So please do tell... what is it that the few people working on WINE and open source games manage to do just fine that multi-million dollar companies can not? If I were to list the reasons, I don't think technical reasons matter much at all. If I was to guess at the list it'd be:
1) Gamers will have a copy of Windows and buy that version anyway 2) Open source people don't want closed source games 3) People who won't pay for their OS won't pay for a game 4) Tons of people running unsupported configurations will bother us 5) Technical difficulty of making a game supported on the top distro(s)
I'm hardly an expert at Linux development, but I know that it's not *that* hard. Unfortunately I also got some business classes, and I can see the business case being hard to make...
So what the judge is saying is that if online gaming services don't regulate against lengthy usage of their services by adult citizens they may face lawsuits like this?
Judge fortunately and unfortunately can't dismiss cases on a whim even if they think it is ridiculous. I don't think you should read it as anything more than that the judge found no legal basis to dismiss the claim at this stage.
You just made the case for "FREE MARKETS". And no, free markets isn't the current version of socialistic corporate capitalism that we currently have.
This is getting way off topic, but most socialists like you find in modern day Europe would take great offense at the US bailouts being called socialism. Europe is called socialist by the US for having better social safety nets, a corporation is not a person and has no need no need of such a net. The kind of corporate welfare you see in the US today is more aligned with fascism than socialism. Obama's health care reform is quite traditional socialism though. I will admit we do try to avoid having people fall into those nets though, it's better for the people who stay employed and better for the tax burden on everyone else.
We don't have free markets any more, and it is reflected in the current state of the economy where MILLIONS can be out of work while we try to save the BIG CORPS who are "too big to fail" (to save a couple hundred thousand special interest jobs).Where's my bailout? I don't have debt, I don't live beyond my means and I don't do stupid stuff and get myself in trouble, and yet I'm supposed to bail out people who repeatedly do those things.
If it was so easy as to let everything fail, and people would instantly create new companies with new jobs minus the fat cats who brought the economy to its knees then sure. That's not how it really works though, when companies fall apart, the knowledge is spread to all winds, the assets liquidated and so on. Most employees in the "too big to fail" companies are regular workers just like you. and many essentially sound businesses would be sucked into the collapse too. I do in general think a free market is good, but a market crash is not good for anyone. Did GM deserve their bailouts? No, but I think Detroit would be a smoking crater today if they hadn't smoothened the fall. The jobs would not have been recreated, they'd be lost to foreign cars. The "nuke from orbit" and start over approach is not that great...
"An Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos, facilitates achievement of this goal."
The Internet has always been chaotic, you never needed to lease lines to any particular point. Everybody can go everywhere at any time over any protocol, that chaos has been the core of its success. That all the users can access mylittlestartup.com just as easily and quickly as they can access megacompany.com has been a massive boom to competition and innovation for corporations and social media for individuals. That is the essence of net neutrality.
The kind of order and regulation they want is to kill Internet as we know it, a system where ISPs get to siphon off the profits acting as the middle men that direct online sales was supposed to avoid. It's to stifle competition leaving only approved, incumbent content providers who pay their way to access the market. What they aim at, despite not saying so, is that to filter anything you must force everything into a few, known formats and protocols you know how to filter.
Child pornography is a red herring, those that deal in that will never let themselves be forced into the confines of such filtering as there are ways like password protected files that prevent any automated filters. What they seek to prevent is to kill off the open marketplace, all those that do not go through a "legitimate" label like themselves but instead offer it up independently. They want every site of user-generated content like YouTube to drown in the cost of being their copyright enforcers. They want to return to the 80s when radio and TV ads determined what people would buy. Do not let them try to turn the clock back.
But the problem is that often if you know about it, it's not really a big issue to you. If I know about an ugly pothole in the road, I can with little effort drive past it. So why then should I spend my valuable time pestering the road maintainers about it? Granted, maybe not in this specific case as you can't avoid the security hole but bugs in general you can often avoid the condition triggering the bug.
The first time you tell them, then maybe the only reason it's not fixed is because nobody told them about it. It's only other people who, having run into the pothole and wrecked their car and learning that the maintainers were in fact notified about it that get pissed. Like in this case, SUSE has been fixed for a long time so why should SUSE maintainers work their butts off getting it upstream?
At times, upstream seem to think it's their god given right that downstream should feed them with everything they do. They don't, the only reason they do is if the benefit of getting it in the upstream tree outweighs the cost of doing it. If you need to pester upstream then that balance may tip in the favor of "Whatever, we'll just keep this in our own branch. Have a nice day." It's a loss for the community but you can't expect everyone to constantly work for the "greater good" and not their own itches.
In the end their purpose is to sell the product. That's why listening to consumers matters.
Customers want a lot of things. Many of them are the kind I'd categorize as "won't happen", and if you fast forward 10 years still no one has done it because it's just not feasible or economical or meaningful as it can't work by magic like the customers expect. I've worked more than enough with trying to find inputs and processes to deliver outputs to know there's plenty handwaving going on there.
I'd take the flying car as a good example. Even though probably many wanted one, reality just didn't let it happen. You'd be much better off trying to make your current car better on the road than trying to make it fly. In this case I think it will happen eventually, but it may be just as easy to pour through the breach in the high IOPS markets where they are already king of the hill and trickle down as it is to start another uphill battle.
Yeah and all that stuff that used to be on half a dozen controller cards, now it's all on the motherboard. How terrible. I just checked here in Norway and for the place of the cheapest nettop which is around 1900 NOK I get three hours of computer assistance at 640 NOK/hour - parts not included. And even if you repair an old laptop the other parts are worn and you get no new warranty.
In short, it doesn't pay off. Deliver it at a recycling center and get a new one, they come off the delivery line at so low price it's not worth it to have a specialized guy with tools and knowledge order and install individual parts. They're going the way of broken cell phones, nobody repairs those. Oh sure that huge gaming rig with modular parts might, but the low end net/laptop won't. And maybe they'll refurb a few warranty replacements. But in large it's just to throw away.
Under those conditions you might just as well solder it on.
"160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds being quoted."
Which is the least interesting performance statistic, making me think the random access and IOPS is not that hot. Still, 64GB with reasonable performance, combined with a TB platter drive makes for one helluva laptop.
Huh? Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age shipped with only a disc check; no online activation at all,
I believe for Dragon Age you get some additional shit if you bought any of the DLC. Which I didn't, so... Great game, looking forward to DA2 but give the fucking in-game DLC peddlers a dollar sign instead of the usual exclamation mark. I'd ask for an option to completely get rid of them, but I know I won't get it.
So that's 20 years for Minesweeper and 18 years for Hearts. I don't know when Freecell was first released. It was part of win32s, but I can't find out when the first version of that thing shipped.
A little bit of digging shows it was later included in the Entertainment Pack 2 which was released in 1991 according to Microsoft's support lifecycle pages. It could not have been earlier than 1990 since that's when Windows 3.0 came out so 19-20 years old. Since it missed EP1, probably 19. And I can't really believe I bothered to go looking.
Umm, TWIRL and TWINKLE are essentially flashing lights in cardboard tubes, and an awful lot of handwaving by the "inventor".
Yup. Though I'd consider it possible that the NSA can brute force a 1024 bit key, given enough interest. However, that's no reason to abandon the algorithm as you can just increase key length to 2048 or 4096 bit. It's essentially just the same as increasing a symmetric key from 64 to 128 or 256 bit, huge difference in security.
In the beginning, SSDs were ridiculously expensive because it was for early adopters and others with plenty money to spend. The prices were in freefall and people were making extreme extrapolations based on that. But then the bottom hit in that this many flash chips makes a rather expensive bill of materials. I bought my SSD in April last year. The same model is still on sale for 83% of the cost and the cheapest SSD of same size is now down to 65% of that cost.
At those rates it will be many, many years until SSDs can compete on cost/GB because they're still about 8 times as expensive. Yes, there are plenty other reasons why SSDs are great but it'll take not only the 25nm process shrink Intel is making the end of this year but probably also the 18nm process - which is still very much in the research lab - before SSDs really hit it big. Right now there's huge differences between controllers because companies are still figuring this out. But in the slightly longer run, it's flash production that'll really determine the fate of SSDs.
If we had a fundamental understanding of problems that aren't solvable by quantum computing, some insight into whether P != NP or not then maybe. But we don't and until then, RSA has a lot going for it - for one it's extremely simple. So simple we went through and did examples on paper, of course with reduced bits. People have been trying to find an algorithm to factor integers for the last 2000 years, it's not a trivial task using conventional computers.
Shor's algorithm is impressive but it needs registers of q qubits where N^2 < 2^q < 2N^2, and N is 2048 bits which makes N^2 4096 bits so you need ~4096 qubits. So far the top public scientists are having huge issues getting more than a handful of qubits working together in a coherent state, and the problems only grows worse the more bits you add to the mix. Of course someone is going to suggest the possibility that the NSA might have overcome all that, but if so they're way, way ahead of the state of the art, and I don't mean in maths but more in physics and engineering. To put it this way, if they're that far ahead of the game we should ask them for the plans for the space elevator...
Still, I wonder if a DHCP-style port lease would be sufficient for most things. Say you want to run a torrent app w/incoming port.
1. Send port request to router 2. Get random port 57284 mapped to you 3. Contact tracker, say hi I'm on [ip]:57284
This obviously only works for cases where you don't need a specific port, but it'll work for IM, P2P and so on. But you can probably get some permanent leases so you can forever announce that your webserver is running on [ip]:28576, that is what UPnP already does I think. That should increase IPv4 capacity by a factor of 100-1000 and give every device a port range if not their unique IP. And it doesn't require the whole world to change around you.
You are not eligible for unemployment if you were fired for cause. If you were laid off, you would be correct.
I don't think "resigning" is cause, so if you give two weeks notice and they fire you on the spot in an at-will state then that's being laid off. Least I'd think so, I never work under that kind of insane conditions (3 months here).
Well, if they aren't illegal in the US maybe they should be. At least here in Norway you can not claim a sale unless you have sold a reasonable volume at that price in the last 6 weeks (what volume depends on the product). You can't claim savings over a "full" price unless you can prove it's a realistic retail price in the market. You can not claim a sale on goods or services that are individually priced and there's no basis for establishing a normal price. If you've bought a batch of goods at low price, you can advertise it as a "batch good" (partivare) with limited availability but not a sale.
Another funny one they caught was price "guarantees" when the product is only available at that retailer, e.g. washing machines and stuff like that. They'd be slightly different at each chain (superficial feature changes, off by one model numbers) so you couldn't actually use it. Again, there must now be a reasonable volume of the exact model in other outlets to promise that.
Broadband here is quite heavily reviewed and essentially you need to offer the advertised bandwidth most of the time, if you took hourly speed checks on a normal day then at least half should be the offered speed. People that can't quite reach the speed are offered to either downgrade one step or keep their current subscription with partial performance. You can not claim packet overhead into it, it's delivered data speed to the customer that counts so the physical lines are slightly faster than advertised.
Of course this drives prices up somewhat, I'm paying $75/month for 25/5 Mbit. However, it's really real 25/5 Mbit where I can get 3MB/s down sustained if only the other server is fast enough. I haven't really tested my upload since the last upgrade, but back then I got the full 3.6 Mbit I had. Also we have rather strong legal consumer rights that often go beyond any warranty, if the ISPs drop a paying customer for using too much "unlimited" bandwidth they will get into trouble. Only clearly communicated limits are valid, some mobile broadband providers still have that but typically slow you down to mini-speed after your quota is up, no terminations or such.
Yes, heard in several places like at work (male, 27) and gf of my friend (female, 24) and her friends too. First off it seems you can use the word more - if you actually laughed out loud as often you'd seem rather manic. Also I've noted they manage to use it as an emotional state like sad, happy etc. for being either amused or finding something silly. Or as an interjection like "The boss said so, lol, but I just did it anyway."
Unfortunately, Intel seems to do like the rest, drop SLC in favour of MLC. That has a huge negative impact on both reliability and performance, but brings the price down and the capacity up.
I've never heard that reliability is that much different, but durability yes. SLC drives can take about 10x as many writes per cell before they wear out. However, MLC drives are rated at 10000 writes/cell too and smart algorithms avoid overusing single cells. Each MLC cell is slower individually, but by writing to many in parallel both have IOPS way, way beyond traditional drives and we're discussing degrees of lightning fast. In other words, both the shortcomings are largely avoided by making smarter controller chips. Unfortunately due to the latter the small and cheap SSD never really came because few cells mean low speed. So when Intel announces bigger drives, it probably means faster too. But compared to a HDD, SSDs are already plenty fast. Try trashing your drive with some random writes and a HDD will grind to a halt, even my Vertex beat the fastest HDDs by a factor of 10x under those conditions.
In terms of name, my bet would be on IE. If the Debian leaders manage to act retarded enough the community might have to fork and pick a new name but the project would live on. While with IE I figure there's a good chance Microsoft will eventually figure out that developing their own browser engine is a waste of resources and create their own Webkit-based browser, but still under the IE name. So one could have the same content with a different name, the other different content with the same name.
As a tech, I find that prayer is often a tool in my methodology when working with windows...
You must be an exception, cursing seems to be the norm... then again in Microsoft's defense it seems to be one thing uniting developers, server administrators and support people. I think it's got something to do with the computer not caring so you really can tell it what a goddamned fucked up piece of shit it is without it taking offense.
Which is why pretty much all "should we go bankrupt, we'll turn off the DRM" promises are worthless. What are you going to do if they don't comply? If your software just calls out for an activation server that is long gone and liquidated? Do you think you'll get that software patched even if you sued, even if you got on the list of creditors? I'd bet not. I'd love to see what would happen if Steam got competed out of the market by another steam-like service and had to "wind down their business". Maybe I'm just a huge cynic but it's so easy to make promises you never have to deal with. So everyone gets mighty pissed, but who cares? They're out of business. Gone. Closed up shop. If you swear to never spend another dime on them, they still don't care. And while despite being utter asshattery, I doubt it pierces the corporate veil so the profits they've taken out of it is theirs.
I know of another case just like this, dealing with resellers and investments. In short, resellers are often short-lived beasts that sell - and sometimes oversell - investments from companies that offer investment opportunities. It takes some time for the investments to mature and while there is a second hand market there's a solid penalty for getting out underways so mostly you're in it for the whole project, it's not liquid like stocks. What happens is that before the investments start delivering results, the resellers declare bankruptcy and start up under a new name and tax id. Then the people who made the actual investment project get to take all the shit for everything that's been said, not legally but as pretty unhappy "customers". Trying to sue a dead copmany where no one picks up the phone because there is no phone just doesn't get you anywhere.
I'd say a good set of prints works for everything you'd want a physical negative for. I guess the point is that digital files, even five copies in five different locations have a quite short life span if nobody manages it, while a set of physical photos will survive 30 years of neglect in the attic. Taken individually I can see it, I have many pictures that I haven't looked at in years but suddenly there's some kind of trigger that makes me want to look at 10+ year old photos. It's only if I take the photo collection as a whole I'd really do the upkeep.
Also, it's pretty obvious if you're throwing away photos but not that obvious what's on a computer or DVD or memory stick, and it might be password protected as well. I don't think most old people arrange any kind of handover, when they die you go through their stuff, find the photo albums and figure out what to do yourself. Again with the "abandoned in attic" thing, would they survive a woman who had Alzheimer the last 10-20 years of her life or will it be all gone by then?
Don't get me wrong, I love digicams. They've made the whole idea of taking out a whole film and processing before you could see the results redundant and a lot of other advantages. And I know myself and some other geeks keep up with the backups and media rotation and all that, but we're not exactly average. I think a lot of people will accidentally lose photos and if it's one thing I've learned is that it doesn't seem like much a loss when the memories are fresh - but as the memories fade you wish more and more you still had the photos.
The advantage of being big is being big.If you instead spent it on 100 small new innovations with no real interdependence, you're no better off than 100 small companies. The whole value is in being able to deliver integrated total solutions the smaller competition can't, it's the only thing justifying the bureaucracy and overhead of being a big company. Mostly they compete not head-to-head but almost like a game or RISK - plenty effort being made to support the borders and juicy cash cows in the center that nobody else manages to serve because it requires interoperability with everything else.
So yeah, almost all the innovation happens in small companies that are bought out. But that's where pretty much all the total failure is too. Big companies have their problems too but most of them never really go under except as a brand, they get bought up by somebody else if they're not doing well. And it's a little easy to say big companies don't innovate to stay big, for example Intel has been the 800lb gorilla in the chip market for quite some time now, but they've done everything but stand still. Even the few times they've taken a wrong path and AMD has caught up on them, that's because they made the wrong choices, not because they didn't try to innovate.
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So please do tell... what is it that the few people working on WINE and open source games manage to do just fine that multi-million dollar companies can not? If I were to list the reasons, I don't think technical reasons matter much at all. If I was to guess at the list it'd be:
1) Gamers will have a copy of Windows and buy that version anyway
2) Open source people don't want closed source games
3) People who won't pay for their OS won't pay for a game
4) Tons of people running unsupported configurations will bother us
5) Technical difficulty of making a game supported on the top distro(s)
I'm hardly an expert at Linux development, but I know that it's not *that* hard. Unfortunately I also got some business classes, and I can see the business case being hard to make...
So what the judge is saying is that if online gaming services don't regulate against lengthy usage of their services by adult citizens they may face lawsuits like this?
Judge fortunately and unfortunately can't dismiss cases on a whim even if they think it is ridiculous. I don't think you should read it as anything more than that the judge found no legal basis to dismiss the claim at this stage.
Anyone have the number for a good lawyer? (hmm, is that an oxymoron?)
Not if you mean proficient. Or NYCL...
You just made the case for "FREE MARKETS". And no, free markets isn't the current version of socialistic corporate capitalism that we currently have.
This is getting way off topic, but most socialists like you find in modern day Europe would take great offense at the US bailouts being called socialism. Europe is called socialist by the US for having better social safety nets, a corporation is not a person and has no need no need of such a net. The kind of corporate welfare you see in the US today is more aligned with fascism than socialism. Obama's health care reform is quite traditional socialism though. I will admit we do try to avoid having people fall into those nets though, it's better for the people who stay employed and better for the tax burden on everyone else.
We don't have free markets any more, and it is reflected in the current state of the economy where MILLIONS can be out of work while we try to save the BIG CORPS who are "too big to fail" (to save a couple hundred thousand special interest jobs).Where's my bailout? I don't have debt, I don't live beyond my means and I don't do stupid stuff and get myself in trouble, and yet I'm supposed to bail out people who repeatedly do those things.
If it was so easy as to let everything fail, and people would instantly create new companies with new jobs minus the fat cats who brought the economy to its knees then sure. That's not how it really works though, when companies fall apart, the knowledge is spread to all winds, the assets liquidated and so on. Most employees in the "too big to fail" companies are regular workers just like you. and many essentially sound businesses would be sucked into the collapse too. I do in general think a free market is good, but a market crash is not good for anyone. Did GM deserve their bailouts? No, but I think Detroit would be a smoking crater today if they hadn't smoothened the fall. The jobs would not have been recreated, they'd be lost to foreign cars. The "nuke from orbit" and start over approach is not that great...
Perhaps this will help.
"Due to copyright and other legal reasons, South Park video content cannot be viewed outside the United States."
No, but it gives me a pretty good idea why they're in such a shithole and digging themselves deeper.
"An Internet predicated on order, rather than chaos, facilitates achievement of this goal."
The Internet has always been chaotic, you never needed to lease lines to any particular point. Everybody can go everywhere at any time over any protocol, that chaos has been the core of its success. That all the users can access mylittlestartup.com just as easily and quickly as they can access megacompany.com has been a massive boom to competition and innovation for corporations and social media for individuals. That is the essence of net neutrality.
The kind of order and regulation they want is to kill Internet as we know it, a system where ISPs get to siphon off the profits acting as the middle men that direct online sales was supposed to avoid. It's to stifle competition leaving only approved, incumbent content providers who pay their way to access the market. What they aim at, despite not saying so, is that to filter anything you must force everything into a few, known formats and protocols you know how to filter.
Child pornography is a red herring, those that deal in that will never let themselves be forced into the confines of such filtering as there are ways like password protected files that prevent any automated filters. What they seek to prevent is to kill off the open marketplace, all those that do not go through a "legitimate" label like themselves but instead offer it up independently. They want every site of user-generated content like YouTube to drown in the cost of being their copyright enforcers. They want to return to the 80s when radio and TV ads determined what people would buy. Do not let them try to turn the clock back.
But the problem is that often if you know about it, it's not really a big issue to you. If I know about an ugly pothole in the road, I can with little effort drive past it. So why then should I spend my valuable time pestering the road maintainers about it? Granted, maybe not in this specific case as you can't avoid the security hole but bugs in general you can often avoid the condition triggering the bug.
The first time you tell them, then maybe the only reason it's not fixed is because nobody told them about it. It's only other people who, having run into the pothole and wrecked their car and learning that the maintainers were in fact notified about it that get pissed. Like in this case, SUSE has been fixed for a long time so why should SUSE maintainers work their butts off getting it upstream?
At times, upstream seem to think it's their god given right that downstream should feed them with everything they do. They don't, the only reason they do is if the benefit of getting it in the upstream tree outweighs the cost of doing it. If you need to pester upstream then that balance may tip in the favor of "Whatever, we'll just keep this in our own branch. Have a nice day." It's a loss for the community but you can't expect everyone to constantly work for the "greater good" and not their own itches.
In the end their purpose is to sell the product. That's why listening to consumers matters.
Customers want a lot of things. Many of them are the kind I'd categorize as "won't happen", and if you fast forward 10 years still no one has done it because it's just not feasible or economical or meaningful as it can't work by magic like the customers expect. I've worked more than enough with trying to find inputs and processes to deliver outputs to know there's plenty handwaving going on there.
I'd take the flying car as a good example. Even though probably many wanted one, reality just didn't let it happen. You'd be much better off trying to make your current car better on the road than trying to make it fly. In this case I think it will happen eventually, but it may be just as easy to pour through the breach in the high IOPS markets where they are already king of the hill and trickle down as it is to start another uphill battle.
Yeah and all that stuff that used to be on half a dozen controller cards, now it's all on the motherboard. How terrible. I just checked here in Norway and for the place of the cheapest nettop which is around 1900 NOK I get three hours of computer assistance at 640 NOK/hour - parts not included. And even if you repair an old laptop the other parts are worn and you get no new warranty.
In short, it doesn't pay off. Deliver it at a recycling center and get a new one, they come off the delivery line at so low price it's not worth it to have a specialized guy with tools and knowledge order and install individual parts. They're going the way of broken cell phones, nobody repairs those. Oh sure that huge gaming rig with modular parts might, but the low end net/laptop won't. And maybe they'll refurb a few warranty replacements. But in large it's just to throw away.
Under those conditions you might just as well solder it on.
"160MB/sec sequential read and 100MB/sec sequential write speeds being quoted."
Which is the least interesting performance statistic, making me think the random access and IOPS is not that hot. Still, 64GB with reasonable performance, combined with a TB platter drive makes for one helluva laptop.
Huh? Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age shipped with only a disc check; no online activation at all,
I believe for Dragon Age you get some additional shit if you bought any of the DLC. Which I didn't, so... Great game, looking forward to DA2 but give the fucking in-game DLC peddlers a dollar sign instead of the usual exclamation mark. I'd ask for an option to completely get rid of them, but I know I won't get it.
So that's 20 years for Minesweeper and 18 years for Hearts. I don't know when Freecell was first released. It was part of win32s, but I can't find out when the first version of that thing shipped.
A little bit of digging shows it was later included in the Entertainment Pack 2 which was released in 1991 according to Microsoft's support lifecycle pages. It could not have been earlier than 1990 since that's when Windows 3.0 came out so 19-20 years old. Since it missed EP1, probably 19. And I can't really believe I bothered to go looking.
Umm, TWIRL and TWINKLE are essentially flashing lights in cardboard tubes, and an awful lot of handwaving by the "inventor".
Yup. Though I'd consider it possible that the NSA can brute force a 1024 bit key, given enough interest. However, that's no reason to abandon the algorithm as you can just increase key length to 2048 or 4096 bit. It's essentially just the same as increasing a symmetric key from 64 to 128 or 256 bit, huge difference in security.
In the beginning, SSDs were ridiculously expensive because it was for early adopters and others with plenty money to spend. The prices were in freefall and people were making extreme extrapolations based on that. But then the bottom hit in that this many flash chips makes a rather expensive bill of materials. I bought my SSD in April last year. The same model is still on sale for 83% of the cost and the cheapest SSD of same size is now down to 65% of that cost.
At those rates it will be many, many years until SSDs can compete on cost/GB because they're still about 8 times as expensive. Yes, there are plenty other reasons why SSDs are great but it'll take not only the 25nm process shrink Intel is making the end of this year but probably also the 18nm process - which is still very much in the research lab - before SSDs really hit it big. Right now there's huge differences between controllers because companies are still figuring this out. But in the slightly longer run, it's flash production that'll really determine the fate of SSDs.
If we had a fundamental understanding of problems that aren't solvable by quantum computing, some insight into whether P != NP or not then maybe. But we don't and until then, RSA has a lot going for it - for one it's extremely simple. So simple we went through and did examples on paper, of course with reduced bits. People have been trying to find an algorithm to factor integers for the last 2000 years, it's not a trivial task using conventional computers.
Shor's algorithm is impressive but it needs registers of q qubits where N^2 < 2^q < 2N^2, and N is 2048 bits which makes N^2 4096 bits so you need ~4096 qubits. So far the top public scientists are having huge issues getting more than a handful of qubits working together in a coherent state, and the problems only grows worse the more bits you add to the mix. Of course someone is going to suggest the possibility that the NSA might have overcome all that, but if so they're way, way ahead of the state of the art, and I don't mean in maths but more in physics and engineering. To put it this way, if they're that far ahead of the game we should ask them for the plans for the space elevator...
Still, I wonder if a DHCP-style port lease would be sufficient for most things. Say you want to run a torrent app w/incoming port.
1. Send port request to router
2. Get random port 57284 mapped to you
3. Contact tracker, say hi I'm on [ip]:57284
This obviously only works for cases where you don't need a specific port, but it'll work for IM, P2P and so on. But you can probably get some permanent leases so you can forever announce that your webserver is running on [ip]:28576, that is what UPnP already does I think. That should increase IPv4 capacity by a factor of 100-1000 and give every device a port range if not their unique IP. And it doesn't require the whole world to change around you.
You are not eligible for unemployment if you were fired for cause. If you were laid off, you would be correct.
I don't think "resigning" is cause, so if you give two weeks notice and they fire you on the spot in an at-will state then that's being laid off. Least I'd think so, I never work under that kind of insane conditions (3 months here).
Well, if they aren't illegal in the US maybe they should be. At least here in Norway you can not claim a sale unless you have sold a reasonable volume at that price in the last 6 weeks (what volume depends on the product). You can't claim savings over a "full" price unless you can prove it's a realistic retail price in the market. You can not claim a sale on goods or services that are individually priced and there's no basis for establishing a normal price. If you've bought a batch of goods at low price, you can advertise it as a "batch good" (partivare) with limited availability but not a sale.
Another funny one they caught was price "guarantees" when the product is only available at that retailer, e.g. washing machines and stuff like that. They'd be slightly different at each chain (superficial feature changes, off by one model numbers) so you couldn't actually use it. Again, there must now be a reasonable volume of the exact model in other outlets to promise that.
Broadband here is quite heavily reviewed and essentially you need to offer the advertised bandwidth most of the time, if you took hourly speed checks on a normal day then at least half should be the offered speed. People that can't quite reach the speed are offered to either downgrade one step or keep their current subscription with partial performance. You can not claim packet overhead into it, it's delivered data speed to the customer that counts so the physical lines are slightly faster than advertised.
Of course this drives prices up somewhat, I'm paying $75/month for 25/5 Mbit. However, it's really real 25/5 Mbit where I can get 3MB/s down sustained if only the other server is fast enough. I haven't really tested my upload since the last upgrade, but back then I got the full 3.6 Mbit I had. Also we have rather strong legal consumer rights that often go beyond any warranty, if the ISPs drop a paying customer for using too much "unlimited" bandwidth they will get into trouble. Only clearly communicated limits are valid, some mobile broadband providers still have that but typically slow you down to mini-speed after your quota is up, no terminations or such.
Yes, heard in several places like at work (male, 27) and gf of my friend (female, 24) and her friends too. First off it seems you can use the word more - if you actually laughed out loud as often you'd seem rather manic. Also I've noted they manage to use it as an emotional state like sad, happy etc. for being either amused or finding something silly. Or as an interjection like "The boss said so, lol, but I just did it anyway."
Unfortunately, Intel seems to do like the rest, drop SLC in favour of MLC. That has a huge negative impact on both reliability and performance, but brings the price down and the capacity up.
I've never heard that reliability is that much different, but durability yes. SLC drives can take about 10x as many writes per cell before they wear out. However, MLC drives are rated at 10000 writes/cell too and smart algorithms avoid overusing single cells. Each MLC cell is slower individually, but by writing to many in parallel both have IOPS way, way beyond traditional drives and we're discussing degrees of lightning fast. In other words, both the shortcomings are largely avoided by making smarter controller chips. Unfortunately due to the latter the small and cheap SSD never really came because few cells mean low speed. So when Intel announces bigger drives, it probably means faster too. But compared to a HDD, SSDs are already plenty fast. Try trashing your drive with some random writes and a HDD will grind to a halt, even my Vertex beat the fastest HDDs by a factor of 10x under those conditions.
In terms of name, my bet would be on IE. If the Debian leaders manage to act retarded enough the community might have to fork and pick a new name but the project would live on. While with IE I figure there's a good chance Microsoft will eventually figure out that developing their own browser engine is a waste of resources and create their own Webkit-based browser, but still under the IE name. So one could have the same content with a different name, the other different content with the same name.
As a tech, I find that prayer is often a tool in my methodology when working with windows...
You must be an exception, cursing seems to be the norm... then again in Microsoft's defense it seems to be one thing uniting developers, server administrators and support people. I think it's got something to do with the computer not caring so you really can tell it what a goddamned fucked up piece of shit it is without it taking offense.
Which is why pretty much all "should we go bankrupt, we'll turn off the DRM" promises are worthless. What are you going to do if they don't comply? If your software just calls out for an activation server that is long gone and liquidated? Do you think you'll get that software patched even if you sued, even if you got on the list of creditors? I'd bet not. I'd love to see what would happen if Steam got competed out of the market by another steam-like service and had to "wind down their business". Maybe I'm just a huge cynic but it's so easy to make promises you never have to deal with. So everyone gets mighty pissed, but who cares? They're out of business. Gone. Closed up shop. If you swear to never spend another dime on them, they still don't care. And while despite being utter asshattery, I doubt it pierces the corporate veil so the profits they've taken out of it is theirs.
I know of another case just like this, dealing with resellers and investments. In short, resellers are often short-lived beasts that sell - and sometimes oversell - investments from companies that offer investment opportunities. It takes some time for the investments to mature and while there is a second hand market there's a solid penalty for getting out underways so mostly you're in it for the whole project, it's not liquid like stocks. What happens is that before the investments start delivering results, the resellers declare bankruptcy and start up under a new name and tax id. Then the people who made the actual investment project get to take all the shit for everything that's been said, not legally but as pretty unhappy "customers". Trying to sue a dead copmany where no one picks up the phone because there is no phone just doesn't get you anywhere.
I'd say a good set of prints works for everything you'd want a physical negative for. I guess the point is that digital files, even five copies in five different locations have a quite short life span if nobody manages it, while a set of physical photos will survive 30 years of neglect in the attic. Taken individually I can see it, I have many pictures that I haven't looked at in years but suddenly there's some kind of trigger that makes me want to look at 10+ year old photos. It's only if I take the photo collection as a whole I'd really do the upkeep.
Also, it's pretty obvious if you're throwing away photos but not that obvious what's on a computer or DVD or memory stick, and it might be password protected as well. I don't think most old people arrange any kind of handover, when they die you go through their stuff, find the photo albums and figure out what to do yourself. Again with the "abandoned in attic" thing, would they survive a woman who had Alzheimer the last 10-20 years of her life or will it be all gone by then?
Don't get me wrong, I love digicams. They've made the whole idea of taking out a whole film and processing before you could see the results redundant and a lot of other advantages. And I know myself and some other geeks keep up with the backups and media rotation and all that, but we're not exactly average. I think a lot of people will accidentally lose photos and if it's one thing I've learned is that it doesn't seem like much a loss when the memories are fresh - but as the memories fade you wish more and more you still had the photos.
The advantage of being big is being big.If you instead spent it on 100 small new innovations with no real interdependence, you're no better off than 100 small companies. The whole value is in being able to deliver integrated total solutions the smaller competition can't, it's the only thing justifying the bureaucracy and overhead of being a big company. Mostly they compete not head-to-head but almost like a game or RISK - plenty effort being made to support the borders and juicy cash cows in the center that nobody else manages to serve because it requires interoperability with everything else.
So yeah, almost all the innovation happens in small companies that are bought out. But that's where pretty much all the total failure is too. Big companies have their problems too but most of them never really go under except as a brand, they get bought up by somebody else if they're not doing well. And it's a little easy to say big companies don't innovate to stay big, for example Intel has been the 800lb gorilla in the chip market for quite some time now, but they've done everything but stand still. Even the few times they've taken a wrong path and AMD has caught up on them, that's because they made the wrong choices, not because they didn't try to innovate.