It should be obvious that when I talk of corporate profits I mean economic profits, not societal or any other kind. I do use the neoclassic definition that includes all costs - if you build a widget factory it may turn a classical profit, but no more than the cost of the factory. Assuming all the nice properties of perfect competition hold, it's trivial to show you have zero net long term profit. Let's pretend you could make $100 in profit - could then a competitor underbid you making $50 in profit? Yes, there's zero barriers to entry, no returns to scale, perfect information, your customers would all go to him because they have half your profit margin. Then you could make the same argument with $50 and $25 and so on, every chance at profit being snuffed out by a competitor. Any classical profits you may make have to be invested back in the business, there's absolutely zero net surplus for an investor - no ROI after inflation and risk adjustment. Yeah I was ignoring more than a few points there, but slashdot is full of armchair quarterback economists. Uusually it's batter to get an imprecise point across than have it completely lost in economic correctness.
Yes, both Apple and Microsoft are anti-choice and act in anti-competitive manners.
Profit-maximizing companies are against choice and competition, it is nothing unique to those two corporations. Competition is great for customers and innovation, but it's never good for profits. The only reason companies don't completely snuff out their competition is antitrust laws, which makes it better to have a weak competitor with 5-10% of the market and breathing problems. If they ever say they want to increase competition it's to weaken or usurp another competitor. Like for example Google wants to weaken Microsoft's hold on the browser market through Firefox and Chrome. They certainly don't want Bing or Yahoo to succeed even if that meant increased competition in the search market. This should be business 101, you know what they call "perfect competition"? The profit there is zero. Is it any wonder they want imperfect competition? Preferably as flawed as possible.
Well, what Linus is focused on is breaking user code - if it worked in a released kernel, you will not break it in any future kernel. I don't think there's any strict rule that performance must always be better or power consumption lower. Particularly if you're not doing something "right" and have to add additional checks/locks/synchronization for corner cases that can slow you down, they generally value correctness over performance. That's the case in many of Phoronix' sensationalist news, a development release is very fast but when you make it work 'right' the performance is no longer that impressive. That stuff will happen as close to the bleeding edge as most of the things they report on are. Of course, they do find real regressions too but it's easy to get the wrong impression...
We already have people having lived close together in very cramped conditions for long periods of time, like say submarines.
We already have plenty people that have been on very isolated research outputs with little to no chance of evacuation.
We already have people having stayed in space as long or longer than the proposed Mars trips.
I think the human aspect is highly exaggerated and a smokescreen for what we don't have. Launch, transfer and landing vehicle, mars habitat and likewise for the return trip. I think we have a pretty good idea what man can survive, what we don't have is the means of doing a Mars mission within those parameters. Like something that won't leave them a smear on the surface as landing like the mars rovers would, because we do have a pretty good idea what humans definitively won't survive.....
No, Apple rubs it in slashdot's face that it's not the engineers and technical innovation that sells stuff. Like so many have pointed out Microsoft had windows tablets long before Apple did. Same with most everything Apple does, people point to some reason why the competitor is a technically superior product - and then Apple wins. Hell, sometimes it's just rebranding an age old idea that never caught on like Facetime.
The attitude remind me of certain IT systems that technically work fine - except nobody uses it. In every project manager's book that is a failure, the success is the project that has users and make people change how they work. I wouldn't go so far as "fundamentally change the world", but I know plenty people that have changed by using iDevices. Many people who'd never before have had a smart phone, for instance.
The only reason Apple got some loving here is because they used BSD as the basis of OS X - not that the kernel has any significant part in what makes Apple a success. FreeBSD and friends don't even register as desktop market share without everything Apple built on top, sure they're happy to not have to license a proprietary kernel but that's what they would have done. Also they don't need to be so intimidating as Microsoft because if you want their products you have to buy their hardware.
iTunes is as far as I know available for 99% of the desktop market (that is, Windows and Mac) so essentially your argument boils down to the iOS device. I don't think they mind that at all, if you want the Apple service you must use Apple hardware.
And slashdot will throw a hissy fit about it as usual. An uncapped 1.5 Gbit/s line could transfer 475 TB a month. If you take something like Amazon EC2 they bill bandwidth at $0.1/GB give or take a little. That means 475 TB works out to $47,500 per month. Sure sometimes the marketing is dishonest, but truth in advertising would only get you the truth - not fifty grand worth of bandwidth for a fraction of the price.
The problem here seems to be a misunderstanding of what 'support' means. Support means being able to get someone on the phone (or your favourite communications technology) and say 'this is broken, fix it,' and have them fix it. If your hardware or software configuration triggers a bug in the Windows 7 kernel causing it to crash, how many companies can offer support? One: Microsoft. A few other organisations have access to the source code, but none have the legal right to ship patches.
If the problem is in fact a code defect and there's no other way to avoid triggering the bug. Just because you have a problem doesn't mean it's a code defect, it can be a configuration problem, server problem (like say your database server is full), antivirus, firewall, security rights (one client had a security cleanup and removed lots of rights from the DB user, after which the application failed in various ways) and lord knows how many other strange variations I've seen. Sometimes we're able to work our way around it or avoid triggering it or implement it some other way. Sometimes it's the client who hasn't understood how the system works and what it does and doesn't do, either because of poor documentation, poor training or simply because the knowledge got lost somewhere along the way. And sometimes it's a long road from a problem the user sees until a code defect has been narrowed down, that any support organization can help with. But yes if it boils down to it then only Microsoft can fix Microsoft products. Been there, but not with Microsoft.
It's not like Microsoft is going to go all childish on you and say "Nope. Not fixing it. Never, for any amount of money." or that your business will have infinite losses. So what's the risk of triggering such a kernel bug, how high could you scream, how much money could you put on the table or how much could you eat in losses. Then you compare that to everything else you're getting for the total expected cost of going with an open source vendor. It's not like having the code is the magic solution to all defects either, I've filed many crash reports that have never ended in a resolution. If your crash is triggered by some deep race condition under your particular load that you need one of the top experts on that subsystem will need weeks to trace, your choices are in practice limited to the few people capable. In reality the only one available is probably the one you've signed a top-tier support agreement with, otherwise they're probably busy. Just like an infinite number of monkeys banging away at the support desk won't give you Shakespear.
There's a few things about emergency-level regression bugs and regressions. They're are rare and hard to make real statistics on and they should be a low part of your total support cost. If they're a high part then it's the product you should throw out, not the support. What people mostly look at are the day-to-day running costs of low to medium severity bugs. In practice you'd rather take something polished with a small chance of meltdown than something unpolished that keeps eating your IT budget every day. Same goes for productivity, people look at the day to day operations not the "but what if we need a critical function Microsoft won't give us?" hypothetics. Usually there's another way that gives you most of the benefits which is good enough.
Starting your argument with an ad-hominem attack, and then moving to unfounded claims of disaster don't really convince. You use a faith-based argument, which is predictable since copyright is basically medieval economic voodoo. Create barriers and friction, and magically you will create wealth! Bzzzt... wrong. Remove barriers and friction, and you will, scientifically, create wealth. Except it won't be in the hands of a powerful minority, won't be as visible, and won't make the politicians leap with joy because there won't be cushy jobs afterwards.
I think if you try arguing copyright has always been wrong, you will need better arguments than calling it "medieval economic voodoo". Copyright used to take power away from powerful middlemen with printing presses who controlled production and distribution and into the hands of creators. Up until a few decades ago there wasn't really any other choice, the common man had no means of doing anything. Then difference between then and now is that computers (production = copying) and Internet (distribution) means the middlemen are no longer necessary. People are now perfectly capable of doing this themselves, as the rise of P2P networks have shown. That is effectively a new choice between creators and the general public instead of the old choice between creators and middlemen. And as for my preference as to who controls production and distribution: General public > creators > middlemen. Copyright was the best choice available for 2-300 years, now we have a better choice and the law should change to reflect that.
I guess it comes down to can intel beat a dual core 2 Ghz ARM?
Yes, easily. Can they beat them in the same power budget? Will the ARM do as much per clock cycle as the Intel? Those are better questions. ARM has a lot to learn about high performance chips. Intel has a lot to learn about low power chips. I wouldn't be so quick to wager ARM can learn Intel's tricks faster than Intel can learn ARM's tricks.
The Atom wasn't targeting ARM, it was more about choking AMD by creating a very low cost, low power chip that'd steal a lot of the "value" market from AMD with battery life AMD couldn't match. In that I would argue it was a success and has been a thorn in AMDs side until the Brazos platform launched this year. It is of course a stepping stone on the way to competing with ARM, but it's hardly the best Intel can do.
You mean like every single phone manufacturer in the world? Intel doesn't even have horse in the race below the tablet level, ARM is pretty much the only game in town for ultra mobile deceives like phones and PDAs.
Yes, pretty much. It's no secret that Intel wants to get into ARMs market, having Android run on x86 is a start. Or at least make sure the battle lines are as far towards ultra mobile as they can. I imagine they're looking at a reverse iPhone -> iPad, first get their CPU in tablets then bring out a smartphone version.
I know ARM has and probably ever will have an advantage in the ultra-low power dumb phone game. But "entertainment" phones have a much higher power budget when playing, it's not certain ARM will be equally superior there. Or if they are, it won't be for Intel's lack of trying...
Maybe I'm saying this a bit cruelly, but teams usually work something out even if you get a mediocre manager. We might more or less end up as a self-organizing team working around the manager rather than through him, but we make it happen. Technical systems like servers, networks, software and so on for the most part give you "Uninformative error message #54122: Illegal operation at 0xFACB4464" or better yet, no error at all if you don't know what you're doing. It simply does not work and won't work no matter how long you stare at it.
That is why in my experience why you never pull a good technical resource into a manager role. There's always some "soft skill" person that somewhat can do the job, probably no better than me and sometimes I'm pretty sure worse. But they're always short of people that really understand the technical side and they can't drop someone in that position the same way. Even with documentation and training colleagues it was never enough to get me to the top of the list.
I found that I had to change jobs and start with new systems where I didn't have the deep geek-fu in order to get those opportunities. Suddenly there were sentences like "Yeah, maybe [person] can cover that as he's worked on it before while you manage getting a new solution up and running." that I'd never heard before. I wasn't irreplaceable at my old job, but you accumulate a burden from having worked there for years knowing all the ins and outs of the system. The only way you really get away from that is by leaving.
Intelligence, yes. Ignorance and attitude to it, no. That is very much a social and cultural issue that'll depend on the availability, quality and affordability of educational institutions as well as peer pressure from parents, family, friends, teachers, role models, the opposite sex and others around you. The ignorant tend to get lumped in with the unintelligent, we don't really care if you miss the facts to make the right conclusions or the intelligence to do it. Either way you come across as dumb.
I think someone is trying to start a flamewar here, but most people in the "first world" countries have run into enough English words to understand OpenOffice. That some of them will understand LibreOffice too, doesn't really make up for all the people who don't.
In any case, there's words that are bad product names even if they're in English, like if they depend on whether you write "theater" or "theatre". The same should be obvious about "libre" and "liber..." as in liberal, liberty, liberation, libero and so on. But as usual with geeks, they'd rather argue that they're technically correct - and so get to make smug corrections - rather than pick a "nice sounding" name that some slick guy from marketing could have come up with. Like whoever decided to name a social network Diaspora, it sounds more like an STD than a social network.
Compare: "Freemium is a business model that works by offering a basic product or service free of charge (such as software, web services or other) while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services." with "In economics, a damaged good (sometimes termed "crippleware" or product with "anti-features") is a good that has been deliberately limited in performance, quality or utility,[1][2][3] typically for marketing reasons as part of a strategy of product differentiation."
They're exactly the same, "Freemium" is just the buzzword bingo name for it. A game demo is not a demo, it's a feature limited freemium model. Shareware is not shareware, it's a time limited freemium model. Welcome to reality 2.0, where everything has a fancier name.
However, if the copyrights were transferred to a non-profit foundation, that foundation would be able to re-license OpenOffice as licenses develop.
If they require copyright assignment of patches - which many companies and people won't do. In fact, it was one of the things people didn't like but Oracle needed to sell StarOffice. Or at least a license which essentially amounts to the same. It's the same with e.g. Qt, I know some code is in kdelibs because people won't sign Nokia's contribution license.
a drive from 5 years ago is beyond suspect in terms of reliability and often just doesn't cut it in terms of speed and capacity
It's been well over 4 years since the first 1TB drive came and we're currently at 3TB with no significant improvements in sight. They're still at 7200 RPM with only minor performance differences due to higher density - in terms of IOPS they're almost the same. I would say the capacity and speed is just fine, only the reliability is questionable. But then nobody really cares as long as the solution is to buy a new, much bigger and much cheaper HDD. But if new disks stop being significantly better, then we'll start caring more about how long they last. Though personally I'm more concerned about how how long my SSD will last...
Damn the submit button for being so close to the preview button. The point is not to avoid every risk, that you should never forget anything or anything like that. But if you're purposely leaving your keys in your car and you act like it's a shock to you that there's car thieves then yes I will mock you for not knowing or not caring. Do you really want a world where people take zero responsibility to make themselves less vulnerable to crime? Of course I don't mean lock yourself in and never go out, that'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater but it would not hurt people to apply sound judgement. That doesn't take it any less a crime when people don't, but it doesn't mean the unlit empty park is just as good a way home as the lit street with people.
What the "Just World Hypothesis" (better referred to as the "Just World Fallacy") actually describes is that pattern of humans seeking a means to place blame on victims while ignoring the free will of the offender.
Other, more pertinent places we see the Just World Fallacy: "Ya, you were robbed, but you left your door unlocked. You deserve what you got." "Ya, she was sexually assaulted, but she was dressed like a whore..." "The boy was killed while legally crossing a street in a crosswalk. But he was dressed in black, so he had it coming." "Her car was stolen, but it was her fault-- she left her keys in car."
Crimes are always the fault of the criminal, but I can't defend complete and utter ignorance of living in the real world. It's got absolutely nothing to do with a "Just World" fallacy, it's because I know the world is an unjust place and you need to look out for yourself and those you care about. If you didn't teach your kids not to play on the freeway and not get in a car with a stranger I'd say you've failed at parenting and eventually if you don't learn yourself you've failed at growing up.
They do try to have backups of the backups of the backups. But this isn't a data center that can fail-over to one thousands of miles away, ultimately all the cooling solutions have to end up at the same reactor at the same plant which is your "single point of failure" you wouldn't allow in a critical IT solution. That really limits the practical level of redundancy you can have, adding more backup systems doesn't help unless they'll function in a scenario where all the other fail. With 9+ magnitude earthquake it's more "how many meters thick are your concrete walls" than "how many redundant systems do you have.
Question is, would a public-run utility design and build nuclear infrastructure to within the letter of the law or would they 'overbuild' for safety?
If safety margins are needed the safety margins should be in the law, not expecting everyone to overbuild. Just like building codes design for worst possible load and then some - basically you can have the whole place stacked with people doing line dancing and the floor still won't collapse by 100 people jumping simultaneously.
Honestly, Titan would be as "done" as the Moon is "done" today. Been there, done that, pretty boring piece of rock in the sky really that nobody's bothered to visit for almost 40 years. If we go there, yeah there's methane in fluid form but it's sterile like an operating room it will be just another one of those rocks.
If you really wanted to be the inner geek, you should go back to Leonardo da Vinci's time, when you could be a multi-discipline genius and most of his inventions really were hands on. Between electron microscopes, giant telescopes, huge particle colliders, robots and probes it's mostly reading stuff out of devices. And when it comes to space on the one side the Mars landers aren't being on Mars, on the other it'll take most of the "news" out of going to Mars. Now here's images just like the landers - except with people in them.
Personally I think one of the most exciting parts of space - searching for other earth-like planets - is happening right now. Good candidates are likely to show up in my lifetime, not in 500+ years. If we can find some, then going to Titan is a lot less interesting. Then people will dream of crossing the interstellar void and reaching "new earth". That's the thing about science, we always move the goal posts.
I find people use the word in much the same way. "I regret selling my car" usually means the expected pros and cons didn't match the actual outcome. It's not remorse for doing it, just disappointment over the results. I would say it's more expressing a factual hindsight than an emotional state. Also I've found that most regrets people have is because you can always assume everything will go your way on the path not taken or you know now that the huge gamble would have worked out. You never know that this girl would have become your psycho ex, the startup work you to death and still flounder, your sports career cut short by injury. You always fantasize that it'd be better than your real life, which being real and all tends to have its smaller and larger setbacks. Most likely you did make the right choice, you just like to beat yourself up about it.
If SpaceX truly is better they'll just use the Chinese 3 step program:
The first ones, you build them and we launch them (teach us to use it) The next ones, we build under your supervision (teach us to build it) The final ones, we build ourselves on license (assuring completeness)
After that a remarkably similar Chinese rocket will replace the US one, naturally not paying any foreign royalties. Most everybody involved will care about their own quarterly bonus and will jump ship by then. Did I miss anything? There's no ??? step in this, but tben again it's not a slashdot plan...
this shouldn't be possible and regulation is a good way of addressing this, for example by forbidding businesses from using SSNs as record identifiers
Governments are very two-faced on this one, on the one hand they get their panties in a bunch about it yet on the other hand they require it in so many places. Here in Norway I have a unique id assigned to me by the government. Employers report income to the authorities for income tax, so all HR positions have to have it. I can't open a bank account without one. I can't trade stocks or funds without one. Car registry, property registry, pretty much every registry that requires a unique id uses it. There's a central registry that I have to report in when I move, so I get all the local voting rights, pay the right local taxes and so on. Even the card that gives me 3% off at the grocery store and pays out when it reaches a certain amount has to have that ID, because even those 20$ are reported to the government as my asset. Along with audit requirements that means many, many people past and present have to know it. That it's also written on my drivers license in my wallet is the least of my worries. Of course the explanations are all the usual ones, tax fraud, money laundering, mistaken identities and so on. Fair enough but you can't both have your cake and eat it too, if so many people know it then it's not a very well kept secret.
Slashdot Mirror
It should be obvious that when I talk of corporate profits I mean economic profits, not societal or any other kind. I do use the neoclassic definition that includes all costs - if you build a widget factory it may turn a classical profit, but no more than the cost of the factory. Assuming all the nice properties of perfect competition hold, it's trivial to show you have zero net long term profit. Let's pretend you could make $100 in profit - could then a competitor underbid you making $50 in profit? Yes, there's zero barriers to entry, no returns to scale, perfect information, your customers would all go to him because they have half your profit margin. Then you could make the same argument with $50 and $25 and so on, every chance at profit being snuffed out by a competitor. Any classical profits you may make have to be invested back in the business, there's absolutely zero net surplus for an investor - no ROI after inflation and risk adjustment. Yeah I was ignoring more than a few points there, but slashdot is full of armchair quarterback economists. Uusually it's batter to get an imprecise point across than have it completely lost in economic correctness.
Yes, both Apple and Microsoft are anti-choice and act in anti-competitive manners.
Profit-maximizing companies are against choice and competition, it is nothing unique to those two corporations. Competition is great for customers and innovation, but it's never good for profits. The only reason companies don't completely snuff out their competition is antitrust laws, which makes it better to have a weak competitor with 5-10% of the market and breathing problems. If they ever say they want to increase competition it's to weaken or usurp another competitor. Like for example Google wants to weaken Microsoft's hold on the browser market through Firefox and Chrome. They certainly don't want Bing or Yahoo to succeed even if that meant increased competition in the search market. This should be business 101, you know what they call "perfect competition"? The profit there is zero. Is it any wonder they want imperfect competition? Preferably as flawed as possible.
Well, what Linus is focused on is breaking user code - if it worked in a released kernel, you will not break it in any future kernel. I don't think there's any strict rule that performance must always be better or power consumption lower. Particularly if you're not doing something "right" and have to add additional checks/locks/synchronization for corner cases that can slow you down, they generally value correctness over performance. That's the case in many of Phoronix' sensationalist news, a development release is very fast but when you make it work 'right' the performance is no longer that impressive. That stuff will happen as close to the bleeding edge as most of the things they report on are. Of course, they do find real regressions too but it's easy to get the wrong impression...
We already have people having lived close together in very cramped conditions for long periods of time, like say submarines.
We already have plenty people that have been on very isolated research outputs with little to no chance of evacuation.
We already have people having stayed in space as long or longer than the proposed Mars trips.
I think the human aspect is highly exaggerated and a smokescreen for what we don't have. Launch, transfer and landing vehicle, mars habitat and likewise for the return trip. I think we have a pretty good idea what man can survive, what we don't have is the means of doing a Mars mission within those parameters. Like something that won't leave them a smear on the surface as landing like the mars rovers would, because we do have a pretty good idea what humans definitively won't survive.....
No, Apple rubs it in slashdot's face that it's not the engineers and technical innovation that sells stuff. Like so many have pointed out Microsoft had windows tablets long before Apple did. Same with most everything Apple does, people point to some reason why the competitor is a technically superior product - and then Apple wins. Hell, sometimes it's just rebranding an age old idea that never caught on like Facetime.
The attitude remind me of certain IT systems that technically work fine - except nobody uses it. In every project manager's book that is a failure, the success is the project that has users and make people change how they work. I wouldn't go so far as "fundamentally change the world", but I know plenty people that have changed by using iDevices. Many people who'd never before have had a smart phone, for instance.
The only reason Apple got some loving here is because they used BSD as the basis of OS X - not that the kernel has any significant part in what makes Apple a success. FreeBSD and friends don't even register as desktop market share without everything Apple built on top, sure they're happy to not have to license a proprietary kernel but that's what they would have done. Also they don't need to be so intimidating as Microsoft because if you want their products you have to buy their hardware.
iTunes is as far as I know available for 99% of the desktop market (that is, Windows and Mac) so essentially your argument boils down to the iOS device. I don't think they mind that at all, if you want the Apple service you must use Apple hardware.
And slashdot will throw a hissy fit about it as usual. An uncapped 1.5 Gbit/s line could transfer 475 TB a month. If you take something like Amazon EC2 they bill bandwidth at $0.1/GB give or take a little. That means 475 TB works out to $47,500 per month. Sure sometimes the marketing is dishonest, but truth in advertising would only get you the truth - not fifty grand worth of bandwidth for a fraction of the price.
The problem here seems to be a misunderstanding of what 'support' means. Support means being able to get someone on the phone (or your favourite communications technology) and say 'this is broken, fix it,' and have them fix it. If your hardware or software configuration triggers a bug in the Windows 7 kernel causing it to crash, how many companies can offer support? One: Microsoft. A few other organisations have access to the source code, but none have the legal right to ship patches.
If the problem is in fact a code defect and there's no other way to avoid triggering the bug. Just because you have a problem doesn't mean it's a code defect, it can be a configuration problem, server problem (like say your database server is full), antivirus, firewall, security rights (one client had a security cleanup and removed lots of rights from the DB user, after which the application failed in various ways) and lord knows how many other strange variations I've seen. Sometimes we're able to work our way around it or avoid triggering it or implement it some other way. Sometimes it's the client who hasn't understood how the system works and what it does and doesn't do, either because of poor documentation, poor training or simply because the knowledge got lost somewhere along the way. And sometimes it's a long road from a problem the user sees until a code defect has been narrowed down, that any support organization can help with. But yes if it boils down to it then only Microsoft can fix Microsoft products. Been there, but not with Microsoft.
It's not like Microsoft is going to go all childish on you and say "Nope. Not fixing it. Never, for any amount of money." or that your business will have infinite losses. So what's the risk of triggering such a kernel bug, how high could you scream, how much money could you put on the table or how much could you eat in losses. Then you compare that to everything else you're getting for the total expected cost of going with an open source vendor. It's not like having the code is the magic solution to all defects either, I've filed many crash reports that have never ended in a resolution. If your crash is triggered by some deep race condition under your particular load that you need one of the top experts on that subsystem will need weeks to trace, your choices are in practice limited to the few people capable. In reality the only one available is probably the one you've signed a top-tier support agreement with, otherwise they're probably busy. Just like an infinite number of monkeys banging away at the support desk won't give you Shakespear.
There's a few things about emergency-level regression bugs and regressions. They're are rare and hard to make real statistics on and they should be a low part of your total support cost. If they're a high part then it's the product you should throw out, not the support. What people mostly look at are the day-to-day running costs of low to medium severity bugs. In practice you'd rather take something polished with a small chance of meltdown than something unpolished that keeps eating your IT budget every day. Same goes for productivity, people look at the day to day operations not the "but what if we need a critical function Microsoft won't give us?" hypothetics. Usually there's another way that gives you most of the benefits which is good enough.
Starting your argument with an ad-hominem attack, and then moving to unfounded claims of disaster don't really convince. You use a faith-based argument, which is predictable since copyright is basically medieval economic voodoo. Create barriers and friction, and magically you will create wealth! Bzzzt... wrong. Remove barriers and friction, and you will, scientifically, create wealth. Except it won't be in the hands of a powerful minority, won't be as visible, and won't make the politicians leap with joy because there won't be cushy jobs afterwards.
I think if you try arguing copyright has always been wrong, you will need better arguments than calling it "medieval economic voodoo". Copyright used to take power away from powerful middlemen with printing presses who controlled production and distribution and into the hands of creators. Up until a few decades ago there wasn't really any other choice, the common man had no means of doing anything. Then difference between then and now is that computers (production = copying) and Internet (distribution) means the middlemen are no longer necessary. People are now perfectly capable of doing this themselves, as the rise of P2P networks have shown. That is effectively a new choice between creators and the general public instead of the old choice between creators and middlemen. And as for my preference as to who controls production and distribution: General public > creators > middlemen. Copyright was the best choice available for 2-300 years, now we have a better choice and the law should change to reflect that.
I guess it comes down to can intel beat a dual core 2 Ghz ARM?
Yes, easily. Can they beat them in the same power budget? Will the ARM do as much per clock cycle as the Intel? Those are better questions. ARM has a lot to learn about high performance chips. Intel has a lot to learn about low power chips. I wouldn't be so quick to wager ARM can learn Intel's tricks faster than Intel can learn ARM's tricks.
The Atom wasn't targeting ARM, it was more about choking AMD by creating a very low cost, low power chip that'd steal a lot of the "value" market from AMD with battery life AMD couldn't match. In that I would argue it was a success and has been a thorn in AMDs side until the Brazos platform launched this year. It is of course a stepping stone on the way to competing with ARM, but it's hardly the best Intel can do.
You mean like every single phone manufacturer in the world? Intel doesn't even have horse in the race below the tablet level, ARM is pretty much the only game in town for ultra mobile deceives like phones and PDAs.
Yes, pretty much. It's no secret that Intel wants to get into ARMs market, having Android run on x86 is a start. Or at least make sure the battle lines are as far towards ultra mobile as they can. I imagine they're looking at a reverse iPhone -> iPad, first get their CPU in tablets then bring out a smartphone version.
I know ARM has and probably ever will have an advantage in the ultra-low power dumb phone game. But "entertainment" phones have a much higher power budget when playing, it's not certain ARM will be equally superior there. Or if they are, it won't be for Intel's lack of trying...
Maybe I'm saying this a bit cruelly, but teams usually work something out even if you get a mediocre manager. We might more or less end up as a self-organizing team working around the manager rather than through him, but we make it happen. Technical systems like servers, networks, software and so on for the most part give you "Uninformative error message #54122: Illegal operation at 0xFACB4464" or better yet, no error at all if you don't know what you're doing. It simply does not work and won't work no matter how long you stare at it.
That is why in my experience why you never pull a good technical resource into a manager role. There's always some "soft skill" person that somewhat can do the job, probably no better than me and sometimes I'm pretty sure worse. But they're always short of people that really understand the technical side and they can't drop someone in that position the same way. Even with documentation and training colleagues it was never enough to get me to the top of the list.
I found that I had to change jobs and start with new systems where I didn't have the deep geek-fu in order to get those opportunities. Suddenly there were sentences like "Yeah, maybe [person] can cover that as he's worked on it before while you manage getting a new solution up and running." that I'd never heard before. I wasn't irreplaceable at my old job, but you accumulate a burden from having worked there for years knowing all the ins and outs of the system. The only way you really get away from that is by leaving.
Intelligence, yes. Ignorance and attitude to it, no. That is very much a social and cultural issue that'll depend on the availability, quality and affordability of educational institutions as well as peer pressure from parents, family, friends, teachers, role models, the opposite sex and others around you. The ignorant tend to get lumped in with the unintelligent, we don't really care if you miss the facts to make the right conclusions or the intelligence to do it. Either way you come across as dumb.
I think someone is trying to start a flamewar here, but most people in the "first world" countries have run into enough English words to understand OpenOffice. That some of them will understand LibreOffice too, doesn't really make up for all the people who don't.
In any case, there's words that are bad product names even if they're in English, like if they depend on whether you write "theater" or "theatre". The same should be obvious about "libre" and "liber..." as in liberal, liberty, liberation, libero and so on. But as usual with geeks, they'd rather argue that they're technically correct - and so get to make smug corrections - rather than pick a "nice sounding" name that some slick guy from marketing could have come up with. Like whoever decided to name a social network Diaspora, it sounds more like an STD than a social network.
Compare:
"Freemium is a business model that works by offering a basic product or service free of charge (such as software, web services or other) while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services."
with
"In economics, a damaged good (sometimes termed "crippleware" or product with "anti-features") is a good that has been deliberately limited in performance, quality or utility,[1][2][3] typically for marketing reasons as part of a strategy of product differentiation."
They're exactly the same, "Freemium" is just the buzzword bingo name for it. A game demo is not a demo, it's a feature limited freemium model. Shareware is not shareware, it's a time limited freemium model. Welcome to reality 2.0, where everything has a fancier name.
However, if the copyrights were transferred to a non-profit foundation, that foundation would be able to re-license OpenOffice as licenses develop.
If they require copyright assignment of patches - which many companies and people won't do. In fact, it was one of the things people didn't like but Oracle needed to sell StarOffice. Or at least a license which essentially amounts to the same. It's the same with e.g. Qt, I know some code is in kdelibs because people won't sign Nokia's contribution license.
a drive from 5 years ago is beyond suspect in terms of reliability and often just doesn't cut it in terms of speed and capacity
It's been well over 4 years since the first 1TB drive came and we're currently at 3TB with no significant improvements in sight. They're still at 7200 RPM with only minor performance differences due to higher density - in terms of IOPS they're almost the same. I would say the capacity and speed is just fine, only the reliability is questionable. But then nobody really cares as long as the solution is to buy a new, much bigger and much cheaper HDD. But if new disks stop being significantly better, then we'll start caring more about how long they last. Though personally I'm more concerned about how how long my SSD will last...
Damn the submit button for being so close to the preview button. The point is not to avoid every risk, that you should never forget anything or anything like that. But if you're purposely leaving your keys in your car and you act like it's a shock to you that there's car thieves then yes I will mock you for not knowing or not caring. Do you really want a world where people take zero responsibility to make themselves less vulnerable to crime? Of course I don't mean lock yourself in and never go out, that'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater but it would not hurt people to apply sound judgement. That doesn't take it any less a crime when people don't, but it doesn't mean the unlit empty park is just as good a way home as the lit street with people.
What the "Just World Hypothesis" (better referred to as the "Just World Fallacy") actually describes is that pattern of humans seeking a means to place blame on victims while ignoring the free will of the offender.
Other, more pertinent places we see the Just World Fallacy:
"Ya, you were robbed, but you left your door unlocked. You deserve what you got."
"Ya, she was sexually assaulted, but she was dressed like a whore..."
"The boy was killed while legally crossing a street in a crosswalk. But he was dressed in black, so he had it coming."
"Her car was stolen, but it was her fault-- she left her keys in car."
Crimes are always the fault of the criminal, but I can't defend complete and utter ignorance of living in the real world. It's got absolutely nothing to do with a "Just World" fallacy, it's because I know the world is an unjust place and you need to look out for yourself and those you care about. If you didn't teach your kids not to play on the freeway and not get in a car with a stranger I'd say you've failed at parenting and eventually if you don't learn yourself you've failed at growing up.
They do try to have backups of the backups of the backups. But this isn't a data center that can fail-over to one thousands of miles away, ultimately all the cooling solutions have to end up at the same reactor at the same plant which is your "single point of failure" you wouldn't allow in a critical IT solution. That really limits the practical level of redundancy you can have, adding more backup systems doesn't help unless they'll function in a scenario where all the other fail. With 9+ magnitude earthquake it's more "how many meters thick are your concrete walls" than "how many redundant systems do you have.
Question is, would a public-run utility design and build nuclear infrastructure to within the letter of the law or would they 'overbuild' for safety?
If safety margins are needed the safety margins should be in the law, not expecting everyone to overbuild. Just like building codes design for worst possible load and then some - basically you can have the whole place stacked with people doing line dancing and the floor still won't collapse by 100 people jumping simultaneously.
Honestly, Titan would be as "done" as the Moon is "done" today. Been there, done that, pretty boring piece of rock in the sky really that nobody's bothered to visit for almost 40 years. If we go there, yeah there's methane in fluid form but it's sterile like an operating room it will be just another one of those rocks.
If you really wanted to be the inner geek, you should go back to Leonardo da Vinci's time, when you could be a multi-discipline genius and most of his inventions really were hands on. Between electron microscopes, giant telescopes, huge particle colliders, robots and probes it's mostly reading stuff out of devices. And when it comes to space on the one side the Mars landers aren't being on Mars, on the other it'll take most of the "news" out of going to Mars. Now here's images just like the landers - except with people in them.
Personally I think one of the most exciting parts of space - searching for other earth-like planets - is happening right now. Good candidates are likely to show up in my lifetime, not in 500+ years. If we can find some, then going to Titan is a lot less interesting. Then people will dream of crossing the interstellar void and reaching "new earth". That's the thing about science, we always move the goal posts.
I find people use the word in much the same way. "I regret selling my car" usually means the expected pros and cons didn't match the actual outcome. It's not remorse for doing it, just disappointment over the results. I would say it's more expressing a factual hindsight than an emotional state. Also I've found that most regrets people have is because you can always assume everything will go your way on the path not taken or you know now that the huge gamble would have worked out. You never know that this girl would have become your psycho ex, the startup work you to death and still flounder, your sports career cut short by injury. You always fantasize that it'd be better than your real life, which being real and all tends to have its smaller and larger setbacks. Most likely you did make the right choice, you just like to beat yourself up about it.
If SpaceX truly is better they'll just use the Chinese 3 step program:
The first ones, you build them and we launch them (teach us to use it)
The next ones, we build under your supervision (teach us to build it)
The final ones, we build ourselves on license (assuring completeness)
After that a remarkably similar Chinese rocket will replace the US one, naturally not paying any foreign royalties. Most everybody involved will care about their own quarterly bonus and will jump ship by then. Did I miss anything? There's no ??? step in this, but tben again it's not a slashdot plan...
this shouldn't be possible and regulation is a good way of addressing this, for example by forbidding businesses from using SSNs as record identifiers
Governments are very two-faced on this one, on the one hand they get their panties in a bunch about it yet on the other hand they require it in so many places. Here in Norway I have a unique id assigned to me by the government. Employers report income to the authorities for income tax, so all HR positions have to have it. I can't open a bank account without one. I can't trade stocks or funds without one. Car registry, property registry, pretty much every registry that requires a unique id uses it. There's a central registry that I have to report in when I move, so I get all the local voting rights, pay the right local taxes and so on. Even the card that gives me 3% off at the grocery store and pays out when it reaches a certain amount has to have that ID, because even those 20$ are reported to the government as my asset. Along with audit requirements that means many, many people past and present have to know it. That it's also written on my drivers license in my wallet is the least of my worries. Of course the explanations are all the usual ones, tax fraud, money laundering, mistaken identities and so on. Fair enough but you can't both have your cake and eat it too, if so many people know it then it's not a very well kept secret.