Yes. Don't ever let Excel touch your csv files. For example, if you open a csv file with Excel and then save it again, it will have converted cells containing (large) numeric IDs to scientific notation. Without asking. Bye, data.
Converting "JAN10" and "MAR10" to dates was also pretty creative, changing like 5 entries in a list of many thousand codes. Silent, subtle data corruption is so fun. At least with the scientific notation it's pretty obvious your data has been fucked.
Unless and until you are "forced" to use Android for your phone's OS, you can't claim Google has a monopoly and therefore you have no right to complain about them having licensing terms of their choice for their products.
The focus on monopolies and anti-trust is an American thing, in the rest of the world it's usually called competition law. I don't know the US legislation but here in Norway they simply say "dominating position" and with a 40% market share as a typical minimum before they will intervene against anti-competitive practices. And in this case you're not even looking at the right market, Android users can't shop in iOS or WP stores. The alternatives are the Play store and a few third party stores that are well hidden behind warning signs that 99% of the market won't use. One of the practices that may be considered anti-competitive is:
"d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to the other parties accepting additional obligations which, by their nature or according to customary commercial usage have no connection with the subject of such contracts."
You want the app store? Well you also need to install our browser, mail app, map app etc. is exactly the kind of bundling this is supposed to prevent. Say there's one dominating supplier of fresh milk to your grocery store, the rest would have to ship from far away at great expense and not all that fresh. And the supplier says if you want our milk, you'll also have to exclusively sell our bread, fruit and vegetables even though there's plenty competition there. That's illegal. Then again, they have no problems with a McDonald's franchise regulating that you exclusively sell McD food under the McD brand. It's the context you do it in that determines if it's an anti-competitive practice or not.
Personally I think it's a close call, but if IE and WMP were anti-competitive enough to intervene at least here in Europe then I wouldn't be surprised if they could win. I'm kinda surprised they're testing this on Android and not the iPhone/iPad though, where Apple has a much more blatant anti-competition policy.
One of the major complaints about estimates is that it "takes too long." Seriously, if estimations take any appreciable amount of time, you're doing them wrong.(unless you need to estimate some massive project, in which case you understand why estimates are needed).
Usually this is because you've already estimated it to the best of your ability but the powers above aren't happy with the uncertainty, where they harass you into giving a magic number or narrow little gap or to talk down your estimate until it's the number they're happy with. Or if you're really lucky get a litlte time for research/experimentation/prototyping but in practice it'd just be faster to start on the implementation, if you know this is a task that in practice will need to be done regardless. I've been in five-person meetings where we spend half an hour debating the schedule and estimates when in fact we'd have a better estimate with a head start on implementation by simply testing it out if key solutions are feasible. Unfortunately some people think that if you just have people work on an estimate long enough, it'll get better. It might work for a plumber who can probably enumerate every task down to the last bolt that needs tightening, but it rarely works in software development. Unless it's really a doer-job of adding one more field to a form just like all the existing fields.
True we can't know everything it can or can't do without a full read on the capabilities from Intel but I trust that if it were capable of offline access by anyone as you claim it would be public knowledge and wouldn't have made it very far.
Part of AMT is remote management, including being able to boot a server that lost power, reboot a frozen machine, wake machines for nightly patching and so on. Obviously it can't reach a machine that doesn't have power, but from the moment you plug in a vPro machine it's live even when it's "off". Maybe it's not public knowledge but you only need to read the advertisement:
Find It. Fix It. Anywhere Intel(R) Active Management Technology provides remote management over wired or wireless networks across devices. Access clients through a secure channel irrespective of power or OS state, address issues while user is online, patch, repair, and upgrade operating systems and applications, and inventory client-side software and hardware.
Of course it's only supposed to talk to your puppet master inside your enterprise and only when it's enabled. But if you had a secret knock backdoor to access AMT on any computer, even when it is allegedly disabled - and perhaps even on CPUs that don't advertise the feature since it's probably there in silicon - that would be the mother of all back doors.
The mentality is that you can and should build your own franken-browser from whatever plug-ins fits you, it's not supposed to be a fully functional browser you can extend but more like a skeleton you can build on. It happens when you go over the top on flexibility and think people want a DIY kit instead of a product. The problem is the same as why you can't fit any car body with any chassis with any engine with any transmission with any brakes with any interior, they don't all go together. And some parts are shit, but only by hogging memory or crashing in ways that aren't easily traceable. I don't want to be the unit and integration tester in a modern day DLL hell, because Mozilla's will not take any responsibility for plug-ins trampling over each other or bringing the browser to its knees. Don't get me wrong, the basic idea that you can write an obscure plug-in without bloating the main code base and getting approval to push it out to 100+ million users is great. But it should be more of a test bed to see what functionality should be standard for the masses, rather than pushing more and more functionality out of the core. Here's an early alpha of Firefox 100, you can have HTML engine plugins, Javascript engine plugins, UI plugins, in fact any functionality you'd care to think of. It looks like this:
As soon as they made the decision to not install urea injection, they effectively decided to cheat at that time because they were asking for the technologically impossible. There is no way they didn't know that their decision to leave off such a key piece of equipment would not result in unacceptable emissions. The engineers at VW aren't dumb. The decision was made for financial reasons (not surprising) but was aided and abetted by a bunch of engineers that should have known better.
Clearly somebody knew. But I would think most simply assumed they'd done something very clever that was being guarded as a trade secret. I mean it's not exactly a perpetuum mobile or warp drive, it's a slightly less environmentally unfriendly car engine. If you pulled the "technologically impossible" card they'd probably accuse you of hubris, like who are you to think you know everything? Sure, in retrospect it's easy to say this was a hoax but I wouldn't have started making noise. If it's legitimate you're that nosy employee trying to access trade secrets you don't have permission to or if not you'll become a liability to everyone who is in on the scam. And this isn't some manager embezzling funds or stealing equipment, it's the company mass cheating on their environmental tests. For all you know this goes all the way up to the CxO level, you'd better have solid proof and be ready to go to the press after you're escorted off the premises. And to be honest I'd look for every other plausible explanation, if it wasn't for the overwhelming proof now in retrospect I'd have a hard time believing the balls of steel necessary to pull this off. It must have been obvious to everyone involved how big a scandal this would become if they were ever discovered.
No, you provision sockets and wire them to the network room. Then you have a bundle of unpatched terminals in the panel. Someone authorized comes in and needs the socket you patch in to the switch and it goes live. When they're done you remove the cable and the socket is dead again. 5 seconds on either end protects your network from unauthorized devices
Virtually on a managed switch? I'm sure that happens all the time in places where you get a device with a particular MAC approved to connect on one particular port on the switch. Until you light it up it's basically dead and you get a nice audit trail of paperwork and access logs. But actually getting into the wiring closet and rewiring the network every time anybody needs a change? That actually sounds like a bigger risk, because who knows what they really do in there. Unless you have a second guy inspecting so the first guy doesn't do anything he's not supposed to. I'd much rather have the switch logs monitored and keep that wiring closet locked as much as possible.
Phones and tablets are much better consumer-level devices than PCs ever were. PCs are just moving into a new and arguably better niche as the most powerful line of computers for people who need or want to do more than a mobile device allows. The reason PC sales have dropped off considerably is that a) the worldwide market has been largely saturated, and b) computers have ridiculously powerful hardware for what most of them are required to do, so they don't need to be replaced nearly as often as they used to be.
The PC market is ridiculously unsaturated compared to smart phones, outside first world countries it's the only computing device a few billion people have. And if it wasn't for the completely different hardware (ARM vs x86) and software (Android/iOS vs Win/Mac/non-Android Linux) and user paradigm (touch vs keyboard+mouse), I suspect many of them could be replaced by a small dock with HDMI+USB+Bluetooth headset in case somebody calls you. A quad core ARM at GHz speeds with >1GB RAM is at least as powerful as a 2000s PC or whenever they became more than powerful enough for general productivity tasks. You already have the compute sticks approaching the form factor, all it takes is someone putting it together.
Never gonna happen. In the corporate world, physical desktop machines will stick around for a long time.
In the workstation market perhaps, otherwise I think laptops for portability and thin clients for on-site work is taking over. That way they can just provision you more resources in a data center somewhere and if it breaks just grab a different thin client.
And as long as you pay a significant premium for a laptop which isn't as easily upgraded, a lot of home users will continue to buy a desktop.
For the premium? Sure. But my impression is relatively few people do anything but the simplest of upgrades, the kind you potentially could do on a laptop too unless it's soldered in except maybe a few gamers.
You can pretty much have a desktop machine built to spec, whereas a laptop is always going to be a much more limited menu.
It's easier to go a little overkill these days. It's not like ten, twenty years ago when it would be half the price in a few years.
Yes, there will be tablets. Yes, a lot of people find a laptop covers their needs. But I don't see the desktop going away any time soon.
If you don't believe the desktop is marginalized, you should realize that the latest Skylake processors topping out at 65W except for the K-model is basically slightly higher clocked laptop chips. The desktop models are just a spin-off, just like the high-end desktop is a spin-off of servers. Nobody puts effort into the desktop anymore.
As long as you use HTTPS and don't get MITM'd by false certificates or use some other secure protocol, the exit node is not the worry. That security is as good as SSH or any other crypto. It's that an adversary with enough resources can do correlation/traffic analysis or even just be the whole chain from start to finish.
If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over public links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity.
If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over private links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity. Because if you're the NSA there's no "private".
Well Prima Cinema is apparently still in business where for $35000 + $500/rental you can see first-run movies at home. If you're a multi-millionaire apparently that's an ok price not to go to the cinema and hang out with the plebs. Really early adopter prices are hard to compare to "sane" price, because the whole point would be you had it first. And you did it because you had that much disposable cash.
And when you dont want ot talk to mom, skype will make sure any naughty keywords you use while sitting at your computer are also promptly forwarded to the NSA as well.
As long as the NSA isn't forwarding the naughty keywords to my mom....
More often than not, 'doxxing' is just compiling information that is already available on the internet. People think they've been 'hacked' or 'stalked' but they often forget that they posted the information in some forum/comment section using the same username they use everywhere.
Also don't forget that once you're circling a target, you can find what someone else has posted. Like if you know someone comes from a particular place or goes to a particular school, just crawl through everyone else's social media feeds until you find the person you're looking for even if they're not tagged or named but they're at some event or class or group or whatever. A lot of "doxxing" is basically casting a big dragnet and have your own personal army sifting through it until you find the person you're looking for from vague references that ordinarily wouldn't identify you..
It's like you deliberately picked mostly Linux-supported titles. Or maybe you really have no idea what's available for Linux...
It's genuinely the latter, I got on board with Linux as my primary desktop around 2007 and quit about 3.5 years later in 2010 so my experience is ~5 years out of date. At that point Steam for Linux didn't exist so my go-to place was to check the WINE database. Perhaps I should give it another go, Windows spyware edition isn't tempting. Then again, I got ~4 years left on this Windows 7 license until EOL and I'm very comfortable where I am. It's nice to know the transition wouldn't be quite as painful this time around though.
True. Tests will tell you if something doesn't work, not if it does work. Automated tests are overrated anyways, they are more like a spell-check than a writing aid. I'd rather have a roomful of nonchalant, untrained users and unleash them on my product than trust the outcome of a series of tests written by biased developers.
I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the purpose and function of tests. If I realized this code would break in some corner case, I would have handled it. No developer would write code that fails his own tests. Granted, sometimes the process of writing tests aids your understanding but in that case you'd improve the code. That is true even for test-driven design, if you don't fully understand all the conditions that need testing, the test will be flawed or incomplete and the code too. The primary function is to prevent existing, working test cases from breaking by accident. Because let's face it, we're imperfect beings working on imperfect code and I've managed to break my own code plenty of times without realizing it, not to speak of someone else's work. Or we're mashing up modules in a new way using them in ways they were never meant to work, testing is also about verifying assumptions. Also by "work" I mean defined behavior, like if you divide by zero it's not supposed to work but it's supposed to fail in a controlled way. Testing is supposed to preserve behavior when the implementation changes. If it was never planned and tested behavior in the first place, well you're going to find out it changed the hard way.
The actual plane ride is actually quite nice. You can get up and stretch your legs, get refreshments and whatnot. The crappy part is getting to the airport, check-in, security control, boarding, disembarking, waiting for luggage, getting from the airport and so on. Going to the capital is ~50 minutes flight time, but in practice city center to city center it's 3.5-4 hours. Now I suppose for the really, really, really long flights this could be an advantage but for the somewhat shorter trips within 1000 km I'd rather see end-to-end high speed rail.
Not that I'm going to really dispute anything you said, but never is a very long time. There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX, so even ignoring Steam and the PC there's a solid future for OpenGL. And with Vulkan doing significantly less there's hope that Linux support in general and open source support in particular will be much better. I mean, Valve has already written an open source driver for Intel, it took two developers two weeks and is ~27 kLoC - though I assume they generously copied bits and pieces from the mesa driver. The GLSL to SPIR-V compilation comes on top but it's generic and already written, it's only the SPIR-V to target that is unique for each card. Android has already picked it as their next-gen API, that's certainly not a bad ally.
If Vulkan can become a first party rendering target for Source 2, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and CryENGINE which I assume they will since they don't want to lose the smartphone/tablet business, the hurdle to produce an AAA game on Linux is that much lower. Maybe the bar still won't be low enough, but lower than it is today. Particularly if Valve paves the way with a good first party title or two, if a year from now Half-Life 3 launches with same day Linux support a lot could change in the next few years. Then again, it might also be just wishful thinking...
Don't Starve is a 2013 action-adventure video game with survival and roguelike elements, developed and published by the Canadian indie company Klei Entertainment. The game was initially released via Valve's Steam software for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux on April 23, 2013.
Thanks, I wasn't aware it was Linux native (gave up gaming on Linux a while ago), just saw that the WINE rating was garbage. Okay one down, two to go...
Those three would be a good start... but real question is "Will it play the next game my friends decide to pick up?" because I once had a decent setup for the games we played at the time. Then those changed and WINE couldn't keep up. The games I play myself, well those I control. The rest is more of a collective decision where I get a vote, not a veto.
Plain HTML/CSS is fine for read-only sites. If you make your navigation dependent on Javascript you should be taken out back and shot. On the other hand if you want a form with even a moderate level of validation, date pickers, chained selects, chosen filters, basic HTML editing (in my case, an email template) or whatever then AJAX is pretty much the only way to go. The whole "put everything in a POST and rerender the whole page on every change" method is just terrible, both from a user and developer perspective. I must admit I haven't looked terribly hard at alternatives since I'm experimenting on an intranet site but even without trying very hard I needed jQuery, jQuery.UI and TinyMCE to fulfill the requirements. And at that point you're really there where you need Javascript anyway, so if another script or library can solve a problem well...
Not that I really want to include every library under the sun, but there's so much basic functionality for a web application I feel is missing. Sort of like being back at plain C++ without the Qt library, sure you could reinvent the wheel but why? Not that I really should expect it to, I mean originally it was just a bit of text mark-up with linking. Unfortunately it's not the 90s anymore, we don't want plain text sites and thick applications. We expect the apps to live in the browser unless they have some really special needs. Mostly it's a good thing, the Javascript sandbox is pretty strong. It's Java, Flash, ActiveX and all the other plug-ins that have been the huge exploit vectors. I guess you could go all RMS on this, but whether the server sends me "x=4" or "x=2+2, you do the math" doesn't really concern me.
It's definitively not a commodity, that simply describes a market where the product is generic like say coal but it's still being sold from producers to consumers. It's a pseudo-currency, but more like a collector's item like (expired) stamps than a bottle of whiskey. You're not really sure why they're valuable in the first place since they don't have any inherent value, but as long as there's collectors who want them they can be bought and sold as a substitute for money. The more interesting part is that the "transfer of value" works no matter what the stamps are worth, it's only the people gathering or selling their collection who care if a stamp is $10 or $100 or $1000. The transactions where A buys bitcoins with cash, transfers bitcoins to B who sells them for cash again are net neutral. So the price is basically all speculators speculating against each other on what they'll do.
Fiat money spoils. It's called inflation. Bitcoin, on the other hand, aims to be deflationary.
If you confuse inflation with one of the causes of inflation - printing money. Inflation is a rise in the general price level or a loss of purchasing power, depending on how you look at it. A bitcoin was worth over $1000, now it's worth closer to $200 so that's an actual 80% loss in purchasing power assuming you bought in at the top and live in the US. For the people who just want to use Bitcoin as an intermediary between other currencies you just need a small amount of coins that you keep swapping around, it doesn't matter what the value is as such. It's only the people who want to hold bitcoins that care about the absolute value. Basically you have a bunch of speculators speculating about what other speculators will do. If you get more people collecting bitcoins the price will rise, if they bail out the price will fall. What's keeping the price from falling further? Nothing really, except the belief that it will go back up.
For the integrated graphics, for gaming you're better off with a <$100 CPU and a >$200 GPU instead of the 5775C. Basically you are paying way too much to have the graphics integrated into the processor. I wasn't comparing it to the 6700K, it's a significantly better CPU but you need to pair it with a dGPU to match gaming performance and then you're in another budget category.
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Yes. Don't ever let Excel touch your csv files. For example, if you open a csv file with Excel and then save it again, it will have converted cells containing (large) numeric IDs to scientific notation. Without asking. Bye, data.
Converting "JAN10" and "MAR10" to dates was also pretty creative, changing like 5 entries in a list of many thousand codes. Silent, subtle data corruption is so fun. At least with the scientific notation it's pretty obvious your data has been fucked.
Unless and until you are "forced" to use Android for your phone's OS, you can't claim Google has a monopoly and therefore you have no right to complain about them having licensing terms of their choice for their products.
The focus on monopolies and anti-trust is an American thing, in the rest of the world it's usually called competition law. I don't know the US legislation but here in Norway they simply say "dominating position" and with a 40% market share as a typical minimum before they will intervene against anti-competitive practices. And in this case you're not even looking at the right market, Android users can't shop in iOS or WP stores. The alternatives are the Play store and a few third party stores that are well hidden behind warning signs that 99% of the market won't use. One of the practices that may be considered anti-competitive is:
"d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to the other parties accepting additional obligations which, by their nature or according to customary commercial usage have no connection with the subject of such contracts."
You want the app store? Well you also need to install our browser, mail app, map app etc. is exactly the kind of bundling this is supposed to prevent. Say there's one dominating supplier of fresh milk to your grocery store, the rest would have to ship from far away at great expense and not all that fresh. And the supplier says if you want our milk, you'll also have to exclusively sell our bread, fruit and vegetables even though there's plenty competition there. That's illegal. Then again, they have no problems with a McDonald's franchise regulating that you exclusively sell McD food under the McD brand. It's the context you do it in that determines if it's an anti-competitive practice or not.
Personally I think it's a close call, but if IE and WMP were anti-competitive enough to intervene at least here in Europe then I wouldn't be surprised if they could win. I'm kinda surprised they're testing this on Android and not the iPhone/iPad though, where Apple has a much more blatant anti-competition policy.
One of the major complaints about estimates is that it "takes too long." Seriously, if estimations take any appreciable amount of time, you're doing them wrong.(unless you need to estimate some massive project, in which case you understand why estimates are needed).
Usually this is because you've already estimated it to the best of your ability but the powers above aren't happy with the uncertainty, where they harass you into giving a magic number or narrow little gap or to talk down your estimate until it's the number they're happy with. Or if you're really lucky get a litlte time for research/experimentation/prototyping but in practice it'd just be faster to start on the implementation, if you know this is a task that in practice will need to be done regardless. I've been in five-person meetings where we spend half an hour debating the schedule and estimates when in fact we'd have a better estimate with a head start on implementation by simply testing it out if key solutions are feasible. Unfortunately some people think that if you just have people work on an estimate long enough, it'll get better. It might work for a plumber who can probably enumerate every task down to the last bolt that needs tightening, but it rarely works in software development. Unless it's really a doer-job of adding one more field to a form just like all the existing fields.
True we can't know everything it can or can't do without a full read on the capabilities from Intel but I trust that if it were capable of offline access by anyone as you claim it would be public knowledge and wouldn't have made it very far.
Part of AMT is remote management, including being able to boot a server that lost power, reboot a frozen machine, wake machines for nightly patching and so on. Obviously it can't reach a machine that doesn't have power, but from the moment you plug in a vPro machine it's live even when it's "off". Maybe it's not public knowledge but you only need to read the advertisement:
Find It. Fix It. Anywhere
Intel(R) Active Management Technology provides remote management over wired or wireless networks across devices. Access clients through a secure channel irrespective of power or OS state, address issues while user is online, patch, repair, and upgrade operating systems and applications, and inventory client-side software and hardware.
Of course it's only supposed to talk to your puppet master inside your enterprise and only when it's enabled. But if you had a secret knock backdoor to access AMT on any computer, even when it is allegedly disabled - and perhaps even on CPUs that don't advertise the feature since it's probably there in silicon - that would be the mother of all back doors.
I just don't understand the mentality.
The mentality is that you can and should build your own franken-browser from whatever plug-ins fits you, it's not supposed to be a fully functional browser you can extend but more like a skeleton you can build on. It happens when you go over the top on flexibility and think people want a DIY kit instead of a product. The problem is the same as why you can't fit any car body with any chassis with any engine with any transmission with any brakes with any interior, they don't all go together. And some parts are shit, but only by hogging memory or crashing in ways that aren't easily traceable. I don't want to be the unit and integration tester in a modern day DLL hell, because Mozilla's will not take any responsibility for plug-ins trampling over each other or bringing the browser to its knees. Don't get me wrong, the basic idea that you can write an obscure plug-in without bloating the main code base and getting approval to push it out to 100+ million users is great. But it should be more of a test bed to see what functionality should be standard for the masses, rather than pushing more and more functionality out of the core. Here's an early alpha of Firefox 100, you can have HTML engine plugins, Javascript engine plugins, UI plugins, in fact any functionality you'd care to think of. It looks like this:
main()
{
loadPlugins()
}
Great, yes?
As soon as they made the decision to not install urea injection, they effectively decided to cheat at that time because they were asking for the technologically impossible. There is no way they didn't know that their decision to leave off such a key piece of equipment would not result in unacceptable emissions. The engineers at VW aren't dumb. The decision was made for financial reasons (not surprising) but was aided and abetted by a bunch of engineers that should have known better.
Clearly somebody knew. But I would think most simply assumed they'd done something very clever that was being guarded as a trade secret. I mean it's not exactly a perpetuum mobile or warp drive, it's a slightly less environmentally unfriendly car engine. If you pulled the "technologically impossible" card they'd probably accuse you of hubris, like who are you to think you know everything? Sure, in retrospect it's easy to say this was a hoax but I wouldn't have started making noise. If it's legitimate you're that nosy employee trying to access trade secrets you don't have permission to or if not you'll become a liability to everyone who is in on the scam. And this isn't some manager embezzling funds or stealing equipment, it's the company mass cheating on their environmental tests. For all you know this goes all the way up to the CxO level, you'd better have solid proof and be ready to go to the press after you're escorted off the premises. And to be honest I'd look for every other plausible explanation, if it wasn't for the overwhelming proof now in retrospect I'd have a hard time believing the balls of steel necessary to pull this off. It must have been obvious to everyone involved how big a scandal this would become if they were ever discovered.
Solid state cows don't sound like they'd taste good with A1, so I am 100% against this idea.
You'd prefer liquid state cows? Or worse yet, cow gas?
No, you provision sockets and wire them to the network room. Then you have a bundle of unpatched terminals in the panel. Someone authorized comes in and needs the socket you patch in to the switch and it goes live. When they're done you remove the cable and the socket is dead again. 5 seconds on either end protects your network from unauthorized devices
Virtually on a managed switch? I'm sure that happens all the time in places where you get a device with a particular MAC approved to connect on one particular port on the switch. Until you light it up it's basically dead and you get a nice audit trail of paperwork and access logs. But actually getting into the wiring closet and rewiring the network every time anybody needs a change? That actually sounds like a bigger risk, because who knows what they really do in there. Unless you have a second guy inspecting so the first guy doesn't do anything he's not supposed to. I'd much rather have the switch logs monitored and keep that wiring closet locked as much as possible.
Phones and tablets are much better consumer-level devices than PCs ever were. PCs are just moving into a new and arguably better niche as the most powerful line of computers for people who need or want to do more than a mobile device allows. The reason PC sales have dropped off considerably is that a) the worldwide market has been largely saturated, and b) computers have ridiculously powerful hardware for what most of them are required to do, so they don't need to be replaced nearly as often as they used to be.
The PC market is ridiculously unsaturated compared to smart phones, outside first world countries it's the only computing device a few billion people have. And if it wasn't for the completely different hardware (ARM vs x86) and software (Android/iOS vs Win/Mac/non-Android Linux) and user paradigm (touch vs keyboard+mouse), I suspect many of them could be replaced by a small dock with HDMI+USB+Bluetooth headset in case somebody calls you. A quad core ARM at GHz speeds with >1GB RAM is at least as powerful as a 2000s PC or whenever they became more than powerful enough for general productivity tasks. You already have the compute sticks approaching the form factor, all it takes is someone putting it together.
Never gonna happen. In the corporate world, physical desktop machines will stick around for a long time.
In the workstation market perhaps, otherwise I think laptops for portability and thin clients for on-site work is taking over. That way they can just provision you more resources in a data center somewhere and if it breaks just grab a different thin client.
And as long as you pay a significant premium for a laptop which isn't as easily upgraded, a lot of home users will continue to buy a desktop.
For the premium? Sure. But my impression is relatively few people do anything but the simplest of upgrades, the kind you potentially could do on a laptop too unless it's soldered in except maybe a few gamers.
You can pretty much have a desktop machine built to spec, whereas a laptop is always going to be a much more limited menu.
It's easier to go a little overkill these days. It's not like ten, twenty years ago when it would be half the price in a few years.
Yes, there will be tablets. Yes, a lot of people find a laptop covers their needs. But I don't see the desktop going away any time soon.
If you don't believe the desktop is marginalized, you should realize that the latest Skylake processors topping out at 65W except for the K-model is basically slightly higher clocked laptop chips. The desktop models are just a spin-off, just like the high-end desktop is a spin-off of servers. Nobody puts effort into the desktop anymore.
As long as you use HTTPS and don't get MITM'd by false certificates or use some other secure protocol, the exit node is not the worry. That security is as good as SSH or any other crypto. It's that an adversary with enough resources can do correlation/traffic analysis or even just be the whole chain from start to finish.
If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over public links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity.
If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over private links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity. Because if you're the NSA there's no "private".
Well Prima Cinema is apparently still in business where for $35000 + $500/rental you can see first-run movies at home. If you're a multi-millionaire apparently that's an ok price not to go to the cinema and hang out with the plebs. Really early adopter prices are hard to compare to "sane" price, because the whole point would be you had it first. And you did it because you had that much disposable cash.
Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.
And when you dont want ot talk to mom, skype will make sure any naughty keywords you use while sitting at your computer are also promptly forwarded to the NSA as well.
As long as the NSA isn't forwarding the naughty keywords to my mom....
More often than not, 'doxxing' is just compiling information that is already available on the internet. People think they've been 'hacked' or 'stalked' but they often forget that they posted the information in some forum/comment section using the same username they use everywhere.
Also don't forget that once you're circling a target, you can find what someone else has posted. Like if you know someone comes from a particular place or goes to a particular school, just crawl through everyone else's social media feeds until you find the person you're looking for even if they're not tagged or named but they're at some event or class or group or whatever. A lot of "doxxing" is basically casting a big dragnet and have your own personal army sifting through it until you find the person you're looking for from vague references that ordinarily wouldn't identify you..
It's like you deliberately picked mostly Linux-supported titles.
Or maybe you really have no idea what's available for Linux...
It's genuinely the latter, I got on board with Linux as my primary desktop around 2007 and quit about 3.5 years later in 2010 so my experience is ~5 years out of date. At that point Steam for Linux didn't exist so my go-to place was to check the WINE database. Perhaps I should give it another go, Windows spyware edition isn't tempting. Then again, I got ~4 years left on this Windows 7 license until EOL and I'm very comfortable where I am. It's nice to know the transition wouldn't be quite as painful this time around though.
True. Tests will tell you if something doesn't work, not if it does work. Automated tests are overrated anyways, they are more like a spell-check than a writing aid. I'd rather have a roomful of nonchalant, untrained users and unleash them on my product than trust the outcome of a series of tests written by biased developers.
I think you've fundamentally misunderstood the purpose and function of tests. If I realized this code would break in some corner case, I would have handled it. No developer would write code that fails his own tests. Granted, sometimes the process of writing tests aids your understanding but in that case you'd improve the code. That is true even for test-driven design, if you don't fully understand all the conditions that need testing, the test will be flawed or incomplete and the code too. The primary function is to prevent existing, working test cases from breaking by accident. Because let's face it, we're imperfect beings working on imperfect code and I've managed to break my own code plenty of times without realizing it, not to speak of someone else's work. Or we're mashing up modules in a new way using them in ways they were never meant to work, testing is also about verifying assumptions. Also by "work" I mean defined behavior, like if you divide by zero it's not supposed to work but it's supposed to fail in a controlled way. Testing is supposed to preserve behavior when the implementation changes. If it was never planned and tested behavior in the first place, well you're going to find out it changed the hard way.
The actual plane ride is actually quite nice. You can get up and stretch your legs, get refreshments and whatnot. The crappy part is getting to the airport, check-in, security control, boarding, disembarking, waiting for luggage, getting from the airport and so on. Going to the capital is ~50 minutes flight time, but in practice city center to city center it's 3.5-4 hours. Now I suppose for the really, really, really long flights this could be an advantage but for the somewhat shorter trips within 1000 km I'd rather see end-to-end high speed rail.
Not that I'm going to really dispute anything you said, but never is a very long time. There's a huge section of the smartphone, tablet and console gaming market that doesn't and won't run DirectX, so even ignoring Steam and the PC there's a solid future for OpenGL. And with Vulkan doing significantly less there's hope that Linux support in general and open source support in particular will be much better. I mean, Valve has already written an open source driver for Intel, it took two developers two weeks and is ~27 kLoC - though I assume they generously copied bits and pieces from the mesa driver. The GLSL to SPIR-V compilation comes on top but it's generic and already written, it's only the SPIR-V to target that is unique for each card. Android has already picked it as their next-gen API, that's certainly not a bad ally.
If Vulkan can become a first party rendering target for Source 2, Unity, Unreal Engine 4 and CryENGINE which I assume they will since they don't want to lose the smartphone/tablet business, the hurdle to produce an AAA game on Linux is that much lower. Maybe the bar still won't be low enough, but lower than it is today. Particularly if Valve paves the way with a good first party title or two, if a year from now Half-Life 3 launches with same day Linux support a lot could change in the next few years. Then again, it might also be just wishful thinking...
Don't Starve is a 2013 action-adventure video game with survival and roguelike elements, developed and published by the Canadian indie company Klei Entertainment. The game was initially released via Valve's Steam software for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux on April 23, 2013.
Thanks, I wasn't aware it was Linux native (gave up gaming on Linux a while ago), just saw that the WINE rating was garbage. Okay one down, two to go...
Those three would be a good start... but real question is "Will it play the next game my friends decide to pick up?" because I once had a decent setup for the games we played at the time. Then those changed and WINE couldn't keep up. The games I play myself, well those I control. The rest is more of a collective decision where I get a vote, not a veto.
Plain HTML/CSS is fine for read-only sites. If you make your navigation dependent on Javascript you should be taken out back and shot. On the other hand if you want a form with even a moderate level of validation, date pickers, chained selects, chosen filters, basic HTML editing (in my case, an email template) or whatever then AJAX is pretty much the only way to go. The whole "put everything in a POST and rerender the whole page on every change" method is just terrible, both from a user and developer perspective. I must admit I haven't looked terribly hard at alternatives since I'm experimenting on an intranet site but even without trying very hard I needed jQuery, jQuery.UI and TinyMCE to fulfill the requirements. And at that point you're really there where you need Javascript anyway, so if another script or library can solve a problem well...
Not that I really want to include every library under the sun, but there's so much basic functionality for a web application I feel is missing. Sort of like being back at plain C++ without the Qt library, sure you could reinvent the wheel but why? Not that I really should expect it to, I mean originally it was just a bit of text mark-up with linking. Unfortunately it's not the 90s anymore, we don't want plain text sites and thick applications. We expect the apps to live in the browser unless they have some really special needs. Mostly it's a good thing, the Javascript sandbox is pretty strong. It's Java, Flash, ActiveX and all the other plug-ins that have been the huge exploit vectors. I guess you could go all RMS on this, but whether the server sends me "x=4" or "x=2+2, you do the math" doesn't really concern me.
It's definitively not a commodity, that simply describes a market where the product is generic like say coal but it's still being sold from producers to consumers. It's a pseudo-currency, but more like a collector's item like (expired) stamps than a bottle of whiskey. You're not really sure why they're valuable in the first place since they don't have any inherent value, but as long as there's collectors who want them they can be bought and sold as a substitute for money. The more interesting part is that the "transfer of value" works no matter what the stamps are worth, it's only the people gathering or selling their collection who care if a stamp is $10 or $100 or $1000. The transactions where A buys bitcoins with cash, transfers bitcoins to B who sells them for cash again are net neutral. So the price is basically all speculators speculating against each other on what they'll do.
Fiat money spoils. It's called inflation. Bitcoin, on the other hand, aims to be deflationary.
If you confuse inflation with one of the causes of inflation - printing money. Inflation is a rise in the general price level or a loss of purchasing power, depending on how you look at it. A bitcoin was worth over $1000, now it's worth closer to $200 so that's an actual 80% loss in purchasing power assuming you bought in at the top and live in the US. For the people who just want to use Bitcoin as an intermediary between other currencies you just need a small amount of coins that you keep swapping around, it doesn't matter what the value is as such. It's only the people who want to hold bitcoins that care about the absolute value. Basically you have a bunch of speculators speculating about what other speculators will do. If you get more people collecting bitcoins the price will rise, if they bail out the price will fall. What's keeping the price from falling further? Nothing really, except the belief that it will go back up.
$200-$300 premium?
I7 5775C in Sweden: 3949 SEK.
I7 6700K in Sweden: 3629 SEK.
Difference: 320 SEK = $39 - VAT = $31.2
For the integrated graphics, for gaming you're better off with a <$100 CPU and a >$200 GPU instead of the 5775C. Basically you are paying way too much to have the graphics integrated into the processor. I wasn't comparing it to the 6700K, it's a significantly better CPU but you need to pair it with a dGPU to match gaming performance and then you're in another budget category.