It's not about that. It's more that if you were planning for AMD to actually release the stuff they said they would release, you're making unrealistic plans.
That has been obvious for quite some time, yes. And though you can use marketing BS to bridge a few gaps in your product line-up and string users along to wait a while, every once in a while you must deliver and cash in the sales. If not the users will understand that they're just chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and buy a product that's on the shelf and delivers today. You saw it most clearly on the FX line that AMD never officially killed, fans were waiting and hoping in vain only to slowly turn sour and buy an Intel. Giving people false hope is even worse than the truth.
Yes, pretty much the only thing it did better was integrated gaming though at a $2-300 premium you could use that for a significantly better discrete GPU. The only thing it was good for was a stylish AIO where you couldn't fit anything bigger, my guess is Apple didn't want it for any iMac so volume would be too small. Also Skylake is really small when it comes to die size, so I guess the profit margin is actually better than selling Broadwells.
No doubt, AMD loves to tout open this and that but keeps their stuff closed as long as possible. example, AMD said mantle was gonna be open source for since day one, did THEY ever release the source for it before killing development for it?
AMD has failed to execute in a number of areas, I don't think this is any more of a "planned failure" than the rest. In particular you have to produce what you want to release first, then get it through legal so it's not surprising that an abandoned project hasn't open sourced any code. Their problem is that Intel is becoming usable for casual gaming - it has 20% market share on Steam now, they're open source too and unlike AMD they've got a war chest to fight on every front at once. Sure, Intel doesn't have high-end discrete cards but you don't find many of the AAA games that need them on Linux either so they have it where it matters. If Intel has day one open source Vulkan support and AMD doesn't then their whole open source strategy is pretty much a failure, they've had years of head start and still get left in the dust.
Not that I'm really surprised the whole "traditional" AMD including old ATI had $378 millions of revenue last quarter, that's regular CPUs , APUs and GPUs combined. The rest was enterprise/embedded/semi-custom solutions. Fury was not the savior many hoped for, Zen had better be if they want to exist in the consumer space at all.
I would rather see "Basic Services" instead of basic income. Every person can get X amount of food, show up and be treated for medical concerns, have day care, be provided with A place to live suitable for themselves alone, with heat and enough electricity for a single person. Do not give out money, give out basic and enabling services people in hard times can use.
Well, the problem with all of those is that you probably end up in all sorts of wacky discussions about how this 90s flat is not like a 00s flat but it's a better/worse location with less/more view and what kind of services are "basic" like do they get a cell phone or TV and if so what type and size and.... The only thing that's moderately universal is healthcare as many people visit the same hospital, but even that is a thorny issue of location and services that will serve some better than others. Money is very straight forward, if necessary you can arrange to have rent and utilities paid directly and the reminder deposited as a daily allowance so the junkie who spent all his money on drugs yesterday has a few bucks to eat. Or not, depending on what he does with it. Besides if you give them something they don't like/want/is worth too much they'll sell/trade it for something else, giving an alcoholic food stamps and thinking he won't swap food for beer with somebody is folly.
In any case, I already pay taxes and plenty of them so giving me basic income is just taking with one hand and giving back a little with the other. Lower my tax bracket and you can functionally leave me with more money to spend So what I assume will happen in practice is that you'll have to tax me more to fund those who aren't paying taxes, in net leaving me with less. Also I doubt you'll be able to kill the other programs, leave the disabled with less than minimum wage to live on even though they got no chance to add to their income? Retirees who have paid their social security taxes for decades? Most likely it will be just be one more type of welfare.
Historically, this is false. Automation just increases worker productivity as last step automation is always more expensive and so non-cost effective as to be permanently pointless and prohibitive.
Like they say about the stock markets, past performance is not indicative of future results. The key is often self service, for example in online banking or e-tailing. If they can get self-driving vehicles on the road it'll be a massive disruption not just for the transport industry but the retail industry will also face even more intense competition from high speed low cost delivery from a nearby warehouse. Imagine you order it online and it goes straight into an automatic car for delivery within the hour, just like takeaway. And takeaway also becomes cheaper compared to today. Heck, if people were smart they'd really cut out the middle men. I just ordered a bunch of boxers and socks from China, it's way cheaper than here and that's where they come from anyway. If women didn't go shopping for clothes, I think the retail industry would already be on the deathbed.
Disease? Not really. The majority of deaths occur because of non-communicable diseases like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and kidney failure that we're getting better at treating. We might have a problem if we run out of functional antibiotics but right now we're in a very comfortable spot compared to all of human history.
War? Iraq/Syria puts us back at 1990s levels but we're nowhere near Korea and Vietnam, nevermind World Wars I and II in terms of deaths as a percent of the human population. The world will progress even though the Middle East continues to be a shithole.
Famine? While they claim a billion people are under-/malnourished, actual starvation is extremely rare and usually only happens in war zones.
Poverty? We've pulled over 25% of the human population out of extreme poverty since 1990, with China and India making huge strides. Even the pessimistic estimates suggest we'll be below 10% in 2030, some believe as low as 3%.
If I were to suggest major threats to human prosperity it would be: The wrecking of the environment with related nurishment, migration and resource conflicts A significant portion of a religion of 1.6 billion people joining forces with the nutcases in Daesh China showing that prosperity doesn't require democracy, free speech or free press The global treaties and megacorporations hollowing out market regulations and consumer rights Global electronic surveillance of everyone, all the time taking away freedom and privacy
That said, I think there's a lot of positive trends too, it's not like the past has been flowers and sunshine either.
Cutting communications lines is a particularly difficult type of terror attack to prevent. Anyone who has ever worked around vital communication lines knows where they are and breaking those lines can be quite easy. Catching such a person may take quite some time and expense. Let's hope this is not the scheme of some foreign enemy.
Terrorism, as in "violence or threats of violence used for intimidation or coercion"? I'm afraid it fails both the first and second part. While sabotage seems to be spot on, "the deliberate destruction, disruption, or damage of equipment, a public service, etc, as by enemy agents, dissatisfied employees, etc"
I'm not so certain she'll accomplish precisely nothing. If the Victorian era school of thought taught us anything, it is that the taboo is even more desirable.
I think almost any female can be put down with a snarky "And you never used a dildo?", this one is almost exclusively a male taboo I think. Because apart from the jokes and the inflatable sex doll as gag gifts, I've never heard any male I know ever admit to having or using any vagina substitute. Sex toys you use with a partner is obviously different, it's the "I couldn't get laid so I had to use a sex toy" that is the taboo. That is entirely different for women, nobody assumes they used a dildo/vibrator because they couldn't get laid.
Exactly. Compare sales of fleshlights to sales of vibrators / dildos. Women are far more likely currently to be buying machines for sexual purposes. Why would the sexbot market be any different?
Because women are buying it as substitute for a cock, men as substitute for a relationship? If you look at something like escort service and prostitution it's massively dominated by male customers who pay for women to pretend to be their girlfriends/lovers or even dressing up RealDolls. Women use vibrators/dildos because they want want sex without the "baggage" of a boyfriend/one night stand, men want to play-pretend the exact opposite. Another clear clue should be that fleshlights try to mimic a human vagina, while there's a huge market for dildos and vibrators in all shapes and colors that have nothing to do with realism.
In any case, she's wrong and it's a massive double standard at work here. Over the last 100 years there's been a massive movement to give women economic independence. Well tough shit, now we men want sexual independence and if I can get a sexbot to screw my brains out then we start a relationship more on equal footing. No, you don't need my money. No, I don't need your pussy. We can both do fine on our own, but maybe we have some mutual interest in having a relationship together because we want to. There's many men staying in poor relationships because they get pussy, ending those would do everyone good.
Netflix bitrate for 4k video is 15.6Mbps. Games are mostly under 0.5Mbps. If you run a game server, you may need more than 0.5Mbps.
Yes, I would rather say it's the other way around. If there's heavy downloads/streaming you might see lag in the game, but no ordinary game uses any significant bandwidth.
Even better, in English, would be to describe it as the the survival of the species that fit best in their environment.
In a modern society where we can talk about sex it's more like compound interest applied to reproduction since it's not just about fitting the environment, a peacock's feathers is primarily to impress the opposite sex not dealing with any environmental pressure. Unless you use a very broad understanding of the word environment to apply on every level of interaction between individuals, groups, species, the natural environment and whatnot. Those who on average multiply more quickly outnumber those who multiply less, add inheritable traits and you essentially have micro-evolution.
Heck, even evolution opponents don't argue with the fact that kids resemble their parents only that there's some kind of invisible barrier that prevents many small steps from eventually becoming a journey, like if each species was on an isolated island. That humans may change hair and eye color but we'll never cease to be human and we never got here from being monkeys, we were always human ever since God created us. And really that's the one they care about because it's our position as God's ultimate creation that makes us special, we're not some random roll of the evolutionary dice. And despite having a pretty good row of proto-humans now showing the transition you can't compress millions of years of evolution into a lab and point to a smoking gun. Without Adam and Eve being literally created in the garden of Eden the whole Old Testament falls apart, so I'm sure how modern Christians cope. Probably by not thinking too much about it, it's very useful if you want to believe.
Expecting a driver to take control in a failure scenario is not a solution. I would never trust a car that could require me to take control in an emergency. At the very least, the autonomus driver should get the car to a safe stop before requiring a human to take over.
I think the premise is wrong, if the car understands enough to know that this is an emergency situation it can probably identify a reasonable response on par with a split-second decision a panicked average driver would make. Even when it's not the best solution, I doubt anyone would blame the driver for slamming the brakes which might be sufficient if the overall safety record is better. I think the problem is that there might be dangers it's oblivious to driving people to their deaths. Would it understand a collapsing bridge? Landslide? Avalanche? Building on fire? Accident with dangerous goods? Drunk driver? Police chase? Mentally unstable, drunks or playing children that aren't going to stay on the sidewalk? Having an alert driver there is primarily to detect "softer" or environmental clues the car doesn't understand, not to come up with better responses to situations the car already recognizes.
It is mostly ignored because of the condescending attitude that too many programmers have. We're supposed to be encouraging young people to get into programming, and in the same breath belittle people who dont understand why it would be on the 256th day of the year?
That assumes programming is a kind of "no child left behind" skill that we should get everybody into. Just judging by the trouble some people have using a computer, I wouldn't want to touch anything they've created with a ten foot pole. Sure a few basics won't hurt the way a little economics to manage your own finances won't hurt no matter what walk of life you end up in, but most will never be able to write code at a professional level. Believe it or not, there are worse things to be ignorant about than the innards of a computer.
This kind of stuff is why I use Windows as my primary OS now. I have a laptop and I have to be mobile right now. With Linux on my laptop I lose about 25% of the battery life and it also runs slower compared to Windows. Even worse it does not hibernate correctly and even sleep sometimes screws up. Sometimes when it wakes up from sleep under Linux the USB ports don't work. I have just gotten tired of dealing with these issues and after all this time it is pretty clear that it is not a priority for developers of Linux. It is just easier to have virtualbox with Linux installed under Windows and use that.
I'm sure they'd like to do more, but I guess volunteers lack the hardware and none of the major laptop vendors have seen much profit in selling Linux preinstalled so there's no funding for paid employees to support it. Unfortunately there's a lot of hardware quirks that can't easily be worked out without being able to diagnose and test it on that particular hardware. Particularly if it just fails every once in a while due to a particular state/timing/condition. Maybe it would be possible to create some kind of remote hardware lab where you get remote management + button operation + webcam + microphone + hard power reset switch to do testing, scripted suspend/resume runs and self-tests to give developers broader access but you still need people with time and interest to fix your particular model. That might be hard in itself.
It's the one life we know exists, if we find aliens with a totally different physiology or totally different technology that's nice but we have no idea of what to look for. It's unlikely that aliens expect us to tap into their communications, if they are trying to ping us they probably do it using all possible channels. And we know at least one of them, it's unlikely a civilization that can do what he proposes hasn't invented the radio.
I hate that Linux has such bad graphical card support. Games are the only thing that are keeping me on the Windows platform. I think it really is the only thing that is keeping the world from a "Linux on the desktop" utopia.
Please don't copy-and-paste from 10 year old slashdot comments.
Well, what has changed really? Most AAA games didn't run on Linux 10 years ago and they still don't. For example I played CoH2 with friends tonight, it's garbage under WINE. GTA V is the same. Granted, many more games do work but if you're a gamer and/or you want to play the same games as your friends there will almost certainly be some games that don't work for you. If you don't have any other particular requirements, why wouldn't games be the only blocker? It was the one thing that kept me running a Windows box and I see it still would be if I was still on Linux. Of course Mesa following the latest OpenGL standards wouldn't magically make WINE work or port DirectX games to OpenGL, but it would be one less hurdle.
"In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."
Honestly, I can't think of any format used in 2005 that's not readable in 2015. Anyone? Sure there were a few really odd and obscure formats used in the first years of computing that was heavily tied to playback hardware or media, but that is all. As long as you can dig up a binary to run in a VM most anything should be readable. And purely for reading documents this is beating down open doors, PDF/A already exists and is an extremely well documented standard for long term document preservation.
Having a Linux desktop at work will not make the average user install Linux at home. The other way around, maybe.
Linux at work = internal and external support = time and money = bugfixes and enhancements = stability and progress. The average home user won't contribute much to the development process, they won't pay. They won't code. They don't write good bug reports, in fact they rather want solutions instead of questions. It's highly unlikely it becomes important enough for someone to look at. But if a hundred employees have a problem, usually someone with the skills needed will look at it to find a solution. Companies will concentrate that little itch each employee has enough that one person in IT can justify spending time on it. And that is exactly the kind of pebbles that need to start rolling to turn it into a landslide. Nobody sees any direct profit from replacing a Windows sale with a Linux sale, the economic incentives aren't very strong. Of course there are other reasons to work on open source, but most of those are already present and they don't seem to do the trick.
Meeh. I bet that Vulkan's Linux implementation will be delayed year after year, just like Wayland is. Open source just doesn't have the funding and manpower to deliver these kind of extremely complex things quickly.
Actually Vulkan is moving most of that complexity out of the driver and into the hands of the engine developers. Unlike a couple decades ago, the market is now dominated by a few big engines like Unity, Unreal Engine and CryEngine who have the skills and funding to write low-level optimizations for broad classes of games, while creating your own engine from DirectX/OpenGL is more and more daunting. I'm not really sure you can call it a win for open source as it means more of the stack will be proprietary, but at least you'll have OS agnostic engine developers take over the role Microsoft has played with DirectX.
They can put you on salary and pay you like $40K to work like 40-60 hours a week and your are on the clock 24/7
Nope. There's a very narrow definition of exempt workers in the EU for management and extremely independent positions. You need to have the freedom to decide the scope, location, duration and content of your work, for the management side the power of delegation is crucial otherwise the other requirements are even stronger. In short, your average white collar labor job must obey regulations on working hours and must pay overtime when certain limits are exceeded.
It's a tricky situation. The problem with paid pirated sites is that some users (read: my father-in-law for example) assume that since they pay - it must be legit. So they pay ~3$ and get infinite number of movies streamed.
Pardon me, but that's just silly and doesn't pass the giggle test - you do think that if you pay a drug dealer the drugs are legal? Or because he pays for Internet that everything on it is free for the taking? I think you're creating a ridiculous and unenforceable standard if the payment companies should decide for each and every customer if what you're paying for may or may not be in violation of some law, code or regulation.
So MasterCard should allow drug dealers and mob bosses to use their services?
Assuming the courts haven't seen any reason to seize the money, MasterCard shouldn't be able to decide who you're permitted to give money to or not. I should not have to justify my spending habits to the bank any more than I need to justify my food habits at the grocery store.
You need both "in the box" and "out of the box" thinking. Most of the people who spend their time in research don't make any big breakthroughs, Nobel prize winners are the exceptions. Many people only produce the complicator's gloves when they try, or they suffer from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome and wants to reinvent the wheel - poorly. The rest make the world go around, nothing wrong with an electrician wiring up a house just like he's wired up many other houses just like many electricians before him. Solid craftsmanship should not be underrated and that's what many engineers do, it might not be so glamorous to create yet another business system with workflows and reports but it's like building condo buildings, they're not exactly revolutionary but we need them. Not everything can be the Sydney Opera.
Meh, they still haven't finished the Electrolysis project for multiprocess Firefox and they've been working on that since 2009, if it's in pre-alpha now it'll take a decade before it's usable.
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It's not about that. It's more that if you were planning for AMD to actually release the stuff they said they would release, you're making unrealistic plans.
That has been obvious for quite some time, yes. And though you can use marketing BS to bridge a few gaps in your product line-up and string users along to wait a while, every once in a while you must deliver and cash in the sales. If not the users will understand that they're just chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and buy a product that's on the shelf and delivers today. You saw it most clearly on the FX line that AMD never officially killed, fans were waiting and hoping in vain only to slowly turn sour and buy an Intel. Giving people false hope is even worse than the truth.
Yes, pretty much the only thing it did better was integrated gaming though at a $2-300 premium you could use that for a significantly better discrete GPU. The only thing it was good for was a stylish AIO where you couldn't fit anything bigger, my guess is Apple didn't want it for any iMac so volume would be too small. Also Skylake is really small when it comes to die size, so I guess the profit margin is actually better than selling Broadwells.
No doubt, AMD loves to tout open this and that but keeps their stuff closed as long as possible. example, AMD said mantle was gonna be open source for since day one, did THEY ever release the source for it before killing development for it?
AMD has failed to execute in a number of areas, I don't think this is any more of a "planned failure" than the rest. In particular you have to produce what you want to release first, then get it through legal so it's not surprising that an abandoned project hasn't open sourced any code. Their problem is that Intel is becoming usable for casual gaming - it has 20% market share on Steam now, they're open source too and unlike AMD they've got a war chest to fight on every front at once. Sure, Intel doesn't have high-end discrete cards but you don't find many of the AAA games that need them on Linux either so they have it where it matters. If Intel has day one open source Vulkan support and AMD doesn't then their whole open source strategy is pretty much a failure, they've had years of head start and still get left in the dust.
Not that I'm really surprised the whole "traditional" AMD including old ATI had $378 millions of revenue last quarter, that's regular CPUs , APUs and GPUs combined. The rest was enterprise/embedded/semi-custom solutions. Fury was not the savior many hoped for, Zen had better be if they want to exist in the consumer space at all.
I would rather see "Basic Services" instead of basic income. Every person can get X amount of food, show up and be treated for medical concerns, have day care, be provided with A place to live suitable for themselves alone, with heat and enough electricity for a single person. Do not give out money, give out basic and enabling services people in hard times can use.
Well, the problem with all of those is that you probably end up in all sorts of wacky discussions about how this 90s flat is not like a 00s flat but it's a better/worse location with less/more view and what kind of services are "basic" like do they get a cell phone or TV and if so what type and size and.... The only thing that's moderately universal is healthcare as many people visit the same hospital, but even that is a thorny issue of location and services that will serve some better than others. Money is very straight forward, if necessary you can arrange to have rent and utilities paid directly and the reminder deposited as a daily allowance so the junkie who spent all his money on drugs yesterday has a few bucks to eat. Or not, depending on what he does with it. Besides if you give them something they don't like/want/is worth too much they'll sell/trade it for something else, giving an alcoholic food stamps and thinking he won't swap food for beer with somebody is folly.
In any case, I already pay taxes and plenty of them so giving me basic income is just taking with one hand and giving back a little with the other. Lower my tax bracket and you can functionally leave me with more money to spend So what I assume will happen in practice is that you'll have to tax me more to fund those who aren't paying taxes, in net leaving me with less. Also I doubt you'll be able to kill the other programs, leave the disabled with less than minimum wage to live on even though they got no chance to add to their income? Retirees who have paid their social security taxes for decades? Most likely it will be just be one more type of welfare.
Historically, this is false. Automation just increases worker productivity as last step automation is always more expensive and so non-cost effective as to be permanently pointless and prohibitive.
Like they say about the stock markets, past performance is not indicative of future results. The key is often self service, for example in online banking or e-tailing. If they can get self-driving vehicles on the road it'll be a massive disruption not just for the transport industry but the retail industry will also face even more intense competition from high speed low cost delivery from a nearby warehouse. Imagine you order it online and it goes straight into an automatic car for delivery within the hour, just like takeaway. And takeaway also becomes cheaper compared to today. Heck, if people were smart they'd really cut out the middle men. I just ordered a bunch of boxers and socks from China, it's way cheaper than here and that's where they come from anyway. If women didn't go shopping for clothes, I think the retail industry would already be on the deathbed.
In no particular order, the grand challenges are:
Disease
War
Famine
Poverty
Disease? Not really. The majority of deaths occur because of non-communicable diseases like cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and kidney failure that we're getting better at treating. We might have a problem if we run out of functional antibiotics but right now we're in a very comfortable spot compared to all of human history.
War? Iraq/Syria puts us back at 1990s levels but we're nowhere near Korea and Vietnam, nevermind World Wars I and II in terms of deaths as a percent of the human population. The world will progress even though the Middle East continues to be a shithole.
Famine? While they claim a billion people are under-/malnourished, actual starvation is extremely rare and usually only happens in war zones.
Poverty? We've pulled over 25% of the human population out of extreme poverty since 1990, with China and India making huge strides. Even the pessimistic estimates suggest we'll be below 10% in 2030, some believe as low as 3%.
If I were to suggest major threats to human prosperity it would be:
The wrecking of the environment with related nurishment, migration and resource conflicts
A significant portion of a religion of 1.6 billion people joining forces with the nutcases in Daesh
China showing that prosperity doesn't require democracy, free speech or free press
The global treaties and megacorporations hollowing out market regulations and consumer rights
Global electronic surveillance of everyone, all the time taking away freedom and privacy
That said, I think there's a lot of positive trends too, it's not like the past has been flowers and sunshine either.
Cutting communications lines is a particularly difficult type of terror attack to prevent. Anyone who has ever worked around vital communication lines knows where they are and breaking those lines can be quite easy. Catching such a person may take quite some time and expense. Let's hope this is not the scheme of some foreign enemy.
Terrorism, as in "violence or threats of violence used for intimidation or coercion"? I'm afraid it fails both the first and second part. While sabotage seems to be spot on, "the deliberate destruction, disruption, or damage of equipment, a public service, etc, as by enemy agents, dissatisfied employees, etc"
I'm not so certain she'll accomplish precisely nothing. If the Victorian era school of thought taught us anything, it is that the taboo is even more desirable.
I think almost any female can be put down with a snarky "And you never used a dildo?", this one is almost exclusively a male taboo I think. Because apart from the jokes and the inflatable sex doll as gag gifts, I've never heard any male I know ever admit to having or using any vagina substitute. Sex toys you use with a partner is obviously different, it's the "I couldn't get laid so I had to use a sex toy" that is the taboo. That is entirely different for women, nobody assumes they used a dildo/vibrator because they couldn't get laid.
No love for flamebait, off-topic or redundant?
Exactly. Compare sales of fleshlights to sales of vibrators / dildos. Women are far more likely currently to be buying machines for sexual purposes. Why would the sexbot market be any different?
Because women are buying it as substitute for a cock, men as substitute for a relationship? If you look at something like escort service and prostitution it's massively dominated by male customers who pay for women to pretend to be their girlfriends/lovers or even dressing up RealDolls. Women use vibrators/dildos because they want want sex without the "baggage" of a boyfriend/one night stand, men want to play-pretend the exact opposite. Another clear clue should be that fleshlights try to mimic a human vagina, while there's a huge market for dildos and vibrators in all shapes and colors that have nothing to do with realism.
In any case, she's wrong and it's a massive double standard at work here. Over the last 100 years there's been a massive movement to give women economic independence. Well tough shit, now we men want sexual independence and if I can get a sexbot to screw my brains out then we start a relationship more on equal footing. No, you don't need my money. No, I don't need your pussy. We can both do fine on our own, but maybe we have some mutual interest in having a relationship together because we want to. There's many men staying in poor relationships because they get pussy, ending those would do everyone good.
Netflix bitrate for 4k video is 15.6Mbps. Games are mostly under 0.5Mbps. If you run a game server, you may need more than 0.5Mbps.
Yes, I would rather say it's the other way around. If there's heavy downloads/streaming you might see lag in the game, but no ordinary game uses any significant bandwidth.
Even better, in English, would be to describe it as the the survival of the species that fit best in their environment.
In a modern society where we can talk about sex it's more like compound interest applied to reproduction since it's not just about fitting the environment, a peacock's feathers is primarily to impress the opposite sex not dealing with any environmental pressure. Unless you use a very broad understanding of the word environment to apply on every level of interaction between individuals, groups, species, the natural environment and whatnot. Those who on average multiply more quickly outnumber those who multiply less, add inheritable traits and you essentially have micro-evolution.
Heck, even evolution opponents don't argue with the fact that kids resemble their parents only that there's some kind of invisible barrier that prevents many small steps from eventually becoming a journey, like if each species was on an isolated island. That humans may change hair and eye color but we'll never cease to be human and we never got here from being monkeys, we were always human ever since God created us. And really that's the one they care about because it's our position as God's ultimate creation that makes us special, we're not some random roll of the evolutionary dice. And despite having a pretty good row of proto-humans now showing the transition you can't compress millions of years of evolution into a lab and point to a smoking gun. Without Adam and Eve being literally created in the garden of Eden the whole Old Testament falls apart, so I'm sure how modern Christians cope. Probably by not thinking too much about it, it's very useful if you want to believe.
Expecting a driver to take control in a failure scenario is not a solution. I would never trust a car that could require me to take control in an emergency. At the very least, the autonomus driver should get the car to a safe stop before requiring a human to take over.
I think the premise is wrong, if the car understands enough to know that this is an emergency situation it can probably identify a reasonable response on par with a split-second decision a panicked average driver would make. Even when it's not the best solution, I doubt anyone would blame the driver for slamming the brakes which might be sufficient if the overall safety record is better. I think the problem is that there might be dangers it's oblivious to driving people to their deaths. Would it understand a collapsing bridge? Landslide? Avalanche? Building on fire? Accident with dangerous goods? Drunk driver? Police chase? Mentally unstable, drunks or playing children that aren't going to stay on the sidewalk? Having an alert driver there is primarily to detect "softer" or environmental clues the car doesn't understand, not to come up with better responses to situations the car already recognizes.
It is mostly ignored because of the condescending attitude that too many programmers have. We're supposed to be encouraging young people to get into programming, and in the same breath belittle people who dont understand why it would be on the 256th day of the year?
That assumes programming is a kind of "no child left behind" skill that we should get everybody into. Just judging by the trouble some people have using a computer, I wouldn't want to touch anything they've created with a ten foot pole. Sure a few basics won't hurt the way a little economics to manage your own finances won't hurt no matter what walk of life you end up in, but most will never be able to write code at a professional level. Believe it or not, there are worse things to be ignorant about than the innards of a computer.
This kind of stuff is why I use Windows as my primary OS now. I have a laptop and I have to be mobile right now. With Linux on my laptop I lose about 25% of the battery life and it also runs slower compared to Windows. Even worse it does not hibernate correctly and even sleep sometimes screws up. Sometimes when it wakes up from sleep under Linux the USB ports don't work. I have just gotten tired of dealing with these issues and after all this time it is pretty clear that it is not a priority for developers of Linux. It is just easier to have virtualbox with Linux installed under Windows and use that.
I'm sure they'd like to do more, but I guess volunteers lack the hardware and none of the major laptop vendors have seen much profit in selling Linux preinstalled so there's no funding for paid employees to support it. Unfortunately there's a lot of hardware quirks that can't easily be worked out without being able to diagnose and test it on that particular hardware. Particularly if it just fails every once in a while due to a particular state/timing/condition. Maybe it would be possible to create some kind of remote hardware lab where you get remote management + button operation + webcam + microphone + hard power reset switch to do testing, scripted suspend/resume runs and self-tests to give developers broader access but you still need people with time and interest to fix your particular model. That might be hard in itself.
It's the one life we know exists, if we find aliens with a totally different physiology or totally different technology that's nice but we have no idea of what to look for. It's unlikely that aliens expect us to tap into their communications, if they are trying to ping us they probably do it using all possible channels. And we know at least one of them, it's unlikely a civilization that can do what he proposes hasn't invented the radio.
I hate that Linux has such bad graphical card support. Games are the only thing that are keeping me on the Windows platform. I think it really is the only thing that is keeping the world from a "Linux on the desktop" utopia.
Please don't copy-and-paste from 10 year old slashdot comments.
Well, what has changed really? Most AAA games didn't run on Linux 10 years ago and they still don't. For example I played CoH2 with friends tonight, it's garbage under WINE. GTA V is the same. Granted, many more games do work but if you're a gamer and/or you want to play the same games as your friends there will almost certainly be some games that don't work for you. If you don't have any other particular requirements, why wouldn't games be the only blocker? It was the one thing that kept me running a Windows box and I see it still would be if I was still on Linux. Of course Mesa following the latest OpenGL standards wouldn't magically make WINE work or port DirectX games to OpenGL, but it would be one less hurdle.
"In the case of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the letters were 140 years old, and I would guess that digital content that was created 10 years ago won't be accessible 10 years from now," said Cerf. "We have the media around, but you may not be able to read it."
Honestly, I can't think of any format used in 2005 that's not readable in 2015. Anyone? Sure there were a few really odd and obscure formats used in the first years of computing that was heavily tied to playback hardware or media, but that is all. As long as you can dig up a binary to run in a VM most anything should be readable. And purely for reading documents this is beating down open doors, PDF/A already exists and is an extremely well documented standard for long term document preservation.
Having a Linux desktop at work will not make the average user install Linux at home. The other way around, maybe.
Linux at work = internal and external support = time and money = bugfixes and enhancements = stability and progress. The average home user won't contribute much to the development process, they won't pay. They won't code. They don't write good bug reports, in fact they rather want solutions instead of questions. It's highly unlikely it becomes important enough for someone to look at. But if a hundred employees have a problem, usually someone with the skills needed will look at it to find a solution. Companies will concentrate that little itch each employee has enough that one person in IT can justify spending time on it. And that is exactly the kind of pebbles that need to start rolling to turn it into a landslide. Nobody sees any direct profit from replacing a Windows sale with a Linux sale, the economic incentives aren't very strong. Of course there are other reasons to work on open source, but most of those are already present and they don't seem to do the trick.
Meeh. I bet that Vulkan's Linux implementation will be delayed year after year, just like Wayland is. Open source just doesn't have the funding and manpower to deliver these kind of extremely complex things quickly.
Actually Vulkan is moving most of that complexity out of the driver and into the hands of the engine developers. Unlike a couple decades ago, the market is now dominated by a few big engines like Unity, Unreal Engine and CryEngine who have the skills and funding to write low-level optimizations for broad classes of games, while creating your own engine from DirectX/OpenGL is more and more daunting. I'm not really sure you can call it a win for open source as it means more of the stack will be proprietary, but at least you'll have OS agnostic engine developers take over the role Microsoft has played with DirectX.
They can put you on salary and pay you like $40K to work like 40-60 hours a week and your are on the clock 24/7
Nope. There's a very narrow definition of exempt workers in the EU for management and extremely independent positions. You need to have the freedom to decide the scope, location, duration and content of your work, for the management side the power of delegation is crucial otherwise the other requirements are even stronger. In short, your average white collar labor job must obey regulations on working hours and must pay overtime when certain limits are exceeded.
It's a tricky situation. The problem with paid pirated sites is that some users (read: my father-in-law for example) assume that since they pay - it must be legit. So they pay ~3$ and get infinite number of movies streamed.
Pardon me, but that's just silly and doesn't pass the giggle test - you do think that if you pay a drug dealer the drugs are legal? Or because he pays for Internet that everything on it is free for the taking? I think you're creating a ridiculous and unenforceable standard if the payment companies should decide for each and every customer if what you're paying for may or may not be in violation of some law, code or regulation.
So MasterCard should allow drug dealers and mob bosses to use their services?
Assuming the courts haven't seen any reason to seize the money, MasterCard shouldn't be able to decide who you're permitted to give money to or not. I should not have to justify my spending habits to the bank any more than I need to justify my food habits at the grocery store.
You need both "in the box" and "out of the box" thinking. Most of the people who spend their time in research don't make any big breakthroughs, Nobel prize winners are the exceptions. Many people only produce the complicator's gloves when they try, or they suffer from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome and wants to reinvent the wheel - poorly. The rest make the world go around, nothing wrong with an electrician wiring up a house just like he's wired up many other houses just like many electricians before him. Solid craftsmanship should not be underrated and that's what many engineers do, it might not be so glamorous to create yet another business system with workflows and reports but it's like building condo buildings, they're not exactly revolutionary but we need them. Not everything can be the Sydney Opera.
Meh, they still haven't finished the Electrolysis project for multiprocess Firefox and they've been working on that since 2009, if it's in pre-alpha now it'll take a decade before it's usable.