Honestly though, in this day and age, such software-controlled hardware assaults should not be possible anymore. Everything has its own micro controller on-board, and here's the flaw: they should all have write-disable switches/jumpers, everything from the DVD burner to the RAID controller and you might as well put one on that fancy mouse too!
When you're developing the firmware/PIC, that write-disable pin typically gets used on a regular basis. Why then, do we not use its functionality in the production device ?
Would it complicate firmware updates ? Sure.
Should unskilled users be performing updates in the first place ? Hell no.
My opinion is if having to open the case and move a jumper is a big enough deterrent to stop you from flashing, then the jumper has done its job, and you shouldn't even go near any firmware downloads. Leave techy stuff to the techies.
Look, I'm not new here and I know you guys hate reading, but AMD is trying to standardize what they call the Mainstream segment of gaming. They purposefully exclude the high-end, which means all your Crysis arguments are null and void.
I personally think AMD's idea makes a lot of sense. It's also somewhat redundant, as it is mostly borne from the confusing product lines for PC components, like how a GeForce 8500 can be slower than a 6800GT, or how an Intel E4600 can be faster than an E6300. It's hard for a non-technical person to reasonable gauge their own PC's performance levels.
It's tricky for a guy like me, as I fit in that upper crust of hardware freaks. If a game doesn't run smoothly on my PC, I fire off hate mail to the developers, but I often get clients who just bought the latest game and found out their PC doesn't have the horsepower. Most times it's fixed with a $100 graphics card and name-brand power supply, but this one time I got a dude who wanted to play Age of Empires 3 on his 800mhz P3... well it actually ran, but peaked at 3-4 fps on the title screen. Well the key point is he wasn't the only one, and my reputation for gaming gear brought many of his ilk through my doors.
If there were a standard like AMDGame, where X game requires Y-level-of-performance to play, then people could ask me "What do I need to meet Y-level ?" and I could sell them exactly what they need. In such a scenario, the most important aspect of the standard is adherence! If the box says a level-4 PC can handle it, and it turns out the level-4 sucks, someone's balls must be sacrificed! What killed MPC wasn't the standard itself, it was the blatant abuse by game houses, who either overshot or undershot the spec by too wide a margin, turning the MPC logo into little more than a misleading marketing gimmick. The world does NOT need a repeat of those mistakes.
I never delved too far into the RISC vs CISC debate, but my understanding is that RISC uses a small number of simple, generic instructions that execute very quickly, and the compiler builds functionality upon those tiny building blocks. CISC uses a larger number of specialized instructions, each one doing a larger amount of "work" as one black box, where the RISC chip would break that down into several smaller tasks. Since RISC executes faster, overall performance is still good.
So my point is: if RISC needs more instructions to do the same work, does it require a higher clock frequency to achieve similar performance to a CISC chip ? Since clock speeds do not scale to infinity, this implies that a RISC chip will hit the frequency wall sooner, thus limiting its maximum speed.
Much of the work done by a modern Intel CPU involves clever decoding, caching and scheduling, to extract as much parallelism as possible from the x86 instruction set. If you were to somehow disable all the prefetching, hyper-threading, predictive branching and all the other bullshit that isn't directly tied to x86 decoding and execution, that Core 2 chip would be no better than a superclocked 386. That "bullshit" works hard to alleviate or outright negate many of CISC's weaknesses.
The simplicity of a RISC design leads to excellent production cost advantages and remarkable power efficiency, because there's a lot less "bullshit" on the die. Low cost + moderate performance + high efficiency = embedded nirvana. That's why we see them in cell phones, RAID controllers, microwave ovens, TVs, etc.
Meanwhile, in PC land, things are more expensive, and performance is king. Nobody wants a slow laptop, because we have work to do, otherwise we wouldn't buy the stupid laptop in the first place. We also want the laptop to sync with our desktop, run the same apps and hook up to the office network. It's bad enough that we have to work through the flight (or bus ride), we don't want to run (and have to learn) heterogeneous platforms.
RISC will continue to reign in small, cheap, battery-powered gadgets. That's what it does best, by design and in practice. That's its turf, where big bad CISC will not dare tread, not even their redheaded stepchild Atom.
Perhaps I hold a fonder memory of that film than most, but I thought the P6 line was a nice little "what if" moment. Sure, they got a lot of the tech wrong, but isn't it funny how 10 years later, Macs run on Intel ? Might it be that the movie's technical consultant dreamed of a faster Intel-based Mac ? The whole point of that scene was to convey the fact that the kids had bleeding-edge hardware.
*sigh* Despite its flaws, it was a fun shiney movie. Nobody would pay $10 to see what geeks REALLY do. Not even Darren Aronofsky could instill wonder in long pan shots of a E16 desktop with a dozen transparent terminal windows running ntop, tcpdump and nethack.
Maybe their platform had the cojones to handle it.
Not everyone is running their mission-critical apps on decommissioned P3 desktops:/ The average SOHO server today is a quad-core with 4gb memory. They can take one hell of a pounding compared to the dinosaurs we had four years ago.
That's because history has proven that any idiot can be President, regardless of age. Perhaps more accurately, we've seen that no matter how hard one tries to do good, half the country will disagree. We might as well have a wheel of fortune that is spun every time a decision needs to be made on national affairs.
Anyway back to the topic, I've met some people who are natural leaders and can lead a company to riches from their teen years. I've also met people who think they're leaders, but they're really just glorified assholes, sadly these are the predominant species. Then you've got people who are neither leaders nor assholes, they just got promoted into the wrong job and are stuck in bureaucracy.
If this young guy is doing good, more power to him! The fact that he's featured in a press article casts a bit of doubt on his character though, at least in my books. Real hard workers don't have time to whore out for attention. If this dude is as good as we're told, he should be contracting his services to other outfits, reaping the big bucks and streamlining global I.T., but he's not. I say fire him, blow up the building, and repatriate the jobs back home... just my random opinion:)
Disclaimer: I did not RTFA. Disclaimer II: I'm sharply anti-military.
Perhaps I've been in the computer industry for far too long, but how could it possibly cost 1.4bn to essentially add access control and a bigger amplifier to existing tech ? Will it realistically provide 1.4bn back in value, either by gaining efficiency in war planning, or enabling new civilian tech to make our lives easier ?
1.4bn might seem small to the average American bureaucrat, but it's a chunk of change that can change hundreds of thousands of lives if spent wisely. A GPS upgrade simply doesn't sound very humanitarian to me.
I think we should burn Texas from the outside in, to prevent these god-killing beasties from spreading out, along with a bunch of other tech-fearing subhumans.
Me, I'm going to keep using Gentoo, and pray their admins graduate from grade school before they destroy the whole thing.
Right now, distros follow different goals. Debian is something like 42 years behind everyone, in the name of stability. Red Hat stays about a year behind for the same reasons. Suse, well I honestly don't know what they do. Then you have Ubuntu, where they throw any friggin version Compiz at you, as long as it builds.
There's a good reason for these differences, and while a common release date would give package developers a goal to shoot for, I don't think it would honestly serve the needs of the users because users are different.
Isn't it kind of redundant to say that rootkits are hard to kill ? That's why we call them rootkits. They replace key features of the OS with infected ones, specifically to make it exceedingly difficult to find and clean them using OS-supplied functionality.
If it's done properly, a virus could theoretically hide itself ENTIRELY from any scanner, by hooking the appropriate entry points and function calls - if it can intercept every single I/O on the system, it can present an altered reality to all the software running on that system. Machines on the outside will still see that it's pumping spam like it's Sanford Wallace's birthday, but the local processes will be deaf, dumb and blind! That includes any anti-virus suite.
The only sure-fire way to sniff out a disk-borne virus is to boot in a trusted environment (in most cases a bootable CD), then run the scanner from there. Ideally one would compare files between the running system and the safe-booted one. This still allows firmware-based viruses to work their magic, but at that point the battle is pretty much lost.
I'm in the same boat. Every time a young hopeful asks me about the tech industry, I give them my cold, hard version of the truth: run away, run like hell!
In any career, you'll have fanatics at both ends of the spectrum. Me, I'm into computers because I was a computer freak for the first 25 years of my life, and now I'm stuck with no other milkable skills. Today I'm mostly indifferent. I like computers as toys and tools for scientific creativity, but the work has become old, repetitive and thankless. The pay sucks, job security is a laughing matter, everybody winds up hating you, and you hate all the ones that don't.
I'd much rather tell someone about the negative aspects of a career, than to blindly glamorize it like religion. If they're tough enough to see the pessimistic points as challenges, then they're both insane and motivated, which is precisely what you need to work any client-facing job.
It's one of those careers where you rarely ever get a compliment for a job well done, but everyone wants to rip off your head and fuck the wound when their email skips a beat. I'm not the most well adjusted fellow in the first place, so I tend to develop this explicitly vengeful distaste for the common whiney client. Homicidal fantasies are my way of coping with the daily stress. I'm perfectly fine with people who don't know or understand tech, but that patience flies out the window the moment they start arguing.
Thing is, you get the same bullshit in any service-oriented career. Mechanics come to mind, as well as doctors, bureaucrats of all shapes and sizes. The sticky issue is that, at least in my experience, there are a LOT of morons in any industry, which means often times the client really is smarter or more competent than the service provider. That means for the remaining 20% that truly are experts, we take the flak for the other 80%.
You'd think doing I.T. stuff in bars and clubs would be fun, right ? It stops being fun right around the 3rd time I have to repeat some basic immutable concept to the end-user like "No, you can't use a scanned image of your Visa card's magstrip to pay your tab". That's right folks, I had to explain the concept of magnetic storage to a cocky little martini-snorting iPhone-humping trendy douche. Three times I explained the facts, and he still complained that we were being uncooperative. As a rule, we don't do manual transactions (fraud is all too common in bars), and this guy's scanned image of his card gave new meaning to the term "Photoshopping." I mean, a physical card can be forged, but that at least requires skill, equipment and/or contacts. Photo editing requires a computer or a Kodak booth.
Hell, if they accept that bullshit in stores, I could easily fabricate doctored images from the wealth of credit card data that goes through my business any given week. Hell I could write a short PHP script to cook up the image every time a transaction goes through, then email it to my iPhone! That's just plain ridiculous.
You know what else is intuitive like the Blender UI ?
American English.
It makes perfect sense, once you learn all the double-entendres, transient jargon and collective ignorance that pervades all digital and print media. There really is no other language on the planet that gyrates anywhere near as much as English.
Oh, they most certainly are. Python is such a resource hog, it's driving up demand for bigger servers, which just happen to use parts manufactured behind the Great Wall.
Just because something creates jobs does not automatically grant it immunity.
If everyone stopped doing blow, or started producing it individually (I wish!), a lot of "highly unskilled laborers" would fall flat on their asses. Does that mean we should all defend the thugs, runners, lobbyists and crooked cops and their ill-gotten riches ?
The entertainment industry has developed a grossly inflated ego. It didn't used to be like that, before the advent of megaplex cinemas and VHS/DVD sales. Back then, acting was a job like any other. Sure, there was fame and adoration, Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart never made 20 million dollar deals. In fact they never even made 1 million dollar deals. Say what you will about inflation, but today's movie industry is a perverse glutton that's about to pop.
'tis cool! English being my second language, I often word things imprecisely, which can get hairy when one is an anti-establishment incendiary socialist pig like me:)
A dog crapping on the sidewalk is a sure sign that:
1. the dog needed to go -and- 2. we put a sidewalk there
Nature doesn't build sidewalks, and I'm pretty damned sure the dog doesn't care where its poop goes, as long as it gets the hell out of him before he explodes.
The only reason why we have laws against pooping dogs is because someone is too snobby to pick it the fuck up and they want someone else to do it for them.
I remember that from several years ago. The differences were one or two stray pixels. I personally could not appreciate their value, but it is definitely something a pro would want. There were also a few tradeoffs between gaming performance/rendering and accuracy, e.g. for antialiased wireframe rendering which is very common in pro environments, yet inexistent in games. You want those lines to be absolutely flawless when you're drawing that mechanical component.
It's easy to compare this to the recent Creative X-Fi debacle, but things are a bit different here.
If everyone stopped buying Quadros tomorrow, the company would stop developing those advanced driver features because I can imagine they're quite costly to develop and maintain (crazy testing!). There's also fanatical support that comes along with a Quadro... call them right up and they will often mash up a quick fix specifically for your issue in a matter of days, if not hours. They know Quadro users have a lot of money on the line for whatever they're designing.
If everyone stopped buying Creative X-Fi's tomorrow, and Creative stopped trying to market "high end gaming" sound cards, no one would starve. People would still have good sound, and professionals wouldn't even notice. Nobody serious about sound is using a Creative product anyway - maybe one or two weirdos with E-Mu gear but they're pretty quiet about it.
The prime difference between these two scenarios is value. When you spend the extra money on a Quadro, you get a lot more in terms of features and service. The hardware may well be the same, but the professional features directly affect your ability to get shit done, thus your bottom line.
When you pay $200 for a hackjob sound card, it doesn't give you an edge in your work and you certainly don't get high-class support. Try producing multitrack music on that fancy X-Fi, and call Creative with your sync issues, or the fact that the response curves look like an EKG, or your compatibility issues with Cubase and Logic. They will tell you to open up your list of installed programs and call everyone on that list, except Creative of course. At the end of the day you still won't have solutions to your problems, you'll only feel like you got scammed.
That is the main reason why Creative is hated and NVidia is praised, in their respective industries.
Stray dogs poop. Slave dogs poop. Why should it matter if the dog has a home ? Pick up the turd and toss it out! If you don't like keeping your property clean, then don't be a property owner!
Having an officer issue fines over stray poop is yet more proof that society has failed.
The thing with lawyers is there's usually two of them. Inevitably, one wins and one loses.
In most cases, the loser still gets paid. It really doesn't matter whose side you're on, as long as you can afford the lease on that luxury car you never learned to drive.
The majority of boxes in our cage are independent, load balancing doesn't even apply. If we could save power, we would, but without moving to a sloppy VM cluster, I don't see how it's even possible.
If/when Replicator technology happens, China will probably get it first. Actually let me specify: some other nation will invent it, but they will outsource the manufacturing (ironically) to China. China will take the design, like they do everything of value, and use it to secure their dominance.
The so-called Western economy will fail, not because of mass replication, but because China will make us their bitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh yes, the WWII tape killer... classic!
Honestly though, in this day and age, such software-controlled hardware assaults should not be possible anymore. Everything has its own micro controller on-board, and here's the flaw: they should all have write-disable switches/jumpers, everything from the DVD burner to the RAID controller and you might as well put one on that fancy mouse too!
When you're developing the firmware/PIC, that write-disable pin typically gets used on a regular basis. Why then, do we not use its functionality in the production device ?
Would it complicate firmware updates ? Sure.
Should unskilled users be performing updates in the first place ? Hell no.
My opinion is if having to open the case and move a jumper is a big enough deterrent to stop you from flashing, then the jumper has done its job, and you shouldn't even go near any firmware downloads. Leave techy stuff to the techies.
Look, I'm not new here and I know you guys hate reading, but AMD is trying to standardize what they call the Mainstream segment of gaming. They purposefully exclude the high-end, which means all your Crysis arguments are null and void.
I personally think AMD's idea makes a lot of sense. It's also somewhat redundant, as it is mostly borne from the confusing product lines for PC components, like how a GeForce 8500 can be slower than a 6800GT, or how an Intel E4600 can be faster than an E6300. It's hard for a non-technical person to reasonable gauge their own PC's performance levels.
It's tricky for a guy like me, as I fit in that upper crust of hardware freaks. If a game doesn't run smoothly on my PC, I fire off hate mail to the developers, but I often get clients who just bought the latest game and found out their PC doesn't have the horsepower. Most times it's fixed with a $100 graphics card and name-brand power supply, but this one time I got a dude who wanted to play Age of Empires 3 on his 800mhz P3... well it actually ran, but peaked at 3-4 fps on the title screen. Well the key point is he wasn't the only one, and my reputation for gaming gear brought many of his ilk through my doors.
If there were a standard like AMDGame, where X game requires Y-level-of-performance to play, then people could ask me "What do I need to meet Y-level ?" and I could sell them exactly what they need. In such a scenario, the most important aspect of the standard is adherence! If the box says a level-4 PC can handle it, and it turns out the level-4 sucks, someone's balls must be sacrificed! What killed MPC wasn't the standard itself, it was the blatant abuse by game houses, who either overshot or undershot the spec by too wide a margin, turning the MPC logo into little more than a misleading marketing gimmick. The world does NOT need a repeat of those mistakes.
I never delved too far into the RISC vs CISC debate, but my understanding is that RISC uses a small number of simple, generic instructions that execute very quickly, and the compiler builds functionality upon those tiny building blocks. CISC uses a larger number of specialized instructions, each one doing a larger amount of "work" as one black box, where the RISC chip would break that down into several smaller tasks. Since RISC executes faster, overall performance is still good.
So my point is: if RISC needs more instructions to do the same work, does it require a higher clock frequency to achieve similar performance to a CISC chip ? Since clock speeds do not scale to infinity, this implies that a RISC chip will hit the frequency wall sooner, thus limiting its maximum speed.
Much of the work done by a modern Intel CPU involves clever decoding, caching and scheduling, to extract as much parallelism as possible from the x86 instruction set. If you were to somehow disable all the prefetching, hyper-threading, predictive branching and all the other bullshit that isn't directly tied to x86 decoding and execution, that Core 2 chip would be no better than a superclocked 386. That "bullshit" works hard to alleviate or outright negate many of CISC's weaknesses.
The simplicity of a RISC design leads to excellent production cost advantages and remarkable power efficiency, because there's a lot less "bullshit" on the die. Low cost + moderate performance + high efficiency = embedded nirvana. That's why we see them in cell phones, RAID controllers, microwave ovens, TVs, etc.
Meanwhile, in PC land, things are more expensive, and performance is king. Nobody wants a slow laptop, because we have work to do, otherwise we wouldn't buy the stupid laptop in the first place. We also want the laptop to sync with our desktop, run the same apps and hook up to the office network. It's bad enough that we have to work through the flight (or bus ride), we don't want to run (and have to learn) heterogeneous platforms.
RISC will continue to reign in small, cheap, battery-powered gadgets. That's what it does best, by design and in practice. That's its turf, where big bad CISC will not dare tread, not even their redheaded stepchild Atom.
Perhaps I hold a fonder memory of that film than most, but I thought the P6 line was a nice little "what if" moment. Sure, they got a lot of the tech wrong, but isn't it funny how 10 years later, Macs run on Intel ? Might it be that the movie's technical consultant dreamed of a faster Intel-based Mac ? The whole point of that scene was to convey the fact that the kids had bleeding-edge hardware.
*sigh* Despite its flaws, it was a fun shiney movie. Nobody would pay $10 to see what geeks REALLY do. Not even Darren Aronofsky could instill wonder in long pan shots of a E16 desktop with a dozen transparent terminal windows running ntop, tcpdump and nethack.
Maybe their platform had the cojones to handle it.
:/ The average SOHO server today is a quad-core with 4gb memory. They can take one hell of a pounding compared to the dinosaurs we had four years ago.
Not everyone is running their mission-critical apps on decommissioned P3 desktops
If by liberal, you meant "American", then you're absolutely correct!
Media is biased, because humans are biased. No single political party is any more or less inclined to distort facts in-line with their own beliefs.
Would you have preferred a headline reading "Rogue DNS server running for 6 months with no adverse effects. Spread the lulz!" ?!
That's because history has proven that any idiot can be President, regardless of age. Perhaps more accurately, we've seen that no matter how hard one tries to do good, half the country will disagree. We might as well have a wheel of fortune that is spun every time a decision needs to be made on national affairs.
:)
Anyway back to the topic, I've met some people who are natural leaders and can lead a company to riches from their teen years. I've also met people who think they're leaders, but they're really just glorified assholes, sadly these are the predominant species. Then you've got people who are neither leaders nor assholes, they just got promoted into the wrong job and are stuck in bureaucracy.
If this young guy is doing good, more power to him! The fact that he's featured in a press article casts a bit of doubt on his character though, at least in my books. Real hard workers don't have time to whore out for attention. If this dude is as good as we're told, he should be contracting his services to other outfits, reaping the big bucks and streamlining global I.T., but he's not. I say fire him, blow up the building, and repatriate the jobs back home... just my random opinion
More like:
Day 1, 0930: US blames Al Qaeda, carpet bombs the entire middle-east
Day 1492, 0705: Witness comes forth, claiming the destruction of GPS satellites was an inside job.
Day 1492, 0930: I die in my office chair from violent eye-rolling spasms.
Disclaimer: I did not RTFA.
Disclaimer II: I'm sharply anti-military.
Perhaps I've been in the computer industry for far too long, but how could it possibly cost 1.4bn to essentially add access control and a bigger amplifier to existing tech ? Will it realistically provide 1.4bn back in value, either by gaining efficiency in war planning, or enabling new civilian tech to make our lives easier ?
1.4bn might seem small to the average American bureaucrat, but it's a chunk of change that can change hundreds of thousands of lives if spent wisely. A GPS upgrade simply doesn't sound very humanitarian to me.
So your strategy is to consume all resources until the planet is dead, then move to the next lush star ?
You're successfully compared the human race to a common parasite. Congratulations! You've confirmed what I already thought.
I think we should burn Texas from the outside in, to prevent these god-killing beasties from spreading out, along with a bunch of other tech-fearing subhumans.
Sure, go nuts. I see how this could help.
Me, I'm going to keep using Gentoo, and pray their admins graduate from grade school before they destroy the whole thing.
Right now, distros follow different goals. Debian is something like 42 years behind everyone, in the name of stability. Red Hat stays about a year behind for the same reasons. Suse, well I honestly don't know what they do. Then you have Ubuntu, where they throw any friggin version Compiz at you, as long as it builds.
There's a good reason for these differences, and while a common release date would give package developers a goal to shoot for, I don't think it would honestly serve the needs of the users because users are different.
Isn't it kind of redundant to say that rootkits are hard to kill ? That's why we call them rootkits. They replace key features of the OS with infected ones, specifically to make it exceedingly difficult to find and clean them using OS-supplied functionality.
If it's done properly, a virus could theoretically hide itself ENTIRELY from any scanner, by hooking the appropriate entry points and function calls - if it can intercept every single I/O on the system, it can present an altered reality to all the software running on that system. Machines on the outside will still see that it's pumping spam like it's Sanford Wallace's birthday, but the local processes will be deaf, dumb and blind! That includes any anti-virus suite.
The only sure-fire way to sniff out a disk-borne virus is to boot in a trusted environment (in most cases a bootable CD), then run the scanner from there. Ideally one would compare files between the running system and the safe-booted one. This still allows firmware-based viruses to work their magic, but at that point the battle is pretty much lost.
I'm in the same boat. Every time a young hopeful asks me about the tech industry, I give them my cold, hard version of the truth: run away, run like hell!
In any career, you'll have fanatics at both ends of the spectrum. Me, I'm into computers because I was a computer freak for the first 25 years of my life, and now I'm stuck with no other milkable skills. Today I'm mostly indifferent. I like computers as toys and tools for scientific creativity, but the work has become old, repetitive and thankless. The pay sucks, job security is a laughing matter, everybody winds up hating you, and you hate all the ones that don't.
I'd much rather tell someone about the negative aspects of a career, than to blindly glamorize it like religion. If they're tough enough to see the pessimistic points as challenges, then they're both insane and motivated, which is precisely what you need to work any client-facing job.
It's one of those careers where you rarely ever get a compliment for a job well done, but everyone wants to rip off your head and fuck the wound when their email skips a beat. I'm not the most well adjusted fellow in the first place, so I tend to develop this explicitly vengeful distaste for the common whiney client. Homicidal fantasies are my way of coping with the daily stress. I'm perfectly fine with people who don't know or understand tech, but that patience flies out the window the moment they start arguing.
Thing is, you get the same bullshit in any service-oriented career. Mechanics come to mind, as well as doctors, bureaucrats of all shapes and sizes. The sticky issue is that, at least in my experience, there are a LOT of morons in any industry, which means often times the client really is smarter or more competent than the service provider. That means for the remaining 20% that truly are experts, we take the flak for the other 80%.
You'd think doing I.T. stuff in bars and clubs would be fun, right ? It stops being fun right around the 3rd time I have to repeat some basic immutable concept to the end-user like "No, you can't use a scanned image of your Visa card's magstrip to pay your tab". That's right folks, I had to explain the concept of magnetic storage to a cocky little martini-snorting iPhone-humping trendy douche. Three times I explained the facts, and he still complained that we were being uncooperative. As a rule, we don't do manual transactions (fraud is all too common in bars), and this guy's scanned image of his card gave new meaning to the term "Photoshopping." I mean, a physical card can be forged, but that at least requires skill, equipment and/or contacts. Photo editing requires a computer or a Kodak booth.
Hell, if they accept that bullshit in stores, I could easily fabricate doctored images from the wealth of credit card data that goes through my business any given week. Hell I could write a short PHP script to cook up the image every time a transaction goes through, then email it to my iPhone! That's just plain ridiculous.
You know what else is intuitive like the Blender UI ?
American English.
It makes perfect sense, once you learn all the double-entendres, transient jargon and collective ignorance that pervades all digital and print media. There really is no other language on the planet that gyrates anywhere near as much as English.
Oh, they most certainly are. Python is such a resource hog, it's driving up demand for bigger servers, which just happen to use parts manufactured behind the Great Wall.
Python and Ruby are real money makers.
Just because something creates jobs does not automatically grant it immunity.
If everyone stopped doing blow, or started producing it individually (I wish!), a lot of "highly unskilled laborers" would fall flat on their asses. Does that mean we should all defend the thugs, runners, lobbyists and crooked cops and their ill-gotten riches ?
The entertainment industry has developed a grossly inflated ego. It didn't used to be like that, before the advent of megaplex cinemas and VHS/DVD sales. Back then, acting was a job like any other. Sure, there was fame and adoration, Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart never made 20 million dollar deals. In fact they never even made 1 million dollar deals. Say what you will about inflation, but today's movie industry is a perverse glutton that's about to pop.
'tis cool! English being my second language, I often word things imprecisely, which can get hairy when one is an anti-establishment incendiary socialist pig like me :)
Way to miss the mark there. Poop != robbery.
A dog crapping on the sidewalk is a sure sign that:
1. the dog needed to go
-and-
2. we put a sidewalk there
Nature doesn't build sidewalks, and I'm pretty damned sure the dog doesn't care where its poop goes, as long as it gets the hell out of him before he explodes.
The only reason why we have laws against pooping dogs is because someone is too snobby to pick it the fuck up and they want someone else to do it for them.
I remember that from several years ago. The differences were one or two stray pixels. I personally could not appreciate their value, but it is definitely something a pro would want. There were also a few tradeoffs between gaming performance/rendering and accuracy, e.g. for antialiased wireframe rendering which is very common in pro environments, yet inexistent in games. You want those lines to be absolutely flawless when you're drawing that mechanical component.
It's easy to compare this to the recent Creative X-Fi debacle, but things are a bit different here.
If everyone stopped buying Quadros tomorrow, the company would stop developing those advanced driver features because I can imagine they're quite costly to develop and maintain (crazy testing!). There's also fanatical support that comes along with a Quadro... call them right up and they will often mash up a quick fix specifically for your issue in a matter of days, if not hours. They know Quadro users have a lot of money on the line for whatever they're designing.
If everyone stopped buying Creative X-Fi's tomorrow, and Creative stopped trying to market "high end gaming" sound cards, no one would starve. People would still have good sound, and professionals wouldn't even notice. Nobody serious about sound is using a Creative product anyway - maybe one or two weirdos with E-Mu gear but they're pretty quiet about it.
The prime difference between these two scenarios is value. When you spend the extra money on a Quadro, you get a lot more in terms of features and service. The hardware may well be the same, but the professional features directly affect your ability to get shit done, thus your bottom line.
When you pay $200 for a hackjob sound card, it doesn't give you an edge in your work and you certainly don't get high-class support. Try producing multitrack music on that fancy X-Fi, and call Creative with your sync issues, or the fact that the response curves look like an EKG, or your compatibility issues with Cubase and Logic. They will tell you to open up your list of installed programs and call everyone on that list, except Creative of course. At the end of the day you still won't have solutions to your problems, you'll only feel like you got scammed.
That is the main reason why Creative is hated and NVidia is praised, in their respective industries.
Dogs poop. It happens.
Stray dogs poop. Slave dogs poop. Why should it matter if the dog has a home ? Pick up the turd and toss it out! If you don't like keeping your property clean, then don't be a property owner!
Having an officer issue fines over stray poop is yet more proof that society has failed.
The thing with lawyers is there's usually two of them. Inevitably, one wins and one loses.
In most cases, the loser still gets paid. It really doesn't matter whose side you're on, as long as you can afford the lease on that luxury car you never learned to drive.
The majority of boxes in our cage are independent, load balancing doesn't even apply. If we could save power, we would, but without moving to a sloppy VM cluster, I don't see how it's even possible.
Ok y'all shut up before I smack ya.
If/when Replicator technology happens, China will probably get it first. Actually let me specify: some other nation will invent it, but they will outsource the manufacturing (ironically) to China. China will take the design, like they do everything of value, and use it to secure their dominance.
The so-called Western economy will fail, not because of mass replication, but because China will make us their bitch.