$$ in his possession.
> Make no mistake about it, Amazon will dole packages out to the lowest bidder
No they won't. That would require additional analysis and work on Amazon's part. What they will do instead is pay per piece at a set rate, and it's up to the companies to figure out how to make money on that. Much easier for Amazon.
> According to a person familiar with the process, the workers who fail to make their case and get their job back can still choose between severance pay or a performance-improvement plan.
So if that piece of information is true, sounds to me like there's no real harm in trying the Thunderdome as you can still choose option 1 or 2. Worth a Hail Mary, you never know, it might land.
The oversight or lack thereof that's birthed such a process though is insane.
> Hiding it in Developer Options after a big, fat disclaimer should be enough, frankly.
You'd think, but then you haven't dealt with some end users. A percentage of them would happily follow a tutorial on disabling that in order to install this "cool new book reader/movie streamer/whatever" if asked by a popup.
As for the disclaimer, I used to work at a software company for a packaged software product. The type of database the application used destroyed records immediately so unless you had a backup, the records were GONE. In order to prevent people from accidentally deleting records in this application, when you clicked delete or hit the delete key on the keyboard, the application would pop a dialog asking to confirm that you were sure you wanted to delete the selected record(s). If the user hit yes, a second bigger more scary looking dialog popped up and said effectively "This is irreversible and the records will be fucking GONE GONE GONE. Are you REALLY SURE?" *and* we moved the default focus on the button from 'yes' in the first dialog to 'no' for the second, so if someone just mindlessly rammed the enter key twice, it would back out of the delete instead of killing the records. You want to guess how many calls a day we got from distraught users frantic about restoring deleted records? A lot.
Of course not. Look what a bang-up job the Air Force did with the Stargate program, this should be in their court as well.
What fucking reality are you living in? Because it's not the one where the Trump administration's FCC just approved the merger in the FA over the objections of the Justice Department on the grounds it'll hurt consumers. Or the one where the Trump administration gave 1.5 Trillion in tax breaks to corporations that are busy using it to consolidate, buy up outstanding stock, buy smaller companies and gear up automation to lay people off.
For general purpose/lightweight stuff sure, but there are exceptions. I had a 2500K as my main desktop for almost 7 years, just replaced it with a Ryzen 1600 and kept my existing video card. For most stuff there was little difference, but throwing something demanding at it like running Sins of a Solar Empire with a few hundred ships going at it at once onscreen and the Ryzen blew the old 2500K away. No more stuttering, everything smoothed out. In other games it made some difference, but most of those the limit was the video card, not the processor for the underlying game code.
Another thing I notice is older boxes are OK watching 1080p content, but 4k doesn't work so well, even downscaled.
> You guys don't get it: 4 cores at 3.4Ghz vs 6 cores at 3.6Ghz makes no difference.
Horse pucky. There's a LOT of shitty bloated software out there, and for the average end user running a browser with 20 tabs open and a mail client and a music player and half dozen other things those two extra cores definitely come into play. If developers today optimized like we used to back in the 80s and early 90s, then yeah even a 5 year old processor would be overkill, but that's not the case. Each release of most software out there packs more features at the expense of efficiency. Hell, even website redesigns do that - replacing slim and fast with flashy/pretty and bloated.
> Those types of "improvements" don't matter for consumers and aren't worth the redesign
If they don't matter, why do all the other companies do them - and especially in the laptop space - get better power consumption? Plus, there are more people out there than you think who still like casual gaming who aren't going to go build a gaming rig so having those extra cores and a better IGP do make a tangible difference.
> What is different from 2016 technology from 2018?
A few things. If you buy a Skylake (2015-2016) i5 8600k you get 4 cores clocked at 3.5GHz. The Coffee Lake (2017-2018) 8600k gives you 6 cores clocked at 3.6GHz. Not earth shattering on the speed bump, but the 2 extra cores on the "same" part is nice. The Coffee Lake chip also supports a higher turbo clock speed, faster RAM, and has the next bump up in onboard graphics. And generally speaking the mobile chips of each generation usually get more energy efficient over their predecessors while keeping the same or better performance.
So while you're not getting 2-3x the performance in 2 years like the olden days of Moore, you still get improvements and better battery life. Why should consumers be happy leaving that on the table with Apple when they don't from other vendors?
Sony once again screws their customers? This is my shocked face.
> Something tells me these numbers are being manipulated. If things really were that good, employers would raise wages. You'd have fast food places offering $20/hr to flip burgers if they needed the labor that badly.
Absolutely. We have seen this, or at least I did when I visited family in Alberta during the mid 2000s boom times. Jobs everywhere and nobody to fill them so Wendys and McDonalds were offering $15 an hour with $1000 SIGNING BONUSES on big advertising boards out in front of the stores.
I'm thinking a good chunk of these so called jobs are in reality so poorly paying and/or unstable that nobody qualified will consider bothering to apply.
The warming effect of these "immersion heaters" on the oceans is insignificant even if all datacenters in the world were already sunk in the ocean. Every second of every day, the Earth is hit by 1.74 x 10^17 watts of energy from the sun. So even 100 gigawatts of "immersion heaters" in the ocean would be less than 0.001% of the heating effect that the oceans already get from solar radiation.
The real benefit is that 15-20% reduction in electricity use for cooling, especially if that's 15-20% less fossil fuel generated electricity, which contributes to greenhouse gases.