You are currently modded +4 Insightful for having claimed, essentially, that the HST repair and upgrade missions could have all been done by unmanned systems. I could have modded you as you deserve. I could just ask for a citation - you're making an extraordinary claim there and you really do deserve to have to back it up or retract it. Instead, I'm taking a couple of months vacation from Slashdot
Good, because you're putting words in his mouth. I could do math with pen and paper, without computers and calculators and my answers would at least theoretically be just as correct but it wouldn't be cost-efficient at all. It's an apples and oranges comparison but Hubble cost:
From its original total cost estimate of about US$400 million, the telescope had by now cost over $2.5 billion to construct. Hubble's cumulative costs up to this day are estimated to be several times higher still, roughly US$10 billion as of 2010.
Space Shuttle program cost:
The total cost of the actual 30-year service life of the shuttle program through 2011, adjusted for inflation, was $196 billion. The exact breakdown into non-recurring and recurring costs is not available, but, according to NASA, the average cost to launch a Space Shuttle as of 2011 was about $450 million per mission.
The numbers we'd really like to know though is that out of those $2.5 billion to design and construct, how much would it cost to just make a new Hubble and launch it. Just the five servicing missions (confusingly named 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 4) alone at $450 million each - that's aggregate, not marginal cost though - would be $2.25 billion. It is certainly possible to argue that science would have progressed further without the Shuttle program, all things considered.
There are certain ways ACID compliance is important and certain ways it is not, in fact sometimes it's a hinderance. In particular the following:
One patient's records must be consistent only with itself, you don't need the whole patient table to be consistent. It's a problem because you do need to have cross-table consistency (patients, episodes, diagnosises, treatments, medications and so on) which can lead to locking issues while they're really millions of records living in parallel. Really I'd like to treat them as millions of microtables that happen to share the same structure but never cross lock.
Perhaps in a hospital you can do synchronization at a database level but for an exchange or common journal you have to assume records come in asynchroneously, your general physician might finish some paperwork while you're in emergency care at the same time as a lab result you've waited a week for comes in. The actual ordering they're applied in doesn't matter, there must be rules so (A,B,C), (C,A,B) and (B,C,A) all end up the same result. This means you can relax the hard synchronization of for example a bank account where it is essential that the transactions are applied in order and rejected if you're overdrawing your account, but that's hard in SQL.
That doesn't just apply to the ordering of writes but also querying. If two people at different hospitals tries to pull up your medical records it is important they're not corrupt but it's not essential that an update being distributed is presented to both or none. In fact, for essential robustness they should be able to continue working independently if the connection is broken and when the connection is restored the records are reconciled. That kind of shard and merge is generally a problem relational databases don't handle while the distributed synchronization is rather essential and implicit in NoSQL solutions.
There's still a >10:1 cost difference between 4TB HDDs and 1TB SSDs and SSD prices are not dropping that fast. Current SSDs are already on the bleeding edge of processing technology with 16nm MLC so there's fairly limited density increases and big durability issues ahead. I guess the wildcard is 3D NAND, but much like going multicore for CPUs it's a substitute. However, they are taking over all normal end user uses in cell phones and tables and laptops, it's just the big bulk storage left.
I think Apple is dropping the ball by not even offering a smaller sized iPhone.
Unfortunately the whole market has leaped off the deep end on this one with "small" models bigger than the old flagships like for example the LG G2 Mini is 4.7", Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is 4.6" and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini and HTC One Mini 2 are both 4.5" - just as big as the new iPhone. I won't even comment on the 5" LG G3 Mini, as opposed to the full 5.5" version. In fact Apple is the only one who calls a <5" screen normal anymore. Obviously with a smaller screen and smaller phone you can't put the biggest, fastest and most features in it but I still find it disappointing that nobody takes the small sized phones seriously. I'm consider the Z3 Compact as it seems to be a decent compromise, but will wait until the reviews are out.
Good for you. Mine is all e-bank and I tend to like it that way. Same with most the e-tailers I shop at, the intersection with physical retailers is slim. How do you visit Gmail or Facebook? Speaking of which, people often have a different third party between them and whoever they're communicating with. You could always pretend it's not signed you know, what would you do? Send an email, asking them if that's their real certificate? Try to verify it through your "web of trust", which includes a bunch of dimwits who'll make the CAs look good? No, I wouldn't trust them for real end-to-end encryption but it's mostly good enough.
CAs takes the fradulent redirect threat down, but they could always just hack your computer and keylog everything, they could hack the bank, it could be an inside job, they could social engineer you into thinking this is a legitimate certificate update or they could social engineer the bank into thinking you've made a new certificate or whatever. It doesn't matter how many inches of steel the front door is if the rest is plywood and glass windows. Direct out of band secure exchange is of course technically the best, but also the most inconvenient. I guess you should also swap giant OTPs, wouldn't want to trust AES right?
There's also that despite their public funding, which means they could give their content away for free, then instead try to leverage it for profit as hard as they can.
Tax some (UK population) and give benefits to others (rest of the world) is not socialism, generally the rule is everybody pays and everybody gets. If the former doesn't hold, you can't expect the latter to hold either so I perfectly understand BBC Worldwide charging for their content.
Your apparent point, that ISP rates are proportional to population density, is also wrong. Remote areas of Finland and Sweden have very low population density, yet still have more bandwidth and better prices than some large American cities.
Norway here, I just have to gloat a little, since our numbers just spiked (Norwegian) last quarter.
US population density: 32.43 pop./km^2 Norway population density: 15.6 pop./km^2 80,1% of households have fixed broadband Mean speed: 23.1 Mbit/s Median speed: 17.8 Mbit/s No caps on fixed broadband
A few select areas already have gigabit, more are rolling out as new fiber nodes are ready while the old are mostly 100 Mbit/s. Actually one company has said they'll deliver 10 gigabit if anyone is willing to pay ($2300/month) but nobody's taken them up on that offer. If I won big in the lottery that'd be on my list though, lol.
I've been stuck with my 4 core cpu for the last 6-7 years now and the only thing that has improved my rendering is the NVIDIA GPUs
6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.
I remember 8-16 cores being announced YEARS ago, but they never ever appeared in regular desktop computers
No, because of a couple things: 1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get. 2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices. 3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon. 4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...
You should really do technical writing or PR on the side, depending on which is true.
I wish I could get around to ever documenting anything, usually I'm too busy making systems work in an accurate, succinct and understandable way. Technical writing can only unfuck so much of a convoluted mess and I definitively lack the patience and bullshit skills for public relations.
As I understand it Bukkit is a mod licensed under the GPL. The Minecraft server is proprietary. They don't share any code, so individually they're not derivates of anything. CraftBukkit combines the server code with the mod code. This is illegal both ways - the server license doesn't let you link to Bukkit, the Bukkit license doesn't let you link to the proprietary server. Mojang could have shut down CraftBukkit any time they wanted to. But so can any of the Bukkit developers, because it's not in compliance with the GPL either. In this case it looks like neither side has seen in their interest to shut this down - until now.
They're not using the DMCA against the server. They're not claiming they have any legal rights to the server. What they are doing is shutting down any mod or add-on that depends on illegal linking and saying the only way to make this legally compliant is if Minecraft decides to GPL their source code. If they don't all these derivates will remain illegal and the copyright will now be enforced. They're hoping that the Minecraft community has become so dependent on these illegal derivates that Mojave will cave and release the code. Yes, he is using the code for extortion by first writing the code knowing it would be used in violation of copyright and then using copyright law as leverage once it's popular. But this is all the legal kind, you can never be charged for threatening to enforce the law.
I see comment after comment from people who are talking out of their back ends, or perhaps their eyes suck... (...) True 4k is amazing, it blows 1080p out of the water. I've seen a similar display as you did, but this was on a 70" 1080p next to a 70" 4k display, from about 8 feet away, in a store.
With all due respect, if you're seeing a huge difference then I very much suspect it'd due to the actual devices, settings and algorithms rather than the resolution. I have an 3840x2160 UHD monitor and I've taken very high resolution photos (18MP) with lots of fine patterns that makes changes in detail easy to spot and scaled it to 3840x2160 as well as 1920x1080 then made a dumb pixel doubling upscale to 3840x2160 to simulate a 1080p display and a high quality upscale to simulate an upscaling UHD display and stored all three as PNGs. That should eliminate pretty much every other source of differences since it's the same screen, same mode, same settings.
When I flip back and forth between them, sitting at a natural distance to a 28" monitor clearly there's some change in detail but it was actually a bit underwhelming compared to what I was expecting. And with a monitor you sit really, really close compared to a TV, if I doubled the distance to a 56" TV the viewing angle would be the same but that would be way, way closer than I actually sit and at couch-equivalent distances I can't tell the difference at all. I guess if I had a 100"+ TV or projector screen then 4K would make sense, so for cinemas and home cinemas I'm sure it's great but your average living room just won't benefit.
That sounds low, here's a test of the iPhone 5 and at maximum power draw they killed a 6000 mWh battery in two hours meaning a power draw of ~3W. Of course that includes the screen and the whole SoC, but if you can put a 5W processor in a tablet I'm thinking 1W in a smartphone seems reasonable. P.S. My Google-fu says that <10 mW is only if the CPU is in suspend/standby mode, basically it's off and waiting for the network or user input to wake it up again. Idle but active draw seems to be more like 30-50 mW which is the target Intel would need to reach. Not Core M territory though, they'll still make Atoms for that.
It looks like Intel is making the GPU larger and more powerful with each iteration.
Well, these chips are primarily for tablets. Fanless tablets. Pretty much the exact opposite of where you'd like to do any serious computing. The CPU is these things mostly exists to support it as a presentation device. I think many people haven't realized how much Intel has moved into the GPU space though, simply because they still think of it as a CPU with integrated graphics. True, they're not competing in the high end discrete graphics cards but they're eating away at the dGPU chips that used to be in all laptops, now you just find them at the very high end. If they took their EUs, put them on a separate chip and multiplied it up to a 250W power budget I wonder how far up the totem pole they'd reach.
Well, if you look at their power distribution graphics it's now primarily screen, then CPU and then SoC. Even though Intel is improving the last two it seems that to take anything to the "next level" we need more power efficient screens.
Like when Penny was making fun of Leonard for being a cry baby during Toy Story 3. "The toys were holding hands in a furnace!" was his retort. When I went to see it in the theaters, there was audible sobbing during that scene.
It's okay, it's the 21st century and men are allowed to cry now. Wuzz.
For those who don't know, Argentina is on the brink of economic collapse yet again. Their occupying government has ruined the currency with wishful thinking as if it didn't just happen a decade or so ago. They've been trying to negotiate away all the bad debt they've run up and not everybody is letting them off the hook this time.
Actually, it is the old debt default from 2001 causing them to default now. In two rounds in 2005 and 2010 some 92% of their creditors agreed to cut 65% of their debt through new bonds - over a barrel, of course. The last 8% want all of it with full interest, but they're not getting anywhere in Argentinian courts. However, now they've gotten a ruling in a US court that Argentine can't pay interest on the new bonds without also paying them in full. Which Argentine can't, because part of the agreement with the other 92% is that nobody else will get a better deal so it would invalidate everything. They could make a backroom deal to make somebody else buy out the last 8% and swap for new bonds, but that's basically paying these guys off and setting a very, very bad precedent for later debt negotiations.
Instead they decided to play hardball back and just default, meaning those 8% get nothing - and neither do the 92% who agreed to new bonds. It's basically a giant game of chicken, who backs down first - Argentine because they want to get back on the international financial markets or will the last 8% figure 35% today is better than dreaming of getting their 100% + interest back forever. Argentine actually manages their finances quite well at the moment, being cut off from international credit means they've had to bring their budgets in balance and from the looks of it they can stay defaulted for quite some time.
Many of the systems on tanks and so on are computer controlled and if the computers stop working then it's a lot less valuable.
I'd be inclined to think most of them, even if they're not really hooked up almost anything runs on ICs these days. How much is really pure mechanical/hydraulic anymore? Forget things like navigation, communication, targetting and such, how good is a tank if the engine won't run and the gun won't fire because the IC controlling the fuel injection and barrel rotation and firing mechanism all need a 128 bit "wake-up code" from the central system?
And the central system is using full disk crypto and the key to booting the whole system is held in write-only memory with a timeout circuit. Either you need to try prying the key out with an electron microscope - and they do make anti-tampering systems for that too - or you need to rip it out and replace all of it because it'll never work for you. Either way it seems pretty simple to make a good off switch, as long as you can make a reliable enough on switch.
i was shopping for a developer company to make a public website DB thing. I was getting all sort of stupid responses. One firm bragged that they use "waterfall", which means they would sign on to do $X worth of work but would not agree to deliverables because it's fluid and agile. is this what the industry's like? lactarded.
On the other hand, I know many companies that have had huge losses on fixed bid projects because a seemingly innocent scope turned out to be a bear trap or because there's no customer incentive to ensure progress, help with clarification, dispute unspecified things such as looks or button texts or tooltips or whatever and in general avoid the most absurd and time-consuming interpretation of the requirements, not to mention all the time spent arguing over them. To compare it to the construction industry it's the difference between having a building blueprint and a few sketches to show roughly the kind of house you'd like. And then expect a fixed bid on it.
I strongly preferred time and material contracts over fixed bid projects when I was a consultant and I think my clients were generally happier about it too, basically if they figured "Hey, that's a good idea" or "Hey, I know I said X but now that I see it we should have done Y" they don't have to make a long change order process with typically inflated estimates and prices, they decide what I spend my time on but the flip side is that they only thing they can say is that they're not happy with my work and cancel my contract, there's no fixed deliverable.
I guess it's a lot harder with a big project where you can't just bail in the middle or expect someone else to take over. Besides, the government is generally not allowed to be subjective. In the private sector, if Oracle treats you like shit you can just make an executive decision to f*ck off. In the public sector you can't refuse Oracle on the next contract just because they were dicks on the last contract, you have to go with the criteria and follow the process that is to ensure your tax money isn't just funneled to their favorite partner. That's also why they can afford to be so abusive, they know this is hardly the end of government contracts in Oregon for Oracle.
A similar argument applies to biological weapons, land mines and nuclear weapons. (...) WORST of all, your naive and foolish attempts make it much harder to ban the weapons we actually CAN ban - land mines, chemical and biological warfare.
It's funny how that list changed from first to second time you said it. The countries most interested in banning biological and chemical weapons are those most heavily invested in nuclear weapons. Perhaps because nukes are pretty hard to come by while even two bit dictators like Saddam and Assad have chemical weapons. Not to mention land mines, IEDs are pretty indiscriminate if civilians happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but they're a staple of most guerrilla warfare.
My impression is that we're getting further and further away from anything like a clean war where the military on both sides come out in the open, battle it out and leave the civilians be. Even when they're not explicitly targeted it seems human shields are more common than ever and that speculating in collateral damage is actively used as a weapon of war. That's the problem with big guns, they're so good that they "force" the other side to fight you in ways where you can't use them.
I wouldnâ(TM)t expect the vast majority of people to appreciate the gravity of having every pic you ever take immediately uploaded to a third party server.
My cell phone is by far the most likely tech device I have to get broken, lost or stolen as I bring and use it almost everywhere. Pictures you take with the cell phone are the first and only copy in existence, what if you phrase "cloud" as "instant online backup", does that sound like a better idea? Yes, ideally I'd like to have them backed up on my computer instead of Apple's or Google's but very few run 24x7 boxes and sending them by email again requires a trusted third party. Unless you could integrate this all with GPG so it'd send encrypted email my home computer can pick up next time it's switched on. And hopefully avoid any attachment/mailbox size limits. But I don't know any software that does that, and the average person sure couldn't set that up. So if you don't want to lose all your photos and don't want to remember syncing all the time (because that totally happens, right?) you flip a switch and hope Apple doesn't screw it up.
I think if you actually went out and asked people, a lot of tech-inclined people use cloud sync too. It's very convenient until something like this happens.
The absolute worst situation is senior architects/designers with no practical experience, they tend to turn out beautiful, elegant masterpieces that're a nightmare to actually implement.
And that fails to actually fulfill the requirements because reality doesn't conform to their model, rather than the other way around.
If Apple or Microsoft decided they want some polorizing system like Systemd to be the new hotness in their OS offerings there's literally fuck all we could do about it.
Would that be "fuck all" as in "buy something else", "don't buy at all" or "insist on the old version"? Tanking sales tend to have a very correcting effect on for-profit companies, assuming there's competition to speak of. Sure, I can't decide what that company will do but I can't decide what that OSS project will do either and while I can theoretically fork and maintain my own version it's not really a practical possibility 99.9% of the time. If there happens to be enough people dissatisfied with the direction it's taking to make a fork that's fortunate for me but really outside my control too.
I've been watching Gnome/KDE trying to battle Windows now for the last 15 years or so and making so little progress YotLD has become the running joke around here ever since Duke Nuke'm Forever shipped. Then I look at Android which is more cathedral than bazaar and it's gone from nothing to 85% world wide market share in 6 years. And the absolutely greatest success the Linux kernel is run like anything but a bazaar, lieutenants are from military hierarchy and it has one general on top - or benevolent dictator for life if that sounds better. Sometimes picking one direction - even if it's not the absolutely best one - beats taking no direction or pulling in ten different directions. Heresy, I know.
Sure he can. He just assumes that the West will never call him on it, or that if they do it'll be a very, very clear line like the Cuban missile crisis or when Hitler invaded Poland. He could probably nuke Kiev and occupy Ukraine and I still don't think NATO would come out and declare war on their own against the second biggest nuclear force on the planet. Don't forget that it's only a defense alliance, you can't invoke it unless a member state is under attack so there'd have to be a long and ugly political process.
Besides, even though Russia is significantly weakened compared to the Cold War when they had the Soviet Union and the East Bloc I'm fairly sure China would not like a US-led invasion party occupying Russia. If they use "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic they might throw their support behind Russia and then we'd all be in very deep shit. Just like WWI spiraled out of control there's really no telling how WWIII might turn out, you can't reliably estimate the cost. And people rarely mean "must be stopped at all costs".
Godwin be damned, this comparison is relevant. I think Crimea is Hitler's Sudetenland. Ukraine would be Hitler's Czechoslovakia. If he's stupid enough to touch a NATO country, that will be his Poland and ultimately his demise. Does he know when to back down? Khrushchev did, though he cut it close. Putin might too, at least the world might hope so. But we won't really know until we really draw the line and say so far, but no further. And I have the impression Ukraine is going to get fucked over before we draw that line.
If you're being shot at by a nutcase, you call the cops. If you're being shot at by an invading army, you call the military. If you're being hacked by script kiddies, you call the cops. If you're being hacked by a foreign government, you call the military. If Iran had the military muscle I would say an attack like Stuxnet is "casus belli" for declaring war. This is NATO expanding its defence treaty to include cyber attacks, launching such attacks against one member nation is like attacking all of them. And I think all nations have some form of private-government cooperation to secure critical infrastructure, whether that's physical or digital I don't see makes the big difference. You might argue it shouldn't be hooked up to the Internet, but totally isolated networks are extremely inconvenient.
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You are currently modded +4 Insightful for having claimed, essentially, that the HST repair and upgrade missions could have all been done by unmanned systems. I could have modded you as you deserve. I could just ask for a citation - you're making an extraordinary claim there and you really do deserve to have to back it up or retract it. Instead, I'm taking a couple of months vacation from Slashdot
Good, because you're putting words in his mouth. I could do math with pen and paper, without computers and calculators and my answers would at least theoretically be just as correct but it wouldn't be cost-efficient at all. It's an apples and oranges comparison but Hubble cost:
From its original total cost estimate of about US$400 million, the telescope had by now cost over $2.5 billion to construct. Hubble's cumulative costs up to this day are estimated to be several times higher still, roughly US$10 billion as of 2010.
Space Shuttle program cost:
The total cost of the actual 30-year service life of the shuttle program through 2011, adjusted for inflation, was $196 billion. The exact breakdown into non-recurring and recurring costs is not available, but, according to NASA, the average cost to launch a Space Shuttle as of 2011 was about $450 million per mission.
The numbers we'd really like to know though is that out of those $2.5 billion to design and construct, how much would it cost to just make a new Hubble and launch it. Just the five servicing missions (confusingly named 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 4) alone at $450 million each - that's aggregate, not marginal cost though - would be $2.25 billion. It is certainly possible to argue that science would have progressed further without the Shuttle program, all things considered.
There are certain ways ACID compliance is important and certain ways it is not, in fact sometimes it's a hinderance. In particular the following:
One patient's records must be consistent only with itself, you don't need the whole patient table to be consistent. It's a problem because you do need to have cross-table consistency (patients, episodes, diagnosises, treatments, medications and so on) which can lead to locking issues while they're really millions of records living in parallel. Really I'd like to treat them as millions of microtables that happen to share the same structure but never cross lock.
Perhaps in a hospital you can do synchronization at a database level but for an exchange or common journal you have to assume records come in asynchroneously, your general physician might finish some paperwork while you're in emergency care at the same time as a lab result you've waited a week for comes in. The actual ordering they're applied in doesn't matter, there must be rules so (A,B,C), (C,A,B) and (B,C,A) all end up the same result. This means you can relax the hard synchronization of for example a bank account where it is essential that the transactions are applied in order and rejected if you're overdrawing your account, but that's hard in SQL.
That doesn't just apply to the ordering of writes but also querying. If two people at different hospitals tries to pull up your medical records it is important they're not corrupt but it's not essential that an update being distributed is presented to both or none. In fact, for essential robustness they should be able to continue working independently if the connection is broken and when the connection is restored the records are reconciled. That kind of shard and merge is generally a problem relational databases don't handle while the distributed synchronization is rather essential and implicit in NoSQL solutions.
There's still a >10:1 cost difference between 4TB HDDs and 1TB SSDs and SSD prices are not dropping that fast. Current SSDs are already on the bleeding edge of processing technology with 16nm MLC so there's fairly limited density increases and big durability issues ahead. I guess the wildcard is 3D NAND, but much like going multicore for CPUs it's a substitute. However, they are taking over all normal end user uses in cell phones and tables and laptops, it's just the big bulk storage left.
I think Apple is dropping the ball by not even offering a smaller sized iPhone.
Unfortunately the whole market has leaped off the deep end on this one with "small" models bigger than the old flagships like for example the LG G2 Mini is 4.7", Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is 4.6" and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini and HTC One Mini 2 are both 4.5" - just as big as the new iPhone. I won't even comment on the 5" LG G3 Mini, as opposed to the full 5.5" version. In fact Apple is the only one who calls a <5" screen normal anymore. Obviously with a smaller screen and smaller phone you can't put the biggest, fastest and most features in it but I still find it disappointing that nobody takes the small sized phones seriously. I'm consider the Z3 Compact as it seems to be a decent compromise, but will wait until the reviews are out.
I'd love to walk into my bank
Good for you. Mine is all e-bank and I tend to like it that way. Same with most the e-tailers I shop at, the intersection with physical retailers is slim. How do you visit Gmail or Facebook? Speaking of which, people often have a different third party between them and whoever they're communicating with. You could always pretend it's not signed you know, what would you do? Send an email, asking them if that's their real certificate? Try to verify it through your "web of trust", which includes a bunch of dimwits who'll make the CAs look good? No, I wouldn't trust them for real end-to-end encryption but it's mostly good enough.
CAs takes the fradulent redirect threat down, but they could always just hack your computer and keylog everything, they could hack the bank, it could be an inside job, they could social engineer you into thinking this is a legitimate certificate update or they could social engineer the bank into thinking you've made a new certificate or whatever. It doesn't matter how many inches of steel the front door is if the rest is plywood and glass windows. Direct out of band secure exchange is of course technically the best, but also the most inconvenient. I guess you should also swap giant OTPs, wouldn't want to trust AES right?
There's also that despite their public funding, which means they could give their content away for free, then instead try to leverage it for profit as hard as they can.
Tax some (UK population) and give benefits to others (rest of the world) is not socialism, generally the rule is everybody pays and everybody gets. If the former doesn't hold, you can't expect the latter to hold either so I perfectly understand BBC Worldwide charging for their content.
Your apparent point, that ISP rates are proportional to population density, is also wrong. Remote areas of Finland and Sweden have very low population density, yet still have more bandwidth and better prices than some large American cities.
Norway here, I just have to gloat a little, since our numbers just spiked (Norwegian) last quarter.
US population density: 32.43 pop./km^2
Norway population density: 15.6 pop./km^2
80,1% of households have fixed broadband
Mean speed: 23.1 Mbit/s
Median speed: 17.8 Mbit/s
No caps on fixed broadband
A few select areas already have gigabit, more are rolling out as new fiber nodes are ready while the old are mostly 100 Mbit/s. Actually one company has said they'll deliver 10 gigabit if anyone is willing to pay ($2300/month) but nobody's taken them up on that offer. If I won big in the lottery that'd be on my list though, lol.
I've been stuck with my 4 core cpu for the last 6-7 years now and the only thing that has improved my rendering is the NVIDIA GPUs
6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.
I remember 8-16 cores being announced YEARS ago, but they never ever appeared in regular desktop computers
No, because of a couple things:
1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get.
2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices.
3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon.
4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...
You should really do technical writing or PR on the side, depending on which is true.
I wish I could get around to ever documenting anything, usually I'm too busy making systems work in an accurate, succinct and understandable way. Technical writing can only unfuck so much of a convoluted mess and I definitively lack the patience and bullshit skills for public relations.
As I understand it Bukkit is a mod licensed under the GPL. The Minecraft server is proprietary. They don't share any code, so individually they're not derivates of anything. CraftBukkit combines the server code with the mod code. This is illegal both ways - the server license doesn't let you link to Bukkit, the Bukkit license doesn't let you link to the proprietary server. Mojang could have shut down CraftBukkit any time they wanted to. But so can any of the Bukkit developers, because it's not in compliance with the GPL either. In this case it looks like neither side has seen in their interest to shut this down - until now.
They're not using the DMCA against the server. They're not claiming they have any legal rights to the server. What they are doing is shutting down any mod or add-on that depends on illegal linking and saying the only way to make this legally compliant is if Minecraft decides to GPL their source code. If they don't all these derivates will remain illegal and the copyright will now be enforced. They're hoping that the Minecraft community has become so dependent on these illegal derivates that Mojave will cave and release the code. Yes, he is using the code for extortion by first writing the code knowing it would be used in violation of copyright and then using copyright law as leverage once it's popular. But this is all the legal kind, you can never be charged for threatening to enforce the law.
I see comment after comment from people who are talking out of their back ends, or perhaps their eyes suck... (...) True 4k is amazing, it blows 1080p out of the water. I've seen a similar display as you did, but this was on a 70" 1080p next to a 70" 4k display, from about 8 feet away, in a store.
With all due respect, if you're seeing a huge difference then I very much suspect it'd due to the actual devices, settings and algorithms rather than the resolution. I have an 3840x2160 UHD monitor and I've taken very high resolution photos (18MP) with lots of fine patterns that makes changes in detail easy to spot and scaled it to 3840x2160 as well as 1920x1080 then made a dumb pixel doubling upscale to 3840x2160 to simulate a 1080p display and a high quality upscale to simulate an upscaling UHD display and stored all three as PNGs. That should eliminate pretty much every other source of differences since it's the same screen, same mode, same settings.
When I flip back and forth between them, sitting at a natural distance to a 28" monitor clearly there's some change in detail but it was actually a bit underwhelming compared to what I was expecting. And with a monitor you sit really, really close compared to a TV, if I doubled the distance to a 56" TV the viewing angle would be the same but that would be way, way closer than I actually sit and at couch-equivalent distances I can't tell the difference at all. I guess if I had a 100"+ TV or projector screen then 4K would make sense, so for cinemas and home cinemas I'm sure it's great but your average living room just won't benefit.
That sounds low, here's a test of the iPhone 5 and at maximum power draw they killed a 6000 mWh battery in two hours meaning a power draw of ~3W. Of course that includes the screen and the whole SoC, but if you can put a 5W processor in a tablet I'm thinking 1W in a smartphone seems reasonable. P.S. My Google-fu says that <10 mW is only if the CPU is in suspend/standby mode, basically it's off and waiting for the network or user input to wake it up again. Idle but active draw seems to be more like 30-50 mW which is the target Intel would need to reach. Not Core M territory though, they'll still make Atoms for that.
It looks like Intel is making the GPU larger and more powerful with each iteration.
Well, these chips are primarily for tablets. Fanless tablets. Pretty much the exact opposite of where you'd like to do any serious computing. The CPU is these things mostly exists to support it as a presentation device. I think many people haven't realized how much Intel has moved into the GPU space though, simply because they still think of it as a CPU with integrated graphics. True, they're not competing in the high end discrete graphics cards but they're eating away at the dGPU chips that used to be in all laptops, now you just find them at the very high end. If they took their EUs, put them on a separate chip and multiplied it up to a 250W power budget I wonder how far up the totem pole they'd reach.
Well, if you look at their power distribution graphics it's now primarily screen, then CPU and then SoC. Even though Intel is improving the last two it seems that to take anything to the "next level" we need more power efficient screens.
Like when Penny was making fun of Leonard for being a cry baby during Toy Story 3. "The toys were holding hands in a furnace!" was his retort. When I went to see it in the theaters, there was audible sobbing during that scene.
It's okay, it's the 21st century and men are allowed to cry now. Wuzz.
For those who don't know, Argentina is on the brink of economic collapse yet again. Their occupying government has ruined the currency with wishful thinking as if it didn't just happen a decade or so ago. They've been trying to negotiate away all the bad debt they've run up and not everybody is letting them off the hook this time.
Actually, it is the old debt default from 2001 causing them to default now. In two rounds in 2005 and 2010 some 92% of their creditors agreed to cut 65% of their debt through new bonds - over a barrel, of course. The last 8% want all of it with full interest, but they're not getting anywhere in Argentinian courts. However, now they've gotten a ruling in a US court that Argentine can't pay interest on the new bonds without also paying them in full. Which Argentine can't, because part of the agreement with the other 92% is that nobody else will get a better deal so it would invalidate everything. They could make a backroom deal to make somebody else buy out the last 8% and swap for new bonds, but that's basically paying these guys off and setting a very, very bad precedent for later debt negotiations.
Instead they decided to play hardball back and just default, meaning those 8% get nothing - and neither do the 92% who agreed to new bonds. It's basically a giant game of chicken, who backs down first - Argentine because they want to get back on the international financial markets or will the last 8% figure 35% today is better than dreaming of getting their 100% + interest back forever. Argentine actually manages their finances quite well at the moment, being cut off from international credit means they've had to bring their budgets in balance and from the looks of it they can stay defaulted for quite some time.
Many of the systems on tanks and so on are computer controlled and if the computers stop working then it's a lot less valuable.
I'd be inclined to think most of them, even if they're not really hooked up almost anything runs on ICs these days. How much is really pure mechanical/hydraulic anymore? Forget things like navigation, communication, targetting and such, how good is a tank if the engine won't run and the gun won't fire because the IC controlling the fuel injection and barrel rotation and firing mechanism all need a 128 bit "wake-up code" from the central system?
And the central system is using full disk crypto and the key to booting the whole system is held in write-only memory with a timeout circuit. Either you need to try prying the key out with an electron microscope - and they do make anti-tampering systems for that too - or you need to rip it out and replace all of it because it'll never work for you. Either way it seems pretty simple to make a good off switch, as long as you can make a reliable enough on switch.
i was shopping for a developer company to make a public website DB thing. I was getting all sort of stupid responses. One firm bragged that they use "waterfall", which means they would sign on to do $X worth of work but would not agree to deliverables because it's fluid and agile. is this what the industry's like? lactarded.
On the other hand, I know many companies that have had huge losses on fixed bid projects because a seemingly innocent scope turned out to be a bear trap or because there's no customer incentive to ensure progress, help with clarification, dispute unspecified things such as looks or button texts or tooltips or whatever and in general avoid the most absurd and time-consuming interpretation of the requirements, not to mention all the time spent arguing over them. To compare it to the construction industry it's the difference between having a building blueprint and a few sketches to show roughly the kind of house you'd like. And then expect a fixed bid on it.
I strongly preferred time and material contracts over fixed bid projects when I was a consultant and I think my clients were generally happier about it too, basically if they figured "Hey, that's a good idea" or "Hey, I know I said X but now that I see it we should have done Y" they don't have to make a long change order process with typically inflated estimates and prices, they decide what I spend my time on but the flip side is that they only thing they can say is that they're not happy with my work and cancel my contract, there's no fixed deliverable.
I guess it's a lot harder with a big project where you can't just bail in the middle or expect someone else to take over. Besides, the government is generally not allowed to be subjective. In the private sector, if Oracle treats you like shit you can just make an executive decision to f*ck off. In the public sector you can't refuse Oracle on the next contract just because they were dicks on the last contract, you have to go with the criteria and follow the process that is to ensure your tax money isn't just funneled to their favorite partner. That's also why they can afford to be so abusive, they know this is hardly the end of government contracts in Oregon for Oracle.
A similar argument applies to biological weapons, land mines and nuclear weapons. (...) WORST of all, your naive and foolish attempts make it much harder to ban the weapons we actually CAN ban - land mines, chemical and biological warfare.
It's funny how that list changed from first to second time you said it. The countries most interested in banning biological and chemical weapons are those most heavily invested in nuclear weapons. Perhaps because nukes are pretty hard to come by while even two bit dictators like Saddam and Assad have chemical weapons. Not to mention land mines, IEDs are pretty indiscriminate if civilians happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time but they're a staple of most guerrilla warfare.
My impression is that we're getting further and further away from anything like a clean war where the military on both sides come out in the open, battle it out and leave the civilians be. Even when they're not explicitly targeted it seems human shields are more common than ever and that speculating in collateral damage is actively used as a weapon of war. That's the problem with big guns, they're so good that they "force" the other side to fight you in ways where you can't use them.
I wouldnâ(TM)t expect the vast majority of people to appreciate the gravity of having every pic you ever take immediately uploaded to a third party server.
My cell phone is by far the most likely tech device I have to get broken, lost or stolen as I bring and use it almost everywhere. Pictures you take with the cell phone are the first and only copy in existence, what if you phrase "cloud" as "instant online backup", does that sound like a better idea? Yes, ideally I'd like to have them backed up on my computer instead of Apple's or Google's but very few run 24x7 boxes and sending them by email again requires a trusted third party. Unless you could integrate this all with GPG so it'd send encrypted email my home computer can pick up next time it's switched on. And hopefully avoid any attachment/mailbox size limits. But I don't know any software that does that, and the average person sure couldn't set that up. So if you don't want to lose all your photos and don't want to remember syncing all the time (because that totally happens, right?) you flip a switch and hope Apple doesn't screw it up.
I think if you actually went out and asked people, a lot of tech-inclined people use cloud sync too. It's very convenient until something like this happens.
So Earth's not hot enough for you? Guess we need more global (bed)warming.
The absolute worst situation is senior architects/designers with no practical experience, they tend to turn out beautiful, elegant masterpieces that're a nightmare to actually implement.
And that fails to actually fulfill the requirements because reality doesn't conform to their model, rather than the other way around.
If Apple or Microsoft decided they want some polorizing system like Systemd to be the new hotness in their OS offerings there's literally fuck all we could do about it.
Would that be "fuck all" as in "buy something else", "don't buy at all" or "insist on the old version"? Tanking sales tend to have a very correcting effect on for-profit companies, assuming there's competition to speak of. Sure, I can't decide what that company will do but I can't decide what that OSS project will do either and while I can theoretically fork and maintain my own version it's not really a practical possibility 99.9% of the time. If there happens to be enough people dissatisfied with the direction it's taking to make a fork that's fortunate for me but really outside my control too.
I've been watching Gnome/KDE trying to battle Windows now for the last 15 years or so and making so little progress YotLD has become the running joke around here ever since Duke Nuke'm Forever shipped. Then I look at Android which is more cathedral than bazaar and it's gone from nothing to 85% world wide market share in 6 years. And the absolutely greatest success the Linux kernel is run like anything but a bazaar, lieutenants are from military hierarchy and it has one general on top - or benevolent dictator for life if that sounds better. Sometimes picking one direction - even if it's not the absolutely best one - beats taking no direction or pulling in ten different directions. Heresy, I know.
Sure he can. He just assumes that the West will never call him on it, or that if they do it'll be a very, very clear line like the Cuban missile crisis or when Hitler invaded Poland. He could probably nuke Kiev and occupy Ukraine and I still don't think NATO would come out and declare war on their own against the second biggest nuclear force on the planet. Don't forget that it's only a defense alliance, you can't invoke it unless a member state is under attack so there'd have to be a long and ugly political process.
Besides, even though Russia is significantly weakened compared to the Cold War when they had the Soviet Union and the East Bloc I'm fairly sure China would not like a US-led invasion party occupying Russia. If they use "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic they might throw their support behind Russia and then we'd all be in very deep shit. Just like WWI spiraled out of control there's really no telling how WWIII might turn out, you can't reliably estimate the cost. And people rarely mean "must be stopped at all costs".
Godwin be damned, this comparison is relevant. I think Crimea is Hitler's Sudetenland. Ukraine would be Hitler's Czechoslovakia. If he's stupid enough to touch a NATO country, that will be his Poland and ultimately his demise. Does he know when to back down? Khrushchev did, though he cut it close. Putin might too, at least the world might hope so. But we won't really know until we really draw the line and say so far, but no further. And I have the impression Ukraine is going to get fucked over before we draw that line.
If you're being shot at by a nutcase, you call the cops. If you're being shot at by an invading army, you call the military. If you're being hacked by script kiddies, you call the cops. If you're being hacked by a foreign government, you call the military. If Iran had the military muscle I would say an attack like Stuxnet is "casus belli" for declaring war. This is NATO expanding its defence treaty to include cyber attacks, launching such attacks against one member nation is like attacking all of them. And I think all nations have some form of private-government cooperation to secure critical infrastructure, whether that's physical or digital I don't see makes the big difference. You might argue it shouldn't be hooked up to the Internet, but totally isolated networks are extremely inconvenient.