You don't blow up threatening space objects. Space is really big. All you do is give the object a little nudge while it's still far enough away.
Of course a "little nudge" is relative if you're talking objects of any serious consequence. A 100m asteroid - a decently sized H-bomb on impact - is likely to weigh >1,000,000 kg. That's a lot of inertia to nudge even a little bit. The smallest ones (<15m) we don't need to do something about, the biggest ones we can't do anything about (the dino killer was a trillion tons) so there's a few in the middle that we maybe could, but statistically it's like an entire city struck by lightning - nasty death from above for those it happen to, not really a threat to the human race.
You won't find many such comments here. Not that they don't exist - it's just that the Russian propaganda workers are focusing primarily on Russian-language media.
Here in Norway I can assure you we have plenty Putin shills commenting on news stories, I assume it's the same for most NATO countries. Putin got Russia in his back pocket, it's the public opinion in the west and all the sanctions they're looking to sway.
Why can't peering be their way to implement throttling? Here's the good, bad and ugly peering point with high, medium and low prices respectively. Sure, we don't throttle the ugly hub but it's connected to the rest of our network by a dial-up via Uzbekistan, while the good hub got a 100Gbit fiber directly to our core network. If you don't have equal access to the network, you don't get equal access for the traffic. You just move the traffic discrimination to another tier.
They made it to Slashdot, so the effort was a success on some level. And maybe more people need to be aware of code analyzers (we just enforce code conventions and obvious bad practices).
Maybe you should stop enforcing obvious bad practices first?:)
So it's a slashvertisement for the same site as every other hardware-related article, but in this case not a single review site has benchmarks. AMD is being a giant cocktease, first they flash a picture, then they give us some speeches and marketing slides, with the promise that they're oh so worth waiting for. Meanwhile nVidia is putting it out there saying if you want it, come get it. I don't think this "hard to get" strategy is working out to AMDs advantage, I'm sure a lot of people are tired of getting stringed along.
In high end CPUs it's been years with no real acknowledgement from AMD that Bulldozer was dead, they're going to string you along as long as possible in the hope that maybe you haven't gone Intel/nVidia by the time they get the product out the door. But their credibility is wearing extremely thin, you know they have review samples ready if they're about to launch the product. That they don't want the facts out there speaks volumes that the facts are against them and the fanboy hype will turn into a backlash when they don't live up to the wishful thinking.
No, the problem is that you got no knowledge or control over the quality of work done on the component. There are lots of ways to subtly break it through failing on a particular set of inputs or a particular sequence of events that is combinatoric in nature and essentially impossible to predict. For example imagine you have functions a() through z() and it'll crash if you call c() after g() unless you've called v() in between. How can you unit test for that? You can't. What if the new component has a threading bug that'll only show up one in a hundred runs under heavy load?
Of course, if they have proper unit tests it shouldn't start regressing and breaking in surprising ways. That's a pretty big if. And it really only needs to happen once before you and your manager get chewed out for breaking the system just to keep up with the bleeding edge. It's pretty hard to argue against code that has withstood the test of time, as long as none of the flaws and limitations seem to matter to you. I know that happens to some code I run into, it's ugly as sin but it actually works and I just pray I don't ever have to debug it.
A better analogy would be "dealer gets supplier to bankroll first shot is free campaign on promise of bigger future earnings". It's just two business partners looking to maximize profits, they're in this together to get you hooked.
More like muscles are high upkeep so you have to exercise to keep them, if you just asked a muscular guy to not exercise he wouldn't lose much weight. In fact unless he adjusted his eating habits he'd be a lot more likely to gain weight. And if you reward yourself with junk food and snacks after exercise it won't do you any good at all. There's three very good effects though:
1) If you're already on a healthy diet it's easier to exercise more than reduce intake even further. 2) The ratio of muscles to fat is improved, giving you more strength to carry less. 3) Muscle is denser, even if you're not lighter you'll be slimmer with less flopping around.
The first one is as simple that the body needs a good fuel mix, it doesn't work well on pure fat. So you have to eat a minimum and if you eat more and exercise you can burn away the fat portion without undernourishing yourself. The second and third basically makes you feel and look better, which is probably just as much the point as the number on a scale.
I work for an ISP. You're wrong on almost every point. Most infrastructure repair costs are for what we jokingly call the "Backhoe disconnect". We're talking upwards of 90% of our repair costs are construction related.
I'm not really seeing where you're contradicting me, but I'm sorry you live in a third world country that hasn't invented the map. Around here it happens rarely as all cables and pipes - not just fiber but electricity, water, sewage etc. are recorded and easily available for anyone else digging. If it does happen whoever broke it pays or if it happens by natural causes it's a running cost built into the monthly subscription. If you manage to trash a fiber network so badly it has to be written down in five years, there's something very wrong with your business.
Further, Fiber does have a lot of longevity, you are correct there. But what doesn't have a lot of longevity is wired internet service as a whole. By 2025 we'll start seeing the first 5g cellular plans they'll offer 1gig+ service for a lower price and using less spectrum than 4g. When that comes along, the residential side of my industry will die.
Fiber is killing copper, coax and satellite for TV, Internet and "landline" delivery. At least 4G is far too little to run all wirelessly on, personally I'd wager against 5G too. Not that it won't be popular, but the future seems to be fiber + mobile. Or to put it another way, if FTTH is to die I expect cable and telcos to die first. Those 70-80% signup rates for fiber we see around our cabin aren't imaginary...
Your sarcasm aside, from TFA it looks like the town in question borrowed ~$1900 per person (NOT per household) to put in the system. They'll get that back with taxes eventually, but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide. Assuming a five year note, average household size of four, and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.
It says it's a town of 1900 people at the top, 800 premises so an average of 2.4 per household. They're borrowing $3.6 million which works out to $4500/household, but five years is generally too short. Most estimate that a buried fiber will last 30-40 years, if we say 20 years then it's an extra $20/month in taxes. Seems like a fair price, near my cabin they're building out to ~1200 premises for $5.2 million with a mix of government funding and extra sign-up fee, though the most part is covered by the fiber company who'll profit for decades to come. Still, if all goes according to plan I can get gigabit there at the end of the year and "only" 100 Mbit at home...
The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years?
Realistically how long would it take for the vendor to go out of business, then how long until you can't find the hardware to run the last version on? And I'm sure there'll be migration options for any semi-popular virtualization system. Worst case you might want to save the install instructions (iso of OS + whatever else you've loaded on top) to use with a different VM provider. No doubt x86_64 emulation will be around 25 years from now, no matter what we run on. You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Buy grocery product, inject with $poison and covertly return it to the store shelf. If you want to be a homicidal psycho, you don't really need the Internet to do it. Compared to all the other risks of buying and doing drugs, like for example bad batches or accidental contamination the odds of problems seem slim. And you'll always have the truly desperate who'll try from the cheapest offer with no reputation, you don't have to be one of them.
I spent six weeks getting the run-around after I moved into a new apartment because the cable/internet didn't work. What they fairly quickly established was that the outlet in my apartment was totally dead, they thought the cable was broken inside a concrete wall. They went tossing the ball back and forth between the cable company and the building developer and I think there was some third party installer company involved in the mix too. My impression was that nobody would do anything because they'd run a high risk of getting stuck with the bill and it was entirely unclear whose fault it was.
I was nice the first week with no service, not so nice the second week, pretty annoyed the third week, pissed the fourth week, flaming mad the fifth week and would have rained fire on brimstone on them the sixth week if I hadn't hounded them to send a tech who finally managed to find the access panel where they'd forgotten to connect the wires... At least the circus clowns gave me a bit of compensation, in addition to obviously not paying for the time I had no service. I guess the people who was supposed to test the cable just checked the box without actually trying.
Doesn't work. For the other person to realize you have some actual skills and isn't just an irate customer who wants this escalated into the stratosphere because you're so important, he'd have to have some skills of his own and he usually doesn't - that's why he's first line support in the first place. I won't even go into the laughable idea of a password since every temp worker would have to know it and will give it to every buddy who they owe a favor. Not to mention the many how have IT skills in one area and by hubris thinks they know everything else.
Document, document, document that you've been in contact with customer service several times without a satisfactory resolution, then try taking it up with them in writing. I'm sure you know IT is dividend into the ignorant who know nothing, the recklessly dangerous who know something and truly competent who know exactly what they're doing. Ripping out a managed router - which they probably had reasons to manage - and installing your own just puts you in the "loose cannon" category. They probably suspect that whatever the problem is, you've caused it yourself.
If you're not getting anywhere with a written technical complaint, I'd try a written legal complaint that they're not providing the service you're paying for. They're a castle and have built a moat on purpose since customer support is an expense. They do have people that are far more competent than you and have the power to solve your problem, they're just being shielded from your average support incident. It's more about finding the angle of attack that's productive, making a compelling case is the last 10% after spending 90% of your time trying to make the right person reads it.
I think you got it wrong, the point of advertisements is not to remember one particular ad impression. It's that after hundreds of ads you associate "Always Coca-Cola" the slogan with the bottle with the logo with the drink with the taste until just seeing it in the store or on a menu triggers you into buying it. Heck, a quick check indicates they got that stuck on my mind in 1993-1995 and I still fucking remember it.
It's the thing you don't care much about or that's too big to get first hand knowledge that gets you, not those you actually research. There you pretty much know all the options and what actually fits you, it's when you're feeling a hunger and a burger is good enough the ads kick in. Because you know there's a burger shop two blocks away, all that branding triggers that. And you might have gotten a wrap or a sandwich or a hot dog or a pizza slice but you're not making a full evaluation you're just thinking "good enough, burger it is".
Do you care if the detergent you use is Wisk, Ariel, Persil or Tide? Or do you simply take whatever is on sale when you simply have to buy a new box 'cause the old one is empty?
We're mostly creatures of habit and just buy whatever we bought last time, advertising and sales go hand in hand to make you try new products. Make lots of people aware that it's a sale, lower the price so they'll try it out and some of those will just keep buying until a different campaign steals them to some other brand. Maybe a few are meticulous but if I got 20-30 things on my grocery list I'm mostly just picking what I'm supposed to buy.
Same sometimes goes for where to shop, if I know one store that has something that's often enough because I don't need three. It's something rare I'm buying once in forever and it's just not worth the time and effort to find and compare multiple sources. Basically volume*frequency*savings = total difference must be enough to justify it.
We recently had a media case about an ex-couple suing each other over custody of the dog. In short, despite whatever personal relationship they had to the dog it was not like a child custody case, it was decided by property law. A robot is someone's property, it's no different from flying an RC plane across the border. Unless you got sentient robots granted their own rights, it's a non-issue. And if you do got sentient robots then passport control is the least of your worries.
And assuming they can make a landing soon, there'll be a lot of high risk re-re-refurbished rockets that they might load up with cheap cubesats and if it works it works, if it doesn't no biggie. If there's no customers, why not make your own market?
This, right here. Your obligations end the moment they stop paying you. Anything else is free labor on your part.
Of course it does. But as long as I'm getting paid I will act professionally and loyally to my soon to be ex-employer, unless I got reason to feel stabbed in the back anyway. It's not like I waited for things to crash and burn then tell my boss "You didn't tell me to do anything about it" before, so I wouldn't be that way in my resignation period either. If they'll listen is another matter, but pretty soon that won't be my problem. It's not really about that company's future, I do it because if I cross paths with my boss or colleagues later they might have a more positive opinion of me.
It certainly can't hurt and whether my boss deserves it or not isn't really relevant, I might think he's a short sighted and ignorant PHB but that doesn't preclude him from being involved in a hiring decision about me. I know for a fact that companies look for current employees that have a shared work history with you and ask their opinion of you, since that way they get a reference you don't control. It of course depends on your field of expertise and mobility, but it's usually hard to avoid having a reputation so best to make it a good one. Unless you really need to burn those bridges and rise from the ashes.
The reason they don't call is that really special people are usually no where near as special and indispensable as they think they are. 80% of what they were frittering their time away on wasn't worth doing in the first place, and the remaining 20% can be streamlined and done faster/cheaper/better by their replacement, using their own methods.
Even if you leave on good terms, you are usually leaving because somebody offered you a better deal, I guess there's a few exceptions where you're moving far away or retiring but usually not. Your manager knows this, it's like bringing your ex-girlfriend flowers and candy after she broke up with you for not paying enough attention to her. Also it implies you're the well-meaning employee and the manager the poor manager for undervaluing the work you do and putting the company in a situation where they're critically dependent on competence they don't have anymore.
I still don't think I've met a manager who'll take more crap than he needs to, if you're no longer around to defend yourself any amount of problems or extra work can be blamed on you, doesn't matter if they have to rip out a good system and replace it with duct tape as long as they don't need to own up to needing the instruction manual. If they have to present it like you left a Rube Goldberg contraption with no documentation, so be it. In short, I think the threshold for calling and grovelling is extremely high even if it's really important. In fact, that might even make it worse unless the manager is at the point of desperation where egg on his face is better than the impending meltdown.
At least globally speaking we're seeing an absolutely massive growth in cell phone use and coverage. According to the last figures from the ITU (pdf) some 95% of the world's population will live in range of a 2G network by the end of this year and 69% in 3G. With the rapid transition towards smartphones in low-cost markets as well even more 3G/4G coverage will be built out and the less room is it for satellite internet to fill in the cracks. I have a friend of mine who used to have it, between the caps and latency he switched the moment he could get something better than dial-up. Even if this is a less crappy alternative, I don't think it'll be competitive when you have other choices.
i just checked my local price guide and out of 631 TV models on sale there's exactly zero SD sets available and less than 10% are 720p. You can get a 58" UHD set today for less than I paid for my 60" 1080p TV about 4 years ago. Sure I'm not going to run out to get one, but in 10 years I expect 720p to be gone, 1080p the cheap option and 4K the norm. There's not really any downsides and the prices are coming down quickly, even 4K downscaled will look better because it's 4:4:4 @ 1080p. Better colors, HDR will probably all come as part of 4K rather than be "backported" to 1080p TVs, even though it's technically possible. Of course 8K is yet another step and maybe into nonsense land, but I'd say the switch towards 4K is progressing just fine.
Everybody starts out in the same boat. The smart, however, learn from their mistakes and keep trying until they find the way to make it work. So.. Go out there and know that your experience makes you less naÃve, just don't make the same idiotic mistakes again, and this time you will have a better chance at success.
Or they realize this is not for them. I couldn't be an artist or athlete or salesman or race car driver. Ok technically I could be a better one, but only because I'm so abysmally poor the only way is up. You know how we can read a description and start making all kinds of plans and sketches on how we'd build that? The guys with real economic talent, they're making a whole different sort of plans and sketches like who can you sell it to, what's the key selling features, what's the price points, how to you reach the market, how can you bring costs down, turnaround up, how do you grow the business.
And yes I know sales and marketing are generally loathed around here, but engineers often want to build "neat" products in ways the customers don't really see or care about. Or maybe he would if he ever knew your product existed, much less bought it. And don't say "go viral", honestly how often do you really spam your friends with what products or services you use? There's a few exceptions in social media where you invite people into a network or to play games with you but those are the rare exceptions. You don't talk about the brand of dental floss you use.
I'm not doing a small startup again, you need many roles that overlap and I'm more a specialist than a generalist. Maybe if it had twenty people, at least ten but not two or three or five. Enough at least that they could dedicate me to building whatever will be cash cow and not dealing with well... everything else. There's so many odds and ends you need to keep a company running that you don't notice working for a big company, on the plus side there's generally less meetings but there's still a lot of overhead that go away on random crap.
Now, ask yourself who is going to replace all of the cars on the planet with your super awesome technology?
Well, assuming the last 50% go off the road as fast as the first 50% then 23 years from now "all" cars will be replaced, except for a few collector's items. Maybe faster if people see this as a big incentive to replace their old one.
At the end of the day, these are products someone wants to sell us. And if the world doesn't feel like it has billions or trillions of dollars to rebuild everything for your shiny new technology, then either it will never happen, or it will be rolled out in a few limited places for the wealthy.
And sometimes you have to ask, if it were possible what would you pay for it. I know many elderly who have a solid economy but due to failing health can't drive a car. And since their health is failing they aren't travelling by bus, tram, subway, foot or bike. And you can't visit a cabin by taxi without paying a fortune. I think there's a huge potential market here that will make people redirect money from other things in order to have a self-driving car.
That first wave of "need-to-have" will be followed by a lot of nice-to-have that just want to be able to browse the web or watch TV on their way to work while the car bumper-rides their commute to work. Or that enjoy cabin trips or visiting distant friends and family but hate the drive or just find it tiring after more than a few hours as it comes down in price. And I swear many families with kids would love a car that could drop off the kids at practice, events, friends and whatnot.
The question is just can it be done technologically for a reasonable-ish amount of money. And at least in some areas, the answer is clearly yes.
Shipping of the VLP-16 began earlier this year, with the order backlog currently exceeding production capacity - a situation, Juchmann said, that will change by mid-year.
"We have already experienced a tenfold drop in price, from about $80,000 for the initial model HDL-64E - famously displayed on Google's self-driving car - to $8,000 today," he said. "We believe the price can be further reduced by at least another factor of 10, in parallel with an expected increase in market volume to millions of units per year.
That's been the single most expensive part, the rest is many, many, many man-years of software programming. But as long as this is something you need to develop once and can sell millions of for decades to come I'm pretty sure that'll happen.
While I totally agree it would be nice, I'm seeing loopholes all around for car pooling roommates, live-in girlfriends, kids technically "moving" to an upstairs/basement apartment and whatnot. And very difficult for those who very rarely drive a car, do you get an expensive driver's insurance or save the money and drive uninsured in a jam? Because you can't prove that 95% of the time someone else was driving, unless you make an Orwellian system to surveillance that.
I guess you could tie the insurance to some form of token, but still there'd be many complications with that. And if you don't have it with you, then what you're uninsured? I don't think that could work unless you actually need the token to start the car, but that would again bring more complications as only one could be valid or two people could drive both cars with the extra token, so no spare keys. Maybe I'm overthinking it but I don't see a practical way it'd work well, even if you could change the law.
If you're going to have a ton of metal travelling at 50+ MPH it's going to be insured, no doubt about that. But if somebody is offering me a self-driving car, I expect them to also provide insurance themselves or in cooperation with an insurance company. After all I have fuck all control over what the car will do and what accidents it will get into. While they on the other hand have a near uniform risk profile, if they got a weakness in the driving AI it's in all the cars. Unless they're all hit by a leap year bug or something the average accident rate should be low enough the manufacturer can weather this themselves, it's just the consumer that can't. The only varying risk factors are the auxiliary ones like theft, fire, vandalism and so on which is a race to the bottom, that's not where they make money.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't blow up threatening space objects. Space is really big. All you do is give the object a little nudge while it's still far enough away.
Of course a "little nudge" is relative if you're talking objects of any serious consequence. A 100m asteroid - a decently sized H-bomb on impact - is likely to weigh >1,000,000 kg. That's a lot of inertia to nudge even a little bit. The smallest ones (<15m) we don't need to do something about, the biggest ones we can't do anything about (the dino killer was a trillion tons) so there's a few in the middle that we maybe could, but statistically it's like an entire city struck by lightning - nasty death from above for those it happen to, not really a threat to the human race.
You won't find many such comments here. Not that they don't exist - it's just that the Russian propaganda workers are focusing primarily on Russian-language media.
Here in Norway I can assure you we have plenty Putin shills commenting on news stories, I assume it's the same for most NATO countries. Putin got Russia in his back pocket, it's the public opinion in the west and all the sanctions they're looking to sway.
Why can't peering be their way to implement throttling? Here's the good, bad and ugly peering point with high, medium and low prices respectively. Sure, we don't throttle the ugly hub but it's connected to the rest of our network by a dial-up via Uzbekistan, while the good hub got a 100Gbit fiber directly to our core network. If you don't have equal access to the network, you don't get equal access for the traffic. You just move the traffic discrimination to another tier.
They made it to Slashdot, so the effort was a success on some level. And maybe more people need to be aware of code analyzers (we just enforce code conventions and obvious bad practices).
Maybe you should stop enforcing obvious bad practices first? :)
So it's a slashvertisement for the same site as every other hardware-related article, but in this case not a single review site has benchmarks. AMD is being a giant cocktease, first they flash a picture, then they give us some speeches and marketing slides, with the promise that they're oh so worth waiting for. Meanwhile nVidia is putting it out there saying if you want it, come get it. I don't think this "hard to get" strategy is working out to AMDs advantage, I'm sure a lot of people are tired of getting stringed along.
In high end CPUs it's been years with no real acknowledgement from AMD that Bulldozer was dead, they're going to string you along as long as possible in the hope that maybe you haven't gone Intel/nVidia by the time they get the product out the door. But their credibility is wearing extremely thin, you know they have review samples ready if they're about to launch the product. That they don't want the facts out there speaks volumes that the facts are against them and the fanboy hype will turn into a backlash when they don't live up to the wishful thinking.
No, the problem is that you got no knowledge or control over the quality of work done on the component. There are lots of ways to subtly break it through failing on a particular set of inputs or a particular sequence of events that is combinatoric in nature and essentially impossible to predict. For example imagine you have functions a() through z() and it'll crash if you call c() after g() unless you've called v() in between. How can you unit test for that? You can't. What if the new component has a threading bug that'll only show up one in a hundred runs under heavy load?
Of course, if they have proper unit tests it shouldn't start regressing and breaking in surprising ways. That's a pretty big if. And it really only needs to happen once before you and your manager get chewed out for breaking the system just to keep up with the bleeding edge. It's pretty hard to argue against code that has withstood the test of time, as long as none of the flaws and limitations seem to matter to you. I know that happens to some code I run into, it's ugly as sin but it actually works and I just pray I don't ever have to debug it.
A better analogy would be "dealer gets supplier to bankroll first shot is free campaign on promise of bigger future earnings". It's just two business partners looking to maximize profits, they're in this together to get you hooked.
More like muscles are high upkeep so you have to exercise to keep them, if you just asked a muscular guy to not exercise he wouldn't lose much weight. In fact unless he adjusted his eating habits he'd be a lot more likely to gain weight. And if you reward yourself with junk food and snacks after exercise it won't do you any good at all. There's three very good effects though:
1) If you're already on a healthy diet it's easier to exercise more than reduce intake even further.
2) The ratio of muscles to fat is improved, giving you more strength to carry less.
3) Muscle is denser, even if you're not lighter you'll be slimmer with less flopping around.
The first one is as simple that the body needs a good fuel mix, it doesn't work well on pure fat. So you have to eat a minimum and if you eat more and exercise you can burn away the fat portion without undernourishing yourself. The second and third basically makes you feel and look better, which is probably just as much the point as the number on a scale.
I work for an ISP. You're wrong on almost every point. Most infrastructure repair costs are for what we jokingly call the "Backhoe disconnect". We're talking upwards of 90% of our repair costs are construction related.
I'm not really seeing where you're contradicting me, but I'm sorry you live in a third world country that hasn't invented the map. Around here it happens rarely as all cables and pipes - not just fiber but electricity, water, sewage etc. are recorded and easily available for anyone else digging. If it does happen whoever broke it pays or if it happens by natural causes it's a running cost built into the monthly subscription. If you manage to trash a fiber network so badly it has to be written down in five years, there's something very wrong with your business.
Further, Fiber does have a lot of longevity, you are correct there. But what doesn't have a lot of longevity is wired internet service as a whole. By 2025 we'll start seeing the first 5g cellular plans they'll offer 1gig+ service for a lower price and using less spectrum than 4g. When that comes along, the residential side of my industry will die.
Fiber is killing copper, coax and satellite for TV, Internet and "landline" delivery. At least 4G is far too little to run all wirelessly on, personally I'd wager against 5G too. Not that it won't be popular, but the future seems to be fiber + mobile. Or to put it another way, if FTTH is to die I expect cable and telcos to die first. Those 70-80% signup rates for fiber we see around our cabin aren't imaginary...
Your sarcasm aside, from TFA it looks like the town in question borrowed ~$1900 per person (NOT per household) to put in the system. They'll get that back with taxes eventually, but it's not clear whether the taxes will be on the locals or Statewide. Assuming a five year note, average household size of four, and the costs paid entirely by the locals, that should about double the $65/month that is the nominal cost of the system.
It says it's a town of 1900 people at the top, 800 premises so an average of 2.4 per household. They're borrowing $3.6 million which works out to $4500/household, but five years is generally too short. Most estimate that a buried fiber will last 30-40 years, if we say 20 years then it's an extra $20/month in taxes. Seems like a fair price, near my cabin they're building out to ~1200 premises for $5.2 million with a mix of government funding and extra sign-up fee, though the most part is covered by the fiber company who'll profit for decades to come. Still, if all goes according to plan I can get gigabit there at the end of the year and "only" 100 Mbit at home...
The obvious solution seems to be to use a VM that has a portable disk image that can be moved to any emulators in the future (the build environment is currently based around Ubuntu 14.04 LTS / x86_64) but how do you predict what vendors / hardware will be available in 25 years?
Realistically how long would it take for the vendor to go out of business, then how long until you can't find the hardware to run the last version on? And I'm sure there'll be migration options for any semi-popular virtualization system. Worst case you might want to save the install instructions (iso of OS + whatever else you've loaded on top) to use with a different VM provider. No doubt x86_64 emulation will be around 25 years from now, no matter what we run on. You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Buy grocery product, inject with $poison and covertly return it to the store shelf. If you want to be a homicidal psycho, you don't really need the Internet to do it. Compared to all the other risks of buying and doing drugs, like for example bad batches or accidental contamination the odds of problems seem slim. And you'll always have the truly desperate who'll try from the cheapest offer with no reputation, you don't have to be one of them.
I spent six weeks getting the run-around after I moved into a new apartment because the cable/internet didn't work. What they fairly quickly established was that the outlet in my apartment was totally dead, they thought the cable was broken inside a concrete wall. They went tossing the ball back and forth between the cable company and the building developer and I think there was some third party installer company involved in the mix too. My impression was that nobody would do anything because they'd run a high risk of getting stuck with the bill and it was entirely unclear whose fault it was.
I was nice the first week with no service, not so nice the second week, pretty annoyed the third week, pissed the fourth week, flaming mad the fifth week and would have rained fire on brimstone on them the sixth week if I hadn't hounded them to send a tech who finally managed to find the access panel where they'd forgotten to connect the wires... At least the circus clowns gave me a bit of compensation, in addition to obviously not paying for the time I had no service. I guess the people who was supposed to test the cable just checked the box without actually trying.
Doesn't work. For the other person to realize you have some actual skills and isn't just an irate customer who wants this escalated into the stratosphere because you're so important, he'd have to have some skills of his own and he usually doesn't - that's why he's first line support in the first place. I won't even go into the laughable idea of a password since every temp worker would have to know it and will give it to every buddy who they owe a favor. Not to mention the many how have IT skills in one area and by hubris thinks they know everything else.
Document, document, document that you've been in contact with customer service several times without a satisfactory resolution, then try taking it up with them in writing. I'm sure you know IT is dividend into the ignorant who know nothing, the recklessly dangerous who know something and truly competent who know exactly what they're doing. Ripping out a managed router - which they probably had reasons to manage - and installing your own just puts you in the "loose cannon" category. They probably suspect that whatever the problem is, you've caused it yourself.
If you're not getting anywhere with a written technical complaint, I'd try a written legal complaint that they're not providing the service you're paying for. They're a castle and have built a moat on purpose since customer support is an expense. They do have people that are far more competent than you and have the power to solve your problem, they're just being shielded from your average support incident. It's more about finding the angle of attack that's productive, making a compelling case is the last 10% after spending 90% of your time trying to make the right person reads it.
I think you got it wrong, the point of advertisements is not to remember one particular ad impression. It's that after hundreds of ads you associate "Always Coca-Cola" the slogan with the bottle with the logo with the drink with the taste until just seeing it in the store or on a menu triggers you into buying it. Heck, a quick check indicates they got that stuck on my mind in 1993-1995 and I still fucking remember it.
It's the thing you don't care much about or that's too big to get first hand knowledge that gets you, not those you actually research. There you pretty much know all the options and what actually fits you, it's when you're feeling a hunger and a burger is good enough the ads kick in. Because you know there's a burger shop two blocks away, all that branding triggers that. And you might have gotten a wrap or a sandwich or a hot dog or a pizza slice but you're not making a full evaluation you're just thinking "good enough, burger it is".
Do you care if the detergent you use is Wisk, Ariel, Persil or Tide? Or do you simply take whatever is on sale when you simply have to buy a new box 'cause the old one is empty?
We're mostly creatures of habit and just buy whatever we bought last time, advertising and sales go hand in hand to make you try new products. Make lots of people aware that it's a sale, lower the price so they'll try it out and some of those will just keep buying until a different campaign steals them to some other brand. Maybe a few are meticulous but if I got 20-30 things on my grocery list I'm mostly just picking what I'm supposed to buy.
Same sometimes goes for where to shop, if I know one store that has something that's often enough because I don't need three. It's something rare I'm buying once in forever and it's just not worth the time and effort to find and compare multiple sources. Basically volume*frequency*savings = total difference must be enough to justify it.
We recently had a media case about an ex-couple suing each other over custody of the dog. In short, despite whatever personal relationship they had to the dog it was not like a child custody case, it was decided by property law. A robot is someone's property, it's no different from flying an RC plane across the border. Unless you got sentient robots granted their own rights, it's a non-issue. And if you do got sentient robots then passport control is the least of your worries.
And assuming they can make a landing soon, there'll be a lot of high risk re-re-refurbished rockets that they might load up with cheap cubesats and if it works it works, if it doesn't no biggie. If there's no customers, why not make your own market?
This, right here. Your obligations end the moment they stop paying you. Anything else is free labor on your part.
Of course it does. But as long as I'm getting paid I will act professionally and loyally to my soon to be ex-employer, unless I got reason to feel stabbed in the back anyway. It's not like I waited for things to crash and burn then tell my boss "You didn't tell me to do anything about it" before, so I wouldn't be that way in my resignation period either. If they'll listen is another matter, but pretty soon that won't be my problem. It's not really about that company's future, I do it because if I cross paths with my boss or colleagues later they might have a more positive opinion of me.
It certainly can't hurt and whether my boss deserves it or not isn't really relevant, I might think he's a short sighted and ignorant PHB but that doesn't preclude him from being involved in a hiring decision about me. I know for a fact that companies look for current employees that have a shared work history with you and ask their opinion of you, since that way they get a reference you don't control. It of course depends on your field of expertise and mobility, but it's usually hard to avoid having a reputation so best to make it a good one. Unless you really need to burn those bridges and rise from the ashes.
The reason they don't call is that really special people are usually no where near as special and indispensable as they think they are. 80% of what they were frittering their time away on wasn't worth doing in the first place, and the remaining 20% can be streamlined and done faster/cheaper/better by their replacement, using their own methods.
Even if you leave on good terms, you are usually leaving because somebody offered you a better deal, I guess there's a few exceptions where you're moving far away or retiring but usually not. Your manager knows this, it's like bringing your ex-girlfriend flowers and candy after she broke up with you for not paying enough attention to her. Also it implies you're the well-meaning employee and the manager the poor manager for undervaluing the work you do and putting the company in a situation where they're critically dependent on competence they don't have anymore.
I still don't think I've met a manager who'll take more crap than he needs to, if you're no longer around to defend yourself any amount of problems or extra work can be blamed on you, doesn't matter if they have to rip out a good system and replace it with duct tape as long as they don't need to own up to needing the instruction manual. If they have to present it like you left a Rube Goldberg contraption with no documentation, so be it. In short, I think the threshold for calling and grovelling is extremely high even if it's really important. In fact, that might even make it worse unless the manager is at the point of desperation where egg on his face is better than the impending meltdown.
At least globally speaking we're seeing an absolutely massive growth in cell phone use and coverage. According to the last figures from the ITU (pdf) some 95% of the world's population will live in range of a 2G network by the end of this year and 69% in 3G. With the rapid transition towards smartphones in low-cost markets as well even more 3G/4G coverage will be built out and the less room is it for satellite internet to fill in the cracks. I have a friend of mine who used to have it, between the caps and latency he switched the moment he could get something better than dial-up. Even if this is a less crappy alternative, I don't think it'll be competitive when you have other choices.
i just checked my local price guide and out of 631 TV models on sale there's exactly zero SD sets available and less than 10% are 720p. You can get a 58" UHD set today for less than I paid for my 60" 1080p TV about 4 years ago. Sure I'm not going to run out to get one, but in 10 years I expect 720p to be gone, 1080p the cheap option and 4K the norm. There's not really any downsides and the prices are coming down quickly, even 4K downscaled will look better because it's 4:4:4 @ 1080p. Better colors, HDR will probably all come as part of 4K rather than be "backported" to 1080p TVs, even though it's technically possible. Of course 8K is yet another step and maybe into nonsense land, but I'd say the switch towards 4K is progressing just fine.
Everybody starts out in the same boat. The smart, however, learn from their mistakes and keep trying until they find the way to make it work. So.. Go out there and know that your experience makes you less naÃve, just don't make the same idiotic mistakes again, and this time you will have a better chance at success.
Or they realize this is not for them. I couldn't be an artist or athlete or salesman or race car driver. Ok technically I could be a better one, but only because I'm so abysmally poor the only way is up. You know how we can read a description and start making all kinds of plans and sketches on how we'd build that? The guys with real economic talent, they're making a whole different sort of plans and sketches like who can you sell it to, what's the key selling features, what's the price points, how to you reach the market, how can you bring costs down, turnaround up, how do you grow the business.
And yes I know sales and marketing are generally loathed around here, but engineers often want to build "neat" products in ways the customers don't really see or care about. Or maybe he would if he ever knew your product existed, much less bought it. And don't say "go viral", honestly how often do you really spam your friends with what products or services you use? There's a few exceptions in social media where you invite people into a network or to play games with you but those are the rare exceptions. You don't talk about the brand of dental floss you use.
I'm not doing a small startup again, you need many roles that overlap and I'm more a specialist than a generalist. Maybe if it had twenty people, at least ten but not two or three or five. Enough at least that they could dedicate me to building whatever will be cash cow and not dealing with well... everything else. There's so many odds and ends you need to keep a company running that you don't notice working for a big company, on the plus side there's generally less meetings but there's still a lot of overhead that go away on random crap.
Take the average age of a car in North America
11.4 years
Now, ask yourself who is going to replace all of the cars on the planet with your super awesome technology?
Well, assuming the last 50% go off the road as fast as the first 50% then 23 years from now "all" cars will be replaced, except for a few collector's items. Maybe faster if people see this as a big incentive to replace their old one.
At the end of the day, these are products someone wants to sell us. And if the world doesn't feel like it has billions or trillions of dollars to rebuild everything for your shiny new technology, then either it will never happen, or it will be rolled out in a few limited places for the wealthy.
And sometimes you have to ask, if it were possible what would you pay for it. I know many elderly who have a solid economy but due to failing health can't drive a car. And since their health is failing they aren't travelling by bus, tram, subway, foot or bike. And you can't visit a cabin by taxi without paying a fortune. I think there's a huge potential market here that will make people redirect money from other things in order to have a self-driving car.
That first wave of "need-to-have" will be followed by a lot of nice-to-have that just want to be able to browse the web or watch TV on their way to work while the car bumper-rides their commute to work. Or that enjoy cabin trips or visiting distant friends and family but hate the drive or just find it tiring after more than a few hours as it comes down in price. And I swear many families with kids would love a car that could drop off the kids at practice, events, friends and whatnot.
The question is just can it be done technologically for a reasonable-ish amount of money. And at least in some areas, the answer is clearly yes.
Shipping of the VLP-16 began earlier this year, with the order backlog currently exceeding production capacity - a situation, Juchmann said, that will change by mid-year.
"We have already experienced a tenfold drop in price, from about $80,000 for the initial model HDL-64E - famously displayed on Google's self-driving car - to $8,000 today," he said. "We believe the price can be further reduced by at least another factor of 10, in parallel with an expected increase in market volume to millions of units per year.
That's been the single most expensive part, the rest is many, many, many man-years of software programming. But as long as this is something you need to develop once and can sell millions of for decades to come I'm pretty sure that'll happen.
While I totally agree it would be nice, I'm seeing loopholes all around for car pooling roommates, live-in girlfriends, kids technically "moving" to an upstairs/basement apartment and whatnot. And very difficult for those who very rarely drive a car, do you get an expensive driver's insurance or save the money and drive uninsured in a jam? Because you can't prove that 95% of the time someone else was driving, unless you make an Orwellian system to surveillance that.
I guess you could tie the insurance to some form of token, but still there'd be many complications with that. And if you don't have it with you, then what you're uninsured? I don't think that could work unless you actually need the token to start the car, but that would again bring more complications as only one could be valid or two people could drive both cars with the extra token, so no spare keys. Maybe I'm overthinking it but I don't see a practical way it'd work well, even if you could change the law.
If you're going to have a ton of metal travelling at 50+ MPH it's going to be insured, no doubt about that. But if somebody is offering me a self-driving car, I expect them to also provide insurance themselves or in cooperation with an insurance company. After all I have fuck all control over what the car will do and what accidents it will get into. While they on the other hand have a near uniform risk profile, if they got a weakness in the driving AI it's in all the cars. Unless they're all hit by a leap year bug or something the average accident rate should be low enough the manufacturer can weather this themselves, it's just the consumer that can't. The only varying risk factors are the auxiliary ones like theft, fire, vandalism and so on which is a race to the bottom, that's not where they make money.