Hard drives have a high cost per gigabyte and no fixed cost. Tape has a low cost per gigabyte but a very substantial fixed cost - a high capacity tape drive cen easily set you back a few thousand pound. There is a crossover point: For any volume of data larger than that, tape is cheaper. For any volume lower, disk is cheaper. Few companies are on the tape-is-cheaper side.
There will always be something of a generational gap in politics - just as there will be in judges, or the higher ranks of military command. These are all long-term careers, where it takes decades to work your way through the ranks and make it to the top. There may be a few who manage to get ahead fast, but even Obama is fifty now. So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did. They do understand lobbying, and economics - so for them, it's a very simply matter: Entertainment production is one of the few industries where the US not only leads the world, but also exports a lot more than it imports. That makes it economically very valuable, and so it must be defended and strengthened.
Back when it was letter-writing, they actually had paid secretaries skim and throw all those letters in the trash. But now they get such a volume of emails, they don't even give that much attention.
This defeats one of the advantages of linux: It's free. As in beer. Companies and individuals alike approve of free - why should they spend money on something expensive if the free software is equally capable? If you have any part of Windows on the system though you'd need a Windows license.
Actually the keys are controlled by the OEM, or the motherboard manufacturer. In theory, they have the choice of which operating systems to allow. In practice, people aren't inclined to trust the OEMs. Most of whom don't like to acknowledge linux exists.
It's called a natural monopoly: The costs to enter the market are so huge (Equipment, laying fiber, buying spectrum, etc) that once one company is established, it's simply pointless for anyone to try to compete - and anyone who has the required billions of dollars isn't stupid enough to try it.
Ideology. The republicans, or at least the base that they need to keep happy, oppose all government regulation by default as a matter of princible. They strongly believe in the power of the free market to self-optimise for the good of the people, if the government would just stop trying to fix it. Any times the market fails they'll just blame it on the government anyway.
Interesting idea, but if you want it to be even remotely feasable you'd have to first work on a transition to a more content-addressable web. That way you could vastly decrease network usage at the expense of vastly increasing storage required by nodes. Sticking a 2TB hard drive in every node is a small price to pay for the network savings.
It also explains why our blocking policy is so strict. In more seriousness, Instructables is likely blocked out of fear a student might injure themselves while building something they looked up at school and their parents would sue. Either that, or a classifier once saw an article on their warning how to make something actually dangerous and decided that rather than go to the trouble of classifying individual articles they'd just block the whole site.
Skilled animators are very expensive. If you can throw expensive hardware at the animators and give them a 50% increase in productivity, you can lay off 1/3 of your animation team - which will easily cover the cost of the hardware.
Motion capture, if not done just right, leads to the 'uncanny valley' - characters that look almost realistic, and yet just nonrealistic enough to be profoundly wrong in some way. It's unsettling.
On the other hand, which studio was it brought us the Toy Story movies, and Up? While dreamworks was producing... well, more Shrek sequals. Pixar really doesn't like doing sequals - the TS movies and Cars 2 are the only ones.
For most purposes, GPU viewports are fine. It's just lighting where having a fast render would be helpful. Lighting is largely a process of adjust a little, rerender, turn that light up, rerender, move that a little right, rerender, put up the fog density a tiny bit, rerender... until you have it looking just perfect. You can't viewport it because viewports can't render lighting and fog in perfect detail, and the only way to make things just right is to keep trying until you perfect it.
You have to keep voting for the less-evil of the two big parties, or the most-evil will get into power. The system sucks, but a duopoly on power is almost as stable as a monopoly. I can't see it being broken short of one of the big two suffering a severe internal split - but that seems unlikely. The democrats don't have enough internal ideological disagreement, and the republicans - while they certainly have plenty of that - have a skilled and powerful leadership that ensures party loyalty.
KC will have no problems with recursion, it's an x86. It's GPUs that don't do recursion. At least not current ones - remember they were made for processing graphics, not something where recursion is of much use.
In 32-bit color, only 24 bits are actually used. It's just more efficient to process one pixel in a 32-bit register than have to screw around with ANDs and shifts to get the data you want. The leftover eight bits are usually zeroed, sometimes used to store alpha or depth information.
More importantly, an x86 chip. Not a GPU. Which means anyone who knows even the fundamentals of programming can use one with minimal additional training. No screwing around with the inability of GPUs to do recursion or deep nesting, no trying to deal with your data as if it were a texture. Just code and go.
There does seem to be a change in the way hacking is handled. The old way was just to identify the source machine, block it, tidy up and secure holes. If some exploring hacker managed to take your site down for a while, it happened. Now that there is a lot more money involved in IT, companies are much more eager to send out the lawyers - which makes the internet more dangerous for the developing hackers. A problem looming, because today's script-kiddie playing around from home is tomorrow's sysadmin or programmer once they mature. The current approach to handling internet crime is like throwing people in jail for littering - it'll certainly keep the streets clean, but at the cost of ruining a lot of lives, many of them people who would grow out of it anyway.
Common, I'd imagine. A hacker has to hack - if someone of technological talent isn't directed into a productive use of their skill, they'll likely end up using it to play around just because it's fun. I know when I was a pupil in school I used to frequently hack their primative network security, and had much fun in the dialup days port scanning and poking at whatever I found. A lot of experts today probably got started with some explorations of dubious legality.
They'll prime the precidents first with a test case sure to go their way. An easy way to do that would be to just charge someone who downloaded child porn with computer fraud as well for violating ToS. Pedophiles are so powerfully loathed by judges and juries alike, they'll just go with 'guilty' without a second thought just to add to the punishment. Then the precident can be used in other cases.
That's because the people from each side of the political divide arguing about constitutionally limited government have very different ideas of what those constitutional limits are. The bit about establishment of religion vs freedom thereof alone has fueled so many very heated debates. The type of debate that tends to end with someone getting compared to Hitler.
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Hard drives have a high cost per gigabyte and no fixed cost. Tape has a low cost per gigabyte but a very substantial fixed cost - a high capacity tape drive cen easily set you back a few thousand pound. There is a crossover point: For any volume of data larger than that, tape is cheaper. For any volume lower, disk is cheaper. Few companies are on the tape-is-cheaper side.
There will always be something of a generational gap in politics - just as there will be in judges, or the higher ranks of military command. These are all long-term careers, where it takes decades to work your way through the ranks and make it to the top. There may be a few who manage to get ahead fast, but even Obama is fifty now. So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did. They do understand lobbying, and economics - so for them, it's a very simply matter: Entertainment production is one of the few industries where the US not only leads the world, but also exports a lot more than it imports. That makes it economically very valuable, and so it must be defended and strengthened.
Back when it was letter-writing, they actually had paid secretaries skim and throw all those letters in the trash. But now they get such a volume of emails, they don't even give that much attention.
This defeats one of the advantages of linux: It's free. As in beer. Companies and individuals alike approve of free - why should they spend money on something expensive if the free software is equally capable? If you have any part of Windows on the system though you'd need a Windows license.
Actually the keys are controlled by the OEM, or the motherboard manufacturer. In theory, they have the choice of which operating systems to allow. In practice, people aren't inclined to trust the OEMs. Most of whom don't like to acknowledge linux exists.
Because the FCC can send men with guns around to arrest you and take your stuff.
It's called a natural monopoly: The costs to enter the market are so huge (Equipment, laying fiber, buying spectrum, etc) that once one company is established, it's simply pointless for anyone to try to compete - and anyone who has the required billions of dollars isn't stupid enough to try it.
Ideology. The republicans, or at least the base that they need to keep happy, oppose all government regulation by default as a matter of princible. They strongly believe in the power of the free market to self-optimise for the good of the people, if the government would just stop trying to fix it. Any times the market fails they'll just blame it on the government anyway.
Interesting idea, but if you want it to be even remotely feasable you'd have to first work on a transition to a more content-addressable web. That way you could vastly decrease network usage at the expense of vastly increasing storage required by nodes. Sticking a 2TB hard drive in every node is a small price to pay for the network savings.
It also explains why our blocking policy is so strict. In more seriousness, Instructables is likely blocked out of fear a student might injure themselves while building something they looked up at school and their parents would sue. Either that, or a classifier once saw an article on their warning how to make something actually dangerous and decided that rather than go to the trouble of classifying individual articles they'd just block the whole site.
Well, I do work at a school...
Skilled animators are very expensive. If you can throw expensive hardware at the animators and give them a 50% increase in productivity, you can lay off 1/3 of your animation team - which will easily cover the cost of the hardware.
Motion capture, if not done just right, leads to the 'uncanny valley' - characters that look almost realistic, and yet just nonrealistic enough to be profoundly wrong in some way. It's unsettling.
On the other hand, which studio was it brought us the Toy Story movies, and Up? While dreamworks was producing... well, more Shrek sequals. Pixar really doesn't like doing sequals - the TS movies and Cars 2 are the only ones.
For most purposes, GPU viewports are fine. It's just lighting where having a fast render would be helpful. Lighting is largely a process of adjust a little, rerender, turn that light up, rerender, move that a little right, rerender, put up the fog density a tiny bit, rerender... until you have it looking just perfect. You can't viewport it because viewports can't render lighting and fog in perfect detail, and the only way to make things just right is to keep trying until you perfect it.
My council-run workplace proxy blocks instructables.com - the site is classified as a 'security threat.'
You have to keep voting for the less-evil of the two big parties, or the most-evil will get into power. The system sucks, but a duopoly on power is almost as stable as a monopoly. I can't see it being broken short of one of the big two suffering a severe internal split - but that seems unlikely. The democrats don't have enough internal ideological disagreement, and the republicans - while they certainly have plenty of that - have a skilled and powerful leadership that ensures party loyalty.
KC will have no problems with recursion, it's an x86. It's GPUs that don't do recursion. At least not current ones - remember they were made for processing graphics, not something where recursion is of much use.
In 32-bit color, only 24 bits are actually used. It's just more efficient to process one pixel in a 32-bit register than have to screw around with ANDs and shifts to get the data you want. The leftover eight bits are usually zeroed, sometimes used to store alpha or depth information.
More importantly, an x86 chip. Not a GPU. Which means anyone who knows even the fundamentals of programming can use one with minimal additional training. No screwing around with the inability of GPUs to do recursion or deep nesting, no trying to deal with your data as if it were a texture. Just code and go.
There does seem to be a change in the way hacking is handled. The old way was just to identify the source machine, block it, tidy up and secure holes. If some exploring hacker managed to take your site down for a while, it happened. Now that there is a lot more money involved in IT, companies are much more eager to send out the lawyers - which makes the internet more dangerous for the developing hackers. A problem looming, because today's script-kiddie playing around from home is tomorrow's sysadmin or programmer once they mature. The current approach to handling internet crime is like throwing people in jail for littering - it'll certainly keep the streets clean, but at the cost of ruining a lot of lives, many of them people who would grow out of it anyway.
Common, I'd imagine. A hacker has to hack - if someone of technological talent isn't directed into a productive use of their skill, they'll likely end up using it to play around just because it's fun. I know when I was a pupil in school I used to frequently hack their primative network security, and had much fun in the dialup days port scanning and poking at whatever I found. A lot of experts today probably got started with some explorations of dubious legality.
Really? We all know the pattern by now. Cynicism is so firmly established, people hardly even bother to campaign when they know they'll be ignored.
They'll prime the precidents first with a test case sure to go their way. An easy way to do that would be to just charge someone who downloaded child porn with computer fraud as well for violating ToS. Pedophiles are so powerfully loathed by judges and juries alike, they'll just go with 'guilty' without a second thought just to add to the punishment. Then the precident can be used in other cases.
That's because the people from each side of the political divide arguing about constitutionally limited government have very different ideas of what those constitutional limits are. The bit about establishment of religion vs freedom thereof alone has fueled so many very heated debates. The type of debate that tends to end with someone getting compared to Hitler.