I've never heard of senior execs that want to learn basic IT, they're not planning to staff the helpdesk. If they want training in anything, it's either
a) Basic use of the ERM package, what it will do for them, where they can find things and such or b) To better understand the pros and cons of the ERM packages, if the selection hasn't been made yet.
Under no circumstances are they interested in the IT plumbing, so talk to your boss again and figure out what he really meant.
Without Debian there'd be no Ubuntu or Linux Mint since they both pull packages from the unstable (read: under testing / "current" ) Debian repos.
And that is really the strange thing to me, that Debian does so much work but don't want to put it in a product. Debian unstable is a rolling release, meaning at any time you can be hit with a major change. Not fun if you want to run any kind of stable environment. Debian testing is extremely variable over the course of a release cycle, being almost similar to unstable early and stable late in the cycle. It's good for people working on the next stable but doesn't balance freshness and stability for anyone else. And stable is of course for the ultra-conservative server that really needs 99.999%+ uptime. They don't have - and apparently don't want to have - anything that competes in the space of Ubuntu (non-LTS), Linux Mint, Fedora etc. with rapid-cycle releases. It's like Debian should mean Debian stable and absolutely nothing else.
I think there would have been a good market for a Debian Desktop distribution, essentially that's what Ubuntu marketed itself. I'm not really surprised that it must happen outside Debian though, because there's been a lot of outright hostility from Debian developers that don't want to divide limited resources between what they consider "real" Debian and "play" Debian. Instead of getting the act together on devices with a GUI now Gnome, KDE, Unity etc. have been overrun by Android on smart phones and tablets and I suspect hybrids and laptops will be next.
The disorganized crowdsourcing of photography and video from various private buildings and random people present like after the Boston Marathon bombings don't intimidate me either, because they happen in a limited scope for a limited time with the awareness of everyone who helped collect it.
I live in a fairly large city, why would anyone be interested in me specifically unless I commit a crime?
That is not how it works, computers aren't limited resources the way humans are. Take for example the Boston Marathon bombings, they'd like to see who was there to drop of the bomb before they exploded and in order to be able to backtrack like that the system will just encompass everyone, all the time on the assumption that something you do now might at some point become important in the future. It's not a problem for the system that 99.99999% of the people in it aren't doing anything wrong.
Even if they were, what could they really find out about me by watching some cameras? The places I visit? That I pick my nose and scratch my balls while walking down the street? All of this is obtainable in other ways.
You're trying to make a mockery of it but combining who you are from e.g. cell phone records and how you looked and dressed at the time for example. If you want the tinfoil hat version it's also the visual fallback system for when you aren't carrying your radio buoy aka cell phone, without the effort of having an undercover officer following you. If you leave the house with a blue cardigan, you'll be auto-flagged as a suspect because someone across town was raped by a person wearing a blue cardigan.
People, it's PUBLIC. You should have no expectation of privacy in public. (...)
You should take a clue from the military, they are quite concerned that if you can systematically collect and process unclassified data you might infer information of a sensitive nature. Who and how many people work at a military facility may be secret, but if you count the comings and goings and track them home, you've inferred something the government doesn't want you to know. Likewise if you systematically collect enough public information, you can infer private information.
Do I worry about being spied on? No, why would I?
I think you've missed the primary reason totalitarian regimes spy on their citizens, it's not really about finding red flags and dealing with them it's about intimidating people from doing anything that might cause a red flag or associating with people that might cause a red flag. Let's go back to McCarthyism and even though you've done nothing wrong, would you really like that database to fill up with lots of light associations to events or groups that are communist-friendly or to people who are communist-friendly? The point is guilt by association and if they want you to be guilty, chances are that somewhere in that mass of data there's something we can nail you for. There will always be idealists and dissidents, the point is to make the silent majority disassociate themselves from them.
So they should have different information for different states. And obviously for city driving as well.
And it still wouldn't really match all real world conditions. I think most cars engines now have very accurate electronic control on the amount of fuel spent at any time, so just make a standard set of "unit figures" for cruising, acceleration etc. given a certain speed, resistance (passengers, luggage, uphill, downhill etc.) and see if you get accurate figures for a full drive profile. That way you can change what is considered a "representative" drive without the need for retesting, or even people could check custom profiles more suited to their actual needs.
I agree this must be the dumbest Ask Slashdot in a while, and that's saying something. What would marketing do with labor costs alone, have them roam the streets as wandering billboards? You need to buy online ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, tv ads, radio ads, billboards, cinema ads, product placements, banners, flyers, folders and various marketing stunts. Meanwhile software developers mainly need a desk and a computer - which may be considered general overhead since all employees need those - and the rest is small change. In other obvious news, software development companies have more labor costs than manufacturing companies with factories, robots, raw materials and inventory.
Rolling out new copper in this day and age would be madness. But the decision to rely on wireless as anything other than a short-term emergency measure is wrong. They should, of course, be rolling out new fiber as a matter of urgency.
Well, it sounds like a long haul of fiber for very few customers and anything that does havoc on the copper wires might do the same for fiber optic wires as well.
"If you go down the block, there are people that are using other technologies so I can spend a fortune running copper down there and have nobody use it," (...) Verizon has its fiber-optic network in other parts of Ocean County's barrier peninsula hit hard by Sandy, including Ortley Beach, Normandy Beach and Brick. There are no plans to bring fiber to Mantoloking.
This is going to happen a lot, here in Norway they're planning a similar phase-out of copper - actually the whole central parts of the country by 2017, cannibalizing for spare parts to run the outskirts - but they're not going to lay fiber to everyone that had copper. The rest will get some form of wireless service.
As long as you must take any active action to display the password I'm fine with it, but if you give me a password field I'm going to assume by default that it won't be echoed back to me in plaintext and I'd consider anything else an obvious bug. It doesn't really matter that in this particular case you almost certainly don't need that protection, it breaks the whole user expectation for password fields in general. It's like if your car would detect there is no traffic so there's no point in blinking the turn signal because nobody would see it, in practice I'd just think my turn lights are broken not that it was "smart". And there's a lot of hand-waving to justify this complicating simplification.
What happens to this system if the criminals can manufacture, cheaply, their own handguns? Suddenly the NRA's nonsense about criminals being the only ones with guns stops being nonsense. That's a big deal.
From what the police has been saying, it's not that hard to get your hands on a gun. The reason most criminals don't use guns around here is the risk/reward ratio, knives are both common and efficient while guns draw a lot of attention and carry much stiffer penalties. Clearly it takes a whole different level of premeditation to acquire illegal guns in order to do more crime than getting a knife from a store and the possession is illegal by itself so you don't want to carry it around for no reason. I guess it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, if they became commonplace than the police wouldn't be able to put so much resources on each gun crime and it could cause more criminals to use guns, but as long as it is rare it is possible to keep it rare.
The only way we will know is if someone notices cop-ware installed on their system and tests the antivirus software to see if it detects it - and then goes public with the results.
So? Antivirus fails to identify malicious software all the time, the only way you'd have any hard evidence is if you proved that the detection code intentionally ignored it.
Actually according to TFA it works with a few other browsers from the 2004 era, but only on Windows. The real summary here is "We haven't done anything to upgrade this system in the last 10 years" and the world moved on, which will happen from time to time. If it was 1990 it would be totally reasonable to ask for documents to be submitted in WordPerfect format, in 2013 it's not. If your maintenance budget is $0, this is eventually going to happen regardless.
You dont actually think each user gets to pick which device they are going to use do you?
No, but collectively users do and they pretty much hate RIM, they're down to 0.7% of new sales and while they still have a bit bigger install base to attract developers it's dwindling fast. Once the approvals are in place they'll follow the 94.7% of users already on Android or iOS, to me that'd be a no-brainer for a new rollout today.
But if you know you are accident prone, or have kids that break everything, or something to that effect that is covered, and the warranty company does not know that, you can still have an expected positive return.
Yes but you're also describing a huge selection bias in who signs up for extended warranty and the insurance company will still have their profit margin, so it is only works out if you're worse than the average warranty buyer, not worse than the average buyer.
You've never felt the urge for revenge even though it won't really benefit you? You've never had anyone steal from you, destroy your property, assault you, cheat on you, backstab you or in some other way made your life miserable and just wanted to make them miserable in return? Yes, usually "it's not worth it" wins but I find it strange if you've gone through life without ever tasting that rage. When I discovered that my car had been vandalized for no reason, if the perp had still been there then I think I'd have beaten him to a bloody pulp. Probably not five minutes later when I'd calmed down a little but I understand those who simply boil over by rage, others fall into despair where it all looks so bleak it doesn't matter but at least they can have their revenge. I've never managed to be that worked up over an employer but I think it's pretty basic human nature.
The reason the guy in question is senior to you is because management likes people they can count on to get shit done.
As long as he's not the kind of developer I'd call the arsonist/firefighter:
1. Create ugly kludge, deliver fast results, management loves you. 2. Minor patch breaks kludge, other developers get blamed for the breakage, management hates them 3. Put out fire with an even uglier kludge, big hero points, management loves you even more
From the management perspective they look great, but as a coworker when management says "solving all our problems" you think "...and causing most of them too". You rarely get the credit you deserve for writing rock solid code that never makes the headlines.
I had an intern try to optimize and clean up my code on his own initiative. It was pretty irritating. (...) OTOH, if I had tasked him to clean up my code and optimize, I might have been happy with his work.
You have an intern that can actually clean and optimize your code and you're complaining? Clearly he feels undervalued and wanted to show his skills or is just eager to learn and want to sharpen his skills, in either case just give him a proper assignment and be grateful.
That's insanity. A manufacturing company hiring somebody with hands on engineering experience at all levels. Everybody knows that to succeed you need an MBA who is great at marketing.
Depends on the manufacturing, if you're manufacturing toothpaste that is pretty much the same white goo as everyone else (hint, the coloring, taste and whatever is just superficial) then probably it's advertising, product placement, brand management and whatnot to make people choose yours over the next one that might be 5% more effective but nobody will ever notice. Processors on the other hand are intensely benchmark driven, it's very hard to talk your way out of engineering fail when you don't deliver - though it doesn't stop anyone trying. Even a car despite all the technical specs comes way more down to style, feel and brand processors, it's far more than MPG that counts.
If you count direct and indirect taxes, that's possibly not far from the truth. Here in Norway the average direct tax rate is 37% and with indirect taxes it's something like 58%. However I would like to add that for this the government paid my parents to raise me, I got a good and free public education up to and including a master degree at university, I don't have a health insurance as the universal healthcare is good enough, 7.8% of that goes towards paying public pensions that are fairly decent and so on. Across your working years it is high, across a lifetime it's not nearly as bad as it sounds when you add up all that people are paying for college funds, health insurance, 401(k) plan and so on and compare what's really left in the wallet every month. If I live to be 80 I've probably net paid taxes for 40 and net spent tax dollars for 40.
To make a very concrete example, I might be needing some surgery that'll probably also involve a few months of sick leave. The surgery and hospital stay isn't going to cost me anything, during the sick leave I'll continue to be paid my regular salary (up to a full year if the doctors say I need it). It's very easy to just stare yourself blind on the high tax rate alone, of course if you dropped out of high school, is always going to be healthy and die right before retirement age you are going to get a crap deal, but most people are going to need some of that sooner or later. Of course it doesn't really add up because there are people who are mentally or physically handicapped and can't work at all, but for the most part it's a cradle to the grave thing. I mean that literally, they'll even pay for funeral service if the deceased can't afford it or is under 18.
Haswell parts are expected to be 10-15% faster than Ivy Bridge, which was itself barely any faster than Sandy Bridge. (...) I suspect that discrete-GPU-buying home PC enthusiasts are going to continue to be completely ignored going forward while Intel continues to focus on chips for tablets and ultrabooks.
It's taken Intel from 2004 to now to go from the 3.8 GHz Penium IV to the 3.5-3.9 GHz i7-4770K, where do you want them to go? While they're still doing moderate IPC improvements there's just no easy way to scale to 5 GHz and beyond and scaling with more cores has rather tapped out, interest in their six-core LGA2011 platform is minimal. Of course price is a big part of it, but also that people don't have much to put the two extra cores to work with. Heck, if all you're doing is gaming many would suggest the i5-3570 since HT does help much, a $225 chip that'll do all gamers need.
That said, even though discrete GPU buyers aren't going to care much I'd say Intel is also launching a full volley at power laptops and AIOs with their 47/65W laptop/desktop chips trying to squeeze AMD and nVidia up and out of the graphics market. It might not do much for the bleeding edge of consumers, but I'm sure they are feeling the heat. In Steam's hardware survey Intel has gone from 3% to 13% over the last year and a half, no doubt that Intel is on the offensive here. Not really surprising that when AMD bets on APUs, Intel is going to try one-upping them.
And I'm fairly sure that if you're willing to pay $10K for a 4K screen (the current cheapest on the market - some Chinese knockoff), display manufacturers are willing to give you the 4K display you want.
Try less than $5K for the Sharp PN-K321 professional monitor.
Or you could pay $1K and get high res 27-30" screens as well just as you always could. You won't be able to find a 4K screen for $100 until 4KTVs are down in the under-$1000 range like HDTVs are now.
The only reason display resolutions "stalled" was because everyone was attracted to cheap cheap cheap - cheap laptops, cheap LCD monitors, etc.
LCDs have been growing and dropping steadily in price, I picked up a 60" LCD at about half the cost a 42" LCD cost me five years earlier. That's double the screen estate (60/42)^2 for considerably less, while resolution has been ridiculously expensive. 4K - as opposed to 2560x1600/1440 that never saw any adoption outside a few niche computer monitors has the potential to be the new HDTV. Right now you're paying early adopter premiums but I've read that it should really cost 1.5-2x of what a similar full hd screen costs, so if the TV momentum and volume gets behind it there'll soon be cheap 4K.
Would releasing full specs of the hardware to OSS coders reveal too much of secrets about the hardware?
The internal documentation would reveal way too much about the hardware, not just where they are but where they're going, so could the driver code and comments. It only takes one/* Will be done through/fixed by XYZ in next gen */ to potentially reveal important information on unreleased products. Could you strip it down to something terse that only says exactly what needs to be said in order to use it and nothing more? Maybe, but that's a lot of lawyer food. Instead AMD has mostly chosen the opposite approach, if we make working code what's the minimal level of documentation required to understand that code, which is usually lot less than the documentation required to figure out that's what the code must look like. There's a lot that could be done with the available AMD specs, it only lacks manpower.
Would having an full-feature open source driver actually hurt or improve business?
Depends if your drivers are currently a competitive advantage or disadvantage, In practice both AMD and nVidia consider their closed source drivers to have big advantages over their open source drivers that they're aren't willing or able to share freely. When you look at Mesa it's okay but when it comes to absolute performance and supporting the latest standards there's no doubt it has a long way to go. I don't think it's really that much about those two though, that rather brings us over to the next question.
Why does Intel have no problem having a relatively open driver development?
Why does MySQL have no problem being open source when Oracle is closed? Because I think it's fairly easy to say what way features would flow, there's not much MySQL could teach Oracle but there's a lot MySQL could learn from Oracle. Intel has two GPU companies that live and breathe graphics ahead of them, none after them (VIA has what, 0.01% or less market share) so they got absolutely nothing to lose, if they can enlist the open source community to help them it can only be to their advantage. Meanwhile AMD and nVidia really, really do not want to teach Chipzilla anything about making GPUs or drivers for them.
Guessing. AMD provides specs, nVidia doesn't nor do they offer developer help. The hardware interface of graphics cards changes a lot since what people care about is compliance with DirectX and OpenGL, what happens behind the scenes between the driver and hardware isn't important. Lots of weird interfaces, lots of magic values, lots of bugs that don't appear in the closed source drivers because the driver and hardware team have agreed on just the right order to set it up and call it. Nouveau is fueled by "if you refuse to support open source, by god we'll make it work with open source" and all credit for that but it seems this is a tough enough mountain to climb without the blindfold. Personally I'd rather get behind one of the companies that actually support open source, but everybody do what they want. That's how it works.
Honestly, I think imessage is something apple has mostly done right. You go to compose an SMS and it detects if the recipient has a compatible device. If so, it sends it as a data packet through imessage; if not, it sends an SMS.
With one very annoying side effect, when I go abroad and turn off my data service the messages are routed to/dev/null without any notification to me or whoever was trying to send me a message despite most people thinking they're sending me a SMS. There really should be a way for me to inform the service that this phone will be in SMS-only mode, reject and redirect to SMS. Either that or force all operators to give me sane data prices worldwide (what the locals are paying + Internet costs ~= what the locals are paying), but I think that's slightly harder...
Or something? You're making an argument when you don't even know? Check out green energy tariffs. They are a bit more expensive than ordinary ones. But not 4 times, that would be ridiculous.
Because the sources are usually heavily subsidized. In addition renewables are in the same phase were you put a small drill to the ground and oil came pouring out, they're not very representative of the average cost. For example here in Norway we have a great many dams providing cheap hydro power, would we like more? Sure. But almost all the good spots are built out, the rest are poor or have other big negative consequences so in practice it's all but stopped. Great, cheap resource but it won't scale. Solar panels work in sunny California, they don't work so well in Alaska. Many places are dry, dark with quiet winds where neither solar, hydro, wind nor wave will work but a galleon of oil will burn as well there as anywhere else. I doubt you could deliver a green tariff there for 10x or even 100x the cost.
Tne DNS system is anything but decentralized, they're quickly running out of countries that'll give them a DNS address. Yes, there will be entirely different solutions found but without DNS it won't be as easy as simply typing in thepiratebay.[whatever]
But once you get up close to the holy grail of true 4k which is 4096, why even bother with 3840? Cinema digital is shot in 4096 (and up). 3840 should be boycotted or even banned.
No black bars. People hated it when we went widescreen, they won't accept another round. There is so much non-cinema 16:9 content that can't be remastered, and even if it could all existing DVDs/BluRays don't have it. The only thing that could give a hint of 17:9 adoption (4096x2160 seem to be the standard for cinema monitors) is if 4K BluRays come with the ability to ship both 3840x2160 and 4096x2160 on the same disc, like an extra 256x2160 slice added to the picture. Or since you're probably doing a bit of pan-and-scan to best fit 16:9, two slices one on each side to "fill out" the picture. Otherwise it's dead, Jim.
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I've never heard of senior execs that want to learn basic IT, they're not planning to staff the helpdesk. If they want training in anything, it's either
a) Basic use of the ERM package, what it will do for them, where they can find things and such or
b) To better understand the pros and cons of the ERM packages, if the selection hasn't been made yet.
Under no circumstances are they interested in the IT plumbing, so talk to your boss again and figure out what he really meant.
Without Debian there'd be no Ubuntu or Linux Mint since they both pull packages from the unstable (read: under testing / "current" ) Debian repos.
And that is really the strange thing to me, that Debian does so much work but don't want to put it in a product. Debian unstable is a rolling release, meaning at any time you can be hit with a major change. Not fun if you want to run any kind of stable environment. Debian testing is extremely variable over the course of a release cycle, being almost similar to unstable early and stable late in the cycle. It's good for people working on the next stable but doesn't balance freshness and stability for anyone else. And stable is of course for the ultra-conservative server that really needs 99.999%+ uptime. They don't have - and apparently don't want to have - anything that competes in the space of Ubuntu (non-LTS), Linux Mint, Fedora etc. with rapid-cycle releases. It's like Debian should mean Debian stable and absolutely nothing else.
I think there would have been a good market for a Debian Desktop distribution, essentially that's what Ubuntu marketed itself. I'm not really surprised that it must happen outside Debian though, because there's been a lot of outright hostility from Debian developers that don't want to divide limited resources between what they consider "real" Debian and "play" Debian. Instead of getting the act together on devices with a GUI now Gnome, KDE, Unity etc. have been overrun by Android on smart phones and tablets and I suspect hybrids and laptops will be next.
The disorganized crowdsourcing of photography and video from various private buildings and random people present like after the Boston Marathon bombings don't intimidate me either, because they happen in a limited scope for a limited time with the awareness of everyone who helped collect it.
I live in a fairly large city, why would anyone be interested in me specifically unless I commit a crime?
That is not how it works, computers aren't limited resources the way humans are. Take for example the Boston Marathon bombings, they'd like to see who was there to drop of the bomb before they exploded and in order to be able to backtrack like that the system will just encompass everyone, all the time on the assumption that something you do now might at some point become important in the future. It's not a problem for the system that 99.99999% of the people in it aren't doing anything wrong.
Even if they were, what could they really find out about me by watching some cameras? The places I visit? That I pick my nose and scratch my balls while walking down the street? All of this is obtainable in other ways.
You're trying to make a mockery of it but combining who you are from e.g. cell phone records and how you looked and dressed at the time for example. If you want the tinfoil hat version it's also the visual fallback system for when you aren't carrying your radio buoy aka cell phone, without the effort of having an undercover officer following you. If you leave the house with a blue cardigan, you'll be auto-flagged as a suspect because someone across town was raped by a person wearing a blue cardigan.
People, it's PUBLIC. You should have no expectation of privacy in public. (...)
You should take a clue from the military, they are quite concerned that if you can systematically collect and process unclassified data you might infer information of a sensitive nature. Who and how many people work at a military facility may be secret, but if you count the comings and goings and track them home, you've inferred something the government doesn't want you to know. Likewise if you systematically collect enough public information, you can infer private information.
Do I worry about being spied on? No, why would I?
I think you've missed the primary reason totalitarian regimes spy on their citizens, it's not really about finding red flags and dealing with them it's about intimidating people from doing anything that might cause a red flag or associating with people that might cause a red flag. Let's go back to McCarthyism and even though you've done nothing wrong, would you really like that database to fill up with lots of light associations to events or groups that are communist-friendly or to people who are communist-friendly? The point is guilt by association and if they want you to be guilty, chances are that somewhere in that mass of data there's something we can nail you for. There will always be idealists and dissidents, the point is to make the silent majority disassociate themselves from them.
So they should have different information for different states. And obviously for city driving as well.
And it still wouldn't really match all real world conditions. I think most cars engines now have very accurate electronic control on the amount of fuel spent at any time, so just make a standard set of "unit figures" for cruising, acceleration etc. given a certain speed, resistance (passengers, luggage, uphill, downhill etc.) and see if you get accurate figures for a full drive profile. That way you can change what is considered a "representative" drive without the need for retesting, or even people could check custom profiles more suited to their actual needs.
I agree this must be the dumbest Ask Slashdot in a while, and that's saying something. What would marketing do with labor costs alone, have them roam the streets as wandering billboards? You need to buy online ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, tv ads, radio ads, billboards, cinema ads, product placements, banners, flyers, folders and various marketing stunts. Meanwhile software developers mainly need a desk and a computer - which may be considered general overhead since all employees need those - and the rest is small change. In other obvious news, software development companies have more labor costs than manufacturing companies with factories, robots, raw materials and inventory.
Rolling out new copper in this day and age would be madness. But the decision to rely on wireless as anything other than a short-term emergency measure is wrong. They should, of course, be rolling out new fiber as a matter of urgency.
Well, it sounds like a long haul of fiber for very few customers and anything that does havoc on the copper wires might do the same for fiber optic wires as well.
"If you go down the block, there are people that are using other technologies so I can spend a fortune running copper down there and have nobody use it," (...) Verizon has its fiber-optic network in other parts of Ocean County's barrier peninsula hit hard by Sandy, including Ortley Beach, Normandy Beach and Brick. There are no plans to bring fiber to Mantoloking.
This is going to happen a lot, here in Norway they're planning a similar phase-out of copper - actually the whole central parts of the country by 2017, cannibalizing for spare parts to run the outskirts - but they're not going to lay fiber to everyone that had copper. The rest will get some form of wireless service.
As long as you must take any active action to display the password I'm fine with it, but if you give me a password field I'm going to assume by default that it won't be echoed back to me in plaintext and I'd consider anything else an obvious bug. It doesn't really matter that in this particular case you almost certainly don't need that protection, it breaks the whole user expectation for password fields in general. It's like if your car would detect there is no traffic so there's no point in blinking the turn signal because nobody would see it, in practice I'd just think my turn lights are broken not that it was "smart". And there's a lot of hand-waving to justify this complicating simplification.
What happens to this system if the criminals can manufacture, cheaply, their own handguns? Suddenly the NRA's nonsense about criminals being the only ones with guns stops being nonsense. That's a big deal.
From what the police has been saying, it's not that hard to get your hands on a gun. The reason most criminals don't use guns around here is the risk/reward ratio, knives are both common and efficient while guns draw a lot of attention and carry much stiffer penalties. Clearly it takes a whole different level of premeditation to acquire illegal guns in order to do more crime than getting a knife from a store and the possession is illegal by itself so you don't want to carry it around for no reason. I guess it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation, if they became commonplace than the police wouldn't be able to put so much resources on each gun crime and it could cause more criminals to use guns, but as long as it is rare it is possible to keep it rare.
The only way we will know is if someone notices cop-ware installed on their system and tests the antivirus software to see if it detects it - and then goes public with the results.
So? Antivirus fails to identify malicious software all the time, the only way you'd have any hard evidence is if you proved that the detection code intentionally ignored it.
Actually according to TFA it works with a few other browsers from the 2004 era, but only on Windows. The real summary here is "We haven't done anything to upgrade this system in the last 10 years" and the world moved on, which will happen from time to time. If it was 1990 it would be totally reasonable to ask for documents to be submitted in WordPerfect format, in 2013 it's not. If your maintenance budget is $0, this is eventually going to happen regardless.
You dont actually think each user gets to pick which device they are going to use do you?
No, but collectively users do and they pretty much hate RIM, they're down to 0.7% of new sales and while they still have a bit bigger install base to attract developers it's dwindling fast. Once the approvals are in place they'll follow the 94.7% of users already on Android or iOS, to me that'd be a no-brainer for a new rollout today.
But if you know you are accident prone, or have kids that break everything, or something to that effect that is covered, and the warranty company does not know that, you can still have an expected positive return.
Yes but you're also describing a huge selection bias in who signs up for extended warranty and the insurance company will still have their profit margin, so it is only works out if you're worse than the average warranty buyer, not worse than the average buyer.
You've never felt the urge for revenge even though it won't really benefit you? You've never had anyone steal from you, destroy your property, assault you, cheat on you, backstab you or in some other way made your life miserable and just wanted to make them miserable in return? Yes, usually "it's not worth it" wins but I find it strange if you've gone through life without ever tasting that rage. When I discovered that my car had been vandalized for no reason, if the perp had still been there then I think I'd have beaten him to a bloody pulp. Probably not five minutes later when I'd calmed down a little but I understand those who simply boil over by rage, others fall into despair where it all looks so bleak it doesn't matter but at least they can have their revenge. I've never managed to be that worked up over an employer but I think it's pretty basic human nature.
The reason the guy in question is senior to you is because management likes people they can count on to get shit done.
As long as he's not the kind of developer I'd call the arsonist/firefighter:
1. Create ugly kludge, deliver fast results, management loves you.
2. Minor patch breaks kludge, other developers get blamed for the breakage, management hates them
3. Put out fire with an even uglier kludge, big hero points, management loves you even more
From the management perspective they look great, but as a coworker when management says "solving all our problems" you think "...and causing most of them too". You rarely get the credit you deserve for writing rock solid code that never makes the headlines.
I had an intern try to optimize and clean up my code on his own initiative. It was pretty irritating. (...) OTOH, if I had tasked him to clean up my code and optimize, I might have been happy with his work.
You have an intern that can actually clean and optimize your code and you're complaining? Clearly he feels undervalued and wanted to show his skills or is just eager to learn and want to sharpen his skills, in either case just give him a proper assignment and be grateful.
That's insanity. A manufacturing company hiring somebody with hands on engineering experience at all levels. Everybody knows that to succeed you need an MBA who is great at marketing.
Depends on the manufacturing, if you're manufacturing toothpaste that is pretty much the same white goo as everyone else (hint, the coloring, taste and whatever is just superficial) then probably it's advertising, product placement, brand management and whatnot to make people choose yours over the next one that might be 5% more effective but nobody will ever notice. Processors on the other hand are intensely benchmark driven, it's very hard to talk your way out of engineering fail when you don't deliver - though it doesn't stop anyone trying. Even a car despite all the technical specs comes way more down to style, feel and brand processors, it's far more than MPG that counts.
If you count direct and indirect taxes, that's possibly not far from the truth. Here in Norway the average direct tax rate is 37% and with indirect taxes it's something like 58%. However I would like to add that for this the government paid my parents to raise me, I got a good and free public education up to and including a master degree at university, I don't have a health insurance as the universal healthcare is good enough, 7.8% of that goes towards paying public pensions that are fairly decent and so on. Across your working years it is high, across a lifetime it's not nearly as bad as it sounds when you add up all that people are paying for college funds, health insurance, 401(k) plan and so on and compare what's really left in the wallet every month. If I live to be 80 I've probably net paid taxes for 40 and net spent tax dollars for 40.
To make a very concrete example, I might be needing some surgery that'll probably also involve a few months of sick leave. The surgery and hospital stay isn't going to cost me anything, during the sick leave I'll continue to be paid my regular salary (up to a full year if the doctors say I need it). It's very easy to just stare yourself blind on the high tax rate alone, of course if you dropped out of high school, is always going to be healthy and die right before retirement age you are going to get a crap deal, but most people are going to need some of that sooner or later. Of course it doesn't really add up because there are people who are mentally or physically handicapped and can't work at all, but for the most part it's a cradle to the grave thing. I mean that literally, they'll even pay for funeral service if the deceased can't afford it or is under 18.
Haswell parts are expected to be 10-15% faster than Ivy Bridge, which was itself barely any faster than Sandy Bridge. (...) I suspect that discrete-GPU-buying home PC enthusiasts are going to continue to be completely ignored going forward while Intel continues to focus on chips for tablets and ultrabooks.
It's taken Intel from 2004 to now to go from the 3.8 GHz Penium IV to the 3.5-3.9 GHz i7-4770K, where do you want them to go? While they're still doing moderate IPC improvements there's just no easy way to scale to 5 GHz and beyond and scaling with more cores has rather tapped out, interest in their six-core LGA2011 platform is minimal. Of course price is a big part of it, but also that people don't have much to put the two extra cores to work with. Heck, if all you're doing is gaming many would suggest the i5-3570 since HT does help much, a $225 chip that'll do all gamers need.
That said, even though discrete GPU buyers aren't going to care much I'd say Intel is also launching a full volley at power laptops and AIOs with their 47/65W laptop/desktop chips trying to squeeze AMD and nVidia up and out of the graphics market. It might not do much for the bleeding edge of consumers, but I'm sure they are feeling the heat. In Steam's hardware survey Intel has gone from 3% to 13% over the last year and a half, no doubt that Intel is on the offensive here. Not really surprising that when AMD bets on APUs, Intel is going to try one-upping them.
And I'm fairly sure that if you're willing to pay $10K for a 4K screen (the current cheapest on the market - some Chinese knockoff), display manufacturers are willing to give you the 4K display you want.
Try less than $5K for the Sharp PN-K321 professional monitor.
Or you could pay $1K and get high res 27-30" screens as well just as you always could. You won't be able to find a 4K screen for $100 until 4KTVs are down in the under-$1000 range like HDTVs are now.
Is $1300 close enough?
The only reason display resolutions "stalled" was because everyone was attracted to cheap cheap cheap - cheap laptops, cheap LCD monitors, etc.
LCDs have been growing and dropping steadily in price, I picked up a 60" LCD at about half the cost a 42" LCD cost me five years earlier. That's double the screen estate (60/42)^2 for considerably less, while resolution has been ridiculously expensive. 4K - as opposed to 2560x1600/1440 that never saw any adoption outside a few niche computer monitors has the potential to be the new HDTV. Right now you're paying early adopter premiums but I've read that it should really cost 1.5-2x of what a similar full hd screen costs, so if the TV momentum and volume gets behind it there'll soon be cheap 4K.
Would releasing full specs of the hardware to OSS coders reveal too much of secrets about the hardware?
The internal documentation would reveal way too much about the hardware, not just where they are but where they're going, so could the driver code and comments. It only takes one /* Will be done through/fixed by XYZ in next gen */ to potentially reveal important information on unreleased products. Could you strip it down to something terse that only says exactly what needs to be said in order to use it and nothing more? Maybe, but that's a lot of lawyer food. Instead AMD has mostly chosen the opposite approach, if we make working code what's the minimal level of documentation required to understand that code, which is usually lot less than the documentation required to figure out that's what the code must look like. There's a lot that could be done with the available AMD specs, it only lacks manpower.
Would having an full-feature open source driver actually hurt or improve business?
Depends if your drivers are currently a competitive advantage or disadvantage, In practice both AMD and nVidia consider their closed source drivers to have big advantages over their open source drivers that they're aren't willing or able to share freely. When you look at Mesa it's okay but when it comes to absolute performance and supporting the latest standards there's no doubt it has a long way to go. I don't think it's really that much about those two though, that rather brings us over to the next question.
Why does Intel have no problem having a relatively open driver development?
Why does MySQL have no problem being open source when Oracle is closed? Because I think it's fairly easy to say what way features would flow, there's not much MySQL could teach Oracle but there's a lot MySQL could learn from Oracle. Intel has two GPU companies that live and breathe graphics ahead of them, none after them (VIA has what, 0.01% or less market share) so they got absolutely nothing to lose, if they can enlist the open source community to help them it can only be to their advantage. Meanwhile AMD and nVidia really, really do not want to teach Chipzilla anything about making GPUs or drivers for them.
Who knows what they are doing.
Guessing. AMD provides specs, nVidia doesn't nor do they offer developer help. The hardware interface of graphics cards changes a lot since what people care about is compliance with DirectX and OpenGL, what happens behind the scenes between the driver and hardware isn't important. Lots of weird interfaces, lots of magic values, lots of bugs that don't appear in the closed source drivers because the driver and hardware team have agreed on just the right order to set it up and call it. Nouveau is fueled by "if you refuse to support open source, by god we'll make it work with open source" and all credit for that but it seems this is a tough enough mountain to climb without the blindfold. Personally I'd rather get behind one of the companies that actually support open source, but everybody do what they want. That's how it works.
Honestly, I think imessage is something apple has mostly done right. You go to compose an SMS and it detects if the recipient has a compatible device. If so, it sends it as a data packet through imessage; if not, it sends an SMS.
With one very annoying side effect, when I go abroad and turn off my data service the messages are routed to /dev/null without any notification to me or whoever was trying to send me a message despite most people thinking they're sending me a SMS. There really should be a way for me to inform the service that this phone will be in SMS-only mode, reject and redirect to SMS. Either that or force all operators to give me sane data prices worldwide (what the locals are paying + Internet costs ~= what the locals are paying), but I think that's slightly harder...
Or something? You're making an argument when you don't even know? Check out green energy tariffs. They are a bit more expensive than ordinary ones. But not 4 times, that would be ridiculous.
Because the sources are usually heavily subsidized. In addition renewables are in the same phase were you put a small drill to the ground and oil came pouring out, they're not very representative of the average cost. For example here in Norway we have a great many dams providing cheap hydro power, would we like more? Sure. But almost all the good spots are built out, the rest are poor or have other big negative consequences so in practice it's all but stopped. Great, cheap resource but it won't scale. Solar panels work in sunny California, they don't work so well in Alaska. Many places are dry, dark with quiet winds where neither solar, hydro, wind nor wave will work but a galleon of oil will burn as well there as anywhere else. I doubt you could deliver a green tariff there for 10x or even 100x the cost.
Tne DNS system is anything but decentralized, they're quickly running out of countries that'll give them a DNS address. Yes, there will be entirely different solutions found but without DNS it won't be as easy as simply typing in thepiratebay.[whatever]
But once you get up close to the holy grail of true 4k which is 4096, why even bother with 3840? Cinema digital is shot in 4096 (and up). 3840 should be boycotted or even banned.
No black bars. People hated it when we went widescreen, they won't accept another round. There is so much non-cinema 16:9 content that can't be remastered, and even if it could all existing DVDs/BluRays don't have it. The only thing that could give a hint of 17:9 adoption (4096x2160 seem to be the standard for cinema monitors) is if 4K BluRays come with the ability to ship both 3840x2160 and 4096x2160 on the same disc, like an extra 256x2160 slice added to the picture. Or since you're probably doing a bit of pan-and-scan to best fit 16:9, two slices one on each side to "fill out" the picture. Otherwise it's dead, Jim.