The world has changed in the last 12 years, Slashdot is now a little fish in a much bigger pond. In case you haven't noticed, there's now many sites with live video coverage that suck waaaaay more bandwidth and server power than this little mostly text based site.
Personal perception of a speaker's "style" is a handy cheat that we use to evaluate the quality of discussion, but, as any politician, con-person, or social engineer can tell you, it is enormously easy to "spoof" - wear a suit and use the right jargon and suddenly any old quack idea sounds like gold, to those using this cheat.
That's the false negatives, but it weeds out a ton of people who really are just ignorant or crazy. If you claim to have some kind of medical invention but talk like you couldn't find a thorax or femur bone if your life depended on it then I'm going to extremely doubt your invention, even if I don't really have the knowledge to say whether it could work or not. If Stephen Hawking wants to tell me his theories on dark matter, then yeah I'm far more inclined to listen than a guy off the street. Of course the truth doesn't care what merits and credentials you have and very respected scientists have been dead wrong like "God does not play dice.", but it sure beats a random lottery.
When I read that, I thought 21 million is not a lot of coins for the whole world to use. It seems screwy to me. You run into the issue that you run into with gold, if that is the case. You can't buy a loaf of bread with gold because it is worth so much.
They can be divided into something like 0.0000000001 BTC so that is not an issue, if the economy got huge you'd price stuff in milli-BTCs or micro-BTCs. But you're getting close to why people think it's a pyramid scheme, to fit a trillion dollar economy in 21m BTC the exchange rate would have to rise to almost $50k/BTC. Actually $100/BTC already seems crazy, it'd put the total value at $2100 millon - until anyone big tries to cash out anyway.
I've tried and tried to wrap my head around this, but it makes no sense to me. How can you have fractional-reserve banking if the coins have to match a digital signature? Fractional-reserve banking creates money out of thin air. How can you create bitcoins out of thin air?
Let's say people deposit 100 BTC in the bank, now the bank lends 90 BTC to others while keeping 10 BTC as a fractional reserve, that might appear as 190 BTC (100 deposits + 90 loaned out) but it is only an illusion. If the people wanted to withdraw their 100 BTC the bank would be bankrupt because it only has 10 BTC in reserves, it is waiting for the other 90 BTC to be paid back with interest. In reality you'd probably secure yourself against bank runs like that by offering fixed interest rates so people can't withdraw all at once and cause a cash shortage and the bank could lend somewhere else with the loan portfolio as security. As long as none of the loans are defaulting, there's no real problem with this.
The problem is when they are defaulting, like we saw now in the financial crisis, if those "90 BTC + interest" is full of rotten loans and only 80 BTC will ever be paid back then 80 + 10 (the reserve) = 90 BTC is less than the 100 BTC the bank owes people, the bank is bankrupt and the account holders lose part of their money. Really nothing of this is specific to Bitcoin, you can replace it with USD throughout and that is how fractional reserve banking works. Normal banks (that is, not the national bank) doesn't actually print any money, they just make it seem more if you count deposits and loans many times (since those money loaned can be deposited.to be loaned out to be deposited to be loan just minus the fraction in each round).
That's nice, but you should probably give that speech to Congress not the Supreme Court. The court only cares if Congress stays within their constitutionally granted power, not if they're doing it smart or even right. After all it's not hard to argue that since patents are valuable it is incentive to create patentable inventions. It might not work that well in practice but the Supreme Court isn't going to overrule Congress on a thing like that.
One key feature of covers is they can come off. I don't have a cover on my phone at home. I do when I'm at work. I'd have broken my phone many times over if it weren't for the cover, but that doesn't mean that I need or want a rugged brick in my pocket.
This, so very much this. I have a few friends that could use a rugged phone but if at all possible they'd rather take a brick-like case for their iPhone than a real rugged phone. Most of the time they'll get out of the weather to actually talk on the phone anyway, as long as it survives the rest of the day.
Not to mention scalable is also relative, if you are a smash hit and need to upgrade fast you can get a 10G link to the backbone with an 8-socket Xeon E7-8870 server, a ton of memory and a RAID array of SSDs as a pretty damn good stop-gap, which I assume you can't afford now since you can't afford to hire developers. There's probably a bunch of other optimizations you can do too in order to offload parts to other machines when you get that far. This is like asking "Will the wind resistance of my afro keep me from breaking the world record on 100 meter dash?", start caring about that when you get below 10 seconds not when you're considering a running career and don't count getting a haircut as the first step of the way.
"The idea that climate has been stable and is being upset by human activity is the left wing version of young earth creationism"
If I had mod points then that sentence would be worth at least a million. Climate change alarm is based on a myth of past climate stability - it is disguised creationism.
Nice straw man you've put up there to cut down, too bad no real scientists say that. Hell, if the climate hadn't changed here since the last ice age this message would be coming to you from deep under the ice cap. Here for example is a graph of the last 2000 years, last 12000 years, last 450000 years. The climate changes naturally but not like now, which is all the time I'm going to waste arguing with a closed mind. And even though the planet has been hotter than it is now (look at the 450k year graph, nobody's denying this shit) a rapid man-made climate change won't leave nature or people time to adapt. Change that happens in a century is different than change that happens over 10000 years.
Climatology isn't a dart board, you don't make a ton of predictions and then claim you are right when one of them hits.
When there's a lot of scientists, there is likely to be a lot of predictions. Some may be well founded, some may just be lucky but the one scientist who made the right prediction is probably going to say he was right because he was. It's the model's performance over time that'll matter.
So if you're not a very good parent and neglect them and they get kidnapped, raped and killed that's totally the parent's fault. There's absolutely nobody else we could blame in this situation. These companies aren't there to play nice, they're there to rip you off for hundreds and thousands of dollars when you slip up and leave your kid with access to your credit card. They're like a hawk just waiting for the mother to look away so they can swoop in for the kill and you want to defend them. Sure, parents could do better but that is no reason to protect predatory companies looking to exploit innocent children and stick their parents with the bill.
Well if you're counting things like playing Angry Birds on iOS/Android, then almost certainly yes. Perhaps not in complexity or number of hardcore gamers, but in screen time I think yes. There's not a whole lot of games that are PC/Xbox exclusives anymore, and if you're doing any other platform you're probably doing OpenGL. It's probably only a matter of time before game makers tell Microsoft they'd rather code to one graphics system rather than two, and that one won't be DirectX. The world has changed drastically over the last 5 years in this respect, people game on smart phones and tablets not just consoles and PCs anymore.
We've had two significant events in about 100 years.
The Tunguska event had one fatality, the Chelyabinsk event had none. That's a total of one for 100 years all across the globe, at least Wikipedia couldn't list any other deaths either. More people have probably died from ingrown toenails. In the same time period we've had seven earthquakes with over 100,000 casualties each. Yes, the really big ones are really scary but our chances of deflecting a dino-killer is bordering on none so is there really a big intersection between what is possible and what is worth doing? If you actually had warning and send people to cellars and bomb shelters we should be able to take considerably bigger impacts with no to minimal casualties. You're chances of dying by being struck by lightning i far, far bigger than death by asteroid.
My ex was a translator and she was constantly complaining about the steady decrease in work because of machine translations being used. The machine results were crap, but they were free, so the businesses didn't care.
They've also taken a clue from Project Gutenberg, the last time I saw a rather major translation project (English -> foreign) it went like this:
1. Start with machine translation - it's faster to correct than start from scratch and their equivalent of OCR. 2. First round pass by third world worker who knows it as a foreign language 3. Second round pass by a native who will do QA until it's "good enough"
I've found you can also improve quality considerably "on the cheap" if you do reverse translation and try various synonyms and different sentence structures until what you get back double translated resembles what you originally wrote.
And if the attitude is that "well, if you haven't got a decent internet connection and are willing to leave it on for is, we don't give a shit about your business" then the sooner people say "fine, fuck you" the better. (...) If they want to take their customers for granted, they might find out their customers are willing to leave.
I see an "invisible hand of the free market" argument coming, but leave for where? This is an oligopoly... If Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Valve want you to be always on, you're either doing it or you're not playing any AAA games. You don't like HDCP in your machine? Hope you don't have anything with an HDMI, DP or modern DVI port. And if you're still waiting for your DVD and BluRay boycott to work, don't hold your breath. Of course everything the big boys make is junk for the unwashed masses and you should just rid you of it all and go indie, right. Not going to happen and good for you but some of us actually like what comes out of the "mainstream" from time to time, you're just doing ideological grandstanding rather than it actually being crap just like RMS wouldn't touch Photoshop with a ten foot pole despite being the industry standard.
I don't know if you've noticed the obvious trend but more and more companies now but logic on the server just to tie you to it, like the obvious lies with SimCity. Also Diablo III is another good example, and when did you last see a game with LAN support without hooking up to the mothership? With mobile and wireless it's going to become less and less plausible that you couldn't possibly manage to sign in, given the vast success of purely online games like MMORPGs there's no doubt there's a critical mass of gamers who could and probably would sign in for their gaming session. They're giving you lip service but you probably got more of a glimpse of the industry attitude than intended, because their actions are pretty much 100% in line with what he said. Both with carrot and stick they want you to go online.
YMMV but I feel memory has been way ahead of the curve since around 4GB, I've doubled and doubled again since then but even at "only" 16GB it feels like I have plenty and if I really needed more I could have up to 64GB with 8x8GB on an X79 board within "reasonable" consumer prices. Unlike CPU and GPU where any increase is noticable I feel memory is more about having "enough", it's terrible if you don't and having extra doesn't really bring all that much. With modern SSDs that can read at 100+ MB/s on random read it's not quite as critical as before to buffer things up in memory.
So we've heard, but even through the financial crisis it's not been this bad and what you said was just as true in 2012, 2011 and 2010. There's always been people on old enough hardware to push sales even as the pace is slowing down, this dip tastes much more of "do not want". Or to the degree that people really want a tablet interface, why not get a proper one not a Win8 hybrid? It's not as if your applications will become touch-friendly just because you upgrade the OS, maybe they will eventually but not here and now.
I think we're at the point now where if a job can be digitized and sent elsewhere then it will end up being done by the lowest-overall-cost person (for a given level of quality) regardless of where they are in the world.
The "for a given level of quality" is a very important part, is the job quantifiable, measurable and easy to replace? Or is it more qualitative (problem solving), lacks good metrics (LoCs are so great) and require a lot of spin-up time before you're productive (groking a large codebase)? You'll be wasting a lot of time and money trying out people that just don't work out, instead of going to a high cost but also generally high quality pool of workers. Just dealing with the fallout of people that didn't work out can cost you tons of time and money. Somewhat related I've recently been cursing at a retailer that for some reason managed to not ship part of my order, mistakes happen and they've been cooperative and all that but it is still hassle for me because even though I'll get my money back I didn't get what I wanted to have to when I wanted to have it and time wasted handling it.
Of course I'm not pretending that you always get what you pay for. All I'm saying is, don't underestimate the value of being a known quantity. That is why you see many companies try a last minute save on your way out the door, they start realizing it's not just your salary. They have to advertise, interview, possibly pay head hunters, get in through HR and all this steals people's time and time is money and in the end the new candidate may still turn out to be a wash-out. That is also why so much happens via personal networks, if an employee they know and trust endorses you then that's a million times better than references you cherry-picked for your CV and who don't have any skin in the game. The chances of a real mishire goes way down as it'll reflect back on the person who made the recommendation.
Proof that people can in fact be decent, generous, and caring.
Or bored. many years ago I had this temp job of staffing the front desk, really quite little traffic and the occasional call, collecting the mail and various other small duties but a lot of downtime and no interest in training me for more since it was a rather short contract. Project Gutenberg seemed like a good way to pass the time, and they were cool with it as long as I tended to my other duties when they needed tending. Seem like a better use of my time than playing solitaire.
The problem is the founding fathers never saw how infinite wealth would tilt the scales, cops can do anything they want now because the state has virtually unlimited wealth to break you.
What, you don't think the government had more resources than lone individuals in the 1780s? That nobody was hustled by bullshit charges by sherrifs? Let's face it, if the system hates you then you've had huge problems all through-out history and things like due process and legal representation and a jury of your peers was exactly so the government couldn't do it as easily as before.
Are you sure the problems aren't your peers? Jammie Thomas did get a jury trial, they still decided to slam her with a $1.5 million dollar verdict for being a small-time, no-profit file sharer - even if you catch a shoplifter acting like an ass he's still not going to prison like he robbed a bank. In less civilized countries you throw stones at the stoning, here they throw proverbial stones from the jury box.
Deminimis rules apply, but you are generally taxed-as-income on the compensation you receive in exchange for your labor.
That includes cash wages, health care benefits paid by your employer, 401k matching, car allowance if you are not driving miles for work purposes, $1,000/year worth of gym membership, or $5,000/year of food.
Of course where it starts getting hairy is if you actually want those benefits or not, say you never care to work out and you're a hyper-allergic who brings all your food from home should you still pay for it? It's rather inevitable that the company will provide a broad range of benefits that you'll only use a few of to varying degrees, if you were to pay taxes for the full use of everything at market rates that could be too much. Or things that are both perks and business, like for example a weekend trip to have a company gathering at a nice hotel in a different city which is technically a department meeting with the necessary formalities of a business expense. There's ridiculously many shades of gray and companies usually try them all because income is typically taxed highest of them all so anything that's a "hidden" benefit is a win-win for everyone but the IRS.
That's a big disingenuous, if the company had something they were paying 70% tax on and found a loophole to only pay 10% tax then everyone else must pay more taxes to make up for the difference. Sure, there's no direct link just like shoplifters don't directly affect the store prices, but they have to adjust their prices to account for people not paying just like the government have to adjust their tax rate to account for people dodging their taxes. But it sounds like you found a very creative moral justification for why avoiding to take your share of the bill doesn't hurt anyone else, you wouldn't happen to work on the C-level of a major company would you?
Which business customers were demanding a touch-screen tablet UI on their desktop PCs?
The CxOs after they got iPads, you have both information producers and information consumers in business as well and those that consume tend to like touch and tablets. You're probably just not one of them.
Firewire can do a lot more than two, initially was vastly faster and could do reliable streaming (used to be VERY important with video cameras for one thing) (...) USB won because it was a lot cheaper and usually good enough.
Firewire was a must have for (H)DV cameras that recorded to tape, where you absolutely had to catch the frame as it was played off. Even so it was a total pain to get a perfect capture, I had to kill all background applications and couldn't do anything else with my computer or I'd lose the odd frame here and there. And it'd run at the same speed as recording, one hour to record meant one hour to transfer. The moment reasonably priced flash/HDD based cameras became available recording to tape was dead and Firewire with it, because the bandwidth on USB was fine once it could do flawless transfers.
1) I use google maps all the time and never once have I agreed to a terms of service. I've never even seen any such terms, nor been asked to agree to them.
Doesn't matter, it's copyrighted (not the subject of the photo, but the photograph of it - that's how nature photography is copyrighted). Google's terms of service grants you right beyond copyright law, if you don't accept them you don't have them - like the GPL.
2) You can make whatever you want from copyrighted works, the law only concerns itself when you try to commercially re-distribute the work.
Nope:
the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords; (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; (3) to distribute copies (...)
And finally:
3) A derivative work, especially one for aritsitic purposes, is expressedly permitted under copyright law. Even a derivative work for profit!
Nothing is "expressedly permitted" as fair use, the factors will merely be taken into consideration and one is "the purpose and character of the use", where being transformative means it's more likely to be legal, merely derivative less. Also being for profit makes it less likely.
That's three for three with total drivel, well done.
Slashdot Mirror
The world has changed in the last 12 years, Slashdot is now a little fish in a much bigger pond. In case you haven't noticed, there's now many sites with live video coverage that suck waaaaay more bandwidth and server power than this little mostly text based site.
Personal perception of a speaker's "style" is a handy cheat that we use to evaluate the quality of discussion, but, as any politician, con-person, or social engineer can tell you, it is enormously easy to "spoof" - wear a suit and use the right jargon and suddenly any old quack idea sounds like gold, to those using this cheat.
That's the false negatives, but it weeds out a ton of people who really are just ignorant or crazy. If you claim to have some kind of medical invention but talk like you couldn't find a thorax or femur bone if your life depended on it then I'm going to extremely doubt your invention, even if I don't really have the knowledge to say whether it could work or not. If Stephen Hawking wants to tell me his theories on dark matter, then yeah I'm far more inclined to listen than a guy off the street. Of course the truth doesn't care what merits and credentials you have and very respected scientists have been dead wrong like "God does not play dice.", but it sure beats a random lottery.
When I read that, I thought 21 million is not a lot of coins for the whole world to use. It seems screwy to me. You run into the issue that you run into with gold, if that is the case. You can't buy a loaf of bread with gold because it is worth so much.
They can be divided into something like 0.0000000001 BTC so that is not an issue, if the economy got huge you'd price stuff in milli-BTCs or micro-BTCs. But you're getting close to why people think it's a pyramid scheme, to fit a trillion dollar economy in 21m BTC the exchange rate would have to rise to almost $50k/BTC. Actually $100/BTC already seems crazy, it'd put the total value at $2100 millon - until anyone big tries to cash out anyway.
I've tried and tried to wrap my head around this, but it makes no sense to me. How can you have fractional-reserve banking if the coins have to match a digital signature? Fractional-reserve banking creates money out of thin air. How can you create bitcoins out of thin air?
Let's say people deposit 100 BTC in the bank, now the bank lends 90 BTC to others while keeping 10 BTC as a fractional reserve, that might appear as 190 BTC (100 deposits + 90 loaned out) but it is only an illusion. If the people wanted to withdraw their 100 BTC the bank would be bankrupt because it only has 10 BTC in reserves, it is waiting for the other 90 BTC to be paid back with interest. In reality you'd probably secure yourself against bank runs like that by offering fixed interest rates so people can't withdraw all at once and cause a cash shortage and the bank could lend somewhere else with the loan portfolio as security. As long as none of the loans are defaulting, there's no real problem with this.
The problem is when they are defaulting, like we saw now in the financial crisis, if those "90 BTC + interest" is full of rotten loans and only 80 BTC will ever be paid back then 80 + 10 (the reserve) = 90 BTC is less than the 100 BTC the bank owes people, the bank is bankrupt and the account holders lose part of their money. Really nothing of this is specific to Bitcoin, you can replace it with USD throughout and that is how fractional reserve banking works. Normal banks (that is, not the national bank) doesn't actually print any money, they just make it seem more if you count deposits and loans many times (since those money loaned can be deposited.to be loaned out to be deposited to be loan just minus the fraction in each round).
That's nice, but you should probably give that speech to Congress not the Supreme Court. The court only cares if Congress stays within their constitutionally granted power, not if they're doing it smart or even right. After all it's not hard to argue that since patents are valuable it is incentive to create patentable inventions. It might not work that well in practice but the Supreme Court isn't going to overrule Congress on a thing like that.
One key feature of covers is they can come off. I don't have a cover on my phone at home. I do when I'm at work. I'd have broken my phone many times over if it weren't for the cover, but that doesn't mean that I need or want a rugged brick in my pocket.
This, so very much this. I have a few friends that could use a rugged phone but if at all possible they'd rather take a brick-like case for their iPhone than a real rugged phone. Most of the time they'll get out of the weather to actually talk on the phone anyway, as long as it survives the rest of the day.
Not to mention scalable is also relative, if you are a smash hit and need to upgrade fast you can get a 10G link to the backbone with an 8-socket Xeon E7-8870 server, a ton of memory and a RAID array of SSDs as a pretty damn good stop-gap, which I assume you can't afford now since you can't afford to hire developers. There's probably a bunch of other optimizations you can do too in order to offload parts to other machines when you get that far. This is like asking "Will the wind resistance of my afro keep me from breaking the world record on 100 meter dash?", start caring about that when you get below 10 seconds not when you're considering a running career and don't count getting a haircut as the first step of the way.
"The idea that climate has been stable and is being upset by human activity is the left wing version of young earth creationism"
If I had mod points then that sentence would be worth at least a million. Climate change alarm is based on a myth of past climate stability - it is disguised creationism.
Nice straw man you've put up there to cut down, too bad no real scientists say that. Hell, if the climate hadn't changed here since the last ice age this message would be coming to you from deep under the ice cap. Here for example is a graph of the last 2000 years, last 12000 years, last 450000 years. The climate changes naturally but not like now, which is all the time I'm going to waste arguing with a closed mind. And even though the planet has been hotter than it is now (look at the 450k year graph, nobody's denying this shit) a rapid man-made climate change won't leave nature or people time to adapt. Change that happens in a century is different than change that happens over 10000 years.
Climatology isn't a dart board, you don't make a ton of predictions and then claim you are right when one of them hits.
When there's a lot of scientists, there is likely to be a lot of predictions. Some may be well founded, some may just be lucky but the one scientist who made the right prediction is probably going to say he was right because he was. It's the model's performance over time that'll matter.
So if you're not a very good parent and neglect them and they get kidnapped, raped and killed that's totally the parent's fault. There's absolutely nobody else we could blame in this situation. These companies aren't there to play nice, they're there to rip you off for hundreds and thousands of dollars when you slip up and leave your kid with access to your credit card. They're like a hawk just waiting for the mother to look away so they can swoop in for the kill and you want to defend them. Sure, parents could do better but that is no reason to protect predatory companies looking to exploit innocent children and stick their parents with the bill.
more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
[citation needed]
Well if you're counting things like playing Angry Birds on iOS/Android, then almost certainly yes. Perhaps not in complexity or number of hardcore gamers, but in screen time I think yes. There's not a whole lot of games that are PC/Xbox exclusives anymore, and if you're doing any other platform you're probably doing OpenGL. It's probably only a matter of time before game makers tell Microsoft they'd rather code to one graphics system rather than two, and that one won't be DirectX. The world has changed drastically over the last 5 years in this respect, people game on smart phones and tablets not just consoles and PCs anymore.
We've had two significant events in about 100 years.
The Tunguska event had one fatality, the Chelyabinsk event had none. That's a total of one for 100 years all across the globe, at least Wikipedia couldn't list any other deaths either. More people have probably died from ingrown toenails. In the same time period we've had seven earthquakes with over 100,000 casualties each. Yes, the really big ones are really scary but our chances of deflecting a dino-killer is bordering on none so is there really a big intersection between what is possible and what is worth doing? If you actually had warning and send people to cellars and bomb shelters we should be able to take considerably bigger impacts with no to minimal casualties. You're chances of dying by being struck by lightning i far, far bigger than death by asteroid.
My ex was a translator and she was constantly complaining about the steady decrease in work because of machine translations being used. The machine results were crap, but they were free, so the businesses didn't care.
They've also taken a clue from Project Gutenberg, the last time I saw a rather major translation project (English -> foreign) it went like this:
1. Start with machine translation - it's faster to correct than start from scratch and their equivalent of OCR.
2. First round pass by third world worker who knows it as a foreign language
3. Second round pass by a native who will do QA until it's "good enough"
I've found you can also improve quality considerably "on the cheap" if you do reverse translation and try various synonyms and different sentence structures until what you get back double translated resembles what you originally wrote.
And if the attitude is that "well, if you haven't got a decent internet connection and are willing to leave it on for is, we don't give a shit about your business" then the sooner people say "fine, fuck you" the better. (...) If they want to take their customers for granted, they might find out their customers are willing to leave.
I see an "invisible hand of the free market" argument coming, but leave for where? This is an oligopoly... If Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and Valve want you to be always on, you're either doing it or you're not playing any AAA games. You don't like HDCP in your machine? Hope you don't have anything with an HDMI, DP or modern DVI port. And if you're still waiting for your DVD and BluRay boycott to work, don't hold your breath. Of course everything the big boys make is junk for the unwashed masses and you should just rid you of it all and go indie, right. Not going to happen and good for you but some of us actually like what comes out of the "mainstream" from time to time, you're just doing ideological grandstanding rather than it actually being crap just like RMS wouldn't touch Photoshop with a ten foot pole despite being the industry standard.
I don't know if you've noticed the obvious trend but more and more companies now but logic on the server just to tie you to it, like the obvious lies with SimCity. Also Diablo III is another good example, and when did you last see a game with LAN support without hooking up to the mothership? With mobile and wireless it's going to become less and less plausible that you couldn't possibly manage to sign in, given the vast success of purely online games like MMORPGs there's no doubt there's a critical mass of gamers who could and probably would sign in for their gaming session. They're giving you lip service but you probably got more of a glimpse of the industry attitude than intended, because their actions are pretty much 100% in line with what he said. Both with carrot and stick they want you to go online.
YMMV but I feel memory has been way ahead of the curve since around 4GB, I've doubled and doubled again since then but even at "only" 16GB it feels like I have plenty and if I really needed more I could have up to 64GB with 8x8GB on an X79 board within "reasonable" consumer prices. Unlike CPU and GPU where any increase is noticable I feel memory is more about having "enough", it's terrible if you don't and having extra doesn't really bring all that much. With modern SSDs that can read at 100+ MB/s on random read it's not quite as critical as before to buffer things up in memory.
So we've heard, but even through the financial crisis it's not been this bad and what you said was just as true in 2012, 2011 and 2010. There's always been people on old enough hardware to push sales even as the pace is slowing down, this dip tastes much more of "do not want". Or to the degree that people really want a tablet interface, why not get a proper one not a Win8 hybrid? It's not as if your applications will become touch-friendly just because you upgrade the OS, maybe they will eventually but not here and now.
So bizarrely these days it's worth buying Xeon if you want a huge discount on the desktop CPU prices.
Maybe you should look at desktop CPU prices then? These are all mobile chips you're comparing to...
I think we're at the point now where if a job can be digitized and sent elsewhere then it will end up being done by the lowest-overall-cost person (for a given level of quality) regardless of where they are in the world.
The "for a given level of quality" is a very important part, is the job quantifiable, measurable and easy to replace? Or is it more qualitative (problem solving), lacks good metrics (LoCs are so great) and require a lot of spin-up time before you're productive (groking a large codebase)? You'll be wasting a lot of time and money trying out people that just don't work out, instead of going to a high cost but also generally high quality pool of workers. Just dealing with the fallout of people that didn't work out can cost you tons of time and money. Somewhat related I've recently been cursing at a retailer that for some reason managed to not ship part of my order, mistakes happen and they've been cooperative and all that but it is still hassle for me because even though I'll get my money back I didn't get what I wanted to have to when I wanted to have it and time wasted handling it.
Of course I'm not pretending that you always get what you pay for. All I'm saying is, don't underestimate the value of being a known quantity. That is why you see many companies try a last minute save on your way out the door, they start realizing it's not just your salary. They have to advertise, interview, possibly pay head hunters, get in through HR and all this steals people's time and time is money and in the end the new candidate may still turn out to be a wash-out. That is also why so much happens via personal networks, if an employee they know and trust endorses you then that's a million times better than references you cherry-picked for your CV and who don't have any skin in the game. The chances of a real mishire goes way down as it'll reflect back on the person who made the recommendation.
Proof that people can in fact be decent, generous, and caring.
Or bored. many years ago I had this temp job of staffing the front desk, really quite little traffic and the occasional call, collecting the mail and various other small duties but a lot of downtime and no interest in training me for more since it was a rather short contract. Project Gutenberg seemed like a good way to pass the time, and they were cool with it as long as I tended to my other duties when they needed tending. Seem like a better use of my time than playing solitaire.
Thanks for the info, Slashdot. If I can get an adequate salary working from home, I'm outta here.
You think you'll be surfing Slashdot less from your home office than your away office?
The problem is the founding fathers never saw how infinite wealth would tilt the scales, cops can do anything they want now because the state has virtually unlimited wealth to break you.
What, you don't think the government had more resources than lone individuals in the 1780s? That nobody was hustled by bullshit charges by sherrifs? Let's face it, if the system hates you then you've had huge problems all through-out history and things like due process and legal representation and a jury of your peers was exactly so the government couldn't do it as easily as before.
Are you sure the problems aren't your peers? Jammie Thomas did get a jury trial, they still decided to slam her with a $1.5 million dollar verdict for being a small-time, no-profit file sharer - even if you catch a shoplifter acting like an ass he's still not going to prison like he robbed a bank. In less civilized countries you throw stones at the stoning, here they throw proverbial stones from the jury box.
Deminimis rules apply, but you are generally taxed-as-income on the compensation you receive in exchange for your labor.
That includes cash wages, health care benefits paid by your employer, 401k matching, car allowance if you are not driving miles for work purposes, $1,000/year worth of gym membership, or $5,000/year of food.
Of course where it starts getting hairy is if you actually want those benefits or not, say you never care to work out and you're a hyper-allergic who brings all your food from home should you still pay for it? It's rather inevitable that the company will provide a broad range of benefits that you'll only use a few of to varying degrees, if you were to pay taxes for the full use of everything at market rates that could be too much. Or things that are both perks and business, like for example a weekend trip to have a company gathering at a nice hotel in a different city which is technically a department meeting with the necessary formalities of a business expense. There's ridiculously many shades of gray and companies usually try them all because income is typically taxed highest of them all so anything that's a "hidden" benefit is a win-win for everyone but the IRS.
That's a big disingenuous, if the company had something they were paying 70% tax on and found a loophole to only pay 10% tax then everyone else must pay more taxes to make up for the difference. Sure, there's no direct link just like shoplifters don't directly affect the store prices, but they have to adjust their prices to account for people not paying just like the government have to adjust their tax rate to account for people dodging their taxes. But it sounds like you found a very creative moral justification for why avoiding to take your share of the bill doesn't hurt anyone else, you wouldn't happen to work on the C-level of a major company would you?
Which business customers were demanding a touch-screen tablet UI on their desktop PCs?
The CxOs after they got iPads, you have both information producers and information consumers in business as well and those that consume tend to like touch and tablets. You're probably just not one of them.
Firewire can do a lot more than two, initially was vastly faster and could do reliable streaming (used to be VERY important with video cameras for one thing) (...) USB won because it was a lot cheaper and usually good enough.
Firewire was a must have for (H)DV cameras that recorded to tape, where you absolutely had to catch the frame as it was played off. Even so it was a total pain to get a perfect capture, I had to kill all background applications and couldn't do anything else with my computer or I'd lose the odd frame here and there. And it'd run at the same speed as recording, one hour to record meant one hour to transfer. The moment reasonably priced flash/HDD based cameras became available recording to tape was dead and Firewire with it, because the bandwidth on USB was fine once it could do flawless transfers.
I know you're trolling but...
1) I use google maps all the time and never once have I agreed to a terms of service. I've never even seen any such terms, nor been asked to agree to them.
Doesn't matter, it's copyrighted (not the subject of the photo, but the photograph of it - that's how nature photography is copyrighted). Google's terms of service grants you right beyond copyright law, if you don't accept them you don't have them - like the GPL.
2) You can make whatever you want from copyrighted works, the law only concerns itself when you try to commercially re-distribute the work.
Nope:
the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies (...)
And finally:
3) A derivative work, especially one for aritsitic purposes, is expressedly permitted under copyright law. Even a derivative work for profit!
Nothing is "expressedly permitted" as fair use, the factors will merely be taken into consideration and one is "the purpose and character of the use", where being transformative means it's more likely to be legal, merely derivative less. Also being for profit makes it less likely.
That's three for three with total drivel, well done.