I think it's more that the FBI has to make criminal charges, the drug cartels indiscriminately kill everyone involved. That makes it a lot more dangerous to give leads for a hacker to hack. The actual hackers get punished pretty good by the FBI too.
On the other hand, patent Enablement under 35 U.S.C. 112 requires that a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) be able to make and use the process or invention described and embodied in the patent (without undue experimentation, per court interpretation.) If the patent fails in that respect, it gets invalidated. Patent attorneys walk a fine line.
Ah, but there's a catch. It must be of sufficient detail that a person can follow the process described in the patent. It does not follow that the person will get the best - or even a usable - result that process can provide. It may say what compounds but not their mixture. It can show a series of steps but not the actual timings. You forget that they typically write patents as broad as possible, they don't say "coat in solution for 2-3 minutes" as that would mean a process that takes 1 minute or 4 minutes aren't covered. They'll just patent all variations, useful or not.
Wouldn't it be possible to make a "universal" file container, in that any other file type could be imbeded with a text file that listed: what type of file it is, what program it is associated with, owner, creation/mod dates, and especially, tags and other types of metadata? (perhaps, author/composer as necessary, things like the publisher or journal it appeared in for pdf, if the main file is source code then the metadata can specify what language it is written in, etc.).
In theory, it's not a problem. The problem is that you would break all existing file formats, they'd all complain the files are corrupt.
They don't care what the statistics or the user testing show... they know they're right.
Except I'm not a statistic, I'm me. That you improve an average doesn't mean it will ever become better for me, even with a change of philosophy, experience and whatnot. Maybe if I remember a dozen command line options the GUI isn't faster for me, even if you insist it's better and drop the CLI because the average person is less lost then. Besides that, I have a feeling many usability studies are based on whatever they want the new interface to be good at, not all the other ways people are using it. For sure you can streamline some things by making everything else harder to do, but it just makes the study a poor fit of actual use.
In any case, there's the small matter of taking the jump or being pushed. Lately I find a lot of the big OSS projects talk just like Microsoft and Apple, if I'm not supposed to have choices then the One Microsoft Way or iWay do it much better. All the howling about the ribbon is nothing compared to what OSS projects expect you to swallow with no grudges.
Personally, I've found that the biggest issue with all the "metadata" systems that try to improve on the basic file/folder system is that they don't transfer anywhere. Send the file once through Samba, NFS, email, FTP, rsync or whatever and the metadata is lost. The only systems that actually get used are those that are embedded in the file, like EXIF for JPG, ID3 for MP3 and so on.
The stupid thing is that we didn't make that a generic part of all file formats, a simple key-value list appended to the file would do. But today that'd break almost everything, plus most things working on the file system would have to know that each file has a data and metadata part. Maybe use a compatibility layer for metadata-unaware applications, where they only see the data part?
That way we really could have a standard form of metadata. It might not cover every use but it'd sure cover a lot. Copy the file, copy the metadata (if you want, of course). Of course most of these researchers seem to want to get rid of the file altogether and replace it with some sort of cloud service, but I'd rather not. I'd rather know where I have my stuff and be able to put it where I want.
But we can clearly see here that there is a high demand for hard drives and not enough supply to go around. I wonder what the prospects might be for domestic manufacturing to start ramping up to meet the demand?
Slim and none. You don't just grab people off the dole line, put them in an abandoned warehouse and make HDDs. It takes a high tech factory with clean rooms and robotics that will take at least a couple years to build. By the time you got the first HDD rolling off the factory floor, the crisis would long since be over.
P.S. For the person taking a jab at the MBAs, in this I think they would fully in agreement with the engineers.
The problem is that you're taking a lot of obvious and known methods, apply them slightly different then patent it. You are essentially creating an anti-competition moat around your product. To take one example, Apple's slide to unlock patent. Is is really that fundamentally different than the slide-to-open camera I've had for many years? The purpose is the same, rather than some button that can be accidentally pushed in the slide doesn't happen very easily. For example, the latest hype now is tablets. I'm pretty sure you can find plenty patents filed lately taking what is obvious on a cell phone or computer, but reapplied to tablets and patented again.
Another example was the Creative patents Apple had to license for the iPod, I read a bit of them. It was essentially taking all the functionality in WinAmp or other PC players and patenting them on a portable music player.
Of course I can see that sometimes taking an existing technique from a different industry and applying it can be a rather revolutionary and novel idea. But most of the time it's not and yet they grant patents for it all the time.
Well, compared to sending spam mails, running a DDoS blackmail or whatever else you want to do after you've looted a computer for identity theft and credit card information, perhaps it is. Like does the hacker care if he spends $1 of your electricity to give him 50 cents worth of BitCoins? No. He's taking the profit, you're eating the cost. That doesn't mean it would make sense for anyone else who'd actually have to pay their own costs...
Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me.
And all cars are German because everybody has been copying Daimler and Benz (car analogy, w00t), it's a matter of degree. It's at least homegrown in the sense that it's domestically produced and they are not currently relying on foreign companies do produce it. And since a 2001 era Dec Alpha would be built on 180nm process and this is supposedly on 45 or 65nm, they've clearly redesigned it quite a lot adjusting timings, gates and all that. You can't just take a design and make it 1/4th the size. That tells me they actually know a lot about this technology themselves.
And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?
That's not an either-or question.
Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets?
Just because it's unsustainable in the long run, doesn't mean it makes sense now. Innovation is possible, but they're so far behind copying is faster. As long as you're ignoring IP laws, that seems logical. Hollywood ignored copyright laws, now that the balance is in their favor they enforce it with vigor.
Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?
You might as well say the Apollo program had no domestic competition, the country was founding it. China wants homegrown CPUs and supercomputers so they will run a program to get it, and it'll run for as long as they need it to run.
The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.
You must not have been paying very good attention to what China is doing, they're absorbing high tech at a huge rate. Their high speed rail is a good example, they imported technology from Germany and Japan, then kept building on it. They now have the largest high speed rail network in the world, with their own train designs. You think that isn't their goal with CPUs? Grab what you can, build on top. It doesn't have to be #1, just good enough they don't rely on anyone else.
The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.
Do you have a source that actually says what you claim, unlike the one you linked to? It said return rates were 4 times higher, but I really doubt 30%/4 = 7.5% of all their laptops are returned. That seems to me an absurdly high number.
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.
No, only: - A long history of locked down devices - A lot of custom hardware on each phone/tablet - No tradition for dual boot - Covered by a ton of silly software patents
Just look at how many problems Linux has had, and still to some degree has, with basic functionality even on fairly standard desktop gear. Like sound, network, wifi, suspend/resume, bluetooth, power management and so on. Now try this in the phone/tablet world where a lot of the hardware is used exactly once in one generation and there's lots of magic values and toggles. I predict the YotLT is even further away than the YotLD.
S1 = cost per hour of CentOS independent support (this includes maintenance, upgrades, deploying software) S2 = cost per hour of RHEL official support
Those should absolutely be multiplied by productivity and quality. Many people would rather pay $50/hour for 4 hours than $150/hour for one hour, even though it makes no sense. Though I guess it's the lemon problem, you don't know when you're paying $150/hour for crap so the less you pay the less you can get screwed I guess.
What happens in both is the provider does not lower costs because of Government input, it raised them to what the government pays and what the individual can bear.
Which is where the US idea of socialized medicine fails. In every other country, the government is the provider. The public system decides what treatments are given based on medical need. Where private hospitals exist, they are paid roughly what it costs to treat them in a public hospital. It's only the US that think socialized health care means pumping lots of money into the supplier side and hoping a trickle of that comes out on the other side to the patients. But to do it properly would kill the insurance companies and most private hospitals. That's a billion dollar industry that'll fight you tooth and nail every step of the way.
The worst part of all this is that his political calculation is correct: Next election I'm probably going to be voting for him. Because the other option will be a lot worse.
Yep. And I'm sure someone will point out that you can choose not to vote. So that you will get someone worse for four years. So that in four years they'll pick a better candidate, except they'd have to find a new one anyway because Obama would have served two terms by then. You'd have to get into some rather far fetched theories about sending a message to improve future presidents or that it'd be better for the next Democrat to not have to clean up Obama's mess to conclude the country will end up better off by not voting. They'll grumble and say they won't right up until election day but when push comes to shove, they'll take the bad over the worse.
More importantly, you don't need the stopping power of a shotgun against a zombie,
That depends entirely on the brand of zombie, some it seems you must literally blow or hack apart. If so I suggest a shotgun blast to the face, it won't have anything left to track you with after that. As long as it's a combat shotgun where you load magazines, not single shells it'd be my weapon of choice. At least compared to a machete, which would probably get stuck in the first zombie's arm as they eat me alive.
If you can't answer the question 'what does the support buy you?', then you can't answer this. Most of the time, when people talk about support at the enterprise level they mean adding features and fixing bugs that are important to the company paying the bills. Do you have the expertise in-house to do this? If so, then there is no advantage in Red Hat over CentOS (unless it means you can make some of your in-house people redundant).
The real question is: Have you ever used your fire insurance? If no, do you think it would be a good idea to drop it? I'd call it excessive if you used it even once a decade. Most companies I know really have support because they can't afford to have a big staff waiting around for shit to hit the fan, but if shit hits the fan they can't afford extended downtime. What if your main man is on vacation or hospitalized or just left the company? The minor features and bugs that get fixed might be perks but that's not really why they're paying. And that's why the CIO's suggestion might work fine this year. And next year. And the year after that. But when your production server just keeps crashing and the backups just keep crashing because it's hit some ugly condition and you need people that really know the system and you need them right now, that's when you want support. But it's rather hard to argue with a man that think lightning never strikes.
The boss doesn't believe in support. CentOS is a product with no support. Do it, and if shit hits the fan you have your big "I told you so", hopefully in writing. If it all goes to hell, show that to his boss, assuming he has one. It's one thing if management doesn't understand, here they apparently do understand but disagree. Then they're free to fall on their own sword IMO.
Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?
How can the level of recognition you get not be a de facto comparison? It's not whether about you give your grandkids $50 or $500 for Christmas, it's that you gave $50 to one and $500 to the other. And the response is like "Giving $500 is crazy, but if you gave it to Steve then Dennis damn well deserves the same." I feel that is a logical and natural reaction, by breaking the scale with Jobs you are changing the expectations for everyone else.
Data mining is based on a single assumption, which if being false, collapses the whole utility of data mining. Data mining expects to get good input data.
That would depend entirely on the model and such a system of course wouldn't assume that. But it's much easier to positively confirm information than to find it.
Observe: "Today I ate at McDonald's and paid cash" although you were home and had Chinese take-away which you paid with a card.
Perhaps the simplest check would be to check your cell phone data, unless you sent a friend to McDonalds with it. Or if you were a person of interest we could pull up security cameras. We could question the employees. We can check the card company that you did in fact pay for Chinese take-away. It's just as much about finding who and when someone would be lying about that sort of thing. Because most like it's because you're having some sort of clandestine meeting, not to hide you eat Chinese.
You can't fake certain events like paying with a card (since it leaves a record) but you can work around it: swap the cards with someone, have a card pool with trusted friends, etc.
Yes, but how many people actually do that? How many people would you trust with your bank account and more importantly, if someone asked you to use their account instead then 99.9% would wonder WTF, what are you doing to drag me into now that is so naughty you can't use your own card? Plus you're both breaking the card holder's agreement, so no fraud protection if your buddy takes all the money and runs.
Another example: leave your mobile phone at home, and go somewhere. Tracking your phone will not reveal your location. Data mining thinks you were at home, when you really weren't.
Yes, but data mining would track everyone else. That's the primary use of for example cell phone data, finding all the witnesses and then you can fairly quickly see if there's persons that don't match a cell phone.
In the absence of noisy and bad data, what does data mining then tell you? Nothing. It's garbage in, garbage out.
Except the fact that it's garbage is valuable in itself. If one of your "trusted friends" is using your card while you're provably somewhere else, then you have a big red flag saying this person is faking his actions and whereabouts.
Of course it's not perfect, but it's a lot harder to create a plausible pattern of false information and not set off any flags that it is. But if almost everyone else is leaving a ton of electronic traces, then the people who don't also start to stand out from the crowd. Which is sort of the real, underlying problem here - if almost everyone else is getting tracked then remainder can be given so much attention that almost all covers become apparent.
Except most companies are absolutely bluffing in that they'd like to fire all their staff and hire people at half the rate, with no experience with their products and services, systems, customers, networks or anything. One by one everyone is expendable, but all together is corporate suicide. Yes, the goal of a company is to maximize profits which means a company is never happy with paying its workers and always want to pay less. And whether you like it or not, you are almost always more dependent on the company than the company is on you. The threat of losing your whole income is much bigger than losing your work is to them. Often they know the job market sucks or they know there's very little other work for you in this town and you'd have to rip up your whole friends and family and relocate to get another job. Or they know you like your job and colleagues so well you will stay even if you don't get a raise.
A lot of the union shops that I know are like cornerstones in the local community. The unions are the only reason why it's possible to work in one place so long and with so little competition. Good unions aren't trying to kill the company, but they damn well know what the executives are making and how much Hollywood accounting is going on when the company claims there's no money for raises. Very often their claims are a bunch of bovine manure and the reality is they're just looking to pad the bottom line at the expense of the workers. The prices in the market would be the same, the only difference is they'd turn a bigger profit. The giants are laughing at all the ants thinking they are playing the game, in the end they still win. I'm not unionized myself but I know many of the benefits I get have been won by unions.
If we look at this a bit further, the obvious alternative to US treasuries would have been AAA rated securities, such as the collateralized debt obligations which more or less caused the current economic crisis. That makes this paper pretty foresighted.
Like government bonds are much safer, Greek public debt was A rated (though not AAA) as little as two years ago but now it's CCC, the step before defaulting and they're talking about a 50% "haircut" which is more like a scalping. And 30% more than they said as late as July, what is it in January - 80%? That has a lot more with fraudulent ratings to do than there not actually being true AAA securities to invest in, like the CDOs were massively poisoned by subprime debt. That the rating agencies are still in business and people think these ratings mean anything anymore is to me amazing. That you think the US with its huge deficit, rapidly ballooning public debt and huge social security commitments to meet shortly is worth anything like an AAA rating just proves to me we've learned exactly nothing so far.
An AAA security is a business that is solidly cash positive but needs additional money to invest to expand capacity or groups of high income earners buying modest homes well within their means. It is not investing in a country that is spiraling towards a debt crisis each year with no apparent signs to clean up their act, no matter how long the credit line seems to be. As we've seen from the Greeks when the market stops trusting you the risk premium on your entire debt goes up so suddenly you're not borrowing at 5% it's 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%. That is like trying to manage a debt 2-5 times greater and even the US couldn't handle that, it's like dropping off a cliff with no parachute and the only way to avoid it is to not accrue so much debt you fall of the ledge.
I see clear tendencies to the same as happened with the CDOs, trying to pool national debts and make good debt out of a collection of rotten debt by spreading it all around. It's not just the "problem countries" like PIGS, the EU has plenty countries that have enough with their own troubled economy like the UK and France and aren't ready for a rescue operation. In total, despite Germany, they're just as deep in the muck as the US. And what are you going to do then? Pool US and EU debt with the IMF? There's more and more eggs being put into the same basket to save it, if all goes to hell then the Great Depression II hasn't even started yet.
Today if you bend and break your phone and try to get a warranty replacement they'll tell you to go fish, you're not supposed to do that. The moment you make it part of the interface, there's people who will go way overboard like intense games, kids being too rough with it, have anger management issues and whatever. Even if it's built like a tank that no average person would ever wear out, there's a pretty thick tail of users who'll treat it way more roughly than everybody else. To me it sounds more like support hell than planned obsolescence heaven. If you want that then you should do it on some part you control the life time of, like say the non-replaceable battery running out, the screen fading away, no more software updates, anything you can reasonably control doesn't happen in the warranty period. This would be anything but that.
What makes you think Intel has one fast thread and one slow thread filling the gaps? As far as I know, both threads share the core's resources equally and the CPU doesn't favor one over the other.
It's possible that I've misunderstood something, but it was my impression that one thread was dominant so that if they both want the same resource at the same time it'd always come first. That way a heavy single threaded application would get nearly the same performance as before unless it was blocked by calculations already in progress, while simultaneously letting it do light work on the side. Early hyperthreading performance was the same for most workloads, indicating to me that one thread run practically all the time and the other didn't get any work done at all. That is at least how I interpreted the numbers.
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I think it's more that the FBI has to make criminal charges, the drug cartels indiscriminately kill everyone involved. That makes it a lot more dangerous to give leads for a hacker to hack. The actual hackers get punished pretty good by the FBI too.
On the other hand, patent Enablement under 35 U.S.C. 112 requires that a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) be able to make and use the process or invention described and embodied in the patent (without undue experimentation, per court interpretation.) If the patent fails in that respect, it gets invalidated. Patent attorneys walk a fine line.
Ah, but there's a catch. It must be of sufficient detail that a person can follow the process described in the patent. It does not follow that the person will get the best - or even a usable - result that process can provide. It may say what compounds but not their mixture. It can show a series of steps but not the actual timings. You forget that they typically write patents as broad as possible, they don't say "coat in solution for 2-3 minutes" as that would mean a process that takes 1 minute or 4 minutes aren't covered. They'll just patent all variations, useful or not.
Wouldn't it be possible to make a "universal" file container, in that any other file type could be imbeded with a text file that listed: what type of file it is, what program it is associated with, owner, creation/mod dates, and especially, tags and other types of metadata? (perhaps, author/composer as necessary, things like the publisher or journal it appeared in for pdf, if the main file is source code then the metadata can specify what language it is written in, etc.).
In theory, it's not a problem. The problem is that you would break all existing file formats, they'd all complain the files are corrupt.
They don't care what the statistics or the user testing show... they know they're right.
Except I'm not a statistic, I'm me. That you improve an average doesn't mean it will ever become better for me, even with a change of philosophy, experience and whatnot. Maybe if I remember a dozen command line options the GUI isn't faster for me, even if you insist it's better and drop the CLI because the average person is less lost then. Besides that, I have a feeling many usability studies are based on whatever they want the new interface to be good at, not all the other ways people are using it. For sure you can streamline some things by making everything else harder to do, but it just makes the study a poor fit of actual use.
In any case, there's the small matter of taking the jump or being pushed. Lately I find a lot of the big OSS projects talk just like Microsoft and Apple, if I'm not supposed to have choices then the One Microsoft Way or iWay do it much better. All the howling about the ribbon is nothing compared to what OSS projects expect you to swallow with no grudges.
Personally, I've found that the biggest issue with all the "metadata" systems that try to improve on the basic file/folder system is that they don't transfer anywhere. Send the file once through Samba, NFS, email, FTP, rsync or whatever and the metadata is lost. The only systems that actually get used are those that are embedded in the file, like EXIF for JPG, ID3 for MP3 and so on.
The stupid thing is that we didn't make that a generic part of all file formats, a simple key-value list appended to the file would do. But today that'd break almost everything, plus most things working on the file system would have to know that each file has a data and metadata part. Maybe use a compatibility layer for metadata-unaware applications, where they only see the data part?
That way we really could have a standard form of metadata. It might not cover every use but it'd sure cover a lot. Copy the file, copy the metadata (if you want, of course). Of course most of these researchers seem to want to get rid of the file altogether and replace it with some sort of cloud service, but I'd rather not. I'd rather know where I have my stuff and be able to put it where I want.
But we can clearly see here that there is a high demand for hard drives and not enough supply to go around. I wonder what the prospects might be for domestic manufacturing to start ramping up to meet the demand?
Slim and none. You don't just grab people off the dole line, put them in an abandoned warehouse and make HDDs. It takes a high tech factory with clean rooms and robotics that will take at least a couple years to build. By the time you got the first HDD rolling off the factory floor, the crisis would long since be over.
P.S. For the person taking a jab at the MBAs, in this I think they would fully in agreement with the engineers.
The problem is that you're taking a lot of obvious and known methods, apply them slightly different then patent it. You are essentially creating an anti-competition moat around your product. To take one example, Apple's slide to unlock patent. Is is really that fundamentally different than the slide-to-open camera I've had for many years? The purpose is the same, rather than some button that can be accidentally pushed in the slide doesn't happen very easily. For example, the latest hype now is tablets. I'm pretty sure you can find plenty patents filed lately taking what is obvious on a cell phone or computer, but reapplied to tablets and patented again.
Another example was the Creative patents Apple had to license for the iPod, I read a bit of them. It was essentially taking all the functionality in WinAmp or other PC players and patenting them on a portable music player.
Of course I can see that sometimes taking an existing technique from a different industry and applying it can be a rather revolutionary and novel idea. But most of the time it's not and yet they grant patents for it all the time.
Well, compared to sending spam mails, running a DDoS blackmail or whatever else you want to do after you've looted a computer for identity theft and credit card information, perhaps it is. Like does the hacker care if he spends $1 of your electricity to give him 50 cents worth of BitCoins? No. He's taking the profit, you're eating the cost. That doesn't mean it would make sense for anyone else who'd actually have to pay their own costs...
Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me.
And all cars are German because everybody has been copying Daimler and Benz (car analogy, w00t), it's a matter of degree. It's at least homegrown in the sense that it's domestically produced and they are not currently relying on foreign companies do produce it. And since a 2001 era Dec Alpha would be built on 180nm process and this is supposedly on 45 or 65nm, they've clearly redesigned it quite a lot adjusting timings, gates and all that. You can't just take a design and make it 1/4th the size. That tells me they actually know a lot about this technology themselves.
And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?
That's not an either-or question.
Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets?
Just because it's unsustainable in the long run, doesn't mean it makes sense now. Innovation is possible, but they're so far behind copying is faster. As long as you're ignoring IP laws, that seems logical. Hollywood ignored copyright laws, now that the balance is in their favor they enforce it with vigor.
Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?
You might as well say the Apollo program had no domestic competition, the country was founding it. China wants homegrown CPUs and supercomputers so they will run a program to get it, and it'll run for as long as they need it to run.
The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.
You must not have been paying very good attention to what China is doing, they're absorbing high tech at a huge rate. Their high speed rail is a good example, they imported technology from Germany and Japan, then kept building on it. They now have the largest high speed rail network in the world, with their own train designs. You think that isn't their goal with CPUs? Grab what you can, build on top. It doesn't have to be #1, just good enough they don't rely on anyone else.
The same way they "competed" with Windows with those Dell consumer laptops running Ubuntu ... 30% return rates suck. Ended up being replaced by the aging XP.
Do you have a source that actually says what you claim, unlike the one you linked to? It said return rates were 4 times higher, but I really doubt 30%/4 = 7.5% of all their laptops are returned. That seems to me an absurdly high number.
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly there. That's the big difference. They're competing mainly with Apple/Google, and I think they can take them on.
No, only:
- A long history of locked down devices
- A lot of custom hardware on each phone/tablet
- No tradition for dual boot
- Covered by a ton of silly software patents
Just look at how many problems Linux has had, and still to some degree has, with basic functionality even on fairly standard desktop gear. Like sound, network, wifi, suspend/resume, bluetooth, power management and so on. Now try this in the phone/tablet world where a lot of the hardware is used exactly once in one generation and there's lots of magic values and toggles. I predict the YotLT is even further away than the YotLD.
*Looks at Unity*
Well, maybe not that shocked...
S1 = cost per hour of CentOS independent support (this includes maintenance, upgrades, deploying software)
S2 = cost per hour of RHEL official support
Those should absolutely be multiplied by productivity and quality. Many people would rather pay $50/hour for 4 hours than $150/hour for one hour, even though it makes no sense. Though I guess it's the lemon problem, you don't know when you're paying $150/hour for crap so the less you pay the less you can get screwed I guess.
What happens in both is the provider does not lower costs because of Government input, it raised them to what the government pays and what the individual can bear.
Which is where the US idea of socialized medicine fails. In every other country, the government is the provider. The public system decides what treatments are given based on medical need. Where private hospitals exist, they are paid roughly what it costs to treat them in a public hospital. It's only the US that think socialized health care means pumping lots of money into the supplier side and hoping a trickle of that comes out on the other side to the patients. But to do it properly would kill the insurance companies and most private hospitals. That's a billion dollar industry that'll fight you tooth and nail every step of the way.
The worst part of all this is that his political calculation is correct: Next election I'm probably going to be voting for him. Because the other option will be a lot worse.
Yep. And I'm sure someone will point out that you can choose not to vote. So that you will get someone worse for four years. So that in four years they'll pick a better candidate, except they'd have to find a new one anyway because Obama would have served two terms by then. You'd have to get into some rather far fetched theories about sending a message to improve future presidents or that it'd be better for the next Democrat to not have to clean up Obama's mess to conclude the country will end up better off by not voting. They'll grumble and say they won't right up until election day but when push comes to shove, they'll take the bad over the worse.
More importantly, you don't need the stopping power of a shotgun against a zombie,
That depends entirely on the brand of zombie, some it seems you must literally blow or hack apart. If so I suggest a shotgun blast to the face, it won't have anything left to track you with after that. As long as it's a combat shotgun where you load magazines, not single shells it'd be my weapon of choice. At least compared to a machete, which would probably get stuck in the first zombie's arm as they eat me alive.
If you can't answer the question 'what does the support buy you?', then you can't answer this. Most of the time, when people talk about support at the enterprise level they mean adding features and fixing bugs that are important to the company paying the bills. Do you have the expertise in-house to do this? If so, then there is no advantage in Red Hat over CentOS (unless it means you can make some of your in-house people redundant).
The real question is: Have you ever used your fire insurance? If no, do you think it would be a good idea to drop it? I'd call it excessive if you used it even once a decade. Most companies I know really have support because they can't afford to have a big staff waiting around for shit to hit the fan, but if shit hits the fan they can't afford extended downtime. What if your main man is on vacation or hospitalized or just left the company? The minor features and bugs that get fixed might be perks but that's not really why they're paying. And that's why the CIO's suggestion might work fine this year. And next year. And the year after that. But when your production server just keeps crashing and the backups just keep crashing because it's hit some ugly condition and you need people that really know the system and you need them right now, that's when you want support. But it's rather hard to argue with a man that think lightning never strikes.
The boss doesn't believe in support. CentOS is a product with no support. Do it, and if shit hits the fan you have your big "I told you so", hopefully in writing. If it all goes to hell, show that to his boss, assuming he has one. It's one thing if management doesn't understand, here they apparently do understand but disagree. Then they're free to fall on their own sword IMO.
Am I missing something here that says we have to compare all these people on the merits of their accomplishments?
How can the level of recognition you get not be a de facto comparison? It's not whether about you give your grandkids $50 or $500 for Christmas, it's that you gave $50 to one and $500 to the other. And the response is like "Giving $500 is crazy, but if you gave it to Steve then Dennis damn well deserves the same." I feel that is a logical and natural reaction, by breaking the scale with Jobs you are changing the expectations for everyone else.
Data mining is based on a single assumption, which if being false, collapses the whole utility of data mining. Data mining expects to get good input data.
That would depend entirely on the model and such a system of course wouldn't assume that. But it's much easier to positively confirm information than to find it.
Observe: "Today I ate at McDonald's and paid cash" although you were home and had Chinese take-away which you paid with a card.
Perhaps the simplest check would be to check your cell phone data, unless you sent a friend to McDonalds with it. Or if you were a person of interest we could pull up security cameras. We could question the employees. We can check the card company that you did in fact pay for Chinese take-away. It's just as much about finding who and when someone would be lying about that sort of thing. Because most like it's because you're having some sort of clandestine meeting, not to hide you eat Chinese.
You can't fake certain events like paying with a card (since it leaves a record) but you can work around it: swap the cards with someone, have a card pool with trusted friends, etc.
Yes, but how many people actually do that? How many people would you trust with your bank account and more importantly, if someone asked you to use their account instead then 99.9% would wonder WTF, what are you doing to drag me into now that is so naughty you can't use your own card? Plus you're both breaking the card holder's agreement, so no fraud protection if your buddy takes all the money and runs.
Another example: leave your mobile phone at home, and go somewhere. Tracking your phone will not reveal your location. Data mining thinks you were at home, when you really weren't.
Yes, but data mining would track everyone else. That's the primary use of for example cell phone data, finding all the witnesses and then you can fairly quickly see if there's persons that don't match a cell phone.
In the absence of noisy and bad data, what does data mining then tell you? Nothing. It's garbage in, garbage out.
Except the fact that it's garbage is valuable in itself. If one of your "trusted friends" is using your card while you're provably somewhere else, then you have a big red flag saying this person is faking his actions and whereabouts.
Of course it's not perfect, but it's a lot harder to create a plausible pattern of false information and not set off any flags that it is. But if almost everyone else is leaving a ton of electronic traces, then the people who don't also start to stand out from the crowd. Which is sort of the real, underlying problem here - if almost everyone else is getting tracked then remainder can be given so much attention that almost all covers become apparent.
Except today they play WoW so they're thinking "Wow, what a n00b because I'm 85th level already."
Except most companies are absolutely bluffing in that they'd like to fire all their staff and hire people at half the rate, with no experience with their products and services, systems, customers, networks or anything. One by one everyone is expendable, but all together is corporate suicide. Yes, the goal of a company is to maximize profits which means a company is never happy with paying its workers and always want to pay less. And whether you like it or not, you are almost always more dependent on the company than the company is on you. The threat of losing your whole income is much bigger than losing your work is to them. Often they know the job market sucks or they know there's very little other work for you in this town and you'd have to rip up your whole friends and family and relocate to get another job. Or they know you like your job and colleagues so well you will stay even if you don't get a raise.
A lot of the union shops that I know are like cornerstones in the local community. The unions are the only reason why it's possible to work in one place so long and with so little competition. Good unions aren't trying to kill the company, but they damn well know what the executives are making and how much Hollywood accounting is going on when the company claims there's no money for raises. Very often their claims are a bunch of bovine manure and the reality is they're just looking to pad the bottom line at the expense of the workers. The prices in the market would be the same, the only difference is they'd turn a bigger profit. The giants are laughing at all the ants thinking they are playing the game, in the end they still win. I'm not unionized myself but I know many of the benefits I get have been won by unions.
If we look at this a bit further, the obvious alternative to US treasuries would have been AAA rated securities, such as the collateralized debt obligations which more or less caused the current economic crisis. That makes this paper pretty foresighted.
Like government bonds are much safer, Greek public debt was A rated (though not AAA) as little as two years ago but now it's CCC, the step before defaulting and they're talking about a 50% "haircut" which is more like a scalping. And 30% more than they said as late as July, what is it in January - 80%? That has a lot more with fraudulent ratings to do than there not actually being true AAA securities to invest in, like the CDOs were massively poisoned by subprime debt. That the rating agencies are still in business and people think these ratings mean anything anymore is to me amazing. That you think the US with its huge deficit, rapidly ballooning public debt and huge social security commitments to meet shortly is worth anything like an AAA rating just proves to me we've learned exactly nothing so far.
An AAA security is a business that is solidly cash positive but needs additional money to invest to expand capacity or groups of high income earners buying modest homes well within their means. It is not investing in a country that is spiraling towards a debt crisis each year with no apparent signs to clean up their act, no matter how long the credit line seems to be. As we've seen from the Greeks when the market stops trusting you the risk premium on your entire debt goes up so suddenly you're not borrowing at 5% it's 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%. That is like trying to manage a debt 2-5 times greater and even the US couldn't handle that, it's like dropping off a cliff with no parachute and the only way to avoid it is to not accrue so much debt you fall of the ledge.
I see clear tendencies to the same as happened with the CDOs, trying to pool national debts and make good debt out of a collection of rotten debt by spreading it all around. It's not just the "problem countries" like PIGS, the EU has plenty countries that have enough with their own troubled economy like the UK and France and aren't ready for a rescue operation. In total, despite Germany, they're just as deep in the muck as the US. And what are you going to do then? Pool US and EU debt with the IMF? There's more and more eggs being put into the same basket to save it, if all goes to hell then the Great Depression II hasn't even started yet.
Today if you bend and break your phone and try to get a warranty replacement they'll tell you to go fish, you're not supposed to do that. The moment you make it part of the interface, there's people who will go way overboard like intense games, kids being too rough with it, have anger management issues and whatever. Even if it's built like a tank that no average person would ever wear out, there's a pretty thick tail of users who'll treat it way more roughly than everybody else. To me it sounds more like support hell than planned obsolescence heaven. If you want that then you should do it on some part you control the life time of, like say the non-replaceable battery running out, the screen fading away, no more software updates, anything you can reasonably control doesn't happen in the warranty period. This would be anything but that.
What makes you think Intel has one fast thread and one slow thread filling the gaps? As far as I know, both threads share the core's resources equally and the CPU doesn't favor one over the other.
It's possible that I've misunderstood something, but it was my impression that one thread was dominant so that if they both want the same resource at the same time it'd always come first. That way a heavy single threaded application would get nearly the same performance as before unless it was blocked by calculations already in progress, while simultaneously letting it do light work on the side. Early hyperthreading performance was the same for most workloads, indicating to me that one thread run practically all the time and the other didn't get any work done at all. That is at least how I interpreted the numbers.