To-date he has saved less than $200 by his own math. From here forward he is "saving" almost $2k per month, but he could save half that without the penalty. Half the money could have been saved sharing a studio.
Actually that's cash flow, he bought a $10000 truck and he's saved $10000 but he still has an asset - the truck - that's probably worth close to the same as when he bought it. And he's got zero commute costs, where the rent is cheap you'll probably need a car to get to work in a timely fashion. And you are aware that "studio apartment" means "extremely tiny, combined living room/sleeping area"? Fair enough if you're single or a couple on a tight budget, but I couldn't imagine permanently living and sleeping in one tiny cramped room with my best buddy. Two tiny bedrooms and a shared living room so you could at least retreat behind a closed door would be my absolute minimum, but then you're probably in a different price category. Otherwise I'd prefer the truck, to be honest. The biggest problems around here in Norway is winter and that you'd have to be officially be homeless, since you can't register a truck, house boat or cabin for use as your permanent residence. That's pretty much an instant credit-killer, no matter what your income is.
Being a normal foreigner, I find it disturbing as you Americans think it's normal to pay 500,000, 800,000, a million for homes that cost 100,000 to be built just because the greedy owner thinks he can charge a million. In a more normal country, this is called extortion. Google to this point have so much money that he could build their own city where he wanted and let these bastards rot waiting for a sucker to pay the price they want.
There's construction cost and there's location cost. The building could burn to the ground and a lot in downtown SF would still be crazy expensive. In Detroit and I guess a lot of other places you could get a lot for next to nothing, I don't know what country you come from where it's different. I would think even in the poorest African countries there's really expensive neighborhoods where the middle class/rich people live and remote plots of land you could get almost for free. And locations don't devalue, in 30 years this apartment I live in will be a worn-down outdated dump. But unless something really extraordinary happens it'll still be in a central location near the river giving it a view and making it a dead end for traffic. That value will still be there if and when I sell it. Even if they want to tear down the building and make a new one, the lot is probably even more valuable because they'll want to make a new building full of high end apartments and those extra perks this lot has that most of the remaining city don't have and can't have makes it exclusive. So it's dead money I got tied up in my living quarters, but it's still a form of investment unlike a building that will fall apart.
This is because stacked ranking is basically a high school popularity contest which pits employees against each other to stay above the bottom part of the bell curve so that they don't end up on a PIP ("Performance Improvement Program") or just plain fired/asked to lead/offered severance.
So in my lifetime America has gone from "give me liberty or give me death" to a bunch of scared sheep repeating "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"?
Only if you're like 240 years old. Yes, yes I know all about what you did in WWII but it was mostly liberating and not so much dying, you might get a few points for the 1860s but outside of a few war veterans that have served abroad the average American hasn't really had to make that choice in ages. There might have been some high stakes poker played in the 1960s, but that was all done by the politicians. Having heard a bit from the occupation and resistance during the Nazi occupation here in Norway it's not that easy to put your money where your mouth is when the enemy is all around you. It's one thing to have a battle line, enemies in front, people you want to protect in the back and you choose to be in harm's way. Random, innocent people being killed just because they were at the wrong time at the wrong place is a lot harder to swallow. Except for Jesus-freaks running out of cheeks to turn to, the alternatives end up being either more surveilance or retaliation. And retaliation leads to collateral damage leading to more terrorists and even further escalation, if you run out of good solutions the poor ones start looking quite okay.
not sure what good it does for them to know if someone is dropping out of an online course or not though, like, I suppose it just checks if someone has advanced in the course in the past 3-7 days at all
If they're paying tuition or to take the exam then sending some kind of trigger message is obviously good for business. See also general customer retention, freemium games and so on. Everybody wants to know what customers are likely to leave them soon.
I was under the impression the taxi system was primarily created to improve customer service because without limits there's be many serving the "sweet spots" both in terms of hours and locations while the rest would be under-served. By making medallions that hold a rather big capital investment it's necessary to keep the taxi on the road as much as possible, even through the slow hours, because even though they're not as profitable it's better than leaving them unused. Not unlike how the postal service will deliver some items to small, remote locations at unprofitable prices at the same flat rates as relatively simple and cheap deliveries. If you let some companies or individuals take just the best bits, that kind of model won't work.
This is a big factor: the cheapness and distance shipped have us moving to a disposable model vs. repair. I just went through this with a washing machine and a lawn mower. The washing machine was LG; very hard to find a schematic with labeled parts. I had to guess and was wrong twice. I didn't bother to ship back the wrong parts as they were about 10 bucks, shipping was also about 10 bucks. So I threw the bad ones away.
Actually being able to ship parts for peanuts from a warehouse in China should have made it easier to find obscure parts, not harder so that's not really it. The real reason is that it's not worth it except for really expensive products. With low transport costs we can centralize production and get economics of scale. It's hard to make one repairman go faster or require less training, it's easier to make an assembly line churn out products faster. Beyond the warranty period (where I haven't had trouble using it) the cost of repair often exceeds the marginal extension of the life time, after all I won't have a new product afterwards. I have a repaired, old and used out of warranty product that might fail next year too. And first I have to bring it in and get an estimate of whether it's repairable and what that'll cost, I have downtime while it's being repaired. The latter is not a trivial hassle if you have only one device and you need it to work.
That turns into a bad cycle, the less items are worth repairing the less common and profitable being a repairman gets and being easy to fix has less value so they start making the products cheaper to build, but harder to repair. If you just glue it all together with superglue and make it 1% cheaper and save 1% on warranty repairs that's more profitable than making it easy to fix. And to take one area where components are supposedly very interchanging, I recently had a computer die on me. I was thinking I could maybe put together a frankenbox from other parts I had lying around, well I had a machine from 2006. But that had VGA and DVI outputs, my current monitor only has HDMI and DP. But okay, I can take the GPU from the machine that just broke. And that gave me DP out, but hey, the machine bluescreen'd because the PSU wasn't built for a 250W gaming card. And so I kept going until I realized at the end of this it'll still be a crap box and ordered new parts that are all current and will all play nice with each other.
That's why I think recycling has a better future than repairing. Pick it apart, melt it down, make something new. Or return it to the manufacturer, if they want it to sell refurbs. As a consumer I really don't want to deal with it, I just want to say this one is broken so do what you want with it, I'll just go buy me a new one right now and be back in working condition as quickly and easily as possible. Then again, I'm not a penny pincher so having some disposable cash might make me lean harder towards the easy solution than the cheapest solution. And I don't really excuse that, money exists for solving problems. But I'd rather not be an environmental dick unless I have to, if there's a green way to take that problem off my hands I'm open for that.
That is as it should be. Restarting a service (or not) is dependent on the nature of the service and that nature of its crash. You can easily end up DoS-ing your machine by automatic unconstrained restarts. Hence service restart and service management has no place in an init-system or actually in the OS. Done right, it is a part of the service. It is also not hard to do and there are several packages that can serve as a basis for this.
Crash management is probably the least interesting bit, it's the power management (sleep/suspend/resume/hibernation) and hotplug/dynamic devices (plugging in/unplugging monitors, headphones, USB devices, Bluetooth, wired and wireless networks) with dependency management that makes people want to turn the init process into a general service management system. Being able to restart a crashed process is just a spin-off and it's pretty easy to set generic constraints so it won't go in an infinite crash loop. Sure it's better to have software that doesn't crash but in the real world you often have to run the buggy software to keep availability up as downtime costs $$$ while you debug to find a solution. Maybe it was a wacky race condition that happens once a decade or a mystery bit corruption, you can't just shut down everything every time you run into a bug and keep it down until you've fixed it.
I might be reading the partial report wrong, but as far as I understood, x264 is not scoring low against HEVC. Either that or HEVC encoders are not mature enough. I get that the "real-time" encoder has very specific constraints, but how about the others?
From what I understand there's three areas where HEVC does very well: - Extremely low bitrates, because there's more blurring and less blocking that looks less bad. - 4K/UHD resolution because it supports larger block sizes that are more efficient at high resolution. - Better parallelism (WPP) for software decoding, if you have full hardware support it doesn't matter.
For moderate resolutions like 1080p at moderate bit rates x264 is still performing very well and it's highly optimized. HEVC brings some new tricks that should improve compression further, but nothing really revolutionary like 20-30%. I mean there's better picture compression than JPG and better audio compression than MP3 but they're "close enough", at this point there's no big need to hurry unless you control the entire ecosystem like say Netflix or YouTube and can do HEVC where it's supported and downgrade to H.264 where it's not. For encoding to a broad number of unknown devices it's going to be H.264 for a long time to come. Looking at broadband speeds most people will either have so fast connections it doesn't matter or so slow connections it doesn't matter, there aren't many in the gap where the size difference is really significant. And I got a feeling 100GB for 4K BluRay is plenty, there are many movies now using only 20-40GB of the possible 50GB so I suspect we'll see H.264 used quite a bit there too. And the commercial terms for HEVC are worse, so there's very little compelling need to use it really.
There are other reasons. One of them is accuracy- you need your commercial simulator to operate the faux control surfaces with the exact same positioning, speed, resisting pressure, and variations thereof in all different conditions to make the simulator worthwhile to the commercial customer.
Well, if you are an aerospace manufacturer you just take the panels and all the knobs/dials/sliders/pedals etc. from the production line, just add force feedback where necessary. If that was $500k to create an accurate simulator - that is, software that calculates the flight state given inputs and outputs that doesn't seem unlikely. If it's $500k for the actual hardware that's crazy, considering the whole plane costs something like $300k off the assembly line and you can take away 98%, add a bit of force feedback and an Occulus Rift. That said, they might think the only people that care for perfect accuracy are flight schools and there's not going to be many sales, so the simulator is really $5k hardware and $495k for making a simulation they promise is exactly like flying the real thing.
And what's registration going to do? If somebody gets run over by my car, the license plate is not sufficient proof that I'm guilty of murder. Install a few triangulation beacons, find the source controlling the drone and send airport security/police out to arrest the guy. These are not covert bursts, they're constant transmissions that should be easy to find. Rather than come up with some crazy idea to register everyone with a $100 drone.
Why would you need to make new law here? Obviously if you let a babysitter in, they can see things in plain sight. If they're looking for a glass and you got illegal stuff hidden in your kitchen cabinet, too bad. It's only if they go snooping in places that they clearly have no business snooping in it might be an issue. Same applies for your computer, clearly some things are just there. Some you might run into. And other things you don't find unless you go snooping.
For any book you'd care to search, hell yeah ebooks. I usually read books during travel and/or on vacation, in both cases I've found "disposable" books better than an electronic gadget I'll try to not break or lose or get stolen or get sand or water in the connectors. Usually they're 500+ page fiction bricks, they get battered and bruised and dog-eared as I please and nobody would care to steal it if I go for a snack or a swim in the water and they're a slow-paced leisure for when I want to chill out but not be completely idle. Afterwards they're in no condition to give away and I'm not reading it again, so I just file them in the paper bin for recycling.
Depends. As long as the size of your population is less than the number of people that your environment can sustain you will be ok. But at the moment that your population grow more than the capacity of the environment to sustain it, you're screwed (And I find disturbing how every single economist miserably fails to understand this).
Those ideas aren't exactly new, the most famous proponent was Thomas Malthus in 1779. However, it turns out we're quite creative at expanding the apparent natural resources so at least in agriculture the peak and crash never came. And for the last decade we've actually reached somewhat of an equilibrium in child births, the world population is growing because people live longer but it's not in massive exponential graph as it was through most of the 20th century so we're not going to swarm the planet to death. What remains now is whether we're running out of one-time resources like natural oil and gas (we are) and can convert to renewable resources (we might). Electric cars are a good example, sure they're not winning the market by a landslide but if oil cost $1000/galleon tomorrow most people would find a way to make them work. It's not like we'd be back at horse and carriage. With China and India making great strides if we get Sub-Saharan Africa out of extreme poverty world population might actually decrease lowering the pressure, naturally.
LED's, arrows on the floor. smartphone, arudino, flip book, GPS...all fail If he can't remember the way down the hall to the dining hall, how in the hell is he going to remember to pick and follow directions on the damn phone? How to get him to the dining hall and back? Someone holding his hand in both directions.
Pretty much this, the only way to make sure he actually gets to the dining hall or back to his room is to have a person making sure of it. No matter how great the device is it's highly doubtful if he has the mental capacity to make use of it, most likely he'll forget where he has it, why he has it and how to operate it. That he could manage on his "own" with such a device sounds like a combination of nerd hubris and wishful thinking on behalf of the relative. You can't fix this with a gizmo.
I'd add to that list: * Never drive preoccupied or in emotional imbalance * Never drive intoxicated or on drugs
Let's face it, we don't leave the rest of our lives behind when we get behind the wheel. If things are troubling or exciting at home or at work or in your love life or with your friends or relatives the mind is churning on it. And while I don't know many who will blatantly drive drunk, I think quite a few have pushed it with hangovers and such. It certainly doesn't take much to drive better than humans at their worst...
Just move to the US and knickers won't be knickers anymore solving this conundrum. Also eating lots of snickers will be a great way to blend in and fill out.
Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop
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KDE Turns 19
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However what I don't get, is why the Linux community hasn't been pushing for dominance in the Work Station market. Those who use larger Personal Computers to do real computational work.
Meh, those probably fit inside the 1% Linux already has. It's the general business desktop you'd like to conquer, the one that consists of Office, Outlook and [very business-specific something]. Where the latter might be cross-platform, web application or some other fairly platform-agnostic business. But it doesn't matter because you all need to run Windows to do the basic collaboration.
I wonder how much "fake" meat they can come up with for $108 million. Because $108 million sure buys a lot of cattle and the land to keep them on. And a herd large enough to maintain its numbers and pay its own expenses. I know a lot of farmers who have started with far less...
If you come up with a killer meat substitute you can sell to large parts of the population, you can sell for way more than 34 cent per American. It's a bit like asking how many drivers could you hire for the money Google has spent on a driverless car. Probably a lot, but if you can make it happen you'll still make killer profit. On the other hand if it's another substitute only vegetarians and masochists would eat, not so much.
Unless what you need protection/freedom from is the government, you're using one power structure to fight oppression from other power structures but every organization end up serving itself, the people who work for it and other organizations to a greater or lesser degree. Government workers care about their own paychecks like everybody else and the bureaucracy won't help reduce the bureaucracy. It's particularly obvious if you include laws that are essentially written by corporations to the benefit of corporations through lobbyists, the idea that the government serves "the people" in all things is incredibly naive. Sure, they're better than the alternative but that's because no power structures is not an alternative. If there is no law, gangs of thugs will quickly make their own rules. And having too much power in one place, well absolute power corrupts absolutely. Particularly when it comes to individual freedom, what "the people" wants should perhaps be less important than what I want. Or not, depends on the situation.
So is there a solution? Well not really, but you try making a system of "checks and balances" which really means you're trying to make a rock-paper-scissor system where no one gets to crush everybody else, take full control and run the country like they own it. And you have a lot of people in all walks of politics that fail to see this, if you go all libertarian and remove all the evils of government regulation you'll have multinational mega-corporations shafting everybody. If you go socialist and remove all the evils of the free market you'll have the government dictating what people should have and want. There is no fairy tale land where there's no people with power and who want to abuse it. You just try to keep them busy fighting and running interference on each other, because if any one of them should actually win they'd turn on us. The government is not our white knight in shining armor, it's more like a mercenary. Certainly useful in protecting us from other villains, but watch out for who lines his purse strings and conflicting loyalties. How free you are will heavily depend on where that sword is pointing.
It's illegal to consider many things about a job applicant, too, but very often, the pretty lady who shows up dressed to kill will still likely get the job over the ugly duckling with the tattoo on her neck, qualifications aside. The white guy will still likely get the job over the black guy, qualifications aside. The guy will still likely get the job over the woman, qualifications aside. VW will still build emissions systems that are out of spec. It's all illegal. It happens anyway.
Sure, a lot of things are illegal. But test results and patient journals won't magically end up on the insurer's hands. They can't be used for risk scoring or denying coverage unless someone builds that into the system. A lot of people would have to get involved and if they're caught they're going to be raked over the coals like VW is now, sure it might happen but it's a lot harder than information you obviously know because you've met the job candidate and you only have to be obtuse or disguise the true reason for rejecting them, nowhere is there a smoking gun proving it - unless you're actually stupid enough to hand them one. There's a lot of other weaknesses I might point out, but with a law in place and penalties that have teeth this isn't really one of them.
And the reference kilogram has been losing weight, which means all of us have steadily started weighing more and more as time goes on.
I've heard a lot of creative excuses for the spread of obesity, but that was a new one. Of course blaming the French is not exactly new, but I think Fre... sorry, freedom fries have more to do with it..
I think the difference goes far more between interactive and non-interactive content, or data and executables if you will. If you copy any audiovisual work (photo, video, music, books etc.) into a DRM-free format you're pretty much done. Even if you have closed source players checking for watermarks like Cinavia they're going to get tracked down and found. Executables are a different story, first of all to patch code you must download code from various dubious sites on the Internet. Secondly, you never know if there's more DRM checks that will trigger at some point. Updates are likely to break the crack and unpatched software is typically dangerous if you're downloading 3rd party content or at the very least buggy. You could be hit with malware, trojans stealing logins and passwords, identity theft, cryptowalls and all sorts of ugly. You really want to risk all that to save $1 playing Angry Birds? At this point I wouldn't want to run "warez" on anything but a burner box dedicated to it that was never used for anything sensitive ever.
I'm not sure what the right answer is, but it won't be found in a niche language whose sole purpose is to support one company's ecosystem and lock in developers to their platforms.
It's less niche than at least two dozen programming languages/. has hyped as the best thing since sliced bread. Sometimes I feel this place has become a bunch of grumpy old farts who think C and POSIX was the pinnacle of computer science and everything since has just been poorly reinventing the wheel. Or that programming should be for real men who could hand code it in assembly and that high level languages is just another attempt to recreate COBOL or Visual Basic. There's not a whole lot of money in creating programming languages, just ask Sun. And if you don't have widespread adoption, you're never getting off the ground. That's why the OSS community is still trying to create UI apps using 1980s tech, sure Qt is a decent band aid and GTK.... well it's a band aid, but the base language is way behind Java, C# and Swift. Not in what you can theoretically do, but in terms of how easy it is to do it.
Besides, Microsoft is open sourcing.NET Core, Apple has promised to open source Swift within the end of the year, Java has of course been open a while with the OpenJDK so it seems like the days of the base language being closed source is coming to an end. Of course they all do it with their own platform in mind, but desktop Linux could use a few allies. Yes, GNOME and KDE has been at it for a very long time but have they managed to get any market share? Once a percent of nerds, nobody else.
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To-date he has saved less than $200 by his own math. From here forward he is "saving" almost $2k per month, but he could save half that without the penalty. Half the money could have been saved sharing a studio.
Actually that's cash flow, he bought a $10000 truck and he's saved $10000 but he still has an asset - the truck - that's probably worth close to the same as when he bought it. And he's got zero commute costs, where the rent is cheap you'll probably need a car to get to work in a timely fashion. And you are aware that "studio apartment" means "extremely tiny, combined living room/sleeping area"? Fair enough if you're single or a couple on a tight budget, but I couldn't imagine permanently living and sleeping in one tiny cramped room with my best buddy. Two tiny bedrooms and a shared living room so you could at least retreat behind a closed door would be my absolute minimum, but then you're probably in a different price category. Otherwise I'd prefer the truck, to be honest. The biggest problems around here in Norway is winter and that you'd have to be officially be homeless, since you can't register a truck, house boat or cabin for use as your permanent residence. That's pretty much an instant credit-killer, no matter what your income is.
Being a normal foreigner, I find it disturbing as you Americans think it's normal to pay 500,000, 800,000, a million for homes that cost 100,000 to be built just because the greedy owner thinks he can charge a million. In a more normal country, this is called extortion. Google to this point have so much money that he could build their own city where he wanted and let these bastards rot waiting for a sucker to pay the price they want.
There's construction cost and there's location cost. The building could burn to the ground and a lot in downtown SF would still be crazy expensive. In Detroit and I guess a lot of other places you could get a lot for next to nothing, I don't know what country you come from where it's different. I would think even in the poorest African countries there's really expensive neighborhoods where the middle class/rich people live and remote plots of land you could get almost for free. And locations don't devalue, in 30 years this apartment I live in will be a worn-down outdated dump. But unless something really extraordinary happens it'll still be in a central location near the river giving it a view and making it a dead end for traffic. That value will still be there if and when I sell it. Even if they want to tear down the building and make a new one, the lot is probably even more valuable because they'll want to make a new building full of high end apartments and those extra perks this lot has that most of the remaining city don't have and can't have makes it exclusive. So it's dead money I got tied up in my living quarters, but it's still a form of investment unlike a building that will fall apart.
This is because stacked ranking is basically a high school popularity contest which pits employees against each other to stay above the bottom part of the bell curve so that they don't end up on a PIP ("Performance Improvement Program") or just plain fired/asked to lead/offered severance.
So that's how you become a manager at Google!
So in my lifetime America has gone from "give me liberty or give me death" to a bunch of scared sheep repeating "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"?
Only if you're like 240 years old. Yes, yes I know all about what you did in WWII but it was mostly liberating and not so much dying, you might get a few points for the 1860s but outside of a few war veterans that have served abroad the average American hasn't really had to make that choice in ages. There might have been some high stakes poker played in the 1960s, but that was all done by the politicians. Having heard a bit from the occupation and resistance during the Nazi occupation here in Norway it's not that easy to put your money where your mouth is when the enemy is all around you. It's one thing to have a battle line, enemies in front, people you want to protect in the back and you choose to be in harm's way. Random, innocent people being killed just because they were at the wrong time at the wrong place is a lot harder to swallow. Except for Jesus-freaks running out of cheeks to turn to, the alternatives end up being either more surveilance or retaliation. And retaliation leads to collateral damage leading to more terrorists and even further escalation, if you run out of good solutions the poor ones start looking quite okay.
not sure what good it does for them to know if someone is dropping out of an online course or not though, like, I suppose it just checks if someone has advanced in the course in the past 3-7 days at all
If they're paying tuition or to take the exam then sending some kind of trigger message is obviously good for business. See also general customer retention, freemium games and so on. Everybody wants to know what customers are likely to leave them soon.
I was under the impression the taxi system was primarily created to improve customer service because without limits there's be many serving the "sweet spots" both in terms of hours and locations while the rest would be under-served. By making medallions that hold a rather big capital investment it's necessary to keep the taxi on the road as much as possible, even through the slow hours, because even though they're not as profitable it's better than leaving them unused. Not unlike how the postal service will deliver some items to small, remote locations at unprofitable prices at the same flat rates as relatively simple and cheap deliveries. If you let some companies or individuals take just the best bits, that kind of model won't work.
This is a big factor: the cheapness and distance shipped have us moving to a disposable model vs. repair. I just went through this with a washing machine and a lawn mower. The washing machine was LG; very hard to find a schematic with labeled parts. I had to guess and was wrong twice. I didn't bother to ship back the wrong parts as they were about 10 bucks, shipping was also about 10 bucks. So I threw the bad ones away.
Actually being able to ship parts for peanuts from a warehouse in China should have made it easier to find obscure parts, not harder so that's not really it. The real reason is that it's not worth it except for really expensive products. With low transport costs we can centralize production and get economics of scale. It's hard to make one repairman go faster or require less training, it's easier to make an assembly line churn out products faster. Beyond the warranty period (where I haven't had trouble using it) the cost of repair often exceeds the marginal extension of the life time, after all I won't have a new product afterwards. I have a repaired, old and used out of warranty product that might fail next year too. And first I have to bring it in and get an estimate of whether it's repairable and what that'll cost, I have downtime while it's being repaired. The latter is not a trivial hassle if you have only one device and you need it to work.
That turns into a bad cycle, the less items are worth repairing the less common and profitable being a repairman gets and being easy to fix has less value so they start making the products cheaper to build, but harder to repair. If you just glue it all together with superglue and make it 1% cheaper and save 1% on warranty repairs that's more profitable than making it easy to fix. And to take one area where components are supposedly very interchanging, I recently had a computer die on me. I was thinking I could maybe put together a frankenbox from other parts I had lying around, well I had a machine from 2006. But that had VGA and DVI outputs, my current monitor only has HDMI and DP. But okay, I can take the GPU from the machine that just broke. And that gave me DP out, but hey, the machine bluescreen'd because the PSU wasn't built for a 250W gaming card. And so I kept going until I realized at the end of this it'll still be a crap box and ordered new parts that are all current and will all play nice with each other.
That's why I think recycling has a better future than repairing. Pick it apart, melt it down, make something new. Or return it to the manufacturer, if they want it to sell refurbs. As a consumer I really don't want to deal with it, I just want to say this one is broken so do what you want with it, I'll just go buy me a new one right now and be back in working condition as quickly and easily as possible. Then again, I'm not a penny pincher so having some disposable cash might make me lean harder towards the easy solution than the cheapest solution. And I don't really excuse that, money exists for solving problems. But I'd rather not be an environmental dick unless I have to, if there's a green way to take that problem off my hands I'm open for that.
That is as it should be. Restarting a service (or not) is dependent on the nature of the service and that nature of its crash. You can easily end up DoS-ing your machine by automatic unconstrained restarts. Hence service restart and service management has no place in an init-system or actually in the OS. Done right, it is a part of the service. It is also not hard to do and there are several packages that can serve as a basis for this.
Crash management is probably the least interesting bit, it's the power management (sleep/suspend/resume/hibernation) and hotplug/dynamic devices (plugging in/unplugging monitors, headphones, USB devices, Bluetooth, wired and wireless networks) with dependency management that makes people want to turn the init process into a general service management system. Being able to restart a crashed process is just a spin-off and it's pretty easy to set generic constraints so it won't go in an infinite crash loop. Sure it's better to have software that doesn't crash but in the real world you often have to run the buggy software to keep availability up as downtime costs $$$ while you debug to find a solution. Maybe it was a wacky race condition that happens once a decade or a mystery bit corruption, you can't just shut down everything every time you run into a bug and keep it down until you've fixed it.
I might be reading the partial report wrong, but as far as I understood, x264 is not scoring low against HEVC. Either that or HEVC encoders are not mature enough. I get that the "real-time" encoder has very specific constraints, but how about the others?
From what I understand there's three areas where HEVC does very well:
- Extremely low bitrates, because there's more blurring and less blocking that looks less bad.
- 4K/UHD resolution because it supports larger block sizes that are more efficient at high resolution.
- Better parallelism (WPP) for software decoding, if you have full hardware support it doesn't matter.
For moderate resolutions like 1080p at moderate bit rates x264 is still performing very well and it's highly optimized. HEVC brings some new tricks that should improve compression further, but nothing really revolutionary like 20-30%. I mean there's better picture compression than JPG and better audio compression than MP3 but they're "close enough", at this point there's no big need to hurry unless you control the entire ecosystem like say Netflix or YouTube and can do HEVC where it's supported and downgrade to H.264 where it's not. For encoding to a broad number of unknown devices it's going to be H.264 for a long time to come. Looking at broadband speeds most people will either have so fast connections it doesn't matter or so slow connections it doesn't matter, there aren't many in the gap where the size difference is really significant. And I got a feeling 100GB for 4K BluRay is plenty, there are many movies now using only 20-40GB of the possible 50GB so I suspect we'll see H.264 used quite a bit there too. And the commercial terms for HEVC are worse, so there's very little compelling need to use it really.
There are other reasons. One of them is accuracy- you need your commercial simulator to operate the faux control surfaces with the exact same positioning, speed, resisting pressure, and variations thereof in all different conditions to make the simulator worthwhile to the commercial customer.
Well, if you are an aerospace manufacturer you just take the panels and all the knobs/dials/sliders/pedals etc. from the production line, just add force feedback where necessary. If that was $500k to create an accurate simulator - that is, software that calculates the flight state given inputs and outputs that doesn't seem unlikely. If it's $500k for the actual hardware that's crazy, considering the whole plane costs something like $300k off the assembly line and you can take away 98%, add a bit of force feedback and an Occulus Rift. That said, they might think the only people that care for perfect accuracy are flight schools and there's not going to be many sales, so the simulator is really $5k hardware and $495k for making a simulation they promise is exactly like flying the real thing.
And what's registration going to do? If somebody gets run over by my car, the license plate is not sufficient proof that I'm guilty of murder. Install a few triangulation beacons, find the source controlling the drone and send airport security/police out to arrest the guy. These are not covert bursts, they're constant transmissions that should be easy to find. Rather than come up with some crazy idea to register everyone with a $100 drone.
Why would you need to make new law here? Obviously if you let a babysitter in, they can see things in plain sight. If they're looking for a glass and you got illegal stuff hidden in your kitchen cabinet, too bad. It's only if they go snooping in places that they clearly have no business snooping in it might be an issue. Same applies for your computer, clearly some things are just there. Some you might run into. And other things you don't find unless you go snooping.
For any book you'd care to search, hell yeah ebooks. I usually read books during travel and/or on vacation, in both cases I've found "disposable" books better than an electronic gadget I'll try to not break or lose or get stolen or get sand or water in the connectors. Usually they're 500+ page fiction bricks, they get battered and bruised and dog-eared as I please and nobody would care to steal it if I go for a snack or a swim in the water and they're a slow-paced leisure for when I want to chill out but not be completely idle. Afterwards they're in no condition to give away and I'm not reading it again, so I just file them in the paper bin for recycling.
Depends. As long as the size of your population is less than the number of people that your environment can sustain you will be ok. But at the moment that your population grow more than the capacity of the environment to sustain it, you're screwed (And I find disturbing how every single economist miserably fails to understand this).
Those ideas aren't exactly new, the most famous proponent was Thomas Malthus in 1779. However, it turns out we're quite creative at expanding the apparent natural resources so at least in agriculture the peak and crash never came. And for the last decade we've actually reached somewhat of an equilibrium in child births, the world population is growing because people live longer but it's not in massive exponential graph as it was through most of the 20th century so we're not going to swarm the planet to death. What remains now is whether we're running out of one-time resources like natural oil and gas (we are) and can convert to renewable resources (we might). Electric cars are a good example, sure they're not winning the market by a landslide but if oil cost $1000/galleon tomorrow most people would find a way to make them work. It's not like we'd be back at horse and carriage. With China and India making great strides if we get Sub-Saharan Africa out of extreme poverty world population might actually decrease lowering the pressure, naturally.
LED's, arrows on the floor. smartphone, arudino, flip book, GPS...all fail If he can't remember the way down the hall to the dining hall, how in the hell is he going to remember to pick and follow directions on the damn phone? How to get him to the dining hall and back? Someone holding his hand in both directions.
Pretty much this, the only way to make sure he actually gets to the dining hall or back to his room is to have a person making sure of it. No matter how great the device is it's highly doubtful if he has the mental capacity to make use of it, most likely he'll forget where he has it, why he has it and how to operate it. That he could manage on his "own" with such a device sounds like a combination of nerd hubris and wishful thinking on behalf of the relative. You can't fix this with a gizmo.
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
I'd add to that list:
* Never drive preoccupied or in emotional imbalance
* Never drive intoxicated or on drugs
Let's face it, we don't leave the rest of our lives behind when we get behind the wheel. If things are troubling or exciting at home or at work or in your love life or with your friends or relatives the mind is churning on it. And while I don't know many who will blatantly drive drunk, I think quite a few have pushed it with hangovers and such. It certainly doesn't take much to drive better than humans at their worst...
Just move to the US and knickers won't be knickers anymore solving this conundrum. Also eating lots of snickers will be a great way to blend in and fill out.
However what I don't get, is why the Linux community hasn't been pushing for dominance in the Work Station market. Those who use larger Personal Computers to do real computational work.
Meh, those probably fit inside the 1% Linux already has. It's the general business desktop you'd like to conquer, the one that consists of Office, Outlook and [very business-specific something]. Where the latter might be cross-platform, web application or some other fairly platform-agnostic business. But it doesn't matter because you all need to run Windows to do the basic collaboration.
I wonder how much "fake" meat they can come up with for $108 million. Because $108 million sure buys a lot of cattle and the land to keep them on. And a herd large enough to maintain its numbers and pay its own expenses. I know a lot of farmers who have started with far less...
If you come up with a killer meat substitute you can sell to large parts of the population, you can sell for way more than 34 cent per American. It's a bit like asking how many drivers could you hire for the money Google has spent on a driverless car. Probably a lot, but if you can make it happen you'll still make killer profit. On the other hand if it's another substitute only vegetarians and masochists would eat, not so much.
Unless what you need protection/freedom from is the government, you're using one power structure to fight oppression from other power structures but every organization end up serving itself, the people who work for it and other organizations to a greater or lesser degree. Government workers care about their own paychecks like everybody else and the bureaucracy won't help reduce the bureaucracy. It's particularly obvious if you include laws that are essentially written by corporations to the benefit of corporations through lobbyists, the idea that the government serves "the people" in all things is incredibly naive. Sure, they're better than the alternative but that's because no power structures is not an alternative. If there is no law, gangs of thugs will quickly make their own rules. And having too much power in one place, well absolute power corrupts absolutely. Particularly when it comes to individual freedom, what "the people" wants should perhaps be less important than what I want. Or not, depends on the situation.
So is there a solution? Well not really, but you try making a system of "checks and balances" which really means you're trying to make a rock-paper-scissor system where no one gets to crush everybody else, take full control and run the country like they own it. And you have a lot of people in all walks of politics that fail to see this, if you go all libertarian and remove all the evils of government regulation you'll have multinational mega-corporations shafting everybody. If you go socialist and remove all the evils of the free market you'll have the government dictating what people should have and want. There is no fairy tale land where there's no people with power and who want to abuse it. You just try to keep them busy fighting and running interference on each other, because if any one of them should actually win they'd turn on us. The government is not our white knight in shining armor, it's more like a mercenary. Certainly useful in protecting us from other villains, but watch out for who lines his purse strings and conflicting loyalties. How free you are will heavily depend on where that sword is pointing.
It's illegal to consider many things about a job applicant, too, but very often, the pretty lady who shows up dressed to kill will still likely get the job over the ugly duckling with the tattoo on her neck, qualifications aside. The white guy will still likely get the job over the black guy, qualifications aside. The guy will still likely get the job over the woman, qualifications aside. VW will still build emissions systems that are out of spec. It's all illegal. It happens anyway.
Sure, a lot of things are illegal. But test results and patient journals won't magically end up on the insurer's hands. They can't be used for risk scoring or denying coverage unless someone builds that into the system. A lot of people would have to get involved and if they're caught they're going to be raked over the coals like VW is now, sure it might happen but it's a lot harder than information you obviously know because you've met the job candidate and you only have to be obtuse or disguise the true reason for rejecting them, nowhere is there a smoking gun proving it - unless you're actually stupid enough to hand them one. There's a lot of other weaknesses I might point out, but with a law in place and penalties that have teeth this isn't really one of them.
And the reference kilogram has been losing weight, which means all of us have steadily started weighing more and more as time goes on.
I've heard a lot of creative excuses for the spread of obesity, but that was a new one. Of course blaming the French is not exactly new, but I think Fre... sorry, freedom fries have more to do with it..
I think the difference goes far more between interactive and non-interactive content, or data and executables if you will. If you copy any audiovisual work (photo, video, music, books etc.) into a DRM-free format you're pretty much done. Even if you have closed source players checking for watermarks like Cinavia they're going to get tracked down and found. Executables are a different story, first of all to patch code you must download code from various dubious sites on the Internet. Secondly, you never know if there's more DRM checks that will trigger at some point. Updates are likely to break the crack and unpatched software is typically dangerous if you're downloading 3rd party content or at the very least buggy. You could be hit with malware, trojans stealing logins and passwords, identity theft, cryptowalls and all sorts of ugly. You really want to risk all that to save $1 playing Angry Birds? At this point I wouldn't want to run "warez" on anything but a burner box dedicated to it that was never used for anything sensitive ever.
I'm not sure what the right answer is, but it won't be found in a niche language whose sole purpose is to support one company's ecosystem and lock in developers to their platforms.
It's less niche than at least two dozen programming languages /. has hyped as the best thing since sliced bread. Sometimes I feel this place has become a bunch of grumpy old farts who think C and POSIX was the pinnacle of computer science and everything since has just been poorly reinventing the wheel. Or that programming should be for real men who could hand code it in assembly and that high level languages is just another attempt to recreate COBOL or Visual Basic. There's not a whole lot of money in creating programming languages, just ask Sun. And if you don't have widespread adoption, you're never getting off the ground. That's why the OSS community is still trying to create UI apps using 1980s tech, sure Qt is a decent band aid and GTK.... well it's a band aid, but the base language is way behind Java, C# and Swift. Not in what you can theoretically do, but in terms of how easy it is to do it.
Besides, Microsoft is open sourcing .NET Core, Apple has promised to open source Swift within the end of the year, Java has of course been open a while with the OpenJDK so it seems like the days of the base language being closed source is coming to an end. Of course they all do it with their own platform in mind, but desktop Linux could use a few allies. Yes, GNOME and KDE has been at it for a very long time but have they managed to get any market share? Once a percent of nerds, nobody else.
Yeah that is so last decade, you should look into Silverlight.