Oh yeah, and I should add to that.. the world needs to get out of last century. I've never written a check in my life, it's all plastic or cash. Debit cards go directly against your account and is far more practical and fraud-safe than checks without the high costs that cause shops to refuse taking Visa etc.
IUnfortunately, that's not how the bank thinks. The bank thinks "He used a false check to get money that wasn't his into his account". That he was in turn acting on behalf of a Malaysian fraudster who has run away with parts of the money is not relevant to them, the bank has never given the Malaysian any money. As far as they see it, the fraud was perpetrated by him against his bank account, and that's what they'll recover it against.
As long as you have the insane clearing system as you have, it has to be this way otherwise you could imagine the reverse scam where they collaborate, the bank has to eat a loss of $500k and then the two of them split the profit of $250k each. The sane solution would be a single and final clear/bounce, where the bank eats any loss. That'd probably lead to damn many checks bouncing at first but serious money transfers would adapt quickly and say "this is now the only way the US take payments".
Of course the people that fall for this are rather naive, but the banks give a good helping hand in fucking you over. If the money is shown as in your account and the bank confirms the check cleared, what are people really supposed to believe? Most people have never heard the words "provisionally cleared" until the bank slaps them with a half a million dollar lawsuit. This is a very common fraud method, other variations is that they somehow "overpay" you and trick you into sending part of the money back or to pay some fraudulent transport company or whatever. In rare cases they'll even try to buy goods and recieve them before the check bounces. Fuck that, the banks should be forced to either clear the check or bounce the check and eat the loss themselves exactly once. If they have to bounce many checks, tough shit. It can't be that hard to set up something like a WU branch office in Nigeria that'll let you send money if you've paid them with real cash and not phoney baloney checks.
I used it long ago (or rather, my mom claimed she wanted some genealogy software but practically never used it after I installed her and showed her how to use it) and decided to go check it out and the marketing is just poor. Like the top new feature being described now is "gramplets". After clicking my way down to the actual screenshot, I get this. A phyton shell, a blank calendar, a bit of meaningless statistics and logs and perhaps the only semi-useful looking gramplet is the Surname cloud. It looks much more like an early proof-of-concept, which is probably what it is. You don't have to sell very hard to impress more than this...
What about the plan of "4 years in uni, two of which were working on the idea in parallel". Get the idea running, gauge interest, and set the groundwork. If it takes over to the point that you don't have time for Uni, then by all means.. Run with it..
Absolutely, if you drop out to start working on your idea that's stupid. And if you're suddenly at the head of a runaway train, ride it. But often you come to a point where you feel you have to really commit and try getting it off the ground or concentrate on your studies. If "all" you need to do is code all night then fine, but many of my classes would be hard to combine with running a business during the day as you can't just buy a book and turn up for the exam. It's if you get to that point that I think you should try it *then*. not sit around and hope the opportunity is still there in a few years. A degree is great to climb the corporate ladder. But if you're head of a startup, you build the ladder below you and the proof is in your business, not you degree anyway.
My interest in genealogy has gone from "cool trying to trace your ancestors" to mostly creepy genetic profiling possibilities, with the ever increasing trend of wanting DNA records to larger and more DNA registries, and every so often someone wants to do DNA records of everyone in a national database. With sufficiently many records and the family relations - which are a lot easier to get hold of - it might not matter that they don't have your DNA sample. You're pretty well defined by your family's lineage anyway. We have some family records but I actually prefer they'd stay family records.
There's two processes: The Front end GUI and the backend service (MsMpEng.exe) which usually consumes about 40MB, which is about average for AV products.
I know it doesn't matter when my desktop has 8GB and my nettop has 1GB of RAM, but I'm old enough statements like that make me cringe.
We can point to plenty of things that make your life shorter, eg. smoking, eating nothing but junk food, but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.
And avoid setting off the chain reaction that'll trip a systemic collapse and kill you. Seriously, I have some elderly in my family that seem to hang on by the thread of their lives but they do it year in and year out as long as a gentle breeze doesn't knock them off their feet. Others have seemed far more healthy, but then they get hit with a bad case of the flu that a 60 year old would recover from, a 40 year old would just be off his feet a few days but an 80 year old starts getting all sorts of other problems that pile up. That sort of thing can easily be the difference between living to 70 or 80 or 90. That's just good advice for staying alive though, it won't improve the human life span.
Their rationale is that if ISPs have managed to block all child porn, they'll also be able to block all other porn as well.
Good thing this is actually just made up by the submitter, because if someone seriously said they had blocked all child porn I'd call them up and say I have the London Bridge for sale and ask if they wanted to buy. The actual article just says there's a block list for child porn sites, why can't we make one for regular porn sites as well? And they're right, that's what all kind of parental control software do already. This is about moving that list one step up from the parental control software up to the ISP level.
What's wrong is in that every home there's at least one person over 18 that it would be perfectly legal for and natural to watch adult entertainment. Families with children of a given age where none of the adults of the household want to watch porn is a very small minority who ought to have to opt in to a clean feed. That's the ridiculousness of the assertion, though I'm sure this will be used to turn parents into some sort of criminals for having an unrestricted internet.
She quoted the example of two underage brothers sentenced to at least five years' detention this year for a sadistic sex attack on two other boys in South Yorkshire. The brothers were said to have had a "toxic" home life where they were exposed to pornography.
So, would these parents be likely to not opt in? Would it do something about a home life where they learn sadistic sex attacks are ok? Of course not. But hey, we got to look tough.
Most startups fail both before and after college. More importantly, it's highly unlikely whatever you learn in the last in the last few years of college is what will make or break your startup. In fact, it's far more likely that in those two years you spent finishing college someone else took your idea and took your market than that there is a golden egg just waiting for you pick it up some day. Of course it's much about being at the right place at the right time, but taking the window of opportunity is a combination of luck, skill and willingness to commit.
Besides, there's dropping out as in "flunking out" and there's dropping out as in temporarily abandoning your studies to try something else. If I as an employer saw [2 years of college with ok grades][2 years failed startup][2 years back to finish college] I'd hardly consider that bad. In fact it's probably more dangerous to have [4 years of college][2 years failed startup] because you now look disillusioned and possibly burned out trying to make it work. The other way around it looks like you've picked yourself back up of the floor and finished your degree.
Besides, it's not as if $100k is that much capital to begin with. If that idea succeeds you will pretty soon need more investors, and if you started with some prize money you will not know how to get more.
For a person who is still living on college student expenses with few commitments, it can be stretched quite far. With $100k most people should have a working business with a growing customer base or the idea isn't really the lone college student type. It's cool if you want to work on the most advanced motion detection technology to go into the Wii 2 or Kinect 2 and they can be huge money makers, but then you'll be spending your time working deep in the bowels of Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony. Don't get me wrong, entrepreneurs are supposed to have certain delusions of grandure but there are the good ones and the "I'm an ant that think I'm a giant but I'm really about to get stepped on and squished" delusions. To take the latest rave hit, $100k should get you a pretty damn decent Facebook.
Why can't our elected representatives create debt-free money
Mostly because there's no such thing. If I get a dollar from you I expect to be able to get something from that dollar, otherwise it's worthless. So every time you print money you either owe more, or you make the value of each dollar less so you maintain the total debt by taking a haircut of everyone's savings. It should be more than obvious from some of the extreme examples in history that a country can't print itself to infinite riches which is what debt-free money means, it'll only collapse the currency and everyone who had savings in it while making it unacceptable as payment for everyone else. At one point perhaps you could get away with it because people were "trapped" in the US economy, but today you are likely to see a mass flight from US investments and savings.
Also note that foreign debt totals some $4.2 trillion; most of the rest is government owing money to itself - which can be forgiven or written down.
Most of that is owed to the people, really. It's been a good principle that people pay for themselves, but since most people only net contribute until retirement and are a net cost afterwards that means the government is supposed to act like a form of savings approaching a net zero as the generation dies out. Sure you could write that down, and tell people all the money they paid in taxes that'd pay for their sunset years is gone and that they'll either be living on the streets or that they'll have to ask their children - who is experiencing the worst economy since the depression - to pay for a generation that's broke and squandered its money. Neither would go over well with the public.
Encryptions that rely on the difficulty large integer factorization like RSA are indeed "doomed", because Shor's algorithm will be able to do that in polynomial time.
Assuming you can make thousands of qubits act coherently. From what I understand you need about 4096 qubits to resolve a 2048 bit RSA key, while in practice we've factored 15 = 3*5 on a 7 qubit computer. Going from 7 to 4096 is like going from creating single anti-matter atoms to a working anti-matter drive that you can tank up at your local gas station. Seriously, even just to break RSA you have a long, long, loooooooooong way to go.
I mean c'mon, killing off Rory and then bringing him back a few episodes later?
You're trying to apply logic to Doctor Who, they've blown up the entire universe except for earth and brought it back. Besides if you didn't know the Nestene duplicates are another one of the "old" enemies they brought back, personally I love the absurdity of their story lines. It just wouldn't be Doctor Who without it.
Remember how everyone on Star Trek looked? Humanoid. Oh you might have given the Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Borg, Cardassians etc. a few superficial changes but it was all rather simple for an actor to play. Even all the "race of the week" encounters were humanoids. BSG pulled a nice trick with skinjobs indistinguishable from normal people but I think that card has been played out. Long story short, doing it today wouldn't be nearly alien enough. We've seen what big budget can do now, I want to see aliens like Gollum or Shelob or the Na'vi. The problem is that this is awfully complicated and expensive, which puts the cost through the roof. Just doing it half way with masks and puppets, well it just doesn't have the exotic feel it ought to. The wraith were really the minimum of "alienness" I'd expect these days, even with them being a half-humand breed and just that cost a fortune in makeup time.
Except that's not how it works. Repeated studies have shown that while some people never buy, most of those that do buy also pirate a lot because they can get so much, much more. People seem to choose how much to pay whether the creators like it or not by buying just a fraction of what they consume. They don't like it because a) the demand are dictating the terms, it's not "pay our price or do without" it's "lower your prices or I'll go pirate it" and b) you're not very likely to buy the CD/DVD when everyone around you got it for free on P2P. There's a huge mental attitude change in the younger generation they're very, very afraid of with good reason. As long as you think of it as a bad habit you should quit or reduce as soon as you get more disposable cash, they will eventually make money off you. If it becomes normal and accepted as the natural state of things, they're lost forever.
The approach here in Europe has been legislative action that allows lesser penalties (internet disconnection) to be imposed without the requirements of proper procedure of a civil action.
Mostly just France really, and even they have barely started after doing a lot of legal rounds. I think everyone else is just waiting to see how that experiment goes. Many, many other countries in Europe don't have any plans like that at all.
Well there's amateur porn and there's "amature" porn where they just pretend to be, I think people are downloading much more pro porn than they think except they don't all have boob jobs and tramp stamps. Their primary problem is that the market is completely oversaturated, your basic fuck flick has now been done a million times before and counting. Unless you have AAA supermodel material that somehow ended up in porn or some niche site, you're in a rat race for the bottom.
The only motive there is the price of the share, which dictates that the company has to show profit growth. When a company makes a 3% growth in profit instead of 5%, the share price usually takes a significant hit, which is very illogical considering the company has actually improved its value per share.
The growth is already priced into the share. If you expected a 5% pay raise and only got a 3% raise, then obviously the future value of your job is lower than previously predicted even though you make more. Duh. As for infinite growth the economy can't, but one very successful company can have huge sustained growth as other companies fail. Just pick the right company...
Actually I think it's perfectly rational if you just add a few more elements to your model. If you send out a RFQ for a project, you typically drop the highest and lowest bids. Why? Because the lowest bidder is also quite likely to cut corners, have the least qualified staff, be a bitch about support and returns and anything else that eats into their non-existent margins. Plus you're likely to meet a hostile store looking to push upsells, accessories and extended warranties. If they take twice the price of their competitors you are obviously being ripped off, but 5%? I'd probably buy it and if turned out to be a pleasant experience I'd continue shopping there. Just the time spent dealing with difficult shops that you have throw the book at more than offsets the difference.
Reason. Linux users refuse to pay for their software so it's not worth targeting it as a platform.
Reason: Ports are years late and often cost more than the original launch price while the Windows version is already in the bargain bin. A rational being will realize that the 30£ = ~$47 vs 5$ will very soon pay for a Windows license, hell even a dedicated Windows PC if you game a little. I'd love to buy more Linux versions, but not at such a craptastic value.
Competitive forces should drive similar efforts for GStreamer (and perhaps Phonon) and QuickTime (is that the right MacOS framework?) soon enough.
Firefox doesn't have a technical problem doing so, my computer plays all sorts of H.264 just fine because I have the x264 library installed. They've just consistently refused to use the system's codecs because it'd lead to a different experience depending on what OS the user is running and what he has installed, and because they can't both be open source and legally licensed at the same time they won't install it on demand either. Google has H.264 support in Chrome and I don't think they mind that much as long as they push HTML5 over flash. I think Firefox overestimate themselves on this on, they're not going to win and they're only going to lose marketshare trying. Probably to Chrome, which seems to be the "in" browser right now.
They gave us the microcode, but not the source used to compile the microcode. It's basically a blob that runs on the GPU parsing command packets and executing them. So while they've documented the command packets, there's another level of code between it and the hardware. Exactly like how CPUs have microcode to execute x86/x86_64 commands, the only difference is that on GPUs they're loaded after the system is booted by the driver. It doesn't really make the GPU closed source any more than Intel or AMD are closed source CPUs, but if you want to get really formal about it you are distributing a non-free piece of software.
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Oh yeah, and I should add to that.. the world needs to get out of last century. I've never written a check in my life, it's all plastic or cash. Debit cards go directly against your account and is far more practical and fraud-safe than checks without the high costs that cause shops to refuse taking Visa etc.
IUnfortunately, that's not how the bank thinks. The bank thinks "He used a false check to get money that wasn't his into his account". That he was in turn acting on behalf of a Malaysian fraudster who has run away with parts of the money is not relevant to them, the bank has never given the Malaysian any money. As far as they see it, the fraud was perpetrated by him against his bank account, and that's what they'll recover it against.
As long as you have the insane clearing system as you have, it has to be this way otherwise you could imagine the reverse scam where they collaborate, the bank has to eat a loss of $500k and then the two of them split the profit of $250k each. The sane solution would be a single and final clear/bounce, where the bank eats any loss. That'd probably lead to damn many checks bouncing at first but serious money transfers would adapt quickly and say "this is now the only way the US take payments".
Of course the people that fall for this are rather naive, but the banks give a good helping hand in fucking you over. If the money is shown as in your account and the bank confirms the check cleared, what are people really supposed to believe? Most people have never heard the words "provisionally cleared" until the bank slaps them with a half a million dollar lawsuit. This is a very common fraud method, other variations is that they somehow "overpay" you and trick you into sending part of the money back or to pay some fraudulent transport company or whatever. In rare cases they'll even try to buy goods and recieve them before the check bounces. Fuck that, the banks should be forced to either clear the check or bounce the check and eat the loss themselves exactly once. If they have to bounce many checks, tough shit. It can't be that hard to set up something like a WU branch office in Nigeria that'll let you send money if you've paid them with real cash and not phoney baloney checks.
I used it long ago (or rather, my mom claimed she wanted some genealogy software but practically never used it after I installed her and showed her how to use it) and decided to go check it out and the marketing is just poor. Like the top new feature being described now is "gramplets". After clicking my way down to the actual screenshot, I get this. A phyton shell, a blank calendar, a bit of meaningless statistics and logs and perhaps the only semi-useful looking gramplet is the Surname cloud. It looks much more like an early proof-of-concept, which is probably what it is. You don't have to sell very hard to impress more than this...
What about the plan of "4 years in uni, two of which were working on the idea in parallel". Get the idea running, gauge interest, and set the groundwork. If it takes over to the point that you don't have time for Uni, then by all means.. Run with it..
Absolutely, if you drop out to start working on your idea that's stupid. And if you're suddenly at the head of a runaway train, ride it. But often you come to a point where you feel you have to really commit and try getting it off the ground or concentrate on your studies. If "all" you need to do is code all night then fine, but many of my classes would be hard to combine with running a business during the day as you can't just buy a book and turn up for the exam. It's if you get to that point that I think you should try it *then*. not sit around and hope the opportunity is still there in a few years. A degree is great to climb the corporate ladder. But if you're head of a startup, you build the ladder below you and the proof is in your business, not you degree anyway.
My interest in genealogy has gone from "cool trying to trace your ancestors" to mostly creepy genetic profiling possibilities, with the ever increasing trend of wanting DNA records to larger and more DNA registries, and every so often someone wants to do DNA records of everyone in a national database. With sufficiently many records and the family relations - which are a lot easier to get hold of - it might not matter that they don't have your DNA sample. You're pretty well defined by your family's lineage anyway. We have some family records but I actually prefer they'd stay family records.
There's two processes: The Front end GUI and the backend service (MsMpEng.exe) which usually consumes about 40MB, which is about average for AV products.
I know it doesn't matter when my desktop has 8GB and my nettop has 1GB of RAM, but I'm old enough statements like that make me cringe.
We can point to plenty of things that make your life shorter, eg. smoking, eating nothing but junk food, but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.
And avoid setting off the chain reaction that'll trip a systemic collapse and kill you. Seriously, I have some elderly in my family that seem to hang on by the thread of their lives but they do it year in and year out as long as a gentle breeze doesn't knock them off their feet. Others have seemed far more healthy, but then they get hit with a bad case of the flu that a 60 year old would recover from, a 40 year old would just be off his feet a few days but an 80 year old starts getting all sorts of other problems that pile up. That sort of thing can easily be the difference between living to 70 or 80 or 90. That's just good advice for staying alive though, it won't improve the human life span.
Their rationale is that if ISPs have managed to block all child porn, they'll also be able to block all other porn as well.
Good thing this is actually just made up by the submitter, because if someone seriously said they had blocked all child porn I'd call them up and say I have the London Bridge for sale and ask if they wanted to buy. The actual article just says there's a block list for child porn sites, why can't we make one for regular porn sites as well? And they're right, that's what all kind of parental control software do already. This is about moving that list one step up from the parental control software up to the ISP level.
What's wrong is in that every home there's at least one person over 18 that it would be perfectly legal for and natural to watch adult entertainment. Families with children of a given age where none of the adults of the household want to watch porn is a very small minority who ought to have to opt in to a clean feed. That's the ridiculousness of the assertion, though I'm sure this will be used to turn parents into some sort of criminals for having an unrestricted internet.
She quoted the example of two underage brothers sentenced to at least five years' detention this year for a sadistic sex attack on two other boys in South Yorkshire. The brothers were said to have had a "toxic" home life where they were exposed to pornography.
So, would these parents be likely to not opt in? Would it do something about a home life where they learn sadistic sex attacks are ok? Of course not. But hey, we got to look tough.
Most startups fail both before and after college. More importantly, it's highly unlikely whatever you learn in the last in the last few years of college is what will make or break your startup. In fact, it's far more likely that in those two years you spent finishing college someone else took your idea and took your market than that there is a golden egg just waiting for you pick it up some day. Of course it's much about being at the right place at the right time, but taking the window of opportunity is a combination of luck, skill and willingness to commit.
Besides, there's dropping out as in "flunking out" and there's dropping out as in temporarily abandoning your studies to try something else. If I as an employer saw [2 years of college with ok grades][2 years failed startup][2 years back to finish college] I'd hardly consider that bad. In fact it's probably more dangerous to have [4 years of college][2 years failed startup] because you now look disillusioned and possibly burned out trying to make it work. The other way around it looks like you've picked yourself back up of the floor and finished your degree.
Besides, it's not as if $100k is that much capital to begin with. If that idea succeeds you will pretty soon need more investors, and if you started with some prize money you will not know how to get more.
For a person who is still living on college student expenses with few commitments, it can be stretched quite far. With $100k most people should have a working business with a growing customer base or the idea isn't really the lone college student type. It's cool if you want to work on the most advanced motion detection technology to go into the Wii 2 or Kinect 2 and they can be huge money makers, but then you'll be spending your time working deep in the bowels of Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony. Don't get me wrong, entrepreneurs are supposed to have certain delusions of grandure but there are the good ones and the "I'm an ant that think I'm a giant but I'm really about to get stepped on and squished" delusions. To take the latest rave hit, $100k should get you a pretty damn decent Facebook.
Why can't our elected representatives create debt-free money
Mostly because there's no such thing. If I get a dollar from you I expect to be able to get something from that dollar, otherwise it's worthless. So every time you print money you either owe more, or you make the value of each dollar less so you maintain the total debt by taking a haircut of everyone's savings. It should be more than obvious from some of the extreme examples in history that a country can't print itself to infinite riches which is what debt-free money means, it'll only collapse the currency and everyone who had savings in it while making it unacceptable as payment for everyone else. At one point perhaps you could get away with it because people were "trapped" in the US economy, but today you are likely to see a mass flight from US investments and savings.
Also note that foreign debt totals some $4.2 trillion; most of the rest is government owing money to itself - which can be forgiven or written down.
Most of that is owed to the people, really. It's been a good principle that people pay for themselves, but since most people only net contribute until retirement and are a net cost afterwards that means the government is supposed to act like a form of savings approaching a net zero as the generation dies out. Sure you could write that down, and tell people all the money they paid in taxes that'd pay for their sunset years is gone and that they'll either be living on the streets or that they'll have to ask their children - who is experiencing the worst economy since the depression - to pay for a generation that's broke and squandered its money. Neither would go over well with the public.
If you have an alien world under your feet, perhaps you should get out more...
Encryptions that rely on the difficulty large integer factorization like RSA are indeed "doomed", because Shor's algorithm will be able to do that in polynomial time.
Assuming you can make thousands of qubits act coherently. From what I understand you need about 4096 qubits to resolve a 2048 bit RSA key, while in practice we've factored 15 = 3*5 on a 7 qubit computer. Going from 7 to 4096 is like going from creating single anti-matter atoms to a working anti-matter drive that you can tank up at your local gas station. Seriously, even just to break RSA you have a long, long, loooooooooong way to go.
Example, fairly well renown institution in Norway.
I mean c'mon, killing off Rory and then bringing him back a few episodes later?
You're trying to apply logic to Doctor Who, they've blown up the entire universe except for earth and brought it back. Besides if you didn't know the Nestene duplicates are another one of the "old" enemies they brought back, personally I love the absurdity of their story lines. It just wouldn't be Doctor Who without it.
CGI happened.
Remember how everyone on Star Trek looked? Humanoid. Oh you might have given the Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Borg, Cardassians etc. a few superficial changes but it was all rather simple for an actor to play. Even all the "race of the week" encounters were humanoids. BSG pulled a nice trick with skinjobs indistinguishable from normal people but I think that card has been played out. Long story short, doing it today wouldn't be nearly alien enough. We've seen what big budget can do now, I want to see aliens like Gollum or Shelob or the Na'vi. The problem is that this is awfully complicated and expensive, which puts the cost through the roof. Just doing it half way with masks and puppets, well it just doesn't have the exotic feel it ought to. The wraith were really the minimum of "alienness" I'd expect these days, even with them being a half-humand breed and just that cost a fortune in makeup time.
Except that's not how it works. Repeated studies have shown that while some people never buy, most of those that do buy also pirate a lot because they can get so much, much more. People seem to choose how much to pay whether the creators like it or not by buying just a fraction of what they consume. They don't like it because a) the demand are dictating the terms, it's not "pay our price or do without" it's "lower your prices or I'll go pirate it" and b) you're not very likely to buy the CD/DVD when everyone around you got it for free on P2P. There's a huge mental attitude change in the younger generation they're very, very afraid of with good reason. As long as you think of it as a bad habit you should quit or reduce as soon as you get more disposable cash, they will eventually make money off you. If it becomes normal and accepted as the natural state of things, they're lost forever.
The approach here in Europe has been legislative action that allows lesser penalties (internet disconnection) to be imposed without the requirements of proper procedure of a civil action.
Mostly just France really, and even they have barely started after doing a lot of legal rounds. I think everyone else is just waiting to see how that experiment goes. Many, many other countries in Europe don't have any plans like that at all.
Well there's amateur porn and there's "amature" porn where they just pretend to be, I think people are downloading much more pro porn than they think except they don't all have boob jobs and tramp stamps. Their primary problem is that the market is completely oversaturated, your basic fuck flick has now been done a million times before and counting. Unless you have AAA supermodel material that somehow ended up in porn or some niche site, you're in a rat race for the bottom.
The only motive there is the price of the share, which dictates that the company has to show profit growth. When a company makes a 3% growth in profit instead of 5%, the share price usually takes a significant hit, which is very illogical considering the company has actually improved its value per share.
The growth is already priced into the share. If you expected a 5% pay raise and only got a 3% raise, then obviously the future value of your job is lower than previously predicted even though you make more. Duh. As for infinite growth the economy can't, but one very successful company can have huge sustained growth as other companies fail. Just pick the right company...
Actually I think it's perfectly rational if you just add a few more elements to your model. If you send out a RFQ for a project, you typically drop the highest and lowest bids. Why? Because the lowest bidder is also quite likely to cut corners, have the least qualified staff, be a bitch about support and returns and anything else that eats into their non-existent margins. Plus you're likely to meet a hostile store looking to push upsells, accessories and extended warranties. If they take twice the price of their competitors you are obviously being ripped off, but 5%? I'd probably buy it and if turned out to be a pleasant experience I'd continue shopping there. Just the time spent dealing with difficult shops that you have throw the book at more than offsets the difference.
Who can confirm Netcraft is dead?
It left a suicide note.
Reason. Linux users refuse to pay for their software so it's not worth targeting it as a platform.
Reason: Ports are years late and often cost more than the original launch price while the Windows version is already in the bargain bin. A rational being will realize that the 30£ = ~$47 vs 5$ will very soon pay for a Windows license, hell even a dedicated Windows PC if you game a little. I'd love to buy more Linux versions, but not at such a craptastic value.
Competitive forces should drive similar efforts for GStreamer (and perhaps Phonon) and QuickTime (is that the right MacOS framework?) soon enough.
Firefox doesn't have a technical problem doing so, my computer plays all sorts of H.264 just fine because I have the x264 library installed. They've just consistently refused to use the system's codecs because it'd lead to a different experience depending on what OS the user is running and what he has installed, and because they can't both be open source and legally licensed at the same time they won't install it on demand either. Google has H.264 support in Chrome and I don't think they mind that much as long as they push HTML5 over flash. I think Firefox overestimate themselves on this on, they're not going to win and they're only going to lose marketshare trying. Probably to Chrome, which seems to be the "in" browser right now.
They gave us the microcode, but not the source used to compile the microcode. It's basically a blob that runs on the GPU parsing command packets and executing them. So while they've documented the command packets, there's another level of code between it and the hardware. Exactly like how CPUs have microcode to execute x86/x86_64 commands, the only difference is that on GPUs they're loaded after the system is booted by the driver. It doesn't really make the GPU closed source any more than Intel or AMD are closed source CPUs, but if you want to get really formal about it you are distributing a non-free piece of software.