A git repository itself acts as a rotational backup... The article itself suggests ZFS snapshots of the git repository, which works just as well.
That still smells like a single point of failure to me, because they didn't say anything about actually backing up those snapshots to another machine. So if you can crack this one root server, you can delete all the snapshots, corrupt all the projects and boom all the good copies are gone.
Granted my experience with the Linux video editors is starting to 4-5 years old, but at least back then I would have been happy with an editor that'd let me import video, cut clips together and encode it back out in a sane format without crashing. With mplayer/mencoder I could play and convert clips no problems, but open a HDV clip in kdenlive and it'd crash instantly with no sensible error message and the others didn't fare much better. If they're already at the level where what they miss the most is more cheesy transitions, they've come a long way...
It is like everything in modern life... how do you build a lathe without a lathe? Or a generator without electricity? It would take a thousand years to start from nothing and get back to where we are now.
I think you vastly underestimate how much time and effort has been spent on pursuits that were futile or that were technically possible but nobody had discovered or knew the usefulness of doing. If the technology was already described to us we'd advance far more rapidly and planned. I'd expect a reboot to Amish levels in 100 years, the 1950s in another 50 and catching up to today 50 years after that at most.
You have no "freedom of expression," you have limited expression as deemed by the government in a very and exceptionally narrowing scope
Seriously, have you looked at far left/right/wacky websites lately and seen what kind of drivel is within the law? The kind of things that are picked up by the police usually goes far beyond just derogatory and insulting and far more towards thinly veiled threats like "Hitler should have finished the job." (Also, thread officially Godwin'd) Many of the loony toons want to rid themselves of democracy because they claim the system is corrupted by their enemies and want to lead an armed revolt against the majority on behalf of the "true" inhabitants and conduct mass deportation, mass revocation of civil rights or genocide. Except for the religious wackos who want to install a theocracy in the first place and kill off all other religions any way they can. Many controversial characters have received death threats and live under police protection but very few convicted of hate speech.
Unless you have people that can ABX the difference, no their criticisms are not scientifically founded. An actual blind test beats any theoretical reasoning any day.
This. This whole lossy vs lossless was dispelled in the 90s for everyone but audiophiles, most people can't hear the difference and neither can most audiophiles either in an ABX setup. There's always some "magic" about their own system that lets them hear the difference, but not in a controlled environment. There's no doubt that we're throwing away lots of information in pretty much every form of sound recording, a bat would probably be very displeased with the sound reproduction. The question is does it matter, you don't need infinite bits of audio anymore than you need infinite pixels on a screen or a photograph. I think the last person I read about who won such a contest had a hearing disability so he heard things that would be masked to normal ears, we're on that level.
My guess is that the base cost is in your rent or something, normal prices seem to be 250-400 SEK = $40-60/month. Or as wikipedia would say, [[citation needed]]
Would it be possible today to build a spacecraft capable of exiting the solar system with enough fuel to send back information from outside the oort cloud? The 14,000 years, could we build a nuclear reactor with enough fuel to be working at that point? Alternatively, would it be possible to slingshot a spacecraft around planets until it was going fast enough that it would exit the cloud in a timeframe that was within the limits of our ability to power it?
Maintaining a system that'll have to work far longer than the pyramids have stood has never taken any serious traction outside sci-fi since we wouldn't get any results for many thousands of years, most effort looks at making the mission much shorter. Voyager was launched at an almost optimal time for gravitational slingshots, so that resource is already tapped out. If I recall correctly the planets won't align like that again until sometime next century and it still wouldn't go faster. In fact that was what gave it most of the speed so we need a lot better propulsion go get anywhere. In rough order of increasing power and decreasing realism the alternatives seem to be fission, fusion, anti-matter and warping space. And even on the drawing board most of these seem to be insane efforts that take a century, which is a long time considering where we were in 1913.
If you ask me "How unfeasible?" I'd say that we'll almost certainly will have sent a probe to a different solar system before year 3000 unless we wipe ourselves out or some such silliness but I think we can already say with certainty it won't be this century. In our life time we'll have to settle for huge telescopes and radio arrays I think, but in all honesty I think there will be many interesting finds there in the years to come. When I was born exoplanets were just conjecture, today we're closing in on earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks Zone. Of course the search for "twin Earths" is an ongoing process the more variables you take into account, but even if we can't find life another planet where we might live is just huge. Of course I'd rather take immortality but it seems medicine is further from that than interstellar flight is from the warp drive.
Easier said than done anywhere, at the last broadband meter here in Norway the mean was 15.6 Mbps, the median 8.6 Mbps and the cheapest rate on the national survay $30 for 1/0.2 Mbps. "Everyone" will be way, way below the median so it'd need to get a helluva lot faster and cheaper real quick. I think 20 Mbps median in 2020 for $60 might be realistic here in Norway, but 20-20 in 2020 is in "and we'll all drive a Ferrari" fairy tale land.
It's environmentalism theater, just like we have security theater. If I turn out the lights for an hour I can say I've done "my part" to help the environment and raise awareness then go back to ignoring it the rest of the year.
1) how does an organization mitigate its liability for subsequent services needed to pull users out of a drink that unlocked their stuff, changed something critical, and bricked the unit? Not all people are responsible with settings..... the unwitting, children, etc.
Depends on what it was and how "reasonable" it was, if your brakes go out because you put a CD in the CD player then clearly that's the car manufacturer's liability. If your brakes go out because you've done a shoddy repair, they're not liable. Why would "taking ownership" have such a crazy meaning for digital goods as opposed to real world goods?
2) if we take ownership, do we also take responsibility for subsequent access? What happens if charges are incurred through the use of an unprotected device, say, a smartphone that gets hijacked and gets a texting malware that runs up charges? What of those charges?
Last I checked none of the hardware manufacturers take one iota of liability for anything wrong their phone will do, so what's new? Would a car manufacturer cover the damage if your car got carjacked? Nah.
3) can we then sell a device that's unlocked, and be free from subsequent liability incurred by the purchaser? What if they hurt themselves?
Depends on the condition you sold it as, I suppose. It's not even illegal to sell a car that's defective and not road-worthy, so as long as you've informed them of the unlocked state I don't see the problem.
If you can build a dome, just hang an airtight inner layer from the dome like a tent. If you don't need any structural strength except to avoid tears and no environmental exposure you should be able to bring something far, far lighter than you otherwise would. Yes, they would need some fancy kind of airlock to make sure it doesn't contaminate the insides but I imagine it would in practice be the opening of the space suit, you step into the space suit and is on the "outside", you back up to the same opening, a gizmo cleans the back of the space suit and you step out of the suit into the living/sleeping quarters. All other equipment and machinery that doesn't have to be brought into the clean area is left on the outside.
In particular, this kind of solution has a lot more potential for redundancy and expansion, imagine a network of domes with interlocking tunnels with air seals. If all you need from earth is more interior coating and air (if you could extract nitrogen on the Moon, possibly just oxygen) while the people on-site build the domes you could save a lot more in the long run. Of course this doesn't really give us any more reasons why we should make a moon base in the first place, but it's pretty certain that in any cost/benefit evaluation lower cost always helps. It's also quite probably more hostile than Mars, even though Mars is much further away and more complicated to do so if we can make it work there, we can probably make it work on Mars too.
Neither of those facts has yet had enough time to change that older image that has been in place for over a decade. They may not until yet another decade has passed.
Voters forget what their politicians have been doing long before the next term, and you think most people still hold a grugde over Windows 95/98/ME? By far the longest and most common experience with Windows today is with XP, that despite the ugly skin compared to Win2K is a solid product from the NT line. Neither do I think most running Windows 7 are disappointed, at least I'm not. The perception that users are deeply longing for a better system is wildly exaggerated. By far the most common sentiment among XP users is "It works, don't change it" and I'm now in the same camp with Win7 vs Win8. If I switch to Linux or OS X, it's because Windows has ceased to work.
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, all of which are less than 1% me. Even if I had the complete records of what their lives and ambitions were in the 1750s or so, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care what my mother's father's mother's mother's father's father's father was doing, I doubt I'd even get around to checking out 128 people before I was bored stiff. At best I'd print out a nice family tree where you could have about three bullet points to describe yourself and that is it. Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.
So yes, stupid rules work out well for the owner and the public. The owner goes broke and out of business (...)
You must be using some other definition of "well" than any I know. Yes of course that's the other way it could happen but that would depend on these places having such a rule to begin with, all they'd really have to say is that they refuse no one. Then he as a customer could of course say it's his business or their business, but if there's many people with Google Glass and few who shun them most owners will go with the money. Because like you say, otherwise they're likely to go out of business and be replaced with an owner that goes with the money.
My guess is that it's mostly political rah-rah but in reality bureaucrats will find requirements so they get the proprietary platform of their choice anyway. Sometimes I've suspected vendor involvement, but in reality it seems to be mostly people on the inside who pick the system they already know and have competence with.
Would the moderator on crack please let me know what the hell in that can be construed as "Flamebait"? The only opinion of my own I offered was:
The real destroyers of the discussion aren't usually strictly speaking trolls, they're people with an extreme black-and-white point of view who'll attack anyone with a dissenting opinion with the intensity of a pit bull with rabies. They're often met by their equal and opposite and together they'll churn out 100 posts drowning out any discussion by anyone with the slightest hint of seeing both sides of the argument.
The rest of the post are actual examples from reality I've run into who have been drowning out discussion elsewhere, if that's flamebait to you well then take your problem up with reality.
This is true. But also, there is the problem of determining what/who is a troll.
The real destroyers of the discussion aren't usually strictly speaking trolls, they're people with an extreme black-and-white point of view who'll attack anyone with a dissenting opinion with the intensity of a pit bull with rabies. They're often met by their equal and opposite and together they'll churn out 100 posts drowning out any discussion by anyone with the slightest hint of seeing both sides of the argument.
For example on our largest newspaper's discussion pages on any page related to immigration or that could possibly framed in reference to immigration (employment = immigrants stealing our work etc.) we'd have the ex-leader of a white supremacist party ranting and raving, all within freedom of speech but what's the point of trying to have a discussion with him? I think they got 200 votes at the election so they represent some 0.00...% of the population, but he sure can take up a lot of online space. And their opposites are those who want to open all borders, let all cultures and people blend and afterwards we'll all sing kumbayah and be one big happy family, nothing could possibly go wrong with importing dark age attitudes and Sharia law or completely extinguishing our national identity.
Or on any article about our version of the CPS there's a guy who clearly is on a crusade against them, half the time he claims they're mad with power and just like to crush families, twist lies and abuse their power, the other half he's trying to make them part of a feminist conspiracy that will always side with the mother no matter what. No points for guessing what his experience with them is, though he never mentions that only uses a lot of pseudoscience and worthless studies that claim the same as him. I could on, but for every subject there seems to be a few people with an ax to grind who just won't shut up. It's practically the online variety of filibustering.
Well, may be so, however, I still won't tolerate you coming to my home, to my gym, to my office, to my restaurant, to my pub, etc. wearing a camera. You can choose to loose your privacy somewhere else.
You own a gym, office, restaurant and a pub? Lucky you. Let me rephrase it for you, if this becomes popular as your all-purpose device like the smart phone that people use for all sorts of things and expect to be able to use anywhere they go then society will change. I think 20 years ago it was unthinkable that everybody would carry a "spy camera" everywhere they go, now it's completely normal. If you refuse to be in the same place as Google Glass, you'll be the one asked to leave.
But hey, who wants to study economics anyway? I am sure they are all full of shit, like the geologists or the biologists.
The problem is that many parts of economy is more like meteorology combined with (group) psychology, since there's so many butterfly wings flapping and crazy hordes of investors, customers and suppliers trying to outsmart each other and because almost everything in economics happens by a decision, either it's to buy, sell, produce, decommission, hire, lay off, in-house, outsource, integrate, specialize and choices of technology, markets, distribution channels, promotion and so on. It is very much unlike geology/biology where most things happen by the laws of nature and the process isn't influenced by geologists/biologists at all. Throw in a ton of positive/negative feedback loops and I assure you nobody really "understands" the macro economy. And yes, I know enough about it to know how much I don't know.
Don't get me wrong, certain parts of economics is very well understood like accounting, also known as "bean counting" but unlike the engineers who want to make regardless of cost and the sales people who want to sell regardless of price it's rather important to the business whether it turns a profit or a loss. But I think most here who's ever been forced to make or read a business case knows that unless there's some explicit existing costs that are replaced by a fairly certain new development/maintenance cost you are starting to try predicting the future, much like the entire stock market. You want to be there when the flock stampedes to smart phones and tablets, but not when they all stampede away from SUVs (in real life, I'd probably prefer the opposite), but I don't think you'll find the answer in an economics textbook.
Anyway, to actually say something useful on social economics vs business economics, in business those who aren't your customers aren't your problem. In social economics, unless people choose to emigrate (which no significant amount of the population ever do due to friends, family, homestead, culture, language and so on except under the most grave circumstances) you can only shuffle them around in various categories such as employed, job seekers, students, invalids, black labor, criminals, prisoners, alcoholics, junkies etc. that all have costs to society. The ROI of getting a job seeker into a job is thus much greater than the tax income of the job, it is also avoiding all the other costs. But when your credit limit is maxed out like Greece, well you don't got any money to spend at anything no matter the ROI.
That is actually a pretty well known fact from individual life as well, it's expensive to be poor because you can't afford to make the good long term investments. You're always skimping and saving to make it go around short term, while the people with disposable cash can take the opportunity to invest in something that'll last longer or be cheaper to maintain in the long run. Not to mention the people living ahead of their paycheck on credit card debt, the financing costs are huge for really very little benefit at all. But it's worse for the macro economy, because when they cut spending, they also cut income so really the only way not to get screwed is to not get that stuck in debt in the first place. But it's always tempting to take one step closer to the edge, only to find out it was one step too far.
I don't claim to be an expert but I thought ghosting was a faint image a short distance to the right of the real image caused by a sharp bend in a co-ax cable which creates a faint out of phase repeat of an analog TV signal.
Never heard of a bent co-ax cable causing ghosting but right behind our cabin there are boat houses with simple metal roofs, they reflect signals like crazy. Back in the analog over-the-air days we used to have lots of ghosting because the signal would hit our antenna, those metal roofs and bounce right back to our antenna. We've been on satellite for many years now and now with digital over-the-air broadcasts I assume it wouldn't be visible, but yes that's the old form of "ghosting".
It would be worth it to see Apple take a hit on this issue, since it seems to be a general business practice, and frankly, false advertising.
Why? If I promise to deliver a package to you within a week and one customer gets it in two days and you get it on the seventh I still haven't made any false advertising. On the Apple website they promise you a screen of a certain resolution, a disk of a certain size and as long as they deliver as advertised, they've done their part. Like you say it's a fairly standard industrial practice, as far as I know this is the same when you buy from all the big name OEMs. If the differences are such that I'd call it a defect, then I'd of course demand a fixed product but I still wouldn't call that false advertising.
g) Deprecate and REMOVE that stupid 'short', 'long', 'double' crap from the language
Why? Sometimes the user wants to use types which are relative to the CPU word width, but don't want to be tied to a specific bit width. Remember, not everyone who codes in c++ uses an Intel CPU.
I think if you asked people how big a short or long is, 99% would answer it's a fixed size and of the 1% that in theory knows it's CPU-dependent 99% of them don't use it to create any intentionally different behavior on different CPUs. The 0,01% that really use this could have something like a set of typedefs in a platform configuration file, while the other 99,99% won't get bitten in the ass by flawed assumptions that a short will always be 16 bit. Nobody but C/C++ has this ambiguity in their most basic units that are used in pretty much every example, pretty much all other languages, databases etc. have found it sane to define them exactly. Sorry, but this is a horrible part of C/C++ even if you happen to like it.
But the day I walked away from C++, Boost and MFC (mutha fucking classes) and joined a C#.Net shop was the happiest day of my life. Slam it all you like, but for UI development, Boost and MFC/Win32 is the worst platform to develop on unless you are a clueless sadomasochist that enjoys pain and suffering.
Don't worry, everybody hates MFC/Win32. Use Qt if you want C++, C# if you don't and I think there's a full dozen more obscure languages/toolkits I'd try before MFC *shudder*.
Why are people running a blatent self-serving PR story?
We lost but... we didn't really want to win it anyway!
Yeah, that was what I was thinking too, of course they say that. And if they'd won instead they'd say the exact opposite and we'd hear this drivel from AMD. It's not like Sony and Microsoft had a lot of other options, who should they have gone to? Intel? VIA? PowerVR? No, if both AMD and nVidia had told them to buzz off they'd come back with a better offer. I doubt AMD sold themselves that cheap, since they knew nVidia wouldn't do that either. Just cheap enough to win, keep their volume up and live to fight another day.
Some people here are permanently damaged by the 80s and 90s where upgrading from last years model to this years model made total sense, or to quote Weird Al:
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
Car companies also release new models each year, are people expected to sell last year's car and get a new one? Of course not. But some two or three decade old rust heaps go off the road, so you need to fill up with new cars in the other end and why not try doing a little better each year? Welcome to normal market reality, the bizarro days when they didn't apply to electronics is long over.
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A git repository itself acts as a rotational backup... The article itself suggests ZFS snapshots of the git repository, which works just as well.
That still smells like a single point of failure to me, because they didn't say anything about actually backing up those snapshots to another machine. So if you can crack this one root server, you can delete all the snapshots, corrupt all the projects and boom all the good copies are gone.
Granted my experience with the Linux video editors is starting to 4-5 years old, but at least back then I would have been happy with an editor that'd let me import video, cut clips together and encode it back out in a sane format without crashing. With mplayer/mencoder I could play and convert clips no problems, but open a HDV clip in kdenlive and it'd crash instantly with no sensible error message and the others didn't fare much better. If they're already at the level where what they miss the most is more cheesy transitions, they've come a long way...
It is like everything in modern life... how do you build a lathe without a lathe? Or a generator without electricity? It would take a thousand years to start from nothing and get back to where we are now.
I think you vastly underestimate how much time and effort has been spent on pursuits that were futile or that were technically possible but nobody had discovered or knew the usefulness of doing. If the technology was already described to us we'd advance far more rapidly and planned. I'd expect a reboot to Amish levels in 100 years, the 1950s in another 50 and catching up to today 50 years after that at most.
You have no "freedom of expression," you have limited expression as deemed by the government in a very and exceptionally narrowing scope
Seriously, have you looked at far left/right/wacky websites lately and seen what kind of drivel is within the law? The kind of things that are picked up by the police usually goes far beyond just derogatory and insulting and far more towards thinly veiled threats like "Hitler should have finished the job." (Also, thread officially Godwin'd) Many of the loony toons want to rid themselves of democracy because they claim the system is corrupted by their enemies and want to lead an armed revolt against the majority on behalf of the "true" inhabitants and conduct mass deportation, mass revocation of civil rights or genocide. Except for the religious wackos who want to install a theocracy in the first place and kill off all other religions any way they can. Many controversial characters have received death threats and live under police protection but very few convicted of hate speech.
Unless you have people that can ABX the difference, no their criticisms are not scientifically founded. An actual blind test beats any theoretical reasoning any day.
This. This whole lossy vs lossless was dispelled in the 90s for everyone but audiophiles, most people can't hear the difference and neither can most audiophiles either in an ABX setup. There's always some "magic" about their own system that lets them hear the difference, but not in a controlled environment. There's no doubt that we're throwing away lots of information in pretty much every form of sound recording, a bat would probably be very displeased with the sound reproduction. The question is does it matter, you don't need infinite bits of audio anymore than you need infinite pixels on a screen or a photograph. I think the last person I read about who won such a contest had a hearing disability so he heard things that would be masked to normal ears, we're on that level.
My guess is that the base cost is in your rent or something, normal prices seem to be 250-400 SEK = $40-60/month. Or as wikipedia would say, [[citation needed]]
Would it be possible today to build a spacecraft capable of exiting the solar system with enough fuel to send back information from outside the oort cloud? The 14,000 years, could we build a nuclear reactor with enough fuel to be working at that point? Alternatively, would it be possible to slingshot a spacecraft around planets until it was going fast enough that it would exit the cloud in a timeframe that was within the limits of our ability to power it?
Maintaining a system that'll have to work far longer than the pyramids have stood has never taken any serious traction outside sci-fi since we wouldn't get any results for many thousands of years, most effort looks at making the mission much shorter. Voyager was launched at an almost optimal time for gravitational slingshots, so that resource is already tapped out. If I recall correctly the planets won't align like that again until sometime next century and it still wouldn't go faster. In fact that was what gave it most of the speed so we need a lot better propulsion go get anywhere. In rough order of increasing power and decreasing realism the alternatives seem to be fission, fusion, anti-matter and warping space. And even on the drawing board most of these seem to be insane efforts that take a century, which is a long time considering where we were in 1913.
If you ask me "How unfeasible?" I'd say that we'll almost certainly will have sent a probe to a different solar system before year 3000 unless we wipe ourselves out or some such silliness but I think we can already say with certainty it won't be this century. In our life time we'll have to settle for huge telescopes and radio arrays I think, but in all honesty I think there will be many interesting finds there in the years to come. When I was born exoplanets were just conjecture, today we're closing in on earth-sized planets in the Goldilocks Zone. Of course the search for "twin Earths" is an ongoing process the more variables you take into account, but even if we can't find life another planet where we might live is just huge. Of course I'd rather take immortality but it seems medicine is further from that than interstellar flight is from the warp drive.
Easier said than done anywhere, at the last broadband meter here in Norway the mean was 15.6 Mbps, the median 8.6 Mbps and the cheapest rate on the national survay $30 for 1/0.2 Mbps. "Everyone" will be way, way below the median so it'd need to get a helluva lot faster and cheaper real quick. I think 20 Mbps median in 2020 for $60 might be realistic here in Norway, but 20-20 in 2020 is in "and we'll all drive a Ferrari" fairy tale land.
It's environmentalism theater, just like we have security theater. If I turn out the lights for an hour I can say I've done "my part" to help the environment and raise awareness then go back to ignoring it the rest of the year.
I think it's car analogy time
1) how does an organization mitigate its liability for subsequent services needed to pull users out of a drink that unlocked their stuff, changed something critical, and bricked the unit? Not all people are responsible with settings..... the unwitting, children, etc.
Depends on what it was and how "reasonable" it was, if your brakes go out because you put a CD in the CD player then clearly that's the car manufacturer's liability. If your brakes go out because you've done a shoddy repair, they're not liable. Why would "taking ownership" have such a crazy meaning for digital goods as opposed to real world goods?
2) if we take ownership, do we also take responsibility for subsequent access? What happens if charges are incurred through the use of an unprotected device, say, a smartphone that gets hijacked and gets a texting malware that runs up charges? What of those charges?
Last I checked none of the hardware manufacturers take one iota of liability for anything wrong their phone will do, so what's new? Would a car manufacturer cover the damage if your car got carjacked? Nah.
3) can we then sell a device that's unlocked, and be free from subsequent liability incurred by the purchaser? What if they hurt themselves?
Depends on the condition you sold it as, I suppose. It's not even illegal to sell a car that's defective and not road-worthy, so as long as you've informed them of the unlocked state I don't see the problem.
If you can build a dome, just hang an airtight inner layer from the dome like a tent. If you don't need any structural strength except to avoid tears and no environmental exposure you should be able to bring something far, far lighter than you otherwise would. Yes, they would need some fancy kind of airlock to make sure it doesn't contaminate the insides but I imagine it would in practice be the opening of the space suit, you step into the space suit and is on the "outside", you back up to the same opening, a gizmo cleans the back of the space suit and you step out of the suit into the living/sleeping quarters. All other equipment and machinery that doesn't have to be brought into the clean area is left on the outside.
In particular, this kind of solution has a lot more potential for redundancy and expansion, imagine a network of domes with interlocking tunnels with air seals. If all you need from earth is more interior coating and air (if you could extract nitrogen on the Moon, possibly just oxygen) while the people on-site build the domes you could save a lot more in the long run. Of course this doesn't really give us any more reasons why we should make a moon base in the first place, but it's pretty certain that in any cost/benefit evaluation lower cost always helps. It's also quite probably more hostile than Mars, even though Mars is much further away and more complicated to do so if we can make it work there, we can probably make it work on Mars too.
Neither of those facts has yet had enough time to change that older image that has been in place for over a decade. They may not until yet another decade has passed.
Voters forget what their politicians have been doing long before the next term, and you think most people still hold a grugde over Windows 95/98/ME? By far the longest and most common experience with Windows today is with XP, that despite the ugly skin compared to Win2K is a solid product from the NT line. Neither do I think most running Windows 7 are disappointed, at least I'm not. The perception that users are deeply longing for a better system is wildly exaggerated. By far the most common sentiment among XP users is "It works, don't change it" and I'm now in the same camp with Win7 vs Win8. If I switch to Linux or OS X, it's because Windows has ceased to work.
I have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents - so far, so good. But go a few more generations back and I have 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, all of which are less than 1% me. Even if I had the complete records of what their lives and ambitions were in the 1750s or so, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care what my mother's father's mother's mother's father's father's father was doing, I doubt I'd even get around to checking out 128 people before I was bored stiff. At best I'd print out a nice family tree where you could have about three bullet points to describe yourself and that is it. Maybe some historians want to dig through it, but I wouldn't.
So yes, stupid rules work out well for the owner and the public. The owner goes broke and out of business (...)
You must be using some other definition of "well" than any I know. Yes of course that's the other way it could happen but that would depend on these places having such a rule to begin with, all they'd really have to say is that they refuse no one. Then he as a customer could of course say it's his business or their business, but if there's many people with Google Glass and few who shun them most owners will go with the money. Because like you say, otherwise they're likely to go out of business and be replaced with an owner that goes with the money.
My guess is that it's mostly political rah-rah but in reality bureaucrats will find requirements so they get the proprietary platform of their choice anyway. Sometimes I've suspected vendor involvement, but in reality it seems to be mostly people on the inside who pick the system they already know and have competence with.
Would the moderator on crack please let me know what the hell in that can be construed as "Flamebait"? The only opinion of my own I offered was:
The real destroyers of the discussion aren't usually strictly speaking trolls, they're people with an extreme black-and-white point of view who'll attack anyone with a dissenting opinion with the intensity of a pit bull with rabies. They're often met by their equal and opposite and together they'll churn out 100 posts drowning out any discussion by anyone with the slightest hint of seeing both sides of the argument.
The rest of the post are actual examples from reality I've run into who have been drowning out discussion elsewhere, if that's flamebait to you well then take your problem up with reality.
This is true. But also, there is the problem of determining what/who is a troll.
The real destroyers of the discussion aren't usually strictly speaking trolls, they're people with an extreme black-and-white point of view who'll attack anyone with a dissenting opinion with the intensity of a pit bull with rabies. They're often met by their equal and opposite and together they'll churn out 100 posts drowning out any discussion by anyone with the slightest hint of seeing both sides of the argument.
For example on our largest newspaper's discussion pages on any page related to immigration or that could possibly framed in reference to immigration (employment = immigrants stealing our work etc.) we'd have the ex-leader of a white supremacist party ranting and raving, all within freedom of speech but what's the point of trying to have a discussion with him? I think they got 200 votes at the election so they represent some 0.00...% of the population, but he sure can take up a lot of online space. And their opposites are those who want to open all borders, let all cultures and people blend and afterwards we'll all sing kumbayah and be one big happy family, nothing could possibly go wrong with importing dark age attitudes and Sharia law or completely extinguishing our national identity.
Or on any article about our version of the CPS there's a guy who clearly is on a crusade against them, half the time he claims they're mad with power and just like to crush families, twist lies and abuse their power, the other half he's trying to make them part of a feminist conspiracy that will always side with the mother no matter what. No points for guessing what his experience with them is, though he never mentions that only uses a lot of pseudoscience and worthless studies that claim the same as him. I could on, but for every subject there seems to be a few people with an ax to grind who just won't shut up. It's practically the online variety of filibustering.
Well, may be so, however, I still won't tolerate you coming to my home, to my gym, to my office, to my restaurant, to my pub, etc. wearing a camera. You can choose to loose your privacy somewhere else.
You own a gym, office, restaurant and a pub? Lucky you. Let me rephrase it for you, if this becomes popular as your all-purpose device like the smart phone that people use for all sorts of things and expect to be able to use anywhere they go then society will change. I think 20 years ago it was unthinkable that everybody would carry a "spy camera" everywhere they go, now it's completely normal. If you refuse to be in the same place as Google Glass, you'll be the one asked to leave.
But hey, who wants to study economics anyway? I am sure they are all full of shit, like the geologists or the biologists.
The problem is that many parts of economy is more like meteorology combined with (group) psychology, since there's so many butterfly wings flapping and crazy hordes of investors, customers and suppliers trying to outsmart each other and because almost everything in economics happens by a decision, either it's to buy, sell, produce, decommission, hire, lay off, in-house, outsource, integrate, specialize and choices of technology, markets, distribution channels, promotion and so on. It is very much unlike geology/biology where most things happen by the laws of nature and the process isn't influenced by geologists/biologists at all. Throw in a ton of positive/negative feedback loops and I assure you nobody really "understands" the macro economy. And yes, I know enough about it to know how much I don't know.
Don't get me wrong, certain parts of economics is very well understood like accounting, also known as "bean counting" but unlike the engineers who want to make regardless of cost and the sales people who want to sell regardless of price it's rather important to the business whether it turns a profit or a loss. But I think most here who's ever been forced to make or read a business case knows that unless there's some explicit existing costs that are replaced by a fairly certain new development/maintenance cost you are starting to try predicting the future, much like the entire stock market. You want to be there when the flock stampedes to smart phones and tablets, but not when they all stampede away from SUVs (in real life, I'd probably prefer the opposite), but I don't think you'll find the answer in an economics textbook.
Anyway, to actually say something useful on social economics vs business economics, in business those who aren't your customers aren't your problem. In social economics, unless people choose to emigrate (which no significant amount of the population ever do due to friends, family, homestead, culture, language and so on except under the most grave circumstances) you can only shuffle them around in various categories such as employed, job seekers, students, invalids, black labor, criminals, prisoners, alcoholics, junkies etc. that all have costs to society. The ROI of getting a job seeker into a job is thus much greater than the tax income of the job, it is also avoiding all the other costs. But when your credit limit is maxed out like Greece, well you don't got any money to spend at anything no matter the ROI.
That is actually a pretty well known fact from individual life as well, it's expensive to be poor because you can't afford to make the good long term investments. You're always skimping and saving to make it go around short term, while the people with disposable cash can take the opportunity to invest in something that'll last longer or be cheaper to maintain in the long run. Not to mention the people living ahead of their paycheck on credit card debt, the financing costs are huge for really very little benefit at all. But it's worse for the macro economy, because when they cut spending, they also cut income so really the only way not to get screwed is to not get that stuck in debt in the first place. But it's always tempting to take one step closer to the edge, only to find out it was one step too far.
I don't claim to be an expert but I thought ghosting was a faint image a short distance to the right of the real image caused by a sharp bend in a co-ax cable which creates a faint out of phase repeat of an analog TV signal.
Never heard of a bent co-ax cable causing ghosting but right behind our cabin there are boat houses with simple metal roofs, they reflect signals like crazy. Back in the analog over-the-air days we used to have lots of ghosting because the signal would hit our antenna, those metal roofs and bounce right back to our antenna. We've been on satellite for many years now and now with digital over-the-air broadcasts I assume it wouldn't be visible, but yes that's the old form of "ghosting".
It would be worth it to see Apple take a hit on this issue, since it seems to be a general business practice, and frankly, false advertising.
Why? If I promise to deliver a package to you within a week and one customer gets it in two days and you get it on the seventh I still haven't made any false advertising. On the Apple website they promise you a screen of a certain resolution, a disk of a certain size and as long as they deliver as advertised, they've done their part. Like you say it's a fairly standard industrial practice, as far as I know this is the same when you buy from all the big name OEMs. If the differences are such that I'd call it a defect, then I'd of course demand a fixed product but I still wouldn't call that false advertising.
g) Deprecate and REMOVE that stupid 'short', 'long', 'double' crap from the language
Why? Sometimes the user wants to use types which are relative to the CPU word width, but don't want to be tied to a specific bit width. Remember, not everyone who codes in c++ uses an Intel CPU.
I think if you asked people how big a short or long is, 99% would answer it's a fixed size and of the 1% that in theory knows it's CPU-dependent 99% of them don't use it to create any intentionally different behavior on different CPUs. The 0,01% that really use this could have something like a set of typedefs in a platform configuration file, while the other 99,99% won't get bitten in the ass by flawed assumptions that a short will always be 16 bit. Nobody but C/C++ has this ambiguity in their most basic units that are used in pretty much every example, pretty much all other languages, databases etc. have found it sane to define them exactly. Sorry, but this is a horrible part of C/C++ even if you happen to like it.
But the day I walked away from C++, Boost and MFC (mutha fucking classes) and joined a C# .Net shop was the happiest day of my life. Slam it all you like, but for UI development, Boost and MFC /Win32 is the worst platform to develop on unless you are a clueless sadomasochist that enjoys pain and suffering.
Don't worry, everybody hates MFC/Win32. Use Qt if you want C++, C# if you don't and I think there's a full dozen more obscure languages/toolkits I'd try before MFC *shudder*.
Why are people running a blatent self-serving PR story?
We lost but... we didn't really want to win it anyway!
Yeah, that was what I was thinking too, of course they say that. And if they'd won instead they'd say the exact opposite and we'd hear this drivel from AMD. It's not like Sony and Microsoft had a lot of other options, who should they have gone to? Intel? VIA? PowerVR? No, if both AMD and nVidia had told them to buzz off they'd come back with a better offer. I doubt AMD sold themselves that cheap, since they knew nVidia wouldn't do that either. Just cheap enough to win, keep their volume up and live to fight another day.
Some people here are permanently damaged by the 80s and 90s where upgrading from last years model to this years model made total sense, or to quote Weird Al:
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
Car companies also release new models each year, are people expected to sell last year's car and get a new one? Of course not. But some two or three decade old rust heaps go off the road, so you need to fill up with new cars in the other end and why not try doing a little better each year? Welcome to normal market reality, the bizarro days when they didn't apply to electronics is long over.