If people want to browse facebook.com and google.com and be logged into their accounts with Firefox, Mozilla should damn well let them. This sounds like some ideological crusade that sounds more like RMS in a suit than a company trying to deliver a good product. I'm more and more convinced that the only reason Firefox beat IE was that it was an ancient piece of crap Microsoft preferred that didn't work well so they'd stall web apps for as long as possible. It's like fighting a beat-up old boxer that's dancing the ropes trying to go all the rounds but not even trying to put up a real fight. Makes me wonder if Google didn't really start Chrome because WTF we give you all this money and this is what you do with it.
And you could depend on other people to hold all that data for you. There's no real advantage to everyone storing the whole block chain forever, so long as enough people have a backup copy somewhere.
There's not even a need for that, for every X blocks create an "account overview" listing all the bitcoin addresses and their value and sign it into the block chain. After it has received X verifications (where X >> than an ordinary transaction) ordinary clients can for practical purposes forget everything before that. If the block chain is subverted, you could rewrite the accounts... but you can rewrite the transactions too, so you're not really more fucked than before.
Agreed, this is totally cool. But it's a loophole and if it's a real concern I expect Uber could easily fix this with a little tweak of their algorithm. For example if they see a suspicious dive in the number of active accounts they could start issuing quarantine periods before you can get rides and/or surge prices again or add some kind of "full shift" bonus for accounts that remain active. Unless it's just surge drivers intentionally waiting it out until there's a surge, but even so if you see a large coordinated action who all come online the moment there's a surge they can just play it evil by not surging to see if some will defect to at least make some money and instead take the customer service hit. Or create some kind of decreasing "if there is a surge in the next hour you get X% bonus" to make people break ranks and get their bonus but that eventually with enough joining there won't be a surge. Lots of ways for Uber to pull a Darth Vader on this one, all they have to do is make it attractive to defect and it'll fall apart.
There simply is no "VR genre" born yet, we don't know yet what games do and which don't work on VR. There is simply not enough data available so far.
If you could make some kind of omni-directional treadmill for VR, it would be really cool. Even if you have a rather big room it's extremely limited in terms of a virtual world so they all have to break the immersion by teleporting you around. Those that work best and that you can do for the longest are those where you're "restricted" to your seat. You're piloting a spaceship. Driving a car. Riding a roller coaster. Being on the tower in tower defense.
And these games also mostly hide the entirely virtual nature of it. Say you want a boxing game, there's no hiding that you hit air. And that your opponent is just air. And that there are no ropes in the boxing ring. Not unless you have a VR suit and take it to an entirely different level. It's nice in the "you can look around" kind of way, I'd love to plan a new apartment in VR. Then again walking around/planning in a non-VR 3D model would work pretty well too. It's that extra immersion, but it's more nice-to-have than need-to-have.
Yup, though I don't mind if the seller asks for proof it's been destroyed. Happened to me with a defective cable - not on Amazon though, cut it in two and they had no problem sending a replacement.
This seems to be a big issue with overseas sellers - I point to China because they're the most common - and shipping. My $5-20 item may come with free shipping, but when it arrives and is broken or turns out to be a fake piece of crap, the return cost may end up being more than the value of the item (especially if I want it tracked and within a reasonable time period).
If it's bought and shipped across the world for $5 my expectations are very low, like a cheap piece of plastic knock-off and not a solid or brand anything. Either the seller will send me another if it's clearly defective or I'll give a bad review and write it off. I only buy from sellers with high 99.x% rating so they care about that, the reminder I expect is mainly the factory/shipping fail rate. For the savings I just figure a few bum deals are worth it and the ratings seem to get crap products off the market. It's quite rare, unless you had the wrong expectations. If you've found a deal too good to be true it usually is.
The largest that I don't use often or can live without. {{{ That makes it a software engineers problem, not the users.
Well if I put on my manager hat I'd say "So our application was not important enough for him to keep?", "You mean he cleaned out the back closet of apps he barely or never used anyway?" and "If it was nice-to-have, he'll probably install it again once he gets more space." Even Apple who is the most overcharged of overchargers only took $100 to upgrade my iPhone SE from 16GB to 64GB, which makes app space a total non-issue. Freeing up 100MB of space should be worth about 100/(48*1024)*$100 = $0.20. If you got SD slots, I imagine much less. So really.... is this the problem you would focus on? If so you're the kind of engineer that needs to be managed.
The NRC needs an overhaul. Modern designs are very safe and emit less radioactivity than burning coal. People are needlessly scared. People perceive threat wrong. They fear terrorist attacks and nuclear meltdowns but don't even know that smoking, heart disease and driving are considerably more likely to kill them.
It's a control issue. With second hand smoke banned almost everywhere you're not very likely to die from it unless you're a smoker. And if you are a smoker, the consequences have been explained to you in great detail. Same with heart disease, the leading cause is obesity and it's no secret. People worry about being hit by drunk drivers, not so much their own mistakes. Terrorists and meltdowns are risks we can't easily manage or mitigate, they just exist. And I'm not sure I can fully rationally explain this, but stopping a murderer seems more important than stopping an accident even though they'll both cost a life. Maybe even if it's more than one. Something to do with everyone getting their fair chance at life, if lightning strikes so be it. But to have someone else take it away from you offends me on a whole other level.
How many average consumer devices can't be compromised with physical access to the hardware?Couldn't someone also just plant a bug in the thing (or somewhere else in your house) and listen to you that way? In what world is this news?
Well, it's a nice spy trick to subvert the enemy's equipment instead of installing your own bug. If it was a cell phone, video conference system or something like that I'd say it was a pretty big deal. I just don't see the overlap between the kind of places you'd worry about a bug sweep and the kind of places you'd put an Amazon Echo though. Though it could be Trump has got one at the White House...
I would imagine that Google has some content policy experts who are making up the rules of what's acceptable and not. And then a whole lot of whack-a-mole workers trying to police by those rules. I guess that doesn't say if the expert is right, but the AI is doing the leg work more consistently in line with policy than the people. If you let say 5% through to a second opinion by humans or if there's some sort of appeal process there should be a pretty continuous learning. Though I suspect the AI will completely fail to understand parody or other use of extremist elements in a non-extremist way.
I think nobody at Mozilla sat down and had a real talk about what's core features and what's customization and accessories, because I think they should be treated differently. To use the car analogy, certain parts are essential like an engine, brakes, suspension and such. These typically follow a linear pattern from basic to premium where the best option is generally considered to be the objectively best. Customization are generally things that you must choose, but have trade-offs or are a matter of preference, like do you want more seat space or more cargo space and what color do you want it to be. Accessories are things some want like spoilers, entertainment system and ski boxes - they don't need to be there.
It's a lot easier to work backwards, IMHO accessories should not be in core Firefox. I'd go with three general rules of exclusion: 1) Features that don't directly relate to browsing 2) Tied to a particular site, service or back-end 3) Manipulates the DOM Particularly the last one should evict most, if it's trying to "enhance" the web page you were served it's not core. There's been too much such junk.
Customizations I think should try to preserve as much flexibility and provide as much functionality as possible, like the organization of tabs, bookmarks, search & filter capability, download manager and so on. Still with limits 1) and 2) above though. Here I feel they've stripped away functionality where it doesn't really make much sense because it becomes more of a "you can have any color you want as long as it is black" situation. Here extensions should be considered more like betas, you absorb functionality.
Core features are basic things like rendering web pages, without crashing and in a separate process in a sandbox so bad plug-ins don't do too much damage and with performance metrics on what is eating CPU/memory/IO so you can identify what plug-ins are causing trouble. Here there's been way too little effort on the fact that many plug-ins will be crap. A simple way to reload with vanilla Firefox wouldn't hurt either. Mozilla should have concentrated way more on this.
At least in my head the goal is not a DIY car. But it sometimes felt like vanilla Mozilla ships extremely stripped in order to not "take" anything from the extension community, that even the basics of managing pages, bookmarks and downloads. Those parts they should embrace, the fluff they should reject and then they should build that sandbox so we don't have to guess which combination of plug-ins went apeshit now. Because I felt that I was forced to use them, then when I used them it was like the problem doesn't exist in vanilla so Firefox doesn't have a problem. But I as a user felt it was a pretty big problem.
You have a technical theory that any poorly written contract can be freely abused, that's not how the real world works. A "creative way" of fulfilling the contract will often be fraud, even if you swear until you're blue in the face that it's not.
That is very premature. From past experiences with similar systems the content got through, the "good" ads got through... and a whole lot of the "bad" ads too. So I installed an hyper-aggressive ad blocker to get rid of the bad ads and the good ads disappeared too. If and only if Google blocks bad ads with a vengeance and shit list sites for trying so there's some real incentive to not try might this be successful. Meanwhile you have a lot of once bitten, twice shy people who'll continue to use the other ad blockers and they'll get really good as the good ads are usually easy to block. It's not easy convincing sites to use ads that are easily blocked and it's not easy convincing people to stop using what's working. This is not the first time it's been tried.
And there are drawbacks to mirrorless cameras, as they focus more slowly
Usually the problem is focus detection/hunting, not actual transition speed. Get a recent mirrorless like the Sony A9 or the GH5 and the actual focusing is blazing quick. However Nikon's DFD (Depth from defocus, contrast-based) is clearly vastly inferior to Sony's PDAF (Phase detection autofocus), but Sony's tech rivals Canon's DPAF (Dual pixel autofocus). And there's always the question of what the autofocus should focus on and how sticky it should be, but that is more software than hardware.
Which sounds like an absolute living hell. I bet after a few weeks of being told they haven't accomplished enough for Bill.com today, and their plan for tomorrow isn't good enough, the really good workers leave and find a job where their boss doesn't look over their shoulder every day.
Sounds to me like a daily scrum via video conference. Any decent scrum master would tell the client that overall progress is for the retrospective and priorities is for the sprint planning, the daily meeting is about impediments. As in what is causing problems delaying/blocking progress, turning out to be much more complicated than expected, any need for advice or assistance, any unresolved design issues that must be debated and decided and so on. The business owner can certainly be there to stay informed and maybe clear up a few things but it's not the place for debate or replanning. At least not in theory, maybe this is one of the very few true Scotsmen.
While AMD goes for hopeless unrequired exotic new designs, Nvida just keeps refining a successful old one.
On memory architecture that's true, the bet on HBM was premature but nVidia is now also doing HBM2 in the V100 data center GPU so it's not a low performance choice though it might be a cost driver. For the rest of the GPU though nVidia's Maxwell architecture brought a tile-based rasterizer which was a huge new trick. Vega was supposed to bring the same functionality to AMD, but so far it's disabled on the frontier edition and probably the gaming edition too either because the drivers aren't ready or they couldn't make it work properly. No doubt this is not the performance they were looking for, clearly in retrospect they should have hedged their bets but given their economic situation it's pretty hard to divide up the little resources they have.
Yes, in current samples that is the case. There's nothing stopping them from releasing an SKU with 32 cores. The socket can handle it.
Well obviously since it appears to be the same socket as EPYC. It's quite possible you'll be able to use one of those in a Threadripper motherboard at EPYC prices of course. I don't see much reason for AMD to release a separate 32C consumer chip for less though.
The infamous quad GPU 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 required so much power that it needed an external power adapter called the "Voodoo Volts". This was back when we only had AGP graphics card slots, so the idea of having dual PCI-E power connections on a single card was unheard of at the time.
Didn't know that one. From some quick googling they got 25W over AGP and could have used a standard molex connector for the rest - in fact the leads were there on the board - but they didn't trust the wimpy PSU in most PCs to take another 50-60W. I'm guessing lesser cards drawing more than 25W did, but rather than risk the magic smoke coming out they made an external connector and included a 12V adapter. I guess that makes sense if people built stuff from parts and you didn't trust them, if you were an OEM you'd just have beefed up the PSU a bit though. Maybe infamy was the goal too. It wasn't strictly necessary at least.
Even my current "low-end" card (an RX 460) can drive six normal-ish displays: One HDMI, one DVI-D, and four HDMI on its singular DisplayPort output using an adapter.
Not sure why that's still a subject though... for non-intensive applications I think it's been solved a while and for games I'd rather go for a single ultra-wide, if games have trouble you can presumably set it to a normal 16:9 resolution and get black bars. There was a time you couldn't get monitors to match but with the current 34/38" monsters the only advantage to multi-monitor is if you get them cheap/free. And for a big video wall there's probably cheaper solutions that are simple splitters.
I might be misremembering, but I recall some older graphics cards were designed to be plugged straight into a wall outlet.
A graphics card that could make direct use of 110/220V AC? I think not. Perhaps some strange specialty card with its own wall wart/on-board converter, but that would only be used because the PSU was impossible to replace / upgrade. Not that I've ever heard of it, but stranger things have happened.
Or the 3rd choice: They don't really care what their employees prefer.
Well Apple has long thought they know better than their customers, it would not surprise me if the hubris has reached the point where they think they know better than their workers. I don't work at Apple, but we're moving to an open floor plan. I don't care because I've worked on one before and seem to have grown mental ear muffs but I know most are against it. They're perfectly aware however we are just resisting change and don't understand how improved collaboration will make us better. And yes, some say the sky is falling when I know it's not. Perhaps it will even get better because I get a whiff of their next terrible plan before it's set out into action, that's one kind of collaboration I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
If people want to browse facebook.com and google.com and be logged into their accounts with Firefox, Mozilla should damn well let them. This sounds like some ideological crusade that sounds more like RMS in a suit than a company trying to deliver a good product. I'm more and more convinced that the only reason Firefox beat IE was that it was an ancient piece of crap Microsoft preferred that didn't work well so they'd stall web apps for as long as possible. It's like fighting a beat-up old boxer that's dancing the ropes trying to go all the rounds but not even trying to put up a real fight. Makes me wonder if Google didn't really start Chrome because WTF we give you all this money and this is what you do with it.
And you could depend on other people to hold all that data for you. There's no real advantage to everyone storing the whole block chain forever, so long as enough people have a backup copy somewhere.
There's not even a need for that, for every X blocks create an "account overview" listing all the bitcoin addresses and their value and sign it into the block chain. After it has received X verifications (where X >> than an ordinary transaction) ordinary clients can for practical purposes forget everything before that. If the block chain is subverted, you could rewrite the accounts... but you can rewrite the transactions too, so you're not really more fucked than before.
They do? 99.99999999999999999% of nature is hard vacuum. Just not where we want it.
*draws a deep breath* I'm quite happy with where it's not.
Then set up a collider and sensors to see where all the parts splatter and... wait, where were you going with this analogy?
Agreed, this is totally cool. But it's a loophole and if it's a real concern I expect Uber could easily fix this with a little tweak of their algorithm. For example if they see a suspicious dive in the number of active accounts they could start issuing quarantine periods before you can get rides and/or surge prices again or add some kind of "full shift" bonus for accounts that remain active. Unless it's just surge drivers intentionally waiting it out until there's a surge, but even so if you see a large coordinated action who all come online the moment there's a surge they can just play it evil by not surging to see if some will defect to at least make some money and instead take the customer service hit. Or create some kind of decreasing "if there is a surge in the next hour you get X% bonus" to make people break ranks and get their bonus but that eventually with enough joining there won't be a surge. Lots of ways for Uber to pull a Darth Vader on this one, all they have to do is make it attractive to defect and it'll fall apart.
There simply is no "VR genre" born yet, we don't know yet what games do and which don't work on VR. There is simply not enough data available so far.
If you could make some kind of omni-directional treadmill for VR, it would be really cool. Even if you have a rather big room it's extremely limited in terms of a virtual world so they all have to break the immersion by teleporting you around. Those that work best and that you can do for the longest are those where you're "restricted" to your seat. You're piloting a spaceship. Driving a car. Riding a roller coaster. Being on the tower in tower defense.
And these games also mostly hide the entirely virtual nature of it. Say you want a boxing game, there's no hiding that you hit air. And that your opponent is just air. And that there are no ropes in the boxing ring. Not unless you have a VR suit and take it to an entirely different level. It's nice in the "you can look around" kind of way, I'd love to plan a new apartment in VR. Then again walking around/planning in a non-VR 3D model would work pretty well too. It's that extra immersion, but it's more nice-to-have than need-to-have.
Yup, though I don't mind if the seller asks for proof it's been destroyed. Happened to me with a defective cable - not on Amazon though, cut it in two and they had no problem sending a replacement.
This seems to be a big issue with overseas sellers - I point to China because they're the most common - and shipping. My $5-20 item may come with free shipping, but when it arrives and is broken or turns out to be a fake piece of crap, the return cost may end up being more than the value of the item (especially if I want it tracked and within a reasonable time period).
If it's bought and shipped across the world for $5 my expectations are very low, like a cheap piece of plastic knock-off and not a solid or brand anything. Either the seller will send me another if it's clearly defective or I'll give a bad review and write it off. I only buy from sellers with high 99.x% rating so they care about that, the reminder I expect is mainly the factory/shipping fail rate. For the savings I just figure a few bum deals are worth it and the ratings seem to get crap products off the market. It's quite rare, unless you had the wrong expectations. If you've found a deal too good to be true it usually is.
The largest that I don't use often or can live without. {{{ That makes it a software engineers problem, not the users.
Well if I put on my manager hat I'd say "So our application was not important enough for him to keep?", "You mean he cleaned out the back closet of apps he barely or never used anyway?" and "If it was nice-to-have, he'll probably install it again once he gets more space." Even Apple who is the most overcharged of overchargers only took $100 to upgrade my iPhone SE from 16GB to 64GB, which makes app space a total non-issue. Freeing up 100MB of space should be worth about 100/(48*1024)*$100 = $0.20. If you got SD slots, I imagine much less. So really.... is this the problem you would focus on? If so you're the kind of engineer that needs to be managed.
The NRC needs an overhaul. Modern designs are very safe and emit less radioactivity than burning coal. People are needlessly scared. People perceive threat wrong. They fear terrorist attacks and nuclear meltdowns but don't even know that smoking, heart disease and driving are considerably more likely to kill them.
It's a control issue. With second hand smoke banned almost everywhere you're not very likely to die from it unless you're a smoker. And if you are a smoker, the consequences have been explained to you in great detail. Same with heart disease, the leading cause is obesity and it's no secret. People worry about being hit by drunk drivers, not so much their own mistakes. Terrorists and meltdowns are risks we can't easily manage or mitigate, they just exist. And I'm not sure I can fully rationally explain this, but stopping a murderer seems more important than stopping an accident even though they'll both cost a life. Maybe even if it's more than one. Something to do with everyone getting their fair chance at life, if lightning strikes so be it. But to have someone else take it away from you offends me on a whole other level.
How many average consumer devices can't be compromised with physical access to the hardware?Couldn't someone also just plant a bug in the thing (or somewhere else in your house) and listen to you that way? In what world is this news?
Well, it's a nice spy trick to subvert the enemy's equipment instead of installing your own bug. If it was a cell phone, video conference system or something like that I'd say it was a pretty big deal. I just don't see the overlap between the kind of places you'd worry about a bug sweep and the kind of places you'd put an Amazon Echo though. Though it could be Trump has got one at the White House...
I would imagine that Google has some content policy experts who are making up the rules of what's acceptable and not. And then a whole lot of whack-a-mole workers trying to police by those rules. I guess that doesn't say if the expert is right, but the AI is doing the leg work more consistently in line with policy than the people. If you let say 5% through to a second opinion by humans or if there's some sort of appeal process there should be a pretty continuous learning. Though I suspect the AI will completely fail to understand parody or other use of extremist elements in a non-extremist way.
I think nobody at Mozilla sat down and had a real talk about what's core features and what's customization and accessories, because I think they should be treated differently. To use the car analogy, certain parts are essential like an engine, brakes, suspension and such. These typically follow a linear pattern from basic to premium where the best option is generally considered to be the objectively best. Customization are generally things that you must choose, but have trade-offs or are a matter of preference, like do you want more seat space or more cargo space and what color do you want it to be. Accessories are things some want like spoilers, entertainment system and ski boxes - they don't need to be there.
It's a lot easier to work backwards, IMHO accessories should not be in core Firefox. I'd go with three general rules of exclusion:
1) Features that don't directly relate to browsing
2) Tied to a particular site, service or back-end
3) Manipulates the DOM
Particularly the last one should evict most, if it's trying to "enhance" the web page you were served it's not core. There's been too much such junk.
Customizations I think should try to preserve as much flexibility and provide as much functionality as possible, like the organization of tabs, bookmarks, search & filter capability, download manager and so on. Still with limits 1) and 2) above though. Here I feel they've stripped away functionality where it doesn't really make much sense because it becomes more of a "you can have any color you want as long as it is black" situation. Here extensions should be considered more like betas, you absorb functionality.
Core features are basic things like rendering web pages, without crashing and in a separate process in a sandbox so bad plug-ins don't do too much damage and with performance metrics on what is eating CPU/memory/IO so you can identify what plug-ins are causing trouble. Here there's been way too little effort on the fact that many plug-ins will be crap. A simple way to reload with vanilla Firefox wouldn't hurt either. Mozilla should have concentrated way more on this.
At least in my head the goal is not a DIY car. But it sometimes felt like vanilla Mozilla ships extremely stripped in order to not "take" anything from the extension community, that even the basics of managing pages, bookmarks and downloads. Those parts they should embrace, the fluff they should reject and then they should build that sandbox so we don't have to guess which combination of plug-ins went apeshit now. Because I felt that I was forced to use them, then when I used them it was like the problem doesn't exist in vanilla so Firefox doesn't have a problem. But I as a user felt it was a pretty big problem.
You have a technical theory that any poorly written contract can be freely abused, that's not how the real world works. A "creative way" of fulfilling the contract will often be fraud, even if you swear until you're blue in the face that it's not.
Now that they have it
That is very premature. From past experiences with similar systems the content got through, the "good" ads got through... and a whole lot of the "bad" ads too. So I installed an hyper-aggressive ad blocker to get rid of the bad ads and the good ads disappeared too. If and only if Google blocks bad ads with a vengeance and shit list sites for trying so there's some real incentive to not try might this be successful. Meanwhile you have a lot of once bitten, twice shy people who'll continue to use the other ad blockers and they'll get really good as the good ads are usually easy to block. It's not easy convincing sites to use ads that are easily blocked and it's not easy convincing people to stop using what's working. This is not the first time it's been tried.
And there are drawbacks to mirrorless cameras, as they focus more slowly
Usually the problem is focus detection/hunting, not actual transition speed. Get a recent mirrorless like the Sony A9 or the GH5 and the actual focusing is blazing quick. However Nikon's DFD (Depth from defocus, contrast-based) is clearly vastly inferior to Sony's PDAF (Phase detection autofocus), but Sony's tech rivals Canon's DPAF (Dual pixel autofocus). And there's always the question of what the autofocus should focus on and how sticky it should be, but that is more software than hardware.
Which sounds like an absolute living hell. I bet after a few weeks of being told they haven't accomplished enough for Bill.com today, and their plan for tomorrow isn't good enough, the really good workers leave and find a job where their boss doesn't look over their shoulder every day.
Sounds to me like a daily scrum via video conference. Any decent scrum master would tell the client that overall progress is for the retrospective and priorities is for the sprint planning, the daily meeting is about impediments. As in what is causing problems delaying/blocking progress, turning out to be much more complicated than expected, any need for advice or assistance, any unresolved design issues that must be debated and decided and so on. The business owner can certainly be there to stay informed and maybe clear up a few things but it's not the place for debate or replanning. At least not in theory, maybe this is one of the very few true Scotsmen.
While AMD goes for hopeless unrequired exotic new designs, Nvida just keeps refining a successful old one.
On memory architecture that's true, the bet on HBM was premature but nVidia is now also doing HBM2 in the V100 data center GPU so it's not a low performance choice though it might be a cost driver. For the rest of the GPU though nVidia's Maxwell architecture brought a tile-based rasterizer which was a huge new trick. Vega was supposed to bring the same functionality to AMD, but so far it's disabled on the frontier edition and probably the gaming edition too either because the drivers aren't ready or they couldn't make it work properly. No doubt this is not the performance they were looking for, clearly in retrospect they should have hedged their bets but given their economic situation it's pretty hard to divide up the little resources they have.
Yes, in current samples that is the case. There's nothing stopping them from releasing an SKU with 32 cores. The socket can handle it.
Well obviously since it appears to be the same socket as EPYC. It's quite possible you'll be able to use one of those in a Threadripper motherboard at EPYC prices of course. I don't see much reason for AMD to release a separate 32C consumer chip for less though.
Ah, a lot of articles never list the damn prices so it's hard to understand who the products are for.
You could RTFH... not article, not summary, but headline would suffice.
The infamous quad GPU 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 required so much power that it needed an external power adapter called the "Voodoo Volts". This was back when we only had AGP graphics card slots, so the idea of having dual PCI-E power connections on a single card was unheard of at the time.
Didn't know that one. From some quick googling they got 25W over AGP and could have used a standard molex connector for the rest - in fact the leads were there on the board - but they didn't trust the wimpy PSU in most PCs to take another 50-60W. I'm guessing lesser cards drawing more than 25W did, but rather than risk the magic smoke coming out they made an external connector and included a 12V adapter. I guess that makes sense if people built stuff from parts and you didn't trust them, if you were an OEM you'd just have beefed up the PSU a bit though. Maybe infamy was the goal too. It wasn't strictly necessary at least.
Even my current "low-end" card (an RX 460) can drive six normal-ish displays: One HDMI, one DVI-D, and four HDMI on its singular DisplayPort output using an adapter.
I guess you should let AMD know, since they say:
Up to 5 displays with DisplayPort MST hub
Not sure why that's still a subject though... for non-intensive applications I think it's been solved a while and for games I'd rather go for a single ultra-wide, if games have trouble you can presumably set it to a normal 16:9 resolution and get black bars. There was a time you couldn't get monitors to match but with the current 34/38" monsters the only advantage to multi-monitor is if you get them cheap/free. And for a big video wall there's probably cheaper solutions that are simple splitters.
I might be misremembering, but I recall some older graphics cards were designed to be plugged straight into a wall outlet.
A graphics card that could make direct use of 110/220V AC? I think not. Perhaps some strange specialty card with its own wall wart/on-board converter, but that would only be used because the PSU was impossible to replace / upgrade. Not that I've ever heard of it, but stranger things have happened.
A cheap bottle of vodka and a fine champagne are both consumer products. You're making an arbitrarily line in the sand where there is none.
Or the 3rd choice: They don't really care what their employees prefer.
Well Apple has long thought they know better than their customers, it would not surprise me if the hubris has reached the point where they think they know better than their workers. I don't work at Apple, but we're moving to an open floor plan. I don't care because I've worked on one before and seem to have grown mental ear muffs but I know most are against it. They're perfectly aware however we are just resisting change and don't understand how improved collaboration will make us better. And yes, some say the sky is falling when I know it's not. Perhaps it will even get better because I get a whiff of their next terrible plan before it's set out into action, that's one kind of collaboration I guess.