Well if the idea was to start a fire he overdid it, what's left of Nokia - at least the mobile division Microsoft bought - is nothing but a smoldering, burned out husk. Despite burning all other sales to the ground Windows Phone still only has about 3% market share and meanwhile Android has covered 80%+ of the market by units and makes money by volume, Apple with their high ASP (average selling price) and margin still do good on revenue while Microsoft is even deeper in no man's land than before.
I doubt Microsoft wanted to buy Nokia, but at this point they were really in danger of losing their one and only remaining hardware partner so it was either that or flunk out of the phone market entirely. Which would pretty much kill the vision they're selling with Windows across the board on phones and tablet/laptop convertibles. That the market isn't buying it yet - and IMHO never - is one thing, but it's what the stock holders are buying into and if Microsoft had to wave the white flag the stock price would tank.
I don't think Microsoft will do well as a hardware company and I don't really understand where all the synergy is supposed to come from, true they have the XBone division but apart from die shrinks they offer a new model maybe twice a decade. If they don't stay on top of all the latest screen, CPU, GPU, broadband, wireless, GPS, camera, sensor, SoC technology and so on then outdated phones don't sell worth shit. And the software to support it is also all mobile specific, what's left to chop?
I find it very strange if I wouldn't have the same standing to sue anyone abusing my likeness in a US court for violation of US law in US jurisdiction as anyone else. For example, if you slander me in a US newspaper why shouldn't I have standing to sue you? If those laws didn't apply to literally everyone, any foreigner would be totally without the protection of the law in every country but their own and there's plenty crimes that can be conducted remotely.
So if only "one in 100 trillion" collisions produce detectable events, and they've only observed "billions" of collisions, then actually detecting just one is shear luck, and reproducing it is next to impossible.......
I guess I'm not understanding something.
They only capture the few collisions that look interesting for further analysis, I don't know exactly what that means but they probably got fingerprints for known, common collision results and discard them immediately. Like a coin flip where you dismiss heads and tails and only look for the WTF events like it landed on the edge, rolled off the table or was snatched in mid-air that doesn't fit any previous pattern.
Re:Fixed what seem like fundamental GUI bugs?
on
KDE Releases Plasma 5
·
· Score: -1
1. check the bug report you posted to see if its fixed. seems a bit of a whinge about nothing though. 2. again, check the bug report you posted to see ifs been fixed. this is a real bug if its real. not experienced it myself
Personally, I just applied the "Windows 7 Installation Disc" patch. It seemed to solve my problems and it lets people like you get back to drinking the kool-aid. I didn't need any criticism I made be turned into an attack on myself of why I haven't been arsed to report/debug/bisect/patch/test it. You even managed to throw in a little belittling and dismissal, all you lacked was a bit of snark about how you "got what you paid for". I tried Linux because so many people told me it was ready, not to be some unpaid QA/alpha tester for buggy crap. That's the kind of work you'd have to pay me to do, free is not worth it. Expect people to get angry when you pull a bait and switch on them, even if you didn't do the baiting. And even though all it costs me was time I actually value my time and despite those who waste it.
In libertarian world negative externalities are paid by those who are stuck with them, even if they're an unwilling third party to someone else's actions because nobody has any responsibility for the common good. If a river flows through your land to someone else's land where they sell drinking water, you can dump your sewage in the river and sell your own clean upstream water. If you're a drug pusher and a junkie wants drugs it's a voluntary transaction, that the junkie robs and steals to feed his crack habit is none of your concern. If you come across a man dying of thirst, you don't have to give him a drink of water even if you have plenty. In short, libertarianism doesn't require you to do anything for anyone else's well-being.
The counter-arguments typically are that charity and compassion will kick in and libertarians will give him a drink of water, but not because they're compelled to by law. People will form voluntary agreements and shared resources like a town well out of mutual benefit. In short, their solution to the "tragedy of the commons" is basically to pretend it won't happen even though history shows it quickly devolves into a few rulers/gangs/companies with power and many regular people at their mercy. If you get to play with every dirty trick in the book then competition will quickly cease and one monopolist or an oligarchy will control the market and smother any start-up in its infancy.
It takes less work to produce the same, but we keep on wanting more. If I compare 2014 to what life was like in 1964 or 1914 then it's obvious I have vastly more and to such a degree I'm completely oblivious about it. When my dad was in his teens they barely had money to put food on the table. Clothes and shoes were mended and patched until they fell apart and the toys, entertainment and vacation budget was a flat zero and very often he'd be working on the farm rather than goofing off. Not to mention they lacked a few minor things like running water and electricity, I guess you can figure out all the other commodities that were missing. I remember when calling long distance - like, outside our county - was expensive and talking to relatives in the US absurdly so. Usually we got and sent one Christmas card a year.
Today's poverty around here is mostly about embarrassment and being a social outcast. No iPhone. No PlayStation. No exotic vacations. No brand clothes. No wasting money on cafes and restaurants. No big parties or expensive birthday presents for classmates. No expensive social activities/hobbies/sports. No living in fancy places in the expensive parts of town. I get it, being the poor kid is absolutely no fun and probably an easy pick for bullies. But apart from keeping up with the Jones' they don't starve or freeze or lack education or healthcare or indeed most modern comforts. Maybe it's just me but despite they being "poor" I'd rather spend money on children who are really being denied basic rights rather than excessive equality ideals at home.
This is a modern comic inspired by Norse mythology, not a retelling. The old Thor was a stout red head, the next was a blonde pretty boy, the new will be a buff woman. Big deal. Time changes things. It's not like this is the strangest story arc to take place in comics.
Oh, it wouldn't be nearly the most fucked up story from the old sagas either - Loki is a shape changer and the mother of an eight-legged horse for starters - but trying to use the old lore to justify this particular story line doesn't work.
Hitting 100Mbit/s peak? Well, today I bought Divinity: Original Sin on Steam and of course that was faster. And it's July, if I want to go to our cabin (no fixed line, barely 3G w/mobile cap) I need to download anything I'd like to bring with me for a rainy day. After a trip with some friends I sent him the videos we'd made (raw 1080p/60 from the camera) and that maxed my line.
Of course, I didn't need 100 Mbit for any of that but on the other hand what's the savings to the ISP if I up/download the same number of GB slower? Across many thousands of subscribers in my city it evens out anyway and they still have to maintain the fiber line and modems at each end so there's no last mile bottleneck, in fact they can switch speeds at will with a simple software update. I suppose with higher speeds I might become a bit more careless about bits and bytes but for the most part it's just convenience, not total throughput.
I think that's reflected in the pricing too, the lowest they offer here is 5/5. Next level: +400% bandwidth, +30% price. After that: +150% bandwidth, +23% price. Finally to reach 100/100: +100% bandwidth, +18% price. Unlike water, electricity or other utilities the higher speeds you got, the faster you're done and the line returns to idle and the premium is not even remotely close to the theoretical increase in bandwidth.
Over the next couple years they'll be rolling out gigabit Internet, do people need it? Of course not, but it's nice to have. I'll probably get it if the premium is not too high, with fiber it could become as standard as GigE on motherboards and all you really pay for is bulk bandwidth. I ran into that on my cell phone this month (vacation time), cap used up so I'm on slooow connection until next month rolls around or pay more this month for increased cap.
Thor is never female in that story, he's cross-dressing pretending to by Freyja in full bridal dress and veil using her clothes and jewelry with rocks for boobies to fool clueless giants. The entire setup is extremely humiliating for Thor and he's not at all identifying with or acting feminine and only Loki saves him through clever excuses. The only one to get a peek under the veil is Trym the giant king looking to get a kiss and quickly reconsiders. When Thor is handed the hammer during the wedding ceremony he goes on a slaughter killing Trym and all his kin for what he's had to endure. Nothing in the ancient tales suggests he's anything but a male and masculine god.
While that's all well and nice there's no Leonardo da Vinci degree where you get to play with everything from anatomy to airplanes, without a degree or other substantial domain knowledge you'll still start at the very bottom of the ladder and never rise much past it. If you want to work in law you need a law degree, in medicine a medical degree and even if the formal requirements aren't so high accumulating the experience to advance means a career is typically a 10+ years investment of your life. Nobody cares if you're good at "problem solving, understanding abstractions, and of course strong communication skills" when you have 10 years experience with whip and buggy but everyone has switched to cars. You have a bit more choice early on to bail and switch paths but it really sucks to find a dead end 20 years down that road and that choice is now.
Obviously it's not that easy to predict the future but you can certainly say something about what jobs are at risk of being automated away and which will expose you to direct competition to the lowest bidder worldwide. For example with autonomous cars on the horizons I'd not want to become a truck driver today, if you're 20 today maybe when you're 50 you realize all you have is 30 years on the road but now trucks drive themselves. And I don't mean you have to become a plumber or something like that, if you get hired by SpaceX I'm fairly sure you'll have a lifetime career in rocket science, if not necessarily at that company. Sure, all those skills you've mentioned are essential to climbing the career ladder, but it helps an awful lot to pick the right ladder first.
Only if you keep it a big secret why the people were fired.
No matter why they were laid off they'll never say who's next in line if conditions don't improve, they need to keep that ambiguous to maintain order. Otherwise you'll have business units and/or employees that feel their heads are on the chopping block and seriously disgruntled, not just an ominous threat. Everybody needs to be made believe that if they work hard and pull the business around their job can be saved.
Meanwhile, not firing those people promptly, and keeping them around to cause problems shows other people that they don't have to work to get paid. Isn't that bad for morale, at least, of your most useful and productive people? I'd think it would be better for them to see the dead weight cut away.
Perhaps if you thought the people fired were those who deserve to be fired and not the result of office politics, ass-kissing, nepotism, mindless cost-cutting (our workers are too expensive, cut the high end), short-sightedness (let's outsource to India) or whatever latest fad found in a trade magazine. Whenever management announces layoffs almost everybody worries and starts focusing on how they can preserve their own ass, regardless of the consequences for the team or company.
My pay check is not that influenced by dead weight, I hardly believe that once they're done weeding out the unworthy they'll be handing out raises for the rest of us. Winding up laid off on the other hand would have pretty big consequences for my personal economy, even if it's irrational or unfair or based on a flawed perception of reality. That they're very reluctant and slow at letting people go is not a purely negative trait when you're looking for a safe haven and steady paycheck, with a solid buffer until you're at risk.
Except that hothardware being tech geeks confuse cause and effect. The estimated cost of the 8GB of GDDR5 in the PS4 is ~$100, the hardware costs are almost the same and the "extra validation" mainly involves staying a little conservative with clock speeds and code optimizations. The real reason is market differentiation and if there is none you create one like with student and senior citizen discounts even though they all take up one seat. That lets you set entirely different prices based on the willingness to pay in workstation markets as opposed to gamer markets.
Of course to make it work, you must make sure that the workstation market won't use the gaming card so you make sure those features are absent or not working or not tested/validated/supported on the consumer cards. It's the same reason Intel won't give you ECC on a consumer motherboard/CPU like AMD does, it would be beneficial and cost next to nothing but it'd encourage penny-pinchers to use them as poor man's servers. It's all about steering customers to the "right" product, the rest is implementation details.
The hyperbole tends to be pretty thick around here, I've used software interfaces that weren't just bad but simply atrocious and if Microsoft could conjure up one so bad I couldn't make it work for me and still be usable outside a mental asylum seems highly unlikely. Hitting the start button to shut down the computer doesn't even register in the top 1000 silliest shit I've had to do in order to make semi-broken, bizarre and buggy applications work. So "broken and useless" is probably more like "temporarily a damper on productivity while my Google-fu figures it out".
I guess a lot of people here have Win8 forced upon them by external circumstances, which tends to put everyone in a sour mood. Particularly end users that hate change and tend to make life even more miserable for IT. Personally the forecast is that Win7 is good until 2020, so in five year's time I should figure out if Microsoft has made anything decent, jump to OS X or take another shot at YotLD. If work pushes it on me, I'll cope. Around here it sounds like they should be awarding war medals like "Survived the 2010 ribbon transition".
I guess there's a whole bunch of people where the OS doesn't really matter and it's just "Which [device/OS] lets me update Facebook and Twitter the easiest?" but personally I'm fairly stuck with Windows and so is my work. They could duct tape a Kinect to all copies of Windows 9 and insist all commands be done Minority Report style and we'd probably still upgrade eventually, as long as the applications don't have to buy into "Metro" or anything like that. I'd just have to learn a few Kung Fu moves to open the most used apps and I'd probably still hit 95% relative efficiency overall.
I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information?
IMHO it's far easier to logically get it right with braces and pretty-print it for proper indentation than fiddling around with whitespace.
That's revisionist history, ludicrously so. Marx never foresaw anything of the sort. He believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labor (and hence the real value).
It is not very hard to re-frame Marx in terms of the knowledge worker, where the owner of the means of production like the [e-tail site/online bank/search engine/social networking site] exploits the individual developers who produce the system but alone are insignificant and replaceable leading to a race to the bottom where providing the labor is greatly underpaid while stock owners and other capital holders make off with the profits. That does of course not exclude the possibility that capital owners will pay off unique individuals and start-ups that threaten to shift the competitive landscape or compete with the existing companies, but more of a global mutual interest among all companies to depress wages.
Even in the absence of formal collusion it's not hard to reach a form of unwritten understanding in direct and transparent competition of substitute goods. For example on the way to work there are two gas stations quite literally across the road from each other, if one drops the price of course the other will follow. So what makes them profit most, both high or both low prices? Now apply the same to store clerk wages, of course neither has an interest in raising the general wages. It is really the same when you see Google/Apple/Microsoft/whatever involved in anti-poaching agreements, surely they could just poach back but it'd raise the wage costs for everyone so better if they don't.
I do agree though that he thought the actual value lay with the labor, not the machinery but I guess you can equally apply this to software, doesn't really all value of the code stem from the one who developed it? Granted, he got paid for it but whether that pay is fair is another matter. Remember, Marx never claimed the workers were forced to work anywhere at gun point. What he said was that all the choices were bad ones and workers were exploited no matter who they worked for. It's not like market economists dispute that companies would lower labor costs if they could either, they just refuse to do something about it. If the supply and demand don't add up to a wage you're comfortable with do something else.
Of course we won't run out of jobs as such, but when there's more people wanting jobs than there are jobs, real wages start trending downwards as workers undercut each other. The relative wealth between those with capital and those who work for a living diverges and it becomes harder and harder to join them as their holdings increase faster than any savings you can make. As long as human labor remains essential to the function of society, we can still unite and strike for higher wages though. If we're no longer essential and the system runs on robotics, software and a few scabs until we go back to work, well then we're in deep shit.
KDE and Qt are synonymous with C++. They prove that C++ is the best language around
LOL, the only reason C++ is tolerable is Qt and only if you avoid screwing with resources yourself and let QObjects handle the mess, it's still full of leftover ugly from the 70s that neither Java, C# nor Swift choose to handle the same way. The problem is that creating a good language, a good compiler and a comprehensive system library (practically a must today IMO) is a huge job and without a big company like Sun/Oracle (Java), Microsoft (C#) or Apple (Swift) backing it you'll never get off the ground.
This country is losing it. Don't know if you realize it my fellow citizens, but you are getting your ass kicked in the world. Socialism is not working.
That's because whenever you try something socialist-ish it's implemented as corporate welfare. Instead of taxing the corporations and helping the people you're bailing out the corporations and handing the bill to the people. Your version of Robin Hood would involve trying to get a trickle-down effect by handing the sheriff of Nottingham more money so he could hire more tax collectors and guards. Or to use a car analogy it's like stabbing the tires and pouring sugar in the gas tank, then comparing it to a horse.
The intersection between stuff I'd love to do and the stuff people would pay me to do = Ø, particularly if I got paid to do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my job (37.5 hour work week, decent pay with overtime, 5 weeks vacation, interesting and meaningful work) but I don't love it and it's not something I'd do without the paycheck. If you can't really think of anything else to do than work, you must have a very gimped imagination. I'm sorry.
The first part you got right, the second I don't think so. From what I gather the photon is really like an "on and off again" couple, every so often they split apart to an electron and positron but almost instantly realize being on their own doesn't work so they get back together again. But in those brief moments they're single they're pulled much stronger towards parties, curving the path they take between our house and their house - not zigzagging.
Apparently over a 168000 light year stretch this adds up to a 0.0005 light year detour, they've not traveled as straight a line as the neutrinos have. Of course we already knew gravity bends light, but these quantum effects means it bends a little more than expected from the photon's mass. It's no wonder quantum mechanics can drive you crazy, God isn't just playing dice on top of that the dice morphs between 1d6 and 1d20 during the throw.
In any case, you're wrong. The world is running out of hellholes that tolerate slave labour, so those companies that can't turn profit without it have nowhere to go
Oh there's plenty of hellholes left, but the remaining ones are mostly plagued by civil war, crazy dictators, massive corruption, lack of basic education and infrastructure or some other form of ethnic, religious, economical, social or political instability that make them unsuitable for running a business no matter how low the wages get. The extremely poor but stable countries are quickly running out, India is still lagging quite a bit behind China but after that if gets tougher and tougher.
Man, I wish I could sell at a loss with a 60% gross margin. Like all companies they make margins slim where competition is strong and large where it's weak or non-existant, but if you've ever had the impression Intel was dumping prices to squish AMD out of the market you must have lived in a different world than me. Dirty OEM tricks? Sure. Bleeding consumers dry by charging tons for extreme performance, long battery life or server features? Sure. Having superior process technology and pocketing the profit from lower costs? Sure. Force feeding the mainstream market IGPs to eat AMD/nVidia's low end? Sure. But I've never looked at an Intel CPU - and particularly a CPU+mobo combo since they have a monopoly on chipsets too and effectively set prices for both - and thought "wow, that's cheap"
whatever it is that your developers are producing (other than warm chair seats) then you start talking like management: "Put X engineers on Project Y to get us to the Z man-months required within schedule." (...) No joke. I've talked to the CEO of a $2B/year semiconductor company and that is precisely as deep as his plaanning goes.
To be fair, at the CEO level of a major company it's impossible to deal with individuals. I've worked for many years with project portfolio management tools and on that level it looks more like a knapsack problem where you have say 100 developers and doing project A consumes 30, project B consumes 40 and project C consumes 50. Except it turns out B and C is both eating the same pool of 20 that know one particular technology or they touch the same systems or users and you don't want two major overhauls colliding. And one project has a much better ROI short term, but the other is strategically important or one is high risk and the other low risk and so on. When you're at this level you're looking at whether you have the capacity and right mix of staff, not how well each individual is suited to their position.
You must understand that as a CEO you're dealing with layers of indirection, perhaps you can make some changes to HR policy that may over time help improve the composition of your workforce, but on the normal management timescale you're stuck with what you've got. And every company tends to have the employees that are favored by that system, rock the boat too much and you get issues with employee dissatisfaction, turnover and a management chain that resist you so mostly they focus on getting the business side right, what products and services should we be delivering. It's up to middle management to pick the aces and go to bat for why these people deserve such a big paycheck compared to others who also call themselves developers. But I will tell you one thing, the CEO might not know what's going on but he does care when the 100 man hours he was going to spend turned into 200, even if the rate was lower.
I think something got lost in translation. If it was compromised 2+ years ago, why didn't the developer pull this stunt back then? If he knew, he sure waited a very long time and NSLs don't expire. If he didn't know, how did he find it since development was essentially dead and how did the NSA know their backdoor was about to get exposed? The more logical explanation is that he's being forced now in 2014 to burn the 2012 version which was too good for NSA to let live. I think the people abandoning TrueCrypt now are led by the nose by NSA, not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if the idea was to start a fire he overdid it, what's left of Nokia - at least the mobile division Microsoft bought - is nothing but a smoldering, burned out husk. Despite burning all other sales to the ground Windows Phone still only has about 3% market share and meanwhile Android has covered 80%+ of the market by units and makes money by volume, Apple with their high ASP (average selling price) and margin still do good on revenue while Microsoft is even deeper in no man's land than before.
I doubt Microsoft wanted to buy Nokia, but at this point they were really in danger of losing their one and only remaining hardware partner so it was either that or flunk out of the phone market entirely. Which would pretty much kill the vision they're selling with Windows across the board on phones and tablet/laptop convertibles. That the market isn't buying it yet - and IMHO never - is one thing, but it's what the stock holders are buying into and if Microsoft had to wave the white flag the stock price would tank.
I don't think Microsoft will do well as a hardware company and I don't really understand where all the synergy is supposed to come from, true they have the XBone division but apart from die shrinks they offer a new model maybe twice a decade. If they don't stay on top of all the latest screen, CPU, GPU, broadband, wireless, GPS, camera, sensor, SoC technology and so on then outdated phones don't sell worth shit. And the software to support it is also all mobile specific, what's left to chop?
I find it very strange if I wouldn't have the same standing to sue anyone abusing my likeness in a US court for violation of US law in US jurisdiction as anyone else. For example, if you slander me in a US newspaper why shouldn't I have standing to sue you? If those laws didn't apply to literally everyone, any foreigner would be totally without the protection of the law in every country but their own and there's plenty crimes that can be conducted remotely.
So if only "one in 100 trillion" collisions produce detectable events, and they've only observed "billions" of collisions, then actually detecting just one is shear luck, and reproducing it is next to impossible.......
I guess I'm not understanding something.
They only capture the few collisions that look interesting for further analysis, I don't know exactly what that means but they probably got fingerprints for known, common collision results and discard them immediately. Like a coin flip where you dismiss heads and tails and only look for the WTF events like it landed on the edge, rolled off the table or was snatched in mid-air that doesn't fit any previous pattern.
1. check the bug report you posted to see if its fixed. seems a bit of a whinge about nothing though.
2. again, check the bug report you posted to see ifs been fixed. this is a real bug if its real. not experienced it myself
Personally, I just applied the "Windows 7 Installation Disc" patch. It seemed to solve my problems and it lets people like you get back to drinking the kool-aid. I didn't need any criticism I made be turned into an attack on myself of why I haven't been arsed to report/debug/bisect/patch/test it. You even managed to throw in a little belittling and dismissal, all you lacked was a bit of snark about how you "got what you paid for". I tried Linux because so many people told me it was ready, not to be some unpaid QA/alpha tester for buggy crap. That's the kind of work you'd have to pay me to do, free is not worth it. Expect people to get angry when you pull a bait and switch on them, even if you didn't do the baiting. And even though all it costs me was time I actually value my time and despite those who waste it.
In libertarian world negative externalities are paid by those who are stuck with them, even if they're an unwilling third party to someone else's actions because nobody has any responsibility for the common good. If a river flows through your land to someone else's land where they sell drinking water, you can dump your sewage in the river and sell your own clean upstream water. If you're a drug pusher and a junkie wants drugs it's a voluntary transaction, that the junkie robs and steals to feed his crack habit is none of your concern. If you come across a man dying of thirst, you don't have to give him a drink of water even if you have plenty. In short, libertarianism doesn't require you to do anything for anyone else's well-being.
The counter-arguments typically are that charity and compassion will kick in and libertarians will give him a drink of water, but not because they're compelled to by law. People will form voluntary agreements and shared resources like a town well out of mutual benefit. In short, their solution to the "tragedy of the commons" is basically to pretend it won't happen even though history shows it quickly devolves into a few rulers/gangs/companies with power and many regular people at their mercy. If you get to play with every dirty trick in the book then competition will quickly cease and one monopolist or an oligarchy will control the market and smother any start-up in its infancy.
It takes less work to produce the same, but we keep on wanting more. If I compare 2014 to what life was like in 1964 or 1914 then it's obvious I have vastly more and to such a degree I'm completely oblivious about it. When my dad was in his teens they barely had money to put food on the table. Clothes and shoes were mended and patched until they fell apart and the toys, entertainment and vacation budget was a flat zero and very often he'd be working on the farm rather than goofing off. Not to mention they lacked a few minor things like running water and electricity, I guess you can figure out all the other commodities that were missing. I remember when calling long distance - like, outside our county - was expensive and talking to relatives in the US absurdly so. Usually we got and sent one Christmas card a year.
Today's poverty around here is mostly about embarrassment and being a social outcast. No iPhone. No PlayStation. No exotic vacations. No brand clothes. No wasting money on cafes and restaurants. No big parties or expensive birthday presents for classmates. No expensive social activities/hobbies/sports. No living in fancy places in the expensive parts of town. I get it, being the poor kid is absolutely no fun and probably an easy pick for bullies. But apart from keeping up with the Jones' they don't starve or freeze or lack education or healthcare or indeed most modern comforts. Maybe it's just me but despite they being "poor" I'd rather spend money on children who are really being denied basic rights rather than excessive equality ideals at home.
This is a modern comic inspired by Norse mythology, not a retelling. The old Thor was a stout red head, the next was a blonde pretty boy, the new will be a buff woman. Big deal. Time changes things. It's not like this is the strangest story arc to take place in comics.
Oh, it wouldn't be nearly the most fucked up story from the old sagas either - Loki is a shape changer and the mother of an eight-legged horse for starters - but trying to use the old lore to justify this particular story line doesn't work.
Hitting 100Mbit/s peak? Well, today I bought Divinity: Original Sin on Steam and of course that was faster. And it's July, if I want to go to our cabin (no fixed line, barely 3G w/mobile cap) I need to download anything I'd like to bring with me for a rainy day. After a trip with some friends I sent him the videos we'd made (raw 1080p/60 from the camera) and that maxed my line.
Of course, I didn't need 100 Mbit for any of that but on the other hand what's the savings to the ISP if I up/download the same number of GB slower? Across many thousands of subscribers in my city it evens out anyway and they still have to maintain the fiber line and modems at each end so there's no last mile bottleneck, in fact they can switch speeds at will with a simple software update. I suppose with higher speeds I might become a bit more careless about bits and bytes but for the most part it's just convenience, not total throughput.
I think that's reflected in the pricing too, the lowest they offer here is 5/5. Next level: +400% bandwidth, +30% price. After that: +150% bandwidth, +23% price. Finally to reach 100/100: +100% bandwidth, +18% price. Unlike water, electricity or other utilities the higher speeds you got, the faster you're done and the line returns to idle and the premium is not even remotely close to the theoretical increase in bandwidth.
Over the next couple years they'll be rolling out gigabit Internet, do people need it? Of course not, but it's nice to have. I'll probably get it if the premium is not too high, with fiber it could become as standard as GigE on motherboards and all you really pay for is bulk bandwidth. I ran into that on my cell phone this month (vacation time), cap used up so I'm on slooow connection until next month rolls around or pay more this month for increased cap.
Thor is never female in that story, he's cross-dressing pretending to by Freyja in full bridal dress and veil using her clothes and jewelry with rocks for boobies to fool clueless giants. The entire setup is extremely humiliating for Thor and he's not at all identifying with or acting feminine and only Loki saves him through clever excuses. The only one to get a peek under the veil is Trym the giant king looking to get a kiss and quickly reconsiders. When Thor is handed the hammer during the wedding ceremony he goes on a slaughter killing Trym and all his kin for what he's had to endure. Nothing in the ancient tales suggests he's anything but a male and masculine god.
While that's all well and nice there's no Leonardo da Vinci degree where you get to play with everything from anatomy to airplanes, without a degree or other substantial domain knowledge you'll still start at the very bottom of the ladder and never rise much past it. If you want to work in law you need a law degree, in medicine a medical degree and even if the formal requirements aren't so high accumulating the experience to advance means a career is typically a 10+ years investment of your life. Nobody cares if you're good at "problem solving, understanding abstractions, and of course strong communication skills" when you have 10 years experience with whip and buggy but everyone has switched to cars. You have a bit more choice early on to bail and switch paths but it really sucks to find a dead end 20 years down that road and that choice is now.
Obviously it's not that easy to predict the future but you can certainly say something about what jobs are at risk of being automated away and which will expose you to direct competition to the lowest bidder worldwide. For example with autonomous cars on the horizons I'd not want to become a truck driver today, if you're 20 today maybe when you're 50 you realize all you have is 30 years on the road but now trucks drive themselves. And I don't mean you have to become a plumber or something like that, if you get hired by SpaceX I'm fairly sure you'll have a lifetime career in rocket science, if not necessarily at that company. Sure, all those skills you've mentioned are essential to climbing the career ladder, but it helps an awful lot to pick the right ladder first.
Only if you keep it a big secret why the people were fired.
No matter why they were laid off they'll never say who's next in line if conditions don't improve, they need to keep that ambiguous to maintain order. Otherwise you'll have business units and/or employees that feel their heads are on the chopping block and seriously disgruntled, not just an ominous threat. Everybody needs to be made believe that if they work hard and pull the business around their job can be saved.
Meanwhile, not firing those people promptly, and keeping them around to cause problems shows other people that they don't have to work to get paid. Isn't that bad for morale, at least, of your most useful and productive people? I'd think it would be better for them to see the dead weight cut away.
Perhaps if you thought the people fired were those who deserve to be fired and not the result of office politics, ass-kissing, nepotism, mindless cost-cutting (our workers are too expensive, cut the high end), short-sightedness (let's outsource to India) or whatever latest fad found in a trade magazine. Whenever management announces layoffs almost everybody worries and starts focusing on how they can preserve their own ass, regardless of the consequences for the team or company.
My pay check is not that influenced by dead weight, I hardly believe that once they're done weeding out the unworthy they'll be handing out raises for the rest of us. Winding up laid off on the other hand would have pretty big consequences for my personal economy, even if it's irrational or unfair or based on a flawed perception of reality. That they're very reluctant and slow at letting people go is not a purely negative trait when you're looking for a safe haven and steady paycheck, with a solid buffer until you're at risk.
Except that hothardware being tech geeks confuse cause and effect. The estimated cost of the 8GB of GDDR5 in the PS4 is ~$100, the hardware costs are almost the same and the "extra validation" mainly involves staying a little conservative with clock speeds and code optimizations. The real reason is market differentiation and if there is none you create one like with student and senior citizen discounts even though they all take up one seat. That lets you set entirely different prices based on the willingness to pay in workstation markets as opposed to gamer markets.
Of course to make it work, you must make sure that the workstation market won't use the gaming card so you make sure those features are absent or not working or not tested/validated/supported on the consumer cards. It's the same reason Intel won't give you ECC on a consumer motherboard/CPU like AMD does, it would be beneficial and cost next to nothing but it'd encourage penny-pinchers to use them as poor man's servers. It's all about steering customers to the "right" product, the rest is implementation details.
The hyperbole tends to be pretty thick around here, I've used software interfaces that weren't just bad but simply atrocious and if Microsoft could conjure up one so bad I couldn't make it work for me and still be usable outside a mental asylum seems highly unlikely. Hitting the start button to shut down the computer doesn't even register in the top 1000 silliest shit I've had to do in order to make semi-broken, bizarre and buggy applications work. So "broken and useless" is probably more like "temporarily a damper on productivity while my Google-fu figures it out".
I guess a lot of people here have Win8 forced upon them by external circumstances, which tends to put everyone in a sour mood. Particularly end users that hate change and tend to make life even more miserable for IT. Personally the forecast is that Win7 is good until 2020, so in five year's time I should figure out if Microsoft has made anything decent, jump to OS X or take another shot at YotLD. If work pushes it on me, I'll cope. Around here it sounds like they should be awarding war medals like "Survived the 2010 ribbon transition".
I guess there's a whole bunch of people where the OS doesn't really matter and it's just "Which [device/OS] lets me update Facebook and Twitter the easiest?" but personally I'm fairly stuck with Windows and so is my work. They could duct tape a Kinect to all copies of Windows 9 and insist all commands be done Minority Report style and we'd probably still upgrade eventually, as long as the applications don't have to buy into "Metro" or anything like that. I'd just have to learn a few Kung Fu moves to open the most used apps and I'd probably still hit 95% relative efficiency overall.
I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information?
IMHO it's far easier to logically get it right with braces and pretty-print it for proper indentation than fiddling around with whitespace.
That's revisionist history, ludicrously so. Marx never foresaw anything of the sort. He believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labor, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labor (and hence the real value).
It is not very hard to re-frame Marx in terms of the knowledge worker, where the owner of the means of production like the [e-tail site/online bank/search engine/social networking site] exploits the individual developers who produce the system but alone are insignificant and replaceable leading to a race to the bottom where providing the labor is greatly underpaid while stock owners and other capital holders make off with the profits. That does of course not exclude the possibility that capital owners will pay off unique individuals and start-ups that threaten to shift the competitive landscape or compete with the existing companies, but more of a global mutual interest among all companies to depress wages.
Even in the absence of formal collusion it's not hard to reach a form of unwritten understanding in direct and transparent competition of substitute goods. For example on the way to work there are two gas stations quite literally across the road from each other, if one drops the price of course the other will follow. So what makes them profit most, both high or both low prices? Now apply the same to store clerk wages, of course neither has an interest in raising the general wages. It is really the same when you see Google/Apple/Microsoft/whatever involved in anti-poaching agreements, surely they could just poach back but it'd raise the wage costs for everyone so better if they don't.
I do agree though that he thought the actual value lay with the labor, not the machinery but I guess you can equally apply this to software, doesn't really all value of the code stem from the one who developed it? Granted, he got paid for it but whether that pay is fair is another matter. Remember, Marx never claimed the workers were forced to work anywhere at gun point. What he said was that all the choices were bad ones and workers were exploited no matter who they worked for. It's not like market economists dispute that companies would lower labor costs if they could either, they just refuse to do something about it. If the supply and demand don't add up to a wage you're comfortable with do something else.
Of course we won't run out of jobs as such, but when there's more people wanting jobs than there are jobs, real wages start trending downwards as workers undercut each other. The relative wealth between those with capital and those who work for a living diverges and it becomes harder and harder to join them as their holdings increase faster than any savings you can make. As long as human labor remains essential to the function of society, we can still unite and strike for higher wages though. If we're no longer essential and the system runs on robotics, software and a few scabs until we go back to work, well then we're in deep shit.
KDE and Qt are synonymous with C++. They prove that C++ is the best language around
LOL, the only reason C++ is tolerable is Qt and only if you avoid screwing with resources yourself and let QObjects handle the mess, it's still full of leftover ugly from the 70s that neither Java, C# nor Swift choose to handle the same way. The problem is that creating a good language, a good compiler and a comprehensive system library (practically a must today IMO) is a huge job and without a big company like Sun/Oracle (Java), Microsoft (C#) or Apple (Swift) backing it you'll never get off the ground.
This country is losing it. Don't know if you realize it my fellow citizens, but you are getting your ass kicked in the world. Socialism is not working.
That's because whenever you try something socialist-ish it's implemented as corporate welfare. Instead of taxing the corporations and helping the people you're bailing out the corporations and handing the bill to the people. Your version of Robin Hood would involve trying to get a trickle-down effect by handing the sheriff of Nottingham more money so he could hire more tax collectors and guards. Or to use a car analogy it's like stabbing the tires and pouring sugar in the gas tank, then comparing it to a horse.
The intersection between stuff I'd love to do and the stuff people would pay me to do = Ø, particularly if I got paid to do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my job (37.5 hour work week, decent pay with overtime, 5 weeks vacation, interesting and meaningful work) but I don't love it and it's not something I'd do without the paycheck. If you can't really think of anything else to do than work, you must have a very gimped imagination. I'm sorry.
The first part you got right, the second I don't think so. From what I gather the photon is really like an "on and off again" couple, every so often they split apart to an electron and positron but almost instantly realize being on their own doesn't work so they get back together again. But in those brief moments they're single they're pulled much stronger towards parties, curving the path they take between our house and their house - not zigzagging.
Apparently over a 168000 light year stretch this adds up to a 0.0005 light year detour, they've not traveled as straight a line as the neutrinos have. Of course we already knew gravity bends light, but these quantum effects means it bends a little more than expected from the photon's mass. It's no wonder quantum mechanics can drive you crazy, God isn't just playing dice on top of that the dice morphs between 1d6 and 1d20 during the throw.
In any case, you're wrong. The world is running out of hellholes that tolerate slave labour, so those companies that can't turn profit without it have nowhere to go
Oh there's plenty of hellholes left, but the remaining ones are mostly plagued by civil war, crazy dictators, massive corruption, lack of basic education and infrastructure or some other form of ethnic, religious, economical, social or political instability that make them unsuitable for running a business no matter how low the wages get. The extremely poor but stable countries are quickly running out, India is still lagging quite a bit behind China but after that if gets tougher and tougher.
Man, I wish I could sell at a loss with a 60% gross margin. Like all companies they make margins slim where competition is strong and large where it's weak or non-existant, but if you've ever had the impression Intel was dumping prices to squish AMD out of the market you must have lived in a different world than me. Dirty OEM tricks? Sure. Bleeding consumers dry by charging tons for extreme performance, long battery life or server features? Sure. Having superior process technology and pocketing the profit from lower costs? Sure. Force feeding the mainstream market IGPs to eat AMD/nVidia's low end? Sure. But I've never looked at an Intel CPU - and particularly a CPU+mobo combo since they have a monopoly on chipsets too and effectively set prices for both - and thought "wow, that's cheap"
whatever it is that your developers are producing (other than warm chair seats) then you start talking like management: "Put X engineers on Project Y to get us to the Z man-months required within schedule." (...) No joke. I've talked to the CEO of a $2B/year semiconductor company and that is precisely as deep as his plaanning goes.
To be fair, at the CEO level of a major company it's impossible to deal with individuals. I've worked for many years with project portfolio management tools and on that level it looks more like a knapsack problem where you have say 100 developers and doing project A consumes 30, project B consumes 40 and project C consumes 50. Except it turns out B and C is both eating the same pool of 20 that know one particular technology or they touch the same systems or users and you don't want two major overhauls colliding. And one project has a much better ROI short term, but the other is strategically important or one is high risk and the other low risk and so on. When you're at this level you're looking at whether you have the capacity and right mix of staff, not how well each individual is suited to their position.
You must understand that as a CEO you're dealing with layers of indirection, perhaps you can make some changes to HR policy that may over time help improve the composition of your workforce, but on the normal management timescale you're stuck with what you've got. And every company tends to have the employees that are favored by that system, rock the boat too much and you get issues with employee dissatisfaction, turnover and a management chain that resist you so mostly they focus on getting the business side right, what products and services should we be delivering. It's up to middle management to pick the aces and go to bat for why these people deserve such a big paycheck compared to others who also call themselves developers. But I will tell you one thing, the CEO might not know what's going on but he does care when the 100 man hours he was going to spend turned into 200, even if the rate was lower.
Obligatory Far Side
I think something got lost in translation. If it was compromised 2+ years ago, why didn't the developer pull this stunt back then? If he knew, he sure waited a very long time and NSLs don't expire. If he didn't know, how did he find it since development was essentially dead and how did the NSA know their backdoor was about to get exposed? The more logical explanation is that he's being forced now in 2014 to burn the 2012 version which was too good for NSA to let live. I think the people abandoning TrueCrypt now are led by the nose by NSA, not the other way around.
No, the point of a kill switch is to destroy the resale value. Same as an IMEI ban, once reported stolen nobody should* give you service
* not actually implemented worldwide, yet