Generally, talented people create things because they either love doing it or have a real need to express themselves. Often, they can also make a living out of doing that if they are good enough. (...) Maybe there's too many content creators in the world - there certainly seems to be a lot of rubbish content out there.
In all honestly, many may have the need but there's plenty who suck at it. See the initial round of talent shows for example, where some people sing like a cat being tortured but still think they can make it as a singer. Trying to get people to pay to listen to you actually weeds out a lot of them. I have a relative that had an intense need to express himself, paintings, books, poems, sculptures, photographs, everything - none of which are going to make art history. He didn't have to care what you thought about it though, so he didn't. It's not those that are "good enough" that make a living, it's those that make things their customers want. That can be two very different things, many so called "great artists" went poor and unrecognized in their time. And many best left forgotten too.
Besides, it tends to presume that just because you have an idea you can realize it without money. I can have a great movie idea but I'd still need a cast, a crew, locations, stages, camera, sound, lighting, clothes, props, makeup, music, editing. For example Lord of the Rings took something like 2400 people to make, how many of them can you name? Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen and Orlando Bloom maybe. The other 99% you can't, most of them didn't give any creative input either. Stand here, do that, move that light two feet to the right. I like a lot of the popular art, no surprise since that's why it's called popular. It's fair to have particular tastes, but some seem to have them just to be elitist artsy fellows, because they understand art "better" than the rest.
If the audience wants brain dead action movies with lots of explosions, is the audience wrong? Is Hollywood wrong for pandering to what they obviously want, and not making art movies instead? Or the music industry for giving teen girls boy bands and teen boys a superbabe in skimpy clothing to drool over? I mean, if it's just for the artist's self realization we're paying them I'd like my government sponsored self-realization too. Just like the press they're both independent but at the same time their value is ultimately none if nobody reads it. Maybe one thought provoking article is worth more than a thousand bland notices but multiplied by zero readers it's still zero value. Art only has value if at least somebody appreciates it beyond the artist itself.
And suddenly 234235623 twitter links go dead. In this context a URL shortener is an anonymizer too, you'll now have a bit.ly referrer not a evilwarezsite.com referrer. I bet Rapidshare would love it if they insisted on that, it'd turn into a PR nightmare for the copyright holders.
I don't see how "sexual orientation" or "marital status" are important questions.
You will understand once you have a female employee of a certain age, childless and in a long term relationship. Maternity leave is a pretty big hit to an employer who just spent half a year training her for the job. Less so for guys but still paternity leave, daycare and child's sickness do affect productivity. Many employers will try finding out indirectly without really asking, not to mention those who have the "right" answers may volunteer them since it's to their benefit. There's a law against asking, but there's no law saying you must disqualify them if they told you as part of a completely innocent question like "Tell me about yourself". You're just not legally allowed to take that into consideration, so legally you'll claim you didn't.
Some think you should simply lie if you're asked. No, you're not planning to have children. When it happens a short while later anyway, it just happened. Tough shit, now you're stuck with me. On the other hand you're now in a hostile relationship with your employer - despite being practically immune during the maternity leave - and employers become suspicious of all females of that age. As for age discrimination, that's a joke - maybe you can't ask about age but you can ask about education. Oh, so you graduated school X in 2003. Any work experience before that? No. Hmm, I wonder how old you can be... For most people their bachelor/master/phd will be relevant for most of their work life, much longer than your first job. They'll know it close enough anyway.
Uncompressed HD is in the neighborhood of 1.5 Gbps. Lossless JPEG 2000 averages around 400-500 Mbps for HD video. DNxHD of "broadcast quality" is 100-200 Mbps. AVC-I 100 (100 Mbps) is probably good enough for most news and sports usage.
A BluRay is about 50 Mbps and typical broadcasts no more than 10-20 Mbps, all these formats are to keep a master that you can encode new consumer versions from. In that sense even uncompressed 4K is "only" about 5TB for a 2 hour movie. Not really much I think for a major Hollywood production that cost many, many millions of dollars - I could store that on two HDDs. Of course things with a quickly diminishing value like news and sports are different, but honestly I can't see storage costs to be that terrible compared to production cost.
If you base your staffing decisions on whoever seems "whitest" or worships the same imaginary friend in the sky, you are severely limiting your ability to compete in the global market.
Well, according to certain libertards that means there's no problem because the free market will take care of it.
Do you really expect an employee to perform well if they're under constant threat of losing their job ? You need to look beyond the tip of your nose and realize you need them as much as they need you.
That's honestly just not true, I've had coworkers - fortunately not close coworkers - die suddenly, one day they're there the other they're gone. Trust me, the company handles that far better than I would showing up for work one day and finding the place boarded up and gone after an Enron scandal or something. Of course they need skilled people in general, but they don't need any employee in particular. And when the economy is in the crapper and unemployment is sky high employees need the job the most while the employer needs the workers the least. It honestly never will be an equal relationship because most people depend on a single full-time job while to a company being totally dependent on one person is usually a big no-no. I only have one life and unless my name is Lord Voldemort I have to accept that I can't distribute that risk around, but a company can and a company will - regardless of how nice they treat their employees.
It uses only a 3.2 TB tape, which is too small to even back up hard drives that were shipping three months ago (4 TB) without compression. (...) Even more amusingly, the tape industry keeps creeping up in their estimates of compression. It used to be that their best-case capacity estimates assumed 2x compression. Now it's 2.5x.
Yeah, I think this is particularly funny in context of being "embraced by movie and television markets". How much is your average H.264 encoded video compressed by the tape drive? 0%, same with working formats like ProRes, DNxHD and CineForm. Even raw, uncompressed footage is better stored with specialized algorithms like H.264 in Hi444PP mode that has predictive lossless coding. Need to store tons of audio? FLAC (or AAC, MP3, Theora for lossy) and again 0% compression. Pictures? PNG. Hell, both Microsoft and LibreOffice apply basic ZIP compression to their documents so it's not even true for that anymore. If you're getting any significant compression of your tape drive, you're doing it wrong.
There's two meanings here, one is the "I believe in science" as in I'd believe in an experiment I've done myself controlling all the parameters and equipment and that others can replicate, that is that the scientific method works. The other meaning is the one where someone claims "Science shows..." because then there's a ton of questions about who did this research, can you trust the data, can you trust the model, can you trust the conclusions, can you trust the way those conclusions are being represented? Has this been independently confirmed or even refuted by other scientists? Everything you read second hand is in a way hearsay and in any larger experiment even the participants have to trust no one is fabricating data or tampering with results or that the equipment is rigged.
Ideal science only exist in an ideal world, where all scientists are perfectly honest, skilled, unbiased and has no stake in either outcome. In practice there's a lot of poor science, a lot of biased science including research-for-hire science and in some cases even dishonest scientists. In that sense I only believe in most science because there's a chain of evidence that I don't trust 100%. If it comes down to two conflicting positions like "AGW is real" and "AGW is made up" then it's a form of meta-research, who is more credible. And that's never really an absolute, though I'll admit in some cases I'd say one side is beyond any reasonable doubt right. But if you ask me if I trust everything that's claimed as science in the papers, then hell no...
I'm not sure there's a contradiction here, Red Hat obviously made their money on the server market as that was their specialization. But the reason they could specialize is that developers can pull Linux in the direction they want. You want it to run on embedded? Mobile? Tablets? Desktops? Servers? Supercomputers? On x86 or PowerPC or ARM or PDP-11? Linux has become its own gravity well, whatever you want to do you'd rather add that functionality to Linux than trying to roll your own thing. Ultimately that's the reason there was something for Red Hat to start packaging up, there's no chicken or egg situation here. Being developer friendly came first, useful as a server later.
The trouble with this type of driverless car tech is that it's going to be as brittle as the AI it's based on. It may work fine for normal, complex or not, situations, but the day a child runs out in front of it in a way it's not been programmed to handle there's going to be a tragedy.
The question is, how prepared is the average driver? I don't mean hazardous driving but according to stats (1, 2) I found there's about 3 trillion miles driven, 6 million crashes and 40,000 fatalities in the US each year. That's one crash for every 500,000 miles driven - that sounds incredibly little to me but it says 3000 billion miles. Even if you consider that near-accidents and emergencies happen more often they're many thousands of miles apart. Nobody is really able to stay alert that long for something that doesn't happen 99.99% of the time.
It's great what you learned at your driver's exam, but most people aren't there. At best they're simply cruising and need to snap into emergency mode, not counting all those who aren't paying sufficient attention, are tired, fiddling with the stereo, their phone, distracted by passengers, fail to react, panic, do stupid things like swerve into opposing traffic, on alcohol, on drugs and so on. Nor do they have a 360 degree view or IR vision or any of the other tools an automated car would use. By far most often the threat is obvious if observed and the solution usually equally so.
After all, there's only so many things you can observe about the people around you too, you can see the child but you can't know what it's thinking. It's just the basics of that it's a child, what trajectory it's on, is it unaccompanied and in all honesty there's not that much you manage to process while you're driving by at a fair speed. It's mostly attention, if that child runs in direction of the road I have to react instantly and break which will cut a typical response time from 1.5 seconds to 0.2 seconds. It might just not be that relevant to a computer that's still analyzing all possible problems simultaneously.
No, the wealth of people in major industrialized countries comes from the ability to work more effectively and be able to perform tasks with less effort and to collectively be able to do things in less time or to produce more with the same amount of labor. This is usually done not through hiring slaves or paying people in 3rd world countries, but rather through designing machines or better manufacturing processes that people who live in countries with less wealth.
And who exactly takes it from there? You design it, cheap foreigners produce it, operate it and support it is the norm today. Sure it's nice to be skimming off the top keeping only the high cost, high skill labor in the US but it won't last forever, in fact it's running out of time. Production, transportation, material moving, natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations in total make up about 20% of the jobs, the production workers alone some 6%. I don't think there's a single thing in my PC, TV, stereo or of my small electronics that is made in the western world, nor is 95%+ of the clothes I find in a regular store. If it wasn't for a bailout you'd not have an auto industry either.
The other 80% working in management, professional, service, sale and office occupations don't really hold much advantage. A guy sitting in India can be just as efficient a hair dresser or waiter or chef or retail clerk or IT administrator or software developer as you. Usually not if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for the lowest bidder, but then that's like hiring the CEO's nephew because he's "good with computers" and would do it for $50. Those design jobs aren't immune to outsourcing either, they build experience and they're not stupid. Be "close enough" and make it cheaper and the cheap clone will win, if you don't believe that you're IBM in the 1980s and in for a rude awakening.
On a personal level, it's often much easier to get around the problem than trying to change the whole system. For example here in Norway there's some real silly restrictions on when you can only buy beer in the store like until 8 PM on weekdays, 6 PM on Saturday and not at all on Sunday. It probably goes as far back as prohibition, we had one too. Can I be arsed to campaign against it? Nah, I'll just buy enough beer that I have some around if we suddenly at 7 PM on a Saturday find out we're gathering for beers anyway and so does the other 75% of the population that drinks alcohol even though if we were arsed to do something about it we have a huge majority. It doesn't help that there's one party on the left (socialists) and one on the center/right (Christians) that with about 5% of the votes each want to keep it this way.
The Roman who called it "Bread and circuses" had this figured out 2000 years ago. As long as people a job that puts food on the table and entertainment, you're pretty much good. A lot of the big noble revolutions in history were to the man in the street about money. "No taxation without representation" leading to the Boston Tea Party, that's things that hit people in the wallet. Say all you want about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, but I doubt the average farmer cared - except maybe he didn't have to quarter any soldiers. Hitler came to power on top of massive unemployment. Gandhi knew attacking the Salt Tax was something everyone could get behind. Don't think a major part of the Civil Rights movement was equal jobs and equal pay as white people. The fall of the Soviet Union was most of all an economic collapse.
If the "silent majority" is getting pissed, it's got to be because they think the government is making them really poor or really miserable. Can most Americans say they feel the clammy hands of government on them? No. You don't see them anymore, you don't feel them. There's cameras and car registration readers and the NSA bugging everyone's phone calls but there no physical stalker to creep you out, like in the old East Bloc where large parts of the population were snitches. The bank bailout that hit people's wallet, now that makes people angry. Maybe not armed revolution angry, but at least occupy wall street angry. Personally I'm rather surprised Europe hasn't had more civil unrest than they have, with countries like Spain at 23% unemployment and rising. That's a lot of people with no bread and you don't enjoy the circus on an empty stomach.
Either their standards of living are raised to the point of the industrialized countries, or our standards are brought down to theirs. (...) I guess we know which one the corporate elite would prefer, based on what they've done to the economies of the industrialized nations.
That's a vast oversimplification, our standard of living is based on being able to hire people to work many hours for one of our hours. If you had to pay US wages to all the people that produce your goods then prices would be higher and your effective wealth lower. Redistributing wealth is easy - it happens every time you buy something from India or China. Creating more wealth is hard, businesses aren't inefficient on purpose. In the end you need to have some sustainable advantage to sustainably have higher wages than other countries and there aren't really that many on a national level, there's a few countries like Saudi-Arabia that have that much oil but for most countries it's just people. Give the rest of the world a good education and there's nothing special about an American teenager over an Indian or Chinese teenager. We've tried to sustain it anyway on debt and the results are trickling in.
Here in Norway we got more mountains and rain per square kilometer or per person the US could dream about - okay we have a cold climate too - but not even we are self-sufficient on hydro power or for that matter renewable power. Sure as fossil fuels run out they'll surely be built - just like wind, water, solar, geothermal, biofuel and everything else you can think of - but they won't add up to the current energy usage. This figure pretty much says it all.
True that, but what they do have are people that are now full time employed as politicians which is probably just as big a difference as the actual political power. Parties that miss the cut-off limit have a really hard time keeping the steam going for 4 years on volunteer work, I've seen the Pirate Party Sweden struggle with that. I hope this means they carry the momentum to the national elections next year, I bet the MAFIAA would grow ulcers over having the Pirate Party in the Bundestag.
For example, an advert that targets everyone within a 10-mile radius of a medium-sized British town (Dorking) is valued at 28p per click by Facebook's advertising tool. However, targeting single gay men in the area with a preference for nightclubbing raises the price to 71p per click
That typically means young and single, which has always been a very attractive market with a lot of disposable time and money. Can we get a comparison to straight people with a preference to nightclubbing? Of course a blanket ad trying to sell to everyone is worth far far less...
Nintendo proved that you could sell an underpowered console at a profit from day one and still make piles of money. Apple and numerous Android manufacterers have shown that you can sell a nifty device at a decent profit margin and satisfy millions of people with $1 games.
Yeah, if anything I think it's the other way around. Casual gamers are often very casual - a $1 smartphone/tablet game may be enough, why get a $200-300 console? In 2006 there really weren't many other casual gaming options except flash games, in 2013 there are plenty. Hell, sometimes they drive an insanely crazy bargain against themselves, for example I got Hector: Badge of Carnage for the iPhone and it's a steal for $3 - actually 3x$1 so you can try it for a dollar, as opposed to paying $19,99 on the Telltalegames site. I can get Angry Birds for the PC at a bargain price of only 6.47 GBP. It's like they don't want to sell for the PC at all unless you're hemorrhaging money.
As for the xbox/ps3, I think they both know the next generation will last much longer than this one - just look at graphics card reviews and how far they have to crank it up to 2560x1600 at Ultra/Extreme/Enthusiast/Maximum quality level and the most punishing AA modes to show the difference. The next gen consoles will have full HD and "enough" shaders for a 1920x1080 screen and will not be outdated for at least a decade. They're waiting because they want to have a little edge over the other - better to have an edge in 10 years than be first to the market for 1 year. Microsoft couldn't honestly couldn't care about their positioning relative to the Wii U, it's their positioning relative to the PS4 that matters to them.
You would be surprised how many employers will reject a potential employee based on unfounded roomers. Even if his skills are needed, many will simply say "why take the risk" and many employers have the mentality that to get the job you need to be from the top 1% and spotless. Trust me on this
Roomers, seriously? Anyway, it's not like candidates are that transparent. Usually you end up with a pool of them that haven't really disqualified themselves in any way, that all look like "okay" workers but you won't know which are the lemons and which are actually good. If you find a reason to disqualify one, great the pool just got smaller. They don't have to be ivy league with honors, but if you're "marked" there's plenty fish in the sea that are not. In all honestly both in the job interviews I've done myself and the few I've been interviewing I've felt that it's a lot easier to single yourself out in a negative way than in a positive way. If you made it through without any major shows of ignorance or awkwardness or character mismatch, it was probably a good interview.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it.
At least here in Norway there no such thing, through the post office you're always entitled to a bank of last resort. Ignoring that I've never been asked for my bank account number until after I've been employed, they may think I'm crazy but they'd still have to pay my salary - they will need my id number for tax reporting though. I would not get paid in cash but I would get a "payout referral" or something like that - I'm not sure how to translate it, it's not a cashier's check but more a wire-to-cash transfer you can collect at the bank. The money is reserved but the transaction is not done until the recipient collects at the bank. If the recipient doesn't collect in 3 months, it expires and the reservation is lifted and the money stays on the account. I used to work in the financial industry and occasionally customers would get payouts but have closed the bank account they were supposed to receive it on. We would then send out these things, most people would simply direct the money to the right account but they could also cash it without having any account at all. If they didn't collect we still had to keep them as client funds until someone asked for them.
Just as math should be taught in math class and so on. If you want to teach religion in a class dedicated to the subject, I'm OK with that. But it would need to cover ALL religions and beliefs, which I think people would throw the hissy fit to end all hissy fits over.
Everyone should have been through the major world religions in social science class, for its impact on society and human behavior. It's pretty hard to avoid religion in history class too, in that context you don't need to cover FSM since it's had no followers and no significant impact on history but we did cover dead religions like greek, roman and norse mythology. Whether or not you believe in a religion or not, it's pretty bad to be ignorant about what billions of other people believe and that is apparently important to them.
That's actually what they need to do if they want to stay relevant, because their competition has done it. (...) You know who I mean.
More like the other way around, today AMD and Intel both have OpenGL 3.0 support through mesa while AMD has OpenGL 4.2 through catalyst/fglrx. If AMD went through the trouble of opening their implementation then Intel would essentially get a free pass to that, not to mention an invaluable lesson in shader optimization tricks and that'd benefit nVidia too. Even if it were possible it'd not be in AMD's best interest.
I switched to Linux full time in 2007 after dabbling with it on and off since around 1999, I switched back to Win7 in 2011 after three and a half years and it wasn't because of Microsoft's marketing message. The reasons were complicated but one of them was that very often I got dragged into problems I didn't want. For example one classic was that I discover a new feature in an application I want. Is that version in my distro? No. Can I find a backport? No. Okay but I can upgrade my distro. Oh, new version has regressions. Oh, upgrade is buggy but problem goes away if I do a clean install - it's the "Why should you reinstall every 6 months" for Linux. One of the great reliefs I've had on Windows is that I can install the latest version and it won't end up hosing the base system.
Without further ado I'll just state the next one simply: There's quite a few Windows applications that either have no counterpart in Linux, lacks features, is buggy or user-unfriendly and WINE/VirtualBox is not always a solution - in particular WINE constantly needs tweaks and has regressions. Saying "you got what you paid for" makes it sound like you had a choice when there is no choice to pay for commercial software, it's either find some way to live with it or ditch Linux altogether. There's many times I wish I could have put down $20 or $50 or $100 for a Linux port and not deal with the OSS abomination. The "all or nothing" approach tends to make people choose nothing, particularly since a lot of good OSS runs on Windows too.
The only part I really miss in Windows is some kind of application update center, where software could register URLs to check for upgrades so you could do it all at once instead of every app running their own updater, not from mostly one repository like on Linux but still centrally managed. Overall though I can't really say I've missed Linux, it's okay enough if Windows turns to shit but it's not a very compelling value even though the cost is very low. But since some now live in the browser I suspect they'll be happy with Facebook, Facebook Chat, Webmail, YouTube etc. and the actual platform is irrelevant. OTOH "switch to Linux, you won't notice the difference" isn't that good a selling point...
Well my understanding of the patch is sketchy, but DCE6 is just the display controller chip and watermark in this context seem to be nothing but frame begin/end indicators or timings depending on number of pixels to draw, latency, display clock etc. so you'll get a picture on screen and the display buffer is updated at the right time. It certainly has nothing to do with watermarks in the cinavia sense.
ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Actually that's what did happen, they said they'd open up and for the most part they have - the instruction set for "decent 3D acceleration" is out there. A decent CPU analogy is that they promised x86_64 specs, you expected GCC. It doesn't magically make a team that's 2-3% the size of the proprietary team magically able to be 50 times as efficient, worse yet the hardware radically changes from generation to generation like now from VLIW to GCN which is basically to start over. And it continues to expand with geometry shaders, tesselation, new display standards, new chips etc. so it's a rapidly moving target.
For example, Mesa just got OpenGL 3.0 support last month, the standard was released back in 2008. That's not just lack of a driver, there's not even an implementation to accelerate. Of course you could say that AMD should release their proprietary driver/OpenGL implementation which would be nice indeed but isn't practical on so many levels and certainly not something they promised. Your post is essentially why nVidia doesn't want to get involved with OSS, it's "Whaaaaaaa give us specs, we'll write the code" "Okay here's specs" "Whaaaaaaaa performance sucks, write the code too".
Actually he said round trip but only after being done in volume and with R&D paid down, he did say towards the end that fuel costs were only $10-20/pound but already the Falcon Heavy would break the $1000/pound barrier - I assume this is to LEO. The capacity is only 40% of that to GTO which is almost the same as Mars transfer orbit, so more like $2500/pound but it still puts a 150 pound person on his way to Mars for $375k. The delta-v needed from Mars to Earth is lower, about as LEO so $150k for a $525k total. Of course you'll still need a lander and life support but I assume at the $500k price point Musk expects there is among other things a working Mars colony that can be expanded using local resources.
Remember that at this price point we could put 36,000 people a year on Mars if we dedicated NASA's budget to it, I'm thinking of a society that makes their own fuel, builds their own domes, produces their own solar panels and expands their own oxygen, food and water supply. The trip costs would be just the trip costs, I don't know how low you could get the lodging cost but surely it can't be that bad in volume. If you assume you start with a fully stockpiled ship on both ends and only think capsule+people+life support for the trip then it doesn't seem that unfeasible. Of course right now we have none of that but it'd be stupid for every mission to bring their own base and supplies forever.
If you could start to approach those rates you could possibly even make a living going to Mars, if you go for a 10 year trip and is a $100k/year software developer - which you can be from a cubicle on Mars - you can probably pay your own trip and boarding. Okay, the millionaire playboys will be first but if they can fund the R&D, get the volume up, cost down, fund the initial base then maybe you can get a snowball effect where lower costs lead to more people lead to lower costs. It won't solve earth's population problems but at $500k/person then colonizing Mars starts to look realistic. Once you're past a few thousand individuals they can procreate on their own too, though I suppose this is at odds with sending software developers;).
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Generally, talented people create things because they either love doing it or have a real need to express themselves. Often, they can also make a living out of doing that if they are good enough. (...) Maybe there's too many content creators in the world - there certainly seems to be a lot of rubbish content out there.
In all honestly, many may have the need but there's plenty who suck at it. See the initial round of talent shows for example, where some people sing like a cat being tortured but still think they can make it as a singer. Trying to get people to pay to listen to you actually weeds out a lot of them. I have a relative that had an intense need to express himself, paintings, books, poems, sculptures, photographs, everything - none of which are going to make art history. He didn't have to care what you thought about it though, so he didn't. It's not those that are "good enough" that make a living, it's those that make things their customers want. That can be two very different things, many so called "great artists" went poor and unrecognized in their time. And many best left forgotten too.
Besides, it tends to presume that just because you have an idea you can realize it without money. I can have a great movie idea but I'd still need a cast, a crew, locations, stages, camera, sound, lighting, clothes, props, makeup, music, editing. For example Lord of the Rings took something like 2400 people to make, how many of them can you name? Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen and Orlando Bloom maybe. The other 99% you can't, most of them didn't give any creative input either. Stand here, do that, move that light two feet to the right. I like a lot of the popular art, no surprise since that's why it's called popular. It's fair to have particular tastes, but some seem to have them just to be elitist artsy fellows, because they understand art "better" than the rest.
If the audience wants brain dead action movies with lots of explosions, is the audience wrong? Is Hollywood wrong for pandering to what they obviously want, and not making art movies instead? Or the music industry for giving teen girls boy bands and teen boys a superbabe in skimpy clothing to drool over? I mean, if it's just for the artist's self realization we're paying them I'd like my government sponsored self-realization too. Just like the press they're both independent but at the same time their value is ultimately none if nobody reads it. Maybe one thought provoking article is worth more than a thousand bland notices but multiplied by zero readers it's still zero value. Art only has value if at least somebody appreciates it beyond the artist itself.
So they ban the anonymizer website...
And suddenly 234235623 twitter links go dead. In this context a URL shortener is an anonymizer too, you'll now have a bit.ly referrer not a evilwarezsite.com referrer. I bet Rapidshare would love it if they insisted on that, it'd turn into a PR nightmare for the copyright holders.
I don't see how "sexual orientation" or "marital status" are important questions.
You will understand once you have a female employee of a certain age, childless and in a long term relationship. Maternity leave is a pretty big hit to an employer who just spent half a year training her for the job. Less so for guys but still paternity leave, daycare and child's sickness do affect productivity. Many employers will try finding out indirectly without really asking, not to mention those who have the "right" answers may volunteer them since it's to their benefit. There's a law against asking, but there's no law saying you must disqualify them if they told you as part of a completely innocent question like "Tell me about yourself". You're just not legally allowed to take that into consideration, so legally you'll claim you didn't.
Some think you should simply lie if you're asked. No, you're not planning to have children. When it happens a short while later anyway, it just happened. Tough shit, now you're stuck with me. On the other hand you're now in a hostile relationship with your employer - despite being practically immune during the maternity leave - and employers become suspicious of all females of that age. As for age discrimination, that's a joke - maybe you can't ask about age but you can ask about education. Oh, so you graduated school X in 2003. Any work experience before that? No. Hmm, I wonder how old you can be... For most people their bachelor/master/phd will be relevant for most of their work life, much longer than your first job. They'll know it close enough anyway.
Uncompressed HD is in the neighborhood of 1.5 Gbps. Lossless JPEG 2000 averages around 400-500 Mbps for HD video. DNxHD of "broadcast quality" is 100-200 Mbps. AVC-I 100 (100 Mbps) is probably good enough for most news and sports usage.
A BluRay is about 50 Mbps and typical broadcasts no more than 10-20 Mbps, all these formats are to keep a master that you can encode new consumer versions from. In that sense even uncompressed 4K is "only" about 5TB for a 2 hour movie. Not really much I think for a major Hollywood production that cost many, many millions of dollars - I could store that on two HDDs. Of course things with a quickly diminishing value like news and sports are different, but honestly I can't see storage costs to be that terrible compared to production cost.
If you base your staffing decisions on whoever seems "whitest" or worships the same imaginary friend in the sky, you are severely limiting your ability to compete in the global market.
Well, according to certain libertards that means there's no problem because the free market will take care of it.
Do you really expect an employee to perform well if they're under constant threat of losing their job ? You need to look beyond the tip of your nose and realize you need them as much as they need you.
That's honestly just not true, I've had coworkers - fortunately not close coworkers - die suddenly, one day they're there the other they're gone. Trust me, the company handles that far better than I would showing up for work one day and finding the place boarded up and gone after an Enron scandal or something. Of course they need skilled people in general, but they don't need any employee in particular. And when the economy is in the crapper and unemployment is sky high employees need the job the most while the employer needs the workers the least. It honestly never will be an equal relationship because most people depend on a single full-time job while to a company being totally dependent on one person is usually a big no-no. I only have one life and unless my name is Lord Voldemort I have to accept that I can't distribute that risk around, but a company can and a company will - regardless of how nice they treat their employees.
It uses only a 3.2 TB tape, which is too small to even back up hard drives that were shipping three months ago (4 TB) without compression. (...) Even more amusingly, the tape industry keeps creeping up in their estimates of compression. It used to be that their best-case capacity estimates assumed 2x compression. Now it's 2.5x.
Yeah, I think this is particularly funny in context of being "embraced by movie and television markets". How much is your average H.264 encoded video compressed by the tape drive? 0%, same with working formats like ProRes, DNxHD and CineForm. Even raw, uncompressed footage is better stored with specialized algorithms like H.264 in Hi444PP mode that has predictive lossless coding. Need to store tons of audio? FLAC (or AAC, MP3, Theora for lossy) and again 0% compression. Pictures? PNG. Hell, both Microsoft and LibreOffice apply basic ZIP compression to their documents so it's not even true for that anymore. If you're getting any significant compression of your tape drive, you're doing it wrong.
There's two meanings here, one is the "I believe in science" as in I'd believe in an experiment I've done myself controlling all the parameters and equipment and that others can replicate, that is that the scientific method works. The other meaning is the one where someone claims "Science shows..." because then there's a ton of questions about who did this research, can you trust the data, can you trust the model, can you trust the conclusions, can you trust the way those conclusions are being represented? Has this been independently confirmed or even refuted by other scientists? Everything you read second hand is in a way hearsay and in any larger experiment even the participants have to trust no one is fabricating data or tampering with results or that the equipment is rigged.
Ideal science only exist in an ideal world, where all scientists are perfectly honest, skilled, unbiased and has no stake in either outcome. In practice there's a lot of poor science, a lot of biased science including research-for-hire science and in some cases even dishonest scientists. In that sense I only believe in most science because there's a chain of evidence that I don't trust 100%. If it comes down to two conflicting positions like "AGW is real" and "AGW is made up" then it's a form of meta-research, who is more credible. And that's never really an absolute, though I'll admit in some cases I'd say one side is beyond any reasonable doubt right. But if you ask me if I trust everything that's claimed as science in the papers, then hell no...
I'm not sure there's a contradiction here, Red Hat obviously made their money on the server market as that was their specialization. But the reason they could specialize is that developers can pull Linux in the direction they want. You want it to run on embedded? Mobile? Tablets? Desktops? Servers? Supercomputers? On x86 or PowerPC or ARM or PDP-11? Linux has become its own gravity well, whatever you want to do you'd rather add that functionality to Linux than trying to roll your own thing. Ultimately that's the reason there was something for Red Hat to start packaging up, there's no chicken or egg situation here. Being developer friendly came first, useful as a server later.
The trouble with this type of driverless car tech is that it's going to be as brittle as the AI it's based on. It may work fine for normal, complex or not, situations, but the day a child runs out in front of it in a way it's not been programmed to handle there's going to be a tragedy.
The question is, how prepared is the average driver? I don't mean hazardous driving but according to stats (1, 2) I found there's about 3 trillion miles driven, 6 million crashes and 40,000 fatalities in the US each year. That's one crash for every 500,000 miles driven - that sounds incredibly little to me but it says 3000 billion miles. Even if you consider that near-accidents and emergencies happen more often they're many thousands of miles apart. Nobody is really able to stay alert that long for something that doesn't happen 99.99% of the time.
It's great what you learned at your driver's exam, but most people aren't there. At best they're simply cruising and need to snap into emergency mode, not counting all those who aren't paying sufficient attention, are tired, fiddling with the stereo, their phone, distracted by passengers, fail to react, panic, do stupid things like swerve into opposing traffic, on alcohol, on drugs and so on. Nor do they have a 360 degree view or IR vision or any of the other tools an automated car would use. By far most often the threat is obvious if observed and the solution usually equally so.
After all, there's only so many things you can observe about the people around you too, you can see the child but you can't know what it's thinking. It's just the basics of that it's a child, what trajectory it's on, is it unaccompanied and in all honesty there's not that much you manage to process while you're driving by at a fair speed. It's mostly attention, if that child runs in direction of the road I have to react instantly and break which will cut a typical response time from 1.5 seconds to 0.2 seconds. It might just not be that relevant to a computer that's still analyzing all possible problems simultaneously.
No, the wealth of people in major industrialized countries comes from the ability to work more effectively and be able to perform tasks with less effort and to collectively be able to do things in less time or to produce more with the same amount of labor. This is usually done not through hiring slaves or paying people in 3rd world countries, but rather through designing machines or better manufacturing processes that people who live in countries with less wealth.
And who exactly takes it from there? You design it, cheap foreigners produce it, operate it and support it is the norm today. Sure it's nice to be skimming off the top keeping only the high cost, high skill labor in the US but it won't last forever, in fact it's running out of time. Production, transportation, material moving, natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations in total make up about 20% of the jobs, the production workers alone some 6%. I don't think there's a single thing in my PC, TV, stereo or of my small electronics that is made in the western world, nor is 95%+ of the clothes I find in a regular store. If it wasn't for a bailout you'd not have an auto industry either.
The other 80% working in management, professional, service, sale and office occupations don't really hold much advantage. A guy sitting in India can be just as efficient a hair dresser or waiter or chef or retail clerk or IT administrator or software developer as you. Usually not if you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for the lowest bidder, but then that's like hiring the CEO's nephew because he's "good with computers" and would do it for $50. Those design jobs aren't immune to outsourcing either, they build experience and they're not stupid. Be "close enough" and make it cheaper and the cheap clone will win, if you don't believe that you're IBM in the 1980s and in for a rude awakening.
On a personal level, it's often much easier to get around the problem than trying to change the whole system. For example here in Norway there's some real silly restrictions on when you can only buy beer in the store like until 8 PM on weekdays, 6 PM on Saturday and not at all on Sunday. It probably goes as far back as prohibition, we had one too. Can I be arsed to campaign against it? Nah, I'll just buy enough beer that I have some around if we suddenly at 7 PM on a Saturday find out we're gathering for beers anyway and so does the other 75% of the population that drinks alcohol even though if we were arsed to do something about it we have a huge majority. It doesn't help that there's one party on the left (socialists) and one on the center/right (Christians) that with about 5% of the votes each want to keep it this way.
The Roman who called it "Bread and circuses" had this figured out 2000 years ago. As long as people a job that puts food on the table and entertainment, you're pretty much good. A lot of the big noble revolutions in history were to the man in the street about money. "No taxation without representation" leading to the Boston Tea Party, that's things that hit people in the wallet. Say all you want about the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, but I doubt the average farmer cared - except maybe he didn't have to quarter any soldiers. Hitler came to power on top of massive unemployment. Gandhi knew attacking the Salt Tax was something everyone could get behind. Don't think a major part of the Civil Rights movement was equal jobs and equal pay as white people. The fall of the Soviet Union was most of all an economic collapse.
If the "silent majority" is getting pissed, it's got to be because they think the government is making them really poor or really miserable. Can most Americans say they feel the clammy hands of government on them? No. You don't see them anymore, you don't feel them. There's cameras and car registration readers and the NSA bugging everyone's phone calls but there no physical stalker to creep you out, like in the old East Bloc where large parts of the population were snitches. The bank bailout that hit people's wallet, now that makes people angry. Maybe not armed revolution angry, but at least occupy wall street angry. Personally I'm rather surprised Europe hasn't had more civil unrest than they have, with countries like Spain at 23% unemployment and rising. That's a lot of people with no bread and you don't enjoy the circus on an empty stomach.
Either their standards of living are raised to the point of the industrialized countries, or our standards are brought down to theirs. (...) I guess we know which one the corporate elite would prefer, based on what they've done to the economies of the industrialized nations.
That's a vast oversimplification, our standard of living is based on being able to hire people to work many hours for one of our hours. If you had to pay US wages to all the people that produce your goods then prices would be higher and your effective wealth lower. Redistributing wealth is easy - it happens every time you buy something from India or China. Creating more wealth is hard, businesses aren't inefficient on purpose. In the end you need to have some sustainable advantage to sustainably have higher wages than other countries and there aren't really that many on a national level, there's a few countries like Saudi-Arabia that have that much oil but for most countries it's just people. Give the rest of the world a good education and there's nothing special about an American teenager over an Indian or Chinese teenager. We've tried to sustain it anyway on debt and the results are trickling in.
Here in Norway we got more mountains and rain per square kilometer or per person the US could dream about - okay we have a cold climate too - but not even we are self-sufficient on hydro power or for that matter renewable power. Sure as fossil fuels run out they'll surely be built - just like wind, water, solar, geothermal, biofuel and everything else you can think of - but they won't add up to the current energy usage. This figure pretty much says it all.
True that, but what they do have are people that are now full time employed as politicians which is probably just as big a difference as the actual political power. Parties that miss the cut-off limit have a really hard time keeping the steam going for 4 years on volunteer work, I've seen the Pirate Party Sweden struggle with that. I hope this means they carry the momentum to the national elections next year, I bet the MAFIAA would grow ulcers over having the Pirate Party in the Bundestag.
For example, an advert that targets everyone within a 10-mile radius of a medium-sized British town (Dorking) is valued at 28p per click by Facebook's advertising tool. However, targeting single gay men in the area with a preference for nightclubbing raises the price to 71p per click
That typically means young and single, which has always been a very attractive market with a lot of disposable time and money. Can we get a comparison to straight people with a preference to nightclubbing? Of course a blanket ad trying to sell to everyone is worth far far less...
Nintendo proved that you could sell an underpowered console at a profit from day one and still make piles of money. Apple and numerous Android manufacterers have shown that you can sell a nifty device at a decent profit margin and satisfy millions of people with $1 games.
Yeah, if anything I think it's the other way around. Casual gamers are often very casual - a $1 smartphone/tablet game may be enough, why get a $200-300 console? In 2006 there really weren't many other casual gaming options except flash games, in 2013 there are plenty. Hell, sometimes they drive an insanely crazy bargain against themselves, for example I got Hector: Badge of Carnage for the iPhone and it's a steal for $3 - actually 3x$1 so you can try it for a dollar, as opposed to paying $19,99 on the Telltalegames site. I can get Angry Birds for the PC at a bargain price of only 6.47 GBP. It's like they don't want to sell for the PC at all unless you're hemorrhaging money.
As for the xbox/ps3, I think they both know the next generation will last much longer than this one - just look at graphics card reviews and how far they have to crank it up to 2560x1600 at Ultra/Extreme/Enthusiast/Maximum quality level and the most punishing AA modes to show the difference. The next gen consoles will have full HD and "enough" shaders for a 1920x1080 screen and will not be outdated for at least a decade. They're waiting because they want to have a little edge over the other - better to have an edge in 10 years than be first to the market for 1 year. Microsoft couldn't honestly couldn't care about their positioning relative to the Wii U, it's their positioning relative to the PS4 that matters to them.
You would be surprised how many employers will reject a potential employee based on unfounded roomers. Even if his skills are needed, many will simply say "why take the risk" and many employers have the mentality that to get the job you need to be from the top 1% and spotless. Trust me on this
Roomers, seriously? Anyway, it's not like candidates are that transparent. Usually you end up with a pool of them that haven't really disqualified themselves in any way, that all look like "okay" workers but you won't know which are the lemons and which are actually good. If you find a reason to disqualify one, great the pool just got smaller. They don't have to be ivy league with honors, but if you're "marked" there's plenty fish in the sea that are not. In all honestly both in the job interviews I've done myself and the few I've been interviewing I've felt that it's a lot easier to single yourself out in a negative way than in a positive way. If you made it through without any major shows of ignorance or awkwardness or character mismatch, it was probably a good interview.
And finally, how about people who do not get a bank account? It's not like it's possible for them to have a halfway decent life now, but then, it will become virtually impossible. Try to get a job in Europe without a bank account. Just try. No such luck. There is NO way you will be paid in cash. No company I know of will ever even consider doing it.
At least here in Norway there no such thing, through the post office you're always entitled to a bank of last resort. Ignoring that I've never been asked for my bank account number until after I've been employed, they may think I'm crazy but they'd still have to pay my salary - they will need my id number for tax reporting though. I would not get paid in cash but I would get a "payout referral" or something like that - I'm not sure how to translate it, it's not a cashier's check but more a wire-to-cash transfer you can collect at the bank. The money is reserved but the transaction is not done until the recipient collects at the bank. If the recipient doesn't collect in 3 months, it expires and the reservation is lifted and the money stays on the account. I used to work in the financial industry and occasionally customers would get payouts but have closed the bank account they were supposed to receive it on. We would then send out these things, most people would simply direct the money to the right account but they could also cash it without having any account at all. If they didn't collect we still had to keep them as client funds until someone asked for them.
Just as math should be taught in math class and so on. If you want to teach religion in a class dedicated to the subject, I'm OK with that. But it would need to cover ALL religions and beliefs, which I think people would throw the hissy fit to end all hissy fits over.
Everyone should have been through the major world religions in social science class, for its impact on society and human behavior. It's pretty hard to avoid religion in history class too, in that context you don't need to cover FSM since it's had no followers and no significant impact on history but we did cover dead religions like greek, roman and norse mythology. Whether or not you believe in a religion or not, it's pretty bad to be ignorant about what billions of other people believe and that is apparently important to them.
That's actually what they need to do if they want to stay relevant, because their competition has done it. (...) You know who I mean.
More like the other way around, today AMD and Intel both have OpenGL 3.0 support through mesa while AMD has OpenGL 4.2 through catalyst/fglrx. If AMD went through the trouble of opening their implementation then Intel would essentially get a free pass to that, not to mention an invaluable lesson in shader optimization tricks and that'd benefit nVidia too. Even if it were possible it'd not be in AMD's best interest.
I switched to Linux full time in 2007 after dabbling with it on and off since around 1999, I switched back to Win7 in 2011 after three and a half years and it wasn't because of Microsoft's marketing message. The reasons were complicated but one of them was that very often I got dragged into problems I didn't want. For example one classic was that I discover a new feature in an application I want. Is that version in my distro? No. Can I find a backport? No. Okay but I can upgrade my distro. Oh, new version has regressions. Oh, upgrade is buggy but problem goes away if I do a clean install - it's the "Why should you reinstall every 6 months" for Linux. One of the great reliefs I've had on Windows is that I can install the latest version and it won't end up hosing the base system.
Without further ado I'll just state the next one simply: There's quite a few Windows applications that either have no counterpart in Linux, lacks features, is buggy or user-unfriendly and WINE/VirtualBox is not always a solution - in particular WINE constantly needs tweaks and has regressions. Saying "you got what you paid for" makes it sound like you had a choice when there is no choice to pay for commercial software, it's either find some way to live with it or ditch Linux altogether. There's many times I wish I could have put down $20 or $50 or $100 for a Linux port and not deal with the OSS abomination. The "all or nothing" approach tends to make people choose nothing, particularly since a lot of good OSS runs on Windows too.
The only part I really miss in Windows is some kind of application update center, where software could register URLs to check for upgrades so you could do it all at once instead of every app running their own updater, not from mostly one repository like on Linux but still centrally managed. Overall though I can't really say I've missed Linux, it's okay enough if Windows turns to shit but it's not a very compelling value even though the cost is very low. But since some now live in the browser I suspect they'll be happy with Facebook, Facebook Chat, Webmail, YouTube etc. and the actual platform is irrelevant. OTOH "switch to Linux, you won't notice the difference" isn't that good a selling point...
Well my understanding of the patch is sketchy, but DCE6 is just the display controller chip and watermark in this context seem to be nothing but frame begin/end indicators or timings depending on number of pixels to draw, latency, display clock etc. so you'll get a picture on screen and the display buffer is updated at the right time. It certainly has nothing to do with watermarks in the cinavia sense.
ATI announced they were opening up, and I got ready to dump Nvidia. And then... it didn't happen.
Actually that's what did happen, they said they'd open up and for the most part they have - the instruction set for "decent 3D acceleration" is out there. A decent CPU analogy is that they promised x86_64 specs, you expected GCC. It doesn't magically make a team that's 2-3% the size of the proprietary team magically able to be 50 times as efficient, worse yet the hardware radically changes from generation to generation like now from VLIW to GCN which is basically to start over. And it continues to expand with geometry shaders, tesselation, new display standards, new chips etc. so it's a rapidly moving target.
For example, Mesa just got OpenGL 3.0 support last month, the standard was released back in 2008. That's not just lack of a driver, there's not even an implementation to accelerate. Of course you could say that AMD should release their proprietary driver/OpenGL implementation which would be nice indeed but isn't practical on so many levels and certainly not something they promised. Your post is essentially why nVidia doesn't want to get involved with OSS, it's "Whaaaaaaa give us specs, we'll write the code" "Okay here's specs" "Whaaaaaaaa performance sucks, write the code too".
I would go see Cowboys of the Caribbean.
<warning: disturbing mental image> Brokeback on the Seven Seas? </warning>
Actually he said round trip but only after being done in volume and with R&D paid down, he did say towards the end that fuel costs were only $10-20/pound but already the Falcon Heavy would break the $1000/pound barrier - I assume this is to LEO. The capacity is only 40% of that to GTO which is almost the same as Mars transfer orbit, so more like $2500/pound but it still puts a 150 pound person on his way to Mars for $375k. The delta-v needed from Mars to Earth is lower, about as LEO so $150k for a $525k total. Of course you'll still need a lander and life support but I assume at the $500k price point Musk expects there is among other things a working Mars colony that can be expanded using local resources.
Remember that at this price point we could put 36,000 people a year on Mars if we dedicated NASA's budget to it, I'm thinking of a society that makes their own fuel, builds their own domes, produces their own solar panels and expands their own oxygen, food and water supply. The trip costs would be just the trip costs, I don't know how low you could get the lodging cost but surely it can't be that bad in volume. If you assume you start with a fully stockpiled ship on both ends and only think capsule+people+life support for the trip then it doesn't seem that unfeasible. Of course right now we have none of that but it'd be stupid for every mission to bring their own base and supplies forever.
If you could start to approach those rates you could possibly even make a living going to Mars, if you go for a 10 year trip and is a $100k/year software developer - which you can be from a cubicle on Mars - you can probably pay your own trip and boarding. Okay, the millionaire playboys will be first but if they can fund the R&D, get the volume up, cost down, fund the initial base then maybe you can get a snowball effect where lower costs lead to more people lead to lower costs. It won't solve earth's population problems but at $500k/person then colonizing Mars starts to look realistic. Once you're past a few thousand individuals they can procreate on their own too, though I suppose this is at odds with sending software developers ;).