The free money might be useless, but I doubt it'll mean nobody will work. If the minimum income is just barely enough to pay for food and shelter well that's all people really NEED, but most people will want more than just a house and food. Also, with some exception, most people are not housecats that are content to just laze about all day doing nothing, most people want to climb the social ladder, get a bigger house, a nicer tv, pay for cable, etc. And that means working. I will agree however that it might mean that businesses need to offer a decent wage to convince people to do bottom barrel work though.
The real question is what stops us from dialing down the welfare system to the bare necessities? Nothing. But we feel there's a difference between being a bum ass teen who can live with his parents and spend it as allowance and a war veteran suffering from crippling PTSD. All the welfare programs do try to reflect a degree of worthiness, culpability, ability to change the situation and so on. The idea that that you could replace everything with basic income is saying you could find a level of income that would give proper incentive to the lazy and that you would still feel is decent to everyone else.
It would surprise me though if he doesn't have at least some long-term goals that take over 6 months to complete and that he's not focussed on working on right now but has in his back-pocket, but maybe he really doesn't.
Well, the kernel runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers and that it doesn't run on desktops has absolutely nothing to do with kernel features. I don't see any huge glaring TODOs, by far most the changes are drivers (non-CPU hardware driven), followed by architecture (CPU hardware driven), followed by high performance in kernel implementations like file systems or network filtering. The number of patches that really touch core "kernel" functionality of managing other processes seem to be rather few.
Sounds like the last few generations - lots of incremental improvements and excellent technology but wont amount to much of a difference in general performance.
Actually they've made quite substantial improvements, but Intel is using that to deliver 105% of the last generation's performance with far less resources. A 32nm Sandy Bridge (i7-2700k) is 216 mm^2, a 14nm Skylake (i7-6700k) is 122.4 mm^2. So on the same wafer Intel can produce 75% more processors. By letting AMD pave the way with APUs they've force-bundled integrated graphics killing low-end discrete chips without an antitrust whimper, almost 20% on Steam now game on Intel and Skylake adds 25% more shaders with 20 vs 16 EUs on regular desktop chips.
Perhaps the most important part of the Skylake announcement has gone largely unnoticed because we haven't seen it in any actual product yet is that Skylake will go up to 72 EUs, as opposed to 40/48 on Haswell/Broadwell. Since Broadwell quad core chips only launched a few months ago, the real comparison is Haswell which means a 72/40 = 80% increase in shaders, clearly Intel is planning to take the midrange laptop graphics too. A fully stacked Skywell seems to be a nVidia 950m-class competitor, both around 1100 GFLOPS and 26 times more powerful than "Intel HD Graphics" from five years ago.
Basically, we're being used. I think Intel knows as well as we do that no matter how fast they released processors people aren't going to throw away their three year old computer anymore. They'll sell new processors when the old go out of service or the market expands, not because it's outdated. So they're using their strengths for profit and market gain, because what's your high end alternative? It's either Intel or an extremely old FX processor or a severely under-powered laptop chip. They know your business is not going anywhere, it's only a matter of how long they need to wait.
Now, hopefully the prices of decent smartphones will come down to a reasonable level. Why the hell pay $600-$700 got the latest from Samsung or LG when there are things like Ubik?
I just took a look at my local pricewatch, 344 cell phone models from 35 different manufacturers now granted a few of them aren't smartphones but still it's very far from a duopoly... what's Ubik but a noname chinese phone with a marketing campaign? They got no track record of component quality, build quality, support or anything, if the phone flops or has any critical flaws the company is likely to disappear without a trace.
They won't get the same kind of volume discounts as those who order millions, if they think they can do the same for so much less it's probably because they forgot some costs. While Apple has been raking in money many of the Android companies have barely been breaking even, it's not like there are fat margins to undercut. By all means, if they have a shipping phone with good reviews I'll consider it but as a kickstarter this sounds like a very uphill battle for an established market.
When you invoke a program that has a manifest which states that it requires some form of administrative rights, Windows will prompt you for "elevated" privileges. Only when you accept to use your administrative privileges will the process be started with a token with higher than standard user rights. It really is a much more elegant solution than the stupid effective user in Linux, where the description of a process rights is strongly tied to a user: There must exist a user with the specific sets of rights you want the process to have.
It's possible they have more fine grained control behind the scenes but since the UAC prompt doesn't tell me anything I have to assume that any time I click yes that process can do anything, much like "sudo" on the Linux side. It might be ready for role-based security like on cell phones where they list the particular privileges the application wants, but I don't see it in practice.
I guess because the only people who'd sign up for a 24 month contract are those who'd almost certainly stay with you anyway. And what would they do after those 24 months are up, automatically bump them down to the BYO plan or blatantly overcharge them? They want the lazy option to be the profitable one, a lease plan means they can keep on charging until the customer makes an effort to change it. If they can charge a few "extra" months that's probably way more profitable.
Linux community itself, for the most part, embraces openness, but the concept itself isn't for that.
Actually that's where you're dead wrong. In 1985 RMS outlined the goals of his free software, and the freedom to study what it does requires openness. Now various companies have found loopholes, but the fundamental goals remain the same: You should be able to run, study, improve and redistribute the source code. And yes, study implies being in the source form most suitable for viewing, not assembler instructions or whatnot.
AMD shoul just release the COMPLETE code already. Then maybe the community can begin fixing all these problems. And don't get me started about how they released the code. It's not all there and is largely a joke. Release some code and wrapping it around a proprietary component is hardly really "open source".
Not really sure what you're grasping at here. The Catalyst driver is not and will not ever be released, due to a number of reasons ranging from trade secrets to IP issues to DRM issues to whatnot. The specs have been released and an open source driver based on it, thers' no "proprietary component" it revolves around. Unless you talk about the firmware which is pretty much like every other hardware company, they load a blob that sets up the hardware correctly. Just about any modern hardware has this, it's just magic values unless you document the hardware which they're not going to do.
Then again, this is probably one of the problems the open source community has, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with regards to openness. Since you're not being totally 100% transparent with everything you do, you're not open and so you're in the same box as the companies that are about 0% transparent. Why bother? Even when you're doing everything that's reasonable to open source your product you're going to have shitheads like the parent complain. I can totally understand nVidia's position on the matter, which pretty much amounts to "No. Fuck off." Sure, they'll be loathed. But AMD gets much of the same flak despite making much more of an effort.
Insightful, Troll, Interesting, what you lack is a Funny moderation despite that's what it is. AMD has open sourced. While there's bits and pieces missing for specialized functions you have all the low level shader instructions to implement high performance gaming. Turns out it's tough work and not a whole lot of people who actually understand how to make efficient use of a modern GPU's resources. And those who do generally are or have been employed by AMD/nVidia/Intel and has to deal with a lot of thorny IP issues.
On the bright side, Intel don't seem to feel they got anything to lose by going open source so eventually they're going to catch up. While it's not for FPS gaming the number of "good enough" games you can play on Intel keeps going up. At least until AMD can pull off a high end CPU worth buying, despite DX12 the FX-8xxx series is 2012 level technology. Every i-something sold with an integrated GPU is a nail in AMD's coffin.
Depends on what you do. If I want to be debug certain processes on the desktop, 16GB is the minimum for me. This is due to one monolithic ~10GB process in debug mode that is beyond my power to break down into more manageable chunks. Honestly, the question is if you compare it to my salary, is there any reason not to just give me however much I ask for? But budgets and sanity don't mix.
Rockets are hard, but they're just physics and chemistry, which are the easy parts.
Technically so are ecosystems. In practice both are rather ugly, particularly landing a larger mass on Mars because the techniques we have used for probes won't scale and much like closed ecosystems we haven't pulled off landing with controlled thrust just yet. And the last rocket SpaceX sent up blew up going up before they even got a shot at landing, there are many non-trivial challenges before we have Mars touch-down. And that part is essential, for sustenance we could just send a ton of supplies the first time while the rest is non-essential experiments. Nice if they work, not fatal if they don't. There's few chances for a plan B with rockets in space, Apollo 13 should be counted among the not so minor miracles.
It is widely known that DX12 will reduce draw call overhead, making weaker CPUs perform better relative to stronger CPUs. This is of course good for AMD, since they don't have high-end CPUs anymore though it's bit of a "scorched earth" result where gamers don't need expensive CPUs at all. But if you look at "Ashes (Heavy) DX11 to DX12 Scaling - Radeon R9 390X" and look at an extremely powerful CPU like the Core i7-6700 you're seeing 50-100% gains. If you're that severely bottle-necked by a 4+ GHz quad core then this is not a typical DX11 game.
We can compare the "typical" difference between a R9 390X and GTX980 in Anandtech's bench, though I have to substitute for a R290X "Uber" so the differences should actually be even smaller. Normally these cards are almost head to head, the question is not why DX12 is closing the gap but why there's such a huge DX11 gap to begin with. And the only reason I can come up with is because they're pushing way, way more draw calls than normal. Which may be DX12 enabling developers to do things they wanted to, but couldn't before or it could be to make someone look good/bad.
This. If you got physical access you can also add a) A GPS tracker/camera/microphone b) A device to cut your brake wires/floor the gas pedal c) A device to release sleep gas at highway speeds d) A poisonous snake/spider/reptile e) A bomb f) All of the above
The only real difference with an online exploit is if you could do it to lots of cars at once with nearly no effort. Like the difference between a virus bricking your machine and a sledgehammer bricking your machine. You don't have any protection against the latter, do you?
Actually I've heard complaints about total disregard of scientific reasoning in Norway too, in that particular case it was about a youth program they made for criminal juveniles. They wanted to know the effect, well the person I talked to said you needed a control group. No way said the police, we believe it's doing good so we're doing it for all of them. Now in healthcare there's no way you'd get anything done without a clinical trial showing that yes, this actually works and to what degree. In police work, the standard is "it sounds like a good idea".
Like we just armed our police force, because it sounds like in some cases that's a good idea. What are the odds the police will get shot because they're armed? What's the odds of a shootout between police and bad guys harming civilians? What's the chance of suspects being shot because the cops won't let them get in reach of their gun? What's the odds of someone grabbing or stealing the officer's gun? What's the odds of accidental shooting? In our last terror attack (Breivik, killed 69 youths) the regular police had guns in the car but waited for our version of the SWAT team anyway.
Half the problem with weapons is that if you choose not to use them they become a huge liability. And in most cases, we do want our cops to solve things in a more peaceful manner than shooting the troublemakers. They might have to deal with people who are simply drunk or unruly or agitated, which is probably handled better without a gun on their hip. It's not that one officer's gun that is the escalation, it's being able to call upon a whole police force to mount a massive response. You pull a gun on a police officer, the police post a manhunt on you. Not even policemen are likely to survive an assassination.
'Marshmallow' is the perfect word for a label that carries no content, is all fluff, and whose sole purpose is to appeal to people with simple tastes.
Maybe I have simple tastes, but I like the idea of relatively unique and absurd version names. If you search for "debian 8 <my issue here>" I could get any kind of old crap, because the number eight has so many other uses like that this page was made the 8th of August 2008 or whatever. If I search for "debian jessie <my issue here>" it's extremely likely the page has been updated with information relevant to my version. Simply because prior to the announcement, there was very little if any reason to use "jessie" on any debian-related page and it's fairly memorable as a unique version identifier for both writers and readers.
It's not the end of the world. Use of an interface for purposes of interoperability has been declared fair use.
But using an interface with the purpose of replacing the original software has not, otherwise Oracle vs Google would have trivially gone in Google's favor. And that is a very dangerous, because they go hand in hand. If LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents, it's also looking to replace MS Office installations. If the scope of interoperability is limited to software that doesn't compete with the original, that would be a mess.
If men actually weigh more, and it costs more fuel to move heavier objects by airplane, then men should pay more. That's not sexism, it's logic.
The line between bigotry and applied statistics is thin and very blurry. For example here in Norway I've heard a lot of broad generalizations of why there's so many Swedes in the restaurant/bar/nightclub business and why there's so many Poles in the construction industry, claiming they have higher work morale, less sick leave and whatnot. But if you say anything remotely like that about why you wouldn't hire immigrants from certain countries, you'll have demonstrations and boycotts and be reported to the police for racial discrimination.
We're all individuals but we're all through statistics part of various groups with positive and negative connotations. For example, by being male I'm more likely than the average person to be a rapist, simply because there's so few females. Not that they don't exist, but statistics. So all other things being equal, would you like me or a woman to drive your wasted daughter home? It doesn't matter what I would do, it's what the "statistical male that you don't know" would do. It's hardly fair to me as I know myself but anyone else would have to go with the superficial.
IOPS/$ and latency, the time from someone runs a report or clicks a filter until the result is returned means a lot for productivity. Of course you can do a lot with smart systems too, but much like single-thread performance a really fast IO subsystem makes everything easier.
really? usually fragmentation is the result of two parties with irreconcilable differences. would you prefer that they spend time fighting with each other or would you rather let them duke it out in implementation land and see who can make a better mousetrap?
Usually I'd rather not see two camps split the rest of the community. Because there's developers working on other parts of the system and if you can't get them on board your fork will likely grow stale and die as it lacks all the other bug fixes, enhancements and features that have nothing to do with what was in dispute. Sure it's open source so you can borrow but it takes time and effort and as the code diverges applying the patches will get harder and harder. This usually leads to a lot of drama and a lot of developers get fed up and leave.
If you want a counterexample, BSD has split many times over into FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD being the largest. Linus has for most practical purposes with the temporary exception of the Android fork managed to keep Linux unified. I don't think it's an understatement to say the latter has been far more successful, though you can of course argue that there's many other reasons for that. But there's no shortage of open source projects that have forked and gotten a very inward and short sighted focus competing over their own users, rather than implement the features that would take the project to the next level.
Google in particular is uniquely positioned to sway the entire industry since they provide both the most popular video service (Youtube) and one of the most popular video clients (Chrome browser.)
Don't forget that without hardware decoding support in mobile/tablets a new codec will have a very tough time. Being able to make demands for the Android platform might be just as important.
It's called rationalizing, and anyone can do it. First, do whatever you want. Next, come up with a justification. As long as you act first and justify second, you're doing it right! Under no circumstances should you reverse the order of operations, you you may end up actually behaving ethically.
No, the opposite is just called "The ends justifies the means" where you get a free pass to do anything for the greater good. That's how you can nuke Hiroshima and still sleep at night. Probably how Nazi death camp staff thought about gas chambers and the Jews too. No doubt many at the NSA feel invading everyone's privacy is for the greater good, even though they'd vehemently oppose China or Russia doing the same to them. But the NSA are the good guys so what they do is good, if the bad guys do the same it's bad. There's no ethical problem that moral relativity can't solve.
I agree that we need to keep researching, but I think we need to speed it up and "go like hell" and get off this rock even if the process is a bit dirty. I mean, what do we do when renewables aren't enough or some fast moving rock is on its way to destroy our rock or some idiot does something really stupid with a virus or two. Let's go!
Go where? Compared to creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, Earth's problems are trivial. Hell, compared to a dino-killer asteroid hitting Earth staying would be preferable. And Voyager 1 is 36 light hours out on a 4.24 light year trip to the nearest star. Not that we actually know any better exoplanets to go to either.
Yes, the difference matters a great deal. I know of no European country that is governed as a democratic socialist country. Many countries nominally have "democratic socialist parties", but they largely do not actually pursue democratic socialism anymore.
As a general case no, but for services the government provides there's always debates of whether they should be provided by public employees or purchases from private companies. Say 25 years ago it was public employees building our public roads, the phone system was publicly owned, everything from the drivers of public transport to the garbage men were employees of the state. Today all of those are privatized but still about 30% here in Norway work in the public sector, primarily in child care, education, healthcare and care for the elderly. The overall trend is that the government is paying but not performing though.
The arguments are fairly classic, the government is a monopolist and has no true incentive to improve and cutting funding only leads to politically unacceptable service levels, not higher efficiency. The counter argument is that there's very little innovation in helping the elderly get dressed, fed and washed so the private sector is just cutting costs by cutting corners, creating worse work conditions and providing poorer service in all the ways you don't manage to measure in a contract and adding a profit margin on top. And the staff just rotates between the companies that get the contract.
We have mixed services but there's always a debate if you're comparing apples to apples, for example in public healthcare you typically have young doctors in training, experts for the really difficult cases or obscure treatments and such while private healthcare is typically an experienced doctor doing routine work to maximize the number of procedures he can bill the government for, making them seem far more efficient when they're skimming the system for easy money and leaving the rest to the public system. Many of the same arguments are also repeated with regards to consultants or employees.
Scam would imply this is some kind of fraud or swindle, like a con artist trying to trick you. This is plain extortion, they've kidnapped your data and is holding it ransom. If bad things really do happen if you don't pay, it's not a scam any more than being robbed at gunpoint is.
of intellectual property was to protect the little guy with the good idea from being abused by the big guy with the deep pockets. the intent has been completely subverted and destroyed and now intellectual property simple serves as another club the big guy with deep pockets can use to rob the little guy with the idea
Oh please, we started messing with that system not them. Instead of buying a copy so the "little guy with the idea" got his royalties we started mass copying stuff for free, which fucked them both over. Maybe their contracts weren't very nice, but it doesn't matter if there's nothing to share. Since then it's been an arms race between those who want to copy and those who want to prevent copying, with both sides playing dirty.
The music industry seems to have found its shape with streaming though, games have Steam so the only hardcore lock down fans seem to be the movie industry. But we broke CSS, we broke AACS, when their 4K BluRay protection cracks hopefully they'll say enough is enough.
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The free money might be useless, but I doubt it'll mean nobody will work. If the minimum income is just barely enough to pay for food and shelter well that's all people really NEED, but most people will want more than just a house and food. Also, with some exception, most people are not housecats that are content to just laze about all day doing nothing, most people want to climb the social ladder, get a bigger house, a nicer tv, pay for cable, etc. And that means working. I will agree however that it might mean that businesses need to offer a decent wage to convince people to do bottom barrel work though.
The real question is what stops us from dialing down the welfare system to the bare necessities? Nothing. But we feel there's a difference between being a bum ass teen who can live with his parents and spend it as allowance and a war veteran suffering from crippling PTSD. All the welfare programs do try to reflect a degree of worthiness, culpability, ability to change the situation and so on. The idea that that you could replace everything with basic income is saying you could find a level of income that would give proper incentive to the lazy and that you would still feel is decent to everyone else.
It would surprise me though if he doesn't have at least some long-term goals that take over 6 months to complete and that he's not focussed on working on right now but has in his back-pocket, but maybe he really doesn't.
Well, the kernel runs on everything from cell phones to supercomputers and that it doesn't run on desktops has absolutely nothing to do with kernel features. I don't see any huge glaring TODOs, by far most the changes are drivers (non-CPU hardware driven), followed by architecture (CPU hardware driven), followed by high performance in kernel implementations like file systems or network filtering. The number of patches that really touch core "kernel" functionality of managing other processes seem to be rather few.
Sounds like the last few generations - lots of incremental improvements and excellent technology but wont amount to much of a difference in general performance.
Actually they've made quite substantial improvements, but Intel is using that to deliver 105% of the last generation's performance with far less resources. A 32nm Sandy Bridge (i7-2700k) is 216 mm^2, a 14nm Skylake (i7-6700k) is 122.4 mm^2. So on the same wafer Intel can produce 75% more processors. By letting AMD pave the way with APUs they've force-bundled integrated graphics killing low-end discrete chips without an antitrust whimper, almost 20% on Steam now game on Intel and Skylake adds 25% more shaders with 20 vs 16 EUs on regular desktop chips.
Perhaps the most important part of the Skylake announcement has gone largely unnoticed because we haven't seen it in any actual product yet is that Skylake will go up to 72 EUs, as opposed to 40/48 on Haswell/Broadwell. Since Broadwell quad core chips only launched a few months ago, the real comparison is Haswell which means a 72/40 = 80% increase in shaders, clearly Intel is planning to take the midrange laptop graphics too. A fully stacked Skywell seems to be a nVidia 950m-class competitor, both around 1100 GFLOPS and 26 times more powerful than "Intel HD Graphics" from five years ago.
Basically, we're being used. I think Intel knows as well as we do that no matter how fast they released processors people aren't going to throw away their three year old computer anymore. They'll sell new processors when the old go out of service or the market expands, not because it's outdated. So they're using their strengths for profit and market gain, because what's your high end alternative? It's either Intel or an extremely old FX processor or a severely under-powered laptop chip. They know your business is not going anywhere, it's only a matter of how long they need to wait.
Now, hopefully the prices of decent smartphones will come down to a reasonable level. Why the hell pay $600-$700 got the latest from Samsung or LG when there are things like Ubik?
I just took a look at my local pricewatch, 344 cell phone models from 35 different manufacturers now granted a few of them aren't smartphones but still it's very far from a duopoly... what's Ubik but a noname chinese phone with a marketing campaign? They got no track record of component quality, build quality, support or anything, if the phone flops or has any critical flaws the company is likely to disappear without a trace.
They won't get the same kind of volume discounts as those who order millions, if they think they can do the same for so much less it's probably because they forgot some costs. While Apple has been raking in money many of the Android companies have barely been breaking even, it's not like there are fat margins to undercut. By all means, if they have a shipping phone with good reviews I'll consider it but as a kickstarter this sounds like a very uphill battle for an established market.
When you invoke a program that has a manifest which states that it requires some form of administrative rights, Windows will prompt you for "elevated" privileges. Only when you accept to use your administrative privileges will the process be started with a token with higher than standard user rights. It really is a much more elegant solution than the stupid effective user in Linux, where the description of a process rights is strongly tied to a user: There must exist a user with the specific sets of rights you want the process to have.
It's possible they have more fine grained control behind the scenes but since the UAC prompt doesn't tell me anything I have to assume that any time I click yes that process can do anything, much like "sudo" on the Linux side. It might be ready for role-based security like on cell phones where they list the particular privileges the application wants, but I don't see it in practice.
I guess because the only people who'd sign up for a 24 month contract are those who'd almost certainly stay with you anyway. And what would they do after those 24 months are up, automatically bump them down to the BYO plan or blatantly overcharge them? They want the lazy option to be the profitable one, a lease plan means they can keep on charging until the customer makes an effort to change it. If they can charge a few "extra" months that's probably way more profitable.
Linux community itself, for the most part, embraces openness, but the concept itself isn't for that.
Actually that's where you're dead wrong. In 1985 RMS outlined the goals of his free software, and the freedom to study what it does requires openness. Now various companies have found loopholes, but the fundamental goals remain the same: You should be able to run, study, improve and redistribute the source code. And yes, study implies being in the source form most suitable for viewing, not assembler instructions or whatnot.
AMD shoul just release the COMPLETE code already. Then maybe the community can begin fixing all these problems. And don't get me started about how they released the code. It's not all there and is largely a joke. Release some code and wrapping it around a proprietary component is hardly really "open source".
Not really sure what you're grasping at here. The Catalyst driver is not and will not ever be released, due to a number of reasons ranging from trade secrets to IP issues to DRM issues to whatnot. The specs have been released and an open source driver based on it, thers' no "proprietary component" it revolves around. Unless you talk about the firmware which is pretty much like every other hardware company, they load a blob that sets up the hardware correctly. Just about any modern hardware has this, it's just magic values unless you document the hardware which they're not going to do.
Then again, this is probably one of the problems the open source community has, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy with regards to openness. Since you're not being totally 100% transparent with everything you do, you're not open and so you're in the same box as the companies that are about 0% transparent. Why bother? Even when you're doing everything that's reasonable to open source your product you're going to have shitheads like the parent complain. I can totally understand nVidia's position on the matter, which pretty much amounts to "No. Fuck off." Sure, they'll be loathed. But AMD gets much of the same flak despite making much more of an effort.
Insightful, Troll, Interesting, what you lack is a Funny moderation despite that's what it is. AMD has open sourced. While there's bits and pieces missing for specialized functions you have all the low level shader instructions to implement high performance gaming. Turns out it's tough work and not a whole lot of people who actually understand how to make efficient use of a modern GPU's resources. And those who do generally are or have been employed by AMD/nVidia/Intel and has to deal with a lot of thorny IP issues.
On the bright side, Intel don't seem to feel they got anything to lose by going open source so eventually they're going to catch up. While it's not for FPS gaming the number of "good enough" games you can play on Intel keeps going up. At least until AMD can pull off a high end CPU worth buying, despite DX12 the FX-8xxx series is 2012 level technology. Every i-something sold with an integrated GPU is a nail in AMD's coffin.
Depends on what you do. If I want to be debug certain processes on the desktop, 16GB is the minimum for me. This is due to one monolithic ~10GB process in debug mode that is beyond my power to break down into more manageable chunks. Honestly, the question is if you compare it to my salary, is there any reason not to just give me however much I ask for? But budgets and sanity don't mix.
Rockets are hard, but they're just physics and chemistry, which are the easy parts.
Technically so are ecosystems. In practice both are rather ugly, particularly landing a larger mass on Mars because the techniques we have used for probes won't scale and much like closed ecosystems we haven't pulled off landing with controlled thrust just yet. And the last rocket SpaceX sent up blew up going up before they even got a shot at landing, there are many non-trivial challenges before we have Mars touch-down. And that part is essential, for sustenance we could just send a ton of supplies the first time while the rest is non-essential experiments. Nice if they work, not fatal if they don't. There's few chances for a plan B with rockets in space, Apollo 13 should be counted among the not so minor miracles.
It is widely known that DX12 will reduce draw call overhead, making weaker CPUs perform better relative to stronger CPUs. This is of course good for AMD, since they don't have high-end CPUs anymore though it's bit of a "scorched earth" result where gamers don't need expensive CPUs at all. But if you look at "Ashes (Heavy) DX11 to DX12 Scaling - Radeon R9 390X" and look at an extremely powerful CPU like the Core i7-6700 you're seeing 50-100% gains. If you're that severely bottle-necked by a 4+ GHz quad core then this is not a typical DX11 game.
We can compare the "typical" difference between a R9 390X and GTX980 in Anandtech's bench, though I have to substitute for a R290X "Uber" so the differences should actually be even smaller. Normally these cards are almost head to head, the question is not why DX12 is closing the gap but why there's such a huge DX11 gap to begin with. And the only reason I can come up with is because they're pushing way, way more draw calls than normal. Which may be DX12 enabling developers to do things they wanted to, but couldn't before or it could be to make someone look good/bad.
This. If you got physical access you can also add
a) A GPS tracker/camera/microphone
b) A device to cut your brake wires/floor the gas pedal
c) A device to release sleep gas at highway speeds
d) A poisonous snake/spider/reptile
e) A bomb
f) All of the above
The only real difference with an online exploit is if you could do it to lots of cars at once with nearly no effort. Like the difference between a virus bricking your machine and a sledgehammer bricking your machine. You don't have any protection against the latter, do you?
Send then to train in Norway and the UK
Actually I've heard complaints about total disregard of scientific reasoning in Norway too, in that particular case it was about a youth program they made for criminal juveniles. They wanted to know the effect, well the person I talked to said you needed a control group. No way said the police, we believe it's doing good so we're doing it for all of them. Now in healthcare there's no way you'd get anything done without a clinical trial showing that yes, this actually works and to what degree. In police work, the standard is "it sounds like a good idea".
Like we just armed our police force, because it sounds like in some cases that's a good idea. What are the odds the police will get shot because they're armed? What's the odds of a shootout between police and bad guys harming civilians? What's the chance of suspects being shot because the cops won't let them get in reach of their gun? What's the odds of someone grabbing or stealing the officer's gun? What's the odds of accidental shooting? In our last terror attack (Breivik, killed 69 youths) the regular police had guns in the car but waited for our version of the SWAT team anyway.
Half the problem with weapons is that if you choose not to use them they become a huge liability. And in most cases, we do want our cops to solve things in a more peaceful manner than shooting the troublemakers. They might have to deal with people who are simply drunk or unruly or agitated, which is probably handled better without a gun on their hip. It's not that one officer's gun that is the escalation, it's being able to call upon a whole police force to mount a massive response. You pull a gun on a police officer, the police post a manhunt on you. Not even policemen are likely to survive an assassination.
'Marshmallow' is the perfect word for a label that carries no content, is all fluff, and whose sole purpose is to appeal to people with simple tastes.
Maybe I have simple tastes, but I like the idea of relatively unique and absurd version names. If you search for "debian 8 <my issue here>" I could get any kind of old crap, because the number eight has so many other uses like that this page was made the 8th of August 2008 or whatever. If I search for "debian jessie <my issue here>" it's extremely likely the page has been updated with information relevant to my version. Simply because prior to the announcement, there was very little if any reason to use "jessie" on any debian-related page and it's fairly memorable as a unique version identifier for both writers and readers.
TL;DR don't confuse nonsensical with useless
It's not the end of the world. Use of an interface for purposes of interoperability has been declared fair use.
But using an interface with the purpose of replacing the original software has not, otherwise Oracle vs Google would have trivially gone in Google's favor. And that is a very dangerous, because they go hand in hand. If LibreOffice can read and write MS Office documents, it's also looking to replace MS Office installations. If the scope of interoperability is limited to software that doesn't compete with the original, that would be a mess.
If men actually weigh more, and it costs more fuel to move heavier objects by airplane, then men should pay more. That's not sexism, it's logic.
The line between bigotry and applied statistics is thin and very blurry. For example here in Norway I've heard a lot of broad generalizations of why there's so many Swedes in the restaurant/bar/nightclub business and why there's so many Poles in the construction industry, claiming they have higher work morale, less sick leave and whatnot. But if you say anything remotely like that about why you wouldn't hire immigrants from certain countries, you'll have demonstrations and boycotts and be reported to the police for racial discrimination.
We're all individuals but we're all through statistics part of various groups with positive and negative connotations. For example, by being male I'm more likely than the average person to be a rapist, simply because there's so few females. Not that they don't exist, but statistics. So all other things being equal, would you like me or a woman to drive your wasted daughter home? It doesn't matter what I would do, it's what the "statistical male that you don't know" would do. It's hardly fair to me as I know myself but anyone else would have to go with the superficial.
IOPS/$ and latency, the time from someone runs a report or clicks a filter until the result is returned means a lot for productivity. Of course you can do a lot with smart systems too, but much like single-thread performance a really fast IO subsystem makes everything easier.
really? usually fragmentation is the result of two parties with irreconcilable differences. would you prefer that they spend time fighting with each other or would you rather let them duke it out in implementation land and see who can make a better mousetrap?
Usually I'd rather not see two camps split the rest of the community. Because there's developers working on other parts of the system and if you can't get them on board your fork will likely grow stale and die as it lacks all the other bug fixes, enhancements and features that have nothing to do with what was in dispute. Sure it's open source so you can borrow but it takes time and effort and as the code diverges applying the patches will get harder and harder. This usually leads to a lot of drama and a lot of developers get fed up and leave.
If you want a counterexample, BSD has split many times over into FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD being the largest. Linus has for most practical purposes with the temporary exception of the Android fork managed to keep Linux unified. I don't think it's an understatement to say the latter has been far more successful, though you can of course argue that there's many other reasons for that. But there's no shortage of open source projects that have forked and gotten a very inward and short sighted focus competing over their own users, rather than implement the features that would take the project to the next level.
Google in particular is uniquely positioned to sway the entire industry since they provide both the most popular video service (Youtube) and one of the most popular video clients (Chrome browser.)
Don't forget that without hardware decoding support in mobile/tablets a new codec will have a very tough time. Being able to make demands for the Android platform might be just as important.
It's called rationalizing, and anyone can do it. First, do whatever you want. Next, come up with a justification. As long as you act first and justify second, you're doing it right! Under no circumstances should you reverse the order of operations, you you may end up actually behaving ethically.
No, the opposite is just called "The ends justifies the means" where you get a free pass to do anything for the greater good. That's how you can nuke Hiroshima and still sleep at night. Probably how Nazi death camp staff thought about gas chambers and the Jews too. No doubt many at the NSA feel invading everyone's privacy is for the greater good, even though they'd vehemently oppose China or Russia doing the same to them. But the NSA are the good guys so what they do is good, if the bad guys do the same it's bad. There's no ethical problem that moral relativity can't solve.
I agree that we need to keep researching, but I think we need to speed it up and "go like hell" and get off this rock even if the process is a bit dirty. I mean, what do we do when renewables aren't enough or some fast moving rock is on its way to destroy our rock or some idiot does something really stupid with a virus or two. Let's go!
Go where? Compared to creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars, Earth's problems are trivial. Hell, compared to a dino-killer asteroid hitting Earth staying would be preferable. And Voyager 1 is 36 light hours out on a 4.24 light year trip to the nearest star. Not that we actually know any better exoplanets to go to either.
Yes, the difference matters a great deal. I know of no European country that is governed as a democratic socialist country. Many countries nominally have "democratic socialist parties", but they largely do not actually pursue democratic socialism anymore.
As a general case no, but for services the government provides there's always debates of whether they should be provided by public employees or purchases from private companies. Say 25 years ago it was public employees building our public roads, the phone system was publicly owned, everything from the drivers of public transport to the garbage men were employees of the state. Today all of those are privatized but still about 30% here in Norway work in the public sector, primarily in child care, education, healthcare and care for the elderly. The overall trend is that the government is paying but not performing though.
The arguments are fairly classic, the government is a monopolist and has no true incentive to improve and cutting funding only leads to politically unacceptable service levels, not higher efficiency. The counter argument is that there's very little innovation in helping the elderly get dressed, fed and washed so the private sector is just cutting costs by cutting corners, creating worse work conditions and providing poorer service in all the ways you don't manage to measure in a contract and adding a profit margin on top. And the staff just rotates between the companies that get the contract.
We have mixed services but there's always a debate if you're comparing apples to apples, for example in public healthcare you typically have young doctors in training, experts for the really difficult cases or obscure treatments and such while private healthcare is typically an experienced doctor doing routine work to maximize the number of procedures he can bill the government for, making them seem far more efficient when they're skimming the system for easy money and leaving the rest to the public system. Many of the same arguments are also repeated with regards to consultants or employees.
Scam would imply this is some kind of fraud or swindle, like a con artist trying to trick you. This is plain extortion, they've kidnapped your data and is holding it ransom. If bad things really do happen if you don't pay, it's not a scam any more than being robbed at gunpoint is.
of intellectual property was to protect the little guy with the good idea from being abused by the big guy with the deep pockets. the intent has been completely subverted and destroyed and now intellectual property simple serves as another club the big guy with deep pockets can use to rob the little guy with the idea
Oh please, we started messing with that system not them. Instead of buying a copy so the "little guy with the idea" got his royalties we started mass copying stuff for free, which fucked them both over. Maybe their contracts weren't very nice, but it doesn't matter if there's nothing to share. Since then it's been an arms race between those who want to copy and those who want to prevent copying, with both sides playing dirty.
The music industry seems to have found its shape with streaming though, games have Steam so the only hardcore lock down fans seem to be the movie industry. But we broke CSS, we broke AACS, when their 4K BluRay protection cracks hopefully they'll say enough is enough.