Agile doesn't deliver what the business wants which is to turn coding into non-creative work where you know almost exactly how long it takes to get from A to B and exceptions have explanations like traffic accidents or construction work. Nothing ever will but it won't stop them from trying so the best Agile can do is shield the developers from impossible tasks and meaningless meetings so they can spend time on actually doing development.
The first shield is the product owner, a ton of people want things and they'll go through all sorts of channels with competing priorities and sneaking in pet features. Shut them down, make that one channel in and one non-developer resource they can talk to if they're not happy with what they're getting. And no, there's no point in re-prioritizing things daily once every two weeks is fine for everything but hair-on-fire emergencies. The second shield is the scrum master, I'm currently one and my main job the way I see it is to maximize the number of hours my team members actually get work done on the things they're supposed to be working on. Particularly all fuzzy meetings called to discuss things where I say "You figure out what you want first from a business perspective, then let's talk solutions" or that are more or less status/re-planning meetings where I say "The quickest way to get it done is to let the ones working on it work on it."
It's not particularly Agile-specific, reality it's about two simple things, what should I be working on and let me be so I can do my f*cking job. Whether it actually works better for planning than iterative waterfall, meh... I've always said you should try to think and explain as far ahead as reasonable, like is this part of the functionality/structure you'd like to have in the end. You don't build a skyscraper by building a one-story building and then building one more story on top, if you know it's going to need to support 50 stories then tell us now.
So unless Tesla goes under, the stocks will be worth what people are prepared to pay for them. And unless you have a set of mind-control orbital satellites which can make people sane and rational when determining what they will pay for stocks, there is absolutely no guarantee a short on Tesla will pay off, even if they remain a tiny company.
While that is true market opportunities don't last forever. Tesla is flying high right now on the assumption that EVs are the future and that Tesla will be leading the revolution. But there's only so long you can sell the idea of a flying car before people want results and start questioning if flying cars will ever be a mass market thing. The other alternative is that the demand arrives, but Tesla isn't on the ball with regard to quantity or quality and some other company takes the bulk of the market. Sure, in theory they could make people think they've found the next big thing without delivering on the first big thing but I don't think it's very likely they can pull it off in practice. But if you're waiting to see if a growth stock will turn into a good value stock you'd better have a really long perspective, like 10 year minimum. A lot of people get emotionally invested and hold on to hope far beyond any rational behavior. They won't acknowledge that their investment was a flop until the profit and loss statement is blood red, that it just looks bad is not enough.
That's pretty ignorant. Because NAT creates very nearly as many problems as it solves. And if users don't want a device traceable or directly reachable by ipv6 address you can still do NAT with ipv6 too if you want; you just don't HAVE to.
Users have little choice on being traceable, it's what the ISP offers. Why do we bother with dynamic IPs, DHCP leases and all that stuff? Because IPs were/are a limited resource and when we were on dial-up reserving an IP for every customer was excessive. With always-on/mobile broadband most devices are always-on and and the IPv6 address space is massive. While there are some laws in some countries to preserve IP-customer history it's usually not forever and it takes a warrant to access. With IPv6 it'd be totally possible to move to a static default, you are path::to::ISP::customerNumber::MAC and it's yours forever and everything you do is linked by default. That's worse than Microsoft's Advertising ID because you can't effectively turn it off and switching to Linux doesn't help. At best maybe you can fake a new device every time and make them think you're a coffee shop or something.
They didn't explicitly state that it was overclocked because it couldn't possibly be more obvious.
True, but they also announced they'd bring it to market. It's a bit like demoing a customized race edition car and saying it's going on sale, while not explicitly saying that the street version will be much slower. If you search the net you'll find lots of false headlines like Intel to launch a 28-core monster CPU running at 5GHz later this year which makes it a PR goof. Some think it was done with malice to steal AMD's thunder but I doubt the backlash is worth it, but those who do are now trying to make as big a stink as possible about it.
It was high time to make sure the people's vote would not be taken into account, hence electronic voting.
Well in that respect I think that Trump being in office shows the system is "working". Unless the tin foil hat brigade decides Trump is just a puppet and the plan all along. Who knows...
And the alternative is...? I seem to remember a case I read once but somebody (given the time frame, probably the Russians) was collecting data on overtime pizza delivered to intelligence agencies. And I can sorta understand that, every time they discovered something big you'd have people working around the clock to figure it out. I can understand why you'd want to keep that a secret, on the other hand it's really hard for accounting and everyone else to pretend it didn't happen.
Take Amazon, it had the most ridiculous negative P/E ever. At the height of the dotcom boom I got a free $10 that I used to buy a $4 book with $6 shipping (international). How the fuckity fuck fuck to you make money on that? By staying the course with enough VC money that eventually you'll surface. That's kinda what I'm thinking about driverless cars at the moment, even if it doesn't make sense... even if they never recover their investment... there's so much money and so many corporations behind it that it'll happen. When I'm a senior citizen in 25+ years I'll have a self driving car. I'm probably not going to Mars, but that's okay. And the singularity is not happening. Immortality certainly not. You have a life, enjoy it.
That is just false. AMDs APU graphics could/can actually play games worth a salt.
Absolutely, but the division of labor between the CPU and GPU remains pretty much the same. The theory with APUs was that you'd mix and match CPU and GPU resources, calling the GPU for parallelism more because of the tight interconnect compared to going over PCIe. In reality AMDs APUs provided competitive value to Intel's CPU + nVidia GPU but they didn't really add any extra value. The gamer market didn't care because they used dGPUs anyway, in fact it's only when AMD released Zen processors with no graphics that competition returned. Integrating graphics didn't provide any value or advantage at all, they'd do just as fine integrating ATI/nVidia graphics chipset as they did before the buyout.
Then it printed your votes onto a piece of paper, and asked you to confirm that the printed ballot accurately reflected your choices. That seemed to me a sensible method of electronic voting. Use a computer to reduce the expense and confusion of custom-printed ballots for every election.
Uh, as long as there's a qualification process of sorts pre-printing a ton of ballots for each candidate at a printing press is likely to be far cheaper than doing it at every voting booth. Don't get me wrong I see a lot of privacy and security advantages of paper ballots but economics is not one of them. All that manual labor is expensive. Dealing with physical paper is expensive. The eVote is cheaper.
At one point AMD briefly passed 50% of retail desktop sales, thanks to the Athlon 64.
If I remember correctly it was retail CPU sales excluding pre-built systems from OEMs, Intel was still by far the biggest by total volume.
Intel came back strong and almost crushed AMD who screwed up with the A-series and other pre-Ryzen processors.
The actual screw-up was earlier, when AMD stretched waaaaaaaay too far to buy ATI for $5.4 billion where $4.2 billion was cash. That's the war chest AMD should have had to counter Intel Core 2, instead they were stretched super thin. To cut development cost they replaced manually designed circuits with inferior designs created by automation and they couldn't afford to invest as much as they should in process technology so that even then they managed an equivalent design they were behind on cost, performance and power consumption. Meanwhile ATI was under siege by nVidia and couldn't really contribute much and there wasn't really all that much gained by APUs over discrete/integrated graphics because it took special code paths to take advantage and the niche was too small.
Strategically it was also a huge mistake because sure ATI would be fully aligned with AMD (the CPU side). But it meant nVidia had little choice but to deal with Intel on their terms, which Intel used to kick nVidia out of the integrated chipset business and then took all integrated graphics on Intel chips for themselves. AMD opened that door and Intel said "look, we're just doing what the competition is doing". Even if worst case Intel had bought ATI as was rumored they'd have gotten nVidia's full support for free in the fight against Chipzilla instead of paying billions. They should have seen that the battle wouldn't be that easily won instead of thinking CPUs was in the box, on to GPUs...
so they choose the alternative --- drug themselves until they forget their pain. (...) Officially those who died of OD or those who drank themselves to death are not counted as suicide --- and they should be
I'd go with Darwin award rules, unless you were trying to die it's not suicide. That your escapism leads to high risk behavior and the need for a stronger and strong fix to keep reality at bay or you recklessly take a too large dose to cause your death is not the same. Otherwise you'd probably have to classify most extreme sport deaths as suicide by adrenaline addiction. Obviously you can miss out on a few that intentionally took a lethal dose without leaving any suicide note or anything like that, but like you said they've made a choice to do drugs instead.
If they were looking to outright die they'd probably pick a more direct approach, I mean there's quite a lot of them and that are quite certain to work, I really don't quite know what to think of people with failed suicide attempts. Honestly I'm thinking that if you really deep down wanted to be dead you'd be dead by now, this is "just" a theatrical cry for help. I could jump off the balcony head first into the pavement and be stone cold dead in a matter of seconds if I wanted to, even if there was a flash of blinding pain I'd hardly notice before my brain was all over the sidewalk. I just like being alive.
And tablets are very popular. They just have a really long usable lifespan, which caused sales per year to plummet once the market was saturated. Mine is going on 4 years old and I have no intention of replacing it, whereas I get the itch to replace my laptop after 2 years and usually replace it by 3 years. I'd still be using my 8 year old tablet if the battery hadn't died.
Funny, I've heard the exact same argument in reverse. Like the tablet is where you have Netflix, YouTube, social media, casual gaming etc. where you care about CPU/GPU power, "snappiness" and battery life while the laptop is relegated to typing up letters, resumes, long emails, blog posts, homework, making up basic checklists and spreadsheets etc. basically quasi-office work. I mean for me it would be completely unthinkable but we're not the average couch potato. For a lot of people having a "real" computer is not that important.
I didn't see anywhere where it says how many people participated in this poll. I sincerely doubt that all 300,000,000 citizens responded. That's the problem with these 'polls': limited number of participants, how do you expect anyone to believe this truly represents the majority?
Even if you were right you'd still be wrong because the problem is never the population size. We know the confidence interval if you randomly pick 30m, 3m, 300k, 30k or 3k out of 300 million, it's just math. Of course in theory you could pick 30 million Trump voters and not a single Clinton voter, but the odds of that is like picking the right lottery number every week for the rest of your life. With >99% probability you'd get a result +/-0.1% of the actual election result, probably an order or two magnitude better I just can't be bothered to do the math. You actually get a surprisingly usable result with a thousand people as long as the sampling is truly random. That's the problem, obviously if you take a poll at a Trump convention he'll win by a landslide. But you can't read that out of number of people polled.
It's not unusual to fire the dev team after the app is built. You hire some folks to do the hard work of building it and then you hire jr code monkeys to maintain it afterwards. Video Games do this.
Video games are almost like Hollywood movies, if you don't make most of it back in the first month it's going to bomb. The fans will suck it out even if it's mediocre and be done playing it, the ones who left in disgust have moved on and those who haven't tried it will be scared away by your low user ratings. If you're a software company that wants to deliver an ongoing product or service or a similar service to many customers you're never "done", even if one particular client has exhausted their budget. If it was a one-off you'd probably hire contractors of some sort, laying off the whole staff is quite unusual unless you're outsourcing the whole thing or closing down the business area altogether.
But Apple did, and does, have a serious foothold in the creative industries, and deprecating OpenGL breaks display acceleration in After Effects and Premiere.
They did, but after FCP X and the trashcan Mac Pro design how many are left? They're trying to sell on you on eGPU solutions and external Thunderbolt storage and whatnot but I would think many video professionals built a big box. Unless they want in the field editing, in which case I'd get a "luggable" desktop replacement PC that is too niche for Apple to make. Particularly now that GPU acceleration is getting to be a big thing. Personally I hope DaVinci Resolve will see some more love, because it's available on Linux (free as in beer, $299 for studio if you need all the bells and whistles) and as of version 15 (now in beta) it works with normal system audio out.
My impression is that pro-level cinematography gear and tools is dropping in price like a stone, you had the Panasonic GH5 and Sony a7s III killing it at $2k, Blackmagic is coming in with "Pocket" 4K/60p RAW for $1300 and Red dropped the price of 8K/60p RAW to $25k (well the brain anyway, maybe $35k for a working rig). Compared to the cost of any half-competent people in front of and behind the camera as well as putting it all together it's a bargain. And on the low end cell phones are constantly raising the bar for an "entry level" camera. Of course, most of them are just used to vlog on YouTube...
In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
I guess all the sane people have finally abandoned/. for this tripe to be at +5. Amazon makes wealth, Jeff Bezos profits. If he dies of cancer next year they'll continue to make money for his estate and heirs. He'd spend millions if not billions of dollars for a cure, but just because it's his own ass. If you think that's efficient allocation you're on so heavy drugs it's amazing you can write a whole sentence. Excuse me while I go to Breitbart for some quality commentary. Or even 4chan...
Major version changes meant a significant difference while minor changes were small changes and fixes. Skipping numbers in version dictated the amount of change in the fix (...) Linux for the most part has been rather consistent.
Well +0.1 every three months is consistent, but it's in complete contraction to the rest you said. There's absolutely no useful major/minor version in the numbering, there's never any skipping it's just one month merge window, two months of RCs, release. Now with random major version bumps that mean nothing. He could have switched to Ubuntu's YY.MM format like Linux 18.06 and lost nothing, at least then everyone would know at a glance how old the kernel is. It's what makes the most sense when you're doing time-based releases anyway.
Which is actually typical of many major projects, there's so much going on there's always a reason to make a release and there's always something that's changed. APIs should be versioned independent of releases. GUIs should give you a "classic" mode grace period before making the switch. Or if you're going totally nuts with a rewrite, rename the old version and offer it separately. Of course then you might find people hate your new version, if that bothers you launch a new version, shove it down their throats and tell them you'll get used to it.
I think the short answer is that if you have anything that's big and popular somebody will buy it and try to monetize it or integrate it into their portfolio. Consider it a way of buying access to a market, even if the app with a million users isn't making money it's a million people you could try to sell some add-on service to. And you wouldn't be cold calling them, the option would be there teasing you whether it's selling hats in TF2 or Azure cloud hosting. Unless the bubble bursts and nobody wants to make a bet on your users, but in a normal market there's always somebody.
Now that that practice has been bred out through consumer uproar, people are probably realising they don't actually need a phone every 2 years because most are good for 4 - 5 years for 99% of the population.
Estimated number of smartphone users: ~2.5 billion Smartphones sold each year: ~1.5 billion Estimated growth: ~200 million Average lifetime: 2500/(1500-200) = ~2 years
California? You must be joking. Amazon is simply not the responsible party here. The merchant has never been the responsible party. They shouldn't be. They didn't make the product.
Depends on your jurisdiction, here in Norway the thought is that the consumer is an amateur, the merchant and manufacturer are professionals and they share responsibility that the rights granted by law are fulfilled. For example if you import US goods with a 90 day manufacturer warranty that has a 2 year minimum warranty here. Or the customer wants to make a complaint in Norwegian, they can't go oh that must be in English or Chinese. Or if it was missing some sort of license or certification or contains outlawed materials or uses illegal frequencies or whatever to be sold in Norway, though it could be legal somewhere else and technically not the manufacturer's fault. Or the fault can be some middle man in distribution. Or they don't agree if it's faulty parts or faulty assembly.
Here we said "not the consumer's problem". Now under normal circumstances blame is put where you expect it, but if say the merchant is bankrupt you can sue the manufacturer and if the manufacturer is bankrupt you can sue the merchant. Or the wholesaler, importer, assembler and everyone else in the middle. Or even the sub-suppliers, like if you buy a car and the carburetor is faulty and the car company is bankrupt you can still sue the carburetor manufacturer for burning your house down. Basically for consumer liability you can shoot at anyone left standing until there's no one to shoot at. That said, it doesn't cover services that hook consumers up with contractors/vendors, even if they take a commission. So whether they're a merchant or not is a pretty big deal.
Anyone who has ever used Voice Recognition knows that heuristics can foul up. The quality of your AI experience, as it absorbs new data may go down as well as up. Wasn't there a recent experience with some Microsoft social media software where its neural net became more and more racist over a period of 24 hours thanks to it gleaning data from Twitter?
That could be an issue in many cases, but when you're getting the gold standard answer a bit further down the road when the biopsy is done I doubt that's much of an issue. Over time you'll simply build up a bigger and bigger database of correct answers and incrementally improve.
We shouldn't act like people are idiots for not reading something incredibly lengthy, wordy, and worded in such a way where they would not understand it, and instead point the finger, at least partially, at the people who insist on keeping these wordy EULAs without providing something that explains it in plain English?
Because the EULA is to law what source code is to computers, if you try putting it through a "plain English" translator you either turn one page into ten as you need to turn it COBOL-like and quasi-paste in "Introduction to programming" throughout or you lose a lot of detail. And it's okay that I make a high-level summary, but the testing and approval must be at the code level because that's what actually runs. Same way the actual contract is legalese because that's the agreement in law, you can make a summary but it can't be what you agree to.
What I do wish they'd make is some kind of standardized commercial terms, like the CC collection of licenses. After all, many of these are a lot of copy-pasted boilerplate but unless you read through them you wouldn't actually know that and you never know if they've added some particularly nasty variation. Something like NC-PU-NOIP - non-commercial, personal use only, no intellectual property grants of any kind in trademark, copyright, patents and so on. That way you could quickly find if they're just normal legal CYA or trying to screw you over.
A few years ago I spoke to a blind Linux/Unix developer who was extremely angry that there was no open source reader available. Not sure if that has changed and if both Apple and Microsoft are behind it, I doubt this will not be open source either.
Well this is a standard API for how to talk to a Braille display, like how to access the hardware. If it can already display "Hello World" under Linux using a custom driver this won't give you any more system/software support. And if it's like most other accessories it probably can, we had keyboards, mice, joysticks, printers, scanners, webcams etc. before the USB class compliant versions, like you could connect a webcam as a generic USB device and use a driver without it being a USB Video/Audio Capture class compliant device. Basically these standards are usually set when everyone is pretty much in agreement on how to talk to a device, they're quite conservative. Which is good, because you tend to be stuck with them for a looong time.
They're nice, in that you know you can pair any USB class X device with any system that support USB class X devices. But they're just one tiny bit of the equation and when it comes to OSS support for the blind it's very difficult for them to scratch their own itch and not much interest from anybody else to integrate it. Maybe there's some OSS developers with blind relatives who want to scratch an itch on their behalf, but even commercial operations mostly do it because they're required by law or for PR reasons. There's not much of a business case for the effort you have to put in and OSS developers aren't affected much by law/PR, so it's a lonely battle.
They can't just step in and say "Hey, this is actually turning out to be BAD for us now, please stop!" They're kinda stuck with it. It takes generations to ease a religious body through a major change, and unfortunately this whole "climate change" thing and "global population booms" has come up a faster than these religious groups can change course to match.
I can only speak for Norway but... 105 years since women got the vote. 57 years since the first female priest. 46 years since homosexuality was decriminalized. 40 years since legalized abortion. 25 years ago since the first female bishop and gay partnership law. 9 years ago since gay marriage. That's all (barely) in living memory. The church has shown an amazing ability to morph into a quasi-spiritual organization for all people who believe in souls and an afterlife as their worldly teachings have been stripped away and the fire and brimstone parts tucked away as not very PC.
The truth is that it's not their teachings on condoms and birth control that makes the most difference, it's their position on women. If you look at all the shittiest countries the men work, the women are at home popping out 5-6-7 children and raising them to adulthood. They don't have jobs, they don't have education, many of them aren't even literate... but they can breed and no matter how dirt poor people are today we don't let kids starve to death. Once women start having their own career, birth rates drop like a rock. Working mom with three kids is doable, six kids is almost impossible.
And all religions are quite capable of adjusting their teachings to accommodate that. Take an Islamic theocracy like Iran, nearly 70% of university graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women. They got a birth rate of about 1.7, same as many western countries. If they can do it, any country can. Take a look at Rosling's "peak child" statistics video to see how much some countries really did change in 50 years, both Christian nations, Islamic nations and Eastern religion nations.
In economy, you always start with the activity that has the highest marginal product. That way you maximize your output for a given amount of inputs. If you're serious about environment, you start with the worst offenders.
That's a gross oversimplification, you always put R&D into progress, new products and markets. If you're just chasing the best ROI today the company often ends up crashing as the cash cow dies and they've done nothing to generate new business. Same with the environment, you try to kill brown coal plants but you also try to develop greener ways and see if they're feasible on a mass scale. And when it comes to environmental issues you often can't force foreign countries to do anything, you need laws and regulations not just money. A lot of the time shaming is a more effective strategy, like all these other countries are cleaning up their act, why are you the dirty slob polluting the oceans. And then, if they're serious about it maybe a little money too. But littering and dumping is a lot about culture, it's easy to throw trash overboard you need a little voice that says this is wrong, I should get it disposed properly.
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Agile doesn't deliver what the business wants which is to turn coding into non-creative work where you know almost exactly how long it takes to get from A to B and exceptions have explanations like traffic accidents or construction work. Nothing ever will but it won't stop them from trying so the best Agile can do is shield the developers from impossible tasks and meaningless meetings so they can spend time on actually doing development.
The first shield is the product owner, a ton of people want things and they'll go through all sorts of channels with competing priorities and sneaking in pet features. Shut them down, make that one channel in and one non-developer resource they can talk to if they're not happy with what they're getting. And no, there's no point in re-prioritizing things daily once every two weeks is fine for everything but hair-on-fire emergencies. The second shield is the scrum master, I'm currently one and my main job the way I see it is to maximize the number of hours my team members actually get work done on the things they're supposed to be working on. Particularly all fuzzy meetings called to discuss things where I say "You figure out what you want first from a business perspective, then let's talk solutions" or that are more or less status/re-planning meetings where I say "The quickest way to get it done is to let the ones working on it work on it."
It's not particularly Agile-specific, reality it's about two simple things, what should I be working on and let me be so I can do my f*cking job. Whether it actually works better for planning than iterative waterfall, meh... I've always said you should try to think and explain as far ahead as reasonable, like is this part of the functionality/structure you'd like to have in the end. You don't build a skyscraper by building a one-story building and then building one more story on top, if you know it's going to need to support 50 stories then tell us now.
So unless Tesla goes under, the stocks will be worth what people are prepared to pay for them. And unless you have a set of mind-control orbital satellites which can make people sane and rational when determining what they will pay for stocks, there is absolutely no guarantee a short on Tesla will pay off, even if they remain a tiny company.
While that is true market opportunities don't last forever. Tesla is flying high right now on the assumption that EVs are the future and that Tesla will be leading the revolution. But there's only so long you can sell the idea of a flying car before people want results and start questioning if flying cars will ever be a mass market thing. The other alternative is that the demand arrives, but Tesla isn't on the ball with regard to quantity or quality and some other company takes the bulk of the market. Sure, in theory they could make people think they've found the next big thing without delivering on the first big thing but I don't think it's very likely they can pull it off in practice. But if you're waiting to see if a growth stock will turn into a good value stock you'd better have a really long perspective, like 10 year minimum. A lot of people get emotionally invested and hold on to hope far beyond any rational behavior. They won't acknowledge that their investment was a flop until the profit and loss statement is blood red, that it just looks bad is not enough.
That's pretty ignorant. Because NAT creates very nearly as many problems as it solves. And if users don't want a device traceable or directly reachable by ipv6 address you can still do NAT with ipv6 too if you want; you just don't HAVE to.
Users have little choice on being traceable, it's what the ISP offers. Why do we bother with dynamic IPs, DHCP leases and all that stuff? Because IPs were/are a limited resource and when we were on dial-up reserving an IP for every customer was excessive. With always-on/mobile broadband most devices are always-on and and the IPv6 address space is massive. While there are some laws in some countries to preserve IP-customer history it's usually not forever and it takes a warrant to access. With IPv6 it'd be totally possible to move to a static default, you are path::to::ISP::customerNumber::MAC and it's yours forever and everything you do is linked by default. That's worse than Microsoft's Advertising ID because you can't effectively turn it off and switching to Linux doesn't help. At best maybe you can fake a new device every time and make them think you're a coffee shop or something.
They didn't explicitly state that it was overclocked because it couldn't possibly be more obvious.
True, but they also announced they'd bring it to market. It's a bit like demoing a customized race edition car and saying it's going on sale, while not explicitly saying that the street version will be much slower. If you search the net you'll find lots of false headlines like Intel to launch a 28-core monster CPU running at 5GHz later this year which makes it a PR goof. Some think it was done with malice to steal AMD's thunder but I doubt the backlash is worth it, but those who do are now trying to make as big a stink as possible about it.
It was high time to make sure the people's vote would not be taken into account, hence electronic voting.
Well in that respect I think that Trump being in office shows the system is "working". Unless the tin foil hat brigade decides Trump is just a puppet and the plan all along. Who knows...
And the alternative is...? I seem to remember a case I read once but somebody (given the time frame, probably the Russians) was collecting data on overtime pizza delivered to intelligence agencies. And I can sorta understand that, every time they discovered something big you'd have people working around the clock to figure it out. I can understand why you'd want to keep that a secret, on the other hand it's really hard for accounting and everyone else to pretend it didn't happen.
Take Amazon, it had the most ridiculous negative P/E ever. At the height of the dotcom boom I got a free $10 that I used to buy a $4 book with $6 shipping (international). How the fuckity fuck fuck to you make money on that? By staying the course with enough VC money that eventually you'll surface. That's kinda what I'm thinking about driverless cars at the moment, even if it doesn't make sense... even if they never recover their investment... there's so much money and so many corporations behind it that it'll happen. When I'm a senior citizen in 25+ years I'll have a self driving car. I'm probably not going to Mars, but that's okay. And the singularity is not happening. Immortality certainly not. You have a life, enjoy it.
That is just false. AMDs APU graphics could/can actually play games worth a salt.
Absolutely, but the division of labor between the CPU and GPU remains pretty much the same. The theory with APUs was that you'd mix and match CPU and GPU resources, calling the GPU for parallelism more because of the tight interconnect compared to going over PCIe. In reality AMDs APUs provided competitive value to Intel's CPU + nVidia GPU but they didn't really add any extra value. The gamer market didn't care because they used dGPUs anyway, in fact it's only when AMD released Zen processors with no graphics that competition returned. Integrating graphics didn't provide any value or advantage at all, they'd do just as fine integrating ATI/nVidia graphics chipset as they did before the buyout.
Then it printed your votes onto a piece of paper, and asked you to confirm that the printed ballot accurately reflected your choices. That seemed to me a sensible method of electronic voting. Use a computer to reduce the expense and confusion of custom-printed ballots for every election.
Uh, as long as there's a qualification process of sorts pre-printing a ton of ballots for each candidate at a printing press is likely to be far cheaper than doing it at every voting booth. Don't get me wrong I see a lot of privacy and security advantages of paper ballots but economics is not one of them. All that manual labor is expensive. Dealing with physical paper is expensive. The eVote is cheaper.
At one point AMD briefly passed 50% of retail desktop sales, thanks to the Athlon 64.
If I remember correctly it was retail CPU sales excluding pre-built systems from OEMs, Intel was still by far the biggest by total volume.
Intel came back strong and almost crushed AMD who screwed up with the A-series and other pre-Ryzen processors.
The actual screw-up was earlier, when AMD stretched waaaaaaaay too far to buy ATI for $5.4 billion where $4.2 billion was cash. That's the war chest AMD should have had to counter Intel Core 2, instead they were stretched super thin. To cut development cost they replaced manually designed circuits with inferior designs created by automation and they couldn't afford to invest as much as they should in process technology so that even then they managed an equivalent design they were behind on cost, performance and power consumption. Meanwhile ATI was under siege by nVidia and couldn't really contribute much and there wasn't really all that much gained by APUs over discrete/integrated graphics because it took special code paths to take advantage and the niche was too small.
Strategically it was also a huge mistake because sure ATI would be fully aligned with AMD (the CPU side). But it meant nVidia had little choice but to deal with Intel on their terms, which Intel used to kick nVidia out of the integrated chipset business and then took all integrated graphics on Intel chips for themselves. AMD opened that door and Intel said "look, we're just doing what the competition is doing". Even if worst case Intel had bought ATI as was rumored they'd have gotten nVidia's full support for free in the fight against Chipzilla instead of paying billions. They should have seen that the battle wouldn't be that easily won instead of thinking CPUs was in the box, on to GPUs...
so they choose the alternative --- drug themselves until they forget their pain. (...) Officially those who died of OD or those who drank themselves to death are not counted as suicide --- and they should be
I'd go with Darwin award rules, unless you were trying to die it's not suicide. That your escapism leads to high risk behavior and the need for a stronger and strong fix to keep reality at bay or you recklessly take a too large dose to cause your death is not the same. Otherwise you'd probably have to classify most extreme sport deaths as suicide by adrenaline addiction. Obviously you can miss out on a few that intentionally took a lethal dose without leaving any suicide note or anything like that, but like you said they've made a choice to do drugs instead.
If they were looking to outright die they'd probably pick a more direct approach, I mean there's quite a lot of them and that are quite certain to work, I really don't quite know what to think of people with failed suicide attempts. Honestly I'm thinking that if you really deep down wanted to be dead you'd be dead by now, this is "just" a theatrical cry for help. I could jump off the balcony head first into the pavement and be stone cold dead in a matter of seconds if I wanted to, even if there was a flash of blinding pain I'd hardly notice before my brain was all over the sidewalk. I just like being alive.
And tablets are very popular. They just have a really long usable lifespan, which caused sales per year to plummet once the market was saturated. Mine is going on 4 years old and I have no intention of replacing it, whereas I get the itch to replace my laptop after 2 years and usually replace it by 3 years. I'd still be using my 8 year old tablet if the battery hadn't died.
Funny, I've heard the exact same argument in reverse. Like the tablet is where you have Netflix, YouTube, social media, casual gaming etc. where you care about CPU/GPU power, "snappiness" and battery life while the laptop is relegated to typing up letters, resumes, long emails, blog posts, homework, making up basic checklists and spreadsheets etc. basically quasi-office work. I mean for me it would be completely unthinkable but we're not the average couch potato. For a lot of people having a "real" computer is not that important.
I didn't see anywhere where it says how many people participated in this poll. I sincerely doubt that all 300,000,000 citizens responded. That's the problem with these 'polls': limited number of participants, how do you expect anyone to believe this truly represents the majority?
Even if you were right you'd still be wrong because the problem is never the population size. We know the confidence interval if you randomly pick 30m, 3m, 300k, 30k or 3k out of 300 million, it's just math. Of course in theory you could pick 30 million Trump voters and not a single Clinton voter, but the odds of that is like picking the right lottery number every week for the rest of your life. With >99% probability you'd get a result +/-0.1% of the actual election result, probably an order or two magnitude better I just can't be bothered to do the math. You actually get a surprisingly usable result with a thousand people as long as the sampling is truly random. That's the problem, obviously if you take a poll at a Trump convention he'll win by a landslide. But you can't read that out of number of people polled.
It's not unusual to fire the dev team after the app is built. You hire some folks to do the hard work of building it and then you hire jr code monkeys to maintain it afterwards. Video Games do this.
Video games are almost like Hollywood movies, if you don't make most of it back in the first month it's going to bomb. The fans will suck it out even if it's mediocre and be done playing it, the ones who left in disgust have moved on and those who haven't tried it will be scared away by your low user ratings. If you're a software company that wants to deliver an ongoing product or service or a similar service to many customers you're never "done", even if one particular client has exhausted their budget. If it was a one-off you'd probably hire contractors of some sort, laying off the whole staff is quite unusual unless you're outsourcing the whole thing or closing down the business area altogether.
But Apple did, and does, have a serious foothold in the creative industries, and deprecating OpenGL breaks display acceleration in After Effects and Premiere.
They did, but after FCP X and the trashcan Mac Pro design how many are left? They're trying to sell on you on eGPU solutions and external Thunderbolt storage and whatnot but I would think many video professionals built a big box. Unless they want in the field editing, in which case I'd get a "luggable" desktop replacement PC that is too niche for Apple to make. Particularly now that GPU acceleration is getting to be a big thing. Personally I hope DaVinci Resolve will see some more love, because it's available on Linux (free as in beer, $299 for studio if you need all the bells and whistles) and as of version 15 (now in beta) it works with normal system audio out.
My impression is that pro-level cinematography gear and tools is dropping in price like a stone, you had the Panasonic GH5 and Sony a7s III killing it at $2k, Blackmagic is coming in with "Pocket" 4K/60p RAW for $1300 and Red dropped the price of 8K/60p RAW to $25k (well the brain anyway, maybe $35k for a working rig). Compared to the cost of any half-competent people in front of and behind the camera as well as putting it all together it's a bargain. And on the low end cell phones are constantly raising the bar for an "entry level" camera. Of course, most of them are just used to vlog on YouTube...
In mean time how do we decide who gets it? Well you can let government decide and we bicker endless about who got it because of their skin color, gender, immigration status or whatever - or we can let the market fairly decide. Lets face it by and large the cream still rises to the top, society probably is better served by letting the 10% who can afford this spend their money on it. So money does not have to be taken from you and I and so the people who likely generate the most wealth for all live the longest. Its called allocation efficiency.
I guess all the sane people have finally abandoned /. for this tripe to be at +5. Amazon makes wealth, Jeff Bezos profits. If he dies of cancer next year they'll continue to make money for his estate and heirs. He'd spend millions if not billions of dollars for a cure, but just because it's his own ass. If you think that's efficient allocation you're on so heavy drugs it's amazing you can write a whole sentence. Excuse me while I go to Breitbart for some quality commentary. Or even 4chan...
Major version changes meant a significant difference while minor changes were small changes and fixes. Skipping numbers in version dictated the amount of change in the fix (...) Linux for the most part has been rather consistent.
Well +0.1 every three months is consistent, but it's in complete contraction to the rest you said. There's absolutely no useful major/minor version in the numbering, there's never any skipping it's just one month merge window, two months of RCs, release. Now with random major version bumps that mean nothing. He could have switched to Ubuntu's YY.MM format like Linux 18.06 and lost nothing, at least then everyone would know at a glance how old the kernel is. It's what makes the most sense when you're doing time-based releases anyway.
Which is actually typical of many major projects, there's so much going on there's always a reason to make a release and there's always something that's changed. APIs should be versioned independent of releases. GUIs should give you a "classic" mode grace period before making the switch. Or if you're going totally nuts with a rewrite, rename the old version and offer it separately. Of course then you might find people hate your new version, if that bothers you launch a new version, shove it down their throats and tell them you'll get used to it.
Why are unprofitable companies worth so much?
I think the short answer is that if you have anything that's big and popular somebody will buy it and try to monetize it or integrate it into their portfolio. Consider it a way of buying access to a market, even if the app with a million users isn't making money it's a million people you could try to sell some add-on service to. And you wouldn't be cold calling them, the option would be there teasing you whether it's selling hats in TF2 or Azure cloud hosting. Unless the bubble bursts and nobody wants to make a bet on your users, but in a normal market there's always somebody.
Now that that practice has been bred out through consumer uproar, people are probably realising they don't actually need a phone every 2 years because most are good for 4 - 5 years for 99% of the population.
Estimated number of smartphone users: ~2.5 billion
Smartphones sold each year: ~1.5 billion
Estimated growth: ~200 million
Average lifetime: 2500/(1500-200) = ~2 years
The facts reject your hypothesis.
California? You must be joking. Amazon is simply not the responsible party here. The merchant has never been the responsible party. They shouldn't be. They didn't make the product.
Depends on your jurisdiction, here in Norway the thought is that the consumer is an amateur, the merchant and manufacturer are professionals and they share responsibility that the rights granted by law are fulfilled. For example if you import US goods with a 90 day manufacturer warranty that has a 2 year minimum warranty here. Or the customer wants to make a complaint in Norwegian, they can't go oh that must be in English or Chinese. Or if it was missing some sort of license or certification or contains outlawed materials or uses illegal frequencies or whatever to be sold in Norway, though it could be legal somewhere else and technically not the manufacturer's fault. Or the fault can be some middle man in distribution. Or they don't agree if it's faulty parts or faulty assembly.
Here we said "not the consumer's problem". Now under normal circumstances blame is put where you expect it, but if say the merchant is bankrupt you can sue the manufacturer and if the manufacturer is bankrupt you can sue the merchant. Or the wholesaler, importer, assembler and everyone else in the middle. Or even the sub-suppliers, like if you buy a car and the carburetor is faulty and the car company is bankrupt you can still sue the carburetor manufacturer for burning your house down. Basically for consumer liability you can shoot at anyone left standing until there's no one to shoot at. That said, it doesn't cover services that hook consumers up with contractors/vendors, even if they take a commission. So whether they're a merchant or not is a pretty big deal.
Anyone who has ever used Voice Recognition knows that heuristics can foul up. The quality of your AI experience, as it absorbs new data may go down as well as up. Wasn't there a recent experience with some Microsoft social media software where its neural net became more and more racist over a period of 24 hours thanks to it gleaning data from Twitter?
That could be an issue in many cases, but when you're getting the gold standard answer a bit further down the road when the biopsy is done I doubt that's much of an issue. Over time you'll simply build up a bigger and bigger database of correct answers and incrementally improve.
We shouldn't act like people are idiots for not reading something incredibly lengthy, wordy, and worded in such a way where they would not understand it, and instead point the finger, at least partially, at the people who insist on keeping these wordy EULAs without providing something that explains it in plain English?
Because the EULA is to law what source code is to computers, if you try putting it through a "plain English" translator you either turn one page into ten as you need to turn it COBOL-like and quasi-paste in "Introduction to programming" throughout or you lose a lot of detail. And it's okay that I make a high-level summary, but the testing and approval must be at the code level because that's what actually runs. Same way the actual contract is legalese because that's the agreement in law, you can make a summary but it can't be what you agree to.
What I do wish they'd make is some kind of standardized commercial terms, like the CC collection of licenses. After all, many of these are a lot of copy-pasted boilerplate but unless you read through them you wouldn't actually know that and you never know if they've added some particularly nasty variation. Something like NC-PU-NOIP - non-commercial, personal use only, no intellectual property grants of any kind in trademark, copyright, patents and so on. That way you could quickly find if they're just normal legal CYA or trying to screw you over.
A few years ago I spoke to a blind Linux/Unix developer who was extremely angry that there was no open source reader available. Not sure if that has changed and if both Apple and Microsoft are behind it, I doubt this will not be open source either.
Well this is a standard API for how to talk to a Braille display, like how to access the hardware. If it can already display "Hello World" under Linux using a custom driver this won't give you any more system/software support. And if it's like most other accessories it probably can, we had keyboards, mice, joysticks, printers, scanners, webcams etc. before the USB class compliant versions, like you could connect a webcam as a generic USB device and use a driver without it being a USB Video/Audio Capture class compliant device. Basically these standards are usually set when everyone is pretty much in agreement on how to talk to a device, they're quite conservative. Which is good, because you tend to be stuck with them for a looong time.
They're nice, in that you know you can pair any USB class X device with any system that support USB class X devices. But they're just one tiny bit of the equation and when it comes to OSS support for the blind it's very difficult for them to scratch their own itch and not much interest from anybody else to integrate it. Maybe there's some OSS developers with blind relatives who want to scratch an itch on their behalf, but even commercial operations mostly do it because they're required by law or for PR reasons. There's not much of a business case for the effort you have to put in and OSS developers aren't affected much by law/PR, so it's a lonely battle.
They can't just step in and say "Hey, this is actually turning out to be BAD for us now, please stop!" They're kinda stuck with it. It takes generations to ease a religious body through a major change, and unfortunately this whole "climate change" thing and "global population booms" has come up a faster than these religious groups can change course to match.
I can only speak for Norway but... 105 years since women got the vote. 57 years since the first female priest. 46 years since homosexuality was decriminalized. 40 years since legalized abortion. 25 years ago since the first female bishop and gay partnership law. 9 years ago since gay marriage. That's all (barely) in living memory. The church has shown an amazing ability to morph into a quasi-spiritual organization for all people who believe in souls and an afterlife as their worldly teachings have been stripped away and the fire and brimstone parts tucked away as not very PC.
The truth is that it's not their teachings on condoms and birth control that makes the most difference, it's their position on women. If you look at all the shittiest countries the men work, the women are at home popping out 5-6-7 children and raising them to adulthood. They don't have jobs, they don't have education, many of them aren't even literate... but they can breed and no matter how dirt poor people are today we don't let kids starve to death. Once women start having their own career, birth rates drop like a rock. Working mom with three kids is doable, six kids is almost impossible.
And all religions are quite capable of adjusting their teachings to accommodate that. Take an Islamic theocracy like Iran, nearly 70% of university graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women. They got a birth rate of about 1.7, same as many western countries. If they can do it, any country can. Take a look at Rosling's "peak child" statistics video to see how much some countries really did change in 50 years, both Christian nations, Islamic nations and Eastern religion nations.
In economy, you always start with the activity that has the highest marginal product. That way you maximize your output for a given amount of inputs. If you're serious about environment, you start with the worst offenders.
That's a gross oversimplification, you always put R&D into progress, new products and markets. If you're just chasing the best ROI today the company often ends up crashing as the cash cow dies and they've done nothing to generate new business. Same with the environment, you try to kill brown coal plants but you also try to develop greener ways and see if they're feasible on a mass scale. And when it comes to environmental issues you often can't force foreign countries to do anything, you need laws and regulations not just money. A lot of the time shaming is a more effective strategy, like all these other countries are cleaning up their act, why are you the dirty slob polluting the oceans. And then, if they're serious about it maybe a little money too. But littering and dumping is a lot about culture, it's easy to throw trash overboard you need a little voice that says this is wrong, I should get it disposed properly.