Yeah, we can ship a few people someplace far away AKA Captain Cook (or was that Captain Bligh?) but for having people living in Tombstone, Arizona, Mars is unbelievable, never mind having a McD, WalM, or Micky there to visit when you're bored.
Well, even in his most generous projections of massive reuse at scale in the far future Musk said "The cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000" which is a bit outside my budget for a burger and it's for a one way trip. So yeah the people who expect warp drive-like bouncing around the Solar system have watched too much sci-fi. Same with the people thinking we have the capability of terraforming Mars.
That said, getting to LEO is a lot of the effort to get into space and the difference between TLI and going to other planets even smaller. According to this chart
Towards Mars you can use aerobraking, which puts the rocket requirements more in the ballpark of the Moon. Granted getting off Mars again is quite a bit harder but it's not some impossible goal from a technological point of view with an Apollo 2 program and a Saturn VI. The challenge is finding some economically viable path to make it happen, but with SpaceX aiming for the third launch of a Block 5 rocket this year they've hopefully turned the corner on that and the 4th and 5th is not that far behind. And 2019 will hopefully see a crew rating of the F9 too.
Remember how Jeff Bezos just recently said that once Amazon stopped focusing on customers, it was going to be the beginning of the end of Amazon? Intel stopped focusing on customers the moment it knowingly sacrificed security to maintain its near-monopoly on CPU's. While AMD has some issues with its chips, those issues pale in comparison to the wholesale don't-give-a-shit practiced by Intel.
And by "knowingly" you mean Intel did this on purpose? They can be dirty as hell doing damage control, but creating Meltdown/Spectre wasn't a conscious plan or at least then I'd really like to see your documentation that security was intentionally sacrificed. And as far as I know they're not making any significant revenue on anything other than selling CPUs, they're not in the data mining business nor to they take a cut of all applications running on an Intel nor are they selling your data to third parties. And no, Intel's management engine and AMD's TrustZone and Apple's T2 all pretty much do the same thing. They're far from saints, but on the evil scale they're not nearly at the top of my list.
In San Francisco, which currently has the second-worst-rated air quality out of any city in the world, one driver was spotted selling N95 respirator masks for $5 apiece. That's significantly above market rate. Right now you can buy a 10-pack of similar masks for about $13 on Amazon.
Truth is, under most circumstances you'd always buy shit cheaper at a supermarket or whatever and often in volume if it's non-perishable. Which means there's very little point at selling something at 30% or 50% mark-up. I've paid 5 euros at a camping grounds on the weekend for a pack of batteries that would normally cost 1 euro. How often would that happen, maybe once a month? You're not going to get rich making 4 euros/month selling batteries. They still wouldn't sell well for 2 euros/pack. At some point you have to cease looking at "rational" cost and look at lost opportunity costs. I was there, out of batteries, the nearest proper store was far away and the alternative was probably to not buy batteries at all. It wasn't a trap or anything like that, it was just a duuuuuuuh moment as I realized all the batteries were dead.
Honestly, I feel that this is sometimes the exact opposite of the sunk cost fallacy - we've spent tons of money to get here but then we're going to skimp on the last dollars to actually take advantage of it. Like you go to a foreign country with airplane tickets and hotel and whatnot but then it's like should we really go out to eat or just grab some snacks from the local store. And I'm like the opportunity cost of going out to eat at a fancy Greek restaurant is just the cost of going out to a fancy restaurant, we've already paid for everything else. Yes in isolation we can go to McDonald's and it's a lot cheaper, but in total we're then paying a ton of money for the same shitty experience we could get at home. If we ever wanted to do it later, we'd have to re-sink the cost of going to Greece so the opportunity is "cheap" here and now. So... if you're about to step of out the taxi and see smog hell, is $5 worth it? I think yes.
Of course that kind of rate-limiting was dependent on one of the parties - the recipient - wanting to add cost so they only got "serious" email. It wouldn't do anything to a Twitter flash mob where people want to read each other's posts, unless you want to take Internet response time down from milliseconds to the days a mailman took for a letter. That's not going to happen so I assume this is about control, if you're like an "influencer" with a large number of daily readers we're going to clamp down on your ability to be a rumor-monger or regime critic. It's back to circulating underground pamphlets...
Oh, the company loses money on bugs... but does it filter back to the developer/manager who caused the bug? Rarely. Those who get a raise/bonus/promotion are typically those who got the feature/project shipped on time or put out the fire with a dirty hack/band-aid. By the time the bug hits or the system collapses under the maintenance burden those people are usually long gone. Same with the sales people who oversell the product, they get their commission even if it ends up a net loss. In a big public company this goes all the way to the top with the CEO who cares about the stock price next quarter and doesn't mind kicking the can down the road.
There are exceptions like family run businesses, start-ups, people who take personal ownership of their work, companies with some kind of humanitarian or altruistic purpose and so on. But even within those you have lots of short-term hires and people who are trying to avoid taking the blame for poor work or not actually understanding what they're doing. There's a reason so many people are bad managers, it's actually damn hard to give people the right incentives and make sure good work is rewarded and bad work dealt with. It's like trying to run a puppet show wearing boxing gloves. And I don't just mean dealing with incompetent people, but competent people who aren't getting enough credit for the hair-on-fire situations they're not creating.
I cannot imagine the need for an antivirus on Linux. Either the code breaks into supervisor mode or it does not.
Or it does not but can access all the logged in user's data and attached devices and whatnot. Neither Windows, Mac nor Linux is built around a hostile software model, if it's installed it's trusted. So if there's any breach in any software, they can do install a cryptolocker and encrypt all your files or whatever. Sure in theory you could set up a custom chroot jail/SELinux/AppArmor/cgroups setup per application but it's very far from easy. I'd like to be able to install a relatively untrusted closed source game and have it play in a sandbox. Like you can wipe my save games, rickroll me or whatever but you can't access my webcam or delete my family photos. That's the kind of security users want and I think that's where we're going when Apple or Google wants to topple Microsoft on the desktop.
will the CEO volunteer to go jail / prison if the car kills someone or will the rider sign an EULA that makes them take ALL liability?
Do you think this is the first time industrial robots, faulty medical equipment or otherwise defective products has killed someone? The answer is neither and you're the poster boy for a false dichotomy.
The problem is, they really did have a bug deleting people's files. And, his testimony that he had the files is already evidence that they existed.
It's like claiming to the insurance company you had a $250k painting on the wall after a fire, if there's no receipt, no photos of it, no witnesses to collaborate it then that "evidence" is worth absolutely nothing. The court will not accept your version of events simply because you say it was so. Now if he had some kind of metadata like say file indexes, project references etc. that'll help but otherwise he'll have an uphill battle trying to convince the court he lost anything at all.
To be fair, that is only true in English. In every other language I know of, the equivalent word means 10^12 and 10^9 is called something resembling the word milliard. It remains confusing except perhaps to those whose mother tongue is English.
Actually it's much more confusing than that, like Eastern Europe and Russia, Brazil, Middle East etc. all use the short form but don't speak English while most of Western Europe use the long form. Like here in Norway there's absolutely no confusion about these terms:
10^6: Million 10^9: Milliard 10^12: Billion 10^15: Billiard
Fortunately we rarely need the word billion in Norwegian as that would be a trillion in English and because it could be ambiguous on the rare occasions we could use it we tend to simply avoid it like a thousand milliards, So practically it's like "billion" is the English translation of Norwegian "milliard", forget everything past 10^9 and the etymology as you'll only confuse yourself.
So? If you're served with a subpoena wiping the records instead is a crime, they don't have to prove the records would have been incriminating. I think it's obvious the same should apply to remotely wiping a seized device. You're free to set up any security policy you like in advance, even a dead man's switch if you want but taking active hostile action against a police investigation is not accepted in any legal system. Now I'm sure the US legal system has a lot of other issues, but I really fail to see how this makes them the bad guy. Not even a little.
No, but it has a lot of impact on how precise it is. Speech is inherently error-prone and ambiguous. People mishear each other all the time. If you really want to avoid misunderstandings, you write things down.
No, the main problem is that the spoken word is fleeting and poorly searchable. If it's not recorded you have no paper trail of what was actually said and even if you do it's is much easier to find the relevant bits with a transcript or better yet a summary that omits all the irrelevant bits, that is why we have long discussions and try to make short conclusions. But it's exceptionally rare that I actually mishear something in a conversation, like I literally didn't understand the words. It may be that I'm struggling to understand what they're trying to explain, but that would probably be the same over Slack or Skype. I will agree that if you're in effect editing a document then trying to come up with a non-ambiguous specification is much easier in writing. Though even the visual aids are more easily designed and debated on a whiteboard than with fancy electronic tools.
You will quickly learn that you have an upper limit to how much relaxation your brain will tolerate. The "extreme hedonism" that people imagine, lounging around in hammocks sipping cocktails all day, leaves you bored out of your mind AND depressed after a couple of weeks (some people can't take it for even a few days).
Cool story bro. Is that what US employers tell you as an excuse to only give you two weeks vacation? From here in Europe I can tell you a month plus is no problem and people want more. Those I've talked to who's taken 3/6/12 month sabbaticals all seem to have enjoyed it too.
Very common stories include people coming out of retirement after a year, people turning to alcoholism after retirement, people dying shortly after retirement (sometimes by suicide and usually with depression-related symptoms), and people volunteering a lot after retirement.
Anecdotal stories yes, but most people who retire simply retire. The mortality tables show no jump or peak at general retirement age. They do more volunteer work but for most that's at a fraction of a full work week and quite possibly a way of winding down, not proof they need it permanently. In fact I just checked the stats here in Norway and only 39% of our retirees are active members in any volunteer organization. Only 30% claim to have done any volunteer work. Of course that covers all retirees, directly post-retirement is probably higher but most of our elderly do fine just being retired.
There's an entire branch of applied mathematics, known as actuarial statistics, that literally does nothing but figure these things all day long. And since corporations pay them a ton of money to do these projections, they've gotten pretty good at them. As in, amazingly good.
They're just extrapolating though, like if you look at historic fertility rates in the US you might think in the 1930s that it's around 2.0, in the 1950s 3.5 and in the 1970s 1.8. Countries have had huge "mood swings" and despite being somewhat correlated with GDP, HDI and whatnot there's a lot of variation. The rate of medical advancements increasing lifespan the next 30 years is also far from given. Maybe someone will set off WW3, that'll throw all projections out the window.
The main reason it's almost certainly true though is that you don't need huge changes from the status quo. People live a lot longer, have kids later and have fewer kids right now, unless there's a radical shift to pop out tons of babies again it's happening. Most western social security systems were created when we had few retirees, they didn't live long on retirement and there was a booming population to support them. The essential input factors have already changed, it just hasn't filtered through the system yet.
And for those of us in the rest of the world, the US is also the cause of fraud on our credit cards. For backward compatibility, our cards still have a magstripe, but the bank's won't authorise payment in local country. So we get our cards cloned, and then used in the US!
Here in Norway they've fixed this quite easily because around 2010 most the banks introduced regional blocks, the defaults vary a little but my bank's card by default only works in Norway. To expand the coverage you must log in to the online bank and enable it. You can permanently enable it for our neighboring countries in Scandinavia, but for the other regions (rest of Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia) you can only enable it for three months at a time. That has pretty much stopped international scams dead in their tracks, even if it is enabled the crooks don't know until they try and while the occasional tourist will forget and enabled it after being declined it will stand out as a sore thumb.
Combined with 2FA using the cell phone/one time codes for online purchases fraud here is extremely low. I found a page that said total credit/debit card fraud in Norway is around 150 MNOK/year, that's $17 million. Divided by 2.4 million households that's about $7, the average household income is about $51k so 0.013% is lost to fraud. Basically that's noise level, people lose more money on grocery prices due to shoplifting than that. I don't think these numbers include robbery where you're forced to enter/hand over the PIN though, just shoulder surfing and such.
I think in this case it's about using one straw man to beat another straw man. Many businesses think they need Oracle when they really don't, by showing examples of huge companies that manage without them you may cause management to make the right decisions for the wrong reasons. That your counterexamples are as invalid as their original beliefs may be intellectually dishonest but if they were going to make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons and dismissed the actual reasons why Oracle is a bad idea, well.... means, ends something something.
Let's assume it is bullshit. Servers are a much smaller market, for people that can be expected to "tinker" a bit with the hardware, and on a far larger budget. The ability to swap out parts is far more valuable even if it comes at the cost of lowered reliability if that reliability comes with things like ease and speed of repairs.
Uhm... no. In the vast majority of cases the main cost is how often you need to pull a machine from service and replace it with another, not how long it's out for because that's rarely within your SLA. Redundancy, hot spare, cold spare, clustering, horizontal scaling, re-provisioning there's many ways but waiting for the technician to replace your faulty hardware is usually not it. Maybe if this is the SMB market but for data centers I think they'd easily swap replacement time for incident rate, people pay ridiculous money for that 99.999% uptime so just replace the bad with good, figure out what went wrong later. At least that's my impression of modern server management.
Seems like the most expensive way to get a Linux system. There have to be at least a dozen better choices for less money.
That's not really the point. If Apple is allowed to make x86 hardware that won't run Linux, I bet Microsoft will "align" their policy to allow it and do the same to their Surface line. Then the OEMs will follow. And then System76 and other niche players is your only choice. Considering they explicitly mention the Linux signing key this is not an accident, it's probably a trial balloon from Apple to see what happens if they ship Macs that don't run Linux ahead of a migration to ARM. Since Windows on ARM doesn't make much sense, they're setting up a play where the new Macs only runs Apple's OS and nothing else.
Remember the PC as an open platform is something of an historical accident based on the naivety of IBM. Microsoft introduced the lock down capability with Secure Boot, but couldn't go through with it due to public outcry. They did try to lock it down with WinRT, except it flopped. Apple did lock down the mobile side with iOS and would like to do it on Macs. It's only dual-booting Mac and Linux users who'd like the status quo preserved. Don't assume that it'll transfer to any new "class" of desktop and don't assume it won't happen. The desktop is ripe for a major cataclysm like what iPhone/Android did to the mobile market.
Here's what the average PC owner wants more than the ability to exchange parts, they want the computer to work. Parts stuck in sockets and slots are less reliable than soldered down parts.
I'm 99.9% sure that's bullshit otherwise servers would be the first to have soldered parts, not laptops. It's all about cost. Lower production cost and not dealing with support costs because people meddled with it, no logistics for parts, no repair instructions or tools. A lot of devices like the Surface Laptop 2 that got a 0/10 score by iFixit is clearly not designed to be repaired by anyone, including Microsoft. Inside warranty if it breaks they replace it, outside warranty you're shit out of luck.
Computers are appliances again, which is really what many people want.
Actually they're going one step past that, the computer is just the terminal to access your data. Your iPhone syncs everything to iCloud, if your phone breaks just grab another and sync it back up. Steam is the same, by default you sync your save games online so just log into another computer and pick up where you left off. Your local HDD is just a cache to the cloud...
hold on a minute my husband just informed me of some very important news about Bill Cosby. it was his character Cliff Huxtable that played chess! not Cosby. So maybe hes not such a great pick
Plus he'd need really long hands to make his move from inside a prison cell. Then again...
I'm not really up on the current state of video encoding and the article doesn't say but is there any reason this is a big deal ? I can't recall the last time I had to even update a codec to play any kind of video. It seems that most content producers have gotten the message and encode using codecs people actually have.
Well yes and no. Bandwidth, licensing and hardware support is still a big deal for providers, but it's sufficiently hidden by applications and user agent strings now that they'll send you a H.264/HEVC/VP9/AV1 stream that works for you. You don't care, but Netflix and YouTube do. If you don't control both end points though H.264 is now almost universal as long as you're willing to use Cisco's OpenH264 patent licensed binary or one of the many other open source decoders, which is 99.99% of the market. That was as late as 2013 though, so it's only been 5 years since missing codecs actually was an end user problem. Not anymore though.
It's royalty free, hopefully patent free... it's in VLC, ffmpeg, MPC-HC, Chrome, Firefox and so on. Hardware support is coming but not here yet:
fixed-function hardware will take 12-18 months after bitstream freeze until chips are available, plus 6 months for products based on those chips to hit the market. The bitstream was finally frozen on 28 March 2018
AV1 is going to be big, the licensing situation has kept HEVC adoption back and kept H.264 as the preferred alternative. What's missing right now is optimized software encoders, the reference encoder is ridiculously slow while decoding is no problem.
Probably not, because the potential savings scale with distance. Halfway across the world and back is 40000 km/300000 km/s = 133 ms at light speed, at c/1.7 it's 226 ms so at most 93 ms to save. But I wouldn't try to play a twitch game at those ping rates while at reasonable gaming ping times the gains are mostly eaten up by the base latency. Unless you really desperately want to play with your guild from another continent, it's not going to matter much. It mainly matters for HFT where your buy/sell orders arrive a few milliseconds before the competition.
The US defines anything faster than a Morse code buzzer as broadband, but speed is relative not to Comcast but to computers. Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband, whatever the FCC says.
Because... random big number? Broadband should be a meaningful number to people, not computers. For example if every member of the average US household (2.6, let's round to 3) can watch Netflix in UHD (25 Mbit/person) the US average length (5 hours/day) which works out 1.7 TB/month but let's round up to 100 Mbit @ 2 TB cap. Preferably on fiber, no "up to" bullshit like with DSL/cable. I actually have a 250 Mbps line now and it's basically nice to have, when there's a huge game patch it'll finish in two minutes instead of five but honestly I'd do just fine with less.
Usually the problem is that the rest of the Internet can't keep up, if something actually runs at >10 MB/s that's a CD in a minute and re-downloading GTA V (65GB) takes two hours. I suppose you could always say why not 10Gbit and two minutes, but that's really solving first world problems. Of course if they first install a fiber node they're all gigabit capable now and I don't think the flowing bits cost much at all so maybe I'll upgrade to that some day. But as it is the premium doesn't seem worth it and I'm nerdier than 99% of the population.
I'm in my late 30's and never made a drivers license
I take it you don't have kids? Even the last buddy of mine who never got his license finally succumbed at age 30 because with three kids the schedule just didn't add up anymore, even though his wife drove. I've taken public transport to work more years than I've driven and not always owned one either, but being stuck without the possibility to borrow/share/rent/lease one and depend on taxis and public transport for everything that would be terrible. I mean I could obviously manage like if I for some medical reason couldn't drive, but for me that'd be a huge problem to work around. A problem that was vastly easier solved getting my license than trying to work out of a lifetime of non-driving, that's kinda the nice thing you do it once and there's no real upkeep. I got mine as quickly as I could and I'd do it all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, we can ship a few people someplace far away AKA Captain Cook (or was that Captain Bligh?) but for having people living in Tombstone, Arizona, Mars is unbelievable, never mind having a McD, WalM, or Micky there to visit when you're bored.
Well, even in his most generous projections of massive reuse at scale in the far future Musk said "The cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000" which is a bit outside my budget for a burger and it's for a one way trip. So yeah the people who expect warp drive-like bouncing around the Solar system have watched too much sci-fi. Same with the people thinking we have the capability of terraforming Mars.
That said, getting to LEO is a lot of the effort to get into space and the difference between TLI and going to other planets even smaller. According to this chart
Earth to LEO: 9.4 km/s
Earth to TLI: 9.4 + 2.44 + 0.68 km/s = 12.5 km/s
Earth to Moon: 12.5 + 0.14 + 0.68 + 1.73 = 15.1 km/s
Earth to Mars: 12.5 + 0.09 + 0.39 + 0.67 + 0.34 + 0.4 + 0.7 + 3.8 = 18.9 km/s
Towards Mars you can use aerobraking, which puts the rocket requirements more in the ballpark of the Moon. Granted getting off Mars again is quite a bit harder but it's not some impossible goal from a technological point of view with an Apollo 2 program and a Saturn VI. The challenge is finding some economically viable path to make it happen, but with SpaceX aiming for the third launch of a Block 5 rocket this year they've hopefully turned the corner on that and the 4th and 5th is not that far behind. And 2019 will hopefully see a crew rating of the F9 too.
Remember how Jeff Bezos just recently said that once Amazon stopped focusing on customers, it was going to be the beginning of the end of Amazon? Intel stopped focusing on customers the moment it knowingly sacrificed security to maintain its near-monopoly on CPU's. While AMD has some issues with its chips, those issues pale in comparison to the wholesale don't-give-a-shit practiced by Intel.
And by "knowingly" you mean Intel did this on purpose? They can be dirty as hell doing damage control, but creating Meltdown/Spectre wasn't a conscious plan or at least then I'd really like to see your documentation that security was intentionally sacrificed. And as far as I know they're not making any significant revenue on anything other than selling CPUs, they're not in the data mining business nor to they take a cut of all applications running on an Intel nor are they selling your data to third parties. And no, Intel's management engine and AMD's TrustZone and Apple's T2 all pretty much do the same thing. They're far from saints, but on the evil scale they're not nearly at the top of my list.
In San Francisco, which currently has the second-worst-rated air quality out of any city in the world, one driver was spotted selling N95 respirator masks for $5 apiece. That's significantly above market rate. Right now you can buy a 10-pack of similar masks for about $13 on Amazon.
Truth is, under most circumstances you'd always buy shit cheaper at a supermarket or whatever and often in volume if it's non-perishable. Which means there's very little point at selling something at 30% or 50% mark-up. I've paid 5 euros at a camping grounds on the weekend for a pack of batteries that would normally cost 1 euro. How often would that happen, maybe once a month? You're not going to get rich making 4 euros/month selling batteries. They still wouldn't sell well for 2 euros/pack. At some point you have to cease looking at "rational" cost and look at lost opportunity costs. I was there, out of batteries, the nearest proper store was far away and the alternative was probably to not buy batteries at all. It wasn't a trap or anything like that, it was just a duuuuuuuh moment as I realized all the batteries were dead.
Honestly, I feel that this is sometimes the exact opposite of the sunk cost fallacy - we've spent tons of money to get here but then we're going to skimp on the last dollars to actually take advantage of it. Like you go to a foreign country with airplane tickets and hotel and whatnot but then it's like should we really go out to eat or just grab some snacks from the local store. And I'm like the opportunity cost of going out to eat at a fancy Greek restaurant is just the cost of going out to a fancy restaurant, we've already paid for everything else. Yes in isolation we can go to McDonald's and it's a lot cheaper, but in total we're then paying a ton of money for the same shitty experience we could get at home. If we ever wanted to do it later, we'd have to re-sink the cost of going to Greece so the opportunity is "cheap" here and now. So... if you're about to step of out the taxi and see smog hell, is $5 worth it? I think yes.
Of course that kind of rate-limiting was dependent on one of the parties - the recipient - wanting to add cost so they only got "serious" email. It wouldn't do anything to a Twitter flash mob where people want to read each other's posts, unless you want to take Internet response time down from milliseconds to the days a mailman took for a letter. That's not going to happen so I assume this is about control, if you're like an "influencer" with a large number of daily readers we're going to clamp down on your ability to be a rumor-monger or regime critic. It's back to circulating underground pamphlets...
Oh, the company loses money on bugs... but does it filter back to the developer/manager who caused the bug? Rarely. Those who get a raise/bonus/promotion are typically those who got the feature/project shipped on time or put out the fire with a dirty hack/band-aid. By the time the bug hits or the system collapses under the maintenance burden those people are usually long gone. Same with the sales people who oversell the product, they get their commission even if it ends up a net loss. In a big public company this goes all the way to the top with the CEO who cares about the stock price next quarter and doesn't mind kicking the can down the road.
There are exceptions like family run businesses, start-ups, people who take personal ownership of their work, companies with some kind of humanitarian or altruistic purpose and so on. But even within those you have lots of short-term hires and people who are trying to avoid taking the blame for poor work or not actually understanding what they're doing. There's a reason so many people are bad managers, it's actually damn hard to give people the right incentives and make sure good work is rewarded and bad work dealt with. It's like trying to run a puppet show wearing boxing gloves. And I don't just mean dealing with incompetent people, but competent people who aren't getting enough credit for the hair-on-fire situations they're not creating.
I cannot imagine the need for an antivirus on Linux. Either the code breaks into supervisor mode or it does not.
Or it does not but can access all the logged in user's data and attached devices and whatnot. Neither Windows, Mac nor Linux is built around a hostile software model, if it's installed it's trusted. So if there's any breach in any software, they can do install a cryptolocker and encrypt all your files or whatever. Sure in theory you could set up a custom chroot jail/SELinux/AppArmor/cgroups setup per application but it's very far from easy. I'd like to be able to install a relatively untrusted closed source game and have it play in a sandbox. Like you can wipe my save games, rickroll me or whatever but you can't access my webcam or delete my family photos. That's the kind of security users want and I think that's where we're going when Apple or Google wants to topple Microsoft on the desktop.
will the CEO volunteer to go jail / prison if the car kills someone or will the rider sign an EULA that makes them take ALL liability?
Do you think this is the first time industrial robots, faulty medical equipment or otherwise defective products has killed someone? The answer is neither and you're the poster boy for a false dichotomy.
The problem is, they really did have a bug deleting people's files. And, his testimony that he had the files is already evidence that they existed.
It's like claiming to the insurance company you had a $250k painting on the wall after a fire, if there's no receipt, no photos of it, no witnesses to collaborate it then that "evidence" is worth absolutely nothing. The court will not accept your version of events simply because you say it was so. Now if he had some kind of metadata like say file indexes, project references etc. that'll help but otherwise he'll have an uphill battle trying to convince the court he lost anything at all.
To be fair, that is only true in English. In every other language I know of, the equivalent word means 10^12 and 10^9 is called something resembling the word milliard. It remains confusing except perhaps to those whose mother tongue is English.
Actually it's much more confusing than that, like Eastern Europe and Russia, Brazil, Middle East etc. all use the short form but don't speak English while most of Western Europe use the long form. Like here in Norway there's absolutely no confusion about these terms:
10^6: Million
10^9: Milliard
10^12: Billion
10^15: Billiard
Fortunately we rarely need the word billion in Norwegian as that would be a trillion in English and because it could be ambiguous on the rare occasions we could use it we tend to simply avoid it like a thousand milliards, So practically it's like "billion" is the English translation of Norwegian "milliard", forget everything past 10^9 and the etymology as you'll only confuse yourself.
If that's the price of bragging rights then I'll skip this one.
The price of bragging rights is always more than what most can afford. Otherwise, what's there to brag about?
So? If you're served with a subpoena wiping the records instead is a crime, they don't have to prove the records would have been incriminating. I think it's obvious the same should apply to remotely wiping a seized device. You're free to set up any security policy you like in advance, even a dead man's switch if you want but taking active hostile action against a police investigation is not accepted in any legal system. Now I'm sure the US legal system has a lot of other issues, but I really fail to see how this makes them the bad guy. Not even a little.
No, but it has a lot of impact on how precise it is. Speech is inherently error-prone and ambiguous. People mishear each other all the time. If you really want to avoid misunderstandings, you write things down.
No, the main problem is that the spoken word is fleeting and poorly searchable. If it's not recorded you have no paper trail of what was actually said and even if you do it's is much easier to find the relevant bits with a transcript or better yet a summary that omits all the irrelevant bits, that is why we have long discussions and try to make short conclusions. But it's exceptionally rare that I actually mishear something in a conversation, like I literally didn't understand the words. It may be that I'm struggling to understand what they're trying to explain, but that would probably be the same over Slack or Skype. I will agree that if you're in effect editing a document then trying to come up with a non-ambiguous specification is much easier in writing. Though even the visual aids are more easily designed and debated on a whiteboard than with fancy electronic tools.
You will quickly learn that you have an upper limit to how much relaxation your brain will tolerate. The "extreme hedonism" that people imagine, lounging around in hammocks sipping cocktails all day, leaves you bored out of your mind AND depressed after a couple of weeks (some people can't take it for even a few days).
Cool story bro. Is that what US employers tell you as an excuse to only give you two weeks vacation? From here in Europe I can tell you a month plus is no problem and people want more. Those I've talked to who's taken 3/6/12 month sabbaticals all seem to have enjoyed it too.
Very common stories include people coming out of retirement after a year, people turning to alcoholism after retirement, people dying shortly after retirement (sometimes by suicide and usually with depression-related symptoms), and people volunteering a lot after retirement.
Anecdotal stories yes, but most people who retire simply retire. The mortality tables show no jump or peak at general retirement age. They do more volunteer work but for most that's at a fraction of a full work week and quite possibly a way of winding down, not proof they need it permanently. In fact I just checked the stats here in Norway and only 39% of our retirees are active members in any volunteer organization. Only 30% claim to have done any volunteer work. Of course that covers all retirees, directly post-retirement is probably higher but most of our elderly do fine just being retired.
There's an entire branch of applied mathematics, known as actuarial statistics, that literally does nothing but figure these things all day long. And since corporations pay them a ton of money to do these projections, they've gotten pretty good at them. As in, amazingly good.
They're just extrapolating though, like if you look at historic fertility rates in the US you might think in the 1930s that it's around 2.0, in the 1950s 3.5 and in the 1970s 1.8. Countries have had huge "mood swings" and despite being somewhat correlated with GDP, HDI and whatnot there's a lot of variation. The rate of medical advancements increasing lifespan the next 30 years is also far from given. Maybe someone will set off WW3, that'll throw all projections out the window.
The main reason it's almost certainly true though is that you don't need huge changes from the status quo. People live a lot longer, have kids later and have fewer kids right now, unless there's a radical shift to pop out tons of babies again it's happening. Most western social security systems were created when we had few retirees, they didn't live long on retirement and there was a booming population to support them. The essential input factors have already changed, it just hasn't filtered through the system yet.
And for those of us in the rest of the world, the US is also the cause of fraud on our credit cards. For backward compatibility, our cards still have a magstripe, but the bank's won't authorise payment in local country. So we get our cards cloned, and then used in the US!
Here in Norway they've fixed this quite easily because around 2010 most the banks introduced regional blocks, the defaults vary a little but my bank's card by default only works in Norway. To expand the coverage you must log in to the online bank and enable it. You can permanently enable it for our neighboring countries in Scandinavia, but for the other regions (rest of Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia) you can only enable it for three months at a time. That has pretty much stopped international scams dead in their tracks, even if it is enabled the crooks don't know until they try and while the occasional tourist will forget and enabled it after being declined it will stand out as a sore thumb.
Combined with 2FA using the cell phone/one time codes for online purchases fraud here is extremely low. I found a page that said total credit/debit card fraud in Norway is around 150 MNOK/year, that's $17 million. Divided by 2.4 million households that's about $7, the average household income is about $51k so 0.013% is lost to fraud. Basically that's noise level, people lose more money on grocery prices due to shoplifting than that. I don't think these numbers include robbery where you're forced to enter/hand over the PIN though, just shoulder surfing and such.
I think in this case it's about using one straw man to beat another straw man. Many businesses think they need Oracle when they really don't, by showing examples of huge companies that manage without them you may cause management to make the right decisions for the wrong reasons. That your counterexamples are as invalid as their original beliefs may be intellectually dishonest but if they were going to make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons and dismissed the actual reasons why Oracle is a bad idea, well.... means, ends something something.
Let's assume it is bullshit. Servers are a much smaller market, for people that can be expected to "tinker" a bit with the hardware, and on a far larger budget. The ability to swap out parts is far more valuable even if it comes at the cost of lowered reliability if that reliability comes with things like ease and speed of repairs.
Uhm... no. In the vast majority of cases the main cost is how often you need to pull a machine from service and replace it with another, not how long it's out for because that's rarely within your SLA. Redundancy, hot spare, cold spare, clustering, horizontal scaling, re-provisioning there's many ways but waiting for the technician to replace your faulty hardware is usually not it. Maybe if this is the SMB market but for data centers I think they'd easily swap replacement time for incident rate, people pay ridiculous money for that 99.999% uptime so just replace the bad with good, figure out what went wrong later. At least that's my impression of modern server management.
Seems like the most expensive way to get a Linux system. There have to be at least a dozen better choices for less money.
That's not really the point. If Apple is allowed to make x86 hardware that won't run Linux, I bet Microsoft will "align" their policy to allow it and do the same to their Surface line. Then the OEMs will follow. And then System76 and other niche players is your only choice. Considering they explicitly mention the Linux signing key this is not an accident, it's probably a trial balloon from Apple to see what happens if they ship Macs that don't run Linux ahead of a migration to ARM. Since Windows on ARM doesn't make much sense, they're setting up a play where the new Macs only runs Apple's OS and nothing else.
Remember the PC as an open platform is something of an historical accident based on the naivety of IBM. Microsoft introduced the lock down capability with Secure Boot, but couldn't go through with it due to public outcry. They did try to lock it down with WinRT, except it flopped. Apple did lock down the mobile side with iOS and would like to do it on Macs. It's only dual-booting Mac and Linux users who'd like the status quo preserved. Don't assume that it'll transfer to any new "class" of desktop and don't assume it won't happen. The desktop is ripe for a major cataclysm like what iPhone/Android did to the mobile market.
Here's what the average PC owner wants more than the ability to exchange parts, they want the computer to work. Parts stuck in sockets and slots are less reliable than soldered down parts.
I'm 99.9% sure that's bullshit otherwise servers would be the first to have soldered parts, not laptops. It's all about cost. Lower production cost and not dealing with support costs because people meddled with it, no logistics for parts, no repair instructions or tools. A lot of devices like the Surface Laptop 2 that got a 0/10 score by iFixit is clearly not designed to be repaired by anyone, including Microsoft. Inside warranty if it breaks they replace it, outside warranty you're shit out of luck.
Computers are appliances again, which is really what many people want.
Actually they're going one step past that, the computer is just the terminal to access your data. Your iPhone syncs everything to iCloud, if your phone breaks just grab another and sync it back up. Steam is the same, by default you sync your save games online so just log into another computer and pick up where you left off. Your local HDD is just a cache to the cloud...
hold on a minute my husband just informed me of some very important news about Bill Cosby. it was his character Cliff Huxtable that played chess! not Cosby. So maybe hes not such a great pick
Plus he'd need really long hands to make his move from inside a prison cell. Then again...
I'm not really up on the current state of video encoding and the article doesn't say but is there any reason this is a big deal ? I can't recall the last time I had to even update a codec to play any kind of video. It seems that most content producers have gotten the message and encode using codecs people actually have.
Well yes and no. Bandwidth, licensing and hardware support is still a big deal for providers, but it's sufficiently hidden by applications and user agent strings now that they'll send you a H.264/HEVC/VP9/AV1 stream that works for you. You don't care, but Netflix and YouTube do. If you don't control both end points though H.264 is now almost universal as long as you're willing to use Cisco's OpenH264 patent licensed binary or one of the many other open source decoders, which is 99.99% of the market. That was as late as 2013 though, so it's only been 5 years since missing codecs actually was an end user problem. Not anymore though.
It's royalty free, hopefully patent free... it's in VLC, ffmpeg, MPC-HC, Chrome, Firefox and so on. Hardware support is coming but not here yet:
fixed-function hardware will take 12-18 months after bitstream freeze until chips are available, plus 6 months for products based on those chips to hit the market. The bitstream was finally frozen on 28 March 2018
AV1 is going to be big, the licensing situation has kept HEVC adoption back and kept H.264 as the preferred alternative. What's missing right now is optimized software encoders, the reference encoder is ridiculously slow while decoding is no problem.
The lower latency could be useful for games, too.
Probably not, because the potential savings scale with distance. Halfway across the world and back is 40000 km/300000 km/s = 133 ms at light speed, at c/1.7 it's 226 ms so at most 93 ms to save. But I wouldn't try to play a twitch game at those ping rates while at reasonable gaming ping times the gains are mostly eaten up by the base latency. Unless you really desperately want to play with your guild from another continent, it's not going to matter much. It mainly matters for HFT where your buy/sell orders arrive a few milliseconds before the competition.
The US defines anything faster than a Morse code buzzer as broadband, but speed is relative not to Comcast but to computers. Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband, whatever the FCC says.
Because... random big number? Broadband should be a meaningful number to people, not computers. For example if every member of the average US household (2.6, let's round to 3) can watch Netflix in UHD (25 Mbit/person) the US average length (5 hours/day) which works out 1.7 TB/month but let's round up to 100 Mbit @ 2 TB cap. Preferably on fiber, no "up to" bullshit like with DSL/cable. I actually have a 250 Mbps line now and it's basically nice to have, when there's a huge game patch it'll finish in two minutes instead of five but honestly I'd do just fine with less.
Usually the problem is that the rest of the Internet can't keep up, if something actually runs at >10 MB/s that's a CD in a minute and re-downloading GTA V (65GB) takes two hours. I suppose you could always say why not 10Gbit and two minutes, but that's really solving first world problems. Of course if they first install a fiber node they're all gigabit capable now and I don't think the flowing bits cost much at all so maybe I'll upgrade to that some day. But as it is the premium doesn't seem worth it and I'm nerdier than 99% of the population.
I'm in my late 30's and never made a drivers license
I take it you don't have kids? Even the last buddy of mine who never got his license finally succumbed at age 30 because with three kids the schedule just didn't add up anymore, even though his wife drove. I've taken public transport to work more years than I've driven and not always owned one either, but being stuck without the possibility to borrow/share/rent/lease one and depend on taxis and public transport for everything that would be terrible. I mean I could obviously manage like if I for some medical reason couldn't drive, but for me that'd be a huge problem to work around. A problem that was vastly easier solved getting my license than trying to work out of a lifetime of non-driving, that's kinda the nice thing you do it once and there's no real upkeep. I got mine as quickly as I could and I'd do it all over again.