Rights to one self take presidence over someone else. You have the right to speak, I have the right to not listen.
But you've never had the right to control what people say about you to others. If that was the case we'd be casually breaking the law all the time every time we mentioned somebody else.
Cant really prevent someoen from them posting "check out this picture of me and X, Y and Z!" however, so the same problem will still exist, just not as easy to find (yet...)
And here's really the issue, tagging is more formal but in principle it's the same thing so to you want to make that posting illegal? Just saying it too?
No, I own my own memories and have the right to talk about them to others. If I see you cheating on your wife then I don't need your permission to tell her, if I saw an anti-porn priest go to a strip club where he thought no one would recognize him I don't need his permission to call him out on his hypocrisy. It is a very important part of free speech to be able to talk about somebody against their will. Do you think all the "birthers" should be put in jail for questioning Obama's heritage without his permission? Don't be silly. You can ask people not to tag and not to post photos, but I don't think you with force of law can demand that they don't.
But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.
All projects that have tried to replace X so far has failed miserably, so I'd say the odds are against both of them. If Ubuntu can do it as quickly and easily as they think then more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. The Wayland people are mostly seasoned X.org developers, I think they know better how complicated it really is. Either way I'm curious to see what Android AIOs will do to the market, give it a big screen, keyboard and mouse then what happens? I'm not so sure X or Wayland or Mir is a requirement to winning the desktop, at least it didn't look that way for smartphones/tablets.
Of course since the kernel is under GPLv2 and not GPLv3 they can restrict it to run only binaries signed by Sony. Any significant code they can put in blobs like AMD and nVidia do with their proprietary drivers. They'd have to show you the changes yes, but it wouldn't run anywhere but an emulator - which is probably what they're most worried about since this is now rather standard PC hardware.
It's the last common tier, either you have a TS clearance or you don't. However there is still information that you need additional clearance for (not just a need to know), but the process is specific to the information and clearance to one doesn't give you clearance for anything else. There's no "ultra top secret" for everything, it's more like rooms on the TS floor with an extra set of locks.
Maybe that person decides the free plan isn't enough speed and becomes a paying customer.
Possibly, but I think it's more likely a new person moving in becomes a paying customer. If the house isn't hooked up you start looking for potential providers and what they'll charge but if you're already getting Internet from Google and it's a simple and instant upgrade then surely that's what you'd go for. And every person they get hooked up is one less potential customer for other ISPs, making it much harder for them to reach critical mass so as a barrier to competition it seems like a cheap insurance. If you have a customer relationship with them it's easier to make special offers, they can for example give them a free unlimited speed weekend to get them hooked. It's a lot cheaper to dig up ditches to all the houses once than to do it one by one as they want to sign up, they probably don't need much of a "hit rate" to make it pay off.
Southwest found that personal intent, ethics and attitude were bigger drivers of success than technical expertise.
How many of those are measurable, how much do you learn in the interview, how much do people tell the truth and how easily are the answers manipulated? The greatest reason interviews are so difficult is that people lie, well the smart people do anyway. For example, the real reason you're changing job is probably that there's something you don't like about the old one, either it's the work assignments, the boss, the colleagues, the pay and benefits, the lack of career progress or options, the commute or any one of a million things your new employer doesn't want to hear. Even when it's nothing negative like you're moving to town with your GF and need new work, that's not what they want to hear it's why you want to work at their company. And the bullshit only gets worse if it's between being out of a job and having a job.
Sometimes I wish I'd had the balls to do a real honest job interview, the answer to that would probably go something along the lines of "Well honestly I'd heard the company name in the passing but I don't know anything about it or what working here would be like, only that you're asking for a set of skills that mostly match mine. Why would I like to work here?" Even if I'm lukewarm to work there I'm going to pretend I highly motivated. Even if I'm in a sullen mood I'm going to pretend to have a positive attitude. As for ethics I do feel I act with integrity, but it's a form of courtship and you put your best foot forward and be on your best behavior. What it's like to live with someone in day to day life probably has very little to do with how it was on the first date, same applies to job interviews. And psychopaths are reportedly very charming on the surface.
Nah, Orwell wasn't even close. He might have been close to predicting STASI in East Germany, but this would have been far, far into science fiction. In his story they might have had telescreens but it was always humans watching humans. Huge segments of the population were informers, everybody was aware the Party had eyes and ears everywhere. Ask yourself, how many of the US/UK population knew these programs even existed? I'm guessing thousands out of hundreds of millions. And if the power that be take one lesson away from this it's not going to be the one you want, it's that humans are a liability. They suffer from a conscience and believing in the constitution, also called espionage and treason. Which is why more of this is going to be automated with fewer in the "need to know".
I'm quite sure China has just the same kind of systems - if not better - to track dissidents, you say something bad about the regime on any media flags start going up around you. The computers will do what their masters instruct with utter dedication. The only good news for now is that you still need human thugs to do the dirty work of throwing people in jail, but we're making progress towards changing that. We already have bomb disposal robots, I'm guessing a team of SWAT robots isn't that far behind. And if it comes to actual civil war more and more weapons are "smart weapons" that won't work for the rebels, did a tank operator defect to the enemy? Throw the kill switch. The deck is getting more and more stacked against any insurrection against any regime for any reason.
And higher machine specs, sure today you laugh at it but as I remember OS/2 required double as much RAM as Windows 3.1 to run well (I think 4MB and 8MB, but don't quote me on that), I used both but for the time the OS stole way too many resources on boot. This was still a time where if you ran anything "demanding" it usually ran barebones in DOS and fiddling with XMS, EMS to give it more than 1MB of memory. Not to mention OS/2 was the personification of the "unpersonal" office computer in a time where we were mostly using it for fun and tinkering, IBMs only real understanding of the personal computer was that one person was using it. Particularly that Microsoft bet big on DirectX was a huge boon for Windows 95+, it's something IBM would never do.
But if you don't buy a $600 iPhone but choose a $100 phone instead, Apple doesn't care whether that $100 phone is a Nokia feature phone or a cheap Android phone.
When the market was an expensive smartphone or no smartphone - particularly none with traction and apps, many chose Apple. My iPhone (4, so three years old) is the first phone I own that had apps and it's not going to be my last, but I'm going to take a long hard look if I need to pay for a new iPhone or a cheaper Android phone will do the trick, Android is an alternative where a Nokia feature phone wouldn't be. I don't regret buying it just like I don't regret buying all the expensive computer gear I've bought over the years, new technology is expensive but it doesn't mean I need to stay on the bleeding edge. Particularly since my next one would be coming out of my own pocket.
Developers don't care about market share, they care about the number of people who are willing to pay for software.
True, as well they should but a lot of companies have also lost sight of where they're going to make money in the future because they're too busy staring at the money they make right now. All those people who are starting out with Android today who might get more advanced and/or more affluent in the future, are they just going to dump their Android phones and the apps they know and go Apple? Some will but many won't, a Nokia feature phone would be a dead end but even a cheap Android phone isn't. With the number of potential future customers on Android now I'd never dare to not develop for Android as well, even though iPhone might be the cash cow right now. YMMV.
If they really could do a petabyte I'd settle for 10x redundancy and 100TB, that should probably work fine and be very useful all the other issues notwithstanding. Because the main reason they're not very useful is capacity, you've got 4TB HDDs for bulk storage and cheap 32-64GB memory sticks for transfers so what good is optical media? A BluRay is probably fine to get a 50GB movie to people who don't have a fast Internet connection, but I haven't burned a CD/DVD in ages, it never seems like the best tool for any job.
Probably because they've become fed up with eco-nutters who insist they should buy a craptastic EV, perhaps not the Tesla Model S but most that have come before because it's the "right thing" to do even if it's a crappy deal. Not too unlike listening to RMS saying you should use open source no matter if it does what you need or not because it's the "right thing" to do. The statistics say second time hybrid buyers are rare, I don't know the stats for EV buyers but not many are on their second car yet. Does it live up to the hype? Does the technology really get all that much better if we get people to use it, or is the very idea fundamentally poor? Modern combustion engines are pretty good at what they do, it's not obvious that EVs will be better for any other reason than that we might run out of oil.
Too many people take Mahatma Gandhi's "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win." like some magic formula for everything. No, many times you stay ignored. No, many times you remain a laughing stock. No, many times you fight and you lose. What about simple things that even if things have been a mess the whole week and I've forgotten to tank/charge but I'm finally ready to go on my cabin weekend trip then my gas car just need a pit stop while my EV is an expensive paperweight while I wait for it to charge at home or I have to drive it to some quick-charger to hang around there. I've managed to make my cell phone black out even though I've had power nearby all the time, but I'm always going to keep a charge on my car? Ideally shit won't happen, practically I'm sure it will.
So...I have to wonder...if I'd bought one of these cars yesterday, how in the hell would they be able to swap all of those batteries out in 90 seconds? If they were as light as empty cardboard boxes, I'd have trouble swapping them all simply because of the bulk. And there's no way they weigh that little, or are that easily dislodged.
A trained formula one team will change all tires in less than 10 seconds, how long does it take you with a tire iron and a hand-cranked jack? I imagine it's pretty much like this:
1. Robot unscrews bolts, removes undercarriage 2. Place a battery caddy under the batteries 3. Disconnect the batteries 4. Caddy goes off to put them in automated storage 5. New caddy slides in with fresh batteries 6. Connect the batteries 7. Caddy goes away 8. Refasten the undercarriage
There's not much guesswork here, they know the exact dimensions, locations, sizes and everything the only thing they'll need to make sure is that the car and machinery is lined up correctly. Besides, it's 90 seconds under ideal conditions - same as the time allotted to evacuate a jumbo jet. I suspect in practice it will take a little longer...
So your argument is that there will always be risk, so there's no point in managing or minimizing it? To continue your car analogy, even if I'm at a pedestrian crossing I don't really trust cars to stop and I always throw a glance to make sure they've noticed me. An uncle of mine was witness to a horrible accident, old lady got run over in broad daylight in the middle of a well-marked crossing, perpetrator was an old half-blind fool who should have lost his license already or had and didn't care. Doesn't help the old lady one bit no matter how much they punish him anyway. You always trust lots of people, you trust the factory who building the brakes on your car and the mechanic who serviced them, you trust the people who built the bridge it won't collapse from out under you but only because you lack any other practical alternative.
With software you do have more and better choices, not perfect choices but it's a helluva lot harder for the NSA to place a spy bug in Linux than in Windows where they can just show up with a national security letter that is both instructions and gag order and violating either can land you in jail. If there are reasonable ways to prove that these are the exact versions and compiler settings used to produce this binary, then that is much stronger than trust. Trust is something that can be betrayed, while reproducible steps is something you can verify. In science, if one scientists told you here are the steps of my experiment, feel free to reproduce my results and the other said "I can't show you the data but the results are correct, trust me", who would you trust?
People need to learn to take time to make things easy, accessible, and fool-proof. Design for the user, not the engineer.
Commercial software companies are too busy creating new features so they can sell product, just making existing features more fool-proof doesn't sell much and they can cheaply outsource following the script to a helldesk. With in-house software the moment you get it working through some dark incantation it's done and on to the second most pressing issue. Sysadmins like to blame the developers, but often they're not the reason you got this rickety heap thrown in your lap. Do it cheap, do it fast, do it good enough and on a good day you might get two out of three and on bad days none of three. And if you by some miracle got three for three, the requirements just changed.
The "halfway" is, as many commenters below have pointed out, that they've yet to remove the built-in Kinect.
No need to remove it they should just add a physical "off" switch, maybe with 2 cents worth of plastic sliding over the web camera. Then the paranoid geeks can pick it apart and confirm that yes, it really turns off the power and the tinfoil hat brigade can breathe a little easier. How many have you seen that have say taped over the Facetime camera on their Mac Books? Oh right, they assume OS X isn't secretly recording them. I honestly don't people see that as nearly as big a deal as the always-on.
Well companies like S3 also made successful headway with their own designs, but this didn't matter because they were way behind the competition at the time. It is NEVER a case of being better than you were before, but a question of being good enough to go up against the market leaders. Intel knows its progress means that internally its GPU team is being patted on the back and given more support, and yet this is a road to nowhere. Intel needs to bite the bullet, give up on its failed GPU projects, and buy in the best designs the market has to offer. Nvidia is this.
The Steam hardware survey seems to disagree, 14% of gamers are now happy running Intel chips so how many non-gamers do you think find them good enough? A GPU running as part of a CPU with a <100W total power budget is never going to compete with dual SLI/CF 200W+ discrete chips, both Intel and hardcore gamers know that. Intel just wants to be in mainstream products without AMD/nVidia getting discrete chip sales and they're succeeding, check any statistics for computers shipped with discrete graphics and they're in decline. Maybe it's an AMD APU, but most of the time it's an Intel.
Actual translation "Intel fucked us in the ass more than AMD that at least got a billion plus for their ass reaming, all we got was the curb. Now we are just gonna have to become patent trolls because with AMD owning ATI and Intel going their own way we missed the boat...damn we should have bought Via". (...) Oh and for Nvidia fans...sorry but I could have told ya so. AMD [has been so much smarter]
Yes, because AMD has totally been flowers and sunshine ever since. In their Q1 2013 finances stockholder's equity was down to $415 million, one more total disaster quarter like Q4 2012 with a $473 million loss and they're filing for bankruptcy. Meanwhile nVidia's market cap is more than twice as big as AMD (and that is after AMD's stock recovered, it was 5x a little while there) and they're making money, this is not a back-against-the-wall move. It's the realization that building a complete SoC is complicated and just having good graphics is not enough, better to play the PowerVR game (who are not productless IP trolls) and be other SoCs than to be nowhere at all.
Yes, and I think his description of the passive-aggressive attitude of fanboys are pretty spot on too, particularly this bit:
Obviously GNOME Shell and Unity are only an example. We can observe the same kind of cognitive dissonance with KDE fanboys. An example I can observe in regular intervals is that "the next version is much better and solves all problems" whenever a user is reporting about instabilities or other problems. The fact that another user is experiencing problems is challenging the beliefs of the fanboys which can be resolved by stating that the next version resolves it. We can see these comments for each version since 4.1.
Also known as "the boy who cried wolf" and you can only take so much of it before you go into "stop wasting my time trying to make me try the same broken thing you lying sack of shit" mode. Note that the same argument is also automatically used to invalidate any opinion that is more than five minutes old, since things are "totally different" now. And that attack is the best defense is popular in all walks of life, if you find your choice hard to defend go attack everything else as being worse. Another thing I see in forums that don't have moderation like/. does is trying to win by flooding the comment field, like there's 300 comments and 50-100 are from the same person aggressively assaulting anyone that posts anything that doesn't fit his opinion. It certainly makes it a total waste to read the comments.
On the other hand, a filtered version of the truth isn't the same as an unfiltered version. If you see a blog with nothing but praises, it's rather obvious comments are being moderated and that you won't be able to read what people really thinks about the subject. If you want constructive discussion you moderate to stay between the extremes where it is wiped out by the mud slinging and being wiped out because dissenting opinion is not permitted. But if you want public debate, well it's often not very constructive it's more of shouting match, people with closed minds and no intention of changing their position trading blows. Not too much different from politics really.
If the author who compiles the list of the fastest computers in the world, and who co-developed Linpack, likes to write "petaflop/s" (see his blog entry in the second link), and if the author who writes the article in Nature World News, writes that as "petaflop per second", then who are you to argue?
Like lack of qualifications has ever stopped any/.er from arguing they know best anyway. This place is pretty much the definition of the Internet peanut gallery.
Life that already exists will have very strong evolutionary pressure to find new and untapped resources that are exclusive to them, it's not certain that living in the middle of the most lush rain forest is better - evolutionary speaking - than in a barren desert. But just because it can spread almost anywhere, doesn't mean it can start almost anywhere. In fact, we still don't have any experiment or strong models that will create life from inorganic compounds indicating that it is quite hard and quite rare. The exact right mix of chemicals and conditions may be an extraordinary event that only happens once every hundred million years in one place on earth, but it only needs to happen once.
They could have gone with just 419 and 421 and leave out the box number altogether. There are even places that have NO house number and that often is a problem as well.
The trouble with creating new numbers is that you'd disrupt everyone else, imagine you'd want to add a new number 5 then old 5 would become 7, 7 become 9, 9 become 11 all the way up to 419 becoming 421 and beyond. Generally here in Norway if you build say a huge block instead of several small buildings you get multiple numbers like 13-17, if you build say three houses on a lot that used to have one they become 13A, 13B and 13C. Which is also open-ended (my current workplace has buildings B-H, A is demolished and doesn't exist anymore) while 419 1/2, what do you do if you build another house? 419 1/4? 419 3/4? It's a poor system just asking for a situation it can't handle.
I presume you'll be fine with the doctors refusing to help you when you get struck down with some rare form tropical disease then? A problem being suffered by a minority is still a problem.
Somewhere I feel that analogy fails, it is more like "the artist formerly known as Prince" who decided an unpronounceable symbol would be his new stage name - for contract reasons. Imagine he'd asked that all government databases also would identify him the same way, his driver's license, his social security card, every form of public registry should now support this symbol. Or that everywhere there is a male and female restroom there should also be various options for crossdressers, transgenders, ladyboys and whatnot other combinations that exist somewhere between or outside the traditional genders. Or that stairs with no elevator should be generally outlawed because it's discriminatory to wheel chair users. Having one doctor trying to treat your rare disease is very different from trying to make world revolve around a few people with special needs.
You got it wrong. The unbelievable part is that the lowest bidder developed software bothered to take time to add and test such a check in the first place.
Presumably it was in the requirements or it was done to check off some fluffy requirement of logical input validation. If you can't play off the "Well I can type in anything here, two women, two men, this software has no checks at all" "Okay, any other rules we should add or does checking it's a man and a woman satisfy requirement 72" conversation in your head, you haven't been to enough of these meetings. It is exactly the kind of simplistic rule you throw in to close a nasty requirement, then anything else is a change order because they didn't provide a complete list.
If it is an Identity database, then gender matters. If it is a medical database, it matters. If its a customer database, it does not matter
If you're doing any selective marketing or sales campaigns or you show them any form of targeted advertising or you're selling customer lists then it does matter or at least it has value. Statistically speaking males and females of same age have vastly different interests, so they're not going to stop collecting that information.
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Rights to one self take presidence over someone else. You have the right to speak, I have the right to not listen.
But you've never had the right to control what people say about you to others. If that was the case we'd be casually breaking the law all the time every time we mentioned somebody else.
Cant really prevent someoen from them posting "check out this picture of me and X, Y and Z!" however, so the same problem will still exist, just not as easy to find (yet...)
And here's really the issue, tagging is more formal but in principle it's the same thing so to you want to make that posting illegal? Just saying it too?
No, I own my own memories and have the right to talk about them to others. If I see you cheating on your wife then I don't need your permission to tell her, if I saw an anti-porn priest go to a strip club where he thought no one would recognize him I don't need his permission to call him out on his hypocrisy. It is a very important part of free speech to be able to talk about somebody against their will. Do you think all the "birthers" should be put in jail for questioning Obama's heritage without his permission? Don't be silly. You can ask people not to tag and not to post photos, but I don't think you with force of law can demand that they don't.
But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.
All projects that have tried to replace X so far has failed miserably, so I'd say the odds are against both of them. If Ubuntu can do it as quickly and easily as they think then more power to them, but I'm not holding my breath. The Wayland people are mostly seasoned X.org developers, I think they know better how complicated it really is. Either way I'm curious to see what Android AIOs will do to the market, give it a big screen, keyboard and mouse then what happens? I'm not so sure X or Wayland or Mir is a requirement to winning the desktop, at least it didn't look that way for smartphones/tablets.
Of course since the kernel is under GPLv2 and not GPLv3 they can restrict it to run only binaries signed by Sony. Any significant code they can put in blobs like AMD and nVidia do with their proprietary drivers. They'd have to show you the changes yes, but it wouldn't run anywhere but an emulator - which is probably what they're most worried about since this is now rather standard PC hardware.
ABOVE Top Secret?
It's the last common tier, either you have a TS clearance or you don't. However there is still information that you need additional clearance for (not just a need to know), but the process is specific to the information and clearance to one doesn't give you clearance for anything else. There's no "ultra top secret" for everything, it's more like rooms on the TS floor with an extra set of locks.
Maybe that person decides the free plan isn't enough speed and becomes a paying customer.
Possibly, but I think it's more likely a new person moving in becomes a paying customer. If the house isn't hooked up you start looking for potential providers and what they'll charge but if you're already getting Internet from Google and it's a simple and instant upgrade then surely that's what you'd go for. And every person they get hooked up is one less potential customer for other ISPs, making it much harder for them to reach critical mass so as a barrier to competition it seems like a cheap insurance. If you have a customer relationship with them it's easier to make special offers, they can for example give them a free unlimited speed weekend to get them hooked. It's a lot cheaper to dig up ditches to all the houses once than to do it one by one as they want to sign up, they probably don't need much of a "hit rate" to make it pay off.
Southwest found that personal intent, ethics and attitude were bigger drivers of success than technical expertise.
How many of those are measurable, how much do you learn in the interview, how much do people tell the truth and how easily are the answers manipulated? The greatest reason interviews are so difficult is that people lie, well the smart people do anyway. For example, the real reason you're changing job is probably that there's something you don't like about the old one, either it's the work assignments, the boss, the colleagues, the pay and benefits, the lack of career progress or options, the commute or any one of a million things your new employer doesn't want to hear. Even when it's nothing negative like you're moving to town with your GF and need new work, that's not what they want to hear it's why you want to work at their company. And the bullshit only gets worse if it's between being out of a job and having a job.
Sometimes I wish I'd had the balls to do a real honest job interview, the answer to that would probably go something along the lines of "Well honestly I'd heard the company name in the passing but I don't know anything about it or what working here would be like, only that you're asking for a set of skills that mostly match mine. Why would I like to work here?" Even if I'm lukewarm to work there I'm going to pretend I highly motivated. Even if I'm in a sullen mood I'm going to pretend to have a positive attitude. As for ethics I do feel I act with integrity, but it's a form of courtship and you put your best foot forward and be on your best behavior. What it's like to live with someone in day to day life probably has very little to do with how it was on the first date, same applies to job interviews. And psychopaths are reportedly very charming on the surface.
Nah, Orwell wasn't even close. He might have been close to predicting STASI in East Germany, but this would have been far, far into science fiction. In his story they might have had telescreens but it was always humans watching humans. Huge segments of the population were informers, everybody was aware the Party had eyes and ears everywhere. Ask yourself, how many of the US/UK population knew these programs even existed? I'm guessing thousands out of hundreds of millions. And if the power that be take one lesson away from this it's not going to be the one you want, it's that humans are a liability. They suffer from a conscience and believing in the constitution, also called espionage and treason. Which is why more of this is going to be automated with fewer in the "need to know".
I'm quite sure China has just the same kind of systems - if not better - to track dissidents, you say something bad about the regime on any media flags start going up around you. The computers will do what their masters instruct with utter dedication. The only good news for now is that you still need human thugs to do the dirty work of throwing people in jail, but we're making progress towards changing that. We already have bomb disposal robots, I'm guessing a team of SWAT robots isn't that far behind. And if it comes to actual civil war more and more weapons are "smart weapons" that won't work for the rebels, did a tank operator defect to the enemy? Throw the kill switch. The deck is getting more and more stacked against any insurrection against any regime for any reason.
And higher machine specs, sure today you laugh at it but as I remember OS/2 required double as much RAM as Windows 3.1 to run well (I think 4MB and 8MB, but don't quote me on that), I used both but for the time the OS stole way too many resources on boot. This was still a time where if you ran anything "demanding" it usually ran barebones in DOS and fiddling with XMS, EMS to give it more than 1MB of memory. Not to mention OS/2 was the personification of the "unpersonal" office computer in a time where we were mostly using it for fun and tinkering, IBMs only real understanding of the personal computer was that one person was using it. Particularly that Microsoft bet big on DirectX was a huge boon for Windows 95+, it's something IBM would never do.
But if you don't buy a $600 iPhone but choose a $100 phone instead, Apple doesn't care whether that $100 phone is a Nokia feature phone or a cheap Android phone.
When the market was an expensive smartphone or no smartphone - particularly none with traction and apps, many chose Apple. My iPhone (4, so three years old) is the first phone I own that had apps and it's not going to be my last, but I'm going to take a long hard look if I need to pay for a new iPhone or a cheaper Android phone will do the trick, Android is an alternative where a Nokia feature phone wouldn't be. I don't regret buying it just like I don't regret buying all the expensive computer gear I've bought over the years, new technology is expensive but it doesn't mean I need to stay on the bleeding edge. Particularly since my next one would be coming out of my own pocket.
Developers don't care about market share, they care about the number of people who are willing to pay for software.
True, as well they should but a lot of companies have also lost sight of where they're going to make money in the future because they're too busy staring at the money they make right now. All those people who are starting out with Android today who might get more advanced and/or more affluent in the future, are they just going to dump their Android phones and the apps they know and go Apple? Some will but many won't, a Nokia feature phone would be a dead end but even a cheap Android phone isn't. With the number of potential future customers on Android now I'd never dare to not develop for Android as well, even though iPhone might be the cash cow right now. YMMV.
If they really could do a petabyte I'd settle for 10x redundancy and 100TB, that should probably work fine and be very useful all the other issues notwithstanding. Because the main reason they're not very useful is capacity, you've got 4TB HDDs for bulk storage and cheap 32-64GB memory sticks for transfers so what good is optical media? A BluRay is probably fine to get a 50GB movie to people who don't have a fast Internet connection, but I haven't burned a CD/DVD in ages, it never seems like the best tool for any job.
Probably because they've become fed up with eco-nutters who insist they should buy a craptastic EV, perhaps not the Tesla Model S but most that have come before because it's the "right thing" to do even if it's a crappy deal. Not too unlike listening to RMS saying you should use open source no matter if it does what you need or not because it's the "right thing" to do. The statistics say second time hybrid buyers are rare, I don't know the stats for EV buyers but not many are on their second car yet. Does it live up to the hype? Does the technology really get all that much better if we get people to use it, or is the very idea fundamentally poor? Modern combustion engines are pretty good at what they do, it's not obvious that EVs will be better for any other reason than that we might run out of oil.
Too many people take Mahatma Gandhi's "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win." like some magic formula for everything. No, many times you stay ignored. No, many times you remain a laughing stock. No, many times you fight and you lose. What about simple things that even if things have been a mess the whole week and I've forgotten to tank/charge but I'm finally ready to go on my cabin weekend trip then my gas car just need a pit stop while my EV is an expensive paperweight while I wait for it to charge at home or I have to drive it to some quick-charger to hang around there. I've managed to make my cell phone black out even though I've had power nearby all the time, but I'm always going to keep a charge on my car? Ideally shit won't happen, practically I'm sure it will.
So...I have to wonder...if I'd bought one of these cars yesterday, how in the hell would they be able to swap all of those batteries out in 90 seconds? If they were as light as empty cardboard boxes, I'd have trouble swapping them all simply because of the bulk. And there's no way they weigh that little, or are that easily dislodged.
A trained formula one team will change all tires in less than 10 seconds, how long does it take you with a tire iron and a hand-cranked jack? I imagine it's pretty much like this:
1. Robot unscrews bolts, removes undercarriage
2. Place a battery caddy under the batteries
3. Disconnect the batteries
4. Caddy goes off to put them in automated storage
5. New caddy slides in with fresh batteries
6. Connect the batteries
7. Caddy goes away
8. Refasten the undercarriage
There's not much guesswork here, they know the exact dimensions, locations, sizes and everything the only thing they'll need to make sure is that the car and machinery is lined up correctly. Besides, it's 90 seconds under ideal conditions - same as the time allotted to evacuate a jumbo jet. I suspect in practice it will take a little longer...
So your argument is that there will always be risk, so there's no point in managing or minimizing it? To continue your car analogy, even if I'm at a pedestrian crossing I don't really trust cars to stop and I always throw a glance to make sure they've noticed me. An uncle of mine was witness to a horrible accident, old lady got run over in broad daylight in the middle of a well-marked crossing, perpetrator was an old half-blind fool who should have lost his license already or had and didn't care. Doesn't help the old lady one bit no matter how much they punish him anyway. You always trust lots of people, you trust the factory who building the brakes on your car and the mechanic who serviced them, you trust the people who built the bridge it won't collapse from out under you but only because you lack any other practical alternative.
With software you do have more and better choices, not perfect choices but it's a helluva lot harder for the NSA to place a spy bug in Linux than in Windows where they can just show up with a national security letter that is both instructions and gag order and violating either can land you in jail. If there are reasonable ways to prove that these are the exact versions and compiler settings used to produce this binary, then that is much stronger than trust. Trust is something that can be betrayed, while reproducible steps is something you can verify. In science, if one scientists told you here are the steps of my experiment, feel free to reproduce my results and the other said "I can't show you the data but the results are correct, trust me", who would you trust?
People need to learn to take time to make things easy, accessible, and fool-proof. Design for the user, not the engineer.
Commercial software companies are too busy creating new features so they can sell product, just making existing features more fool-proof doesn't sell much and they can cheaply outsource following the script to a helldesk. With in-house software the moment you get it working through some dark incantation it's done and on to the second most pressing issue. Sysadmins like to blame the developers, but often they're not the reason you got this rickety heap thrown in your lap. Do it cheap, do it fast, do it good enough and on a good day you might get two out of three and on bad days none of three. And if you by some miracle got three for three, the requirements just changed.
The "halfway" is, as many commenters below have pointed out, that they've yet to remove the built-in Kinect.
No need to remove it they should just add a physical "off" switch, maybe with 2 cents worth of plastic sliding over the web camera. Then the paranoid geeks can pick it apart and confirm that yes, it really turns off the power and the tinfoil hat brigade can breathe a little easier. How many have you seen that have say taped over the Facetime camera on their Mac Books? Oh right, they assume OS X isn't secretly recording them. I honestly don't people see that as nearly as big a deal as the always-on.
Too late, they're already full of hot air.
Well companies like S3 also made successful headway with their own designs, but this didn't matter because they were way behind the competition at the time. It is NEVER a case of being better than you were before, but a question of being good enough to go up against the market leaders. Intel knows its progress means that internally its GPU team is being patted on the back and given more support, and yet this is a road to nowhere. Intel needs to bite the bullet, give up on its failed GPU projects, and buy in the best designs the market has to offer. Nvidia is this.
The Steam hardware survey seems to disagree, 14% of gamers are now happy running Intel chips so how many non-gamers do you think find them good enough? A GPU running as part of a CPU with a <100W total power budget is never going to compete with dual SLI/CF 200W+ discrete chips, both Intel and hardcore gamers know that. Intel just wants to be in mainstream products without AMD/nVidia getting discrete chip sales and they're succeeding, check any statistics for computers shipped with discrete graphics and they're in decline. Maybe it's an AMD APU, but most of the time it's an Intel.
Actual translation "Intel fucked us in the ass more than AMD that at least got a billion plus for their ass reaming, all we got was the curb. Now we are just gonna have to become patent trolls because with AMD owning ATI and Intel going their own way we missed the boat...damn we should have bought Via". (...) Oh and for Nvidia fans...sorry but I could have told ya so. AMD [has been so much smarter]
Yes, because AMD has totally been flowers and sunshine ever since. In their Q1 2013 finances stockholder's equity was down to $415 million, one more total disaster quarter like Q4 2012 with a $473 million loss and they're filing for bankruptcy. Meanwhile nVidia's market cap is more than twice as big as AMD (and that is after AMD's stock recovered, it was 5x a little while there) and they're making money, this is not a back-against-the-wall move. It's the realization that building a complete SoC is complicated and just having good graphics is not enough, better to play the PowerVR game (who are not productless IP trolls) and be other SoCs than to be nowhere at all.
Yes, and I think his description of the passive-aggressive attitude of fanboys are pretty spot on too, particularly this bit:
Obviously GNOME Shell and Unity are only an example. We can observe the same kind of cognitive dissonance with KDE fanboys. An example I can observe in regular intervals is that "the next version is much better and solves all problems" whenever a user is reporting about instabilities or other problems. The fact that another user is experiencing problems is challenging the beliefs of the fanboys which can be resolved by stating that the next version resolves it. We can see these comments for each version since 4.1.
Also known as "the boy who cried wolf" and you can only take so much of it before you go into "stop wasting my time trying to make me try the same broken thing you lying sack of shit" mode. Note that the same argument is also automatically used to invalidate any opinion that is more than five minutes old, since things are "totally different" now. And that attack is the best defense is popular in all walks of life, if you find your choice hard to defend go attack everything else as being worse. Another thing I see in forums that don't have moderation like /. does is trying to win by flooding the comment field, like there's 300 comments and 50-100 are from the same person aggressively assaulting anyone that posts anything that doesn't fit his opinion. It certainly makes it a total waste to read the comments.
On the other hand, a filtered version of the truth isn't the same as an unfiltered version. If you see a blog with nothing but praises, it's rather obvious comments are being moderated and that you won't be able to read what people really thinks about the subject. If you want constructive discussion you moderate to stay between the extremes where it is wiped out by the mud slinging and being wiped out because dissenting opinion is not permitted. But if you want public debate, well it's often not very constructive it's more of shouting match, people with closed minds and no intention of changing their position trading blows. Not too much different from politics really.
If the author who compiles the list of the fastest computers in the world, and who co-developed Linpack, likes to write "petaflop/s" (see his blog entry in the second link), and if the author who writes the article in Nature World News, writes that as "petaflop per second", then who are you to argue?
Like lack of qualifications has ever stopped any /.er from arguing they know best anyway. This place is pretty much the definition of the Internet peanut gallery.
Life that already exists will have very strong evolutionary pressure to find new and untapped resources that are exclusive to them, it's not certain that living in the middle of the most lush rain forest is better - evolutionary speaking - than in a barren desert. But just because it can spread almost anywhere, doesn't mean it can start almost anywhere. In fact, we still don't have any experiment or strong models that will create life from inorganic compounds indicating that it is quite hard and quite rare. The exact right mix of chemicals and conditions may be an extraordinary event that only happens once every hundred million years in one place on earth, but it only needs to happen once.
They could have gone with just 419 and 421 and leave out the box number altogether. There are even places that have NO house number and that often is a problem as well.
The trouble with creating new numbers is that you'd disrupt everyone else, imagine you'd want to add a new number 5 then old 5 would become 7, 7 become 9, 9 become 11 all the way up to 419 becoming 421 and beyond. Generally here in Norway if you build say a huge block instead of several small buildings you get multiple numbers like 13-17, if you build say three houses on a lot that used to have one they become 13A, 13B and 13C. Which is also open-ended (my current workplace has buildings B-H, A is demolished and doesn't exist anymore) while 419 1/2, what do you do if you build another house? 419 1/4? 419 3/4? It's a poor system just asking for a situation it can't handle.
I presume you'll be fine with the doctors refusing to help you when you get struck down with some rare form tropical disease then? A problem being suffered by a minority is still a problem.
Somewhere I feel that analogy fails, it is more like "the artist formerly known as Prince" who decided an unpronounceable symbol would be his new stage name - for contract reasons. Imagine he'd asked that all government databases also would identify him the same way, his driver's license, his social security card, every form of public registry should now support this symbol. Or that everywhere there is a male and female restroom there should also be various options for crossdressers, transgenders, ladyboys and whatnot other combinations that exist somewhere between or outside the traditional genders. Or that stairs with no elevator should be generally outlawed because it's discriminatory to wheel chair users. Having one doctor trying to treat your rare disease is very different from trying to make world revolve around a few people with special needs.
You got it wrong. The unbelievable part is that the lowest bidder developed software bothered to take time to add and test such a check in the first place.
Presumably it was in the requirements or it was done to check off some fluffy requirement of logical input validation. If you can't play off the "Well I can type in anything here, two women, two men, this software has no checks at all" "Okay, any other rules we should add or does checking it's a man and a woman satisfy requirement 72" conversation in your head, you haven't been to enough of these meetings. It is exactly the kind of simplistic rule you throw in to close a nasty requirement, then anything else is a change order because they didn't provide a complete list.
If it is an Identity database, then gender matters. If it is a medical database, it matters. If its a customer database, it does not matter
If you're doing any selective marketing or sales campaigns or you show them any form of targeted advertising or you're selling customer lists then it does matter or at least it has value. Statistically speaking males and females of same age have vastly different interests, so they're not going to stop collecting that information.