Does this mean that we're hitting a software complexity wall?
I'm not sure about complexity, but at least detail to cost ratio. If you want a lot of detail your designers have to design it, the modelers model it, the animators animate it, the developers develop it and so on. You can do some things with procedural programming, but then you need good procedural programmers too. It's not like they need shaders for one effect, they now have a hundred small effects they could do (in parallel with the 1000+ shaders the high end now has) that'd each make it a little more realistic but that each also costs development time.
Anandtech's conclusion on the HD 5970:
There are two things that become very clear when looking at our data for the 5970
It's hands down the fastest single card on the market
It's so fast that it's wasted on a single monitor
If you game at 1920x1200/1920x1080 - including 1080p HDTVs - then the 5850/5870 are really overkill too, then 5750/5770 is all you really need even for maximum quality. So yeah, I'd say graphics cards are definitely running ahead of the games, no wonder nVidia is looking at other markets. Next round of gaming consoles will at least bring 1080p DX11 class graphics - seeing as they're not even announced yet - and they'll fully compare to a gaming PC if you can hook up a keyboard and mouse. Eyefinity with many 2560x1600 displays will just be extremely niche.
You can search all day long for antimatter in open space and not find it because it goes boom in contact with normal matter. Yes it would mean we have to rewrite a lot of laws of science, but I don't see a fundamental reason why FTL can't be possible even though we haven't observed it anywhere. According to the laws of science as we know them you'll need infinite energy to reach c so there's no beyond, if that's not true then everything is on the table.
Funny, I never thought that... That people can inherit traits of their parents, I find just as natural as a child inheriting height, skin color, eye color, hair color, facial characteristics, genetic diseases and whatnot from their parents. Even the relatively homogeneous group of children I grew up with, sharing our school time and most of our spare time, we were always very different people and not just because of social groupings. But all of us, like pretty much everyone that don't belong in a mental institution, were in control of our actions. Even the most bubbly over-the-top happy and cheerful extrovert could button it down for a solemn funeral.
Some people are impulsive, aggressive and low on empathy by nature, but I don't believe people are compelled to act out those impulses. I've wanted to beat the crap out of many, but never did. I've lusted for many things, but never stolen them. I've desired many pretty women, but never raped any of them. I don't think people could function without basic impulse control, not without ending up as mental three year olds. And that's why I also think it's always a choice, they choose to go with what they want to do rather than what they know is right. Lord help us if "I blame my DNA" becomes as much of an excuse as "I blame society".
Speaking as a Norwegian, and on top of all the other taxes we're paying, yes. Norway is going to kill itself by the heaviest public sector in Europe, propped up by oil funds for as long as it lasts while killing off all competition-exposed industry and services. Then we'll collapse like the US is doing, a country full of consumers and debt. That's my prediction of Norway 15-30 years from now.
Probably, in the days of warez ftps and that sort of thing. But these days it'd be a lot like going after those going 5 mph over the limit when everybody else is doing 20 mph over the limit, Outside the US, where awarded damages seem to be 1000x higher than anywhere else, people aren't really seeing it as much of a risk either way. At worst you'll likely get a letter from your ISP telling you to please stop that.
I guess for small values of "only". I think the more important metric is this:
Cheapest 2.5" SSD (40GB): 696,- NOK Cheapest 2.5" HDD (160GB): 285,- NOK
That's now <2.5 times the difference. Sure it's 10x the difference if you price it per gigabyte, but only if you need 160GB. That's what'll trigger the SSD revolution, the bulk storage will come much later.
Consumer SSDs are typically MLC and have a failure rate far above "enterprise" SSDs which are SLC. I wish you could buy consumer SLC SSDs
You'd be the first person I know claiming to have any solid data on that, so I'd love to see it. What we do know is that MLC drives will wear out about 10x faster after ~10000 rewrites instead of ~100000 rewrites/cell, but regular desktop use is unlikely to hit those limits while an enterprise server working 24x7 might. But I've never seen any data to indicate there's a difference in failure rates up to that limit, please enlighten us.
Ok, so I got no sense of humor but the by far most common configuration is for the motherboard to be vertical and all the expansion cards to be *drumroll* horizontal. But yeah, that must be limiting the potential throughput, the Z-drive is already faster than SATA3.
Good point, but pretty much every other heavy use is interested in this. If you just need high sequential speeds then RAIDed HDDs have been doing that well for much lower cost. In general servers are extremely interested in random write performance and IOPS, even more than desktop users.
This must be one of the worst cases of CYA that I have ever seen, I guess noone with a law degree felt like standing up for sanity rather than legal fiction. Customer expectations are disappointed by products after the sale each day every day in a million ways and almost none of those, short of clear product defects, are covered under warranty. Unless the customer has any grounds for a refund, there's no reason to not book that revenue. If you were to not give any free updates, those spurned users could create a shitstorm and kill your future sales but that would not undo the cash handed over at the sale. SOX is supposed to ensure booking accuracy, not business sanity. You can give your customers the finger if you just book it correctly against goodwill.
(Yes, I know that's not what goodwill is, don't let pedantry get in the way of a joke)
That last requirement means is you use digital devices that produce analogue signals, the resolution on the ADC has to be so crappy that the RFI from the radio doesn't screw up the picture AND the voltage changes when a call is picked up or an alarm goes off or what have you can't throw the ADC.
They've gotten extremely good at "shut-off" circuits lately, which is why both the latest Core i7s, AMD 5xxx series and so on draw much, much less power. There's no reason why this can't be applied to phones, if the camera is off it's near dead plastic. And it's on, you don't let the alarm ring in the exact same moment via software.
The low-power means no fancy, power-hungry logic, the software zoom and other floating-point logic won't be terribly high precision, and the image compression algorithm will need to be light on the quality.
It's fixed function and fixed function is really cheap compared to say running cell phone games, which people do lots of on iPhones and whatever.
The size and damage-resistance impacts what sort of lens you can use, how rigid the structure has to be, how much the user can just seriously screw up the device before the image quality drops. Even for a disposable standalone camera, it's practical to put in some quite acceptable optics.
Yes, which is why modern camera phones protect the lens when it's not in use etc. The whole statement, except the optics, is like the naysayers of 10-20 years ago saying we can't turn the bricks into 100g cell phones. Yes, we can.
Even when such devices are of a size comparable to that OF the phone, you've got to remember that the camera is sans radio (or radios, for phones that have bluetooth and/or wifi and/or AM/FM tuners as well as the standard phone radio), sans keyboard, sans quite a bit of space-hungry stuff that phones either need or have as "features".
Yes, but they have a processor, storage, lcd screen.. lots of things that are shared as well.
Of course if you're always comparing the latest P&S to the latest camera phones, the P&S will always win. But I have some early digicams lying around, I dare you to compare them to the latest camera phones because they'll lose by far. And those cameras were also usable and popular. So the question is if you really want to see grandaunt Selma's nose hair, or if you'd just like to take a decent picture to remind everyone of a family gathering. I'd say camera phones are just fine P&S for the reasons people carry P&S cameras in the first place and not huge DSLRs. And that they are still getting better and better.
FTFA: "there's hardly any fallback if any of the services dies or an office is disconnected."
So let's see if I understand: you want to take a simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand architecture with no single points of failure
Not that I agree with everything the article poster wrote, but in what world does "no fallback" == "no single point of failure"? Sure there's no one point of total catastrophic failure but I think he just described two single points of failure where all users would be without one service or one office without all services.
I'd keep the architecture, but I'd migrate it slowly to virtual servers running on a high-quality server. That would make the failure more severe, but would make it less likely to happen. The total number of failures should be 1/x where x is the number of servers you replaced. The more servers you have, the more you skimp on server features and quality not to mention the support to get them back and running quickly so that should bring it down further. Of course if it should fail then all services would fail, but there's usually dependencies - if you get an email which means you should do something on an intranet application then it won't work if either mail or web is down so in total a complete failure might not be so bad if you recover fast enough.
Then I'd get a second server, and work per service to make it as redundant as possible - some services may be easy with load balancing or automatic fail-over, others could be hot/cold spares that need recovering from backups etc. but do what you can, as time permits. Eventually you may reach a point where you have no single point of hardware failure. Network failure is much harder, if he can't handle fail-over and resynchronizing in the data center there's no way he'll be able to do it between branch offices. Check your SLAs, check out possibilities for redundant connections but leave anything else until you have full redundancy in your data center. At that point, you may realize that is more than sufficient.
The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage. The Luddites are winning. Polls show that almost as many Americans believe in creationism as evolution. I find it disturbing that "If This Goes On--" could be Heinlein's most accurate social forecast. The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. LEO is still a bloody expensive place to get to. Commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. We'll probably never get flying cars. The general attitude towards engineering seems to have changed. We went from the neutron as a theoretical particle to 100 commercial reactors in 50 years; but nuclear waste is regarded is a problem that engineers won't solve even if given hundreds of years. The Club of Rome's forecasts are turning out to be depressingly accurate. Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.
1. Pass a law against it. Say genetic == racial discrimination, or simply just do it. It's many things you can't ask in a job interview, likewise there should be things the insurance company can't ask. 2. Only in the US, in most other parts of the world people are getting a much more relaxed relationship to religion and the Church as institution in particular. It's more about tradition and community than faith. 3. Some things are harder, some easier. Show me someone imagining cell phone video cameras directly uploaded to YouTube for everyone on the Internet to see 50 years ago, and they'd be in a room with padded walls. 4. Because the last generation lived by accumulating debt and passing the bill. If the children of the Baby Boomers are in the mud, it's because their parents stepped on them to reach a little taller.
Any company that goes under that quickly was standing at the edge of the abyss, this is nowhere near an economy killer. Unless the US is standing on the edge of the abyss, but that's a different problem entirely. The economy can have setbacks without going into a Great Depression II death spiral, and temporary things like people falling sick for a few weeks isn't it. There's far bigger structural issues that the US is struggling with, right now they seem to go for the credit card trap - taking up more debt to make payment but will end up in a worse position than where they started. I'm curios to see what the world will look like in 2015, there will be Change and I don't mean Obama.
My current statistics is that in Norway a little over 20 people have died - most with complicating diseases - while 2-300 die each year in traffic accidents. In other words, I find it completely and utterly blown out of any proportion and there's probably not enough deaths to make decent statistics, not unless you gather all of them worldwide. I'm not getting vaccinated, and honestly they could have skipped the whole damn thing. Yes, some more people would lose a week's worth of work but they'd handle the flu and recover naturally, making them stronger. If and only if there is a much deadlier strain would I consider it.
But that's where my defense of their methodology ends. They say the total sample size was 30,000, and they analyzed 9 brands that had over 1,000 units each. IMHO, that's still a pretty small sample size. The margin of error on at least some of those numbers would be around ±3%; that would be enough for the "top 6" manufacturers to be roughly indistinguishable.
Which will still be better than the anecdotal evidence based on personal experience or a single IT service representative, which is what the rest of this post will have. Also you have a selection problem, because it's unlikely that they were put to the same use. Imagine in a corporation you have two kinds of laptops, a "toughbook" for road warriors and a "fragilebook" for people mostly sitting at their desk. The "toughbook" could have a higher failure rate, and yet be a lot more durable product and replacing them with "fragilebooks" would be a disaster. And a simple price bias, if you sold the same laptop at 300$ and 500$ the people who spent 500$ would probably treat it nicer because it was more expensive, then on the other hand they could be less tolerant of faults. There's lots of potential data issues. That said, even knowing they're around the same reliability is valuable information in itself, then you can look at all other qualities to decide without worrying too much.
Personally I hope the LHC gets up to full power and running at the latest by the end of 2011, so I can sigh and say "Whatever, wasn't the world supposed to end last year too when the LHC went online? This is getting ridiculous..." If they are delayed into 2012, the conspiracy nuts will align and we'll never hear the end of it (until 2013 anyway).
Sometimes I notice a wonderful double standard on slashdot. The GIMP having an interface that is entirely, completely unlike Photoshop is not a weakness. Microsoft rearranging a few things into a ribbon is a complete disaster that will kill it. That. Does. Not. Compute.
Yes, I know there's more than one person on slashdot but you'd think the moderation and groupthink was the same but even the groupthink is inconsistent. Personally, I think the GIMP interface is a victim of designers with too much knowledge. If you know the code, know the modules then things seem so much more logical than if you're staring at a black box. I just see a bunch of puzzle pieces and no obvious way they're hanging together.
Wouldn't it be trivial for a remote user to alter stuff in the user's home dir to install it next time someone logs on with a local user? I think this defense only works if the user never logs on locally, which is very unlikely for a home machine.
Well, that's questionable... Unplug the machine, hook it directly to a laptop pretending to be the server but with an old signed package list and old signed packages. You have to fool it into fetching the "new" package list though but launching one of the update tray tools that give you "you have x updates waiting" should cover that without entering any password. As far as I know there's no downgrade protection of package lists so it'll happily accept any old package list and install any old version you want it to.
I think you're wrong. For anything where the quality is somehow approximate to a bell curve, there'll be people willing to pay great amounts for the tail end and it will truly be better. To get back into geeky analogies, it's like the cherry-picked CPU that'll overclock 200MHz over what the others will. It's rare, it's worth a premium and the 1000$ processor is in fact better than the 100$ one. Worth it for $/GHz? No, but if you want one very fast computer and not ten fast ones it makes sense. Just like when you drink a 1000$ bottle of wine, it's not a choice between that and ten 100$ bottles of wine.
It's a very poorly understood concept when it comes to luxury goods - you only sleep in one bed, wear one set of clothes, eat one dinner, drink one bottle of wine. It doesn't matter than you could buy a whole rack of clothes for the cost of one Armani suit. Sure there's a lot of brand and other market distortions but the basic principle holds true, if you want a meal cooked by the best chef in the world it'll cost you dearly not because it's that much better than the 1000th best chef but because there's lots of people who'd also like the best meal possible so there's competition on a limited supply even though you can get food everywhere.
With so many people expressing that sentiment, I'm curious: has KDE 3 seen any significant development since the release of KDE 4?
From what I gather, basically none at all. Nobody's really questioning the way forward, so I guess those who do develop just fix their own itches in KDE4 and live with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that we're hitting a software complexity wall?
I'm not sure about complexity, but at least detail to cost ratio. If you want a lot of detail your designers have to design it, the modelers model it, the animators animate it, the developers develop it and so on. You can do some things with procedural programming, but then you need good procedural programmers too. It's not like they need shaders for one effect, they now have a hundred small effects they could do (in parallel with the 1000+ shaders the high end now has) that'd each make it a little more realistic but that each also costs development time.
Anandtech's conclusion on the HD 5970:
There are two things that become very clear when looking at our data for the 5970
If you game at 1920x1200/1920x1080 - including 1080p HDTVs - then the 5850/5870 are really overkill too, then 5750/5770 is all you really need even for maximum quality. So yeah, I'd say graphics cards are definitely running ahead of the games, no wonder nVidia is looking at other markets. Next round of gaming consoles will at least bring 1080p DX11 class graphics - seeing as they're not even announced yet - and they'll fully compare to a gaming PC if you can hook up a keyboard and mouse. Eyefinity with many 2560x1600 displays will just be extremely niche.
You can search all day long for antimatter in open space and not find it because it goes boom in contact with normal matter. Yes it would mean we have to rewrite a lot of laws of science, but I don't see a fundamental reason why FTL can't be possible even though we haven't observed it anywhere. According to the laws of science as we know them you'll need infinite energy to reach c so there's no beyond, if that's not true then everything is on the table.
Funny, I never thought that... That people can inherit traits of their parents, I find just as natural as a child inheriting height, skin color, eye color, hair color, facial characteristics, genetic diseases and whatnot from their parents. Even the relatively homogeneous group of children I grew up with, sharing our school time and most of our spare time, we were always very different people and not just because of social groupings. But all of us, like pretty much everyone that don't belong in a mental institution, were in control of our actions. Even the most bubbly over-the-top happy and cheerful extrovert could button it down for a solemn funeral.
Some people are impulsive, aggressive and low on empathy by nature, but I don't believe people are compelled to act out those impulses. I've wanted to beat the crap out of many, but never did. I've lusted for many things, but never stolen them. I've desired many pretty women, but never raped any of them. I don't think people could function without basic impulse control, not without ending up as mental three year olds. And that's why I also think it's always a choice, they choose to go with what they want to do rather than what they know is right. Lord help us if "I blame my DNA" becomes as much of an excuse as "I blame society".
I think the better question is, has anyone ever run BSD on an OCZ MLC SSD without LSD?
Is 25% VAT absurd in your opinion?
Speaking as a Norwegian, and on top of all the other taxes we're paying, yes. Norway is going to kill itself by the heaviest public sector in Europe, propped up by oil funds for as long as it lasts while killing off all competition-exposed industry and services. Then we'll collapse like the US is doing, a country full of consumers and debt. That's my prediction of Norway 15-30 years from now.
Probably, in the days of warez ftps and that sort of thing. But these days it'd be a lot like going after those going 5 mph over the limit when everybody else is doing 20 mph over the limit, Outside the US, where awarded damages seem to be 1000x higher than anywhere else, people aren't really seeing it as much of a risk either way. At worst you'll likely get a letter from your ISP telling you to please stop that.
I guess for small values of "only". I think the more important metric is this:
Cheapest 2.5" SSD (40GB): 696,- NOK
Cheapest 2.5" HDD (160GB): 285,- NOK
That's now <2.5 times the difference. Sure it's 10x the difference if you price it per gigabyte, but only if you need 160GB. That's what'll trigger the SSD revolution, the bulk storage will come much later.
MLC = Multi-Level Cell stores more than one bit/cell increasing density at a performance and lifespan cost, unlike SLC = Single-Level Cell.
OCZ is just OCZ, AFAIK that's not a TLA. ;)
Consumer SSDs are typically MLC and have a failure rate far above "enterprise" SSDs which are SLC. I wish you could buy consumer SLC SSDs
You'd be the first person I know claiming to have any solid data on that, so I'd love to see it. What we do know is that MLC drives will wear out about 10x faster after ~10000 rewrites instead of ~100000 rewrites/cell, but regular desktop use is unlikely to hit those limits while an enterprise server working 24x7 might. But I've never seen any data to indicate there's a difference in failure rates up to that limit, please enlighten us.
Ok, so I got no sense of humor but the by far most common configuration is for the motherboard to be vertical and all the expansion cards to be *drumroll* horizontal. But yeah, that must be limiting the potential throughput, the Z-drive is already faster than SATA3.
Good point, but pretty much every other heavy use is interested in this. If you just need high sequential speeds then RAIDed HDDs have been doing that well for much lower cost. In general servers are extremely interested in random write performance and IOPS, even more than desktop users.
This must be one of the worst cases of CYA that I have ever seen, I guess noone with a law degree felt like standing up for sanity rather than legal fiction. Customer expectations are disappointed by products after the sale each day every day in a million ways and almost none of those, short of clear product defects, are covered under warranty. Unless the customer has any grounds for a refund, there's no reason to not book that revenue. If you were to not give any free updates, those spurned users could create a shitstorm and kill your future sales but that would not undo the cash handed over at the sale. SOX is supposed to ensure booking accuracy, not business sanity. You can give your customers the finger if you just book it correctly against goodwill.
(Yes, I know that's not what goodwill is, don't let pedantry get in the way of a joke)
That last requirement means is you use digital devices that produce analogue signals, the resolution on the ADC has to be so crappy that the RFI from the radio doesn't screw up the picture AND the voltage changes when a call is picked up or an alarm goes off or what have you can't throw the ADC.
They've gotten extremely good at "shut-off" circuits lately, which is why both the latest Core i7s, AMD 5xxx series and so on draw much, much less power. There's no reason why this can't be applied to phones, if the camera is off it's near dead plastic. And it's on, you don't let the alarm ring in the exact same moment via software.
The low-power means no fancy, power-hungry logic, the software zoom and other floating-point logic won't be terribly high precision, and the image compression algorithm will need to be light on the quality.
It's fixed function and fixed function is really cheap compared to say running cell phone games, which people do lots of on iPhones and whatever.
The size and damage-resistance impacts what sort of lens you can use, how rigid the structure has to be, how much the user can just seriously screw up the device before the image quality drops. Even for a disposable standalone camera, it's practical to put in some quite acceptable optics.
Yes, which is why modern camera phones protect the lens when it's not in use etc. The whole statement, except the optics, is like the naysayers of 10-20 years ago saying we can't turn the bricks into 100g cell phones. Yes, we can.
Even when such devices are of a size comparable to that OF the phone, you've got to remember that the camera is sans radio (or radios, for phones that have bluetooth and/or wifi and/or AM/FM tuners as well as the standard phone radio), sans keyboard, sans quite a bit of space-hungry stuff that phones either need or have as "features".
Yes, but they have a processor, storage, lcd screen.. lots of things that are shared as well.
Of course if you're always comparing the latest P&S to the latest camera phones, the P&S will always win. But I have some early digicams lying around, I dare you to compare them to the latest camera phones because they'll lose by far. And those cameras were also usable and popular. So the question is if you really want to see grandaunt Selma's nose hair, or if you'd just like to take a decent picture to remind everyone of a family gathering. I'd say camera phones are just fine P&S for the reasons people carry P&S cameras in the first place and not huge DSLRs. And that they are still getting better and better.
FTFA: "there's hardly any fallback if any of the services dies or an office is disconnected."
So let's see if I understand: you want to take a simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand architecture with no single points of failure
Not that I agree with everything the article poster wrote, but in what world does "no fallback" == "no single point of failure"? Sure there's no one point of total catastrophic failure but I think he just described two single points of failure where all users would be without one service or one office without all services.
I'd keep the architecture, but I'd migrate it slowly to virtual servers running on a high-quality server. That would make the failure more severe, but would make it less likely to happen. The total number of failures should be 1/x where x is the number of servers you replaced. The more servers you have, the more you skimp on server features and quality not to mention the support to get them back and running quickly so that should bring it down further. Of course if it should fail then all services would fail, but there's usually dependencies - if you get an email which means you should do something on an intranet application then it won't work if either mail or web is down so in total a complete failure might not be so bad if you recover fast enough.
Then I'd get a second server, and work per service to make it as redundant as possible - some services may be easy with load balancing or automatic fail-over, others could be hot/cold spares that need recovering from backups etc. but do what you can, as time permits. Eventually you may reach a point where you have no single point of hardware failure. Network failure is much harder, if he can't handle fail-over and resynchronizing in the data center there's no way he'll be able to do it between branch offices. Check your SLAs, check out possibilities for redundant connections but leave anything else until you have full redundancy in your data center. At that point, you may realize that is more than sufficient.
The giant corporations are winning. Ask people if they think it more likely that genetic research will result in exciting new medical treatments or be used by enormous health insurance companies to deny coverage.
The Luddites are winning. Polls show that almost as many Americans believe in creationism as evolution. I find it disturbing that "If This Goes On--" could be Heinlein's most accurate social forecast.
The problems keep turning out to be harder than most people thought. LEO is still a bloody expensive place to get to. Commercial nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. We'll probably never get flying cars.
The general attitude towards engineering seems to have changed. We went from the neutron as a theoretical particle to 100 commercial reactors in 50 years; but nuclear waste is regarded is a problem that engineers won't solve even if given hundreds of years.
The Club of Rome's forecasts are turning out to be depressingly accurate. Many economists now believe that the Baby Boomers' kids will be the first generation in the US with a lower standard of living than their parents.
1. Pass a law against it. Say genetic == racial discrimination, or simply just do it. It's many things you can't ask in a job interview, likewise there should be things the insurance company can't ask.
2. Only in the US, in most other parts of the world people are getting a much more relaxed relationship to religion and the Church as institution in particular. It's more about tradition and community than faith.
3. Some things are harder, some easier. Show me someone imagining cell phone video cameras directly uploaded to YouTube for everyone on the Internet to see 50 years ago, and they'd be in a room with padded walls.
4. Because the last generation lived by accumulating debt and passing the bill. If the children of the Baby Boomers are in the mud, it's because their parents stepped on them to reach a little taller.
Any company that goes under that quickly was standing at the edge of the abyss, this is nowhere near an economy killer. Unless the US is standing on the edge of the abyss, but that's a different problem entirely. The economy can have setbacks without going into a Great Depression II death spiral, and temporary things like people falling sick for a few weeks isn't it. There's far bigger structural issues that the US is struggling with, right now they seem to go for the credit card trap - taking up more debt to make payment but will end up in a worse position than where they started. I'm curios to see what the world will look like in 2015, there will be Change and I don't mean Obama.
My current statistics is that in Norway a little over 20 people have died - most with complicating diseases - while 2-300 die each year in traffic accidents. In other words, I find it completely and utterly blown out of any proportion and there's probably not enough deaths to make decent statistics, not unless you gather all of them worldwide. I'm not getting vaccinated, and honestly they could have skipped the whole damn thing. Yes, some more people would lose a week's worth of work but they'd handle the flu and recover naturally, making them stronger. If and only if there is a much deadlier strain would I consider it.
But that's where my defense of their methodology ends. They say the total sample size was 30,000, and they analyzed 9 brands that had over 1,000 units each. IMHO, that's still a pretty small sample size. The margin of error on at least some of those numbers would be around ±3%; that would be enough for the "top 6" manufacturers to be roughly indistinguishable.
Which will still be better than the anecdotal evidence based on personal experience or a single IT service representative, which is what the rest of this post will have. Also you have a selection problem, because it's unlikely that they were put to the same use. Imagine in a corporation you have two kinds of laptops, a "toughbook" for road warriors and a "fragilebook" for people mostly sitting at their desk. The "toughbook" could have a higher failure rate, and yet be a lot more durable product and replacing them with "fragilebooks" would be a disaster. And a simple price bias, if you sold the same laptop at 300$ and 500$ the people who spent 500$ would probably treat it nicer because it was more expensive, then on the other hand they could be less tolerant of faults. There's lots of potential data issues. That said, even knowing they're around the same reliability is valuable information in itself, then you can look at all other qualities to decide without worrying too much.
Personally I hope the LHC gets up to full power and running at the latest by the end of 2011, so I can sigh and say "Whatever, wasn't the world supposed to end last year too when the LHC went online? This is getting ridiculous..." If they are delayed into 2012, the conspiracy nuts will align and we'll never hear the end of it (until 2013 anyway).
Sometimes I notice a wonderful double standard on slashdot. The GIMP having an interface that is entirely, completely unlike Photoshop is not a weakness. Microsoft rearranging a few things into a ribbon is a complete disaster that will kill it. That. Does. Not. Compute.
Yes, I know there's more than one person on slashdot but you'd think the moderation and groupthink was the same but even the groupthink is inconsistent. Personally, I think the GIMP interface is a victim of designers with too much knowledge. If you know the code, know the modules then things seem so much more logical than if you're staring at a black box. I just see a bunch of puzzle pieces and no obvious way they're hanging together.
Wouldn't it be trivial for a remote user to alter stuff in the user's home dir to install it next time someone logs on with a local user? I think this defense only works if the user never logs on locally, which is very unlikely for a home machine.
Well, that's questionable... Unplug the machine, hook it directly to a laptop pretending to be the server but with an old signed package list and old signed packages. You have to fool it into fetching the "new" package list though but launching one of the update tray tools that give you "you have x updates waiting" should cover that without entering any password. As far as I know there's no downgrade protection of package lists so it'll happily accept any old package list and install any old version you want it to.
I picked up my HD 5850 on monday, so anecdotally I would say they're around.
I think you're wrong. For anything where the quality is somehow approximate to a bell curve, there'll be people willing to pay great amounts for the tail end and it will truly be better. To get back into geeky analogies, it's like the cherry-picked CPU that'll overclock 200MHz over what the others will. It's rare, it's worth a premium and the 1000$ processor is in fact better than the 100$ one. Worth it for $/GHz? No, but if you want one very fast computer and not ten fast ones it makes sense. Just like when you drink a 1000$ bottle of wine, it's not a choice between that and ten 100$ bottles of wine.
It's a very poorly understood concept when it comes to luxury goods - you only sleep in one bed, wear one set of clothes, eat one dinner, drink one bottle of wine. It doesn't matter than you could buy a whole rack of clothes for the cost of one Armani suit. Sure there's a lot of brand and other market distortions but the basic principle holds true, if you want a meal cooked by the best chef in the world it'll cost you dearly not because it's that much better than the 1000th best chef but because there's lots of people who'd also like the best meal possible so there's competition on a limited supply even though you can get food everywhere.
With so many people expressing that sentiment, I'm curious: has KDE 3 seen any significant development since the release of KDE 4?
From what I gather, basically none at all. Nobody's really questioning the way forward, so I guess those who do develop just fix their own itches in KDE4 and live with it.