Because they aren't actually rights. It's not property and never was. Trying to pretend that it's property is just repeating propaganda that's ultimately intended to benefit large corporations and abuse the actual talent.
And you have any evidence for that? By evidence I mean things that don't get torn apart in a millisecond by anyone with a brain? MacOS X _still_ doesn't have any protection that prevents you from running copies on any number of Macs you want.
Every biography, everyone he's ever worked with or otherwise been in touch with agree he was a grade A control freak. He wanted to control every aspect of the products, he wanted to control every aspect of the workers (he actually wanted to uniform them in his turtlenecks!) and he wanted to control every aspect of his users. His whole business was built around the opposite of listening to his customers, Apple would tell the customers what they want because Apple knew it better than the customers knew themselves. I'm sure Ford was a big inspiration with his "If I'd asked the customers what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse".
Much like the turtlenecks, sometimes reality had to reign him in and say the customers wouldn't accept that. That doesn't mean he'd give up, it just means he'd prod them in gentler ways by taking away the options to do it differently. Besides, just like Microsoft he figured it's better to be a dominant player that's pretending not to abuse their monopoly than do blatantly do it with their DRM. As for OS X, they don't really care as long as you still run it on genuine Mac hardware that you paid Apple for. Hell, with the $20-30 upgrades they're basically making free money on what Windows would call service packs and yet nobody complains.
Personally I've never understood why life should enter into at all, as a matter of principle. I mean, if an author wrote a book and owns the rights to it, why should those rights change in value just because he's hit by a car? Why does the cancer patient writing a book on his deathbed deserve less protection than the teenager with a hundred years left to live? Why should it matter if you form a corporation and let the corporation produce it instead of the person? You should just get a fixed number of years and that's it.
If you look at their product lineup and try building an equivalent Windows machine, occasionally they do. If you start with what you need and then try to pick the closest Mac fulfilling those needs, then they mostly don't. I wish Apple would dare to kill their workstation segment by offering a "normal" Mac, no micro, no all-in-one, no workstation with Xeons and ECC ram. A normal mid-tower that runs an i7-3770K on a Z77 motherboard with OS X on it. If they can charge $2500 for a Mac Pro, I'm sure they could sell one for $1500 and get away with it.
Android ships on over a million devices a day and that doesn't even include the large numbers of non-Google sanctioned gear. Is Apple really moving that many iDevice?
A quick look at my price check shows you get an Android phone with crappy screen and practically useless for surfing from 800 NOK, the iPhone 4 is 4000 NOK. So Android might be selling many phones, but they probably also sell to many more people that never or only occasionally use it to browse the web, while if you're spending 5x that you probably do that for a reason (or you're just an Apple fanboi) and is going to use it actively. So I have no real problem believing these figures.
StatCounter has a nice selection where you can drill down to continents or even single countries, they put OS X at 14% market share in the US, 7% worldwide. Vista is at 12% and 8% respectively, so not a bad comparison in either case. Not really surprising though, since they're expensive computers you'd probably find in the rich parts of the world. Unfortunately you can't get figures for Linux since it gets lumped into the "other" category, it barely registers in Germany which is typically extremely open source friendly with 2%. Globally I think most say 1% with a rather random spattering depending on the open source culture of the country more than wealth.
It's not even clear that maintaining Linux drivers entails that much of an effort. History has shown that, if vendors open-source their drivers (or at least document the hardware interfaces), the kernel community will happily take it upon themselves to maintain them.
Some of the simpler drivers perhaps. AMD did release hardware specs, and yet it takes a whole lot of development effort from AMD just to keep the lights on. There hasn't exactly been a rush to build a high performance OpenGL stack that's up to current standards either. The kernel community will usually sort out their own breakage but getting a driver mainlined usually takes quite a bit of work.
The thing is, that Apple by the very definition of their business model, will never be able to reach a 100% monopoly. As a GNOME developer was pointing out, all the success that Apple is having only gave them about 7.5% market share on the desktop, they have been surpassed already by Android on smartphones and their only remaining bastion is the iPad which I think with Windows 8 devices, will truly have a run for its money.
Because they price themselves out of most of the market. My Norwegian price checker lists 703 laptop models for sale. Apple's cheapest laptop is the MacBook Air for 999 USD / 8290 NOK and it's the 239th most expensive. Basically Apple has models for the top third, nothing for the bottom two thirds. What's keeping Apple from making a $499 laptop? Nothing as far as I can tell, they just have to decide to do it. Their market share would skyrocket at the expense of their margins, but they might make it up on volume. So far it doesn't seem like a battle Apple is willing to take, but if they are to sustain their growth it can't all be new business areas, they have to expand in the markets they're already in too.
Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers?
Actually Ford would be the one being sued to hell and back by Daimler-Benz. His mass production on an assembly line was revolutionary but he did not in any way invent the automobile.
BluRay is massive bandwidth overkill, most put the sweet spot of bits/pixel at around 0.2 bits. For a 2160p24 movie that would be 40 Mbit/s, for p60 an even 100 Mbit/s. HEVC, the new encoding standard coming next year promises to give same visual quality in half the bits so maybe all the way down to 20-50 Mbit/s. I'm sure Sony will tell you that you need their BluRay XXL of 250GB, but reality is that you'll have BluRay-size rips that look damn much better than the BluRay just like today you have DVD-size rips that look damn much better than the DVD.
He might deserve anything, but we like to think we have progressed somewhat.
More like we're delayed, if the new penalty code that's 12 years delayed due to lack of computer systems to handle it (government bureaucracy, yay) was implemented he'd at least have gotten 30 years for terrorism. They can say what they want about "in practice", but in theory he could be back on the streets in 10 years if he pulls a total reformation.
There are new technologies being developed that are both fast, dense, and non-volatile. With a fast enough, cheap and non-volatile memroy system, you would not need cache, RAM or disk.
No matter how dense memory technology you use you can put a 32K L1 cache much closer to where it's needed than a 16GB main memory. One is simply hundred thousands of times bigger. That means lower latency and higher performance, so cache is here to say. Here's is for example the latency figures for L1/L2/L3/memory for Ivy Bridge:
L1: 1 ns L2: 3.0 ns L3: 3.8 ns Memory: 39.2 ns
Sure you could do it without the cache... if you want to wait 40 times as long. And it's not just to say that you will make a 1ns memory then, at the speed of electricity (about 2/3rds of light) you get about a 10 cm round trip in 1ns with absolutely no transistors in the way. In practice, you'll probably never get off the die before your time is up.
Well, not many as the initial production run is 84 units in the first month. Even with it going worldwide you're probably looking at hundreds per month and maybe 10000 units a year. Is there a market for 10000 $20k TVs? Quite probably, the richest man I've been in a meeting with was good for over $100m so that TV is a drop in the bucket for him. Remember with 7 billion people on the planet there's 70 million 1%-ers and 700k 0.01%-ers. And the last ones will probably get half a dozen to decorate their other rooms in addition to their THX-grade home cinema...
I don't see the problem with that. Don't let the door hit you as you leave. Something that commercial software companies just don't appear to get is that the Linux ecosystem just isn't prepared to let them sell a big binary blob and never update it for ten years. We're not here to give them an easy time and help them make money.
Ah, the OSS purist. Fuck closed source, who needs them? Apparently not you. Either you run Linux and run GIMP and you will like it, or you can get lost and go back to Windows. A person running Linux and 90% open source software but who needs Photoshop, that's an abomination we can't have. You will either stay on Windows or join the cult of RMS and go cold turkey on all proprietary software. Open source is about choice, but only from the choices the community gives you. Trust me, commercial software companies got the message loud and clear which is why most won't touch it with a ten foot pole. It's not your job to make it easy on them, but it's not their job to be a charity either. If they can't turn a profit on it, they won't serve that market. I doubt they lose any sleep over it, but anyone who dreams of a YotLD probably should.
Windows is a consumer/business product geared to people who want (and are convinced they need) a high level of support.
Lolwut? I know there are many businesses that want support because it's their bread and butter, but my home desktop isn't supported by anyone and I think that's pretty common. The reasons are more:
1) It's what most other people run meaning most shit has been found by somebody else and fixed. Maybe the driver developers should care that they have crap support for the 1% that's Linux or the 5% that's Mac but they sure as hell care if 90%+ of their market think they're crap. Of course this is a chicken and egg situation, if Linux had 90%+ market share it'd be the one with stellar support but it isn't. How any laptops still have problems with power management and suspend/resume? How many dare ship a laptop with those functions broken in Windows? 2) Because most people are on Windows, most software is written for Windows. I'm sure you can try arguing that quality beats quantity, but it doesn't hold up in practice. Most of the commercial software have people to do all the boring and tedious work and polish that so often is skimped on in the OSS community. Not to mention most OSS is available on Windows, sure if you want to use GIMP you can but you can also get Photoshop or whatever else you fancy. The list of Linux-exclusive killer apps is short if not empty. 3) With lots of users, there's also lots of people that might be able to help you. If people have any kind of installation instructions or guides or tutorials for something, it's likely to be for Windows and possibly Mac. How to do it in Linux? You're on your own. It's not that I can't find out on my own and there's usually something analogous but it's still time spent and if you don't like to play with those details then it's time wasted. If you get any training at work it's likely to be for Windows or Windows applications.
Using Windows is travelling down the well worn path, if you're using Linux you're far more paving way. I'd also wager that any person able to manage a Linux box could just as easily have managed a Windows box, Seriously, if you spend any significant time managing your home desktop then you're doing it wrong.
I think the main reason Intel would never release a discrete graphics card at this stage is because that'd make it obvious how silly it is to buy both an integrated and discrete GPU as everyone building an Intel gaming PC do today. To not look really stupid they'd have to release a GPU-less CPU to pair with their discrete GPU (apart from the overpriced LGA2011 CPUs to go with the overpriced X79 motherboards) and that'd let AMD and nVidia back into a market that Intel is making a killing off now - using their CPU dominance to put their GPU in every processor, whether you want it or not. Their market share is 62% now and on a rising trend, why risk your cash cow? They basically got a free pass to gently prod AMD and nVidia out of the market without anyone shouting antitrust.
Long term, it's clearly the way for Intel to go. nVidia has no CPU so if Intel keeps their CPU dominance they'll get their profits anyway. They'll even get a free graphics "sale" if the gamer sells the rig minus the gaming cards. Turning it into an APU war with AMD means their CPU and GPU division will rise and fall together, and to be honest in AMDs case I fear one will drag the other down with them. Certainly the odds of them having two stellar parts that steal market share from Intel is less, it makes it harder to change the status quo which is in favor Intel. No, their guns are all pointing at the lower end of the scale, smartphones and tablets.
The graphics market is in my opinion in a solid squeeze on both ends, from Intel on the low end and lack of progress in displays on the high end. Even with all the fancy shaders, graphics cards are still only pushing ~2M pixels on a 1920x1200/1080 screen and high resolution monitors are nowhere but in the rMPB. Like for example before SLI/CF was a really big thing, today you only need it if you're really on the extreme end. Hopefully we can get 4K gaming, that'd at least fire up the high end again...
To make hypersonic travel practical, they have to make passenger-mile per gallon-of-fuel close to present day passenger airliners. That's why supersonic airliners like the Concorde really failed.
I don't think they have a chance anyway, because a lot of the reason the Concorde worked what a lot of important people had to physically be present. Concorde's heyday was long before you got high quality, stable video conferencing and phone calls just did not cut it. And these people are no longer in a contact blackout zone - which can be a pretty big deal if you're the CEO and shit just hit the fan. A friend of mine recently told about an episode where he was sending mail from the plane's wifi network, a colleague was like "Umm.... aren't you supposed to be on the plane back home now?" so he answered "I am, what's your point?;)"
Having said all that, there may be niche markets for small hypersonic business jets or small cargo planes (FedEx's new slogan, "When it absolutely, positively has to be halfway around the world... TODAY!").
Could be, but I doubt it - most of the overhead in package delivery is that they're rounded up, sorted and bulk shipped every leg of the way with scheduled deliveries. The very fastest overnight express rush orders where your package is driven directly to the airport, put individually on the first jet going in the right direction on every leg with a delivery truck standing by to get it to its final destination is pretty damn fast. And expensive, but nothing like chartering a hypersonic jet would be. The only way would be if they were already in regularly scheduled traffic and full of other things, but then you're stuck to the schedule and the regular jet that's scheduled to leave now will beat the once-per-day hypersonic flight that leaves in 10 hours.
However Bitcoin has limited and predictable inflation which eventually stops entirely, so (in theory) it's quite possible to just build up savings. With a stable monetary base the value of your savings basically tracks overall change in GDP. If the economy grows at 2% per year, the value of your savings does too. No investment required, though obviously nothing stops you investing if you want to try and beat general economic growth.
I've rarely seen so much wrong rolled up into a few sentences. Inflation means that the purchasing power of your money goes down over time, the quantity of Bitcoin is known but the value is not so saying it has a predictable inflatioin is just ridiculous. Yes, printing of money is one of the things causing inflation but far from the only one. Like you say in the next sentence, the purchasing power will continue to change also after all Bitcoins are assigned an an increasing value we'd call deflation - it's just negative inflation. But let us talk closer about the steady stead.
With a steady state, whoever owns Bitcoins own a fixed fraction of the total Bitcoin economy - not to be confused with the GDP of any country or the world. If you own 1% of the Bitcoins, you own 1% of the economy whether that's worth a million, a billion, a trillion or nothing at all. So if 10 times as many people want to use Bitcoins, all the existing money will be worth 10 times as much. If 90% (leaving 1/10th) leaves, your money will drop to 1/10th of the value.
Actually it's worse than that because most of the Bitcoins are not liquid, In order to be able to buy Bitcoins somebody must be willing to sell them, and already today most of them are hoarded. What it means is that the people who actually want to use Bitcoins are buying and selling from an even smaller pool of money, the whole actual economy must fit within just a fraction of the total Bitcoins. And it gets very susceptible to flash crashes if the hoarders stampede, on top of the chance that people abandon the currency.
Either way, the system keeps getting stuffed with more and more "old money" which means you have to be crazier and crazier to invest as you get less and less Bitcoins for your dollars while the existing Bitcoin owners profit from deflation. The early adopters have the most to gain and the last ones in most to lose, eventually new people will cease to join and the panic will start in the other direction as the Bitcoins only have value as long as anyone else accepts Bitcoins.
Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.
I think you will find a lot of people in the open source community who think Linux should be used by everyone because open source software is superior and not just FLOSSies who'll take substandard software because it's GNU/free. I doubt for example that 99.9% of the Android users care about the that aspect of their phone - which is often locked down anyway.
How can you do that when anyone can contribute? In FOSS land there is no way to enforce regression testing and when contributes give you whatever they want to make instead of that somebody tells them to make?
Reject the patches? If Linus doesn't like your code, it doesn't go into the Linux kernel period. Maybe the would be contributer gives up, maybe it goes into some kind of test branch or even try for a full fork, but every project is responsible for their own quality. You can't let crap through then complain it's full of shit.
Of course if you are hardline about that, the community might turn on you and turn the fork into the more popular version but all that'd show is that people care more about the new features than any stability and compatibility. And you can't stop people from aiming the gun at their feet and pulling the trigger.
Long story short if you get a tax on your profits you should also get a tax break on your losses, otherwise say you made $100m one year and lose $100m the next year, the government would take a big profit tax while you in net haven't actually made any profit. This is actually true for people too, at least here in Norway. If I had a just terrible year, realized huge losses in the stock market so I should in theory get a tax refund but it exceeds my actual taxes then I don't get a check, I only get zero taxes and a deductible loss I can use next year.
The same is true for companies, which is often a problem for a company posting huge losses and going out of business. The government "owes" them a tax break but since companies disappear when they go bankrupt if you don't handle it right the government never has to honor it. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just making sure that the company going out of business gets the same tax breaks as a company managing to stay in business would have had. And no, you still don't make money by losing money...
Do not feel dirty about doing.NET/MS SQL Server development; we were all young an idealistic and while you can still build a decent career without using the Microsoft stack why limit your options? In the end to me programming is programming, if I like what I am be tasked to do I donâ(TM)t care what platform it is under and ultimately I am looking to pay the bills:)
While that is true I've found that if you just let your career drift and take on whatever work someone offers you or is most easily available then you rarely end up going where you wanted. You do this one bit because even though you're not interested you can grok it and you're available, then the next time you're the most qualified and before you know it you're stuck with it and you get passed up for doing the job you really wanted to do. If you want to work with Linux, then really you should work hard to get experience on Linux and not just get a.NET job and hope you can switch somewhere down the road.
Looking back from the beginning to the present I have moved quite a bit, but always a limited distance with each job move. Maybe you had one such good experience but most employers most of the time want an employer who's done the same job already, they're not interested in your professional development only to have a drop-in cog in their machinery. Of course they rarely find a carbon copy of the person they want so there's some wiggle room but the big leaps just don't happen unless you're willing to really start at the bottom again. It's not that I couldn't do the job, but I'm not going to get the job because nobody could read my CV and know that.
And don't forget that astroturfing isn't just about making yourself look good, it's also about astrotrashing your competition. Alternatively you can run a really really poor and obvious astroturfing, making it look like not only is the company so desperate about their product quality they need to resort to astroturfing, they're also horribly inept at it. Ultimately it comes down to actually reading review and thinking "Does it sound like the author has an ax to grind or is trying to sugarcoat it?", usually there's some that seem more genuine than others.
The point is to use some kind of exception to get the doctor to go from "you WILL die of a heart attack" to "you MIGHT die of a heart attack" and then think "might schmight, I might and I might not" and just pretend that's a total unknown instead of a very strong probability.
But seriously folks this is pretty much the same thing as Your Doctor telling you that you need to do a significant amount of exercise and change your diet
because there's no way you can become the world's oldest person smoking from you're 21 to you're 117, drinking alcohol (port wine) and eating lots of chocolate. People like that just need one counterexample of a person who didn't have a heart attack and they're fine. Yeah maybe that'll kill you or something else will kill you but it's all statistics and in the end something will kill us all, so why worry? And in an odd sort of way, I can understand that because dead people don't worry over the life they never got to live. I mean if I went to sleep tonight and never woke up, everybody would be all "oh ah torn away so early, what a shame he died so young" (well, 30s is still young when it comes to dying) but I'd have no clue about it. I'd gone to bed thinking I'd live to be a hundred and never find out I was wrong.
Whenever someone mentions unusually cold temperatures in a single winter or even a decade or two, well, that's just weather. Why isn't the reverse true? What you advocate isn't science, it's evangelism.
I have a feeling you're going to just scoff at any science anyway, but low and high pressures alternate. If there's been an unusually cold winter one place, other places probably had unusually warm winters. The whole globe isn't cooling down, it's warming up. And we do have other less accurate measures that go further back in time, you're the one claiming we don't have enough information but can't be bothered to find out if it's true. If you go camping and make a fire and a forest fire breaks out near your campsite and you go "it's not proven, forest fires can start by lightning strikes" yet nobody has seen a thunderstorm pass through your claim of natural causes starts looking pretty weak. Replace the campfire with the whole earth burning oil, the forest fire with melting ice and the lightning strike with natural variation and you have a pretty good analogy.
Well, note that the chart is of the "white lies, black lies and statistics" type. If you actually extend it down to 0 you'll see there's a pretty far way to go still. Then again, it's also like a smaller and smaller ice cube in a big glass of water...
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Because they aren't actually rights. It's not property and never was. Trying to pretend that it's property is just repeating propaganda that's ultimately intended to benefit large corporations and abuse the actual talent.
I never said property, you did. As for the word "rights" go take it up with Congress because it clearly says 17 USC 106 - Exclusive rights in copyrighted works.
And you have any evidence for that? By evidence I mean things that don't get torn apart in a millisecond by anyone with a brain? MacOS X _still_ doesn't have any protection that prevents you from running copies on any number of Macs you want.
Every biography, everyone he's ever worked with or otherwise been in touch with agree he was a grade A control freak. He wanted to control every aspect of the products, he wanted to control every aspect of the workers (he actually wanted to uniform them in his turtlenecks!) and he wanted to control every aspect of his users. His whole business was built around the opposite of listening to his customers, Apple would tell the customers what they want because Apple knew it better than the customers knew themselves. I'm sure Ford was a big inspiration with his "If I'd asked the customers what they wanted, they'd say a faster horse".
Much like the turtlenecks, sometimes reality had to reign him in and say the customers wouldn't accept that. That doesn't mean he'd give up, it just means he'd prod them in gentler ways by taking away the options to do it differently. Besides, just like Microsoft he figured it's better to be a dominant player that's pretending not to abuse their monopoly than do blatantly do it with their DRM. As for OS X, they don't really care as long as you still run it on genuine Mac hardware that you paid Apple for. Hell, with the $20-30 upgrades they're basically making free money on what Windows would call service packs and yet nobody complains.
Personally I've never understood why life should enter into at all, as a matter of principle. I mean, if an author wrote a book and owns the rights to it, why should those rights change in value just because he's hit by a car? Why does the cancer patient writing a book on his deathbed deserve less protection than the teenager with a hundred years left to live? Why should it matter if you form a corporation and let the corporation produce it instead of the person? You should just get a fixed number of years and that's it.
Apple also has no "non over-priced" products.
If you look at their product lineup and try building an equivalent Windows machine, occasionally they do. If you start with what you need and then try to pick the closest Mac fulfilling those needs, then they mostly don't. I wish Apple would dare to kill their workstation segment by offering a "normal" Mac, no micro, no all-in-one, no workstation with Xeons and ECC ram. A normal mid-tower that runs an i7-3770K on a Z77 motherboard with OS X on it. If they can charge $2500 for a Mac Pro, I'm sure they could sell one for $1500 and get away with it.
Android ships on over a million devices a day and that doesn't even include the large numbers of non-Google sanctioned gear. Is Apple really moving that many iDevice?
A quick look at my price check shows you get an Android phone with crappy screen and practically useless for surfing from 800 NOK, the iPhone 4 is 4000 NOK. So Android might be selling many phones, but they probably also sell to many more people that never or only occasionally use it to browse the web, while if you're spending 5x that you probably do that for a reason (or you're just an Apple fanboi) and is going to use it actively. So I have no real problem believing these figures.
StatCounter has a nice selection where you can drill down to continents or even single countries, they put OS X at 14% market share in the US, 7% worldwide. Vista is at 12% and 8% respectively, so not a bad comparison in either case. Not really surprising though, since they're expensive computers you'd probably find in the rich parts of the world. Unfortunately you can't get figures for Linux since it gets lumped into the "other" category, it barely registers in Germany which is typically extremely open source friendly with 2%. Globally I think most say 1% with a rather random spattering depending on the open source culture of the country more than wealth.
It's not even clear that maintaining Linux drivers entails that much of an effort. History has shown that, if vendors open-source their drivers (or at least document the hardware interfaces), the kernel community will happily take it upon themselves to maintain them.
Some of the simpler drivers perhaps. AMD did release hardware specs, and yet it takes a whole lot of development effort from AMD just to keep the lights on. There hasn't exactly been a rush to build a high performance OpenGL stack that's up to current standards either. The kernel community will usually sort out their own breakage but getting a driver mainlined usually takes quite a bit of work.
The thing is, that Apple by the very definition of their business model, will never be able to reach a 100% monopoly. As a GNOME developer was pointing out, all the success that Apple is having only gave them about 7.5% market share on the desktop, they have been surpassed already by Android on smartphones and their only remaining bastion is the iPad which I think with Windows 8 devices, will truly have a run for its money.
Because they price themselves out of most of the market. My Norwegian price checker lists 703 laptop models for sale. Apple's cheapest laptop is the MacBook Air for 999 USD / 8290 NOK and it's the 239th most expensive. Basically Apple has models for the top third, nothing for the bottom two thirds. What's keeping Apple from making a $499 laptop? Nothing as far as I can tell, they just have to decide to do it. Their market share would skyrocket at the expense of their margins, but they might make it up on volume. So far it doesn't seem like a battle Apple is willing to take, but if they are to sustain their growth it can't all be new business areas, they have to expand in the markets they're already in too.
Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers?
Actually Ford would be the one being sued to hell and back by Daimler-Benz. His mass production on an assembly line was revolutionary but he did not in any way invent the automobile.
BluRay is massive bandwidth overkill, most put the sweet spot of bits/pixel at around 0.2 bits. For a 2160p24 movie that would be 40 Mbit/s, for p60 an even 100 Mbit/s. HEVC, the new encoding standard coming next year promises to give same visual quality in half the bits so maybe all the way down to 20-50 Mbit/s. I'm sure Sony will tell you that you need their BluRay XXL of 250GB, but reality is that you'll have BluRay-size rips that look damn much better than the BluRay just like today you have DVD-size rips that look damn much better than the DVD.
He might deserve anything, but we like to think we have progressed somewhat.
More like we're delayed, if the new penalty code that's 12 years delayed due to lack of computer systems to handle it (government bureaucracy, yay) was implemented he'd at least have gotten 30 years for terrorism. They can say what they want about "in practice", but in theory he could be back on the streets in 10 years if he pulls a total reformation.
There are new technologies being developed that are both fast, dense, and non-volatile. With a fast enough, cheap and non-volatile memroy system, you would not need cache, RAM or disk.
No matter how dense memory technology you use you can put a 32K L1 cache much closer to where it's needed than a 16GB main memory. One is simply hundred thousands of times bigger. That means lower latency and higher performance, so cache is here to say. Here's is for example the latency figures for L1/L2/L3/memory for Ivy Bridge:
L1: 1 ns
L2: 3.0 ns
L3: 3.8 ns
Memory: 39.2 ns
Sure you could do it without the cache... if you want to wait 40 times as long. And it's not just to say that you will make a 1ns memory then, at the speed of electricity (about 2/3rds of light) you get about a 10 cm round trip in 1ns with absolutely no transistors in the way. In practice, you'll probably never get off the die before your time is up.
Well, not many as the initial production run is 84 units in the first month. Even with it going worldwide you're probably looking at hundreds per month and maybe 10000 units a year. Is there a market for 10000 $20k TVs? Quite probably, the richest man I've been in a meeting with was good for over $100m so that TV is a drop in the bucket for him. Remember with 7 billion people on the planet there's 70 million 1%-ers and 700k 0.01%-ers. And the last ones will probably get half a dozen to decorate their other rooms in addition to their THX-grade home cinema...
I don't see the problem with that. Don't let the door hit you as you leave. Something that commercial software companies just don't appear to get is that the Linux ecosystem just isn't prepared to let them sell a big binary blob and never update it for ten years. We're not here to give them an easy time and help them make money.
Ah, the OSS purist. Fuck closed source, who needs them? Apparently not you. Either you run Linux and run GIMP and you will like it, or you can get lost and go back to Windows. A person running Linux and 90% open source software but who needs Photoshop, that's an abomination we can't have. You will either stay on Windows or join the cult of RMS and go cold turkey on all proprietary software. Open source is about choice, but only from the choices the community gives you. Trust me, commercial software companies got the message loud and clear which is why most won't touch it with a ten foot pole. It's not your job to make it easy on them, but it's not their job to be a charity either. If they can't turn a profit on it, they won't serve that market. I doubt they lose any sleep over it, but anyone who dreams of a YotLD probably should.
Windows is a consumer/business product geared to people who want (and are convinced they need) a high level of support.
Lolwut? I know there are many businesses that want support because it's their bread and butter, but my home desktop isn't supported by anyone and I think that's pretty common. The reasons are more:
1) It's what most other people run meaning most shit has been found by somebody else and fixed. Maybe the driver developers should care that they have crap support for the 1% that's Linux or the 5% that's Mac but they sure as hell care if 90%+ of their market think they're crap. Of course this is a chicken and egg situation, if Linux had 90%+ market share it'd be the one with stellar support but it isn't. How any laptops still have problems with power management and suspend/resume? How many dare ship a laptop with those functions broken in Windows?
2) Because most people are on Windows, most software is written for Windows. I'm sure you can try arguing that quality beats quantity, but it doesn't hold up in practice. Most of the commercial software have people to do all the boring and tedious work and polish that so often is skimped on in the OSS community. Not to mention most OSS is available on Windows, sure if you want to use GIMP you can but you can also get Photoshop or whatever else you fancy. The list of Linux-exclusive killer apps is short if not empty.
3) With lots of users, there's also lots of people that might be able to help you. If people have any kind of installation instructions or guides or tutorials for something, it's likely to be for Windows and possibly Mac. How to do it in Linux? You're on your own. It's not that I can't find out on my own and there's usually something analogous but it's still time spent and if you don't like to play with those details then it's time wasted. If you get any training at work it's likely to be for Windows or Windows applications.
Using Windows is travelling down the well worn path, if you're using Linux you're far more paving way. I'd also wager that any person able to manage a Linux box could just as easily have managed a Windows box, Seriously, if you spend any significant time managing your home desktop then you're doing it wrong.
I think the main reason Intel would never release a discrete graphics card at this stage is because that'd make it obvious how silly it is to buy both an integrated and discrete GPU as everyone building an Intel gaming PC do today. To not look really stupid they'd have to release a GPU-less CPU to pair with their discrete GPU (apart from the overpriced LGA2011 CPUs to go with the overpriced X79 motherboards) and that'd let AMD and nVidia back into a market that Intel is making a killing off now - using their CPU dominance to put their GPU in every processor, whether you want it or not. Their market share is 62% now and on a rising trend, why risk your cash cow? They basically got a free pass to gently prod AMD and nVidia out of the market without anyone shouting antitrust.
Long term, it's clearly the way for Intel to go. nVidia has no CPU so if Intel keeps their CPU dominance they'll get their profits anyway. They'll even get a free graphics "sale" if the gamer sells the rig minus the gaming cards. Turning it into an APU war with AMD means their CPU and GPU division will rise and fall together, and to be honest in AMDs case I fear one will drag the other down with them. Certainly the odds of them having two stellar parts that steal market share from Intel is less, it makes it harder to change the status quo which is in favor Intel. No, their guns are all pointing at the lower end of the scale, smartphones and tablets.
The graphics market is in my opinion in a solid squeeze on both ends, from Intel on the low end and lack of progress in displays on the high end. Even with all the fancy shaders, graphics cards are still only pushing ~2M pixels on a 1920x1200/1080 screen and high resolution monitors are nowhere but in the rMPB. Like for example before SLI/CF was a really big thing, today you only need it if you're really on the extreme end. Hopefully we can get 4K gaming, that'd at least fire up the high end again...
To make hypersonic travel practical, they have to make passenger-mile per gallon-of-fuel close to present day passenger airliners. That's why supersonic airliners like the Concorde really failed.
I don't think they have a chance anyway, because a lot of the reason the Concorde worked what a lot of important people had to physically be present. Concorde's heyday was long before you got high quality, stable video conferencing and phone calls just did not cut it. And these people are no longer in a contact blackout zone - which can be a pretty big deal if you're the CEO and shit just hit the fan. A friend of mine recently told about an episode where he was sending mail from the plane's wifi network, a colleague was like "Umm.... aren't you supposed to be on the plane back home now?" so he answered "I am, what's your point? ;)"
Having said all that, there may be niche markets for small hypersonic business jets or small cargo planes (FedEx's new slogan, "When it absolutely, positively has to be halfway around the world... TODAY!").
Could be, but I doubt it - most of the overhead in package delivery is that they're rounded up, sorted and bulk shipped every leg of the way with scheduled deliveries. The very fastest overnight express rush orders where your package is driven directly to the airport, put individually on the first jet going in the right direction on every leg with a delivery truck standing by to get it to its final destination is pretty damn fast. And expensive, but nothing like chartering a hypersonic jet would be. The only way would be if they were already in regularly scheduled traffic and full of other things, but then you're stuck to the schedule and the regular jet that's scheduled to leave now will beat the once-per-day hypersonic flight that leaves in 10 hours.
However Bitcoin has limited and predictable inflation which eventually stops entirely, so (in theory) it's quite possible to just build up savings. With a stable monetary base the value of your savings basically tracks overall change in GDP. If the economy grows at 2% per year, the value of your savings does too. No investment required, though obviously nothing stops you investing if you want to try and beat general economic growth.
I've rarely seen so much wrong rolled up into a few sentences. Inflation means that the purchasing power of your money goes down over time, the quantity of Bitcoin is known but the value is not so saying it has a predictable inflatioin is just ridiculous. Yes, printing of money is one of the things causing inflation but far from the only one. Like you say in the next sentence, the purchasing power will continue to change also after all Bitcoins are assigned an an increasing value we'd call deflation - it's just negative inflation. But let us talk closer about the steady stead.
With a steady state, whoever owns Bitcoins own a fixed fraction of the total Bitcoin economy - not to be confused with the GDP of any country or the world. If you own 1% of the Bitcoins, you own 1% of the economy whether that's worth a million, a billion, a trillion or nothing at all. So if 10 times as many people want to use Bitcoins, all the existing money will be worth 10 times as much. If 90% (leaving 1/10th) leaves, your money will drop to 1/10th of the value.
Actually it's worse than that because most of the Bitcoins are not liquid, In order to be able to buy Bitcoins somebody must be willing to sell them, and already today most of them are hoarded. What it means is that the people who actually want to use Bitcoins are buying and selling from an even smaller pool of money, the whole actual economy must fit within just a fraction of the total Bitcoins. And it gets very susceptible to flash crashes if the hoarders stampede, on top of the chance that people abandon the currency.
Either way, the system keeps getting stuffed with more and more "old money" which means you have to be crazier and crazier to invest as you get less and less Bitcoins for your dollars while the existing Bitcoin owners profit from deflation. The early adopters have the most to gain and the last ones in most to lose, eventually new people will cease to join and the panic will start in the other direction as the Bitcoins only have value as long as anyone else accepts Bitcoins.
Market domination isn't a goal of FOSS at all, ir shouldnt be. Software freedom is for those who want it and are willing to trade their own time and effort for it.
I think you will find a lot of people in the open source community who think Linux should be used by everyone because open source software is superior and not just FLOSSies who'll take substandard software because it's GNU/free. I doubt for example that 99.9% of the Android users care about the that aspect of their phone - which is often locked down anyway.
How can you do that when anyone can contribute? In FOSS land there is no way to enforce regression testing and when contributes give you whatever they want to make instead of that somebody tells them to make?
Reject the patches? If Linus doesn't like your code, it doesn't go into the Linux kernel period. Maybe the would be contributer gives up, maybe it goes into some kind of test branch or even try for a full fork, but every project is responsible for their own quality. You can't let crap through then complain it's full of shit.
Of course if you are hardline about that, the community might turn on you and turn the fork into the more popular version but all that'd show is that people care more about the new features than any stability and compatibility. And you can't stop people from aiming the gun at their feet and pulling the trigger.
Long story short if you get a tax on your profits you should also get a tax break on your losses, otherwise say you made $100m one year and lose $100m the next year, the government would take a big profit tax while you in net haven't actually made any profit. This is actually true for people too, at least here in Norway. If I had a just terrible year, realized huge losses in the stock market so I should in theory get a tax refund but it exceeds my actual taxes then I don't get a check, I only get zero taxes and a deductible loss I can use next year.
The same is true for companies, which is often a problem for a company posting huge losses and going out of business. The government "owes" them a tax break but since companies disappear when they go bankrupt if you don't handle it right the government never has to honor it. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just making sure that the company going out of business gets the same tax breaks as a company managing to stay in business would have had. And no, you still don't make money by losing money...
Do not feel dirty about doing .NET/MS SQL Server development; we were all young an idealistic and while you can still build a decent career without using the Microsoft stack why limit your options? In the end to me programming is programming, if I like what I am be tasked to do I donâ(TM)t care what platform it is under and ultimately I am looking to pay the bills :)
While that is true I've found that if you just let your career drift and take on whatever work someone offers you or is most easily available then you rarely end up going where you wanted. You do this one bit because even though you're not interested you can grok it and you're available, then the next time you're the most qualified and before you know it you're stuck with it and you get passed up for doing the job you really wanted to do. If you want to work with Linux, then really you should work hard to get experience on Linux and not just get a .NET job and hope you can switch somewhere down the road.
Looking back from the beginning to the present I have moved quite a bit, but always a limited distance with each job move. Maybe you had one such good experience but most employers most of the time want an employer who's done the same job already, they're not interested in your professional development only to have a drop-in cog in their machinery. Of course they rarely find a carbon copy of the person they want so there's some wiggle room but the big leaps just don't happen unless you're willing to really start at the bottom again. It's not that I couldn't do the job, but I'm not going to get the job because nobody could read my CV and know that.
And don't forget that astroturfing isn't just about making yourself look good, it's also about astrotrashing your competition. Alternatively you can run a really really poor and obvious astroturfing, making it look like not only is the company so desperate about their product quality they need to resort to astroturfing, they're also horribly inept at it. Ultimately it comes down to actually reading review and thinking "Does it sound like the author has an ax to grind or is trying to sugarcoat it?", usually there's some that seem more genuine than others.
The point is to use some kind of exception to get the doctor to go from "you WILL die of a heart attack" to "you MIGHT die of a heart attack" and then think "might schmight, I might and I might not" and just pretend that's a total unknown instead of a very strong probability.
But seriously folks this is pretty much the same thing as Your Doctor telling you that you need to do a significant amount of exercise and change your diet
because there's no way you can become the world's oldest person smoking from you're 21 to you're 117, drinking alcohol (port wine) and eating lots of chocolate. People like that just need one counterexample of a person who didn't have a heart attack and they're fine. Yeah maybe that'll kill you or something else will kill you but it's all statistics and in the end something will kill us all, so why worry? And in an odd sort of way, I can understand that because dead people don't worry over the life they never got to live. I mean if I went to sleep tonight and never woke up, everybody would be all "oh ah torn away so early, what a shame he died so young" (well, 30s is still young when it comes to dying) but I'd have no clue about it. I'd gone to bed thinking I'd live to be a hundred and never find out I was wrong.
Whenever someone mentions unusually cold temperatures in a single winter or even a decade or two, well, that's just weather. Why isn't the reverse true? What you advocate isn't science, it's evangelism.
I have a feeling you're going to just scoff at any science anyway, but low and high pressures alternate. If there's been an unusually cold winter one place, other places probably had unusually warm winters. The whole globe isn't cooling down, it's warming up. And we do have other less accurate measures that go further back in time, you're the one claiming we don't have enough information but can't be bothered to find out if it's true. If you go camping and make a fire and a forest fire breaks out near your campsite and you go "it's not proven, forest fires can start by lightning strikes" yet nobody has seen a thunderstorm pass through your claim of natural causes starts looking pretty weak. Replace the campfire with the whole earth burning oil, the forest fire with melting ice and the lightning strike with natural variation and you have a pretty good analogy.
Well, note that the chart is of the "white lies, black lies and statistics" type. If you actually extend it down to 0 you'll see there's a pretty far way to go still. Then again, it's also like a smaller and smaller ice cube in a big glass of water...