"the core software components used to boot the machine are verified for correct cryptographic signatures, or the system refuses to boot"
Does that mean that IF malware infects the bootloader, the OS will not boot, BRICKING IT? Seems like an easy way for grandmothers to lose their whole computer with a click of the mouse.
You make it sound like running a corrupt/compromised system is a good thing. The system isn't supposed to let you alter the system files, but it might happen anyway for example by an exploit or mounting the drive in another computer. If it's just random bit flips I think Windows keeps backup copies anyway. If all the copies fail verification, it'll tell you the system is corrupt and insert a repair disc/USB stick with good copies. It's broken, not bricked. And whatever broke it, you probably want to fix. It's basically the less nuclear version of a wipe and reimage, the BIOS makes sure the boot loader's not compromised, the boot loader makes sure the kernel's not compromised, the kernel makes sure the modules aren't compromised and so you build a trusted zone of what's going on. Of course if you signed malware, you're pretty much screwed.
Well, not to let research get in your way, but the vast majority of suicides are the result of (a) fleeting desire and (b) opportunity. To wit, those stupid "anti-jumping" fences you see on bridges? Those lower suicide rates - not move them. Therefore, preventing someone from committing suicide is a good thing.
I feel you're jumping the gun on that conclusion, because it would justify essentially all kinds of nanny-state behavior on what an alleged future self might want. The twenty-something me did a lot of things thirty-something me wouldn't have and didn't do a lot of things I would have, but that was past-me's choice. And I'm going to pass along my choices to forty-something me (hopefully) but I don't know what he'll think of them. Heck, hangover-me often thinks last night's party-me could have skipped those last beers. I wouldn't take away his/my freedom to make those choices.
Of course you might argue that if you're dead you don't have a future, but you are arguing the same principle. If it's for the good of your future self, society can disempower you from making your own choices today. I don't find that nearly as unproblematic as you. As for philosophy, I can't say more than it's more my life than anyone else's. I can't give a proof for it anymore than you could prove "All men are created equal". A racist would disagree, it's more of a fundamental theorem on which you can build a moral compass. If instead you imagine a master and slave race you get a different compass, they're more like different mathematical models built on different axioms than one indisputable truth.
Yet none of the abortion protesters take into account what our population level would be like if we had not allowed abortions. Obviously the offspring would be a huge number and might have been such a great burden that our nation could not survive.
Almost totally false. Studies show that women who have unwanted pregnancies but give birth don't usually end up with more kids total, those who do take an abortion generally want to start a family just not there and then. Heck, this would be totally obvious if you had any contact with the opposite sex, most women want a few kids and once they've had two or three few want four-five-six and beyond though they're certainly biologically capable of 10+. Now if you'd said contraception that's certainly helped keep the population down, but assuming they exist abortions don't make any significant difference.
No. Not really. Microsoft pushes the idea that you don't need to have any clue to use it's products. It helps enable this idea with better novice interfaces. This leads to the problem that you end up with barely trained monkeys having the appearance that they can us Microsoft products.
And they're selling a very popular OS that barely trained monkeys can manage. And they're selling a very popular office suite that barely trained monkeys can use. And so on.... the world runs on barely trained monkeys.
If you have a problem with that, take it up with the Creator who made a 1% patch to a chimp.
Well, private chargers are generally really slow and usually meant for overnight charging, it's rarely what you want to wait for if you are running out of juice. Here in Norway we already have several vendors that have set up paid fast charging points - not quite as fast as superchargers but 20-50 kW is overkill at home. And you'll still be paying for the same power, just not the premium but if you put any reasonable value on your time it's probably better anyway unless there's something you'd like to spend time on (eating, shopping, entertainment, whatever) nearby.
Vsync prevents the frame from being written to while it's displayed, avoiding tearing. FreeSync/Gsync makes the monitor wait for the frame to be rendered and ready for display instead of the other way around.
That mean the person riding in the taxi won't be allowed to arbitrarily stop it
I really doubt a car without an "emergency stop" button will ever fly. And if by default won't let you open the doors then an override and/or an emergency hammer to break the glass, they're not going to make something where you get trapped in a fire. Maybe it won't go offroad or pull up the driveway for me, but street address to street address it should be "close enough" unless I got 30kg of luggage. Otherwise I can complain and maybe they can do a remote drive-by-wire or get half off / refund.
Seriously. If more people had read Mein Kampf, a lot of shit would have been spared from us. Simply because more people would have noticed just what a lunatic that guy was. Personally, I'd make it mandatory lecture for every neo nazi just to show them what kind of fucked up megalomaniac they idolize.
Doesn't matter, he was the perfect talking head. He got people engaged, he got people enraged, he was speaking directly to a gravely wounded national pride. You might think the captain of the boat is a total idiot, but you're not going to stage a mutiny as long as he's on the course you want to be. Never underestimate the power of telling people what they want to hear.
Actually that's exactly what this card is not, they've dropped FP64 performance and basically made a bigger, more badass gaming card. If there's any others who can use it, that's because they don't really need the compute features. This is like Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs, the performance/dollar is abysmal but it's not an Xeon. Neither is this a Tesla. This is for the "I can drop $3k on a gaming rig" market. I know people with more expensive hobbies than computers.
So basically the card is overspecced for no sensible reason and you can't fill that amount of VRAM even at 8K with 8xFSAA (and when you do that, you get 9fps). Even SLI'ing 4 of those together won't get you 40fps at those res.
You do realize that 8K @ 12GB is the same as 4K (25% the pixels) @ 3GB? Are you claiming the GTX970/980 is equally overspecced at 4GB(-ish)? I don't think we have 8K monitors yet but make a triple UHD monitor setup and I think you'll make quad-Titan X sweat.
So which is it? Is America really 'more restricted', or are we in fact freer?
It probably depends on the meaning of free, particularly "free to" and "free from". I'm free to wear my gold chain for a stroll in Somalia, but the odds of being free from crime is probably better at home. Recently we had a court case about a guy who was openly applauding the IS atrocities and calling them heroes and martyrs and true followers of Islam, but stopped just short of encouraging others to commit terrorism. On the one hand it would be silly to criminalize approval of illegal actions - it would make saying you approve of pot smoking criminal - on the other hand you can't get a more clearly told unsaid message if you tried. Or even directly through handpicked quotes, hiding behind the book to avoid saying it yourself. It's not some axiomatic rule set where one right always outranks the other, they brush up to each other and there's shades of gray were you can argue both ways. I even sometimes manage to disagree with myself depending on the starting point.
That depends on whether it's all fun and games. Like what you want to do is play ball, not be the groundskeeper. They can pay someone to do that. You don't want to scrub the toilet in the clubhouse. They can pay someone to do that. Same with FLOSS projects, you're there to write cool new features. Do you want to triage bugs? Write documentation? Test for regressions? Fix the build server? The fun parts will be done better, the not so fun parts is probably the other way around exactly because you're not paying anyone do to them.
Either that or you are one who constantly feels things would have been done better if your bosses simply got out of your way. (...) This is why I don't feel you are speaking from experience. The fact is getting those Christmas sales are probably far more important than your viewpoints on perfection. And sometimes those deadlines are there for a reason. Developers are not tasked with creating some shining example of what perfect code can be, they are tasked with making a return on investment.
No, actually there's where I'd like the manager or business owner to get in the way and do his job of figuring out what's most important and if necessary make those hard calls between schedule, quality and cost. I've actually worked a lot with project and portfolio management tools and I know those warning lights start blinking but poor managers want to have their cake and eat it too. Like one project I was in once was supposed to last eight weeks, it got three weeks delayed due to a contract problem but the deadline didn't move an inch. Neither did the scope. Or the resources. Beneath the manager talk it was just "do eight weeks work in five", like we had three works of slack to begin with.
It's got nothing to do with perfection, it's to say it takes what it takes. If you give me a list of features and tell me you need all of them, the amount of work doesn't change just because you set a deadline. I can tell you - with some level of uncertainty - what's reasonable to expect in that amount of time. If those two don't add up, you need to solve that not just dump it on me. Or if that was my job I'd have to do it, I'm quite sure I know how but I don't want it. The problem is when you won't manage and just crack the whip then developers won't take the shit. That's when you get progress bars where the first 90% take 90% of the time and the last 10% forever. But it looked great until shit the fan because everyone fudged the numbers.
The problem when you won't manage is that you often end up with something not actually working but gets rolled into production anyway. To use the infamous car analogy, instead of cutting a few features like lane assistance and automatic windshield wipers you've only half finished the steering, engine, gearbox, transmission and all the other must-have items so you slap the fastest, ugliest hack you got on there and ship it. Yes, I am familiar with time to market but there's no good time to flop in the market. And then you blame the developers for shipping a buggy clusterfuck.
Honestly I feel your heart is in the right place, and your level of principles will produce far better products than those who care little for software quality. But your statements really don't reflect those of someone who has ever actually been in charge of large software projects.
If we're trading compliments, it sounds like you've actually got a clue about running software projects and that will produce far better products than those who want to polish their project all day long. But your statements really don't reflect those of someone who has ever actually been on the receiving end of crap management.
A mentality of "it will be done when it's right" is almost as foolish as "it will be done on Thursday." Software will never be "right".
I don't think it's an unrealistic standard of perfection, the point is that it's done when the code does what it's supposed to do. It won't be done because the boss sets a deadline or marketing wants it or the bean counters want to hit the Christmas sales. Or even because the developer wants it to. They act like the code is in the chain of command, they tell the developer what to do and the developer tells the computer what to do so if they say Thursday it will be done.
Except the computer doesn't give a damn, isn't responsive to feedback and is entirely unhelpful in tracking down what the problem is, if you've ever thrown your hands in the air and exclaimed "WHY???????" you know what I'm talking about. This is particularly fun during fire fighting, where the answer is that I might find the bug 30 seconds or 3 days after we end this meaningless conversation because I have no basis for an estimate, much less a guarantee for when it'll work.
Yes, I know that for planning purposes you have to make some kind of educated guess but I can only estimate what I know needs to be done, not the "unknown unknowns" that can throw your estimates off by an order of magnitude or simply make it unfeasible. This is particularly - but not only - true when you're working with third party software and libraries. I say I have a worst-case estimate but really that's probably the 95th percentile, there's no hard limit where you can guarantee it'll work.
5) If the meeting ends exactly one hour after it starts, then it's a time filler. Finish the meeting when everything is accomplished, not when the time is up.
What kind of meetings do you go to? Most my meetings have more points on the agenda than we'll conclude on and the remaining discussions are tabled to the next meeting because some of the members have to attend other meetings, the room is booked for a new meeting or people need to leave for the day. Status meetings can be the exception when there's a fixed time slot set off every week and not much is happening, but rarely those where we plan the schedule and resources, discuss the architecture and design, solve implementation issues and so on. It always could be fine tuned further, the question is if it's good enough that we can move on or if we have to resume the discussion later.
You are hilarious... Companies pay $5000 or more for laptops that are secure and ar ethe same horsepower as a $500 walmart cheapie. I suggest you actually learn what companies will pay. Because they will pay a lot and do it all the time. Hell they happily and readily pay $3000 to $5000 each just for Panasonic toughbooks that are only rugged.
I've never worked for a company that would give me a $5000 laptop, quality laptops yes but not gold plated ones. Yes, some buy Toughbooks but only for the people in the field that really need one. These tablets sound like they'd be most useful as a corporate-wide standard and $2300/person is a pretty solid asking price. I'd just settle for the private repository, corporate-approved apps only and leave Facebook to be done on some other device.
The trouble with a voting system where >99% of the users won't vote on >99% of the proposed changes is that you have special interest groups and semi-celebrities that dwarf everyone else who can't be arsed. You really need to get the opinion of a representative sample and see if 10% like it and 90% don't care or 10% like it and 90% want to burn it with fire.
There may be no current commercial need for the SLS, but you can bet that it will appear once the system launches successfully a few times.
The difference compared to the Apollo days is that now we have a lot of experience building modules and docking them in orbit to form the ISS. The biggest single piece we've sent up there so far is the S3/S4 truss at 16,183 kg. Falcon Heavy will do 53,000 kg. SLS will do up to 130,000 kg. The total launch mass of the ISS is 417,289 kg, so even with the SLS it's not enough to launch as big structures as we might like. Most plans for a human mission to Mars seem to involve many SLS launches to assemble a ship in LEO, NASA's latest "design reference mission" called for seven launches at 130 tons = 910 tons total.
Alternatively that could be 18 launches of the Falcon Heavy, assuming no module needs to be bigger than 53 tons. For comparison the four RS-25s powering the SLS first stage only weighs about 3.5 tons each for a total of 14 tons, the bulk is fuel. Fuel you can bring up in as small quantities as makes economic sense. My guess is that 53 tons dry weight is plenty. They only publish a standard cost these days not a full weight launch but it used to be $135m, let's say $150m and that we need 20 launches. For $3 billion you have your launch capability.
What's missing is really all the rest, a Mars transfer vehicle, lander, habitat with supplies and power, launch vehicle, return craft and splashdown capsule. It's possible the Dragon can be expanded and adapted but it's made for short hops to the ISS, not living quarters for months. But we're also getting a little bit ahead of ourselves because the Falcon Heavy hasn't flown yet. I think that around 2020 with five years of launches behind us we'll wonder WTF did we build the SLS and maybe ask SpaceX to add another few boosters for a superheavy but we're not ready to do that just yet. I'm guessing the SLS will be the last rocket NASA will build though.
Yes, it's certainly in some ways better: Max speed 150 Mbps -> 450 Mbps through more aggregation. Supported bands from "up to" 20 to "up to" 29. Reception? No idea. Power consumption? No idea. Size? No idea. Price? No idea, but clearly it's a premium chip.
But I'm guessing Intel really wants to break into this market so they might have given Apple a good price, after all they get to ship in a huge volume. Assuming this is actually true though, I'll call it speculation until it actually launches.
Least humane way to execute someone: Put them in a box till they die, funded by money that could have been spent saving lives.
There are people with far more crippling disabilities than being stuck in a jail cell, yet nobody wants to kill them. Just be honest, it's because they're criminals and it's a resource issue not because you can't have some form of life behind bars. At least if you didn't make life in jail as shitty as possible as a deterrence, if you wanted to mimic real life under supervised conditions and with certain temptations removed you could do a way better job.
I think there are people who have already dealt so great harm to society they don't deserve the opportunity to deal more. Because that's the flip side of giving people a second change, if you release a rapist from prison he may have changed but if not there's a victim who'll pay the price. You're of course free to seek redemption and forgiveness on a spiritual level, but not to ask society to accept more risk on account of you.
That doesn't mean I wish them more harm than what's necessary to keep the rest of us safe. Retribution isn't usually about justice, it's about returning suffering and often in an escalated fashion. If you punch me, I don't just want to punch you back and get even. I want to beat the crap out of you for starting a fight with me for no good reason. It's about cruelty and while I certainly can feel like certain people deserve it I also know it doesn't really have much to do with justice.
The article briefly mentions that there are humans inside [yes, I read it]. Until then, I was wondering how they planned to handle refueling (and maybe in the future, recharging). When they figure that one out, imagine what this kind of system will do to the trucking industry.
When they figure what out? All you need is $5 of electronics to open the fuel tank and a robot arm to hit a stationary, active target that can light itself up like a Christmas tree and say here I am. A month sounds like a long time to solve this problem, more the kind you have a prototype made over the weekend. A year max to create an integrated solution of how to find gas stations & gas prices, locate a pump, two way authentication so nobody can pour sugar in the tank, payment and so on. The only reason we don't solve it today is because it's not a problem worth solving. By the time we have actual self-driving cars that can drive with no passengers - which is still many years away - I'm sure we'll have a few self-tanking stations. And if you want the business from robo-cars, the market will take care of the rest.
We have to separate 'science' from 'scientists' in a similar way you have to separate any practice from its practitioners. (...) In the end though from a social perspective, how can we guarantee scientists adhere to the scientific method and search for truth, any more than catholic priests adhere to their creed (while raping little children).
Not really a great example as all catholic priests are part of the catholic church and while you can't control everything they do there were more that enough warning flags being ignored or thrown under the rug. Or for that sake any doctrine from the indoctrinated, quite often the Holy Book is the problem not that people read it as the devil's advocate. Oh and another thing science is detached from is ethics, there's nothing as such saying the experiments the nazis did were scientifically invalid. it's just a tool, like a knife doesn't know if you're slicing bread or trying to stab someone.
So what did you expect, to tell the world's poor that if they get rich they'll pollute more and the planet can't take it, so stay poor? For the rich to say let's lower our standard of living to a third world country because it's so environmentally friendly? Genocide? We're making progress towards becoming greener in a way that will actually be acceptable, as opposed to all the ways that aren't. If curbing pollution doesn't have to be about hamstringing economic development we might see a lot more willingness to make an effort while now it's mostly a shit-slinging fight about who should bear the biggest burdens.
Can I tell the difference between 60 and 250? Absolutely. Heck, I can tell the difference between 60 and 75 fps, and can identify a frame rate below 100 pretty readily if things onscreen are moving quickly. (...) When I was gaming regularly, I couldn't stand playing at less than 100 fps.
Games don't have natural motion blur, if I throw a ball in front of the camera it'll travel during the 1/24th second and leave a smear while a game rendered at 24 fps will have the ball jump in discrete steps like filmed with a strobe light. The easiest way to fix that is to render more frames so the steps become smaller and a better approximation to reality's infinitely smooth motion. What you're measuring isn't how important the frame rate is for the display, but how important the sampling speed is for the simulation. For example if you modeled a realistic camera flash you'd probably need to render at 1000+ FPS to catch the flash going off. Of course that would be a stupid way of doing it, but that's why fps in games don't really say anything about how many fps you need for video.
What's annoying is that none of these sites seem to give a straight answer to how many frames per second we can actually distinguish. Yes, even an extremely short flicker of light is detectable but can we notice the difference between a 60 fps and 250 fps video? Here's my proposal:
1. Get some *extremely high* fps footage, for example the Phantom Flex4K can do 1000 fps for 5 seconds. 2. Make interpolations that play at normal speed, like: 7 -> 1 frame for 142.8 fps 8 -> 1 frame for 125 fps 10 -> 1 frame for 100 fps 12 -> 1 frame for 83.3 fps 14 -> 1 frame for 71.4 fps 16 -> 1 frame for 62.5 fps 20 -> 1 frame for 50 fps 25 -> 1 frame for 40 fps 32 -> 1 frame for 31.3 fps 40 -> 1 frame for 25 fps 3. Do blind A/B tests on a 144 Hz gaming monitor set to match the video frequency. When do you stop being able to tell the difference? That's the frame rate you need to be visually transparent.
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"the core software components used to boot the machine are verified for correct cryptographic signatures, or the system refuses to boot"
Does that mean that IF malware infects the bootloader, the OS will not boot, BRICKING IT? Seems like an easy way for grandmothers to lose their whole computer with a click of the mouse.
You make it sound like running a corrupt/compromised system is a good thing. The system isn't supposed to let you alter the system files, but it might happen anyway for example by an exploit or mounting the drive in another computer. If it's just random bit flips I think Windows keeps backup copies anyway. If all the copies fail verification, it'll tell you the system is corrupt and insert a repair disc/USB stick with good copies. It's broken, not bricked. And whatever broke it, you probably want to fix. It's basically the less nuclear version of a wipe and reimage, the BIOS makes sure the boot loader's not compromised, the boot loader makes sure the kernel's not compromised, the kernel makes sure the modules aren't compromised and so you build a trusted zone of what's going on. Of course if you signed malware, you're pretty much screwed.
Well, not to let research get in your way, but the vast majority of suicides are the result of (a) fleeting desire and (b) opportunity. To wit, those stupid "anti-jumping" fences you see on bridges? Those lower suicide rates - not move them. Therefore, preventing someone from committing suicide is a good thing.
I feel you're jumping the gun on that conclusion, because it would justify essentially all kinds of nanny-state behavior on what an alleged future self might want. The twenty-something me did a lot of things thirty-something me wouldn't have and didn't do a lot of things I would have, but that was past-me's choice. And I'm going to pass along my choices to forty-something me (hopefully) but I don't know what he'll think of them. Heck, hangover-me often thinks last night's party-me could have skipped those last beers. I wouldn't take away his/my freedom to make those choices.
Of course you might argue that if you're dead you don't have a future, but you are arguing the same principle. If it's for the good of your future self, society can disempower you from making your own choices today. I don't find that nearly as unproblematic as you. As for philosophy, I can't say more than it's more my life than anyone else's. I can't give a proof for it anymore than you could prove "All men are created equal". A racist would disagree, it's more of a fundamental theorem on which you can build a moral compass. If instead you imagine a master and slave race you get a different compass, they're more like different mathematical models built on different axioms than one indisputable truth.
Yet none of the abortion protesters take into account what our population level would be like if we had not allowed abortions. Obviously the offspring would be a huge number and might have been such a great burden that our nation could not survive.
Almost totally false. Studies show that women who have unwanted pregnancies but give birth don't usually end up with more kids total, those who do take an abortion generally want to start a family just not there and then. Heck, this would be totally obvious if you had any contact with the opposite sex, most women want a few kids and once they've had two or three few want four-five-six and beyond though they're certainly biologically capable of 10+. Now if you'd said contraception that's certainly helped keep the population down, but assuming they exist abortions don't make any significant difference.
No. Not really. Microsoft pushes the idea that you don't need to have any clue to use it's products. It helps enable this idea with better novice interfaces. This leads to the problem that you end up with barely trained monkeys having the appearance that they can us Microsoft products.
And they're selling a very popular OS that barely trained monkeys can manage.
And they're selling a very popular office suite that barely trained monkeys can use.
And so on.... the world runs on barely trained monkeys.
If you have a problem with that, take it up with the Creator who made a 1% patch to a chimp.
Well, private chargers are generally really slow and usually meant for overnight charging, it's rarely what you want to wait for if you are running out of juice. Here in Norway we already have several vendors that have set up paid fast charging points - not quite as fast as superchargers but 20-50 kW is overkill at home. And you'll still be paying for the same power, just not the premium but if you put any reasonable value on your time it's probably better anyway unless there's something you'd like to spend time on (eating, shopping, entertainment, whatever) nearby.
Vsync prevents the frame from being written to while it's displayed, avoiding tearing. FreeSync/Gsync makes the monitor wait for the frame to be rendered and ready for display instead of the other way around.
That mean the person riding in the taxi won't be allowed to arbitrarily stop it
I really doubt a car without an "emergency stop" button will ever fly. And if by default won't let you open the doors then an override and/or an emergency hammer to break the glass, they're not going to make something where you get trapped in a fire. Maybe it won't go offroad or pull up the driveway for me, but street address to street address it should be "close enough" unless I got 30kg of luggage. Otherwise I can complain and maybe they can do a remote drive-by-wire or get half off / refund.
Seriously. If more people had read Mein Kampf, a lot of shit would have been spared from us. Simply because more people would have noticed just what a lunatic that guy was. Personally, I'd make it mandatory lecture for every neo nazi just to show them what kind of fucked up megalomaniac they idolize.
Doesn't matter, he was the perfect talking head. He got people engaged, he got people enraged, he was speaking directly to a gravely wounded national pride. You might think the captain of the boat is a total idiot, but you're not going to stage a mutiny as long as he's on the course you want to be. Never underestimate the power of telling people what they want to hear.
Actually that's exactly what this card is not, they've dropped FP64 performance and basically made a bigger, more badass gaming card. If there's any others who can use it, that's because they don't really need the compute features. This is like Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs, the performance/dollar is abysmal but it's not an Xeon. Neither is this a Tesla. This is for the "I can drop $3k on a gaming rig" market. I know people with more expensive hobbies than computers.
So basically the card is overspecced for no sensible reason and you can't fill that amount of VRAM even at 8K with 8xFSAA (and when you do that, you get 9fps). Even SLI'ing 4 of those together won't get you 40fps at those res.
You do realize that 8K @ 12GB is the same as 4K (25% the pixels) @ 3GB? Are you claiming the GTX970/980 is equally overspecced at 4GB(-ish)? I don't think we have 8K monitors yet but make a triple UHD monitor setup and I think you'll make quad-Titan X sweat.
So which is it? Is America really 'more restricted', or are we in fact freer?
It probably depends on the meaning of free, particularly "free to" and "free from". I'm free to wear my gold chain for a stroll in Somalia, but the odds of being free from crime is probably better at home. Recently we had a court case about a guy who was openly applauding the IS atrocities and calling them heroes and martyrs and true followers of Islam, but stopped just short of encouraging others to commit terrorism. On the one hand it would be silly to criminalize approval of illegal actions - it would make saying you approve of pot smoking criminal - on the other hand you can't get a more clearly told unsaid message if you tried. Or even directly through handpicked quotes, hiding behind the book to avoid saying it yourself. It's not some axiomatic rule set where one right always outranks the other, they brush up to each other and there's shades of gray were you can argue both ways. I even sometimes manage to disagree with myself depending on the starting point.
That depends on whether it's all fun and games. Like what you want to do is play ball, not be the groundskeeper. They can pay someone to do that. You don't want to scrub the toilet in the clubhouse. They can pay someone to do that. Same with FLOSS projects, you're there to write cool new features. Do you want to triage bugs? Write documentation? Test for regressions? Fix the build server? The fun parts will be done better, the not so fun parts is probably the other way around exactly because you're not paying anyone do to them.
Either that or you are one who constantly feels things would have been done better if your bosses simply got out of your way. (...) This is why I don't feel you are speaking from experience. The fact is getting those Christmas sales are probably far more important than your viewpoints on perfection. And sometimes those deadlines are there for a reason. Developers are not tasked with creating some shining example of what perfect code can be, they are tasked with making a return on investment.
No, actually there's where I'd like the manager or business owner to get in the way and do his job of figuring out what's most important and if necessary make those hard calls between schedule, quality and cost. I've actually worked a lot with project and portfolio management tools and I know those warning lights start blinking but poor managers want to have their cake and eat it too. Like one project I was in once was supposed to last eight weeks, it got three weeks delayed due to a contract problem but the deadline didn't move an inch. Neither did the scope. Or the resources. Beneath the manager talk it was just "do eight weeks work in five", like we had three works of slack to begin with.
It's got nothing to do with perfection, it's to say it takes what it takes. If you give me a list of features and tell me you need all of them, the amount of work doesn't change just because you set a deadline. I can tell you - with some level of uncertainty - what's reasonable to expect in that amount of time. If those two don't add up, you need to solve that not just dump it on me. Or if that was my job I'd have to do it, I'm quite sure I know how but I don't want it. The problem is when you won't manage and just crack the whip then developers won't take the shit. That's when you get progress bars where the first 90% take 90% of the time and the last 10% forever. But it looked great until shit the fan because everyone fudged the numbers.
The problem when you won't manage is that you often end up with something not actually working but gets rolled into production anyway. To use the infamous car analogy, instead of cutting a few features like lane assistance and automatic windshield wipers you've only half finished the steering, engine, gearbox, transmission and all the other must-have items so you slap the fastest, ugliest hack you got on there and ship it. Yes, I am familiar with time to market but there's no good time to flop in the market. And then you blame the developers for shipping a buggy clusterfuck.
Honestly I feel your heart is in the right place, and your level of principles will produce far better products than those who care little for software quality. But your statements really don't reflect those of someone who has ever actually been in charge of large software projects.
If we're trading compliments, it sounds like you've actually got a clue about running software projects and that will produce far better products than those who want to polish their project all day long. But your statements really don't reflect those of someone who has ever actually been on the receiving end of crap management.
A mentality of "it will be done when it's right" is almost as foolish as "it will be done on Thursday." Software will never be "right".
I don't think it's an unrealistic standard of perfection, the point is that it's done when the code does what it's supposed to do. It won't be done because the boss sets a deadline or marketing wants it or the bean counters want to hit the Christmas sales. Or even because the developer wants it to. They act like the code is in the chain of command, they tell the developer what to do and the developer tells the computer what to do so if they say Thursday it will be done.
Except the computer doesn't give a damn, isn't responsive to feedback and is entirely unhelpful in tracking down what the problem is, if you've ever thrown your hands in the air and exclaimed "WHY???????" you know what I'm talking about. This is particularly fun during fire fighting, where the answer is that I might find the bug 30 seconds or 3 days after we end this meaningless conversation because I have no basis for an estimate, much less a guarantee for when it'll work.
Yes, I know that for planning purposes you have to make some kind of educated guess but I can only estimate what I know needs to be done, not the "unknown unknowns" that can throw your estimates off by an order of magnitude or simply make it unfeasible. This is particularly - but not only - true when you're working with third party software and libraries. I say I have a worst-case estimate but really that's probably the 95th percentile, there's no hard limit where you can guarantee it'll work.
5) If the meeting ends exactly one hour after it starts, then it's a time filler. Finish the meeting when everything is accomplished, not when the time is up.
What kind of meetings do you go to? Most my meetings have more points on the agenda than we'll conclude on and the remaining discussions are tabled to the next meeting because some of the members have to attend other meetings, the room is booked for a new meeting or people need to leave for the day. Status meetings can be the exception when there's a fixed time slot set off every week and not much is happening, but rarely those where we plan the schedule and resources, discuss the architecture and design, solve implementation issues and so on. It always could be fine tuned further, the question is if it's good enough that we can move on or if we have to resume the discussion later.
You are hilarious... Companies pay $5000 or more for laptops that are secure and ar ethe same horsepower as a $500 walmart cheapie. I suggest you actually learn what companies will pay. Because they will pay a lot and do it all the time. Hell they happily and readily pay $3000 to $5000 each just for Panasonic toughbooks that are only rugged.
I've never worked for a company that would give me a $5000 laptop, quality laptops yes but not gold plated ones. Yes, some buy Toughbooks but only for the people in the field that really need one. These tablets sound like they'd be most useful as a corporate-wide standard and $2300/person is a pretty solid asking price. I'd just settle for the private repository, corporate-approved apps only and leave Facebook to be done on some other device.
The trouble with a voting system where >99% of the users won't vote on >99% of the proposed changes is that you have special interest groups and semi-celebrities that dwarf everyone else who can't be arsed. You really need to get the opinion of a representative sample and see if 10% like it and 90% don't care or 10% like it and 90% want to burn it with fire.
There may be no current commercial need for the SLS, but you can bet that it will appear once the system launches successfully a few times.
The difference compared to the Apollo days is that now we have a lot of experience building modules and docking them in orbit to form the ISS. The biggest single piece we've sent up there so far is the S3/S4 truss at 16,183 kg. Falcon Heavy will do 53,000 kg. SLS will do up to 130,000 kg. The total launch mass of the ISS is 417,289 kg, so even with the SLS it's not enough to launch as big structures as we might like. Most plans for a human mission to Mars seem to involve many SLS launches to assemble a ship in LEO, NASA's latest "design reference mission" called for seven launches at 130 tons = 910 tons total.
Alternatively that could be 18 launches of the Falcon Heavy, assuming no module needs to be bigger than 53 tons. For comparison the four RS-25s powering the SLS first stage only weighs about 3.5 tons each for a total of 14 tons, the bulk is fuel. Fuel you can bring up in as small quantities as makes economic sense. My guess is that 53 tons dry weight is plenty. They only publish a standard cost these days not a full weight launch but it used to be $135m, let's say $150m and that we need 20 launches. For $3 billion you have your launch capability.
What's missing is really all the rest, a Mars transfer vehicle, lander, habitat with supplies and power, launch vehicle, return craft and splashdown capsule. It's possible the Dragon can be expanded and adapted but it's made for short hops to the ISS, not living quarters for months. But we're also getting a little bit ahead of ourselves because the Falcon Heavy hasn't flown yet. I think that around 2020 with five years of launches behind us we'll wonder WTF did we build the SLS and maybe ask SpaceX to add another few boosters for a superheavy but we're not ready to do that just yet. I'm guessing the SLS will be the last rocket NASA will build though.
Yes, it's certainly in some ways better:
Max speed 150 Mbps -> 450 Mbps through more aggregation.
Supported bands from "up to" 20 to "up to" 29.
Reception? No idea.
Power consumption? No idea.
Size? No idea.
Price? No idea, but clearly it's a premium chip.
But I'm guessing Intel really wants to break into this market so they might have given Apple a good price, after all they get to ship in a huge volume. Assuming this is actually true though, I'll call it speculation until it actually launches.
Least humane way to execute someone:
Put them in a box till they die, funded by money that could have been spent saving lives.
There are people with far more crippling disabilities than being stuck in a jail cell, yet nobody wants to kill them. Just be honest, it's because they're criminals and it's a resource issue not because you can't have some form of life behind bars. At least if you didn't make life in jail as shitty as possible as a deterrence, if you wanted to mimic real life under supervised conditions and with certain temptations removed you could do a way better job.
I think there are people who have already dealt so great harm to society they don't deserve the opportunity to deal more. Because that's the flip side of giving people a second change, if you release a rapist from prison he may have changed but if not there's a victim who'll pay the price. You're of course free to seek redemption and forgiveness on a spiritual level, but not to ask society to accept more risk on account of you.
That doesn't mean I wish them more harm than what's necessary to keep the rest of us safe. Retribution isn't usually about justice, it's about returning suffering and often in an escalated fashion. If you punch me, I don't just want to punch you back and get even. I want to beat the crap out of you for starting a fight with me for no good reason. It's about cruelty and while I certainly can feel like certain people deserve it I also know it doesn't really have much to do with justice.
The article briefly mentions that there are humans inside [yes, I read it]. Until then, I was wondering how they planned to handle refueling (and maybe in the future, recharging). When they figure that one out, imagine what this kind of system will do to the trucking industry.
When they figure what out? All you need is $5 of electronics to open the fuel tank and a robot arm to hit a stationary, active target that can light itself up like a Christmas tree and say here I am. A month sounds like a long time to solve this problem, more the kind you have a prototype made over the weekend. A year max to create an integrated solution of how to find gas stations & gas prices, locate a pump, two way authentication so nobody can pour sugar in the tank, payment and so on. The only reason we don't solve it today is because it's not a problem worth solving. By the time we have actual self-driving cars that can drive with no passengers - which is still many years away - I'm sure we'll have a few self-tanking stations. And if you want the business from robo-cars, the market will take care of the rest.
We have to separate 'science' from 'scientists' in a similar way you have to separate any practice from its practitioners. (...) In the end though from a social perspective, how can we guarantee scientists adhere to the scientific method and search for truth, any more than catholic priests adhere to their creed (while raping little children).
Not really a great example as all catholic priests are part of the catholic church and while you can't control everything they do there were more that enough warning flags being ignored or thrown under the rug. Or for that sake any doctrine from the indoctrinated, quite often the Holy Book is the problem not that people read it as the devil's advocate. Oh and another thing science is detached from is ethics, there's nothing as such saying the experiments the nazis did were scientifically invalid. it's just a tool, like a knife doesn't know if you're slicing bread or trying to stab someone.
So what did you expect, to tell the world's poor that if they get rich they'll pollute more and the planet can't take it, so stay poor? For the rich to say let's lower our standard of living to a third world country because it's so environmentally friendly? Genocide? We're making progress towards becoming greener in a way that will actually be acceptable, as opposed to all the ways that aren't. If curbing pollution doesn't have to be about hamstringing economic development we might see a lot more willingness to make an effort while now it's mostly a shit-slinging fight about who should bear the biggest burdens.
Can I tell the difference between 60 and 250? Absolutely. Heck, I can tell the difference between 60 and 75 fps, and can identify a frame rate below 100 pretty readily if things onscreen are moving quickly. (...) When I was gaming regularly, I couldn't stand playing at less than 100 fps.
Games don't have natural motion blur, if I throw a ball in front of the camera it'll travel during the 1/24th second and leave a smear while a game rendered at 24 fps will have the ball jump in discrete steps like filmed with a strobe light. The easiest way to fix that is to render more frames so the steps become smaller and a better approximation to reality's infinitely smooth motion. What you're measuring isn't how important the frame rate is for the display, but how important the sampling speed is for the simulation. For example if you modeled a realistic camera flash you'd probably need to render at 1000+ FPS to catch the flash going off. Of course that would be a stupid way of doing it, but that's why fps in games don't really say anything about how many fps you need for video.
What's annoying is that none of these sites seem to give a straight answer to how many frames per second we can actually distinguish. Yes, even an extremely short flicker of light is detectable but can we notice the difference between a 60 fps and 250 fps video? Here's my proposal:
1. Get some *extremely high* fps footage, for example the Phantom Flex4K can do 1000 fps for 5 seconds.
2. Make interpolations that play at normal speed, like:
7 -> 1 frame for 142.8 fps
8 -> 1 frame for 125 fps
10 -> 1 frame for 100 fps
12 -> 1 frame for 83.3 fps
14 -> 1 frame for 71.4 fps
16 -> 1 frame for 62.5 fps
20 -> 1 frame for 50 fps
25 -> 1 frame for 40 fps
32 -> 1 frame for 31.3 fps
40 -> 1 frame for 25 fps
3. Do blind A/B tests on a 144 Hz gaming monitor set to match the video frequency. When do you stop being able to tell the difference? That's the frame rate you need to be visually transparent.