My impression of "pure" functional programming is that it's roughly like having only static classes and no static members in OOP. Basically if you can have all the information you need "in flight" with you, then it can do all sorts of neat parallelization and optimization tricks because there's no state that makes the ordering important. I guess that's great if you're running some sort of scientific simulation where all the input is set in the model and you expect a result set out at the very end. But I don't find that part hard, the hard part about OOP is when the state throws you a curve ball. You try to write to a database record but it's not there anymore or the user removed the CD from the drive or the database is full or the network connection was lost and now what? It's handling all the contingencies that is difficult. I guess if the problem is the performance of your side effect free code, functional programming may be the answer. But it's not what most developers deal with.
Well, if we're really running out of jobs there's always healthcare. From what I've read there would be no problem employing many, many more people there but the blocker is economy. Over the next 30 years or so at least here the proportion of elderly will grow massively compared to the workforce, they're looking at all kinds of automation just to cope.
Oh please, the Industrial Revolution was "the" killer for skilled artisans and craftsmen who were often replaced by unskilled labor operating machinery which incorporated the skill. Being self-employed and providing services directly became much harder, you had to be a worker at a factory because they owned the machinery and reaped the profits. Probably the worst time to be a worker was in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Taylorism was at its peak and it was all about how many seconds operation X took at the assembly line and it was all about dumb replaceable workers you could drag in from the street at subsistence wages.
It never really changed until Ford doubled the worker's wages in 1914 and from there was the golden age of the "skilled" worker, concepts like Kanban/Lean Manufacturing in the 1950s also focused on small cells of skilled workers providing much higher flexibility and lower defect rates than the big, long assembly lines. Then started a new cycle where the skill those workers had were incorporated into robotics, again forcing us to develop a new set of meta-skills because it can crank out parts with near perfect precision 24x7 and it was back to huge production lines. We still needed a lot of monitoring and repair though, because the first robots were rather dumb and did things rather mindlessly. Now those skills are being incorporated into electronics, and we're again looking for new meta skills. It all comes full circle again and again.
What you can't do is provide a link in the app that takes you directly to a purchasing page to work wrounf the in-app thing. Honestly tough, I've always thought it was a pretty fair trade-off to pay 30% to gan access to many millions of people who already have payment details entered and ready to go at the press of a button.
So basically you're saying it's such a good offer we have to ban them from not taking advantage of it, Stockholm syndrome much? They can go to any website and buy any non-app item they want, the app store doesn't give you access to the market. The app store is the only remaining way to sell apps after all other ways have been taken away from you, it's what keeps the market hostage and enables them to get a 30% shakedown of all transactions. Why do you think there's no such thing in the PC world, here's millions of people ready to one-click shop for only 30% of your gross? Because no sane business would use it if they had a choice.
As for the quality, it was what it was, and it wasn't really any worse than the other games available for the 2600 at the time, so I didn't really know the difference. I liked it because it made me think about strategy in ways I hadn't otherwise yet learned at 8 years old, it taught me planning because I mapped out on paper some of the puzzle piece locations so I could try and find a pattern (sorta like D&D, even though I was never allowed to play that), and most of all because it certainly taught me patience beyond my years. I look back fondly at the E.T. game - not for the gameplay, but for what I learned as a young gamer because of what I now know are its flaws.
You forgot the most important lesson, sometimes no matter what you do or think you could have done differently you're fucked because you're set up to fail. That's important to remember when the project you're on fails miserably and the crap rolls downhill, of course assuming you weren't the screw-up.
In what appears to be the first court decision addressing the issue, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York said Internet service providers such as Microsoft Corp or Google Inc cannot refuse to turn over customer information and emails stored in other countries when issued a valid search warrant from U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Emphasis mine. I read this to mean that if you use any US owned mail provider the FBI can subpoena anything they want through a US judge. That just seems horribly wrong and would put the world wide operation of any company at the mercy of the jurisdiction where they're headquartered. By this logic the NSA can get a subpoena to demand all US companies turn over any information they got anywhere in the world. You could never trust a foreign company to follow local laws. If this stands it's a horrible precedent.
Technically speaking, most of those nuclear weapons everyone was afraid of back then are still there, just waiting to be fired. Now, rather than the Soviet Union, they're in the hands of Russia. A least nothing is going on that might increase tensions between Russia and the rest of the world right? Oh, and fortunately Russia isn't run by some hard-right authoritarian, obsessesed with projecting strength.
The Soviet Union with half of Europe as allies was a superpower. Russia is barely in the top 10 biggest economies of the world, they have 140 million men against 900 million in NATO. Their military technology and spending suffered during the reforms, by all means they're powerful but they got no chance of pulling off a victory. Putin is gambling that nobody wants to pick a fight with Russia over a few areas in Ukraine, if he's called on it they'd lose but probably not before a hundred million people have died. Unless of course China were to join on the Russian side, 1.35 billion people and the world's second biggest economy along with Russia's nukes would give NATO a real run for their money. Personally I think what's happening in Ukraine will push all the other countries in the "buffer zone" between NATO and Russia to seek NATO membership over Russia's objections.
I fail to see the problem with his choice of words, you find exploits and put them in an arsenal of attacks. Just because you count number of exploits and not numbers of guns it's still an accumulation of weapons set aside for future use in cyber-warfare. And of course it costs lots of money to maintain such an arsenal as old exploits are patched or the vulnerable software or hardware goes out of use, it doesn't have a shelf life like physical weapons but your capability degrades over time unless you supply it with new exploits not entirely unlike when your enemies upgrade their weapons capabilities making yours obsolete. At least it's no worse of an abuse than using "cyber warfare" for sending bits and bytes instead of bullets at each other.
I don't think Microsoft can rely on the customer being "stuck" with Win8 and MS Office much longer, according to StatCounter mobile is now 24%, tablets 6% and the desktop only 70% of web browsing. Subtract a few percent for Mac/Linux and more than one in three is no longer using Windows to browse the web. Of course web browsing != general computing but people are going to want solutions for the devices they're using, if there's an app for it they'd probably rather use that than haul out their laptop. I guess most of those 30% have a PC they could use if they wanted to, but I'm not sure casual users will in the future. I think the "PC-less" digital life is quickly becoming possible and that significant parts of the population will find they don't really need a PC. Microsoft has the enterprise by the balls, consumers much less so.
The idea of longevity research, of course, is to make 100 year old body indistinguishable from a 20 year old body, not merely to "keep the heart beating".
That may be the long term ideal, practically though there's very little of significance modern medicine will do until you actually have an injury, disease or organ failure. If you take a reasonably healthy 80 year old to the hospital and say "What can you do to make him more like a 20 year old?" they wouldn't replacing aching bones or an aging heart and lungs and kidneys and liver, nor would they do anything about the poor eyesight, hearing or all the other senses that weaken with age. The primary effect of modern medicine is that people rarely die young, today most live to be 70 but few live to see 90, the curve has a quite sharp decline where the average body just expires. Yes we're looking at the people who become 100+ to figure out why, but that's looking at terminal reasons not trying to make the old young again.
He's just here as a Vorlon observer, being a smart ass is part of the job but he needs to work on being more cryptic. Oh and if we actually discover the formula for immortality, duck before the fireworks start.
In fact we learned today that the FCC is going to allow capitalists to fuck the internet up at least in the US.
Considering all the nice things I've heard about American ISPs, you already seem more buttfucked than the goatse guy. But I guess from now on you'll pay extra for lube.
Right now we have a consumer culture that doesn't really teach people to make and repair their own things (which is what a 3D printing would mostly be useful for).
Mass production killed the repair business, unless it's really expensive they just come cheaper off the assembly line than having a repairman with the skills, parts and tools fix them one item at the time. I don't think I could find a seamstress or cobbler anymore if I wanted to repair my clothes or shoes, at least I'd have to search far and wide. I'm sure a tailor would do it for way too much money but it wouldn't be cost efficient. Same goes for my furniture, if anything breaks it's almost certainly easier and cheaper to replace than repair. Small electronics repair has died entirely, cars and houses are still expensive enough to repair but not much else. Particularly if you're not really sure if it's properly fixed or the repaired part is weaker than the original and taking into account that the item is worn and likely to break again sooner than a new one.
Not that it's just repairs, in many areas you're so outpaced that being self-sufficient is more expensive than at the store. Like for example my dad and I used to chop firewood, but now we buy it and if you add up the raw material cost (owning a forest patch), the production costs (chain saw, blade, chain, fuel, oil, protection gear, cleaver, transport) and a modest self cost for your time (getting there, felling, cutting into pieces, transporting to the road, cleaving, getting it home, stacking for drying) it's still cheaper to work, pay taxes and buy firewood from a company that drives around with big forest machines and creates more firewood in an hour than we can manage in a week. Customization is really more interesting and worth a premium, but it's rarely combined with the urgency of needing it from my own printer. Or if it's that urgent, I probably can't wait for the printer.
Our one example hasn't really been around for very long though, all estimates of the Sun's life cycle indicates Earth should remain habitable for another billion years or more. Where were we even a thousand years ago? It doesn't matter if the technology isn't ready until 3014, it's still a blink of an eye on the time scales we're talking here. And there's already semi-realistic craft designs like Project Orion that'll take hundreds of years to reach the next star, not tens of thousands. Unless the world goes for WW3 and a new stone age, it seems plausible that the technology will be available in a thousand years.
It doesn't: this new initiative have so far done nothing. I fully expect Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Netapp, Qualcomm, Rackspace and VMWare (yep those are the logos splattered all over the place) to sit around with their dicks in their hands having press releases statting initiatives and decding how to spend the funding while OpenBSD actually knuckles down and fixes OpenSSL.
No doubt Theo will do a solo run as usual, then bitch about all those ungrateful companies using it and giving nothing in return just like with OpenSSH. Meanwhile, this looks like a genuine attempt at starting a "Linux-style" project with lots of corporate support like the Linux kernel that all seem to have a stake in users trusting their computers for shopping and banking and cloud services and whatnot. Of course Theo can make his heroic and sacrificial stand, but this looks more like collaborative open source in progress "You know these low level libraries we all depend on? Well they're not really getting the attention they should have, none of us alone are going to do all the grunt work but if we pool our resources..." It can of course be fluff and PR but really it doesn't seem like a big seller to their end users, there's more potential for PR blunders if big bugs slip past them.
Are they going to hit the ground running? No. But I think you underestimate the potential here if they really choose to take... well, not ownership but stewardship over key libraries and provide the level of development, patching, review, testing, auditing etc. they lack today. Of course they will need skilled people, but those companies certainly have the capability to provide that if they want to. It's not like Theo is the only coder who knows his stuff around and he's still only one person with so many hours in a day and who'd better not get hit by a bus. And it still remains to be seen how clean the code Theo writes is in someone else's eyes, I usually think my code is perfectly clear until I ask others to look at it...
The flip side of that is the old adage "divide and conquer", the OSS community is almost self-defeating at times. Long before the mouse trap is the kind of smooth experience users want the core developers have moved to their new and even more grand mouse trap refactoring/redesign/remake that'll fix all the fundamental issues they discovered in the last design. Not that it's really different from proprietary software, at work it's exactly the same I'd love to get rid of the old and in with the new because even though it's not entirely done yet it's so much better than the old. The difference is at work I can't just drop working on our existing software and with our current user base, what pays the bills is what they get done not what I feel like doing. With OSS the train is leaving the station quite often, either you're on it or you're on your own.
And by on your own, I mean good luck finding a backport of any modern software to run on a distro 5+ years old or figuring out all the dependencies yourself. Just upgrade, it's free as in beer and in speech... but not as in time. Almost every 6 month cycle when I was on Ubuntu there was something I wanted and a bunch of unwelcome changes that tagged along. With Windows 7 I feel pretty confident that I can install any 2014 application on my 2009 OS, it'll work and it'll involve just that application. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's somebody out there who wants the new version but as long as it's not broken for me, don't fix it. I just wanted a new app, not a new distro.
For the life of me I don't understand why people consider a non-removable battery (and batteries are very prone to failures) to be a feature; I like to have spares in case I go somewhere charging is not possible or convenient or in the more likely case the original battery loses its ability to keep a charge like I've experienced with two different Li-Ion batteries.
Well, I can't speak for the failure rate but my iPhone 4 is now 3.5 years old and during Easter I used it a lot, even after a day of heavy use I still had 20% battery left. Today it's at 67% after a 2 hours of GPS tracking. For daily use it's still fine and I'm guessing will be fine for years to come. For weekends and vacations away from a charger I'm considering getting a battery pack - compared to the original 1420 mAh battery you can get a 7000-10000 mAh external charger for cheap. You put it in your backpack or luggage, plug it in where you sleep at night even if that's a remote cabin or a tent in the wilds. Or for that matter just turn off the "smart", if I kill data traffic it'll last very long as a dumb phone as I've done that abroad due to cost. Basically as long as the battery works it's not really a problem.
This. The NPR article seems misleading. They stopped him based on the 911 call. Which seems reasonable to me. If some moron is driving like a fool I'd really like to cops to stop him. The probable cause for the SEARCH was due to the marijuana smell. I don't think this ruling is a broad as it's being made out to be.
Well the cops did get a tip of one reckless maneuver that allegedly forced the tipper off the road. They tailed the truck for five minutes, saw no traffic violations or poor driving to collaborate the story. Then they pulled the truck over instead of being on their way. I'd agree with the dissenters, there's no reasonable suspicion of an ongoing crime - that is, drunk driving - and they pulled him over on a fishing expedition. One incident, observed by nobody but an anonymous tipper who may or may not have called it in just to be mean - I mean it's quite impressive to get a full license plate down while you're really being run off the road so some generous exaggeration may have happened. She didn't even accuse them of driving drunk, that's the court's argument that maybe they were while completely ignoring that the officers saw no sign of it.
Or maybe you just have a pack rat obsession with owning things while the rest of us as just looking to get some entertainment. I "buy" a non-transferrable license to a DRM-locked online-tied sandbox, even a DVD which also has DRM is more liberal as I can sell, lend, play anywhere without anyone's approval or activation but even that one I can't back up or format shift legally as I expect to do with my own property. None of that is an absolute necessity though, what matters if if the value (utility, desire) exceeds the costs (money, inconvenience) and if I am confident that I'll get my money's worth from it before Steam goes under and the service disappears in a puff of smoke I come out ahead. If I desperately want to play it 10+ years down the line I suspect it will be available somehow on GOG (legally), TPB (not so legally) or whatever so it's not a "now or never" situation.
Yes, I get pretty pissed when you abuse DRM to deliver use control like unskippable commercials and region locks, crap that acts more like malware (hello StarForce) and such things but ultimately I am looking to get entertained, it's in the same class as Netflix (subscription), Spotify (subscription) not about having my documents and data trapped in proprietary products with lock-in. Realistically if Steam said all games are now a 5 year lease it'd probably not change my habits at all. If they start acting like asses I always have the option to say here are the letters F and U, I'll be sourcing my entertainment elsewhere from now on. It's not like there's a shortage or anything, particularly since it won't cost me a moral fiber to download games I used to have on Steam off TPB should that ever become necessary.
Well, if we do an experiment on gravity we determine it only in a point location at a given time, the rest is extrapolation/intrapolation that gravity remains constant between locations and across time. Take two sections of forest, build greenhouses around them and pump more CO2 into one and you have a pretty good scientific experiment. Yes, putting the pieces correctly together is complicated but as long as you accept that things obey the laws of physics and chemistry and don't magically become different at a macro scale you can build bigger and bigger pieces of the puzzle from small blocks. There's no "irreducable complexity" here as the relgious like to trot out when they don't like the science.
To quote AMD (pdf) in their 2014 Q1 earnings, a couple days ago:
We are on track to generate approximately 50% of our revenue from high-growth markets, including embedded, semi-custom, dense server, professional graphics, and Ultra Low-Power client, where we can create differentiated winning solutions by the end of 2015. (...) We used to be a business centered over one stream of revenue, one opportunity, the PC market. Now we've introduced five new ones with our traditional space; that's six key markets where we can leverage our core IP. (...) Now let's turn to our traditional businesses. In graphics, we see strong demand in the enthusiast portion of the market. Our industry-leading R7 and R9 products drove GPU revenue growth year-over-year and sequentially.
In short, they're transforming away from their "traditional" business and of the PC market graphics revenue is going to be significant. AMDs x86 CPUs/APUs are going to be a small part of their business, there's a reason Intel is aiming all the big guns at ARM because AMD has already in their strategy decided to get out of the head-to-head competition with Intel. If you don't believe that, read the above lines again. They couldn't compete with Intel when they bet everything on one horse, now they're riding five others as well? That's a slow exit strategy, milking the CPU/APU revenue to execute their transformation. The FX line is probably already dead, Kaveri/Beema/Mullins will keep AMD present in the consumer market a while longer but the revenue is funneled into all those other key areas.
"...'Cover Oregon lacked the skills, knowledge or ability to be successful as the systems integrator on an undertaking of this scope and complexity,'
Gee, that's funny. And here I thought I was in the majority in thinking that it is in fact Oracle who lacks the skills, knowledge, or ability to fix that piece-of-shit Frankenstein they want to label a working product.
Time and material contracts basically means renting consultants by the hour, short of outright criminal behavior there's no promised time frames, deliverables or guarantees of functionality or quality. The upside is the lack of formalism, I've developed many reports on a T&M basis and basically if you want a filter here and a total there and to add one more column and add a traffic light here and a drill down there just say it and I'll keep working on it until you're happy. Heck, I've taken "requirements" from a single yellow post-it note, as long as the client is happy and the invoices get paid it's a win-win for everyone compared to bids and change orders.
The problem begins if you need anything other than yes-men because basically you're going to lead these people and point them to tasks that need doing and make sure it all comes together to a working solution. Consider it a bit like building a house where every contractor assumes that the rest of the work to bring it up to code will be done by somebody else, you tell the plumber to put a pipe here, the electrician a wire there and the carpenter to board up that wall and they do it, but they don't take any responsibility on whether it's done to code or the overall result. My guess is that Oracle have their asses well covered legally, but often they have to play the scapegoat when the client has been incompetent. Usually they don't want to throw eggs in the face of the manager who hired them, unless it becomes an even bigger PR problem not to.
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My impression of "pure" functional programming is that it's roughly like having only static classes and no static members in OOP. Basically if you can have all the information you need "in flight" with you, then it can do all sorts of neat parallelization and optimization tricks because there's no state that makes the ordering important. I guess that's great if you're running some sort of scientific simulation where all the input is set in the model and you expect a result set out at the very end. But I don't find that part hard, the hard part about OOP is when the state throws you a curve ball. You try to write to a database record but it's not there anymore or the user removed the CD from the drive or the database is full or the network connection was lost and now what? It's handling all the contingencies that is difficult. I guess if the problem is the performance of your side effect free code, functional programming may be the answer. But it's not what most developers deal with.
Well, if we're really running out of jobs there's always healthcare. From what I've read there would be no problem employing many, many more people there but the blocker is economy. Over the next 30 years or so at least here the proportion of elderly will grow massively compared to the workforce, they're looking at all kinds of automation just to cope.
Oh please, the Industrial Revolution was "the" killer for skilled artisans and craftsmen who were often replaced by unskilled labor operating machinery which incorporated the skill. Being self-employed and providing services directly became much harder, you had to be a worker at a factory because they owned the machinery and reaped the profits. Probably the worst time to be a worker was in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Taylorism was at its peak and it was all about how many seconds operation X took at the assembly line and it was all about dumb replaceable workers you could drag in from the street at subsistence wages.
It never really changed until Ford doubled the worker's wages in 1914 and from there was the golden age of the "skilled" worker, concepts like Kanban/Lean Manufacturing in the 1950s also focused on small cells of skilled workers providing much higher flexibility and lower defect rates than the big, long assembly lines. Then started a new cycle where the skill those workers had were incorporated into robotics, again forcing us to develop a new set of meta-skills because it can crank out parts with near perfect precision 24x7 and it was back to huge production lines. We still needed a lot of monitoring and repair though, because the first robots were rather dumb and did things rather mindlessly. Now those skills are being incorporated into electronics, and we're again looking for new meta skills. It all comes full circle again and again.
What you can't do is provide a link in the app that takes you directly to a purchasing page to work wrounf the in-app thing. Honestly tough, I've always thought it was a pretty fair trade-off to pay 30% to gan access to many millions of people who already have payment details entered and ready to go at the press of a button.
So basically you're saying it's such a good offer we have to ban them from not taking advantage of it, Stockholm syndrome much? They can go to any website and buy any non-app item they want, the app store doesn't give you access to the market. The app store is the only remaining way to sell apps after all other ways have been taken away from you, it's what keeps the market hostage and enables them to get a 30% shakedown of all transactions. Why do you think there's no such thing in the PC world, here's millions of people ready to one-click shop for only 30% of your gross? Because no sane business would use it if they had a choice.
As for the quality, it was what it was, and it wasn't really any worse than the other games available for the 2600 at the time, so I didn't really know the difference. I liked it because it made me think about strategy in ways I hadn't otherwise yet learned at 8 years old, it taught me planning because I mapped out on paper some of the puzzle piece locations so I could try and find a pattern (sorta like D&D, even though I was never allowed to play that), and most of all because it certainly taught me patience beyond my years. I look back fondly at the E.T. game - not for the gameplay, but for what I learned as a young gamer because of what I now know are its flaws.
You forgot the most important lesson, sometimes no matter what you do or think you could have done differently you're fucked because you're set up to fail. That's important to remember when the project you're on fails miserably and the crap rolls downhill, of course assuming you weren't the screw-up.
In what appears to be the first court decision addressing the issue, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York said Internet service providers such as Microsoft Corp or Google Inc cannot refuse to turn over customer information and emails stored in other countries when issued a valid search warrant from U.S. law enforcement agencies.
Emphasis mine. I read this to mean that if you use any US owned mail provider the FBI can subpoena anything they want through a US judge. That just seems horribly wrong and would put the world wide operation of any company at the mercy of the jurisdiction where they're headquartered. By this logic the NSA can get a subpoena to demand all US companies turn over any information they got anywhere in the world. You could never trust a foreign company to follow local laws. If this stands it's a horrible precedent.
Technically speaking, most of those nuclear weapons everyone was afraid of back then are still there, just waiting to be fired. Now, rather than the Soviet Union, they're in the hands of Russia. A least nothing is going on that might increase tensions between Russia and the rest of the world right? Oh, and fortunately Russia isn't run by some hard-right authoritarian, obsessesed with projecting strength.
The Soviet Union with half of Europe as allies was a superpower. Russia is barely in the top 10 biggest economies of the world, they have 140 million men against 900 million in NATO. Their military technology and spending suffered during the reforms, by all means they're powerful but they got no chance of pulling off a victory. Putin is gambling that nobody wants to pick a fight with Russia over a few areas in Ukraine, if he's called on it they'd lose but probably not before a hundred million people have died. Unless of course China were to join on the Russian side, 1.35 billion people and the world's second biggest economy along with Russia's nukes would give NATO a real run for their money. Personally I think what's happening in Ukraine will push all the other countries in the "buffer zone" between NATO and Russia to seek NATO membership over Russia's objections.
I fail to see the problem with his choice of words, you find exploits and put them in an arsenal of attacks. Just because you count number of exploits and not numbers of guns it's still an accumulation of weapons set aside for future use in cyber-warfare. And of course it costs lots of money to maintain such an arsenal as old exploits are patched or the vulnerable software or hardware goes out of use, it doesn't have a shelf life like physical weapons but your capability degrades over time unless you supply it with new exploits not entirely unlike when your enemies upgrade their weapons capabilities making yours obsolete. At least it's no worse of an abuse than using "cyber warfare" for sending bits and bytes instead of bullets at each other.
I don't think Microsoft can rely on the customer being "stuck" with Win8 and MS Office much longer, according to StatCounter mobile is now 24%, tablets 6% and the desktop only 70% of web browsing. Subtract a few percent for Mac/Linux and more than one in three is no longer using Windows to browse the web. Of course web browsing != general computing but people are going to want solutions for the devices they're using, if there's an app for it they'd probably rather use that than haul out their laptop. I guess most of those 30% have a PC they could use if they wanted to, but I'm not sure casual users will in the future. I think the "PC-less" digital life is quickly becoming possible and that significant parts of the population will find they don't really need a PC. Microsoft has the enterprise by the balls, consumers much less so.
The idea of longevity research, of course, is to make 100 year old body indistinguishable from a 20 year old body, not merely to "keep the heart beating".
That may be the long term ideal, practically though there's very little of significance modern medicine will do until you actually have an injury, disease or organ failure. If you take a reasonably healthy 80 year old to the hospital and say "What can you do to make him more like a 20 year old?" they wouldn't replacing aching bones or an aging heart and lungs and kidneys and liver, nor would they do anything about the poor eyesight, hearing or all the other senses that weaken with age. The primary effect of modern medicine is that people rarely die young, today most live to be 70 but few live to see 90, the curve has a quite sharp decline where the average body just expires. Yes we're looking at the people who become 100+ to figure out why, but that's looking at terminal reasons not trying to make the old young again.
He's just here as a Vorlon observer, being a smart ass is part of the job but he needs to work on being more cryptic. Oh and if we actually discover the formula for immortality, duck before the fireworks start.
In fact we learned today that the FCC is going to allow capitalists to fuck the internet up at least in the US.
Considering all the nice things I've heard about American ISPs, you already seem more buttfucked than the goatse guy. But I guess from now on you'll pay extra for lube.
Or, you could just continue doing what people do today: tape it back on. Total expense, tenth of a cent. Total time spent, 15 seconds.
That sounds familiar...
Right now we have a consumer culture that doesn't really teach people to make and repair their own things (which is what a 3D printing would mostly be useful for).
Mass production killed the repair business, unless it's really expensive they just come cheaper off the assembly line than having a repairman with the skills, parts and tools fix them one item at the time. I don't think I could find a seamstress or cobbler anymore if I wanted to repair my clothes or shoes, at least I'd have to search far and wide. I'm sure a tailor would do it for way too much money but it wouldn't be cost efficient. Same goes for my furniture, if anything breaks it's almost certainly easier and cheaper to replace than repair. Small electronics repair has died entirely, cars and houses are still expensive enough to repair but not much else. Particularly if you're not really sure if it's properly fixed or the repaired part is weaker than the original and taking into account that the item is worn and likely to break again sooner than a new one.
Not that it's just repairs, in many areas you're so outpaced that being self-sufficient is more expensive than at the store. Like for example my dad and I used to chop firewood, but now we buy it and if you add up the raw material cost (owning a forest patch), the production costs (chain saw, blade, chain, fuel, oil, protection gear, cleaver, transport) and a modest self cost for your time (getting there, felling, cutting into pieces, transporting to the road, cleaving, getting it home, stacking for drying) it's still cheaper to work, pay taxes and buy firewood from a company that drives around with big forest machines and creates more firewood in an hour than we can manage in a week. Customization is really more interesting and worth a premium, but it's rarely combined with the urgency of needing it from my own printer. Or if it's that urgent, I probably can't wait for the printer.
Our one example hasn't really been around for very long though, all estimates of the Sun's life cycle indicates Earth should remain habitable for another billion years or more. Where were we even a thousand years ago? It doesn't matter if the technology isn't ready until 3014, it's still a blink of an eye on the time scales we're talking here. And there's already semi-realistic craft designs like Project Orion that'll take hundreds of years to reach the next star, not tens of thousands. Unless the world goes for WW3 and a new stone age, it seems plausible that the technology will be available in a thousand years.
It doesn't: this new initiative have so far done nothing. I fully expect Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Netapp, Qualcomm, Rackspace and VMWare (yep those are the logos splattered all over the place) to sit around with their dicks in their hands having press releases statting initiatives and decding how to spend the funding while OpenBSD actually knuckles down and fixes OpenSSL.
No doubt Theo will do a solo run as usual, then bitch about all those ungrateful companies using it and giving nothing in return just like with OpenSSH. Meanwhile, this looks like a genuine attempt at starting a "Linux-style" project with lots of corporate support like the Linux kernel that all seem to have a stake in users trusting their computers for shopping and banking and cloud services and whatnot. Of course Theo can make his heroic and sacrificial stand, but this looks more like collaborative open source in progress "You know these low level libraries we all depend on? Well they're not really getting the attention they should have, none of us alone are going to do all the grunt work but if we pool our resources..." It can of course be fluff and PR but really it doesn't seem like a big seller to their end users, there's more potential for PR blunders if big bugs slip past them.
Are they going to hit the ground running? No. But I think you underestimate the potential here if they really choose to take... well, not ownership but stewardship over key libraries and provide the level of development, patching, review, testing, auditing etc. they lack today. Of course they will need skilled people, but those companies certainly have the capability to provide that if they want to. It's not like Theo is the only coder who knows his stuff around and he's still only one person with so many hours in a day and who'd better not get hit by a bus. And it still remains to be seen how clean the code Theo writes is in someone else's eyes, I usually think my code is perfectly clear until I ask others to look at it...
The flip side of that is the old adage "divide and conquer", the OSS community is almost self-defeating at times. Long before the mouse trap is the kind of smooth experience users want the core developers have moved to their new and even more grand mouse trap refactoring/redesign/remake that'll fix all the fundamental issues they discovered in the last design. Not that it's really different from proprietary software, at work it's exactly the same I'd love to get rid of the old and in with the new because even though it's not entirely done yet it's so much better than the old. The difference is at work I can't just drop working on our existing software and with our current user base, what pays the bills is what they get done not what I feel like doing. With OSS the train is leaving the station quite often, either you're on it or you're on your own.
And by on your own, I mean good luck finding a backport of any modern software to run on a distro 5+ years old or figuring out all the dependencies yourself. Just upgrade, it's free as in beer and in speech... but not as in time. Almost every 6 month cycle when I was on Ubuntu there was something I wanted and a bunch of unwelcome changes that tagged along. With Windows 7 I feel pretty confident that I can install any 2014 application on my 2009 OS, it'll work and it'll involve just that application. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's somebody out there who wants the new version but as long as it's not broken for me, don't fix it. I just wanted a new app, not a new distro.
For the life of me I don't understand why people consider a non-removable battery (and batteries are very prone to failures) to be a feature; I like to have spares in case I go somewhere charging is not possible or convenient or in the more likely case the original battery loses its ability to keep a charge like I've experienced with two different Li-Ion batteries.
Well, I can't speak for the failure rate but my iPhone 4 is now 3.5 years old and during Easter I used it a lot, even after a day of heavy use I still had 20% battery left. Today it's at 67% after a 2 hours of GPS tracking. For daily use it's still fine and I'm guessing will be fine for years to come. For weekends and vacations away from a charger I'm considering getting a battery pack - compared to the original 1420 mAh battery you can get a 7000-10000 mAh external charger for cheap. You put it in your backpack or luggage, plug it in where you sleep at night even if that's a remote cabin or a tent in the wilds. Or for that matter just turn off the "smart", if I kill data traffic it'll last very long as a dumb phone as I've done that abroad due to cost. Basically as long as the battery works it's not really a problem.
Astroturfing Microsoft on websites, duh...
This. The NPR article seems misleading. They stopped him based on the 911 call. Which seems reasonable to me. If some moron is driving like a fool I'd really like to cops to stop him. The probable cause for the SEARCH was due to the marijuana smell. I don't think this ruling is a broad as it's being made out to be.
Well the cops did get a tip of one reckless maneuver that allegedly forced the tipper off the road. They tailed the truck for five minutes, saw no traffic violations or poor driving to collaborate the story. Then they pulled the truck over instead of being on their way. I'd agree with the dissenters, there's no reasonable suspicion of an ongoing crime - that is, drunk driving - and they pulled him over on a fishing expedition. One incident, observed by nobody but an anonymous tipper who may or may not have called it in just to be mean - I mean it's quite impressive to get a full license plate down while you're really being run off the road so some generous exaggeration may have happened. She didn't even accuse them of driving drunk, that's the court's argument that maybe they were while completely ignoring that the officers saw no sign of it.
Or maybe you just have a pack rat obsession with owning things while the rest of us as just looking to get some entertainment. I "buy" a non-transferrable license to a DRM-locked online-tied sandbox, even a DVD which also has DRM is more liberal as I can sell, lend, play anywhere without anyone's approval or activation but even that one I can't back up or format shift legally as I expect to do with my own property. None of that is an absolute necessity though, what matters if if the value (utility, desire) exceeds the costs (money, inconvenience) and if I am confident that I'll get my money's worth from it before Steam goes under and the service disappears in a puff of smoke I come out ahead. If I desperately want to play it 10+ years down the line I suspect it will be available somehow on GOG (legally), TPB (not so legally) or whatever so it's not a "now or never" situation.
Yes, I get pretty pissed when you abuse DRM to deliver use control like unskippable commercials and region locks, crap that acts more like malware (hello StarForce) and such things but ultimately I am looking to get entertained, it's in the same class as Netflix (subscription), Spotify (subscription) not about having my documents and data trapped in proprietary products with lock-in. Realistically if Steam said all games are now a 5 year lease it'd probably not change my habits at all. If they start acting like asses I always have the option to say here are the letters F and U, I'll be sourcing my entertainment elsewhere from now on. It's not like there's a shortage or anything, particularly since it won't cost me a moral fiber to download games I used to have on Steam off TPB should that ever become necessary.
Well, if we do an experiment on gravity we determine it only in a point location at a given time, the rest is extrapolation/intrapolation that gravity remains constant between locations and across time. Take two sections of forest, build greenhouses around them and pump more CO2 into one and you have a pretty good scientific experiment. Yes, putting the pieces correctly together is complicated but as long as you accept that things obey the laws of physics and chemistry and don't magically become different at a macro scale you can build bigger and bigger pieces of the puzzle from small blocks. There's no "irreducable complexity" here as the relgious like to trot out when they don't like the science.
To quote AMD (pdf) in their 2014 Q1 earnings, a couple days ago:
We are on track to generate approximately 50% of our revenue from high-growth markets, including embedded, semi-custom, dense server, professional graphics, and Ultra Low-Power client, where we can create differentiated winning solutions by the end of 2015. (...) We used to be a business centered over one stream of revenue, one opportunity, the PC market. Now we've introduced five new ones with our traditional space; that's six key markets where we can leverage our core IP. (...) Now let's turn to our traditional businesses. In graphics, we see strong demand in the enthusiast portion of the market. Our industry-leading R7 and R9 products drove GPU revenue growth year-over-year and sequentially.
In short, they're transforming away from their "traditional" business and of the PC market graphics revenue is going to be significant. AMDs x86 CPUs/APUs are going to be a small part of their business, there's a reason Intel is aiming all the big guns at ARM because AMD has already in their strategy decided to get out of the head-to-head competition with Intel. If you don't believe that, read the above lines again. They couldn't compete with Intel when they bet everything on one horse, now they're riding five others as well? That's a slow exit strategy, milking the CPU/APU revenue to execute their transformation. The FX line is probably already dead, Kaveri/Beema/Mullins will keep AMD present in the consumer market a while longer but the revenue is funneled into all those other key areas.
"...'Cover Oregon lacked the skills, knowledge or ability to be successful as the systems integrator on an undertaking of this scope and complexity,'
Gee, that's funny. And here I thought I was in the majority in thinking that it is in fact Oracle who lacks the skills, knowledge, or ability to fix that piece-of-shit Frankenstein they want to label a working product.
False dichotomy, it's not one or the other.
Time and material contracts basically means renting consultants by the hour, short of outright criminal behavior there's no promised time frames, deliverables or guarantees of functionality or quality. The upside is the lack of formalism, I've developed many reports on a T&M basis and basically if you want a filter here and a total there and to add one more column and add a traffic light here and a drill down there just say it and I'll keep working on it until you're happy. Heck, I've taken "requirements" from a single yellow post-it note, as long as the client is happy and the invoices get paid it's a win-win for everyone compared to bids and change orders.
The problem begins if you need anything other than yes-men because basically you're going to lead these people and point them to tasks that need doing and make sure it all comes together to a working solution. Consider it a bit like building a house where every contractor assumes that the rest of the work to bring it up to code will be done by somebody else, you tell the plumber to put a pipe here, the electrician a wire there and the carpenter to board up that wall and they do it, but they don't take any responsibility on whether it's done to code or the overall result. My guess is that Oracle have their asses well covered legally, but often they have to play the scapegoat when the client has been incompetent. Usually they don't want to throw eggs in the face of the manager who hired them, unless it becomes an even bigger PR problem not to.