There is one very good excuse. Portability. That's what USB sticks are used for. You want to be able to take your stick and use it on your desktop, your laptop, your work (/school) computers where you don't have admin access, your friends' computers, and so on regardless of what OS. And right away, not after first installing additional software. None of those solutions solve this problem.
The standard nontechies approach to getting software is as follows:
1. Enter name of software into browser search box*
2. Go to first link
3. Click 'download.' Repeat until a download starts.
4. Click 'next' until installation complete.
They go to download.com because for some programs, it actually comes higher in the listings than the program's main site. Espicially if they add 'download' to the search query, as many do.
*They don't quite get the concept of a search engine yet, so they'll go with the default. Theres a one-in-two chance they'll just type it in the address bar.
Now, that isn't fair. The GOP arn't attacking Obama because he is black - they are attacking him because he is a Democrat, their natural enemy. They may at times use the blackness in some manner - typically indirectly, by questioning his patriotism or by suggesting that he is a racist himself who will unfairy hurt the white man to enrich his black bothers - but it's his alignment with a major political party that makes him their enemy. The racial is just a tactic.
Depends on the task. In games, yes, they have issues with bandwidth. But in GPGPU? Very task dependant. There are some functions, like cryptographic brute forcing, for which the transfer from host to GPU is negligable.
The Cell, at the time of release, was mind-blowingly fast. Fastest chip around. But it didn't advance very far, and more conventional processors have now overtaken it.
I recall it is possible to fit a 16x card in a 1x slot (Obviously at 1x performance), but this requires the card be hacked. Literally. With a hacksaw. All the power and essential control lanes are at the front, and if 15 of the 16 data lanes are not connected then the card will simply not use them.
Microsoft is far from a has-been. They still dominate in desktop operating systems, and in all office software for business use. Not doing badly in servers too. Just because their efforts to expand into HPC and embedded have failed dismally doesn't make them a has-been.
Depends on how well it's done. A well-performed product placement isn't a problem, but sometimes it can be horribly forced and appear out of place, or even demand the writers alter the story in order to get it in.
The most extreme case of placement-induced rewriting I've heard of was actually from Japan - the fourth series of Digimon. The series actually started out as a card game and toy series, with a TV series written to promote those. Over the first three series it created a popular world with many viewers, but the company behind it decided that the series had drifted too far from it's original purpose: Selling toys. So they made a demand to the writers for series four: The series must not only include all of the toys and the card game, but they must all be frequently shown and used by the characters and made an integral part of the story. Amazingly, the writers actually pulled it off and made that work story-wise, but only by performing a complete reboot of the story universe, relegating the previous three series to 'didn't really happen.'
The same *was* said. The result was the Comstock laws, which prohibited sending anything obscene through the US postal service. This was back in a time when anything relating to contraception was legally classed as obscene, and so is still used as a choice example of how anti-pornography laws can be used for censorship of non-pornographic speech.
Back to the current century, it wouldn't be unprecidented. Most US states make their funding for libraries conditional upon the installation of content filters on the library computers, to 'protect the children.' The same condition is applied to various subsidies for private schools: If they don't filter their internet access, they lose their subsidies. I imagine that the same would be applied to any significant-scale municipal broadband service: At a bare minimum, it'll come with obscenity filtering at the network level and no way for the users to disable it. It'll probably also come with filtering for anything else the state deems illegal - piracy, sites promoting illicit drugs, etc.
If you can beat the army of lobbyists, and then the army of lawyers behind them, and then the army of pressure groups who will demand that the network be censored because the government should not spend tax money to distribute smut.
The channels have countered tivo with new ways to get the advertising in. Like those annoyingly huge banners that take up half the screen, and the increasing use of product placement. Sometimes so skillful you won't even notice it, others so unsubtle it ruins the program.
They still lead when it comes to documentary programs too. They don't dumb down as much, plus they have Attenborough. Any channel that has Attenborough is basically unbeatable in the field of nature docs. You just can't outdo his work. I'm concerned at how long he can keep it up though - he is 85 now, and there are no younger producers who even come close to matching the consistant quality of his work.
The TV advertising industry finds this concerning. Not the torrenting - pirates are actually a very small minority - but the use of PVRs to flick through adverts, a practice which threatens to destroy their entire business model. That's why they have increasingly been turning to product placement in recent years, and some channels have opted to make their commercial breaks shorter and more numerous.
Didn't take off in the US. Here in Europe, we mandated many years ago that all TVs must have a composite input.
Unfortunatly we also mandated it be via the SCART port, a connector designed by a committee to support every possible video standard in existance at the time on one port. It has a cable like a hosepipe and no retention clips.
On the other hand, it's also putting out 'Ancient Aliens.' Television has good and bad shows, and often the most popular are the least culturally valuable.
I notice the US hasn't ran a budget surplus since Clinton, and even then only briefly. The only thing keeping the US from it's own fiscal shit hole is borrowing at an unsustainable rate.
So after eating, I need to scrape the veggie part of my plate into one bin and the meat side into another. You underestimate the sheer force of lazy in the general population. If it takes even the very tiniest amount of effort, and doesn't lead to a direct benefit for them personally, they won't do it. It's hard enough just getting people to turn off the lights downstairs before they go to bed.
I have a plastic bin in the garden into which I threw the remains of a dead bush years ago. It's still there, undecomposed. From this I conclude that there is actually some effort involved in composting and therefore most people (like myself) will be too lazy to do it properly. They'll just chuck it all in a big heap and wonder why it isn't magically transforming into fertiliser.
Capitalism sucks. Communism sucks. That is why much of the world worked out long ago that you can pick bits from each, and combine them into something better than either. Whereas the US is still suffering from the cultural relics of the cold war, and considers the unrestrained free market to be the greatest power and symbol of their country.
Possibly because he was half-right. Edison *was* a hack. A good inventor, yes - but an even better businessman, quite ruthless, and not above stealing credit. He ran a research lab with a sizeable team of inventors, but personally took the credit for everything they came up with in order to create the image of a genius inventor. Better for business to have good publicity like that.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one very good excuse. Portability. That's what USB sticks are used for. You want to be able to take your stick and use it on your desktop, your laptop, your work (/school) computers where you don't have admin access, your friends' computers, and so on regardless of what OS. And right away, not after first installing additional software. None of those solutions solve this problem.
They do, and they do.
https://reporting-emea.bsa.org/r/report/add.aspx?src=uk&ln=en-gb
The standard nontechies approach to getting software is as follows:
1. Enter name of software into browser search box*
2. Go to first link
3. Click 'download.' Repeat until a download starts.
4. Click 'next' until installation complete.
They go to download.com because for some programs, it actually comes higher in the listings than the program's main site. Espicially if they add 'download' to the search query, as many do.
*They don't quite get the concept of a search engine yet, so they'll go with the default. Theres a one-in-two chance they'll just type it in the address bar.
Now, that isn't fair. The GOP arn't attacking Obama because he is black - they are attacking him because he is a Democrat, their natural enemy. They may at times use the blackness in some manner - typically indirectly, by questioning his patriotism or by suggesting that he is a racist himself who will unfairy hurt the white man to enrich his black bothers - but it's his alignment with a major political party that makes him their enemy. The racial is just a tactic.
Depends on the task. In games, yes, they have issues with bandwidth. But in GPGPU? Very task dependant. There are some functions, like cryptographic brute forcing, for which the transfer from host to GPU is negligable.
True, but then you'll probably run into other obstructions on the motherboard.
The Cell, at the time of release, was mind-blowingly fast. Fastest chip around. But it didn't advance very far, and more conventional processors have now overtaken it.
I recall it is possible to fit a 16x card in a 1x slot (Obviously at 1x performance), but this requires the card be hacked. Literally. With a hacksaw. All the power and essential control lanes are at the front, and if 15 of the 16 data lanes are not connected then the card will simply not use them.
Microsoft is far from a has-been. They still dominate in desktop operating systems, and in all office software for business use. Not doing badly in servers too. Just because their efforts to expand into HPC and embedded have failed dismally doesn't make them a has-been.
Depends on how well it's done. A well-performed product placement isn't a problem, but sometimes it can be horribly forced and appear out of place, or even demand the writers alter the story in order to get it in.
The most extreme case of placement-induced rewriting I've heard of was actually from Japan - the fourth series of Digimon. The series actually started out as a card game and toy series, with a TV series written to promote those. Over the first three series it created a popular world with many viewers, but the company behind it decided that the series had drifted too far from it's original purpose: Selling toys. So they made a demand to the writers for series four: The series must not only include all of the toys and the card game, but they must all be frequently shown and used by the characters and made an integral part of the story. Amazingly, the writers actually pulled it off and made that work story-wise, but only by performing a complete reboot of the story universe, relegating the previous three series to 'didn't really happen.'
What if what they want is to stop others getting what they want?
You may have to read that a few times to parse it.
The same *was* said. The result was the Comstock laws, which prohibited sending anything obscene through the US postal service. This was back in a time when anything relating to contraception was legally classed as obscene, and so is still used as a choice example of how anti-pornography laws can be used for censorship of non-pornographic speech.
Back to the current century, it wouldn't be unprecidented. Most US states make their funding for libraries conditional upon the installation of content filters on the library computers, to 'protect the children.' The same condition is applied to various subsidies for private schools: If they don't filter their internet access, they lose their subsidies. I imagine that the same would be applied to any significant-scale municipal broadband service: At a bare minimum, it'll come with obscenity filtering at the network level and no way for the users to disable it. It'll probably also come with filtering for anything else the state deems illegal - piracy, sites promoting illicit drugs, etc.
If you can beat the army of lobbyists, and then the army of lawyers behind them, and then the army of pressure groups who will demand that the network be censored because the government should not spend tax money to distribute smut.
The channels have countered tivo with new ways to get the advertising in. Like those annoyingly huge banners that take up half the screen, and the increasing use of product placement. Sometimes so skillful you won't even notice it, others so unsubtle it ruins the program.
They still lead when it comes to documentary programs too. They don't dumb down as much, plus they have Attenborough. Any channel that has Attenborough is basically unbeatable in the field of nature docs. You just can't outdo his work. I'm concerned at how long he can keep it up though - he is 85 now, and there are no younger producers who even come close to matching the consistant quality of his work.
The TV advertising industry finds this concerning. Not the torrenting - pirates are actually a very small minority - but the use of PVRs to flick through adverts, a practice which threatens to destroy their entire business model. That's why they have increasingly been turning to product placement in recent years, and some channels have opted to make their commercial breaks shorter and more numerous.
Didn't take off in the US. Here in Europe, we mandated many years ago that all TVs must have a composite input.
Unfortunatly we also mandated it be via the SCART port, a connector designed by a committee to support every possible video standard in existance at the time on one port. It has a cable like a hosepipe and no retention clips.
Come to the dark side... join the pirates. We will save you money.
On the other hand, it's also putting out 'Ancient Aliens.' Television has good and bad shows, and often the most popular are the least culturally valuable.
Aristophanes was quite the satirist. Doesn't work as well today because few people know what exactly he was satirising.
I notice the US hasn't ran a budget surplus since Clinton, and even then only briefly. The only thing keeping the US from it's own fiscal shit hole is borrowing at an unsustainable rate.
So after eating, I need to scrape the veggie part of my plate into one bin and the meat side into another. You underestimate the sheer force of lazy in the general population. If it takes even the very tiniest amount of effort, and doesn't lead to a direct benefit for them personally, they won't do it. It's hard enough just getting people to turn off the lights downstairs before they go to bed.
I have a plastic bin in the garden into which I threw the remains of a dead bush years ago. It's still there, undecomposed. From this I conclude that there is actually some effort involved in composting and therefore most people (like myself) will be too lazy to do it properly. They'll just chuck it all in a big heap and wonder why it isn't magically transforming into fertiliser.
Capitalism sucks. Communism sucks. That is why much of the world worked out long ago that you can pick bits from each, and combine them into something better than either. Whereas the US is still suffering from the cultural relics of the cold war, and considers the unrestrained free market to be the greatest power and symbol of their country.
Possibly because he was half-right. Edison *was* a hack. A good inventor, yes - but an even better businessman, quite ruthless, and not above stealing credit. He ran a research lab with a sizeable team of inventors, but personally took the credit for everything they came up with in order to create the image of a genius inventor. Better for business to have good publicity like that.