Actually, it's more that developers can't stop futzing around with it. Unlike many things were you can run a benchmark, how people like to organize things is largely a matter of habit. For example I like the "Windows" style of single-click to select, double-click to open/launch. It drives me nuts if I have to work on a single-click to open/launch system because I keep doing lots of things I didn't mean to do. It's one of those "I don't care if DVORAK is in theory 1% better than QWERTY, give me what I'm used to" situations. It drives me crazy every time someone wants to reinvent the start menu or file dialog or whatever, the old one worked just fine. Maybe it's 50% old fart who won't try anything new, but it's also 50% don't break what works perfectly good enough.
Yea, I'm surprised it's not used more. I heard at one point the RIAA wanted to do the same with music files legally downloaded; put some watermark that no one would notice in the audio portion of the file.
First of all, a watermark doesn't matter if the credit card is stolen, the login has been hacked or the person's PC has been hacked or it's been accidentally shared or whatever, doing this would quite quickly lead to a shit storm. And there's no such thing as a watermark "no one would notice", very quickly on file sharing sites they would notice the same file with many different hashes or if not before the first time you mention it in court. Compare them and you'll pretty quickly find out how it's watermarked and learn to remove it, that's why the RIAA gave up on the idea. It only works when you have a very limited number of copies to track and getting multiple copies is hard, like for example in what cinema a movie was recorded or the movies sent out for Oscar nomination. On the mass market any popular system would quickly get circumvented.
[1] This actually provides a fairly simple loophole if you're willing to wait three years: take some GPL code, modify it, and give it to a third party. They then sit on it for three years and then sell it as a binary-only product. They pass on your (now expired) offer, and no one has the right to demand the source code from you.
Not really, here's the GPLv3 clause and the GPLv2 clause is similar:
c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
Well it's a statutory claim and technically the crime fulfills the statutory requirements, it's a fine written in law so without any arguments from the defense I'm not surprised. It'd be different if you tried to claim a million dollars under regular tort law.
Ultimately where you car is going is determined by four little contact points between the car and the ground, that has a certain grip (rubber on road friction). That grip can be used for accelerating, braking or keeping a turn. The math here is a few integrals and nothing humans do in their head, but for computers that's pretty straightforward. It doesn't make the car road safe though. The main reason your typical driver isn't so good at this is that you don't actually want to find out where that limit goes. I remember when I was 18 and cocky and did a turn at an intersection just on the limit, my back tires actually went a little sideways on dry asphalt. It was not a "wow, fucking awesome just like at the race track" it was an "oh crap, 2 km/h faster or 0,2 seconds slower at braking or the road grip being slightly worse I'd have slammed into the railing" moment.
If you want to get good at this you have to set up a training area with cones and just go for it - how fast can you go and still make the turn and you haven't really tested it until you've gone off the road and then dialed it back a notch. That's what race drivers have in their blood, they know that's exactly how far you can push it. For the rest of us, like you say for your commute even a few minutes are pretty measly so why risk it trying to shave 0,2 seconds off that turn? If the computer can reliably squeeze out those extra margins that's fine, but that's never been a selling point nor the blocker for having automated cars. Hell, I'd probably take 45 minutes as a passenger over 30 minutes like a driver.
Intel has shown Ivy Bridge running 4K over two DP cables. Video acceleration also works. Haswell has been promised to do 4K over one cable, I hope 3840x2160x60 fps over DisplayPort and not just 3840x2160x24 fps over HDMI 1.4 or maybe HDMI 2.0 will show up - but we'll know in half a year or so. Here's a clip of Haswell decoding a 200 Mbps 4K video stream in hardware, 1% CPU. So by this time next year, mainstream CPUs will be able to do it. Meanwhile people have tested it for gaming, top end cards in CF/SLI will give you okay frame rates. It is also rumored that the PS4 will support 4K video output - not unlikely since Sony also sells 4K TVs now - with that not being said that games will be in 4K resolution, just like the PS3 plays 720p games and outputs 1080p BluRay.
The huge elephant in the closet is of course still the cost of 4K displays. The "Retina" screens add a hefty premium to the 13-15" MBPs, I suspect for a >20 inch 4K monitor you are looking at least $1000 extra, even if Apple plans to make up for it on volume. Remember current 4K monitors are way over $10k, though they're only for special use in industry/medical/military which of course means a huge sticker price. That said, no doubt a $34,999 Eizo monitor is overpriced when you can get LGs 84" 4K TV for $16,999 but still it's a good stretch down to normal consumer prices.
Militarily China is 20 years behind in submarine technology, has one aircraft carrier (Russian surplus), is just now introducing stealth technology in its aircraft,
And no military significant enemies where they'd be useful, nobody would be crazy enough to attack 1.35 billion people with tons of manufacturing capability and 240 nukes unless China goes on the aggressive and say invades Taiwan and the US gets involved. And in that case it won't be about subs or aircraft carriers or stealth planes, it'll be about the US having many, many thousands of nukes and how poker face they can play another Cuban missile crisis. Any other country? Draft a hundred million soldiers and do it the "hard" way. P.S. If they really wanted to make an arms rally, check how long it took Hitler to go from a demilitarized Germany to one armed to the teeth if you're planning a war for real.
I can't seem to find anything on google either way, are win 7 market apps backwards compatible with windows 8?
You mean forwards compatible? (...)
Yes I do:)
I saw that but figured it was a subtle hint that windows 8 would be a downgrade, hence backwards compatibility. But I guess this is the one time it wasn't a snide remark about Microsoft on Slashdot, there's an exception to every rule I guess.
If technology did exist to ensure that no individual could be held responsible for what either he or others do, then this would be quite the act of opposition to the states you and I live in: Western European states, the USA - i.e. surveillance and police states.
You think it would be a good idea if nobody was held responsible to the law? Do tell me where you live while I put on this assassin's invisibility cloak, ah the wonders of technology.
Of all the significant issues with this idea, that's not really one of them. It should be fairly trivial to set up rate-limiting either on bandwidth or total traffic/month, say if you have a 250 GB cap then say 25 GB max should be plenty for people who are just in the neighborhood - not including any neighbors that want to leech from you 24x7.
today, the top of the line Intel consumer desktop CPU's have 4 cores.
More like 6. And the LGA2011 platform is also nice if for some reason you need 64GB (8x8GB) of RAM. The real issue for Intel is that most of things that "enthusiasts" care about don't scale that well. Sure, there's always people that need 3D rendering or whatever that could scale to 8+ cores easily, but they're more the "workstation" market. You're much more likely to find enthusiasts with a 3770K overclocked to 4-5 GHz and a few 2000+ MHz sticks of RAM than anything the LGA2011 offers. It's been that way since Sandy Bridge and I don't think it's going to change any time soon. Intel has absolutely zero competition either so I'm guessing IVB-E will be a huge disappointment when it finally arrives sometime after Haswell's release.
Meaning that AMD's offering takes more marketing footwork, but technically is not all bad. Not at all.
I guess I'm looking at it, and yes it needs more work. Fewer and faster cores are better if not all the cores are fully loaded, choosing the benchmarks where all 8 cores are perfectly balanced is cherry picking. Intel makes better all-rounders at the same price. As for price and value, if the price doesn't match the value people feel it gives them the prices come down. The FX-8150 started as a $245 chip with Intel's 2500K at $216. Now the FX-8350 sells for $199 while Intel's 3570K sells for $225. Why are you now paying $50 less for a CPU that's much, much better while the competition has increased their prices? Because the FX-8150 delivered terrible, terrible value and that's engineer fail, not marketing fail.
Well I still think it was a bone-headed waste of money, they bought a company that did okay and is still doing okay but they haven't really gotten that much synergy out of it. The world still runs on exclusive CPU or GPU solutions, HSA is still a bit pie-in-the-sky. Instead they could have put that money into CPU design and/or processing tech and let ATI/nVidia/PowerVR compete for delivering chipsets/IGPs or the graphics part of their APUs. With Intel putting the thumbscrews on nVidia, they could have been rather favorable to helping AMD but not when AMD owns ATI. Biting over more than they can chew is a leading cause to AMD being in the situation they're in now.
Some of the more expensive labor around is woefully ignorant of large parts of science like evolution and most things outside of North America, but it doesn't seem to significantly affect their work performance or salary requirements. China is no longer that cheap, it says "Labour costs have surged by 20% a year for the past four years" - pretty different from what most Americans have experienced the last four years I bet. China is rapidly becoming a modern country, compared to most other countries in South East Asia they are already rich. For example India is poor compared to China. Right now I'd hold Greece and Spain much more likely to have a revolution than China...
Last I heard, failure rate was directly tied to process size. Does any of this fix that?
I haven't heard anything about failure rate, but smaller process size generally means it will wear out earlier. Anandtech's review says it is still rated at 3000 P/E (program/erase cycles) like the 25nm NAND that preceded it, but they found some very disturbing results of less than 1000 P/E so I'd definitively wait to see how that checks out. Personally I'm sitting on a 5K-rated drive that according to the life meter should die after three years, so yeah... these new SSDs may be "cheap", but they're also consumables. The speed is addictive though so I'll just get a small and fairly cheap one until the dust settles, then maybe I'll spring for an "enterprise" SSD. They often have 10x the life span, so if I say 3 years for this one I'm thinking 30 years. That's good enough.
Well, I agree with the author. Tech is a malignant leech on society, unlike wholesome industries such as finance or insurance.
You forgot the law industry. But in all honestly, sci-fi has shown us everything from tech utopias like Star Trek to tech dystopias like 1984 with omnipresent telescreens with hidden cameras and microphones - though I'm sure there's even "techier" dystopias. Don't get me wrong, technology is great progress but it's also great progress for those who want to surveillance and control other people. And the big difference from the past is that computers and robots are obedient to a fault, they'll never rebel, never refuse to carry out an order, never lead an insurrection no matter what rights they violate or atrocities they're commanded to commit. Here in Norway 2/3rds of the population no longer make any adjustment to their tax returns - the government already knows everything and will hand you a pre-filled tax statement that you check.
Income tax? The company you work for report your income, unless you're self-employed. Own property? Bank accounts? Stocks? Car? Boat? Bought or sold any of those? All domestic registries report in and all linked to the same person id, you just need to report foreign holdings/transactions. Oh yes and marriage status and children, so you get your tax breaks. About 94% of all payments now happen electronically, somewhere between 50% and 60% of the population is on Facebook that we know stores everything indefinitely, there's electronic toll roads that read car signs and for regular travel most now have electronic tickets linked of course to your ATM card or your cell phone - that are all registered to a person, so even if you left your cell phone that everybody carries at home you're likely tracked somehow.
Now I don't see any particular reason to want to overthrow the government, but I sure think it's going to get harder and harder to organize anything big without the government's knowledge - at least a government that doesn't care one bit about personal privacy like authoritarian regimes generally don't. I'm pretty sure the TV is just a TV though and not a two-way telescreen, but in pretty much every other way imaginable the government knows far more about me than they did as little as 20 years ago. And a lot of the things they don't log today, is only because the logging switch is set to off. If the watchdogs are silenced, it's as easy as flipping a switch and more data comes streaming in than ever before in history.
In practical discussion if you say any religion may be true every religious person will jump on it and say "$my_religion is the one true faith" and the best argument you've got is "you can't be sure of that" "yes I am" "..." You've just turned the burden of proof so you have to try to prove god doesn't exist, which is of course equally futile as to prove that he does. I don't know for a fact that unicorns don't exist, but until I see some credible evidence that they do I will consider them a fantasy figure. At which point they'll probably bring up their $holy_book of choice, which is of course about as much evidence as a story book with unicorns. I think they already know it's pointless before they start, there's no metaphysical logic that's going to change their minds.
And that's really the long and short of it, if you think people should start with the default assumption that there is no god and there's no way to prove there is a god, then no logical, rational person should believe in god. That doesn't exclude the possibility that god may exist, but it makes the religious irrational that believe it. Which is also why most have their religion from early childhood, before they were mature enough to apply any critical thinking to the things they were learned. While there's always a few that go religious in adult age, I think organized religion as we know it would cease to exist in a few generations if nobody under 18 was forced into one.
You're assuming whoever is planning genocide with a bio-weapon cares about a little collateral damage. I imagine with fuzzy matching you can get a pretty good match, if you have X or more genetic markers typically found in that population.then activate.
Well, seriously, it's pretty much now or never for the mythical "linux desktop". With Windows 8 MS has managed to simultaneously piss off the customers, the hardware vendors, and the 3rd party software vendors. If Linux can't make inroads into the desktop market over the next year or two, when will it?
You know I was thinking that in 2000 when they released Windows ME (win2k was their business line) and in 2006 when they released Vista. so I'm not holding my breath after Win8 in 2012 and I'll give you good odds on 2018, 2024 and 2030. Much of the OSS community is caught in the same smart phone/tablet hype as everyone else and make fancy new touch-friendly environments, but all those applications aren't going to be touch-friendly any time soon. That sort of thing just doesn't happen very quickly in the OSS world, it's like replacing 8-bit RGB in GIMP - implicit keyboard/mouse access is rampant throughout the whole system. So that'll be another 1% OSS die-hards while the opportunity to strike at the desktop while the others' attention is elsewhere will go largely unused.
On the bright side though, Linux will always be coming back for another attempt. And with Android on smart phones and tablets things will continue to happen on the graphical side too, not just embedded, servers and supercomputers that often don't have an UI. And then I'm just thinking market, not the progress made by Intel and AMD on open source drivers for the desktop. It's not like they're not making progress, it's just that the competition and the goal posts keep moving too. Eventually things will mature and the OS you have will be mostly like the OS you had 10 years ago - and Linux is not 10 years behind. I just don't think we're there any time soon.
The same people who put Curiosity on Mars could have put you or me there instead, if they were given half of the funding that George Bush spent blowing up brown people for lulz.
There's also the small question if we're sending stuff out there for science or for chest-thumping of how great we are. While I'm not disputing that a Mars mission is very difficult, it's also not revolutionary different from we did with Apollo - yes humans can survive space, land on another rock and do moonwalks... err, marswalks. Yes, there's more radiation issues, landing on Mars is harder and they'll be staying longer but nothing really fundamentally sets it apart from what we've done before. Are they going to contribute anything useful we couldn't have done better with hundreds of billions in robotics? Will it bring us any closer to a permanent settlement? Or it will it be like the Apollo program: Show it's possible, not just theory but then don't do it again for 40+ years. That'll just be the world's most expensive tourists.
Well, that's the way the law is written. The only unqualified right to the data you have is the right to destroy it. Copying, backing up, selling, importing and exporting, making derivative works, performing, device shifting, format shifting, and even time shifting are all locked down in some way.
And to use it used to be unqualified, until they realized they can just lump the use restrictions in with the copyright protection and have them protected by the DMCA. In fact, almost nothing of this used to be locked down - somebody would have to take you to court to take action for it. Today it's all about putting into a super-DRM safe where you won't be able to do any backups, device shifting, format shifting, time shifting or anything else you used to be able to do in a limited fashion without breaking the law by removing the DRM. Since these things were only permitted and not rights, they managed to turn a huge number of activities from legal to illegal. Apart from copyright lasting infinity minus a day in 20 year increments that's the other big reason to hate modern copyright protection.
Because that is all the IP owner can get in say a developing nation. The book is written, it is a sunk cost, you get what you can from that point forward. If you insist on developed nation pricing in a developing nation you get nothing. If you offer developing nation pricing everywhere then the cost of the book is never recouped and you go out of business. The developed world subsidizes the developing world. Get used to that.
Tough. The corporations buy products and outsource jobs to where it is cheapest to produce, why shouldn't we take advantage of the global marketplace too? With rules like these there's no "free trade" for consumers, we have to buy in our region/country or it won't work or it's illegal. DVDs and BluRays are obvious examples, in some cases a US game won't work on an EU console, Steam has region-locked games too where you need a VPN to trick it and so on. This should be a clue to many other areas in society too, even if they pretend it's a two way street they'll make sure they can screw you but you can't screw them. Like the people willing to give up their privacy because they think "everybody watches everybody" is ever going to become reality, you'll really give up your privacy but they won't really give up theirs.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's more that developers can't stop futzing around with it. Unlike many things were you can run a benchmark, how people like to organize things is largely a matter of habit. For example I like the "Windows" style of single-click to select, double-click to open/launch. It drives me nuts if I have to work on a single-click to open/launch system because I keep doing lots of things I didn't mean to do. It's one of those "I don't care if DVORAK is in theory 1% better than QWERTY, give me what I'm used to" situations. It drives me crazy every time someone wants to reinvent the start menu or file dialog or whatever, the old one worked just fine. Maybe it's 50% old fart who won't try anything new, but it's also 50% don't break what works perfectly good enough.
And some more exposed circuitry.
Yea, I'm surprised it's not used more. I heard at one point the RIAA wanted to do the same with music files legally downloaded; put some watermark that no one would notice in the audio portion of the file.
First of all, a watermark doesn't matter if the credit card is stolen, the login has been hacked or the person's PC has been hacked or it's been accidentally shared or whatever, doing this would quite quickly lead to a shit storm. And there's no such thing as a watermark "no one would notice", very quickly on file sharing sites they would notice the same file with many different hashes or if not before the first time you mention it in court. Compare them and you'll pretty quickly find out how it's watermarked and learn to remove it, that's why the RIAA gave up on the idea. It only works when you have a very limited number of copies to track and getting multiple copies is hard, like for example in what cinema a movie was recorded or the movies sent out for Oscar nomination. On the mass market any popular system would quickly get circumvented.
[1] This actually provides a fairly simple loophole if you're willing to wait three years: take some GPL code, modify it, and give it to a third party. They then sit on it for three years and then sell it as a binary-only product. They pass on your (now expired) offer, and no one has the right to demand the source code from you.
Not really, here's the GPLv3 clause and the GPLv2 clause is similar:
c) Convey individual copies of the object code with a copy of the written offer to provide the Corresponding Source. This alternative is allowed only occasionally and noncommercially, and only if you received the object code with such an offer, in accord with subsection 6b.
Well it's a statutory claim and technically the crime fulfills the statutory requirements, it's a fine written in law so without any arguments from the defense I'm not surprised. It'd be different if you tried to claim a million dollars under regular tort law.
Ultimately where you car is going is determined by four little contact points between the car and the ground, that has a certain grip (rubber on road friction). That grip can be used for accelerating, braking or keeping a turn. The math here is a few integrals and nothing humans do in their head, but for computers that's pretty straightforward. It doesn't make the car road safe though. The main reason your typical driver isn't so good at this is that you don't actually want to find out where that limit goes. I remember when I was 18 and cocky and did a turn at an intersection just on the limit, my back tires actually went a little sideways on dry asphalt. It was not a "wow, fucking awesome just like at the race track" it was an "oh crap, 2 km/h faster or 0,2 seconds slower at braking or the road grip being slightly worse I'd have slammed into the railing" moment.
If you want to get good at this you have to set up a training area with cones and just go for it - how fast can you go and still make the turn and you haven't really tested it until you've gone off the road and then dialed it back a notch. That's what race drivers have in their blood, they know that's exactly how far you can push it. For the rest of us, like you say for your commute even a few minutes are pretty measly so why risk it trying to shave 0,2 seconds off that turn? If the computer can reliably squeeze out those extra margins that's fine, but that's never been a selling point nor the blocker for having automated cars. Hell, I'd probably take 45 minutes as a passenger over 30 minutes like a driver.
Intel has shown Ivy Bridge running 4K over two DP cables. Video acceleration also works. Haswell has been promised to do 4K over one cable, I hope 3840x2160x60 fps over DisplayPort and not just 3840x2160x24 fps over HDMI 1.4 or maybe HDMI 2.0 will show up - but we'll know in half a year or so. Here's a clip of Haswell decoding a 200 Mbps 4K video stream in hardware, 1% CPU. So by this time next year, mainstream CPUs will be able to do it. Meanwhile people have tested it for gaming, top end cards in CF/SLI will give you okay frame rates. It is also rumored that the PS4 will support 4K video output - not unlikely since Sony also sells 4K TVs now - with that not being said that games will be in 4K resolution, just like the PS3 plays 720p games and outputs 1080p BluRay.
The huge elephant in the closet is of course still the cost of 4K displays. The "Retina" screens add a hefty premium to the 13-15" MBPs, I suspect for a >20 inch 4K monitor you are looking at least $1000 extra, even if Apple plans to make up for it on volume. Remember current 4K monitors are way over $10k, though they're only for special use in industry/medical/military which of course means a huge sticker price. That said, no doubt a $34,999 Eizo monitor is overpriced when you can get LGs 84" 4K TV for $16,999 but still it's a good stretch down to normal consumer prices.
Militarily China is 20 years behind in submarine technology, has one aircraft carrier (Russian surplus), is just now introducing stealth technology in its aircraft,
And no military significant enemies where they'd be useful, nobody would be crazy enough to attack 1.35 billion people with tons of manufacturing capability and 240 nukes unless China goes on the aggressive and say invades Taiwan and the US gets involved. And in that case it won't be about subs or aircraft carriers or stealth planes, it'll be about the US having many, many thousands of nukes and how poker face they can play another Cuban missile crisis. Any other country? Draft a hundred million soldiers and do it the "hard" way. P.S. If they really wanted to make an arms rally, check how long it took Hitler to go from a demilitarized Germany to one armed to the teeth if you're planning a war for real.
I can't seem to find anything on google either way, are win 7 market apps backwards compatible with windows 8?
You mean forwards compatible? (...)
Yes I do :)
I saw that but figured it was a subtle hint that windows 8 would be a downgrade, hence backwards compatibility. But I guess this is the one time it wasn't a snide remark about Microsoft on Slashdot, there's an exception to every rule I guess.
If technology did exist to ensure that no individual could be held responsible for what either he or others do, then this would be quite the act of opposition to the states you and I live in: Western European states, the USA - i.e. surveillance and police states.
You think it would be a good idea if nobody was held responsible to the law? Do tell me where you live while I put on this assassin's invisibility cloak, ah the wonders of technology.
Of all the significant issues with this idea, that's not really one of them. It should be fairly trivial to set up rate-limiting either on bandwidth or total traffic/month, say if you have a 250 GB cap then say 25 GB max should be plenty for people who are just in the neighborhood - not including any neighbors that want to leech from you 24x7.
today, the top of the line Intel consumer desktop CPU's have 4 cores.
More like 6. And the LGA2011 platform is also nice if for some reason you need 64GB (8x8GB) of RAM. The real issue for Intel is that most of things that "enthusiasts" care about don't scale that well. Sure, there's always people that need 3D rendering or whatever that could scale to 8+ cores easily, but they're more the "workstation" market. You're much more likely to find enthusiasts with a 3770K overclocked to 4-5 GHz and a few 2000+ MHz sticks of RAM than anything the LGA2011 offers. It's been that way since Sandy Bridge and I don't think it's going to change any time soon. Intel has absolutely zero competition either so I'm guessing IVB-E will be a huge disappointment when it finally arrives sometime after Haswell's release.
Meaning that AMD's offering takes more marketing footwork, but technically is not all bad. Not at all.
I guess I'm looking at it, and yes it needs more work. Fewer and faster cores are better if not all the cores are fully loaded, choosing the benchmarks where all 8 cores are perfectly balanced is cherry picking. Intel makes better all-rounders at the same price. As for price and value, if the price doesn't match the value people feel it gives them the prices come down. The FX-8150 started as a $245 chip with Intel's 2500K at $216. Now the FX-8350 sells for $199 while Intel's 3570K sells for $225. Why are you now paying $50 less for a CPU that's much, much better while the competition has increased their prices? Because the FX-8150 delivered terrible, terrible value and that's engineer fail, not marketing fail.
And the ratio of artists to engineers is roughly the same as the ratio of people who've read it to those who have not.
Well I still think it was a bone-headed waste of money, they bought a company that did okay and is still doing okay but they haven't really gotten that much synergy out of it. The world still runs on exclusive CPU or GPU solutions, HSA is still a bit pie-in-the-sky. Instead they could have put that money into CPU design and/or processing tech and let ATI/nVidia/PowerVR compete for delivering chipsets/IGPs or the graphics part of their APUs. With Intel putting the thumbscrews on nVidia, they could have been rather favorable to helping AMD but not when AMD owns ATI. Biting over more than they can chew is a leading cause to AMD being in the situation they're in now.
Some of the more expensive labor around is woefully ignorant of large parts of science like evolution and most things outside of North America, but it doesn't seem to significantly affect their work performance or salary requirements. China is no longer that cheap, it says "Labour costs have surged by 20% a year for the past four years" - pretty different from what most Americans have experienced the last four years I bet. China is rapidly becoming a modern country, compared to most other countries in South East Asia they are already rich. For example India is poor compared to China. Right now I'd hold Greece and Spain much more likely to have a revolution than China...
Last I heard, failure rate was directly tied to process size. Does any of this fix that?
I haven't heard anything about failure rate, but smaller process size generally means it will wear out earlier. Anandtech's review says it is still rated at 3000 P/E (program/erase cycles) like the 25nm NAND that preceded it, but they found some very disturbing results of less than 1000 P/E so I'd definitively wait to see how that checks out. Personally I'm sitting on a 5K-rated drive that according to the life meter should die after three years, so yeah... these new SSDs may be "cheap", but they're also consumables. The speed is addictive though so I'll just get a small and fairly cheap one until the dust settles, then maybe I'll spring for an "enterprise" SSD. They often have 10x the life span, so if I say 3 years for this one I'm thinking 30 years. That's good enough.
Well, I agree with the author. Tech is a malignant leech on society, unlike wholesome industries such as finance or insurance.
You forgot the law industry. But in all honestly, sci-fi has shown us everything from tech utopias like Star Trek to tech dystopias like 1984 with omnipresent telescreens with hidden cameras and microphones - though I'm sure there's even "techier" dystopias. Don't get me wrong, technology is great progress but it's also great progress for those who want to surveillance and control other people. And the big difference from the past is that computers and robots are obedient to a fault, they'll never rebel, never refuse to carry out an order, never lead an insurrection no matter what rights they violate or atrocities they're commanded to commit. Here in Norway 2/3rds of the population no longer make any adjustment to their tax returns - the government already knows everything and will hand you a pre-filled tax statement that you check.
Income tax? The company you work for report your income, unless you're self-employed. Own property? Bank accounts? Stocks? Car? Boat? Bought or sold any of those? All domestic registries report in and all linked to the same person id, you just need to report foreign holdings/transactions. Oh yes and marriage status and children, so you get your tax breaks. About 94% of all payments now happen electronically, somewhere between 50% and 60% of the population is on Facebook that we know stores everything indefinitely, there's electronic toll roads that read car signs and for regular travel most now have electronic tickets linked of course to your ATM card or your cell phone - that are all registered to a person, so even if you left your cell phone that everybody carries at home you're likely tracked somehow.
Now I don't see any particular reason to want to overthrow the government, but I sure think it's going to get harder and harder to organize anything big without the government's knowledge - at least a government that doesn't care one bit about personal privacy like authoritarian regimes generally don't. I'm pretty sure the TV is just a TV though and not a two-way telescreen, but in pretty much every other way imaginable the government knows far more about me than they did as little as 20 years ago. And a lot of the things they don't log today, is only because the logging switch is set to off. If the watchdogs are silenced, it's as easy as flipping a switch and more data comes streaming in than ever before in history.
In practical discussion if you say any religion may be true every religious person will jump on it and say "$my_religion is the one true faith" and the best argument you've got is "you can't be sure of that" "yes I am" "..." You've just turned the burden of proof so you have to try to prove god doesn't exist, which is of course equally futile as to prove that he does. I don't know for a fact that unicorns don't exist, but until I see some credible evidence that they do I will consider them a fantasy figure. At which point they'll probably bring up their $holy_book of choice, which is of course about as much evidence as a story book with unicorns. I think they already know it's pointless before they start, there's no metaphysical logic that's going to change their minds.
And that's really the long and short of it, if you think people should start with the default assumption that there is no god and there's no way to prove there is a god, then no logical, rational person should believe in god. That doesn't exclude the possibility that god may exist, but it makes the religious irrational that believe it. Which is also why most have their religion from early childhood, before they were mature enough to apply any critical thinking to the things they were learned. While there's always a few that go religious in adult age, I think organized religion as we know it would cease to exist in a few generations if nobody under 18 was forced into one.
You're assuming whoever is planning genocide with a bio-weapon cares about a little collateral damage. I imagine with fuzzy matching you can get a pretty good match, if you have X or more genetic markers typically found in that population.then activate.
Well, seriously, it's pretty much now or never for the mythical "linux desktop". With Windows 8 MS has managed to simultaneously piss off the customers, the hardware vendors, and the 3rd party software vendors. If Linux can't make inroads into the desktop market over the next year or two, when will it?
You know I was thinking that in 2000 when they released Windows ME (win2k was their business line) and in 2006 when they released Vista. so I'm not holding my breath after Win8 in 2012 and I'll give you good odds on 2018, 2024 and 2030. Much of the OSS community is caught in the same smart phone/tablet hype as everyone else and make fancy new touch-friendly environments, but all those applications aren't going to be touch-friendly any time soon. That sort of thing just doesn't happen very quickly in the OSS world, it's like replacing 8-bit RGB in GIMP - implicit keyboard/mouse access is rampant throughout the whole system. So that'll be another 1% OSS die-hards while the opportunity to strike at the desktop while the others' attention is elsewhere will go largely unused.
On the bright side though, Linux will always be coming back for another attempt. And with Android on smart phones and tablets things will continue to happen on the graphical side too, not just embedded, servers and supercomputers that often don't have an UI. And then I'm just thinking market, not the progress made by Intel and AMD on open source drivers for the desktop. It's not like they're not making progress, it's just that the competition and the goal posts keep moving too. Eventually things will mature and the OS you have will be mostly like the OS you had 10 years ago - and Linux is not 10 years behind. I just don't think we're there any time soon.
The same people who put Curiosity on Mars could have put you or me there instead, if they were given half of the funding that George Bush spent blowing up brown people for lulz.
There's also the small question if we're sending stuff out there for science or for chest-thumping of how great we are. While I'm not disputing that a Mars mission is very difficult, it's also not revolutionary different from we did with Apollo - yes humans can survive space, land on another rock and do moonwalks... err, marswalks. Yes, there's more radiation issues, landing on Mars is harder and they'll be staying longer but nothing really fundamentally sets it apart from what we've done before. Are they going to contribute anything useful we couldn't have done better with hundreds of billions in robotics? Will it bring us any closer to a permanent settlement? Or it will it be like the Apollo program: Show it's possible, not just theory but then don't do it again for 40+ years. That'll just be the world's most expensive tourists.
I thought it was the year the Desktop died. Isn't that what Windows 8 is trying to do?
Well if you include making it depressed and suicidal, I'd have to agree. Otherwise I'd say Apple is doing most of the killing.
Well, that's the way the law is written. The only unqualified right to the data you have is the right to destroy it. Copying, backing up, selling, importing and exporting, making derivative works, performing, device shifting, format shifting, and even time shifting are all locked down in some way.
And to use it used to be unqualified, until they realized they can just lump the use restrictions in with the copyright protection and have them protected by the DMCA. In fact, almost nothing of this used to be locked down - somebody would have to take you to court to take action for it. Today it's all about putting into a super-DRM safe where you won't be able to do any backups, device shifting, format shifting, time shifting or anything else you used to be able to do in a limited fashion without breaking the law by removing the DRM. Since these things were only permitted and not rights, they managed to turn a huge number of activities from legal to illegal. Apart from copyright lasting infinity minus a day in 20 year increments that's the other big reason to hate modern copyright protection.
Because that is all the IP owner can get in say a developing nation. The book is written, it is a sunk cost, you get what you can from that point forward. If you insist on developed nation pricing in a developing nation you get nothing. If you offer developing nation pricing everywhere then the cost of the book is never recouped and you go out of business. The developed world subsidizes the developing world. Get used to that.
Tough. The corporations buy products and outsource jobs to where it is cheapest to produce, why shouldn't we take advantage of the global marketplace too? With rules like these there's no "free trade" for consumers, we have to buy in our region/country or it won't work or it's illegal. DVDs and BluRays are obvious examples, in some cases a US game won't work on an EU console, Steam has region-locked games too where you need a VPN to trick it and so on. This should be a clue to many other areas in society too, even if they pretend it's a two way street they'll make sure they can screw you but you can't screw them. Like the people willing to give up their privacy because they think "everybody watches everybody" is ever going to become reality, you'll really give up your privacy but they won't really give up theirs.