It's one thing that every job and every employer has their less than stellar moments, that's what they're paying you for. It's another thing to run into a career dead end where your skills aren't really in demand and you're either unemployed, flipping fries because you can't get a relevant job or clinging to a dead end job because the institutional knowledge you have is the only thing keeping you employed. Of course a lot of that is random chance for better or for worse, you'll never who will or won't hire you or if the shifting winds of the market will suddenly leave you without a job. But a lot of it also conscious choice, for example I once left a job primarily because I felt I was becoming too specialized in a particular tool. I felt that if I wanted to stay easily employable, I'd have to diversify. I couldn't have gotten the job I have today if I'd stayed that path.
Another example is that really through no fault of my own I had to swap employers several times in a relatively short amount of time, I know I could explain it well in an interview but it raises flags if you're just glancing through my CV. So now I'm planning to stay with my current employer to build credibility that I can commit and won't just head for greener pastures in less than a year. That is quite deliberate management of my career and I'm actively aware that it's not what I know I know that matters, it's what I can convince others I know. For example in my last job part of the reason they hired me was certifications, I didn't need those to do the job but they turned out to be very helpful in showing that I could.
I think your answer is a little simplistic, continuing a coding career might seem a good idea today. But what's coming down river, is it heavy rapids and a waterfall around the next bend? That's what he's asking. It might be okay to become a truck driver today. It might be a lot less nice in 20 years if your job has been taken over by autonomous cars and you got no marketable skills anymore. Personally I wouldn't worry too much about it, good coders will be in demand. But you might want to set your wage expectations correctly, it might not be way to earn the fattest paychecks as a 50-60 year old.
Artificially scarcity implies that somebody is regulating the supply and could flood the market, which is clearly impossible with Bitcoin so it's more like scarcity by design but equal for everyone. While there might be other good reasons not to invest in Bitcoin it simply doesn't have this risk, that's more of a risk with regular cash where they could print more at any time.
You're probably the kind of guy who translates "I ran a mile yesterday" to "I ran 1609 meters yesterday", it's theoretically correct but in practice probably silly and wrong unless it was a one mile run at a race track. If it was a jogging trip it was an approximation and could just as easily be 1500 meters or 1700 meters, you're over-specifying the precision. In this case 3000 fps is the same level of approximation as 2000 MPH, which is actually much less misleading.
They're not a common carrier, they got something in many ways better: USC 17512. Being an ISP is under section (a):
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the providerâ(TM)s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if - (1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider; (2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider; (3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person; (4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and (5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
Notice anything in particular missing from this section? No DMCA notice, that only applies to (b) Caching, (c) Hosting and (d) Searching. They can send all those DMCA notices to/dev/null and it's legally kosher and they got full immunity. I expect Cox Communications will have this case thrown out quickly assuming they have a competent lawyer.
With every new piece of news I am further dismayed with our failure as a species. I can't shake the nagging sensation that we deserve to become extinct.
By finding a ridiculously complex and expensive answer to a relatively simple problem? If you settled yourself way, way out in the wilderness you probably didn't expect Internet over fiber, my guess is that satellite TV and Internet is probably better than what they had. But hey, if you have the trillions of dollars to put it on the Moon, go right ahead. I kind of see why that wouldn't be the case though...
Even when we learned cursive, it was more about writing "pretty" with nice, flowing curves than writing efficiently. If they wanted that, they'd teach us stenography. Kind of the grade school version of learning Latin, high degree of sophistication but of little practical value anymore. Typing with ease on the other hand is valuable both to concentrate on the actual task instead of the typing and because good typing skills + auto complete lets you use long, sane names and verbose comments with very little extra effort. Second to the developers who code like they paid by the line I hate the ones who code like they get docked in pay per letter used almost equally much.
I think the answer to that one is "all over the map". Certain aspects of open source are done with excessive attention to niche functionality because there's either funding or the kind of geeky details that have nerds jumping all over it to implement. Other features, particularly features you'd use if you're a... less than tech-savvy user, tend to be ignored. Obligatory XKCD. On the bright side, it's not like code actually rots so the resource problem can be rephrased as how quickly does the environment change with new hardware and languages and libraries and standards and protocols and so on. Not to mention input paradigms like multi-touch versus keyboard and mouse. Eventually it has to slow down. PCIe has existed longer than any of the standards that preceded it. USB has lasted longer than than the standards that preceded it. H.264 has lasted longer than any of the standards that preceded it. Now we've got computers that can fit into the palm of our hands, how much smaller and different could they get? I guess sci-fi isn't out of ideas yet but if keyboard and mouse has gotten us through the last 30 years I expect touch to last longer and what follows touch even longer.
Another perspective is simply considering if the users' needs are going to rise infinitely, which I suppose is a special case of the above. Just because Photoshop continues to add features doesn't mean that people need photo editing of infinite complexity. It might simply be that once you've reached a certain level of functionality open source is good enough for most people on a fairly permanent basis. I know at least a few tools that I more or less consider "done", like just recently I installed Babaschess which was last updated in 2007, it's abandoned yet fully functional. I have QuickPar installed, which hasn't been updated since 2004 yet I also consider "done". With open source people like to fiddle with it but there as well there's software which has been essentially unchanged for years. The pace might be glacial at times but ultimately I think open source will win out. Just look at Linux/BSD, Windows is the only one with a homegrown kernel and I suspect that's mostly history. I doubt Microsoft would start writing another kernel from scratch today.
AMD has spend a lot of time and money building low power SoCs. Tablets use low-power SoCs. That they can't make money in that market is a pretty clear admission they've bet on the wrong horse. High end desktops and servers died with the FX line and you know their laptop line is in trouble when they have to advertise this: Introducing mobile systems with AMD's highest performing APUs, exclusively at Best Buy. It can't be long until they're waving the white flag and pulling out of mainstream x86 processors altogether, they're losing on all fronts. They got lucky in "graphics" for a while with AMD card being far superior for cryptocurrency mining, but that's over and nVidia is now selling as many graphics chips as AMD does total, including the APUs. I expect the Q4 numbers to be worse as nVidia launched the GTX 980/970 and AMD isn't due for a new production until 2015. What's carrying AMD is now the console business, if they didn't have that to prop up volume they'd be done for. The way things are going they need to find money in the ARM business and fast.
But it sounds like Apple was bankrolling GT for the factory. which means they negotiated some kind of investment budget. Apple probably went through the list, found what sounds like excesses and asked GT if all this was really necessary or if it could be done cheaper. Apparently GT failed to justify the cost, so it was stricken from the final budget. When shit hit the fan it might have been too late to start redesigning and they were already behind schedule and budget with botched batches, GT might not have had the financial muscle to fix it and Apple might be concerned about throwing good money after bad. After all, this is how most terrible investment decisions are made, we're already $500 million down the hole so we need to spend a hundred more to finish it. Then we're already $600 million down the hole so we need to spend a hundred more to finish it and so on. Apple had a reasonable plan B by sticking with Gorilla Glass so they weren't pot commited as they'd say in poker.
Remember, just because GT can point to this and say that's why it failed doesn't mean it'd be a success otherwise as they might have stumbled on the next hurdle too. After all, if the product that did come out okay was that great I'm sure Apple would have been more willing to see it through too, unless they decided it was cheaper to let GT fail and pick up the pieces. I really doubt it's as easy as Apple buying GT's assets, installing a few UPSes in the factory and they're ready to go for the iPhone 6s. Like they say, production at this scale had never been attempted before which generally means you have to expect the unexpected. GT seems to have bet everything on things going according to plan, they gambled and lost. It's pretty cheap to try blaming Apple for their own botched execution, they're a business and don't just throw money around. If they failed to get sufficient investment that's nobody but GT's fault.
The whole idea is stupid. What governments should of course be considering instead, if they find biased internet searches so troubling, is to create a government body that provides the same service upon a completely neutral basis.
"Neutral", seriously you want a government imposed Pravda? Or are you just trying to set up such an absurd left wing straw man to get everyone on Google's side? What the EU is generally against is bundling products and services because it hampers competition and creates vertical collusion and hidden costs. Say you buy a car only to find they use IP, warranty terms, secret error codes and such to make sure you only use original parts, authorized service dealers, approved fuel and tires from partners and so on . There's laws curbing such behavior because it's in the consumers' interest that car companies compete on making cars, auto repair companies compete on maintenance and repair and tire manufacturers compete on making car tires. It doesn't mean the government should jump in national everything so everybody gets "fair" maintenance on their cars.
For example, during the first iPhone launch here they tried playing the "exclusive carrier" game bundled with a high monthly cost, but our consumer laws demand you can terminate such a agreement by covering their loss. So those who wanted another carrier would sign up, got their iPhone, insta-canceled, paid for the full price of the phone and was free to sign up with another carrier. That effectively killed it, pretty soon after you could buy it directly with no subscription and sign up with whoever you wanted. And that's how it should be, phone manufacturers compete on phones and carriers compete on being carriers. Companies don't want free markets where prices are low and competition intense, they want dysfunctional markets where they can make huge profits. This is very obvious in software where they want you to buy into the Microsoft stack or the Apple stack or the Google stack. If the bits and pieces were compatible and interchangeable you'd see a lot more competition and many smaller third parties providing a few parts. Bunding is a way for megacorporations to make sure only megacorporations compete.
Instant Godwin, but should Holocaust deniers have the right to demand that Adolf Hitler be disassociated from those "lies"? There's no objective standard of what is true, much less what is current, balanced and relevant information so in truth you ask Google to play oracle. They've found lots of pages mentioning Adolf Hitler and Holocaust together, so they return what they found. They've never done any primary research in the matter, all they have is an objection that it's not true. Should Google then become legally liable if they ignore the protest and keep returning Holocaust-related results? I mean you're holding Google to a higher standard than the sites they're indexing, they can spew out crap on the Internet without fact-checking but if Google collects statistics then they have to determine the truthiness of it. It only works because Google is a megacorporation and the only reason they don't protest harder is probably because it blocks out the competition. Setting up a server to spider the Internet? Easy. Dealing with a zillion more-or-less valid claims to remove information? Massive money sink, great to kill any start-up.
"But it's to protect the children!" Bullshit, try shutting down the child traffickers accounts on facebook and ban advertising for foster carers for financial incentives - in fact, ban financial incentives for looking after other peoples' kids and instead try helping the families instead of making shit up about them. The best place for a child is with the family he was born into, NO EXCEPTIONS. If his entire family is dead, THEN you can talk about adoption, otherwise it's not adoption, it's trafficking.
No exceptions? Have you any idea how bad violence, sexual abuse, neglect and so on can get? In the worst cases, children die. Foster parents are paid because they tend to get deeply traumatized kids with behavioral problems who need lots of care and therapy. The alternative is often institutions because leaving them with the parents was not an option. You rarely if ever get paid for adopting healthy, normal children because there's many childless couples that'll do that job for free.
Comparing the U.S. the little toy countries in Europe is silly. They are about the size of one of our states. It is much easier given their pop. density to keep their little toy grids up and running.
The countries with lower population density in Europe has more stable power supplies. The countries with higher population density also have more stable power supplies. Those "toy" networks put together supply more than twice the US population wtih power. At least with ISPs the Chewbacca defense could say the US has more long haul domestic traffic, when it comes to the power grid....what? Snip all the interstate lines then and one state will be the size of one EU country and supply its own population and US power supply will be great. That's what you're saying, because you built one big network it must be crap. And it has to be crap, because...?
LTO-9 goes to 25TB/cart, LTO-10 goes to 48TB. Already announced.
As "announced" as Intel's roadmaps saying they'll reach 5nm or whatever, near as I can tell no LTO-7 or LTO-8 drives exist much less LTO-9 or LTO-10 and usually there's 2-3 years between generations so this is guesswork for 2020-2025 or so.
But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.
I've got school stuff older than that, copied from one generation of drives to the next since the 1980s without ever needing a tape drive. Most data is lost because there's not enough redundancy and integrity checking, a private backup cloud makes total sense to me just add another node and it'll sync up another perfect copy. Doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is, as long as there's enough of them and it gets replaced in a timely fashion. Assuming that takes care of physical and geographical redundancy, you're left with misconfiguration, internal or external malice.
True, it's possible to make deleting disk backups easy. It's also possible to make it almost as hard as deleting tape backups by using a third party, sign off procedures and such. The only time you gain a significant advantage with tape is if you got a human in the process as an air gap defense, if you got a tape robot - which is what you want for a large, automated system - then theoretically whoever could hack your disk backup server could just as easily hack your tape robot server and instruct it to wipe all the tapes. Unless you use WORM media, but I don't think many do unless they absolutely must for legal compliance since you can't recycle tapes.
Even if something is irreplaceable it doesn't mean it's of infinite worth. A one-way file transfer gateway to a backup server in a mountain bunker might be enough, even if it's stored on a R/W disk. At least it starts competing with other far out possibilities like the hacker/sysadmin disabling or encrypting your backups until one day you wake up to "Your data is locked, pay me $$$ or go fish" or worse "Thanks for laying me off here's the letters F and U" only to discover the backups are useless. And I don't mean just an occasional restore test, if you're that paranoid you should also verify that what's on your WORM drives is what you so desperately need bullet proof backup of.
Ultimately the more exotic a technology gets, the less find it worth it which can lead to a negative loop where the lesser technology wins out anyway. I don't think tape will die but it can become more specialized, like companies don't having their own tape drives they just send encrypted backups to companies specializing in disaster recovery for when everything else has been nuked and just run the risk that the day-to-day operations are well enough secured by disk backup. Losing a day's worth of work is expensive, but also not fatal to most businesses.
For a laptop I see it but for a desktop I clearly prefer small SSD+big HDD for predictable performance and flexibility. Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task. You get really cheap, slow 4+ TB drives that can't be beat on GB/$. Once I excluded that data, I found a 128GB SSD was slightly cramped and 256GB plentiful, I just checked and I'm using 180GB now but could easily get it down to 110GB if I wanted. I really don't have more data where an SSD makes sense.
Then again with Netflix, Spotify etc. I see a lot of people going very lightweight, with Steam it's pretty easy to nuke a game you haven't used in a while to free up space so I guess the trend is towards SSD being enough with hybrids as a temporary intermediate. Even on torrents download, watch and delete seems to be a trend instead of trying to archive the Internet. Some do, of course because they're pack rats like me. But I did clear out 5TB of content that I figured I'd definitively not watch again and some I guess I never watched at all, just started and got bored thinking I might return some day. The only content I need to keep is the stuff I've made myself.
My first computer stored data on audio tape! (...) I don't think we're beating that unless someone here is old enough to have used core memory or fluid delay lines.
Commodore 64 or similar right? Heck, I did that and I don't think that's anything special here on/. it's 80s tech. Now let me get my dad in here so he can tell you all about vacuum tube computers, you kids and your fancy schmanzy transistors. In other words, I think you're solidly beat.
Considering that 30%~ of the world are subsistence farmers, and 40~%+ are involved in farming I am not surprised. I highly doubt that Sub-Saharan Africa should be worrying about the myth of the digital divide for most of the people there. Or the people that don't use money in central America. I mean 50% of the world eats with their hands. 1st world People have weird priorities sometimes. I hope this group isn't getting any donated money.
So were my grandparents, education precedes change. If you formulate it like "What good is Internet going to do for a subsistence farmer?" the answer is not much. Heck, you can say the same about literacy. If you formulate it like "How can we teach you more valuable skills than being a subsistence farmer?" then Internet is a great tool. Industrialized agriculture can easily grow a few extra tons of rice and beans, put them on a container ship and ship to Africa but they can't afford it. Internationally they operate with two limits at $1.25/day and $2/day at purchasing power parity, which generally means even less nominally in poorer countries. So the question is, if they work all day can they do something worth $2 to me? If so can they can stop working as subsistence farmers, work for us and buy their food.
Of course you can't expect much, they'll probably make Indian workers seem skilled by comparison. The language they know is probably not English. But at least they got a chance of tapping into a huge market where there's a lot of people who from their perspective have a lot of money. And very often there's this one guy who speaks English who can translate and sublet to others, that's how outsourcing to India works. I know that's how many migrant workers do it too, one team/work leader that speaks English most of the rest need translators. It gets the job done, they key is just getting on the lowest level of the ladder where learning more means earning more. The rest will work itself out.
I guess it's some kind of meta-game, the same way every forum attract trolls every game attract cheaters. Even playing free recreational chess, no prizes, no loot, nothing but a meaningless, unofficial ranking you run into people who set up a bot for shits and giggles. Then again it's better than the people who play games like a job, the goal is not to have fun it's to grind so you can reach the next level for more of almost the same. And with "Freemium" you can take the addicts' money too, not just their life.
Good luck sneaking up on a robot with 360 degree sensors and flipping a switch that's probably behind a locked panel when it's in combat mode. Or give commands to a robot that only takes digitally signed orders with a chain of trust all the way to a root key deep in a vault somewhere in the US, verified in hardware and tamper-proofed so you'll with 99.999% probability will break it before you can circumvent the signature validation. And even then they probably have unique single use kill codes to stop a malfunctioning robot. Assuming it won't just blow itself up rather than be captured, at least the essential bits. Sure you can take the physical parts like guns and fire manually, but I doubt you'll ever get much working software and without that you're still a man against a robot army that's totally indifferent to both your and their losses.
I have a high six-figure income, and I've money in the bank. I'm not a "1%er" but I'm up there with the rest...
If I recall correctly, any six-figure salary makes you a 0,1%er globally. It doesn't really show until you travel but then it's just weird, like people making less in a year than you make in a week. It's no wonder they like tourists or our money anyway, to them it seems we have insane amounts and because it's relatively cheap we're inclined to spend it more loosely as well. But if they ever came to visit me, they'd think paying >$10000/m^2 for an apartment is absurdity itself.
Not really, space may be infinite but as far as we know there's a finite amount of energy which by E=mc^2 means a finite amount of mass and since there's a lower bound on the mass of a star and stars to form a galaxy the number of galaxies must be finite.
And still it boils down to us giving it task and the computer executing it, once it's done it shuts down. What do you do to build an AI that doesn't have any particular purpose, just a general curiosity for life? What do you do to create a sense of self-awareness and an AI that doesn't want to be terminated? Computers are incredible at executing tasks people give it, but it doesn't have a self. It doesn't do anything by itself for itself because it wants to do it. But since we have no clue what makes us tick, I don't suppose there's much chance we can teach an AI.
Unix (Linux) is about as far from a monoculture as you can get while still remaining reasonably compatible between distributions, and it was built with security in mind.
It was designed from scratch to be a multi-user system, which is neat and took Microsoft at least until UAC in 2006 to really implement. On the other hand Microsoft is the one who had a fleet of PCs that needed managing and created AD, which is the bread and butter of most corporate networks. That you can ssh in and run scripts isn't even close, I know there are third party tools to mimic some of it but there it's Microsoft that has the native advantage. And you can lock it way more down than the defaults.
In the end, even when you work with sensitive or critical information it's about getting the job done. And here's the real deal with how it works most place. Say 100 admins choose Windows, 99 do fine and one is hit by lightning. And 100 admins choose Linux, 99 get the evil eye and one is a hero for dodging lightning. Who wins? Usually the Windows admins where shit didn't hit the fan, because the happy Windows users outnumber the miserable Linux users. Those who got pwned aren't enough to swing the overall mood.
Well, I'm not sure I agree. The wikipedia definition:
Virtual Reality (VR), sometimes referred to as immersive multimedia, is a computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds.
I think some limited forms of "simulated physical presence" is possible here in situations where you're not free to move, but the world appears to move around you, for example you're on a roller coaster ride. Granted that is somewhat like what you could do with 3D IMAX, but the goggles means you get full 360 degree experience as if you were the only one there, you can't break the illusion by looking at the people next to you. Being on the back of a giant bird like they show in the demo as well. Here's the Navy in a parachute VR simulator, you could probably get the tandem jump experience. What you don't get is control, you can't ride the bird or direct the parachute because it's a movie. You're on a scripted experience that must be exactly the same each run, it could still be pretty cool though.
P.S. Actual 3D movies with screen changes would probably be quite disturbing, it's one thing to flip from angle to angle and location to location on a 2D/3D screen, either you have to do it very differently or it's like getting randomly teleported around constantly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing that every job and every employer has their less than stellar moments, that's what they're paying you for. It's another thing to run into a career dead end where your skills aren't really in demand and you're either unemployed, flipping fries because you can't get a relevant job or clinging to a dead end job because the institutional knowledge you have is the only thing keeping you employed. Of course a lot of that is random chance for better or for worse, you'll never who will or won't hire you or if the shifting winds of the market will suddenly leave you without a job. But a lot of it also conscious choice, for example I once left a job primarily because I felt I was becoming too specialized in a particular tool. I felt that if I wanted to stay easily employable, I'd have to diversify. I couldn't have gotten the job I have today if I'd stayed that path.
Another example is that really through no fault of my own I had to swap employers several times in a relatively short amount of time, I know I could explain it well in an interview but it raises flags if you're just glancing through my CV. So now I'm planning to stay with my current employer to build credibility that I can commit and won't just head for greener pastures in less than a year. That is quite deliberate management of my career and I'm actively aware that it's not what I know I know that matters, it's what I can convince others I know. For example in my last job part of the reason they hired me was certifications, I didn't need those to do the job but they turned out to be very helpful in showing that I could.
I think your answer is a little simplistic, continuing a coding career might seem a good idea today. But what's coming down river, is it heavy rapids and a waterfall around the next bend? That's what he's asking. It might be okay to become a truck driver today. It might be a lot less nice in 20 years if your job has been taken over by autonomous cars and you got no marketable skills anymore. Personally I wouldn't worry too much about it, good coders will be in demand. But you might want to set your wage expectations correctly, it might not be way to earn the fattest paychecks as a 50-60 year old.
Artificially scarcity implies that somebody is regulating the supply and could flood the market, which is clearly impossible with Bitcoin so it's more like scarcity by design but equal for everyone. While there might be other good reasons not to invest in Bitcoin it simply doesn't have this risk, that's more of a risk with regular cash where they could print more at any time.
2933 feet, 4 inches per second. Exactly. 15 MPH = 22 FPS.
You're probably the kind of guy who translates "I ran a mile yesterday" to "I ran 1609 meters yesterday", it's theoretically correct but in practice probably silly and wrong unless it was a one mile run at a race track. If it was a jogging trip it was an approximation and could just as easily be 1500 meters or 1700 meters, you're over-specifying the precision. In this case 3000 fps is the same level of approximation as 2000 MPH, which is actually much less misleading.
They're not a common carrier, they got something in many ways better: USC 17512. Being an ISP is under section (a):
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the providerâ(TM)s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if -
(1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;
(2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;
(3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person;
(4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and
(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
Notice anything in particular missing from this section? No DMCA notice, that only applies to (b) Caching, (c) Hosting and (d) Searching. They can send all those DMCA notices to /dev/null and it's legally kosher and they got full immunity. I expect Cox Communications will have this case thrown out quickly assuming they have a competent lawyer.
With every new piece of news I am further dismayed with our failure as a species. I can't shake the nagging sensation that we deserve to become extinct.
By finding a ridiculously complex and expensive answer to a relatively simple problem? If you settled yourself way, way out in the wilderness you probably didn't expect Internet over fiber, my guess is that satellite TV and Internet is probably better than what they had. But hey, if you have the trillions of dollars to put it on the Moon, go right ahead. I kind of see why that wouldn't be the case though...
Even when we learned cursive, it was more about writing "pretty" with nice, flowing curves than writing efficiently. If they wanted that, they'd teach us stenography. Kind of the grade school version of learning Latin, high degree of sophistication but of little practical value anymore. Typing with ease on the other hand is valuable both to concentrate on the actual task instead of the typing and because good typing skills + auto complete lets you use long, sane names and verbose comments with very little extra effort. Second to the developers who code like they paid by the line I hate the ones who code like they get docked in pay per letter used almost equally much.
I think the answer to that one is "all over the map". Certain aspects of open source are done with excessive attention to niche functionality because there's either funding or the kind of geeky details that have nerds jumping all over it to implement. Other features, particularly features you'd use if you're a... less than tech-savvy user, tend to be ignored. Obligatory XKCD. On the bright side, it's not like code actually rots so the resource problem can be rephrased as how quickly does the environment change with new hardware and languages and libraries and standards and protocols and so on. Not to mention input paradigms like multi-touch versus keyboard and mouse. Eventually it has to slow down. PCIe has existed longer than any of the standards that preceded it. USB has lasted longer than than the standards that preceded it. H.264 has lasted longer than any of the standards that preceded it. Now we've got computers that can fit into the palm of our hands, how much smaller and different could they get? I guess sci-fi isn't out of ideas yet but if keyboard and mouse has gotten us through the last 30 years I expect touch to last longer and what follows touch even longer.
Another perspective is simply considering if the users' needs are going to rise infinitely, which I suppose is a special case of the above. Just because Photoshop continues to add features doesn't mean that people need photo editing of infinite complexity. It might simply be that once you've reached a certain level of functionality open source is good enough for most people on a fairly permanent basis. I know at least a few tools that I more or less consider "done", like just recently I installed Babaschess which was last updated in 2007, it's abandoned yet fully functional. I have QuickPar installed, which hasn't been updated since 2004 yet I also consider "done". With open source people like to fiddle with it but there as well there's software which has been essentially unchanged for years. The pace might be glacial at times but ultimately I think open source will win out. Just look at Linux/BSD, Windows is the only one with a homegrown kernel and I suspect that's mostly history. I doubt Microsoft would start writing another kernel from scratch today.
AMD has spend a lot of time and money building low power SoCs. Tablets use low-power SoCs. That they can't make money in that market is a pretty clear admission they've bet on the wrong horse. High end desktops and servers died with the FX line and you know their laptop line is in trouble when they have to advertise this: Introducing mobile systems with AMD's highest performing APUs, exclusively at Best Buy. It can't be long until they're waving the white flag and pulling out of mainstream x86 processors altogether, they're losing on all fronts. They got lucky in "graphics" for a while with AMD card being far superior for cryptocurrency mining, but that's over and nVidia is now selling as many graphics chips as AMD does total, including the APUs. I expect the Q4 numbers to be worse as nVidia launched the GTX 980/970 and AMD isn't due for a new production until 2015. What's carrying AMD is now the console business, if they didn't have that to prop up volume they'd be done for. The way things are going they need to find money in the ARM business and fast.
But it sounds like Apple was bankrolling GT for the factory. which means they negotiated some kind of investment budget. Apple probably went through the list, found what sounds like excesses and asked GT if all this was really necessary or if it could be done cheaper. Apparently GT failed to justify the cost, so it was stricken from the final budget. When shit hit the fan it might have been too late to start redesigning and they were already behind schedule and budget with botched batches, GT might not have had the financial muscle to fix it and Apple might be concerned about throwing good money after bad. After all, this is how most terrible investment decisions are made, we're already $500 million down the hole so we need to spend a hundred more to finish it. Then we're already $600 million down the hole so we need to spend a hundred more to finish it and so on. Apple had a reasonable plan B by sticking with Gorilla Glass so they weren't pot commited as they'd say in poker.
Remember, just because GT can point to this and say that's why it failed doesn't mean it'd be a success otherwise as they might have stumbled on the next hurdle too. After all, if the product that did come out okay was that great I'm sure Apple would have been more willing to see it through too, unless they decided it was cheaper to let GT fail and pick up the pieces. I really doubt it's as easy as Apple buying GT's assets, installing a few UPSes in the factory and they're ready to go for the iPhone 6s. Like they say, production at this scale had never been attempted before which generally means you have to expect the unexpected. GT seems to have bet everything on things going according to plan, they gambled and lost. It's pretty cheap to try blaming Apple for their own botched execution, they're a business and don't just throw money around. If they failed to get sufficient investment that's nobody but GT's fault.
The whole idea is stupid. What governments should of course be considering instead, if they find biased internet searches so troubling, is to create a government body that provides the same service upon a completely neutral basis.
"Neutral", seriously you want a government imposed Pravda? Or are you just trying to set up such an absurd left wing straw man to get everyone on Google's side? What the EU is generally against is bundling products and services because it hampers competition and creates vertical collusion and hidden costs. Say you buy a car only to find they use IP, warranty terms, secret error codes and such to make sure you only use original parts, authorized service dealers, approved fuel and tires from partners and so on . There's laws curbing such behavior because it's in the consumers' interest that car companies compete on making cars, auto repair companies compete on maintenance and repair and tire manufacturers compete on making car tires. It doesn't mean the government should jump in national everything so everybody gets "fair" maintenance on their cars.
For example, during the first iPhone launch here they tried playing the "exclusive carrier" game bundled with a high monthly cost, but our consumer laws demand you can terminate such a agreement by covering their loss. So those who wanted another carrier would sign up, got their iPhone, insta-canceled, paid for the full price of the phone and was free to sign up with another carrier. That effectively killed it, pretty soon after you could buy it directly with no subscription and sign up with whoever you wanted. And that's how it should be, phone manufacturers compete on phones and carriers compete on being carriers. Companies don't want free markets where prices are low and competition intense, they want dysfunctional markets where they can make huge profits. This is very obvious in software where they want you to buy into the Microsoft stack or the Apple stack or the Google stack. If the bits and pieces were compatible and interchangeable you'd see a lot more competition and many smaller third parties providing a few parts. Bunding is a way for megacorporations to make sure only megacorporations compete.
Instant Godwin, but should Holocaust deniers have the right to demand that Adolf Hitler be disassociated from those "lies"? There's no objective standard of what is true, much less what is current, balanced and relevant information so in truth you ask Google to play oracle. They've found lots of pages mentioning Adolf Hitler and Holocaust together, so they return what they found. They've never done any primary research in the matter, all they have is an objection that it's not true. Should Google then become legally liable if they ignore the protest and keep returning Holocaust-related results? I mean you're holding Google to a higher standard than the sites they're indexing, they can spew out crap on the Internet without fact-checking but if Google collects statistics then they have to determine the truthiness of it. It only works because Google is a megacorporation and the only reason they don't protest harder is probably because it blocks out the competition. Setting up a server to spider the Internet? Easy. Dealing with a zillion more-or-less valid claims to remove information? Massive money sink, great to kill any start-up.
"But it's to protect the children!" Bullshit, try shutting down the child traffickers accounts on facebook and ban advertising for foster carers for financial incentives - in fact, ban financial incentives for looking after other peoples' kids and instead try helping the families instead of making shit up about them. The best place for a child is with the family he was born into, NO EXCEPTIONS. If his entire family is dead, THEN you can talk about adoption, otherwise it's not adoption, it's trafficking.
No exceptions? Have you any idea how bad violence, sexual abuse, neglect and so on can get? In the worst cases, children die. Foster parents are paid because they tend to get deeply traumatized kids with behavioral problems who need lots of care and therapy. The alternative is often institutions because leaving them with the parents was not an option. You rarely if ever get paid for adopting healthy, normal children because there's many childless couples that'll do that job for free.
Comparing the U.S. the little toy countries in Europe is silly. They are about the size of one of our states. It is much easier given their pop. density to keep their little toy grids up and running.
The countries with lower population density in Europe has more stable power supplies. The countries with higher population density also have more stable power supplies. Those "toy" networks put together supply more than twice the US population wtih power. At least with ISPs the Chewbacca defense could say the US has more long haul domestic traffic, when it comes to the power grid....what? Snip all the interstate lines then and one state will be the size of one EU country and supply its own population and US power supply will be great. That's what you're saying, because you built one big network it must be crap. And it has to be crap, because...?
LTO-9 goes to 25TB/cart, LTO-10 goes to 48TB. Already announced.
As "announced" as Intel's roadmaps saying they'll reach 5nm or whatever, near as I can tell no LTO-7 or LTO-8 drives exist much less LTO-9 or LTO-10 and usually there's 2-3 years between generations so this is guesswork for 2020-2025 or so.
But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.
I've got school stuff older than that, copied from one generation of drives to the next since the 1980s without ever needing a tape drive. Most data is lost because there's not enough redundancy and integrity checking, a private backup cloud makes total sense to me just add another node and it'll sync up another perfect copy. Doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is, as long as there's enough of them and it gets replaced in a timely fashion. Assuming that takes care of physical and geographical redundancy, you're left with misconfiguration, internal or external malice.
True, it's possible to make deleting disk backups easy. It's also possible to make it almost as hard as deleting tape backups by using a third party, sign off procedures and such. The only time you gain a significant advantage with tape is if you got a human in the process as an air gap defense, if you got a tape robot - which is what you want for a large, automated system - then theoretically whoever could hack your disk backup server could just as easily hack your tape robot server and instruct it to wipe all the tapes. Unless you use WORM media, but I don't think many do unless they absolutely must for legal compliance since you can't recycle tapes.
Even if something is irreplaceable it doesn't mean it's of infinite worth. A one-way file transfer gateway to a backup server in a mountain bunker might be enough, even if it's stored on a R/W disk. At least it starts competing with other far out possibilities like the hacker /sysadmin disabling or encrypting your backups until one day you wake up to "Your data is locked, pay me $$$ or go fish" or worse "Thanks for laying me off here's the letters F and U" only to discover the backups are useless. And I don't mean just an occasional restore test, if you're that paranoid you should also verify that what's on your WORM drives is what you so desperately need bullet proof backup of.
Ultimately the more exotic a technology gets, the less find it worth it which can lead to a negative loop where the lesser technology wins out anyway. I don't think tape will die but it can become more specialized, like companies don't having their own tape drives they just send encrypted backups to companies specializing in disaster recovery for when everything else has been nuked and just run the risk that the day-to-day operations are well enough secured by disk backup. Losing a day's worth of work is expensive, but also not fatal to most businesses.
For a laptop I see it but for a desktop I clearly prefer small SSD+big HDD for predictable performance and flexibility. Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task. You get really cheap, slow 4+ TB drives that can't be beat on GB/$. Once I excluded that data, I found a 128GB SSD was slightly cramped and 256GB plentiful, I just checked and I'm using 180GB now but could easily get it down to 110GB if I wanted. I really don't have more data where an SSD makes sense.
Then again with Netflix, Spotify etc. I see a lot of people going very lightweight, with Steam it's pretty easy to nuke a game you haven't used in a while to free up space so I guess the trend is towards SSD being enough with hybrids as a temporary intermediate. Even on torrents download, watch and delete seems to be a trend instead of trying to archive the Internet. Some do, of course because they're pack rats like me. But I did clear out 5TB of content that I figured I'd definitively not watch again and some I guess I never watched at all, just started and got bored thinking I might return some day. The only content I need to keep is the stuff I've made myself.
My first computer stored data on audio tape! (...) I don't think we're beating that unless someone here is old enough to have used core memory or fluid delay lines.
Commodore 64 or similar right? Heck, I did that and I don't think that's anything special here on /. it's 80s tech. Now let me get my dad in here so he can tell you all about vacuum tube computers, you kids and your fancy schmanzy transistors. In other words, I think you're solidly beat.
Considering that 30%~ of the world are subsistence farmers, and 40~%+ are involved in farming I am not surprised. I highly doubt that Sub-Saharan Africa should be worrying about the myth of the digital divide for most of the people there. Or the people that don't use money in central America. I mean 50% of the world eats with their hands. 1st world People have weird priorities sometimes. I hope this group isn't getting any donated money.
So were my grandparents, education precedes change. If you formulate it like "What good is Internet going to do for a subsistence farmer?" the answer is not much. Heck, you can say the same about literacy. If you formulate it like "How can we teach you more valuable skills than being a subsistence farmer?" then Internet is a great tool. Industrialized agriculture can easily grow a few extra tons of rice and beans, put them on a container ship and ship to Africa but they can't afford it. Internationally they operate with two limits at $1.25/day and $2/day at purchasing power parity, which generally means even less nominally in poorer countries. So the question is, if they work all day can they do something worth $2 to me? If so can they can stop working as subsistence farmers, work for us and buy their food.
Of course you can't expect much, they'll probably make Indian workers seem skilled by comparison. The language they know is probably not English. But at least they got a chance of tapping into a huge market where there's a lot of people who from their perspective have a lot of money. And very often there's this one guy who speaks English who can translate and sublet to others, that's how outsourcing to India works. I know that's how many migrant workers do it too, one team/work leader that speaks English most of the rest need translators. It gets the job done, they key is just getting on the lowest level of the ladder where learning more means earning more. The rest will work itself out.
I guess it's some kind of meta-game, the same way every forum attract trolls every game attract cheaters. Even playing free recreational chess, no prizes, no loot, nothing but a meaningless, unofficial ranking you run into people who set up a bot for shits and giggles. Then again it's better than the people who play games like a job, the goal is not to have fun it's to grind so you can reach the next level for more of almost the same. And with "Freemium" you can take the addicts' money too, not just their life.
Good luck sneaking up on a robot with 360 degree sensors and flipping a switch that's probably behind a locked panel when it's in combat mode. Or give commands to a robot that only takes digitally signed orders with a chain of trust all the way to a root key deep in a vault somewhere in the US, verified in hardware and tamper-proofed so you'll with 99.999% probability will break it before you can circumvent the signature validation. And even then they probably have unique single use kill codes to stop a malfunctioning robot. Assuming it won't just blow itself up rather than be captured, at least the essential bits. Sure you can take the physical parts like guns and fire manually, but I doubt you'll ever get much working software and without that you're still a man against a robot army that's totally indifferent to both your and their losses.
I have a high six-figure income, and I've money in the bank. I'm not a "1%er" but I'm up there with the rest...
If I recall correctly, any six-figure salary makes you a 0,1%er globally. It doesn't really show until you travel but then it's just weird, like people making less in a year than you make in a week. It's no wonder they like tourists or our money anyway, to them it seems we have insane amounts and because it's relatively cheap we're inclined to spend it more loosely as well. But if they ever came to visit me, they'd think paying >$10000/m^2 for an apartment is absurdity itself.
Not really, space may be infinite but as far as we know there's a finite amount of energy which by E=mc^2 means a finite amount of mass and since there's a lower bound on the mass of a star and stars to form a galaxy the number of galaxies must be finite.
And still it boils down to us giving it task and the computer executing it, once it's done it shuts down. What do you do to build an AI that doesn't have any particular purpose, just a general curiosity for life? What do you do to create a sense of self-awareness and an AI that doesn't want to be terminated? Computers are incredible at executing tasks people give it, but it doesn't have a self. It doesn't do anything by itself for itself because it wants to do it. But since we have no clue what makes us tick, I don't suppose there's much chance we can teach an AI.
Unix (Linux) is about as far from a monoculture as you can get while still remaining reasonably compatible between distributions, and it was built with security in mind.
It was designed from scratch to be a multi-user system, which is neat and took Microsoft at least until UAC in 2006 to really implement. On the other hand Microsoft is the one who had a fleet of PCs that needed managing and created AD, which is the bread and butter of most corporate networks. That you can ssh in and run scripts isn't even close, I know there are third party tools to mimic some of it but there it's Microsoft that has the native advantage. And you can lock it way more down than the defaults.
In the end, even when you work with sensitive or critical information it's about getting the job done. And here's the real deal with how it works most place. Say 100 admins choose Windows, 99 do fine and one is hit by lightning. And 100 admins choose Linux, 99 get the evil eye and one is a hero for dodging lightning. Who wins? Usually the Windows admins where shit didn't hit the fan, because the happy Windows users outnumber the miserable Linux users. Those who got pwned aren't enough to swing the overall mood.
Well, I'm not sure I agree. The wikipedia definition:
Virtual Reality (VR), sometimes referred to as immersive multimedia, is a computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world or imagined worlds.
I think some limited forms of "simulated physical presence" is possible here in situations where you're not free to move, but the world appears to move around you, for example you're on a roller coaster ride. Granted that is somewhat like what you could do with 3D IMAX, but the goggles means you get full 360 degree experience as if you were the only one there, you can't break the illusion by looking at the people next to you. Being on the back of a giant bird like they show in the demo as well. Here's the Navy in a parachute VR simulator, you could probably get the tandem jump experience. What you don't get is control, you can't ride the bird or direct the parachute because it's a movie. You're on a scripted experience that must be exactly the same each run, it could still be pretty cool though.
P.S. Actual 3D movies with screen changes would probably be quite disturbing, it's one thing to flip from angle to angle and location to location on a 2D/3D screen, either you have to do it very differently or it's like getting randomly teleported around constantly.