I've been following the thread, but I don't know shit about video codecs or recovery so my understanding is limited at best. That said, it seems like FFMPEG (the codec used, I think) gains a lot of its compression by containing occasional keyframes that contain the full image, and then calculating deltas for providing subsequent frames. So, if you miss a few keyframes, you get huge swaths of video that are totally unintelligible. And, I think errors can cascade down into many subsequent frames because of the way the original image is modified and modified again.
As well, I get the impression that blocks within images can have the same sorts of issues, where an early bit or two in error can corrupt the entire thing. So, the effort has seemed to focus on trying to go through and fix keyframes first, and sometimes human pattern recognition can pick out the errors quickly, sometimes it looks like it has been a frame-by-frame trial and error where someone flips a bit and sees what comes out.
Given ~20 seconds of video, ~30 FPS, and probably several hundred blocks per frame, that's on the order of 100,000 pieces that are being repaired by human trial-and-error. It's a pretty herculean effort led by some extremely capable people.
The PSP was actually a pretty nice piece of hardware, at least for those of us that grew up when a black and white portable system was a big deal. My old PSP1000, long since hacked, is now mainly used when I get a sudden urge to play FF7. Which is still awesome. If they had come out day one with a bunch of ported PS1 titles available on PSN I think things could've been different.
An N-type semiconductor (think N for negative) has an excessive number of electrons. So, those electrons hop around from atom to atom and you get a movement of negative charge.
A P-type semiconductor (P for positive) doesn't have enough electrons to go around. So, you get places where electrons aren't, but would like to be (holes).
In either case, you don't really have electrons moving around - you have charge moving around. Think of a tube, where you insert one ball at the end, and a ball pops out the other end. Or something like a Newton's cradle. You are transporting balls in one sense, but it isn't exactly right to think of an individual ball traveling. Instead, the location of an excess electron (or an absent electron) is traveling.
So tired of the people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation who just bitch about the article. This topic has actually achieved something most posts don't: it has solicited a high number of interesting replies on a fun and nerdy topic, without igniting a political/technological flamefest. And rather than participating, you complain about the messenger. I assume that you have nothing relevant or interesting to share so instead you try to criticize and demean.
But of course, I must be new here. This is slashdot, of course, where 90% of posts are by grammar Nazis, righteous Liberal/Conservative/Apple/Android/vi/emacs zealots, and pedants that love to debate minutia while completely ignoring the main point. And folks like yourself who inexplicably choose to go out of your way to explain why people having an interesting conversation shouldn't be.
There was a robotics competition I participated in the middle of the sand dunes outside of Alamosa, Colorado. We had pretty decent code running, but then the hardware guy decided to swap in some new, higher voltage batteries the night before. The motor controller got fried (should've seen it coming), but thankfully, we cobbled together enough parts to get a basic bot together in about 45 minutes the next morning, all while squatting in the middle of the desert. Learned a lot on that trip - including discovering proportional control, and why you shouldn't put your magnetometers too close to your drive motors. Imagine a tank having a seizure and you can picture what the result was.
Second up was a rocket experiment I worked on as an undergrad - we needed to get to Virginia for the launch, and decided taking a 70's Winnebago was a good way to do it. It actually worked pretty well (despite the thing catching on fire somewhere in Kansas) and we got a lot of final testing/integration done en route. It makes me want to have a mobile workstation again... parking outside of the radio shack and hacking away was surprisingly effective, because any parts we needed were right outside our door.
If you are single, have no or few student loans, and live in a place with low cost of living, that's true. If you have a child, have substantial student loans, or live somewhere with crazy real estate, that is poverty.
You aren't reading that correctly. The author considered herself lucky to work on many teams that were well balanced and capable. Even in that situation, with a good team, failure sometimes happened. There's nothing in there that suggests evading fault.
What? Believing that interdependence is good doesn't mean that you are a bleeding-heart one-love hippy. It just means that Hadfield is a realist and acknowledges all the expertise and capability of the Russians. And that he understands the fact that the ISS literally cannot survive without the Russian modules that perform critical functions.
I'm not saying that scrapping our manned space capability before we had a replacement was a good idea, nor was it a good idea to design our workhorse military launch vehicle around an engine that we can only get from Russia. In fact, those ideas were idiotic. Nobody was paying attention apparently while the Russians beat us at our own game, and sold us the rope they could hang us with. That said, while we do need to fix those issues and remove the imbalanced leverage that Russia has thanks to our stupidity, once we do we've still got a space station that relies on cooperation to function. It's certainly better to have political spats about a giant science experiment in space (an awesome one, at that) than it is to have them with nuclear subs that could end humanity. The ISS has done a lot of good for all parties, and is an incredible achievement both technically and politically - to deny and discard that would be tragic.
First off, Hadfield is a (now retired) Canadian astronaut, so if anything he's a CSA PR guy. Secondly, he (rightly) considers the Russians to be the leading experts in long-term human presence in space - they have been building and operating space stations much longer than we have. Thirdly, he spent a good chunk of his career living and working in Russia, with the Russian space program, so he's pretty well qualified to understand their contributions to the ISS.
I don't think he's at all the PR shill you seem to want him to be. I think he legitimately respects and values cooperation with Russia and appreciates their unique capabilities. And, there's no evidence that he's against SpaceX and their success - I think he's just trying to be a voice of moderation, and pointing out all the good that has come out of the ISS partnership. Consider: although the ISS and space access have been used as political footballs in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, that doesn't mean things would be better otherwise. I think it instead demonstrates that both countries place a high value on this space partnership and so that is the stage for political maneuvering, which I think we can all agree is an improvement from putting missiles in Cuba and playing war games with nuclear subs that could end humanity.
I was probably playing a few years after that, I think the game had been out for a little while once I picked it up. It had a bunch of really innovative concepts though, which really set it apart from your standard RTS like C&C or AoE. The camouflage was awesome, the spies, the "phasing" (I think there were a number of infantry units that could phase to hide their locations) and even artillery was implemented pretty uniquely.
I had a less nuanced strategy with the phase vehicle and the artillery - I liked to take a few disposable units and get a bunch of artillery together, and then pop a guy out behind enemy lines just long enough to get line of sight to get artillery targeted.
Anybody here ever play that game? It was one of the first computer games I got seriously into, it was an RTS, and it had an incredible feature: all the units and buildings had their attributes stored in plaintext files. It was awesome, because I could just open up a random file, search for a unit (the sniper, for instance), and figure out where and how the damage was calculated. It actually had an impressively complex damage system, so the sniper was excellent against humanoid targets but bad against armor. It incorporated a critical hit chance as well... so I redesigned the sniper with the ability to get massive crit damage against armored targets.
The best part was that the snipers in that game could disguise themselves as any piece of terrain, so you could build up your army of super snipers and then overrun the enemy with a horde of trees and bushes.
Don't underestimate things like simple computer games and map editors to introduce programming concepts to young minds. That got me started, and only much later did I realize that I had been learning about variables, objects, attributes, and general programming principles without even meaning to.
So full of shit. Here's a thought experiment for you:
You are going to teach 8 periods to high school students, tomorrow. Thankfully, those 8 classes only represent 4 courses, so you can prepare 4 and reteach each one twice. You may have a textbook to refer to or a general subject outline that will give you a topic (say, Newton's laws). For each class, prepare a lesson that includes:
1. An warmup that starts the process and gives students something to do while you log attendance and do other administrative things to get the class ready.
2. A "hook" that introduces the topic in a way that will hopefully capture the attention of a bunch of teenagers that are far more interested in whatever the Kardashians are doing.
3. Present the subject matter, the real meat of the issue, in a way that isn't too advanced for the lowest students but isn't too boring for the most advanced students. Find ways to keep this interesting.
4. Make sure the students then have some way of engaging with this new knowledge independently - worksheets and textbook problems are the easy way out, if you have the time to put some creativity into it you could have them work through a lab activity, design an engineering project that demonstrates the topic in a hands-on manner, etc.
5. Do something summative at the end to help retention, address misconceptions, and monitor student progress.
As part of all this, make sure that each element demonstrably connects to a state standard, can be specially and uniquely adapted for the ~5 different students with disabilities in each class, and also offer an extension for the 2 or 3 advanced student in each class. Then, make sure you prepare all those lab activities, grade all the work generated yesterday, deal with the parents who are bitching about something, follow up with students that are struggling, and deal with the administrative BS and paperwork that you are constantly required to deal with.
By the way, this is LITERALLY what I prepared for every single day of teaching. Zero exaggeration.
The problem is, there is no way to get this work done in the ~45 minutes allotted. (That "prep time" that you think is so superfluous) So, there are two options: take a huge chunk of personal time (your lunch, time at home that you could be spending with your family, weekends, holidays) and do everything that needs doing, or lower your standards until the time required matches the time you have available.
So, predictably, you get a few main types of teachers. You get the young, idealistic teachers that work 12 hour days and then do another 8 hours of grading on the weekend, and who forsake their families, hobbies, and personal lives for pay that puts them just above the poverty line if they're lucky. I'd say 95% of these teachers burn out and either quit, or lose their ideals. You also get the more flexible, compromising teachers that find a way (involving lots of movies and bookwork) to get the job done at a mediocre level while retaining some semblance of balance in their lives. Any long-term successful teacher ultimately ends up somewhere between the two extremes - figuring out what stuff is most essential and is worth spending time on, while discarding and neglecting things that, while good, are too time consuming.
I spent a year doing this mad shuffle, doing impressive experiments weekly, setting up labs for every unit, running extracurricular robotics teams and leading them to competitions (working from 7 in the morning to 10 at night a couple of times a week during competition season) and making $28k doing it. I rightly realized that my commitment to being a good teacher meant that I was being a shitty husband and father and went into engineering making twice as much.
So think about what kind of people you are going to get with that kind of career available. If you're lucky, you get the irrationally idealistic teacher that is willing to sacrifice time, money, and relationships for the children of strangers. More likely, you get somebody who finds ways to play a lot of videos, point to the textbook, and sit there counting the days until summer. You're getting what you're paying for.
They are collecting an incredible amount of data every instant that this machine is running - they've got extremely capable processing that combs through terabits of data and discards the 99.9% that is irrelevant, so that they merely have to store gigabits to disk (as it is, they have an incredible amount of storage on site). Some pretty impressive computing they have to go through before they even begin to look at the data.
I give this guy a 25% chance of lasting as a teacher. He's very technically capable, he's in grad school so he likely has significant student loan debt, and he doesn't appear to be exceedingly extroverted. Unfortunately most teaching positions don't require technical capability or involve technical challenges, they don't pay anywhere near what you need to cover those loan bills, and the key to success is the ability to redirect and manipulate unruly teenagers (and their hovering parents), which can be especially challenging for someone who isn't already socially adept.
I really hope he's successful, because folks like him could do a lot to inspire some of the brightest minds. I just think the teaching profession (in the US, anyway) isn't set up to be very rewarding for someone like him. I had the same ambitions, but the cold realities of our education system drove me away.
Apple turns on iMessage by default. It isn't as though I went and sought out an app to give me extra messaging features. Merely having an iPhone makes this happen, and then moving away from an iPhone means the new phone doesn't work right. Imagine that an Apple computer by default instituted a fancy "internet enhancement" on your WiFi router that would cause any future device to be unable to download... that is essentially what we're talking about here, hijacking your default texting protocols, which offer some whiz-bang features, but subsequently interfere with service when the user switches away.
If they were up front about this, made it an opt-in policy, or fixed it on their end without an asinine fee, it would be fine. As it is, it harms the carriers, competitors, and ex-users, so they don't do anything about it.
That isn't the problem. The problem is that any person you have iMessaged with in the past now can't message you. What's worse, the only fix is for each of those contacts to change a setting within their phone. So it isn't a technical problem I have to deal with, it is a technical problem that anybody I've iMessaged before, ever, has to deal with.
The thing that makes it anti-competitive is that Apple knows about the issue but has left it unaddressed, presumably because it impacts ex-customers of theirs, and therefore at first seems to be the fault of the new non-Apple device or the carrier. It amounts to sabotaging the service of their competitor's customers.
What's worse, they can fix this trivially, because I called in recently to deal with the issue. The problem is, they charge $20 for the privilege of having them stop screwing with your SMS service.
That's bullshit. Why the hell should I expect that I'll have to go through extra hoops to get text messages to work when I switch away from an Apple device? When I get a new phone, it should work as long as I go through the activation process for that new phone. I just did this recently, and discovered after quite a bit of troubleshooting (it isn't immediately obvious that texts aren't going through/you aren't receiving them) that there was a big problem here.
The only solution that has worked so far is to have every person with an iPhone that I ever messaged with change their contact settings for me to turn off the iMessage notifications. I have no issues with technical problems cropping up. That isn't a big deal. The problem is that Apple knows about the problem, but refuses to fix it and leaves it as a customer service issue for the carriers and non-Apple phone owners to deal with. That's anti-competitive behavior if ever I saw it.
To add injury to insult, when you call Apple about solving the problem, they happily offer to reset their server settings for a $20 fee per iPhone. So, they can fix this trivially - they just want to make it as painful as possible. Sue them to oblivion, I say.
That's bullshit. Why the hell should I expect that I'll have to go through extra hoops to get text messages to work when I switch away from an Apple device? When I get a new phone, it should work as long as I go through the activation process for that new phone. I just did this recently, and discovered after quite a bit of troubleshooting (it isn't immediately obvious that texts aren't going through/you aren't receiving them) that there was a big problem here.
The only solution that has worked so far is to have every person with an iPhone that I ever messaged with change their contact settings for me to turn of the iMessage notifications.
I have no issues with technical problems cropping up. That isn't a big deal. The problem is that Apple knows about the problem, but refuses to fix it and leaves it as a customer service issue for the carriers and non-Apple phone owners to deal with. That's anti-competitive behavior if ever I saw it.
To add injury to insult, when you call Apple about solving the problem, they happily offer to reset their server settings for a $20 fee per iPhone. So, they can fix this trivially - they just want to make it as painful as possible. Sue them to oblivion, I say.
So, turns out that funneling cash to huge defense contractors only works for national security as long as those involved care more about defense than cash.
Lockheed and Boeing got a bunch of money (and get a bunch of money every year, assured access) to deal with this and develop capability for building this engine domestically, but turns out they just pocketed the money, never built the rocket engine factory, and nobody blinked an eye. Thankfully they have the Delta IV, but who knows if they can scale up production like they need to, and you can guarantee it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive.
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Good to know - I defer to you, as I have next to no idea what I'm talking about with video stuff.
I've been following the thread, but I don't know shit about video codecs or recovery so my understanding is limited at best. That said, it seems like FFMPEG (the codec used, I think) gains a lot of its compression by containing occasional keyframes that contain the full image, and then calculating deltas for providing subsequent frames. So, if you miss a few keyframes, you get huge swaths of video that are totally unintelligible. And, I think errors can cascade down into many subsequent frames because of the way the original image is modified and modified again.
As well, I get the impression that blocks within images can have the same sorts of issues, where an early bit or two in error can corrupt the entire thing. So, the effort has seemed to focus on trying to go through and fix keyframes first, and sometimes human pattern recognition can pick out the errors quickly, sometimes it looks like it has been a frame-by-frame trial and error where someone flips a bit and sees what comes out.
Given ~20 seconds of video, ~30 FPS, and probably several hundred blocks per frame, that's on the order of 100,000 pieces that are being repaired by human trial-and-error. It's a pretty herculean effort led by some extremely capable people.
I believe the codec was FFMPEG - they've got one of the codec's authors helping out on the recovery effort.
The PSP was actually a pretty nice piece of hardware, at least for those of us that grew up when a black and white portable system was a big deal. My old PSP1000, long since hacked, is now mainly used when I get a sudden urge to play FF7. Which is still awesome. If they had come out day one with a bunch of ported PS1 titles available on PSN I think things could've been different.
"a dense husk of degenerate matter"
Sounds like the average slashdotter. *rimshot*
An N-type semiconductor (think N for negative) has an excessive number of electrons. So, those electrons hop around from atom to atom and you get a movement of negative charge.
A P-type semiconductor (P for positive) doesn't have enough electrons to go around. So, you get places where electrons aren't, but would like to be (holes).
In either case, you don't really have electrons moving around - you have charge moving around. Think of a tube, where you insert one ball at the end, and a ball pops out the other end. Or something like a Newton's cradle. You are transporting balls in one sense, but it isn't exactly right to think of an individual ball traveling. Instead, the location of an excess electron (or an absent electron) is traveling.
So tired of the people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation who just bitch about the article. This topic has actually achieved something most posts don't: it has solicited a high number of interesting replies on a fun and nerdy topic, without igniting a political/technological flamefest. And rather than participating, you complain about the messenger. I assume that you have nothing relevant or interesting to share so instead you try to criticize and demean.
But of course, I must be new here. This is slashdot, of course, where 90% of posts are by grammar Nazis, righteous Liberal/Conservative/Apple/Android/vi/emacs zealots, and pedants that love to debate minutia while completely ignoring the main point. And folks like yourself who inexplicably choose to go out of your way to explain why people having an interesting conversation shouldn't be.
There was a robotics competition I participated in the middle of the sand dunes outside of Alamosa, Colorado. We had pretty decent code running, but then the hardware guy decided to swap in some new, higher voltage batteries the night before. The motor controller got fried (should've seen it coming), but thankfully, we cobbled together enough parts to get a basic bot together in about 45 minutes the next morning, all while squatting in the middle of the desert. Learned a lot on that trip - including discovering proportional control, and why you shouldn't put your magnetometers too close to your drive motors. Imagine a tank having a seizure and you can picture what the result was.
Second up was a rocket experiment I worked on as an undergrad - we needed to get to Virginia for the launch, and decided taking a 70's Winnebago was a good way to do it. It actually worked pretty well (despite the thing catching on fire somewhere in Kansas) and we got a lot of final testing/integration done en route. It makes me want to have a mobile workstation again... parking outside of the radio shack and hacking away was surprisingly effective, because any parts we needed were right outside our door.
If you are single, have no or few student loans, and live in a place with low cost of living, that's true. If you have a child, have substantial student loans, or live somewhere with crazy real estate, that is poverty.
You aren't reading that correctly. The author considered herself lucky to work on many teams that were well balanced and capable. Even in that situation, with a good team, failure sometimes happened. There's nothing in there that suggests evading fault.
What? Believing that interdependence is good doesn't mean that you are a bleeding-heart one-love hippy. It just means that Hadfield is a realist and acknowledges all the expertise and capability of the Russians. And that he understands the fact that the ISS literally cannot survive without the Russian modules that perform critical functions.
I'm not saying that scrapping our manned space capability before we had a replacement was a good idea, nor was it a good idea to design our workhorse military launch vehicle around an engine that we can only get from Russia. In fact, those ideas were idiotic. Nobody was paying attention apparently while the Russians beat us at our own game, and sold us the rope they could hang us with. That said, while we do need to fix those issues and remove the imbalanced leverage that Russia has thanks to our stupidity, once we do we've still got a space station that relies on cooperation to function. It's certainly better to have political spats about a giant science experiment in space (an awesome one, at that) than it is to have them with nuclear subs that could end humanity. The ISS has done a lot of good for all parties, and is an incredible achievement both technically and politically - to deny and discard that would be tragic.
First off, Hadfield is a (now retired) Canadian astronaut, so if anything he's a CSA PR guy. Secondly, he (rightly) considers the Russians to be the leading experts in long-term human presence in space - they have been building and operating space stations much longer than we have. Thirdly, he spent a good chunk of his career living and working in Russia, with the Russian space program, so he's pretty well qualified to understand their contributions to the ISS.
I don't think he's at all the PR shill you seem to want him to be. I think he legitimately respects and values cooperation with Russia and appreciates their unique capabilities. And, there's no evidence that he's against SpaceX and their success - I think he's just trying to be a voice of moderation, and pointing out all the good that has come out of the ISS partnership. Consider: although the ISS and space access have been used as political footballs in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, that doesn't mean things would be better otherwise. I think it instead demonstrates that both countries place a high value on this space partnership and so that is the stage for political maneuvering, which I think we can all agree is an improvement from putting missiles in Cuba and playing war games with nuclear subs that could end humanity.
I was probably playing a few years after that, I think the game had been out for a little while once I picked it up. It had a bunch of really innovative concepts though, which really set it apart from your standard RTS like C&C or AoE. The camouflage was awesome, the spies, the "phasing" (I think there were a number of infantry units that could phase to hide their locations) and even artillery was implemented pretty uniquely.
I had a less nuanced strategy with the phase vehicle and the artillery - I liked to take a few disposable units and get a bunch of artillery together, and then pop a guy out behind enemy lines just long enough to get line of sight to get artillery targeted.
That was fun stuff. Making me all nostalgic.
Anybody here ever play that game? It was one of the first computer games I got seriously into, it was an RTS, and it had an incredible feature: all the units and buildings had their attributes stored in plaintext files. It was awesome, because I could just open up a random file, search for a unit (the sniper, for instance), and figure out where and how the damage was calculated. It actually had an impressively complex damage system, so the sniper was excellent against humanoid targets but bad against armor. It incorporated a critical hit chance as well... so I redesigned the sniper with the ability to get massive crit damage against armored targets.
The best part was that the snipers in that game could disguise themselves as any piece of terrain, so you could build up your army of super snipers and then overrun the enemy with a horde of trees and bushes.
Don't underestimate things like simple computer games and map editors to introduce programming concepts to young minds. That got me started, and only much later did I realize that I had been learning about variables, objects, attributes, and general programming principles without even meaning to.
Frank Herbert wasn't hard sci-fi. And Stross's writing is both clear and interesting: two things that Gibson has struggled with.
So full of shit. Here's a thought experiment for you:
You are going to teach 8 periods to high school students, tomorrow. Thankfully, those 8 classes only represent 4 courses, so you can prepare 4 and reteach each one twice. You may have a textbook to refer to or a general subject outline that will give you a topic (say, Newton's laws). For each class, prepare a lesson that includes:
1. An warmup that starts the process and gives students something to do while you log attendance and do other administrative things to get the class ready.
2. A "hook" that introduces the topic in a way that will hopefully capture the attention of a bunch of teenagers that are far more interested in whatever the Kardashians are doing.
3. Present the subject matter, the real meat of the issue, in a way that isn't too advanced for the lowest students but isn't too boring for the most advanced students. Find ways to keep this interesting.
4. Make sure the students then have some way of engaging with this new knowledge independently - worksheets and textbook problems are the easy way out, if you have the time to put some creativity into it you could have them work through a lab activity, design an engineering project that demonstrates the topic in a hands-on manner, etc.
5. Do something summative at the end to help retention, address misconceptions, and monitor student progress.
As part of all this, make sure that each element demonstrably connects to a state standard, can be specially and uniquely adapted for the ~5 different students with disabilities in each class, and also offer an extension for the 2 or 3 advanced student in each class. Then, make sure you prepare all those lab activities, grade all the work generated yesterday, deal with the parents who are bitching about something, follow up with students that are struggling, and deal with the administrative BS and paperwork that you are constantly required to deal with.
By the way, this is LITERALLY what I prepared for every single day of teaching. Zero exaggeration.
The problem is, there is no way to get this work done in the ~45 minutes allotted. (That "prep time" that you think is so superfluous) So, there are two options: take a huge chunk of personal time (your lunch, time at home that you could be spending with your family, weekends, holidays) and do everything that needs doing, or lower your standards until the time required matches the time you have available.
So, predictably, you get a few main types of teachers. You get the young, idealistic teachers that work 12 hour days and then do another 8 hours of grading on the weekend, and who forsake their families, hobbies, and personal lives for pay that puts them just above the poverty line if they're lucky. I'd say 95% of these teachers burn out and either quit, or lose their ideals. You also get the more flexible, compromising teachers that find a way (involving lots of movies and bookwork) to get the job done at a mediocre level while retaining some semblance of balance in their lives. Any long-term successful teacher ultimately ends up somewhere between the two extremes - figuring out what stuff is most essential and is worth spending time on, while discarding and neglecting things that, while good, are too time consuming.
I spent a year doing this mad shuffle, doing impressive experiments weekly, setting up labs for every unit, running extracurricular robotics teams and leading them to competitions (working from 7 in the morning to 10 at night a couple of times a week during competition season) and making $28k doing it. I rightly realized that my commitment to being a good teacher meant that I was being a shitty husband and father and went into engineering making twice as much.
So think about what kind of people you are going to get with that kind of career available. If you're lucky, you get the irrationally idealistic teacher that is willing to sacrifice time, money, and relationships for the children of strangers. More likely, you get somebody who finds ways to play a lot of videos, point to the textbook, and sit there counting the days until summer. You're getting what you're paying for.
They are collecting an incredible amount of data every instant that this machine is running - they've got extremely capable processing that combs through terabits of data and discards the 99.9% that is irrelevant, so that they merely have to store gigabits to disk (as it is, they have an incredible amount of storage on site). Some pretty impressive computing they have to go through before they even begin to look at the data.
I give this guy a 25% chance of lasting as a teacher. He's very technically capable, he's in grad school so he likely has significant student loan debt, and he doesn't appear to be exceedingly extroverted. Unfortunately most teaching positions don't require technical capability or involve technical challenges, they don't pay anywhere near what you need to cover those loan bills, and the key to success is the ability to redirect and manipulate unruly teenagers (and their hovering parents), which can be especially challenging for someone who isn't already socially adept.
I really hope he's successful, because folks like him could do a lot to inspire some of the brightest minds. I just think the teaching profession (in the US, anyway) isn't set up to be very rewarding for someone like him. I had the same ambitions, but the cold realities of our education system drove me away.
Mods! This AC post is informative and interesting. A useful perspective on the trend of fusion development.
Apple turns on iMessage by default. It isn't as though I went and sought out an app to give me extra messaging features. Merely having an iPhone makes this happen, and then moving away from an iPhone means the new phone doesn't work right. Imagine that an Apple computer by default instituted a fancy "internet enhancement" on your WiFi router that would cause any future device to be unable to download... that is essentially what we're talking about here, hijacking your default texting protocols, which offer some whiz-bang features, but subsequently interfere with service when the user switches away.
If they were up front about this, made it an opt-in policy, or fixed it on their end without an asinine fee, it would be fine. As it is, it harms the carriers, competitors, and ex-users, so they don't do anything about it.
That isn't the problem. The problem is that any person you have iMessaged with in the past now can't message you. What's worse, the only fix is for each of those contacts to change a setting within their phone. So it isn't a technical problem I have to deal with, it is a technical problem that anybody I've iMessaged before, ever, has to deal with.
The thing that makes it anti-competitive is that Apple knows about the issue but has left it unaddressed, presumably because it impacts ex-customers of theirs, and therefore at first seems to be the fault of the new non-Apple device or the carrier. It amounts to sabotaging the service of their competitor's customers.
What's worse, they can fix this trivially, because I called in recently to deal with the issue. The problem is, they charge $20 for the privilege of having them stop screwing with your SMS service.
That's bullshit. Why the hell should I expect that I'll have to go through extra hoops to get text messages to work when I switch away from an Apple device? When I get a new phone, it should work as long as I go through the activation process for that new phone. I just did this recently, and discovered after quite a bit of troubleshooting (it isn't immediately obvious that texts aren't going through/you aren't receiving them) that there was a big problem here.
The only solution that has worked so far is to have every person with an iPhone that I ever messaged with change their contact settings for me to turn off the iMessage notifications. I have no issues with technical problems cropping up. That isn't a big deal. The problem is that Apple knows about the problem, but refuses to fix it and leaves it as a customer service issue for the carriers and non-Apple phone owners to deal with. That's anti-competitive behavior if ever I saw it.
To add injury to insult, when you call Apple about solving the problem, they happily offer to reset their server settings for a $20 fee per iPhone. So, they can fix this trivially - they just want to make it as painful as possible. Sue them to oblivion, I say.
That's bullshit. Why the hell should I expect that I'll have to go through extra hoops to get text messages to work when I switch away from an Apple device? When I get a new phone, it should work as long as I go through the activation process for that new phone. I just did this recently, and discovered after quite a bit of troubleshooting (it isn't immediately obvious that texts aren't going through/you aren't receiving them) that there was a big problem here.
The only solution that has worked so far is to have every person with an iPhone that I ever messaged with change their contact settings for me to turn of the iMessage notifications.
I have no issues with technical problems cropping up. That isn't a big deal. The problem is that Apple knows about the problem, but refuses to fix it and leaves it as a customer service issue for the carriers and non-Apple phone owners to deal with. That's anti-competitive behavior if ever I saw it.
To add injury to insult, when you call Apple about solving the problem, they happily offer to reset their server settings for a $20 fee per iPhone. So, they can fix this trivially - they just want to make it as painful as possible. Sue them to oblivion, I say.
That's the main upside I see to all this - we might actually get some cool rocket development coming out of this, if we're lucky.
So, turns out that funneling cash to huge defense contractors only works for national security as long as those involved care more about defense than cash.
Lockheed and Boeing got a bunch of money (and get a bunch of money every year, assured access) to deal with this and develop capability for building this engine domestically, but turns out they just pocketed the money, never built the rocket engine factory, and nobody blinked an eye. Thankfully they have the Delta IV, but who knows if they can scale up production like they need to, and you can guarantee it's going to be a hell of a lot more expensive.