In tournaments it's about who can pick the most points from the weakest players, of course you'd like to win every time but if you're facing Carlsen I think most players will be more than happy to draw and try to outpace him on the rest. The world championship is intended to be a hardcore duel between the two best players, you have to defeat your opponent to win you can't skirt around it. The issue is twofold, one to get the opportunity to play you must win the candidates tournament meaning you must be pretty damn good in tournaments anyway and second by the time another championship comes around many expect the current champion to fall. Unlike many other sports the chess ranking is far more important than "points" collected from tournaments in other sports, so it's hard to make a single tournament be all that important. There are already several long-standing tournaments that usually have most of the top ten players, they're not going to get bigger even if the world championship went away.
A sub-$100 price is about it, since they took out Gamecube backwards compatibility and Internet connectivity. It's really just aimed at the people buying Wii Fit and Wii Sports, not at anyone who's even mildly serious about gaming.
Well duh, it's a mini version of a last-gen console released in 2006 so that's the only people who you could sell it to. Even if anyone needed Gamecube compatibility there's now 100 million regular Wiis on the market to 20 million Gamecubes sold. And Nintendo probably looked at the stats and found extremely many Wiis are never online, the only system updates they get are through game discs. Add in a few clueless parents who think anything involving the Internet is a scary place and you got a $99 guaranteed safe kids/family console. No matter how old and boring you think it is, it's always new to some new kids.
Uh no. If the warranty is 5 years, I expect it to last at least that long, if not longer. If the drive fails within 5 years, I expect a new drive since I purchased a guarantee of uninterrupted operation for 5 years. If I didn't get it with the first drive, or the second, or the third, then I expect them to keep sending me drives until they get it right or refund my money. If they go out of business doing this with too many customers too much of the time, then they should have as their products suck. That is how you honor warranties the right way. Of course, companies cheap out on them now, and it's getting real bad with things like computer components, notably, motherboards, video boards, and hard disks. A new product was paid for, and it was faulty, and they send a refurb? I did not buy a refurb!
A five year warranty is not a guarantee of five years of uninterrupted operation, only that they'll fix any problems you have with it the next five years. Otherwise I bet you'd see a lot of "accidents" around the four year, eleven months mark. And while it might have been a new drive when you bought it, if you need a warranty repair after four years and eleven months it's now a four years and eleven months old drive. Do you think your car insurance company should give you a totally new car when your 20 year old car is totaled by a drunk driver? Same with warranties, they are only intended to reinstate you to where you are now, not where you were almost five years ago.
Yes, the refurb should absolutely be tested and working. If it has any metric of how "worn" it is, it should be no worse than what you sent in. But I think you have an exaggerated view of what a warranty could and should do. Particularly if you apply it to the product as a whole, if your laptop broke you should get a new one? They can't just swap the faulty RAM stick for a new one and ship the rest back to you? I mean your operation of the laptop was interrupted right, try again? And while computer equipment tend to fail catastrophically it'd be even sillier to apply this to consumer goods as a whole. I find it quite okay that their choices are:
1) Repair - if you want to swap a broken component, fine no matter if it's one capacitor or one motherboard. 2) Replace - that's how I have a WD SSD in my machine though I bought a OCZ SSD 3) Refund - if all else fails, hand the money back. But not just because you'd like to see the sale "undone".
I feel we here in Norway have very strong consumer protections in law, but still nothing like you imagine them to be. And I don't think it would be very healthy for the market if they were.
So if there's a mall shooting the solution is armed guards in every mall? If there's a school shooting the solution is armed guards in every school? Every bus station, train station, subway station, park and so on until there's a whole army of armed guards running around? The point of the secuity control is that nobody gets to bring anything on board to crash or hijack the plane and in that respect, mission accomplished. It's not a general defense against a random person pulling out a gun and opening fire, not any more than any other place.
But you're never going to get a cheap fanless discrete GPU with the power to hold up against a GTX660 or better hardware.
Never? Like how cheap fanless GPUs from 2013 don't beat the crap out of any high end graphics card from 1998 never? Don't go there. But yes, for any given level of technology you can always do more with a 250W+ dGPU power budget than a <10W fanless thing. But do gamers need it? From the Steam hardware survey 98.5% of the users play at 1920x1200 or below and of them 16% on Intel graphics. Not every game is a Crysis, many of them simply play well on any recent dGPU but suck just a little bit too much on integrated graphics. That's the market Intel's after, if most your games play decently at 1080p on medium settings it's "good enough" for many. Sure you could invest in a $200-600 graphics card and bump that up to ultra/enthusiast level, but most people won't bother.
Yeah, it's like lights out when the last employee leaves for the shutdown and to be surprised they all managed to switch the lights back on when they returned to work. Well, almost all.
As so much just can't be done after dark, and it gets really expensive to light up every field, park, and body of water just to be able to live life after work.
But that's where our current time zones are totally off the mark. I just checked and today the sun rises at 8 AM and sets at 4 PM (yes, I'm quite far north) and guess what my working hours are? Basically I go to work at dawn, sit in an office until dusk then go home and enjoy the whole evening in darkness with artificial lights. I get it, some occupations like construction depends on natural lighting but by far the majority work indoors like me where it matters very little if it's dark outside or not. If we really wanted to provide optimal daylight the sun would shine 4PM-12PM instead. I really doubt I'd spend any more electricity 8AM-4PM than I do today 4PM-12PM, the difference is that I could spend that time outdoors in the sun instead of being stuck in an office.
The current time zones were set in a time when you tried to preserve candles, lamp oil and firewood. People worked from sunrise to sunset, often on a farm or other outdoor work and spent the nights mostly in the dark. Today it's completely backwards and we should change it so that we work in the dark and have our time off when the sun is up. Today you go home and it's pitch dark when you come home so you end up doing some sort of passive activity like watch TV, sit at the computer, read a book or whatever. If it was daylight outside you could do something, anything it'd be almost like a small weekend every day. It'd be wonderful.
Helping the poorest of the poor is indeed good and we have managed to lift many out of extreme poverty (less than $1.25/day) but we've not made the same progress on lifting people further out of the very poor (less than $2/day). Like for example India where 33% live in extreme poverty and 69% are very poor or Pakistan where 21% live in extreme poverty but 60% is very poor. Those billions of people also need a lift so we're more to help drag the poorest billion out of poverty.
1. Volume, volume, volume. Same panel for monitor and TV. 2. Most software can't adjust DPI properly. 3. Even on computers YouTube, Netflix etc. is huge
The trend was already very clear with ATSC, DVB-S2 and BluRay all standardizing on 1920x1080 ten years ago, if you didn't realize it five years ago you must have had your head in the sand. You're the first person I've heard that has claimed it's an advantage to always have distracting controls and other information on the screen, maybe you're just seriously out of touch with the rest of the world? A 1920x1200 monitor is great for more workspace, but too few care about the extra 180 pixels to overcome the massive momentum. And the 2560x1440/1600 screens never got out of being an expensive niche product for a very small group of computer users. Video looked worse with upscaling.
It was Apple that showed the way really, how do you get higher resolution without all these DPI/upscaling issues? You double it, stupid apps are simply zoomed 200% until they fix their shit. Apple did it to their phones, their tablets and their laptops and that's how TV is going to do it as well, we're just waiting for 4K to become doable. The cheap 4K panels like Seiki show there's no inherent big cost increase, it's just new technology and you're currently paying a lot to be on the bleeding edge. Once the momentum really gets behind 4K TV, I expect the prices for 4K monitors will quickly dive at or below 1440/1600p monitors.
The whole idea of keyservers is a big hack anyway due to SMTP having no support for encryption, mixing two entirely different issues. Are you john.doe@gmail.com or are you *that* John Doe that you're looking to mail to. It's gmail.com (verified through domain keys) that should be authoritative as to what your public key is (which you've preferably generated locally and uploaded, but depends on how much you trust the server) while authenticated and that you're talking to the real gmail.com should be verified through whatever anti-domain spoofing methods already exists. And finally you should have test clients query the server to check that it's really serving up the right public key. Once you've resolved that sending mail to john.doe@gmail.com will be encrypted to whoever is in control of that account and nobody else, maybe or maybe not it should be tied to a real person.
Actually, that could be a possibility. As this is the most extensive exoplanetary system discovered to date, we do not have enough data to really determine what is "normal". However, quite a few of the exoplanets I have been reading about do orbit their star pretty closely (although I would say I haven't even looked at 5% of the 1000 exoplanets out there).
The methods used are extremely biased for short transition periods meaning short time to confirmation, if I recall correctly the standard is three passes. That means three years for Earth, thirtysix years for Jupiter while many of those observed are measured in weeks and months. With greater distance from the star it's also less likely the planet will pass in the same plane as the star and us. I don't think anyone has done a metastudy that says exactly what kind of planets we wouldn't have found by now, it's probably too much of a moving target and too much uncertainty. In time I guess we'll get there (as in if there was a planet there we'd have seen it by now) but right now I don't think any of the searches are exhaustive.
First of all, there's lots of people who make money in a single payer system. Public hospitals still needs equipment, systems, staff and it doesn't in any way preclude them from buying standard services from private hospitals and other institutions, hiring contractors and so on. The question is who ultimately picks up the bill, which is generally the tax payer though there's some copay capped at $350/year. However, there are very few middle men who needs to get paid, whether it's insurance salesmen, marketing, claims investigators, lawyers and so on, though we of course have doctors reviewing other doctor's work to control both quality and spending.
As for what's covered or not, that is actually a rather long medical discussion on duration of the effect, quality of life and so on and I'm not saying we're perfect at it but it is dominated by medical professionals who have our health at heart, it is not a bunch of insurance companies trying to maximize profits by denying coverage. The system has to cover all the high risk behavior, but it's also spread across a huge pool and overall people don't break a leg to get a free cast. We also get the freedom choose if we should pick up overall public health trends like obesity in the health care system or whether we should try to make more proactive changes to lower our own costs. We have to pick up all the hopeless cases but we also get many people back into self-sufficiency or taxable work that wouldn't have the means to do that on their own.
It's not really about denying anyone profit, though some see that as a nice side effect. The primary reasons are: 1. Everybody is at risk of disease, injury or disability from birth and until well into adult life. You can be a victim of it long before you have any real choice in the matter and not everybody have parents with money or that spend it well. 2. No normal person can handle the expenses of catastrophic health failure, if you get chronically ill, unable to work and in need of care the next 50 years only billionaires could do it. It's not a luxury, it's a necessity. 3. Unlike say fire insurance your health is an ongoing thing, it deteriorates, you have relapses, chronic problems that come and go and the insurance company want to get rid of you the moment you're a losing proposition. 4. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, making the barrier low to go see the doctor is avoiding a lot of large medical expenses later and slows the spread of disease in the population. 5. Deteriorating health is causing irreparable harm, even if you can win some compensation it's no substitute for lack of care or treatment because your claims were stalled or denied and sick or dying people can't fight an insurance company. 6. Even if your risk varies with age you'll spend one year in every age category anyway, the profiling doesn't gain you anything because your healthy 25 year old will become a middle aged 50 year old and eventually an aged 75 year old.
Sure, they're monopolists in many ways but they're also fairly curbed for exactly that reason, it's better than to pretend there's meaningful competition between an oligarchy of few and poor choices.
When you buy low and sell high over time in a one-way flow it's a supplier/customer relationship and the people you buy low from are your suppliers, the people you sell high to customers. We supply Google with raw information and get paid in free services, they process it and sell it to their customers. Of course they want us to use their services because it means they have more product to sell to their customers but we're the "supply" part of the market, not the "demand". Both can be mutually beneficial relationships, but they should not be confused such as when Google changes their services to maximize the commercial value of that information, not for our benefit but for their customers. They have a very direct financial interest in manipulating us into being a more profitable product that your example lacks, he doesn't care if he's paid in goat or gold.
I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm doing and programming computers well does require a lot of skill that's borderline autistic in the real world. I'm sure your teachers too did some kind of "How dumb can a computer be?" exercise where you tried instructing the teacher to put jam on a piece of bread and he tried acting as dumb as possible making you Lay. Out. Each. Step. Exactly. Computers are like that and we accept that, you've got nobody to blame but yourself because it did exactly what you told it to. But the rest of the world isn't like that, if coworkers or a dog or a three year old showed the same utter inability to work out the details we'd start wondering if there was something wrong with their intelligence, not ours. If the recipe says a cup of sugar, you don't throw the cup itself in the mix.
The same goes for the ability to anticipate every possible unexpected and improbable circumstance that might occur, normal people might think ahead on what they'd do in a few common or anticipated situations but a computer expects you to Lay. Out. Every. Exception. Exactly. In real life for one you'd never get out get door but even if you did it'd be in full survival gear in case you fell into a sinkhole and you'd still fail because the road was blocked and you didn't plan any alternative routes. For most people most of the time they'll simply cross that bridge when they get to it, there's no need to go all OCD and plan out everything in excruciating detail ahead of time. Yet that's what we have to do because the computer is utterly unable to deal with any situation on its own without instructions.
Finally normal people don't manage resources like programmers do, if they're cooking dinner they collect the pots and pans and other utensils they need from where ever they were put last and clean them if necessary. Even with managed languages where you don't have to free the memory used, you still need to destroy the objects you create, close the connections you opened, release the locks you've gotten and Manage. Every. Resource. Exactly. Everything must be kept track on in detail and put back in exactly the same place in exactly the same state as you found it. If you had a kitchen managed like a computer I'd say you were suffering from massive OCD, not just having it tidy and keeping things in the usual places. A cooking process doesn't die because one thing is out of place, a computer process does.
Of course you could say that's two different settings that you turn on when you get to work and turn off when you go home, but we're not machines and we can stop caring and be a slob at home but it still changes how we think. A lot of it is simply mental training, because you need to plan out so far ahead in such detail it naturally translates to every other situation you come across in life too. Personally I'd like the ability to live a bit more in the moment, to lose that "big picture" and just live in the here and now and not care so much about tomorrow. There is such a thing as overthinking it and it tends to be a bit of a party pooper, have fun today and worry about the hangover tomorrow. Too much rationality is dull.
In it's efforts to solve a non-problem (namely making a machine boot faster)
To many people it's a non-problem because they hardly ever reboot their machine or they expect a redundant fail-over cluster to take over. For a lot of people boot time matters, even if it doesn't for you.
Most people also don't have any use for a $550 graphics card, if you buy one you're almost certainly a serious gamer who'll get many hours of use out of that card. Of course you're not doing that on minimum wage, but having a $1k gaming PC is hardly just for the excessively wealthy. Honestly the cash investment is very low compared to many other hobbies, it's mostly time and effort. Just like WoW addiction is probably the cheapest addiction you can get, well if you don't count losing your job over it. Personally I'm a pack rat, but at 4TB/$170 I'm still not blowing that much on collecting everything under the sun. And my digital hoarding is still limited to one miditower, I don't live with stuff up to the ceiling.
Partly, but they never could match Intel on process technology which meant Intel always had a cost advantage, even when their CPU designs were inferior. As for more recent events, AMD looks saved for a while as the division that includes consoles more than doubled last quarter and gave them an overall profit so at least for the next year or so with big console sales they should be good. Still, with all their diversifying I'm worried that they simply don't want to step back into the ring with Intel, but instead focus on graphics cards, graphics-heavy APUs, heterogenous computing, semicustom designs, ARM micrservers and so on.
The reason I say that is because their CPU sales are way down, still going down and losing money - they have to either really step it up or step out and their roadmaps don't exactly indicate going on the offensive, just moderate revisions that might keep them from losing more ground. They have CPUs good enough to be "console-quality" for this generation of consoles, that'll sell for a good while since many PC games will be console ports and so play well on that level of hardware even if they give up competing with future Intel CPUs. It's not like they're competing very well on high-performance or performance per watt today, jjust performance per dollar and it's showing on AMDs financials.
While the above could work, I wonder if it will be actually implemented in practice. For one thing, it shouldn't be necessary: every autonomous car should be able to detect the slowing of the car in front of it and respond within a few milliseconds anyway. So why tell the car behind you something that it pretty much already knows?
Don't underestimate the cumulative effects of even a small delay in this system. The first car brakes. The second car brakes 10ms later, but to make up for those 10ms it hits the brakes harder. The third car brakes 10ms later, and since the second car is breaking hard it's breaking even harder. If it's a long line of cars the last could easily go into a full emergency break even if the first one just made a small speed adjustment. I think broadcasting an intent to change speed is very useful, if you're slowing down from 50 to 45 mph with low urgency because you're hitting slow traffic that should cause a different reaction than an intent of 0 mph with high urgency. You could make non-emergency speed adjustments happen in sync or back-to-front, not front-to-back.
I see this as working in conjunction with the sensors to stay inside a buffer zone, if you broadcast a fake 0 mph signal all that would happen is that the car behind would slam the brakes only until the distance and speed differential is big enough. If you transmit a fake 45 mph signal when you're really slamming the brakes the sensors would detect it and slam your brakes anyway. It's a guideline of intent but if the map doesn't match the terrain, trust the sensors. Besides, it could be that the car in front of you has lost all braking power and is about to slam into a traffic jam. I think anyone sending funny signals would be found and taken care of rather quick, after all there's plenty sensors to document it.
unclean hands n. a legal doctrine which is a defense to a complaint, which states that a party who is asking for a judgment cannot have the help of the court if he/she has done anything unethical in relation to the subject of the lawsuit. Thus, if a defendant can show the plaintiff had "unclean hands," the plaintiff's complaint will be dismissed or the plaintiff will be denied judgment.
The police can provoke you to commit a crime and arrest you for it in a classic non-entrapment sting operation. A copyright holder can't provoke you into committing copyright infringement and then sue you in court for damages, it doesn't make it legal but it's an affirmative defense meaning they can't collect any damages from it. Basically you will never get rewarded in court for causing damages to yourself, it creates far too much potential for abuse.
Except it seems these apps are rather battery-intensive in any automatic trigger mode and you don't want to have to manually activate them, meaning you'll probably only turn them on if you think you might possibly need them. Second since they're totally non-standard, they only do any good if you've agreed with your travel companions to use this as your avalanche search app, any other bystanders or rescue crews will look for a transponder if you have one or search based on visual observation if you don't, they won't spend valuable time searching through a bunch of odd apps on the off chance you have one and has activated it. Both of those issues indicate to me that the only times you'd use it is when you should have a proper avalanche transponder, after all they're not totally random you need a certain terrain and conditions as prerequisites.
I sort of agree with you in general though, if I'm out exercising with a pulse belt and my heart rate just goes crazy like I'm having a seizure or a stroke then why shouldn't the phone alert 911? It's not like you need a medical degree to call 911 in the same situation either. On the other hand, I'd be extremely careful in marketing such a feature because can it for example tell the difference between a user removing the belt and a heart going full stop? Probably not. If you sell something like these avalanche apps, they should come with a big fat red warning label saying "This is not a avalanche transponder, it does not broadcast on the standard rescue frequency and your smart phone is not designed to function as one with respect to range, accuracy, robustness or battery life. It may still aid your rescue if no transponder is available, but it is no replacement for one."
This reminds me a little of the distinction between medication and nutritional supplements, sure supplements can have beneficial effects on your health and reduce or make certain symptoms go away, but the moment you claim a medicinal effect you've crossed a big boundary. The same goes for this transponder, the moment you say it's fit for a particular use and that is to aid in a search and rescue operation you're taking on a whole lot of liability. If this app has a bug and for some reason points you in the entirely wrong direction, I'd say you have a pretty good case for criminal charges no matter what the EULA may or may not say. It's like disclaiming any liability on the brakes of your car, it simply can't be done no matter what kind of legalese you put in the contract.
Some nerdy sheeple won't believe what I've just said about Intel's lies. Well Intel gets 10 million transistors per mm2 on its 22nm process, and AMD, via TSMC, gets 14+ million on the larger 28nm process. Defies all concept of maths when Intel CLAIMS a smaller process, but gets far less transistors per area against a larger process.
Comparing apples and oranges are we? Yes, AMD gets 12.2 million/mm^2 on a GPU (7970 is 4.313 billion transistors on 352 mm^2) but CPU transistor density is a lot lower for everybody. The latest Haswell (22nm) has 1.4B transistors in 177mm^2 or about 7.9 million/mm^2, but AMD's Richland (32nm) has only 1.3B transistors in 246mm^2. or 5.3 million/mm^2. Their 28nm CPUs aren't out yet but they'll still have lower transistor density than Intel's 22nm and at this rate they'll be competing against the even smaller Broadwell, though I agree it's probably not true 14nm. Very well formulated post though that appears plausible and posted as AC, paid AMD shill or desperate investor?
Charge per unit plans, that don't place any barriers to excessive usage, and unexpected bills, inevitably backfire. (...) In response the ISP's all set up "unlimited" plans, which have a fixed limit of usage per month. After you hit your quota they throttle your connection back to modem-ish speeds to prevent you from using too much more bandwidth. Without cutting you off completely. You may then have the option of paying for another unit of bandwidth, or bumping your monthly plan permanently.
This is the only sane way to do it, automatic overage billing is the work of the devil. One of the really huge benefits of going to broadband over pay per minute dial-up was that the price was fixed. No more surprises, no way for anything to hijack the line and cause you crazy expenses. They use the same principle here on "unlimited" 3G/4G mobile broadband plans still, if you hit the cap you're slowed to a crawl then the ball is in your court.
I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize.
The trouble is that most of these ideas are crap for application development like service and support, though they're okay for platform/distro/device development like Android / Tivo / RHEL / Ubuntu and so on. Particularly those where you have a huge number of users who each contribute very little, like say a million people paying $1 on the app store. That's a pretty good income for a small development house of say ten people, less Apple's cut it's $70k/head before expenses and taxes. I wager that if you made it open source and asked for donations you'd raise less than $1000, that's more like $100 each in beer money instead. Sure you can raise more money in the Humble Bundle for charity, but that's not money to pay your bills and you can also question how much people's total charity budget goes up as a result.
Basically it's this: Before the work is done, it's a wild guess what you'll actually get and everybody is in a game of chicken about who will fund it. After all, it's going to be open sourced so if it gets funded but you didn't fund it you get to have your cake and eat it too. Nobody wants to carry the burden and even when trying to share the burden through Kickstarter it's still easy to be a cynic and freeload if you see the goals are met anyway. After the work is done, well the work is already done. Nobody loses out by not giving you anything, so they don't. It's very different from closed source where you put down $2000 in work thinking you can sell it back to 100 people for $20 each, you take the risk and people buy a known quantity with reviews or go without.
Maybe a "delayed" open source licence would do the trick, like any time you compile a binary you get a one-year BSD license but after that year is up you must provide the complete corresponding source code for that binary with a GPL-compatible license. That way you get a good exclusivity period for people who want the new features right now and you don't have to wait life+70/95 years for it to go out of copyright - and you still wouldn't have the source, just the binary. The hook needs a little more bait than that everyone can copy everything you do, instantly.
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In tournaments it's about who can pick the most points from the weakest players, of course you'd like to win every time but if you're facing Carlsen I think most players will be more than happy to draw and try to outpace him on the rest. The world championship is intended to be a hardcore duel between the two best players, you have to defeat your opponent to win you can't skirt around it. The issue is twofold, one to get the opportunity to play you must win the candidates tournament meaning you must be pretty damn good in tournaments anyway and second by the time another championship comes around many expect the current champion to fall. Unlike many other sports the chess ranking is far more important than "points" collected from tournaments in other sports, so it's hard to make a single tournament be all that important. There are already several long-standing tournaments that usually have most of the top ten players, they're not going to get bigger even if the world championship went away.
A sub-$100 price is about it, since they took out Gamecube backwards compatibility and Internet connectivity. It's really just aimed at the people buying Wii Fit and Wii Sports, not at anyone who's even mildly serious about gaming.
Well duh, it's a mini version of a last-gen console released in 2006 so that's the only people who you could sell it to. Even if anyone needed Gamecube compatibility there's now 100 million regular Wiis on the market to 20 million Gamecubes sold. And Nintendo probably looked at the stats and found extremely many Wiis are never online, the only system updates they get are through game discs. Add in a few clueless parents who think anything involving the Internet is a scary place and you got a $99 guaranteed safe kids/family console. No matter how old and boring you think it is, it's always new to some new kids.
AtivceX: So wrong you can't even spell it right.
Uh no. If the warranty is 5 years, I expect it to last at least that long, if not longer. If the drive fails within 5 years, I expect a new drive since I purchased a guarantee of uninterrupted operation for 5 years. If I didn't get it with the first drive, or the second, or the third, then I expect them to keep sending me drives until they get it right or refund my money. If they go out of business doing this with too many customers too much of the time, then they should have as their products suck. That is how you honor warranties the right way. Of course, companies cheap out on them now, and it's getting real bad with things like computer components, notably, motherboards, video boards, and hard disks. A new product was paid for, and it was faulty, and they send a refurb? I did not buy a refurb!
A five year warranty is not a guarantee of five years of uninterrupted operation, only that they'll fix any problems you have with it the next five years. Otherwise I bet you'd see a lot of "accidents" around the four year, eleven months mark. And while it might have been a new drive when you bought it, if you need a warranty repair after four years and eleven months it's now a four years and eleven months old drive. Do you think your car insurance company should give you a totally new car when your 20 year old car is totaled by a drunk driver? Same with warranties, they are only intended to reinstate you to where you are now, not where you were almost five years ago.
Yes, the refurb should absolutely be tested and working. If it has any metric of how "worn" it is, it should be no worse than what you sent in. But I think you have an exaggerated view of what a warranty could and should do. Particularly if you apply it to the product as a whole, if your laptop broke you should get a new one? They can't just swap the faulty RAM stick for a new one and ship the rest back to you? I mean your operation of the laptop was interrupted right, try again? And while computer equipment tend to fail catastrophically it'd be even sillier to apply this to consumer goods as a whole. I find it quite okay that their choices are:
1) Repair - if you want to swap a broken component, fine no matter if it's one capacitor or one motherboard.
2) Replace - that's how I have a WD SSD in my machine though I bought a OCZ SSD
3) Refund - if all else fails, hand the money back. But not just because you'd like to see the sale "undone".
I feel we here in Norway have very strong consumer protections in law, but still nothing like you imagine them to be. And I don't think it would be very healthy for the market if they were.
So if there's a mall shooting the solution is armed guards in every mall? If there's a school shooting the solution is armed guards in every school? Every bus station, train station, subway station, park and so on until there's a whole army of armed guards running around? The point of the secuity control is that nobody gets to bring anything on board to crash or hijack the plane and in that respect, mission accomplished. It's not a general defense against a random person pulling out a gun and opening fire, not any more than any other place.
But you're never going to get a cheap fanless discrete GPU with the power to hold up against a GTX660 or better hardware.
Never? Like how cheap fanless GPUs from 2013 don't beat the crap out of any high end graphics card from 1998 never? Don't go there. But yes, for any given level of technology you can always do more with a 250W+ dGPU power budget than a <10W fanless thing. But do gamers need it? From the Steam hardware survey 98.5% of the users play at 1920x1200 or below and of them 16% on Intel graphics. Not every game is a Crysis, many of them simply play well on any recent dGPU but suck just a little bit too much on integrated graphics. That's the market Intel's after, if most your games play decently at 1080p on medium settings it's "good enough" for many. Sure you could invest in a $200-600 graphics card and bump that up to ultra/enthusiast level, but most people won't bother.
Yeah, it's like lights out when the last employee leaves for the shutdown and to be surprised they all managed to switch the lights back on when they returned to work. Well, almost all.
As so much just can't be done after dark, and it gets really expensive to light up every field, park, and body of water just to be able to live life after work.
But that's where our current time zones are totally off the mark. I just checked and today the sun rises at 8 AM and sets at 4 PM (yes, I'm quite far north) and guess what my working hours are? Basically I go to work at dawn, sit in an office until dusk then go home and enjoy the whole evening in darkness with artificial lights. I get it, some occupations like construction depends on natural lighting but by far the majority work indoors like me where it matters very little if it's dark outside or not. If we really wanted to provide optimal daylight the sun would shine 4PM-12PM instead. I really doubt I'd spend any more electricity 8AM-4PM than I do today 4PM-12PM, the difference is that I could spend that time outdoors in the sun instead of being stuck in an office.
The current time zones were set in a time when you tried to preserve candles, lamp oil and firewood. People worked from sunrise to sunset, often on a farm or other outdoor work and spent the nights mostly in the dark. Today it's completely backwards and we should change it so that we work in the dark and have our time off when the sun is up. Today you go home and it's pitch dark when you come home so you end up doing some sort of passive activity like watch TV, sit at the computer, read a book or whatever. If it was daylight outside you could do something, anything it'd be almost like a small weekend every day. It'd be wonderful.
Helping the poorest of the poor is indeed good and we have managed to lift many out of extreme poverty (less than $1.25/day) but we've not made the same progress on lifting people further out of the very poor (less than $2/day). Like for example India where 33% live in extreme poverty and 69% are very poor or Pakistan where 21% live in extreme poverty but 60% is very poor. Those billions of people also need a lift so we're more to help drag the poorest billion out of poverty.
1. Volume, volume, volume. Same panel for monitor and TV.
2. Most software can't adjust DPI properly.
3. Even on computers YouTube, Netflix etc. is huge
The trend was already very clear with ATSC, DVB-S2 and BluRay all standardizing on 1920x1080 ten years ago, if you didn't realize it five years ago you must have had your head in the sand. You're the first person I've heard that has claimed it's an advantage to always have distracting controls and other information on the screen, maybe you're just seriously out of touch with the rest of the world? A 1920x1200 monitor is great for more workspace, but too few care about the extra 180 pixels to overcome the massive momentum. And the 2560x1440/1600 screens never got out of being an expensive niche product for a very small group of computer users. Video looked worse with upscaling.
It was Apple that showed the way really, how do you get higher resolution without all these DPI/upscaling issues? You double it, stupid apps are simply zoomed 200% until they fix their shit. Apple did it to their phones, their tablets and their laptops and that's how TV is going to do it as well, we're just waiting for 4K to become doable. The cheap 4K panels like Seiki show there's no inherent big cost increase, it's just new technology and you're currently paying a lot to be on the bleeding edge. Once the momentum really gets behind 4K TV, I expect the prices for 4K monitors will quickly dive at or below 1440/1600p monitors.
The whole idea of keyservers is a big hack anyway due to SMTP having no support for encryption, mixing two entirely different issues. Are you john.doe@gmail.com or are you *that* John Doe that you're looking to mail to. It's gmail.com (verified through domain keys) that should be authoritative as to what your public key is (which you've preferably generated locally and uploaded, but depends on how much you trust the server) while authenticated and that you're talking to the real gmail.com should be verified through whatever anti-domain spoofing methods already exists. And finally you should have test clients query the server to check that it's really serving up the right public key. Once you've resolved that sending mail to john.doe@gmail.com will be encrypted to whoever is in control of that account and nobody else, maybe or maybe not it should be tied to a real person.
Actually, that could be a possibility. As this is the most extensive exoplanetary system discovered to date, we do not have enough data to really determine what is "normal". However, quite a few of the exoplanets I have been reading about do orbit their star pretty closely (although I would say I haven't even looked at 5% of the 1000 exoplanets out there).
The methods used are extremely biased for short transition periods meaning short time to confirmation, if I recall correctly the standard is three passes. That means three years for Earth, thirtysix years for Jupiter while many of those observed are measured in weeks and months. With greater distance from the star it's also less likely the planet will pass in the same plane as the star and us. I don't think anyone has done a metastudy that says exactly what kind of planets we wouldn't have found by now, it's probably too much of a moving target and too much uncertainty. In time I guess we'll get there (as in if there was a planet there we'd have seen it by now) but right now I don't think any of the searches are exhaustive.
First of all, there's lots of people who make money in a single payer system. Public hospitals still needs equipment, systems, staff and it doesn't in any way preclude them from buying standard services from private hospitals and other institutions, hiring contractors and so on. The question is who ultimately picks up the bill, which is generally the tax payer though there's some copay capped at $350/year. However, there are very few middle men who needs to get paid, whether it's insurance salesmen, marketing, claims investigators, lawyers and so on, though we of course have doctors reviewing other doctor's work to control both quality and spending.
As for what's covered or not, that is actually a rather long medical discussion on duration of the effect, quality of life and so on and I'm not saying we're perfect at it but it is dominated by medical professionals who have our health at heart, it is not a bunch of insurance companies trying to maximize profits by denying coverage. The system has to cover all the high risk behavior, but it's also spread across a huge pool and overall people don't break a leg to get a free cast. We also get the freedom choose if we should pick up overall public health trends like obesity in the health care system or whether we should try to make more proactive changes to lower our own costs. We have to pick up all the hopeless cases but we also get many people back into self-sufficiency or taxable work that wouldn't have the means to do that on their own.
It's not really about denying anyone profit, though some see that as a nice side effect. The primary reasons are:
1. Everybody is at risk of disease, injury or disability from birth and until well into adult life. You can be a victim of it long before you have any real choice in the matter and not everybody have parents with money or that spend it well.
2. No normal person can handle the expenses of catastrophic health failure, if you get chronically ill, unable to work and in need of care the next 50 years only billionaires could do it. It's not a luxury, it's a necessity.
3. Unlike say fire insurance your health is an ongoing thing, it deteriorates, you have relapses, chronic problems that come and go and the insurance company want to get rid of you the moment you're a losing proposition.
4. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, making the barrier low to go see the doctor is avoiding a lot of large medical expenses later and slows the spread of disease in the population.
5. Deteriorating health is causing irreparable harm, even if you can win some compensation it's no substitute for lack of care or treatment because your claims were stalled or denied and sick or dying people can't fight an insurance company.
6. Even if your risk varies with age you'll spend one year in every age category anyway, the profiling doesn't gain you anything because your healthy 25 year old will become a middle aged 50 year old and eventually an aged 75 year old.
Sure, they're monopolists in many ways but they're also fairly curbed for exactly that reason, it's better than to pretend there's meaningful competition between an oligarchy of few and poor choices.
When you buy low and sell high over time in a one-way flow it's a supplier/customer relationship and the people you buy low from are your suppliers, the people you sell high to customers. We supply Google with raw information and get paid in free services, they process it and sell it to their customers. Of course they want us to use their services because it means they have more product to sell to their customers but we're the "supply" part of the market, not the "demand". Both can be mutually beneficial relationships, but they should not be confused such as when Google changes their services to maximize the commercial value of that information, not for our benefit but for their customers. They have a very direct financial interest in manipulating us into being a more profitable product that your example lacks, he doesn't care if he's paid in goat or gold.
I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm doing and programming computers well does require a lot of skill that's borderline autistic in the real world. I'm sure your teachers too did some kind of "How dumb can a computer be?" exercise where you tried instructing the teacher to put jam on a piece of bread and he tried acting as dumb as possible making you Lay. Out. Each. Step. Exactly. Computers are like that and we accept that, you've got nobody to blame but yourself because it did exactly what you told it to. But the rest of the world isn't like that, if coworkers or a dog or a three year old showed the same utter inability to work out the details we'd start wondering if there was something wrong with their intelligence, not ours. If the recipe says a cup of sugar, you don't throw the cup itself in the mix.
The same goes for the ability to anticipate every possible unexpected and improbable circumstance that might occur, normal people might think ahead on what they'd do in a few common or anticipated situations but a computer expects you to Lay. Out. Every. Exception. Exactly. In real life for one you'd never get out get door but even if you did it'd be in full survival gear in case you fell into a sinkhole and you'd still fail because the road was blocked and you didn't plan any alternative routes. For most people most of the time they'll simply cross that bridge when they get to it, there's no need to go all OCD and plan out everything in excruciating detail ahead of time. Yet that's what we have to do because the computer is utterly unable to deal with any situation on its own without instructions.
Finally normal people don't manage resources like programmers do, if they're cooking dinner they collect the pots and pans and other utensils they need from where ever they were put last and clean them if necessary. Even with managed languages where you don't have to free the memory used, you still need to destroy the objects you create, close the connections you opened, release the locks you've gotten and Manage. Every. Resource. Exactly. Everything must be kept track on in detail and put back in exactly the same place in exactly the same state as you found it. If you had a kitchen managed like a computer I'd say you were suffering from massive OCD, not just having it tidy and keeping things in the usual places. A cooking process doesn't die because one thing is out of place, a computer process does.
Of course you could say that's two different settings that you turn on when you get to work and turn off when you go home, but we're not machines and we can stop caring and be a slob at home but it still changes how we think. A lot of it is simply mental training, because you need to plan out so far ahead in such detail it naturally translates to every other situation you come across in life too. Personally I'd like the ability to live a bit more in the moment, to lose that "big picture" and just live in the here and now and not care so much about tomorrow. There is such a thing as overthinking it and it tends to be a bit of a party pooper, have fun today and worry about the hangover tomorrow. Too much rationality is dull.
In it's efforts to solve a non-problem (namely making a machine boot faster)
To many people it's a non-problem because they hardly ever reboot their machine or they expect a redundant fail-over cluster to take over. For a lot of people boot time matters, even if it doesn't for you.
Most people also don't have any use for a $550 graphics card, if you buy one you're almost certainly a serious gamer who'll get many hours of use out of that card. Of course you're not doing that on minimum wage, but having a $1k gaming PC is hardly just for the excessively wealthy. Honestly the cash investment is very low compared to many other hobbies, it's mostly time and effort. Just like WoW addiction is probably the cheapest addiction you can get, well if you don't count losing your job over it. Personally I'm a pack rat, but at 4TB/$170 I'm still not blowing that much on collecting everything under the sun. And my digital hoarding is still limited to one miditower, I don't live with stuff up to the ceiling.
Has AMD only cut the budget for CPU R&D and not GPUs?
They don't report R&D per division, only overall so you'd pretty detailed internal knowledge to say.
Partly, but they never could match Intel on process technology which meant Intel always had a cost advantage, even when their CPU designs were inferior. As for more recent events, AMD looks saved for a while as the division that includes consoles more than doubled last quarter and gave them an overall profit so at least for the next year or so with big console sales they should be good. Still, with all their diversifying I'm worried that they simply don't want to step back into the ring with Intel, but instead focus on graphics cards, graphics-heavy APUs, heterogenous computing, semicustom designs, ARM micrservers and so on.
The reason I say that is because their CPU sales are way down, still going down and losing money - they have to either really step it up or step out and their roadmaps don't exactly indicate going on the offensive, just moderate revisions that might keep them from losing more ground. They have CPUs good enough to be "console-quality" for this generation of consoles, that'll sell for a good while since many PC games will be console ports and so play well on that level of hardware even if they give up competing with future Intel CPUs. It's not like they're competing very well on high-performance or performance per watt today, jjust performance per dollar and it's showing on AMDs financials.
While the above could work, I wonder if it will be actually implemented in practice. For one thing, it shouldn't be necessary: every autonomous car should be able to detect the slowing of the car in front of it and respond within a few milliseconds anyway. So why tell the car behind you something that it pretty much already knows?
Don't underestimate the cumulative effects of even a small delay in this system. The first car brakes. The second car brakes 10ms later, but to make up for those 10ms it hits the brakes harder. The third car brakes 10ms later, and since the second car is breaking hard it's breaking even harder. If it's a long line of cars the last could easily go into a full emergency break even if the first one just made a small speed adjustment. I think broadcasting an intent to change speed is very useful, if you're slowing down from 50 to 45 mph with low urgency because you're hitting slow traffic that should cause a different reaction than an intent of 0 mph with high urgency. You could make non-emergency speed adjustments happen in sync or back-to-front, not front-to-back.
I see this as working in conjunction with the sensors to stay inside a buffer zone, if you broadcast a fake 0 mph signal all that would happen is that the car behind would slam the brakes only until the distance and speed differential is big enough. If you transmit a fake 45 mph signal when you're really slamming the brakes the sensors would detect it and slam your brakes anyway. It's a guideline of intent but if the map doesn't match the terrain, trust the sensors. Besides, it could be that the car in front of you has lost all braking power and is about to slam into a traffic jam. I think anyone sending funny signals would be found and taken care of rather quick, after all there's plenty sensors to document it.
He's probably thinking of the unclean hands doctrine.
unclean hands n. a legal doctrine which is a defense to a complaint, which states that a party who is asking for a judgment cannot have the help of the court if he/she has done anything unethical in relation to the subject of the lawsuit. Thus, if a defendant can show the plaintiff had "unclean hands," the plaintiff's complaint will be dismissed or the plaintiff will be denied judgment.
The police can provoke you to commit a crime and arrest you for it in a classic non-entrapment sting operation. A copyright holder can't provoke you into committing copyright infringement and then sue you in court for damages, it doesn't make it legal but it's an affirmative defense meaning they can't collect any damages from it. Basically you will never get rewarded in court for causing damages to yourself, it creates far too much potential for abuse.
Except it seems these apps are rather battery-intensive in any automatic trigger mode and you don't want to have to manually activate them, meaning you'll probably only turn them on if you think you might possibly need them. Second since they're totally non-standard, they only do any good if you've agreed with your travel companions to use this as your avalanche search app, any other bystanders or rescue crews will look for a transponder if you have one or search based on visual observation if you don't, they won't spend valuable time searching through a bunch of odd apps on the off chance you have one and has activated it. Both of those issues indicate to me that the only times you'd use it is when you should have a proper avalanche transponder, after all they're not totally random you need a certain terrain and conditions as prerequisites.
I sort of agree with you in general though, if I'm out exercising with a pulse belt and my heart rate just goes crazy like I'm having a seizure or a stroke then why shouldn't the phone alert 911? It's not like you need a medical degree to call 911 in the same situation either. On the other hand, I'd be extremely careful in marketing such a feature because can it for example tell the difference between a user removing the belt and a heart going full stop? Probably not. If you sell something like these avalanche apps, they should come with a big fat red warning label saying "This is not a avalanche transponder, it does not broadcast on the standard rescue frequency and your smart phone is not designed to function as one with respect to range, accuracy, robustness or battery life. It may still aid your rescue if no transponder is available, but it is no replacement for one."
This reminds me a little of the distinction between medication and nutritional supplements, sure supplements can have beneficial effects on your health and reduce or make certain symptoms go away, but the moment you claim a medicinal effect you've crossed a big boundary. The same goes for this transponder, the moment you say it's fit for a particular use and that is to aid in a search and rescue operation you're taking on a whole lot of liability. If this app has a bug and for some reason points you in the entirely wrong direction, I'd say you have a pretty good case for criminal charges no matter what the EULA may or may not say. It's like disclaiming any liability on the brakes of your car, it simply can't be done no matter what kind of legalese you put in the contract.
Some nerdy sheeple won't believe what I've just said about Intel's lies. Well Intel gets 10 million transistors per mm2 on its 22nm process, and AMD, via TSMC, gets 14+ million on the larger 28nm process. Defies all concept of maths when Intel CLAIMS a smaller process, but gets far less transistors per area against a larger process.
Comparing apples and oranges are we? Yes, AMD gets 12.2 million/mm^2 on a GPU (7970 is 4.313 billion transistors on 352 mm^2) but CPU transistor density is a lot lower for everybody. The latest Haswell (22nm) has 1.4B transistors in 177mm^2 or about 7.9 million/mm^2, but AMD's Richland (32nm) has only 1.3B transistors in 246mm^2. or 5.3 million/mm^2. Their 28nm CPUs aren't out yet but they'll still have lower transistor density than Intel's 22nm and at this rate they'll be competing against the even smaller Broadwell, though I agree it's probably not true 14nm. Very well formulated post though that appears plausible and posted as AC, paid AMD shill or desperate investor?
Charge per unit plans, that don't place any barriers to excessive usage, and unexpected bills, inevitably backfire. (...) In response the ISP's all set up "unlimited" plans, which have a fixed limit of usage per month. After you hit your quota they throttle your connection back to modem-ish speeds to prevent you from using too much more bandwidth. Without cutting you off completely. You may then have the option of paying for another unit of bandwidth, or bumping your monthly plan permanently.
This is the only sane way to do it, automatic overage billing is the work of the devil. One of the really huge benefits of going to broadband over pay per minute dial-up was that the price was fixed. No more surprises, no way for anything to hijack the line and cause you crazy expenses. They use the same principle here on "unlimited" 3G/4G mobile broadband plans still, if you hit the cap you're slowed to a crawl then the ball is in your court.
I hear this myth perpetuated a lot and it's not really true. Stallman has said on several occasions he believes developers can and should be compensated for their work and he believes this is perfectly feasible within a free software ecosystem. The problem is that many traditional methods of monetization don't hold up in a free software world and it would require people to rethink how they plan to monetize.
The trouble is that most of these ideas are crap for application development like service and support, though they're okay for platform/distro/device development like Android / Tivo / RHEL / Ubuntu and so on. Particularly those where you have a huge number of users who each contribute very little, like say a million people paying $1 on the app store. That's a pretty good income for a small development house of say ten people, less Apple's cut it's $70k/head before expenses and taxes. I wager that if you made it open source and asked for donations you'd raise less than $1000, that's more like $100 each in beer money instead. Sure you can raise more money in the Humble Bundle for charity, but that's not money to pay your bills and you can also question how much people's total charity budget goes up as a result.
Basically it's this: Before the work is done, it's a wild guess what you'll actually get and everybody is in a game of chicken about who will fund it. After all, it's going to be open sourced so if it gets funded but you didn't fund it you get to have your cake and eat it too. Nobody wants to carry the burden and even when trying to share the burden through Kickstarter it's still easy to be a cynic and freeload if you see the goals are met anyway. After the work is done, well the work is already done. Nobody loses out by not giving you anything, so they don't. It's very different from closed source where you put down $2000 in work thinking you can sell it back to 100 people for $20 each, you take the risk and people buy a known quantity with reviews or go without.
Maybe a "delayed" open source licence would do the trick, like any time you compile a binary you get a one-year BSD license but after that year is up you must provide the complete corresponding source code for that binary with a GPL-compatible license. That way you get a good exclusivity period for people who want the new features right now and you don't have to wait life+70/95 years for it to go out of copyright - and you still wouldn't have the source, just the binary. The hook needs a little more bait than that everyone can copy everything you do, instantly.