I think I ended up resizing the 120MB [sic] DOS partition down to 40MB
[sic] means that you're quoting someone else's typo, to show you just faithfully reproduced it. Since you're neither quoting nor was it a typo it doesn't make any sense. I assume you meant something like [yes, MB] though I'm not sure there's any latin for that. This has been an informational message by your local grammar Nazi. By the nature of this post, it will contain at least one typo.
That's all well and good but there's a reason thick clients are still around. By pushing "application-like" functionality in Chrome they can start making their web apps more like normal desktop apps, only delivered online over the Internet. Yes, it will require you to run Chrome to get the extra "desktop-ish" qualities but what exactly would be Google's problem with that? It wouldn't be to own the browser market as you know it today, but to control the next-gen application delivery framework. They want you to go to Google Docs with Chrome and have a MS Office clone - or at least something just as technically capable - spawn from your web browser. The browser market would continue to exist but it'd be "just" a browser, using it for apps would be what Outlook Web Access is to Outlook.
He sounds like an engineer working for a private company, not a politician so he's hardly running the place. And how often do we get people here essentially saying "the sheep don't realize their own good, the government should do X even though it doesn't have popular support"? In his mind this system is probably more fair, and everybody wants a fair system right so the people are just being irrational about it, just sneak it in and you're really doing them a favor..
It's actually a fairly common tactic from the left side here in Europe, they need this information to make the tax system better. Pull out a few groups that are getting unfairly hard hit, make it seem like if you're against this you're kicking people that are already down. Then you get systems that are more and more impossible to avoid. For example here in Norway before you could pay by cash at most toll roads, now they're automated and you just drive through and get an invoice in the mail based on your license plate. There's simply no way to avoid being tracked by car anymore.
Planes have required ids now forever and increasingly more and more public transport is moving to electronic tickets typically tied to your person. Yes, you can still avoid that but it's inconvenient and expensive. Ticket automates strongly discourage cash due to break-ins and such, same with buying a ticket from the driver. Oh by the way, have I mentioned that if there's a rape in the area they'll gather all the cell phone logs and ask everyone to come in for a "voluntary" DNA testing?
Personally I think it's only a matter of time before everyone in this country is in a national DNA registry, for our own good of course to help solve crime and catch rapists and whatnot. And if we're really sleeping at the wheel, maybe the people who want to abolish cash will get their way and there won't be any anonymous tickets or purchases of any kind. I would not be surprised...
The problem is this: Let's say HR gives you the benefit of the doubt and trusts your ability to learn the new language in a week. Then it turns out you overestimated your abilities
Or you're a shyster looking to get a few paychecks before he's fired. Or a desperate guy who needs to put food on the table. There's a huge gap between my actual skills and my documented, externally verifiable skills. And in a job application process pretty much only the latter count, the rest is taken with a ton of salt as unsubstantiated claims. So you worked at $company as $title, but that's really all that is properly verifiable and it doesn't say really anything at all about how you performed. And even the worst sociopath usually has a favored coworker willing to give them a good reference, even if the rest hate his guts.
That's why networks and reputation matters, even though I'm hardly an expert at using them. If they manage to find an ex-coworker of mine that works for them and he says "great guy, skilled and liked" that matters infinitely much more than if a person I picked says the same. And I find that's why my diploma still matters, it might be many years old but my grades don't lie - they say I'm smart in a way my employment history can't.
Unless you're the kind who'd go mad trying to train a dog into doing a task you could do ten times as easily yourself. Some people like to manage and train, others hate it with a passion. I know from my school days that my patience with people who can't grasp things as fast as I can is extremely limited and that I'd feel like I'm trying to teach a bunch of incompetents even if wouldn't be true.
Personally I prefer the consultant route, clinging tightly enough to the customer that you can't send my job off to India. Because honestly on a pure IT function I can't compete, I'm good but not *that* great. The tech stuff I get to do is because the round trip - but in terms of accuracy of understanding, time and overhead - is so long and costly that it works better to have me work tightly with the client updating the solution as we go along.
You can bring on all the horror stories you want about outsourcing but they're like the dotcom bubble, yes it burst but it brought everyone online. More and more I've found that yes, there's now a sizable class of outsourced workers that know WTF they're doing and talking about yet live on a cost level far below mine. I think both the US and Europe will have some rather rude awakenings on that as the economy recovers but the new jobs are everywhere else.
Until they need some software and popping in the CD or double-clicking setup.exe won't work. Or anything else where you get a paint-by-the-numbers guide for the computer illiterate that's only good on Windows (and maybe OS X). And it's probably easier to find volunteers with a little bit of Windows knowledge than Linux knowledge when they need it. Not even a Linux system is that "fire and forget" that this doesn't matter.
Far, far too many of the android and Apple products are going for glitz and glamour and eschewing the basics of what a phone should be. That is to say, a phone. In addition, they get crap battery life.
You get "crap" battery life if you use all the features that actually make it into a smartphone. I was abroad this summer, turned off all data transfer so I wouldn't get a nasty phone bill and suddenly my iPhone used 8% battery from one morning to the next - 12 days if it'd keep going like that. I didn't really get to test how long it'd last because I drained it by gaming, but probably longer than I care to be without electricity under normal circumstances. And for the extraordinary, there are ways to recharge it in the field.
Except now I don't just use it for that, now I use it to kill time. Five minutes to the next bus? Check some headlines. Ten minute ride with the bus? Oh, play some Angry Birds. Study the map where I should go when I get there. Listen to some tunes. With the iPhone my "watching paint dry" time is reduced to zero, if I'm trapped waiting I can just fish it out of my pocket and do something interesting. Granted, it's expensive and I probably wouldn't have bought it myself but it's certainly addictive. Plus the ease of being able to look something up online - technically I could with my last phone too but it was so annoyingly poor I never did.
People have to stand up and take responsibility for their own lives first and then remove themselves from the government teat. Once we no longer need the government to provide for our finances we can take away their power over us.
YMMV, but I'd much rather deal with the government than the corporations. And if you mean like really go it on your own, well I just don't consider that very realistic. There's no way I could provide my own health care for example, a bad traffic accident could be in the millions even though the risk is small. I need to pool that risk somehow, and honestly I'd much rather deal with my country's universal healthcare than the US health insurance companies. And that goes for pretty much every other case where I'd get screwed over by big institutions, chains and conglomerates. Yes, every time you create an organization it starts having a life of its own like democracy and the political system, but alone you're an ant to be brushed away if not trampled on.
At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014â"far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call OistÃmÃ, but his phone battery was dead. "He must have been trying an Android phone that day," says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, "It was truly an oh-s--t momentâ"and really, really painful to realize where we were," says OistÃmÃ. Months later, OistÃmà still struggles to hold back tears. "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Personally I don't understand how they could screw that up so royally, but it seems they did.
Nobody is found innocent, only not guilty. You are presumed innocent on the possibility - the reasonable doubt - that you are indeed innocent, not the certainty. That is why so many find the taint of the accusation hangs over them, on the other hand it'd be pretty insulting to the victims if they were essentially judged to be liars and frauds when the evidence isn't strong enough for a conviction. We do know after all that the system lets many guilty men walk free by design.
Dear Nokia, I love your engineers. But please ditch your marketing department, just soon as you fire your CEO Stephen Elop, the $hill from Micro$oft. I miss you lots.
Please. In all honestly, Nokia was in deep trouble long before he took over in September 2010. Android and iPhone was and still is eating them for lunch while the precious engineers never managed to make anything out of Symbian/Qt/Maemo/MeeGo so they'd have a competitive smartphone. Elop took over a company that was already driving off the road, he might have panicked and sent them head-first into the ditch rather than back on the road, but it was far from flowers and sunshine before he took over.
On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.
Of course they don't want to lose 20-30% of the search market. But a lot of people speculate that Google has been propping up Mozilla, paying them a lot more than strictly necessary so that they can fight IE and Bing on Google's behalf. With Chrome Google is now taking that competition directly, possibly only paying Mozilla the barest minimum that's commercially necessary. Let's say Google now offers Mozilla a pittance, what are the alternatives? Well the closest alternative would be Microsoft, who now powers Bing and Yahoo but a lot of open source people would choke on that, many users would hate it and possibly change browser rather than change search engine. Or to not have a default at all, but that probably brings in very little royalties and Google would get most users back anyway. Without a credible threat of doing something else, Mozilla has very little bargaining power despite having many users.
Whether they'll admit it or not, their royalties are also now in direct competition with putting more money into Chrome development and marketing. Paying Mozilla now costs $104M*0.85/0.30 = ~$3M per percent market share per year. If you can convert 1% from Firefox to Chrome for less (actually, less than the discounted cash flow if you assume the conversion is permanent) then that saves Google money. And companies love saving money. So no, I'm pretty sure Firefox will continue to use Google but I question how much they'll get paid and how hard Google will push Chrome. Mozilla may have money in the bank, but very little compared to Google if they are gunning for the same users.
But that is tablets encoded by humans being decoded by humans with relatively obvious patterns. It's far from certain tablets encoded by computers can be as easily decoded, even with computers as there's a huge asymmetry in developer time. There's an incredibly large set of fairly efficient compression/encoding routines that'll all produce near-random data. Trying to figure out exactly which of these routines applies in which order with which parameters and settings is one helluva job.
Try locking a bunch of developers who've never worked on the H.264 standard, give them some basic books on compression/encoding but nothing describing the exact implementation in H.264 and hand them some decrypted BluRays. Let them try working from the encoded bitstream to a decoded movie, with absolutely no hints if they're on the right track or not. My prediction is that they'd give up pretty quickly.
That doesn't seem to be directly related. The main issue is that a 16x PCIe 2.1 slot - what you'll find on most motherboards - can transfer 8 GB/s (64 Gbit/s). Thunderbird can do 10 Gbit/s, and that probably includes the 8/10b encoding so the comparable number is 8 Gbit/s. Any real high-end graphics card will probably starve. As for the outputs, wouldn't you then naturally use the additional outputs on the card? I don't see much sense in sending anything but the laptop screen - if in use at all - back to the laptop.
At this point DirectX is so important they're not going to drop anything from hardware because OpenGL does or doesn't support it. The only difference is whether there'll be an interface to use it on Linux or not and the time you buy is only temporary. What do you do in five years when developers ask for features every card sold in the last five years has? Is it going to be less work then, or will it be just as much work and you're now five years behind the cutting edge? The answer is the latter, you're really asking for OpenGL to curl up and die in few years.
But wouldn't it seem likely that AMD still owns some equity in GlobalFoundaries? It seems like AMD's move was to better utilize its facilities. Given that the company isn't public, this kind of information is hard to find but I can't imagine AMD would just spin it off if they would take a loss.
I do believe they kept 51%. They spun it off because they just didn't have the financial depth to keep up with the massive, massive investments involved in next-gen processing tech. Their competition is Intel and TSMC - which is also becoming a bigger and bigger behemoth. They simply had to scale up or get out, and this was their way of scaling up.
Now, take a look at the current US legal system, where the outcome of a court case depends to a large degree on how much you can afford to spend on lawyers, whether you make a good impression on the judge, and which judge you happen to appear in front of. Does that really sound like the rule of law to you?
I'll give you the part about the money, but the last two sounds more like the fallacies of a human system. Sure there are minimums and maximums and sentencing guidelines, but whatever impression you make on the judge (or jury) obviously will have a big impact. But is there any way we could really take the human factor out of it? Is there any court system you could point to that really does better? They're all people and people get emotional, no matter how you organize the system.
You're missing the point. The devs repeatedly said it wasn't for everyday use for everyone
No, you are missing the point. What they said on their blog is almost irrelevant as long as they call it 4.0, then distros will ship it, users will use it, reviewers will review it as if it's a finished product. And then they go "you should not have shipped it", "you should not use KDE4 yet", "you should not have slaughtered it" when people do and pretend it's everyone's fault but their own. And I think you've drunk too much of the koolaid.
I'd rather go from a fully patched Windows XP SP3 to release day Vista than from KDE 3.5.x to KDE 4.0.0, perfection has nothing to do with it. When you hit the big release drum you get compared to other big releases like Windows, OS X, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox and so on, if OpenOffice 3.0 had been as buggy and lacked as many basic features as KDE 4.0 it'd be called a disaster too. Maybe they have the perception that through their blogging their major release should be held to a completely different standard than every other major release, but then their logic is sorely flawed. If you call it a release it will be judged by release standards, something it seems several developers still are in denial about.
There'll always be demand for personal services, if anything most of the western world is looking at a wave of elderly who'll need care which robots are very poor at. The question is more if the distribution of wealth would become more and more uneven between workers and capitalists. I'm from Norway, a very rich country. I went to vacation in Thailand, a relative poor country though not bottom of the barrel. There was staff everywhere, why? Because it costs almost nothing compared to my Norwegian income, so there were people doing work I'd never see in Norway - it'd cost insanely much.
If really the "peak employment" happens, that is what I think will happen. There'll still be work but wages and the value of it will go into decline. Possibly not just relative decline, but even absolute decline where people have to live cheaper, work longer and cut non-necessities. The class differences will increase, but eventually the market will even out because those with money would like to be pampered. It'll just not be very pretty because large wage cuts only come through desperation.
MPEG-LA does not seem to know what to do with h264 either. They keep pushing the "end of free license" period. We are safe until 2016 for now I believe. That is about when h265 should be finalized.
They're still collecting plenty cash from all the people who want to produce H.264 content. They're just checking to see if they dominate the market so completely they can start double or triple-dipping, making people pay for both producing and streaming and viewing. The extensions mean "not yet", maybe they'll continue all the way through the last patent - I hear 2027 - but don't bet on it.
My impression of Steam's offline mode is that it's designed to work through a network outage or a long weekend trip. If it lasts longer than 3 days like your "after a few weeks of travel" then it'll throw up $random_excuse why it will not work. I can understand their business reasons for doing so, or we'd see pirate versions where Steam was forced into a "we're on a remote mission in the Antarctic and won't have Internet for the next six months" mode. They will always make sure there's some catch to make sure it must connect to the mothership on a regular basis even in offline mode. It pleases the masses, but if you're really on a remote location and need offline gaming to work for an extended period of time, good luck with that. I read that that some people have been able to do it, but it seems a crapshoot every time. And that's on Windows, it never worked at all under WINE. I could play Steam games in online mode but offline never worked at all.
The question is really more how and what level will be managing it. On the one end you have pure heuristics based on usage and access patterns, on the other you have a completely fixed split installation between the SSD and HDD. The downside to heuristics is that they don't work until it's gathered statistics, it doesn't use any ex facto knowledge even though we know what the performance critical parts of the game is the launcher and engine, not the cinematics. They're prone to misclassification, move around in a video looking for a particular scene and it could be classified as random access, even though it makes no sense. And worst of all from a consumer point of view, the performance is unpredictable. Suddenly things are much slower because it's been evicted from cache but there's no obvious reason as to why. The current mechanisms also look more to usage than access method, after all randomly accessed files that you never use don't make sense to cache. However this too is an imperfect approach, the MP3 playlist you have running often may lead to all the MP3s being pulled into cache because they're used so often, even though it makes no sense since they're played at 320kbps or less.
Personally, I would like to manage my SSD more by myself, picking what goes where but I find I lack the granularity. There's 25GB games and you can either install it all here or all there, there's no in between. I'd like to be able to pick an application and get a slider bar starting with "Full - SSD only" and ending with "None - HDD only" with settings in between.
Take for example Civilization 5, total size 4,58 GB. 461 MB is the opening movie in different languages. 1,21 GB are UI resources (bitmaps) 959 MB are terrain textures 1,46 GB are sounds. 106 MB are DirectX installers
Subtract that and you got 430 MB that is the "core" of the game - maybe less if you go through it properly. That's small enough I'd like to say just install it, keep it on the SSD permanently. That way it'd take >1 TB of installed applications to fill up my 128 GB SSD, not just a few all-or-nothing hogs. Of course there's a few downsides to this approach, you get RAID0-ish reliability, if one disk failes the entire installation is hosed. And you have to move those in sync if you want your files somewhere else. But overall I'd be pretty cool with such a solution.
True, but to get a mammogram you have to well, get a mammogram. Very few doctors even have a mammography machine, normally you'd have to go to a smaller clinic and it'd be completely new expense all the way. Blood samples on the other hand are taken almost all the time in pretty much every doctor's office. Even if you're a relatively healthy young individual they tend to take blood samples from time to time and in the age you're likely to get Alzheimers, quite a bit more often. So if the whole blood taking is a sunk cost already, the question is how cheap can you make squeezing out a few more mL of blood to do an Alzheimer test as well. For that reason alone, anything that can be done with a blood test is much, much more likely to be widely used.
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I think I ended up resizing the 120MB [sic] DOS partition down to 40MB
[sic] means that you're quoting someone else's typo, to show you just faithfully reproduced it. Since you're neither quoting nor was it a typo it doesn't make any sense. I assume you meant something like [yes, MB] though I'm not sure there's any latin for that. This has been an informational message by your local grammar Nazi. By the nature of this post, it will contain at least one typo.
That's all well and good but there's a reason thick clients are still around. By pushing "application-like" functionality in Chrome they can start making their web apps more like normal desktop apps, only delivered online over the Internet. Yes, it will require you to run Chrome to get the extra "desktop-ish" qualities but what exactly would be Google's problem with that? It wouldn't be to own the browser market as you know it today, but to control the next-gen application delivery framework. They want you to go to Google Docs with Chrome and have a MS Office clone - or at least something just as technically capable - spawn from your web browser. The browser market would continue to exist but it'd be "just" a browser, using it for apps would be what Outlook Web Access is to Outlook.
He sounds like an engineer working for a private company, not a politician so he's hardly running the place. And how often do we get people here essentially saying "the sheep don't realize their own good, the government should do X even though it doesn't have popular support"? In his mind this system is probably more fair, and everybody wants a fair system right so the people are just being irrational about it, just sneak it in and you're really doing them a favor..
It's actually a fairly common tactic from the left side here in Europe, they need this information to make the tax system better. Pull out a few groups that are getting unfairly hard hit, make it seem like if you're against this you're kicking people that are already down. Then you get systems that are more and more impossible to avoid. For example here in Norway before you could pay by cash at most toll roads, now they're automated and you just drive through and get an invoice in the mail based on your license plate. There's simply no way to avoid being tracked by car anymore.
Planes have required ids now forever and increasingly more and more public transport is moving to electronic tickets typically tied to your person. Yes, you can still avoid that but it's inconvenient and expensive. Ticket automates strongly discourage cash due to break-ins and such, same with buying a ticket from the driver. Oh by the way, have I mentioned that if there's a rape in the area they'll gather all the cell phone logs and ask everyone to come in for a "voluntary" DNA testing?
Personally I think it's only a matter of time before everyone in this country is in a national DNA registry, for our own good of course to help solve crime and catch rapists and whatnot. And if we're really sleeping at the wheel, maybe the people who want to abolish cash will get their way and there won't be any anonymous tickets or purchases of any kind. I would not be surprised...
The problem is this: Let's say HR gives you the benefit of the doubt and trusts your ability to learn the new language in a week. Then it turns out you overestimated your abilities
Or you're a shyster looking to get a few paychecks before he's fired. Or a desperate guy who needs to put food on the table. There's a huge gap between my actual skills and my documented, externally verifiable skills. And in a job application process pretty much only the latter count, the rest is taken with a ton of salt as unsubstantiated claims. So you worked at $company as $title, but that's really all that is properly verifiable and it doesn't say really anything at all about how you performed. And even the worst sociopath usually has a favored coworker willing to give them a good reference, even if the rest hate his guts.
That's why networks and reputation matters, even though I'm hardly an expert at using them. If they manage to find an ex-coworker of mine that works for them and he says "great guy, skilled and liked" that matters infinitely much more than if a person I picked says the same. And I find that's why my diploma still matters, it might be many years old but my grades don't lie - they say I'm smart in a way my employment history can't.
Unless you're the kind who'd go mad trying to train a dog into doing a task you could do ten times as easily yourself. Some people like to manage and train, others hate it with a passion. I know from my school days that my patience with people who can't grasp things as fast as I can is extremely limited and that I'd feel like I'm trying to teach a bunch of incompetents even if wouldn't be true.
Personally I prefer the consultant route, clinging tightly enough to the customer that you can't send my job off to India. Because honestly on a pure IT function I can't compete, I'm good but not *that* great. The tech stuff I get to do is because the round trip - but in terms of accuracy of understanding, time and overhead - is so long and costly that it works better to have me work tightly with the client updating the solution as we go along.
You can bring on all the horror stories you want about outsourcing but they're like the dotcom bubble, yes it burst but it brought everyone online. More and more I've found that yes, there's now a sizable class of outsourced workers that know WTF they're doing and talking about yet live on a cost level far below mine. I think both the US and Europe will have some rather rude awakenings on that as the economy recovers but the new jobs are everywhere else.
Until they need some software and popping in the CD or double-clicking setup.exe won't work. Or anything else where you get a paint-by-the-numbers guide for the computer illiterate that's only good on Windows (and maybe OS X). And it's probably easier to find volunteers with a little bit of Windows knowledge than Linux knowledge when they need it. Not even a Linux system is that "fire and forget" that this doesn't matter.
Far, far too many of the android and Apple products are going for glitz and glamour and eschewing the basics of what a phone should be. That is to say, a phone. In addition, they get crap battery life.
You get "crap" battery life if you use all the features that actually make it into a smartphone. I was abroad this summer, turned off all data transfer so I wouldn't get a nasty phone bill and suddenly my iPhone used 8% battery from one morning to the next - 12 days if it'd keep going like that. I didn't really get to test how long it'd last because I drained it by gaming, but probably longer than I care to be without electricity under normal circumstances. And for the extraordinary, there are ways to recharge it in the field.
Except now I don't just use it for that, now I use it to kill time. Five minutes to the next bus? Check some headlines. Ten minute ride with the bus? Oh, play some Angry Birds. Study the map where I should go when I get there. Listen to some tunes. With the iPhone my "watching paint dry" time is reduced to zero, if I'm trapped waiting I can just fish it out of my pocket and do something interesting. Granted, it's expensive and I probably wouldn't have bought it myself but it's certainly addictive. Plus the ease of being able to look something up online - technically I could with my last phone too but it was so annoyingly poor I never did.
People have to stand up and take responsibility for their own lives first and then remove themselves from the government teat. Once we no longer need the government to provide for our finances we can take away their power over us.
YMMV, but I'd much rather deal with the government than the corporations. And if you mean like really go it on your own, well I just don't consider that very realistic. There's no way I could provide my own health care for example, a bad traffic accident could be in the millions even though the risk is small. I need to pool that risk somehow, and honestly I'd much rather deal with my country's universal healthcare than the US health insurance companies. And that goes for pretty much every other case where I'd get screwed over by big institutions, chains and conglomerates. Yes, every time you create an organization it starts having a life of its own like democracy and the political system, but alone you're an ant to be brushed away if not trampled on.
Now MeeGo is ready
That's hardly what this article says.
At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014â"far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call OistÃmÃ, but his phone battery was dead. "He must have been trying an Android phone that day," says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, "It was truly an oh-s--t momentâ"and really, really painful to realize where we were," says OistÃmÃ. Months later, OistÃmà still struggles to hold back tears. "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Personally I don't understand how they could screw that up so royally, but it seems they did.
or even if you've been found innocent
Nobody is found innocent, only not guilty. You are presumed innocent on the possibility - the reasonable doubt - that you are indeed innocent, not the certainty. That is why so many find the taint of the accusation hangs over them, on the other hand it'd be pretty insulting to the victims if they were essentially judged to be liars and frauds when the evidence isn't strong enough for a conviction. We do know after all that the system lets many guilty men walk free by design.
Dear Nokia, I love your engineers. But please ditch your marketing department, just soon as you fire your CEO Stephen Elop, the $hill from Micro$oft. I miss you lots.
Please. In all honestly, Nokia was in deep trouble long before he took over in September 2010. Android and iPhone was and still is eating them for lunch while the precious engineers never managed to make anything out of Symbian/Qt/Maemo/MeeGo so they'd have a competitive smartphone. Elop took over a company that was already driving off the road, he might have panicked and sent them head-first into the ditch rather than back on the road, but it was far from flowers and sunshine before he took over.
On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.
Of course they don't want to lose 20-30% of the search market. But a lot of people speculate that Google has been propping up Mozilla, paying them a lot more than strictly necessary so that they can fight IE and Bing on Google's behalf. With Chrome Google is now taking that competition directly, possibly only paying Mozilla the barest minimum that's commercially necessary. Let's say Google now offers Mozilla a pittance, what are the alternatives? Well the closest alternative would be Microsoft, who now powers Bing and Yahoo but a lot of open source people would choke on that, many users would hate it and possibly change browser rather than change search engine. Or to not have a default at all, but that probably brings in very little royalties and Google would get most users back anyway. Without a credible threat of doing something else, Mozilla has very little bargaining power despite having many users.
Whether they'll admit it or not, their royalties are also now in direct competition with putting more money into Chrome development and marketing. Paying Mozilla now costs $104M*0.85/0.30 = ~$3M per percent market share per year. If you can convert 1% from Firefox to Chrome for less (actually, less than the discounted cash flow if you assume the conversion is permanent) then that saves Google money. And companies love saving money. So no, I'm pretty sure Firefox will continue to use Google but I question how much they'll get paid and how hard Google will push Chrome. Mozilla may have money in the bank, but very little compared to Google if they are gunning for the same users.
But that is tablets encoded by humans being decoded by humans with relatively obvious patterns. It's far from certain tablets encoded by computers can be as easily decoded, even with computers as there's a huge asymmetry in developer time. There's an incredibly large set of fairly efficient compression/encoding routines that'll all produce near-random data. Trying to figure out exactly which of these routines applies in which order with which parameters and settings is one helluva job.
Try locking a bunch of developers who've never worked on the H.264 standard, give them some basic books on compression/encoding but nothing describing the exact implementation in H.264 and hand them some decrypted BluRays. Let them try working from the encoded bitstream to a decoded movie, with absolutely no hints if they're on the right track or not. My prediction is that they'd give up pretty quickly.
That doesn't seem to be directly related. The main issue is that a 16x PCIe 2.1 slot - what you'll find on most motherboards - can transfer 8 GB/s (64 Gbit/s). Thunderbird can do 10 Gbit/s, and that probably includes the 8/10b encoding so the comparable number is 8 Gbit/s. Any real high-end graphics card will probably starve. As for the outputs, wouldn't you then naturally use the additional outputs on the card? I don't see much sense in sending anything but the laptop screen - if in use at all - back to the laptop.
At this point DirectX is so important they're not going to drop anything from hardware because OpenGL does or doesn't support it. The only difference is whether there'll be an interface to use it on Linux or not and the time you buy is only temporary. What do you do in five years when developers ask for features every card sold in the last five years has? Is it going to be less work then, or will it be just as much work and you're now five years behind the cutting edge? The answer is the latter, you're really asking for OpenGL to curl up and die in few years.
But wouldn't it seem likely that AMD still owns some equity in GlobalFoundaries? It seems like AMD's move was to better utilize its facilities. Given that the company isn't public, this kind of information is hard to find but I can't imagine AMD would just spin it off if they would take a loss.
I do believe they kept 51%. They spun it off because they just didn't have the financial depth to keep up with the massive, massive investments involved in next-gen processing tech. Their competition is Intel and TSMC - which is also becoming a bigger and bigger behemoth. They simply had to scale up or get out, and this was their way of scaling up.
Now, take a look at the current US legal system, where the outcome of a court case depends to a large degree on how much you can afford to spend on lawyers, whether you make a good impression on the judge, and which judge you happen to appear in front of. Does that really sound like the rule of law to you?
I'll give you the part about the money, but the last two sounds more like the fallacies of a human system. Sure there are minimums and maximums and sentencing guidelines, but whatever impression you make on the judge (or jury) obviously will have a big impact. But is there any way we could really take the human factor out of it? Is there any court system you could point to that really does better? They're all people and people get emotional, no matter how you organize the system.
You're missing the point. The devs repeatedly said it wasn't for everyday use for everyone
No, you are missing the point. What they said on their blog is almost irrelevant as long as they call it 4.0, then distros will ship it, users will use it, reviewers will review it as if it's a finished product. And then they go "you should not have shipped it", "you should not use KDE4 yet", "you should not have slaughtered it" when people do and pretend it's everyone's fault but their own. And I think you've drunk too much of the koolaid.
I'd rather go from a fully patched Windows XP SP3 to release day Vista than from KDE 3.5.x to KDE 4.0.0, perfection has nothing to do with it. When you hit the big release drum you get compared to other big releases like Windows, OS X, Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox and so on, if OpenOffice 3.0 had been as buggy and lacked as many basic features as KDE 4.0 it'd be called a disaster too. Maybe they have the perception that through their blogging their major release should be held to a completely different standard than every other major release, but then their logic is sorely flawed. If you call it a release it will be judged by release standards, something it seems several developers still are in denial about.
There'll always be demand for personal services, if anything most of the western world is looking at a wave of elderly who'll need care which robots are very poor at. The question is more if the distribution of wealth would become more and more uneven between workers and capitalists. I'm from Norway, a very rich country. I went to vacation in Thailand, a relative poor country though not bottom of the barrel. There was staff everywhere, why? Because it costs almost nothing compared to my Norwegian income, so there were people doing work I'd never see in Norway - it'd cost insanely much.
If really the "peak employment" happens, that is what I think will happen. There'll still be work but wages and the value of it will go into decline. Possibly not just relative decline, but even absolute decline where people have to live cheaper, work longer and cut non-necessities. The class differences will increase, but eventually the market will even out because those with money would like to be pampered. It'll just not be very pretty because large wage cuts only come through desperation.
MPEG-LA does not seem to know what to do with h264 either. They keep pushing the "end of free license" period. We are safe until 2016 for now I believe. That is about when h265 should be finalized.
They're still collecting plenty cash from all the people who want to produce H.264 content. They're just checking to see if they dominate the market so completely they can start double or triple-dipping, making people pay for both producing and streaming and viewing. The extensions mean "not yet", maybe they'll continue all the way through the last patent - I hear 2027 - but don't bet on it.
My impression of Steam's offline mode is that it's designed to work through a network outage or a long weekend trip. If it lasts longer than 3 days like your "after a few weeks of travel" then it'll throw up $random_excuse why it will not work. I can understand their business reasons for doing so, or we'd see pirate versions where Steam was forced into a "we're on a remote mission in the Antarctic and won't have Internet for the next six months" mode. They will always make sure there's some catch to make sure it must connect to the mothership on a regular basis even in offline mode. It pleases the masses, but if you're really on a remote location and need offline gaming to work for an extended period of time, good luck with that. I read that that some people have been able to do it, but it seems a crapshoot every time. And that's on Windows, it never worked at all under WINE. I could play Steam games in online mode but offline never worked at all.
The question is really more how and what level will be managing it. On the one end you have pure heuristics based on usage and access patterns, on the other you have a completely fixed split installation between the SSD and HDD. The downside to heuristics is that they don't work until it's gathered statistics, it doesn't use any ex facto knowledge even though we know what the performance critical parts of the game is the launcher and engine, not the cinematics. They're prone to misclassification, move around in a video looking for a particular scene and it could be classified as random access, even though it makes no sense. And worst of all from a consumer point of view, the performance is unpredictable. Suddenly things are much slower because it's been evicted from cache but there's no obvious reason as to why. The current mechanisms also look more to usage than access method, after all randomly accessed files that you never use don't make sense to cache. However this too is an imperfect approach, the MP3 playlist you have running often may lead to all the MP3s being pulled into cache because they're used so often, even though it makes no sense since they're played at 320kbps or less.
Personally, I would like to manage my SSD more by myself, picking what goes where but I find I lack the granularity. There's 25GB games and you can either install it all here or all there, there's no in between. I'd like to be able to pick an application and get a slider bar starting with "Full - SSD only" and ending with "None - HDD only" with settings in between.
Take for example Civilization 5, total size 4,58 GB.
461 MB is the opening movie in different languages.
1,21 GB are UI resources (bitmaps)
959 MB are terrain textures
1,46 GB are sounds.
106 MB are DirectX installers
Subtract that and you got 430 MB that is the "core" of the game - maybe less if you go through it properly. That's small enough I'd like to say just install it, keep it on the SSD permanently. That way it'd take >1 TB of installed applications to fill up my 128 GB SSD, not just a few all-or-nothing hogs. Of course there's a few downsides to this approach, you get RAID0-ish reliability, if one disk failes the entire installation is hosed. And you have to move those in sync if you want your files somewhere else. But overall I'd be pretty cool with such a solution.
True, but to get a mammogram you have to well, get a mammogram. Very few doctors even have a mammography machine, normally you'd have to go to a smaller clinic and it'd be completely new expense all the way. Blood samples on the other hand are taken almost all the time in pretty much every doctor's office. Even if you're a relatively healthy young individual they tend to take blood samples from time to time and in the age you're likely to get Alzheimers, quite a bit more often. So if the whole blood taking is a sunk cost already, the question is how cheap can you make squeezing out a few more mL of blood to do an Alzheimer test as well. For that reason alone, anything that can be done with a blood test is much, much more likely to be widely used.
This is Slashdot. Many here would be happy to admit to having an SO with whom they are having regular sex.
So would a lot of the people with SOs...