It would absolutely be legal in Europe. Stores in Europe are free to chose what they want to sell and not, they are not required to carry everyone that wants to.
Microsoft has already paid over a billion dollar in fines to the EU over anti-trust charges, they've had the browser selection screen, the forced unbundling of WMP... technically you're correct, they will never force Apple to ship Spotify. What they will do is to say that banning Spotify in favor of their own in-house app is an anti-competitive practice and fine them millions of dollars per day until it ends. The most relevant article in the EU treaty is 102 that explicitly mentions blocking off markets in section (b):
Article 102 (ex Article 82 TEC) Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers; (c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage; (d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts.
It hinges on the definition of dominant though and while many factors come into play a market share of >40% is considered a minimum. I think even if you consider smartphones a sub-market Apple isn't dominant anymore. Basically if you're just one of many players you can do whatever you like, it's only if you have 40-100% market share you need to consider anti-trust.
On a more practical note, no way Apple would dare ban Spotify. It'd piss off way too many people. Part of the "walled garden" is that you must make it look like a gated community and not a prison. Though I'm guessing you might end up with only grandfathered applications, if you start a new music streaming service next month you might get rejected.
Everyone would be great at it. Anyone that thinks you can find the secrets to being a good anything in a couple of paragraphs, just doesn't know very much about the topic.
I don't think you can learn the how in a few paragraphs, but sometimes you can learn about what developers expect from a manager. Let's face it, a lot of managers just ended up there by being put in charge and is learning by doing whatever they think a manager should be doing. And sometimes not even that because they're still techs at heart and want to dive into problems, not manage them. Others have just gone the management 101 school and don't have anything but generic theory.
In particular, there's a massive difference between production work and creative work when it comes to estimates. If I need to get my car repaired or order catering, I expect a rather good time and cost estimate because it's standardized inputs and known quantities of work, at least for the most part. And you can fairly easily scale production with overtime, extra shifts, rush orders etc. to meet deadlines. And if a part is not in stock or you burn the cake there's a fairly standard and known fix.
Most time I've wasted with management is discussing timelines or estimates that are as good as it gets and they're not going to get better by repeating the question. In the end you just fudge it up by a factor of x you hope is big enough and give them a number, because that's what they wanted. This is particularly true when there's bugs or problems that I really don't know where is, what the root cause is, how long it'll take to fix or even if I can fix it since it's in third party code/systems/tools.
The best managers understand enough about computers to know this variation is natural and are pragmatic about working with it and working around issues when they arise. Those who come from a production industry seem to think you can beat a square peg into a round hole and act like I'm in the one being intentionally obtuse. "Can you do it man, yes or no?" which makes sense if you got a painter with three walls left to paint. It does fuck all when you got a developer who has no idea what to fix, but it's probably a one-liner when he finds it.
Furthermore, those who don't understand that you want me out of that meeting and working on plan A - getting it done - while you work on a plan B, what to do if it doesn't get done on time or fixed in a reasonable time. I've had to sit through rescheduling sessions which were almost as pointless as the original scheduling sessions, the problem is that you don't have good data on how long it'll take. And rather than accept that you just double down on the developers and their poor estimating ability and demand that this time, you need correct estimates. In their eyes, we're the hopeless ones...
For example, measuring things in Kelvin may make a lot of sense in a lab, the Fahrenheit scale makes a lot of sense for measuring weather. In Fahrenheit, 0-100 degrees is roughly the range of temperatures that is habitable for people. And I know, it's not exactly the range of habitable temperature, but if there's a climate that spends a lot of time outside of that range, then people probably won't be very comfortable there. In Celcius, that translates into roughly -18 to 38, and Kelvin is 255 to 311. Those seem stupid and arbitrary by comparison.
Actually I find the difference between 5C = 41F and -5C = 23 much more significant than the rest, at the former it's usually rainy and wet and at the latter icy and snow. That 100F = ~body temperature is fine, but 0F is hardly of any significance to anybody. The only good thing to say about that is that it keeps most Americans from dealing with negative numbers.
Also, if you measure only in 1 degree increments, Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and provide better resolution, though I suppose I can't tell the difference between 69 degrees and 70 degrees anyway.
Heck, I find Celsius to be more than fine enough as there's no way I have 50+ distinct temperature states from -18C to 38C. Without looking at a thermometer I'd say maybe 3C intervals like 15-17C or 18-20C. Not unlike Americans saying "high 60s" or "low 70s", roughly the same range since 5F ~= 3C.
The kernel team will take an LTS release 2-3 years out, but most enterprise-class distros will provide least 5 years of support. RHEL 5 was released in March 2007 and with Extended Lifecycle Support it'll last to November 2020 so that's 13.5 years. And at that point I'd just sign up for the CVE list and see if there's any critical and relevant bugs for the most recently supported kernel that needs backporting, my guess is that it'd be once a leap year from there on out. It seems rather unlikely that hackers would target a 10+ year old kernel to find exploits that'd go under the radar because they're unsupported.
And that's of course on top of the usual good practices of hardening, firewalls, virtualized sandboxes and so on to limit exposure and damage. If that's not enough, you just need to add the cost of upgrading the kernel into your product. It's not like companies don't fuck up in other ways, being forced to bring all your cars in for a firmware upgrade seems better than a recall.
Whenever a company "launches" a computer part without any reviewers getting a sample, that's at least one strike against it. It tells me they'd rather you read their marketing material than an actual review. Do you think they don't have any ready? Of course they do. So add 2+2... Or maybe a counterpoint, when was the last time you were really impressed by a paper launch? If you got it, you're not afraid to show it off. AMD is really good at Powerpoint, but it's easy to look good on paper.
I've never understood what market wants a powerful CPU paired with a meddling and power crippled yet still expensive GPU though, except in a laptop where it's all you got. Pretty much every benchmark shows that if you want gaming performance, put almost all your money in the graphics card. I mean the high end processor is $366, you can get a $64 Intel G3260 and pair it with a $299 Radeon 290X for less that'll be a much, much better gaming machine though it'll use 200W more when you're playing.
Now if you really want that powerful CPU for non-gaming purposes that's fine, but then you can buy an i7-4790K and save the rest towards buying a real graphics card. I mean seriously, you're spending $300+ and the benchmarks are if you can play at 720p low quality between your number crunching? It does not compute. And it's a total waste if you decide that 720p is not enough, the integrated graphics will then be dead weight, which seems more likely to happen if 60-80% of your budget went to buying the CPU as opposed to buying an APU where you spent 60-80% on the GPU in the first place.
What's in it for Microsoft, when the upgrades are free? They've had six years to make improvements that users might pay for and they're just going to hand them over for free. Why? They're not making profit on the hardware the way Apple does, selling software is their core business. Part of getting a new machine is also getting the latest OS, if you already have Win10 on your 2.8 GHz i7-860 w/DDR3 and 16x PCIe 2.0 and add a new graphics card and some more RAM you have a pretty solid platform to play with. It's not like they massively improve each year anymore.
I think it's about control. Users have repeatedly refused to get on boards Microsoft's failtrains like ME, Vista and Win8 staying on the last good version for years. I think it's everybody on the Win10 train and when they pull another stunt there's nowhere to get off, if you want to stay supported you'll be upgrading to the latest 10.x release whether you want to or not. Unlike the OS service packs are only supported for a short while and in this new model it's not even clear if consumers will get that or if it's just one update stream of security patches and "upgrades" all rolled into one.
$650 is "sensibly priced" for a gaming card? That's almost double the cost of a current-gen console and you still have to buy the rest of the computer.
And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels. For games that only run at 30 fps or 720p/900p make that 6x-8x as many pixels. Sure, it's like comparing a soccer mom car to a $100k+ sports car, it's not "sensibly" priced. It has terrible MPG with a 250W power consumption. But when you put the pedal to the metal, it's seriously fast.
The Titan X was clearly a "because we're the fastest, charge double" card. I guess you're always looking at it from your point of view and saying the others are the insane ones, "Paying a $1000 for a graphics card? That's crazy, I'll settle for a $650 GTX 980 Ti". Next guy says "Paying $650 for a graphics card? That's crazy, it'll settle for a $199 GTX 960" and so on. Basically you spend relative to your interest and the amount of money you can comfortably spend. Don't go to a five star luxury resort if the budget says a hostel, but if you can afford the resort do it. YOLO and all that.
Uh, no. You're not trying to find a needle in a haystack, the ATM is trying to determine if the one person in front of the camera matches the one identity on file. it doesn't matter if there's 300.000 people who look enough like you to pass the check as long as the thief is one of the other 300+ million. You're weeding out the 99.9% who look nothing like you.
3. Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.
The repair business is way down. Say 25 years ago small electronics repair was a big thing, radios, TVs, computers, stereos and so on. Except for warranty repair - which is suspect is more and more synonymous with warranty replacement or the replacement of complete subsystems - nobody really does that anymore. It went from replacing capacitors to replacing cards to just replacing the whole unit, while the skill level dropped from engineer to glorified delivery boy.
Nobody I know mends their clothes or socks or shoes anymore, they come cheaper off the assembly line. Really all the kinds of small household items I'd be more inclined to replace than start finding duct tape and glue. Maintenance is a little better, I still need people to paint walls but a quick search indicates robots want to take that job too.
More and more has embedded diagnostic sensors and service programs where you're really just following a list of instructions, granted the actual work is still done manually but by much lower skilled staff than before. The less electronics is involved, the more likely your job is safe. Also fixed items that you can't easily replace like electric wiring, water/sewage pipes or air conditioning. Make sure you need actual skills, not just swapping parts as otherwise it won't pay well or be very fun.
How do they do that? Have more users. How do they do that? Have more applications. How do they do that? Have more users. How do they do that? ***ERROR: Infinite loop detected. By that logic, nothing new should ever be successful.
The magic you're looking for is called "investments". I can't run an ad hoc burger shop from my home kitchen and make that a viable business by selling one burger, then two, three and so on. I'd have to find a location, get furniture and equipment, supplies, utility services, permits and staff so I can keep stable business hours and so on. On day one I'm in a net negative and I'll pretty quickly need a big turnaround to cover running costs and make a return on investment. The software business is the exception here where many have started with nothing and just written code without any real investment except time.
In practice that's how it is for many software projects too, if you want to launch an AAA game you can't write a little, sell a little and so on. You need to hire lots of people, give them enough time (= money) and make a big splash selling for more than you spent. Or something boring like accounting software, if you can't do the tax forms right it simply won't sell. That's generally how the world works, people want to buy finished products not buy the book while it's written or the movie while it's filmed. But that investment requires a return on investment.
Which brings us to open source, which sucks at that. Service and support is almost purely a "What have you done for me lately?" business, if it's the kind of software you'd buy support for in the first place. You have Kickstarter and other crowdfunding schemes, but you have no idea what and if anything really is going to be delivered at the end of the day. And there could be a lot of bad blood if someone does the heavy lifting while someone else gets paid off for exposing the functionality. Cooperation and money generally don't mix well. So that is why I think open source is often caught in this Catch-22, it's not that it's impossible to get out of but you'll get no reward for making the effort.
It's not their fault that I can't play GTA V either, but it's a pretty good reason to stay on Windows. I have used WINE quite a bit back when I tried to run Linux and really half the problem with it is the same as with overclocking, if it's buggy now is it the application or the emulation? And what do you do if there's a bug somewhere in the bowels of WINE that nobody will support? Playing around with it on my desktop where it's my time on the line is fine, I wouldn't rely on it in a business setting.
Same goes with lack of drivers, proprietary protocols, proprietary file formats and whatnot it's not anybody's fault. It's still a pain in the ass for anyone trying to use Linux where the de facto standard is something else. That said, with mobile and tablets there's a whole lot of non-Windows code being written out there, I wonder when Google will get serious about an Android desktop. Or at least something more widely targeted than Chromebook.
$200,000 sounds insane for an old computer. OK it's a fairly rare computer that has some historical value, but even a fraction of that amount would be quite high.
Stop thinking about it as a computer, start thinking about it as an antique. It is the beginning of the company with the highest market cap in the world and whose products are a household item. If you have an "Apple I" billions of people will recognize the product or the company, perhaps even more than a Picasso or Da Vinci. It is a very tangible, practical showpiece that doesn't easily decay or require tons of maintenance that is very rare - 63 are known to still exist - but not so uniquely rare as to all be locked up in an art museum, nor so huge and impractical as the first computers.
Compared to other showoff pieces it doesn't have any nasty history like old artifacts stolen from somewhere, it doesn't involve rare or endangered animals, it's somewhat nerdy but I'd consider it similar to owning a genuinely antique car. You might only drive it for a parade or not at all, but it's the classic "I got something you don't got" which is the essence for rich people who want to impress other rich people. The manly verison of women who pay 10x as much to wear a designer dress - which sometimes is neither prettier nor more practical - but more exclusive.
These speculations are useful intellectual exercises, but should not be taken very seriously. Intelligent life may or may not last for 10^100 years, but the chances of any detailed theory of the long term future of the universe surviving 100 years is basically nil, and even 10 years is no sure thing.
The details may be a bit fuzzy, but entropy makes forever seem impossible and it doesn't rely on any particular macro model. The one exception is the Big Bang, which created a ridiculous amount of energy in a point source. It doesn't matter if we invent fission/fusion/anti-matter/warp drive to colonize the universe or Dyson's spheres to harness the power of entire stars, eventually all the stars run out of fuel and we die even if we've figured out how to rejuvenate and live "forever". Or we'll discover some freaky quantum effect that makes energy seep into our universe tomorrow, leaving us with an infinite power source. Or in a million years. It's not exactly an immediate concern and mostly belongs in a philosophy class, if everything will end does anything have a meaning.
Yes, but the whole plug to make it/.-worthy is that he's using 3D PRINTING. Which is pretty much like saying he's saving the Louvre by making PNGs of Mona Lisa for home printing. Most any art of significance is extensively photographed, measured and cataloged. Without the artifacts themselves you're relying on a chain of authenticity, meaning that whatever you photoshopped at home won't matter one bit. In short, your 3D printer is no more significant in preserving history than your 2D printer is, which is to say not at all.
The key to this is that Mooney is "transforming" Prince's "work" in exactly the same way he "transformed" hers. If her use is infringing, so is his. The "transformation" of simply making a large printout isn't going to fly. Copyright doesn't depend on the size or transmission method.
I don't think that argument is going to fly, because you could argue the same about landscape photography. Nature isn't copyrighted and you could have been at the same place at the same time choosing to capture the same image. Yet that particular image is copyrighted. I think the argument will be that even though it's transformational, it is also part original. Imagine for example a news article, even though it may quote pieces of a book for context, it clearly also contains a lot of the journalist's original thoughts.
This isn't actually new ground, it's been thoroughly reviewed with songs and compilation albums, photographs and photobooks and many other situations. The selection, structure and composition may give rise to a new copyright on making that particular arrangement. I can license all the songs of one of the "Absolute hits" CDs, yet I can't make the exact same compilation CD. Then again, I think you'd have a strong case for a "fair use" defense of anyone using your work in a "fair use" way.
And people don't usually die of "old age" but of things related to it. When the body gets older, the immune system gets weaker, your bones and muscles decay, your brain gets messed up, and a lot of deaths are in reality just a mix of a bunch of factors that just result in the body kind of shutting down. None of that will happen anymore.
And there's a feedback loop here too, because you a) have less life left to live and b) is generally weaker you get less treatment. A relative of mine is dying from cancer and it's low intensity life-prolonging treatment. If he was 20 years younger, they'd put him on high intensity drugs that would keep the cancer suppressed much, much longer. If he was 50 years younger, they'd probably try a full bone marrow transplant which is a massive procedure that is not only ridiculously expensive but likely to kill the old by itself. So being forever young wouldn't just avoid age-related diseases, it'd open up far stronger treatments as well.
Even if it worked (I doubt), this does not mean that you stay young forever. You don't age normally, but all your joints will be used up purely mechanically. Not ageing does not equate to 'no wear'. It doesn't equate to 'no disease', and neither to 'no cancer'. Teeth will decay, nothing to do with age. Even parts of the heart will be used up and not regenerate. In a nutshell, the non-ageing population segment will be zombies with artificial hips, joints, teeth, heart, and so forth.
Why artificial? All the blueprints are in my DNA. On severe burn victims they do muscle and skin grafts, with sufficiently advanced technology we could grow pretty much anything. The non-ethical way would be to just clone me, zap the higher brain functions and keep for 15 years in a vegetative state you'll have all the organs to fit an adult man. The ethical way would be to find ways to grow just that organ in a lab. It wouldn't be the cure to everything as you could have brain tumors and whatnot but you could get pretty far that way.
That takes care of the first 20%... but what about the cheap AC->DC transformers that sit between your house wiring and your devices? I'd love to be able to switch each outlet I have between 110VAC/15a, 12VDC/3-5a and 9VDC/500Ma-2a, and do away with wall warts altogether.
Since you have different DC voltages you either need DC wall warts (not achieving anything), per outlet transformers (sounds expensive and turn the socket into a wall wart) or one circuit per outlet (sounds expensive and needs big conduits). And because of fire risk, property damage and whatnot you'll never get to use the same plug, tripling each outlet. Then you need something fancy to flip each socket at the source and what part of the socket is powered at the sink in a safe way, for every outlet. And I doubt 9VDC/500mW-2A matters much economically, if you want the aesthetics embed the wall wart in the wall, it'll probably be less hassle than the alternatives.
Slashdot-specific: Heat Wave in India kills 9,1666666666666666666666666666667e-5% of its population.
Nerd fail, invalid use of significant digits;). Though I was thinking the same thing, one in a million doesn't seem very significant. It's like 5 people dying in my country of 5 million, that's one bad car crash not exactly dropping like flies.
You life a life of adventure and challenge, and die young in one of the many tragic accidents that your inhospitable environment causes on a regular basis.
Fair enough, many climb Mount Everest for no better reason.
You pioneer a new way of life,
Well mostly you'll be living in a bunker living off a long supply chain from Earth. It'll be a lot like living on a submarine that you mostly endure rather than pioneer. Many will envy you going, not so many the actual living conditions.
and there's a good chance of your name going down in history books.
Name the third guy to set foot on the moon. I'm not saying there's no fame, but there's many easier ways to celebrity status. Except if you're the next Neil Armstrong.
You contribute to something that may change the course of history.
True. But I imagine it'll be a rather unglamorous and unthankful task. Remember that you're a million miles away from any fans or fame, no vacations or time off and it's unlikely any amount of money will get you fresh bacon and eggs.
And as for changing the world, they won't send you up there just to be a warm body. If you can change the world up there, you can probably change the world down here too. There's thousands of people who can say they contributed to the Apollo program, even though they never went to the moon.
Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.
My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.
Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.
The same thing happened to OS X and iOS. What once was clear and easy to understand is now pretty and mostly useless.
Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...
Europe is too diverse to be able to sustain a single currency without tensions that can lead to disaster.
And the US is not? Sure it's quite a bit different with State/Federal instead of Country/Union, but there's places in the US going to shit too like Detroit while others are doing well. Some 337 million Europeans use it daily, most of them for the last 16 years (exchange rates were frozen end of 1998, bank notes came in 2002) and there's one country of 11 million who might bail because they can't print their way out of a debt problem. Tough shit, but not worse than every US state has to deal with, they can't print their way out of trouble either. It's only vital if you rely on it to bail you out of loans you can't pay back.
Slashdot Mirror
It would absolutely be legal in Europe. Stores in Europe are free to chose what they want to sell and not, they are not required to carry everyone that wants to.
Microsoft has already paid over a billion dollar in fines to the EU over anti-trust charges, they've had the browser selection screen, the forced unbundling of WMP... technically you're correct, they will never force Apple to ship Spotify. What they will do is to say that banning Spotify in favor of their own in-house app is an anti-competitive practice and fine them millions of dollars per day until it ends. The most relevant article in the EU treaty is 102 that explicitly mentions blocking off markets in section (b):
Article 102
(ex Article 82 TEC)
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States.
Such abuse may, in particular, consist in:
(a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions;
(b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
(c) applying dissimilar conditions to equivalent transactions with other trading parties, thereby placing them at a competitive disadvantage;
(d) making the conclusion of contracts subject to acceptance by the other parties of supplementary obligations which, by their nature or according to commercial usage, have no connection with the subject of such contracts.
It hinges on the definition of dominant though and while many factors come into play a market share of >40% is considered a minimum. I think even if you consider smartphones a sub-market Apple isn't dominant anymore. Basically if you're just one of many players you can do whatever you like, it's only if you have 40-100% market share you need to consider anti-trust.
On a more practical note, no way Apple would dare ban Spotify. It'd piss off way too many people. Part of the "walled garden" is that you must make it look like a gated community and not a prison. Though I'm guessing you might end up with only grandfathered applications, if you start a new music streaming service next month you might get rejected.
Everyone would be great at it. Anyone that thinks you can find the secrets to being a good anything in a couple of paragraphs, just doesn't know very much about the topic.
I don't think you can learn the how in a few paragraphs, but sometimes you can learn about what developers expect from a manager. Let's face it, a lot of managers just ended up there by being put in charge and is learning by doing whatever they think a manager should be doing. And sometimes not even that because they're still techs at heart and want to dive into problems, not manage them. Others have just gone the management 101 school and don't have anything but generic theory.
In particular, there's a massive difference between production work and creative work when it comes to estimates. If I need to get my car repaired or order catering, I expect a rather good time and cost estimate because it's standardized inputs and known quantities of work, at least for the most part. And you can fairly easily scale production with overtime, extra shifts, rush orders etc. to meet deadlines. And if a part is not in stock or you burn the cake there's a fairly standard and known fix.
Most time I've wasted with management is discussing timelines or estimates that are as good as it gets and they're not going to get better by repeating the question. In the end you just fudge it up by a factor of x you hope is big enough and give them a number, because that's what they wanted. This is particularly true when there's bugs or problems that I really don't know where is, what the root cause is, how long it'll take to fix or even if I can fix it since it's in third party code/systems/tools.
The best managers understand enough about computers to know this variation is natural and are pragmatic about working with it and working around issues when they arise. Those who come from a production industry seem to think you can beat a square peg into a round hole and act like I'm in the one being intentionally obtuse. "Can you do it man, yes or no?" which makes sense if you got a painter with three walls left to paint. It does fuck all when you got a developer who has no idea what to fix, but it's probably a one-liner when he finds it.
Furthermore, those who don't understand that you want me out of that meeting and working on plan A - getting it done - while you work on a plan B, what to do if it doesn't get done on time or fixed in a reasonable time. I've had to sit through rescheduling sessions which were almost as pointless as the original scheduling sessions, the problem is that you don't have good data on how long it'll take. And rather than accept that you just double down on the developers and their poor estimating ability and demand that this time, you need correct estimates. In their eyes, we're the hopeless ones...
For example, measuring things in Kelvin may make a lot of sense in a lab, the Fahrenheit scale makes a lot of sense for measuring weather. In Fahrenheit, 0-100 degrees is roughly the range of temperatures that is habitable for people. And I know, it's not exactly the range of habitable temperature, but if there's a climate that spends a lot of time outside of that range, then people probably won't be very comfortable there. In Celcius, that translates into roughly -18 to 38, and Kelvin is 255 to 311. Those seem stupid and arbitrary by comparison.
Actually I find the difference between 5C = 41F and -5C = 23 much more significant than the rest, at the former it's usually rainy and wet and at the latter icy and snow. That 100F = ~body temperature is fine, but 0F is hardly of any significance to anybody. The only good thing to say about that is that it keeps most Americans from dealing with negative numbers.
Also, if you measure only in 1 degree increments, Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and provide better resolution, though I suppose I can't tell the difference between 69 degrees and 70 degrees anyway.
Heck, I find Celsius to be more than fine enough as there's no way I have 50+ distinct temperature states from -18C to 38C. Without looking at a thermometer I'd say maybe 3C intervals like 15-17C or 18-20C. Not unlike Americans saying "high 60s" or "low 70s", roughly the same range since 5F ~= 3C.
The kernel team will take an LTS release 2-3 years out, but most enterprise-class distros will provide least 5 years of support. RHEL 5 was released in March 2007 and with Extended Lifecycle Support it'll last to November 2020 so that's 13.5 years. And at that point I'd just sign up for the CVE list and see if there's any critical and relevant bugs for the most recently supported kernel that needs backporting, my guess is that it'd be once a leap year from there on out. It seems rather unlikely that hackers would target a 10+ year old kernel to find exploits that'd go under the radar because they're unsupported.
And that's of course on top of the usual good practices of hardening, firewalls, virtualized sandboxes and so on to limit exposure and damage. If that's not enough, you just need to add the cost of upgrading the kernel into your product. It's not like companies don't fuck up in other ways, being forced to bring all your cars in for a firmware upgrade seems better than a recall.
Whenever a company "launches" a computer part without any reviewers getting a sample, that's at least one strike against it. It tells me they'd rather you read their marketing material than an actual review. Do you think they don't have any ready? Of course they do. So add 2+2... Or maybe a counterpoint, when was the last time you were really impressed by a paper launch? If you got it, you're not afraid to show it off. AMD is really good at Powerpoint, but it's easy to look good on paper.
I've never understood what market wants a powerful CPU paired with a meddling and power crippled yet still expensive GPU though, except in a laptop where it's all you got. Pretty much every benchmark shows that if you want gaming performance, put almost all your money in the graphics card. I mean the high end processor is $366, you can get a $64 Intel G3260 and pair it with a $299 Radeon 290X for less that'll be a much, much better gaming machine though it'll use 200W more when you're playing.
Now if you really want that powerful CPU for non-gaming purposes that's fine, but then you can buy an i7-4790K and save the rest towards buying a real graphics card. I mean seriously, you're spending $300+ and the benchmarks are if you can play at 720p low quality between your number crunching? It does not compute. And it's a total waste if you decide that 720p is not enough, the integrated graphics will then be dead weight, which seems more likely to happen if 60-80% of your budget went to buying the CPU as opposed to buying an APU where you spent 60-80% on the GPU in the first place.
What's in it for Microsoft, when the upgrades are free? They've had six years to make improvements that users might pay for and they're just going to hand them over for free. Why? They're not making profit on the hardware the way Apple does, selling software is their core business. Part of getting a new machine is also getting the latest OS, if you already have Win10 on your 2.8 GHz i7-860 w/DDR3 and 16x PCIe 2.0 and add a new graphics card and some more RAM you have a pretty solid platform to play with. It's not like they massively improve each year anymore.
I think it's about control. Users have repeatedly refused to get on boards Microsoft's failtrains like ME, Vista and Win8 staying on the last good version for years. I think it's everybody on the Win10 train and when they pull another stunt there's nowhere to get off, if you want to stay supported you'll be upgrading to the latest 10.x release whether you want to or not. Unlike the OS service packs are only supported for a short while and in this new model it's not even clear if consumers will get that or if it's just one update stream of security patches and "upgrades" all rolled into one.
$650 is "sensibly priced" for a gaming card? That's almost double the cost of a current-gen console and you still have to buy the rest of the computer.
And you're playing at most 1920x1080x60 Hz, from what I understand often less. This is the kind of card you want if you're looking for 2560x1440x144 Hz or 3840x2160x60 Hz gaming on say an Acer XB270HU or XB280HK, pushing at least 4x as many pixels. For games that only run at 30 fps or 720p/900p make that 6x-8x as many pixels. Sure, it's like comparing a soccer mom car to a $100k+ sports car, it's not "sensibly" priced. It has terrible MPG with a 250W power consumption. But when you put the pedal to the metal, it's seriously fast.
The Titan X was clearly a "because we're the fastest, charge double" card. I guess you're always looking at it from your point of view and saying the others are the insane ones, "Paying a $1000 for a graphics card? That's crazy, I'll settle for a $650 GTX 980 Ti". Next guy says "Paying $650 for a graphics card? That's crazy, it'll settle for a $199 GTX 960" and so on. Basically you spend relative to your interest and the amount of money you can comfortably spend. Don't go to a five star luxury resort if the budget says a hostel, but if you can afford the resort do it. YOLO and all that.
Uh, no. You're not trying to find a needle in a haystack, the ATM is trying to determine if the one person in front of the camera matches the one identity on file. it doesn't matter if there's 300.000 people who look enough like you to pass the check as long as the thief is one of the other 300+ million. You're weeding out the 99.9% who look nothing like you.
3. Maintenance and repair work. Repairs are almost never carried out by a machine. You can find a factory that is 100 percent automated and it actually still has human repair techs keeping the robots working.
The repair business is way down. Say 25 years ago small electronics repair was a big thing, radios, TVs, computers, stereos and so on. Except for warranty repair - which is suspect is more and more synonymous with warranty replacement or the replacement of complete subsystems - nobody really does that anymore. It went from replacing capacitors to replacing cards to just replacing the whole unit, while the skill level dropped from engineer to glorified delivery boy.
Nobody I know mends their clothes or socks or shoes anymore, they come cheaper off the assembly line. Really all the kinds of small household items I'd be more inclined to replace than start finding duct tape and glue. Maintenance is a little better, I still need people to paint walls but a quick search indicates robots want to take that job too.
More and more has embedded diagnostic sensors and service programs where you're really just following a list of instructions, granted the actual work is still done manually but by much lower skilled staff than before. The less electronics is involved, the more likely your job is safe. Also fixed items that you can't easily replace like electric wiring, water/sewage pipes or air conditioning. Make sure you need actual skills, not just swapping parts as otherwise it won't pay well or be very fun.
How do they do that? Have more users. How do they do that? Have more applications. How do they do that? Have more users. How do they do that? ***ERROR: Infinite loop detected. By that logic, nothing new should ever be successful.
The magic you're looking for is called "investments". I can't run an ad hoc burger shop from my home kitchen and make that a viable business by selling one burger, then two, three and so on. I'd have to find a location, get furniture and equipment, supplies, utility services, permits and staff so I can keep stable business hours and so on. On day one I'm in a net negative and I'll pretty quickly need a big turnaround to cover running costs and make a return on investment. The software business is the exception here where many have started with nothing and just written code without any real investment except time.
In practice that's how it is for many software projects too, if you want to launch an AAA game you can't write a little, sell a little and so on. You need to hire lots of people, give them enough time (= money) and make a big splash selling for more than you spent. Or something boring like accounting software, if you can't do the tax forms right it simply won't sell. That's generally how the world works, people want to buy finished products not buy the book while it's written or the movie while it's filmed. But that investment requires a return on investment.
Which brings us to open source, which sucks at that. Service and support is almost purely a "What have you done for me lately?" business, if it's the kind of software you'd buy support for in the first place. You have Kickstarter and other crowdfunding schemes, but you have no idea what and if anything really is going to be delivered at the end of the day. And there could be a lot of bad blood if someone does the heavy lifting while someone else gets paid off for exposing the functionality. Cooperation and money generally don't mix well. So that is why I think open source is often caught in this Catch-22, it's not that it's impossible to get out of but you'll get no reward for making the effort.
It's not their fault that I can't play GTA V either, but it's a pretty good reason to stay on Windows. I have used WINE quite a bit back when I tried to run Linux and really half the problem with it is the same as with overclocking, if it's buggy now is it the application or the emulation? And what do you do if there's a bug somewhere in the bowels of WINE that nobody will support? Playing around with it on my desktop where it's my time on the line is fine, I wouldn't rely on it in a business setting.
Same goes with lack of drivers, proprietary protocols, proprietary file formats and whatnot it's not anybody's fault. It's still a pain in the ass for anyone trying to use Linux where the de facto standard is something else. That said, with mobile and tablets there's a whole lot of non-Windows code being written out there, I wonder when Google will get serious about an Android desktop. Or at least something more widely targeted than Chromebook.
$200,000 sounds insane for an old computer. OK it's a fairly rare computer that has some historical value, but even a fraction of that amount would be quite high.
Stop thinking about it as a computer, start thinking about it as an antique. It is the beginning of the company with the highest market cap in the world and whose products are a household item. If you have an "Apple I" billions of people will recognize the product or the company, perhaps even more than a Picasso or Da Vinci. It is a very tangible, practical showpiece that doesn't easily decay or require tons of maintenance that is very rare - 63 are known to still exist - but not so uniquely rare as to all be locked up in an art museum, nor so huge and impractical as the first computers.
Compared to other showoff pieces it doesn't have any nasty history like old artifacts stolen from somewhere, it doesn't involve rare or endangered animals, it's somewhat nerdy but I'd consider it similar to owning a genuinely antique car. You might only drive it for a parade or not at all, but it's the classic "I got something you don't got" which is the essence for rich people who want to impress other rich people. The manly verison of women who pay 10x as much to wear a designer dress - which sometimes is neither prettier nor more practical - but more exclusive.
These speculations are useful intellectual exercises, but should not be taken very seriously. Intelligent life may or may not last for 10^100 years, but the chances of any detailed theory of the long term future of the universe surviving 100 years is basically nil, and even 10 years is no sure thing.
The details may be a bit fuzzy, but entropy makes forever seem impossible and it doesn't rely on any particular macro model. The one exception is the Big Bang, which created a ridiculous amount of energy in a point source. It doesn't matter if we invent fission/fusion/anti-matter/warp drive to colonize the universe or Dyson's spheres to harness the power of entire stars, eventually all the stars run out of fuel and we die even if we've figured out how to rejuvenate and live "forever". Or we'll discover some freaky quantum effect that makes energy seep into our universe tomorrow, leaving us with an infinite power source. Or in a million years. It's not exactly an immediate concern and mostly belongs in a philosophy class, if everything will end does anything have a meaning.
Yes, but the whole plug to make it /.-worthy is that he's using 3D PRINTING. Which is pretty much like saying he's saving the Louvre by making PNGs of Mona Lisa for home printing. Most any art of significance is extensively photographed, measured and cataloged. Without the artifacts themselves you're relying on a chain of authenticity, meaning that whatever you photoshopped at home won't matter one bit. In short, your 3D printer is no more significant in preserving history than your 2D printer is, which is to say not at all.
The key to this is that Mooney is "transforming" Prince's "work" in exactly the same way he "transformed" hers. If her use is infringing, so is his. The "transformation" of simply making a large printout isn't going to fly. Copyright doesn't depend on the size or transmission method.
I don't think that argument is going to fly, because you could argue the same about landscape photography. Nature isn't copyrighted and you could have been at the same place at the same time choosing to capture the same image. Yet that particular image is copyrighted. I think the argument will be that even though it's transformational, it is also part original. Imagine for example a news article, even though it may quote pieces of a book for context, it clearly also contains a lot of the journalist's original thoughts.
This isn't actually new ground, it's been thoroughly reviewed with songs and compilation albums, photographs and photobooks and many other situations. The selection, structure and composition may give rise to a new copyright on making that particular arrangement. I can license all the songs of one of the "Absolute hits" CDs, yet I can't make the exact same compilation CD. Then again, I think you'd have a strong case for a "fair use" defense of anyone using your work in a "fair use" way.
And people don't usually die of "old age" but of things related to it. When the body gets older, the immune system gets weaker, your bones and muscles decay, your brain gets messed up, and a lot of deaths are in reality just a mix of a bunch of factors that just result in the body kind of shutting down. None of that will happen anymore.
And there's a feedback loop here too, because you a) have less life left to live and b) is generally weaker you get less treatment. A relative of mine is dying from cancer and it's low intensity life-prolonging treatment. If he was 20 years younger, they'd put him on high intensity drugs that would keep the cancer suppressed much, much longer. If he was 50 years younger, they'd probably try a full bone marrow transplant which is a massive procedure that is not only ridiculously expensive but likely to kill the old by itself. So being forever young wouldn't just avoid age-related diseases, it'd open up far stronger treatments as well.
Even if it worked (I doubt), this does not mean that you stay young forever. You don't age normally, but all your joints will be used up purely mechanically. Not ageing does not equate to 'no wear'. It doesn't equate to 'no disease', and neither to 'no cancer'. Teeth will decay, nothing to do with age. Even parts of the heart will be used up and not regenerate.
In a nutshell, the non-ageing population segment will be zombies with artificial hips, joints, teeth, heart, and so forth.
Why artificial? All the blueprints are in my DNA. On severe burn victims they do muscle and skin grafts, with sufficiently advanced technology we could grow pretty much anything. The non-ethical way would be to just clone me, zap the higher brain functions and keep for 15 years in a vegetative state you'll have all the organs to fit an adult man. The ethical way would be to find ways to grow just that organ in a lab. It wouldn't be the cure to everything as you could have brain tumors and whatnot but you could get pretty far that way.
That takes care of the first 20%... but what about the cheap AC->DC transformers that sit between your house wiring and your devices? I'd love to be able to switch each outlet I have between 110VAC/15a, 12VDC/3-5a and 9VDC/500Ma-2a, and do away with wall warts altogether.
Since you have different DC voltages you either need DC wall warts (not achieving anything), per outlet transformers (sounds expensive and turn the socket into a wall wart) or one circuit per outlet (sounds expensive and needs big conduits). And because of fire risk, property damage and whatnot you'll never get to use the same plug, tripling each outlet. Then you need something fancy to flip each socket at the source and what part of the socket is powered at the sink in a safe way, for every outlet. And I doubt 9VDC/500mW-2A matters much economically, if you want the aesthetics embed the wall wart in the wall, it'll probably be less hassle than the alternatives.
Slashdot-specific:
Heat Wave in India kills 9,1666666666666666666666666666667e-5% of its population.
Nerd fail, invalid use of significant digits ;). Though I was thinking the same thing, one in a million doesn't seem very significant. It's like 5 people dying in my country of 5 million, that's one bad car crash not exactly dropping like flies.
You life a life of adventure and challenge, and die young in one of the many tragic accidents that your inhospitable environment causes on a regular basis.
Fair enough, many climb Mount Everest for no better reason.
You pioneer a new way of life,
Well mostly you'll be living in a bunker living off a long supply chain from Earth. It'll be a lot like living on a submarine that you mostly endure rather than pioneer. Many will envy you going, not so many the actual living conditions.
and there's a good chance of your name going down in history books.
Name the third guy to set foot on the moon. I'm not saying there's no fame, but there's many easier ways to celebrity status. Except if you're the next Neil Armstrong.
You contribute to something that may change the course of history.
True. But I imagine it'll be a rather unglamorous and unthankful task. Remember that you're a million miles away from any fans or fame, no vacations or time off and it's unlikely any amount of money will get you fresh bacon and eggs.
And as for changing the world, they won't send you up there just to be a warm body. If you can change the world up there, you can probably change the world down here too. There's thousands of people who can say they contributed to the Apollo program, even though they never went to the moon.
Why do this in the first place?
Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.
My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.
Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.
The same thing happened to OS X and iOS. What once was clear and easy to understand is now pretty and mostly useless.
Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...
Europe is too diverse to be able to sustain a single currency without tensions that can lead to disaster.
And the US is not? Sure it's quite a bit different with State/Federal instead of Country/Union, but there's places in the US going to shit too like Detroit while others are doing well. Some 337 million Europeans use it daily, most of them for the last 16 years (exchange rates were frozen end of 1998, bank notes came in 2002) and there's one country of 11 million who might bail because they can't print their way out of a debt problem. Tough shit, but not worse than every US state has to deal with, they can't print their way out of trouble either. It's only vital if you rely on it to bail you out of loans you can't pay back.