Wow, that's a bit pissy of you. I didn't even deny your assertion (other than through my initial assertion that in most cities--like NYC--a college kid driving 20 hours a week could not be a taxi driver), and just asked if you had any evidence, even going so far as adding that I didn't have any to back up my own assertion! That's how conversations are supposed to go, instead of jumping in with "bullshits" and "you don't know enough to be worth listening to." If you have data or proof to back up your statements, that tough talk has legs; if not, you're just a troll.
You think? I don't think I've ever ridden in a tax driven by a non-professional. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion (I don't have any).
I'm sorry, I didn't get that at all out of your post--I didn't know what the "one" you mentioned referred to. I see now that it's because you don't understand how taxis work, nor did you RTFA. I was also confused since you mentioned me being down-modded (must have been momentary), but that's neither here nor there.
You found one example of a taxi company that doesn't treat their employees well.
No, that's not remotely accurate. For one, RTFA. Many--if not most--taxi drivers are already dreaded contractors who own their own cars. They just also have to do stupid regulatory crap like buy horrifically expensive government-mandated monopoly medallions. No, I didn't find "one example of a taxi company," read the article:
The Alliance estimates that about half of New York City's taxi drivers don't have health insurance, since there's no employer to provide it, and projected that many wouldn't be able to afford even the plans offered on an exchange when the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
Yet, you won't find any employees of uber (or contractors) getting any benefits at all.
The "benefit" of driving for Uber is that you can do whatever you want.
So your 'point' really isn't all that valid - it's a moot point, to be honest.
Your 'analysis' (nice scare quotes!) is lacking in background information. We can certainly moot more, if you're up for discussing further.
I want _all_ employees to stop being abused. The argument that it's OK for Uber to abuse employees because someone else does it is something like what a toddler says when they're caught stealing cookies. What I don't understand is how the hell an argument this ridiculous is resonating with people.
Any Uber driver can choose to stop being "abused" at any time. Nothing at all--other than their own desire to drive for Uber--makes them drive. They're not battered spouses who are afraid to leave a dangerous relationship.
To be 100% clear, I want _both_ groups to be treated as employees. I want to put an end to the practice employers using the word "Contractor" to get out of the social obligations we have place on them. I don't care if you're Uber, a Taxi company, and IT service company or bloody part runners for an auto shop. If your business depends on those people and you wouldn't have a business without them they're employees. If they work they do is an ongoing part of your business they're employees. If you exercise significant control over their day to day work (how and when) they're employees. Enough with the bs already. If we're going to base 90% of our quality of life on employment then employers don't get to bitch when they're given obligations. Period.
I want the exact opposite of that. I don't want where you choose to work (or how you choose to work) to have any impact on your healthcare and insurance and retirement. None of those should be linked to employment at all. The fact that they are is only an outgrowth of bizarre government regulations that attempted to make the market more "fair" and managed to accomplished the exact opposite. Despite how inept the development of the Obamacare exchanges was, and despite how ineptly they seem to be run even now, I think they are a step in the right direction.
Companies like Uber exercise NO control over the lives of people who choose to drive.
Not true at all. In most cities neither of these drivers would be able to become taxi drivers even if they wanted to. They have freedom to do as they choose. That seems to matter a lot to me.
I generally avoided Uber, but last year I needed a taxi to get to the airport. I called two different taxi companies, and neither one had any taxis available to pick me up. Uber came right away, and was cheaper than a taxi.
I had the exact same experience. I've ridden Uber exactly three times. The first was after I tried getting a taxi to the airport in a medium-sized city around 3pm on a weekday. 45 minutes before a taxi would show, plus some kind of surcharge for the hour--was going to be like $35, pre-tip. Uber arrived in about 45 seconds and was $18. I even tipped the guy a $5 because he carried 3 of us and he picked up our suitcases...
Wait, you think most taxi drivers are employees with full benefits? Not so at all. So are the evil taxi companies just selfishly "externalizing" all their costs?
I took two Ubers a month ago in Minneapolis. The first driver was a young woman, an undergrad, studying computer science. She drives Uber about 15-20 hours a week to help cover college and living expenses. At 20 hours a week, she would not be eligible for full benefits anywhere.
The second driver was a retired lawyer who drives Uber whenever he feels like it, to keep active and talk to people (we shared some law stories, so I'm quite sure he was telling the truth about being a lawyer--not that *I'm* a lawyer!). He's retired and doesn't drive enough hours--or regularly enough--that any business in the country would consider him an employee.
Small sample size, but pretty interesting.
Uber drivers do not work set hours, have no obligation to Uber (other than completing a drive if they agree to start one), do not give two weeks notice when they quit, can work for the competition any time (simultaneously even!), etc. It baffles me that anyone would consider them employees.
Ugh, that sounds really obnoxious. I have never understood paying extra for multiple processors. I mean, I guess it makes SOME sense today virtualization, but historically?
Oh, it was. The OS/X upgrade wasn't free, for one thing. Apple fucked up and sent the french version, because apparently that's the default language they send to Canadians. Eventually got it, and the install was... well, after a couple attempts it worked. Don't get me wrong, it was still easier than installing Windows, but it wasn't fun. I assume they've gotten better in the last decade, but I definitely identify with the previous poster about his ProTools experience. When Apple stuff works, it works well and in harmony with everything else. When it doesn't, it's not pretty.
I only used Jaguar (10.2, released 2002) in testing. At the time I viewed OS X 10.2 as basically a beta release. 10.1 was clearly unfinished. 10.2 was getting closer, but still had a long ways to go, and the system APIs were still in a great flux. We (production usage at work) actually kept running all of our Macs on OS 9 until 10.4 (2003/2004) came out and had at least one computer still running OS 9 until maybe 2009.
You're right that things have changed a lot in the last 15 years:-P
I assume they've gotten better in the last decade, but I definitely identify with the previous poster about his ProTools experience. When Apple stuff works, it works well and in harmony with everything else. When it doesn't, it's not pretty.
Operating system updates breaking old software is nothing even remotely specific to Apple, and I don't even think Apple is particularly bad about it.
About six months later the hard drive in the iBook croaked. I can assure you that "fucking pile of grief" is exactly the way to describe the process to replace the hard disk in an iBook G4 [ifixit.com]. What kind of psychopath assembles the entire device around the part with the shortest expected lifespan?
Yeah, I've replaced my share of hard drives in Apples, and the process is rarely fun (excepting the classic Mac Pro--incredibly elegant design there). I had to buy a plunger just for putting an SSD in an iMac!
No. He's complaining about a new Apple iPhone requiring a gratuitous O/S update of another Apple product.
Can't be that gratuitous. The current version of iTunes runs on any of the last 4 OS revisions, covering about 4 years and probably 10 years of hardware at a minimum. IIRC, earlier iTunes generally supported older operating systems, but they started moving the requirements up once they started glomping on more cloud functionality. You won't get any defense of iTunes out of me--it's a horrible mess and I hate it.
This same thing happened to my wife a while ago... she got an iPod Nano, which required a new version of iTunes, which required a newer version of OS/X (Jaguar on the iBook, IIRC), which... well, that was a fucking pile of grief for stuff that's supposed to Just Work, isn't it?
One nice thing about Macs is, no, it's really not a "fucking pile of grief." OSX upgrades are basically seamless with the very rare (very rare!) exception of some software like Quark or ProTools that doesn't work. The OS upgrades have also been free for what--5-6 years (the last version I remember paying for was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and I think it cost $5)? I generally tell my parents and other relatives to just let the system autoupdate when it asks.
Yeah, third party software might have some issues too, but the core problem is that Apple regularly screws over people who work witihin their ecosystem but for whatever reason don't run all the latest stuff.
Point is, Apple allows a lot of people (more specifically, a lot of hardware) to run the latest stuff without any additional cost. They were ahead of the curve in this regard. Windows is now basically versionless. Chrome/Firefox/everything autoupdates and is basically versionless to the enduser. Hell, I imagine the same type of behavior is even coming to Linux through systemd.
Another friend had a Mac Laptop old enough that she couldn't upgrade it to the current rev of Mac O/S. When she purchased a new Airport Express, the version of the Airport Utility on her laptop wasn't compatible. She had to borrow an iPad from a friend to manage the Airport Express, which is just a home router. Every other home router on the planet is managed through a web browser GUI, but Apple makes you use their proprietary utility and that's how it is with everything Apple. It's all proprietary and you pay through the nose for it.
I realized upon further checking that the 6th-gen airport isn't covered in this list, and I'm not sure what the software specs for it are (which versions of the utility will manage it). It's quite possible it's the same as the other generations. The current version of the Airport Utility requires OSX 10.7 (release 2011).
I have a friend who had a 4 year old Mac laptop. He was big into recording his own music with ProTools. When he got a new iPhone 6, iTunes wouldn't work with it. He was instructed to upgrade Mac O/S, which did get his iTunes working but then broke ProTools. 4 years of recording work was lost unless he purchased a new ProTools license.
So what you're really complaining about here is a 3rd-party software package (ProTools) not working on a recent operating system release? How exactly is that Apple's fault? My company uses Quark XPress with a license server. Quark v8 (released 2009) no longer works with OSX Mavericks or above, due to a deprecated system library--OpenTransport--used by the license checkout client. OpenTransport has been officially deprecated since OS X 10.4 was released in *2004*. Quark was using a library deprecated for over 5 years. Quark's fault or Apple's that my software will no longer work with new computers?
I will also note that these kind of incompatibilities are, in my experience, very rare. Parallels and Quark are the only programs I have had issues with when upgrading OS. I still run Adobe CS1 on 10.10!
Another friend had a Mac Laptop old enough that she couldn't upgrade it to the current rev of Mac O/S. When she purchased a new Airport Express, the version of the Airport Utility on her laptop wasn't compatible. She had to borrow an iPad from a friend to manage the Airport Express, which is just a home router. Every other home router on the planet is managed through a web browser GUI, but Apple makes you use their proprietary utility and that's how it is with everything Apple. It's all proprietary and you pay through the nose for it.
This didn't sound quite right to me either, so I checked the Apple support site:
This appears to show that as long as you're running 10.5 or higher, you can manage every single version of the Airport ever released. I may be missing something, but this seems to cover it. I won't argue that it would be nice if the Airport had a web interface as well, but the client works just fine. It evens support syslogging to external hosts!
My employer gave me an Apple Mac to use, which I hate. But it's that or Windows, which I also hate. I much prefer Ubuntu running the Windowmaker window manager. The Mac is adequate as a desktop, but I'd never spend money on a product that expensive with a 3 year useful lifespan. After 3 years, most anything Apple won't work with anything Apple which is new, which is why people keep buying the latest Mac toys that come out. It's a great business model, one which Microsoft ran for years.
Nice rant, though completely afactual. Apple is actually very good about supporting old hardware. My personal laptop remains a MacBook Pro 3,1 (June 2007). To this day it runs the latest OS and all software. Apple similarly supports most other aged hardware. The only big transitions recently have been from PowerPC to Intel and 32-bit to 64-bit. A few slightly newer than 2007 models have been left behind due to 32-but uefi. My macpro 1,1 from 2006 is in this boat--luckily with a custom compiled bootloader (Darwin is open source, remember) it's good to go with 10.10 and soon 10.11 too.
My eldest was tracking the lower 95th percentile for weight since he was born, and is still a skinny 10 year old despite eating adult sized portions. At first we were told we needed to feed him more, and almost ended up with social services assigned to the case, but after reviewing a food diary which showed him eating more quantity of more nutritious food than most toddlers his age, they finally left us alone.
Ugh, I hate that kind of thing so much. With our oldest child (now 6), the pediatrician gave us such a hard time about him being *2 oz* below the targeted weight for this particular appointment (and the implicit threats of getting outside forces involved), that my wife started bawling in the office. I just said look, the kid just had a wet diaper five minutes ago, there's your 2 ounces, and we'll be finding a new pediatrician now.
When I worked in retail 15 years ago I had someone pay with a credit card, and while checking the signature, which matched perfectly, I saw the card number on the receipt didn't match the card. I only paid attention because they were suspiciously easy to up-sell to.
Odd comment then, that I commented on how much much more expensive large SSDs are. Typical desktop-sized SSDs are dirt cheap. Like I said, we're a small business. We run typical business apps in addition to a few people doing graphical and multimedia production work. Out of about 25 desktops, I don't think a single user is using more than 250gb of local storage. We have absolutely no need for 2tb of space--it would just be totally wasted. a 200gb SSD makes for a _far_ better desktop experience and is well under $100.
... on high capacity SSD's being over what you'd pay for an equivalent amount of storage on a hard drive is the single biggest issue with flash storage, in general.
There's a bit of an exponential curve where high capacity SSDs get much more expensive. Smaller SSDs are dirt cheap.
Until that issue is settled, SSD's can really only replace the floppy, IMO... but not the hard drive.
That battle is over. The SSD has ALREADY replaced the hard drive. We haven't bought a new computer with a spinning platter in our office in probably 3 years. We're a small business without huge data needs and our one server, built circa 2011, currently has a 4tb ZFS pool, and about 1/2 of that is snapshots and workstation backups (for which speed doesn't particularly matter). Next time I build a new server (another year or two I would guess), I'm expecting to put in only SSDs, because why not? A 1tb SATA SSD can be had for less than $400 today. I'll keep platters in the backup server.
But that's not at all the point of this article. The point of this article is that a computer program learned--in a manner SOMEWHAT analogous to human learning--through practicing how to play certain video games without having any game-specific special programming. AI opponents have existed as long as there have been video games (or close to it) and you're right, if that's what this article was about, it would be be boring. Neural net learning by examining visual output--now that's pretty cool.
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Wow, that's a bit pissy of you. I didn't even deny your assertion (other than through my initial assertion that in most cities--like NYC--a college kid driving 20 hours a week could not be a taxi driver), and just asked if you had any evidence, even going so far as adding that I didn't have any to back up my own assertion! That's how conversations are supposed to go, instead of jumping in with "bullshits" and "you don't know enough to be worth listening to." If you have data or proof to back up your statements, that tough talk has legs; if not, you're just a troll.
You think? I don't think I've ever ridden in a tax driven by a non-professional. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion (I don't have any).
I'm sorry, I didn't get that at all out of your post--I didn't know what the "one" you mentioned referred to. I see now that it's because you don't understand how taxis work, nor did you RTFA. I was also confused since you mentioned me being down-modded (must have been momentary), but that's neither here nor there.
You found one example of a taxi company that doesn't treat their employees well.
No, that's not remotely accurate. For one, RTFA. Many--if not most--taxi drivers are already dreaded contractors who own their own cars. They just also have to do stupid regulatory crap like buy horrifically expensive government-mandated monopoly medallions. No, I didn't find "one example of a taxi company," read the article:
The Alliance estimates that about half of New York City's taxi drivers don't have health insurance, since there's no employer to provide it, and projected that many wouldn't be able to afford even the plans offered on an exchange when the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
Yet, you won't find any employees of uber (or contractors) getting any benefits at all.
The "benefit" of driving for Uber is that you can do whatever you want.
So your 'point' really isn't all that valid - it's a moot point, to be honest.
Your 'analysis' (nice scare quotes!) is lacking in background information. We can certainly moot more, if you're up for discussing further.
I want _all_ employees to stop being abused. The argument that it's OK for Uber to abuse employees because someone else does it is something like what a toddler says when they're caught stealing cookies. What I don't understand is how the hell an argument this ridiculous is resonating with people.
Any Uber driver can choose to stop being "abused" at any time. Nothing at all--other than their own desire to drive for Uber--makes them drive. They're not battered spouses who are afraid to leave a dangerous relationship.
To be 100% clear, I want _both_ groups to be treated as employees. I want to put an end to the practice employers using the word "Contractor" to get out of the social obligations we have place on them. I don't care if you're Uber, a Taxi company, and IT service company or bloody part runners for an auto shop. If your business depends on those people and you wouldn't have a business without them they're employees. If they work they do is an ongoing part of your business they're employees. If you exercise significant control over their day to day work (how and when) they're employees. Enough with the bs already. If we're going to base 90% of our quality of life on employment then employers don't get to bitch when they're given obligations. Period.
I want the exact opposite of that. I don't want where you choose to work (or how you choose to work) to have any impact on your healthcare and insurance and retirement. None of those should be linked to employment at all. The fact that they are is only an outgrowth of bizarre government regulations that attempted to make the market more "fair" and managed to accomplished the exact opposite. Despite how inept the development of the Obamacare exchanges was, and despite how ineptly they seem to be run even now, I think they are a step in the right direction.
Companies like Uber exercise NO control over the lives of people who choose to drive.
Did you reply to the wrong post? I'm not sure what everything in your post is referring to.
Not true at all. In most cities neither of these drivers would be able to become taxi drivers even if they wanted to. They have freedom to do as they choose. That seems to matter a lot to me.
I generally avoided Uber, but last year I needed a taxi to get to the airport. I called two different taxi companies, and neither one had any taxis available to pick me up. Uber came right away, and was cheaper than a taxi.
I had the exact same experience. I've ridden Uber exactly three times. The first was after I tried getting a taxi to the airport in a medium-sized city around 3pm on a weekday. 45 minutes before a taxi would show, plus some kind of surcharge for the hour--was going to be like $35, pre-tip. Uber arrived in about 45 seconds and was $18. I even tipped the guy a $5 because he carried 3 of us and he picked up our suitcases...
Wait, you think most taxi drivers are employees with full benefits? Not so at all. So are the evil taxi companies just selfishly "externalizing" all their costs?
See, e.g.:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/16/new-york-court-guts-a-groundbreaking-health-care-fund-that-would-have-changed-taxi-drivers-lives/
I took two Ubers a month ago in Minneapolis. The first driver was a young woman, an undergrad, studying computer science. She drives Uber about 15-20 hours a week to help cover college and living expenses. At 20 hours a week, she would not be eligible for full benefits anywhere.
The second driver was a retired lawyer who drives Uber whenever he feels like it, to keep active and talk to people (we shared some law stories, so I'm quite sure he was telling the truth about being a lawyer--not that *I'm* a lawyer!). He's retired and doesn't drive enough hours--or regularly enough--that any business in the country would consider him an employee.
Small sample size, but pretty interesting.
Uber drivers do not work set hours, have no obligation to Uber (other than completing a drive if they agree to start one), do not give two weeks notice when they quit, can work for the competition any time (simultaneously even!), etc. It baffles me that anyone would consider them employees.
Ugh, that sounds really obnoxious. I have never understood paying extra for multiple processors. I mean, I guess it makes SOME sense today virtualization, but historically?
I've never even come close to an Oracle install. What kind of things are in the contract that Oracle audits for?
Oh, it was. The OS/X upgrade wasn't free, for one thing. Apple fucked up and sent the french version, because apparently that's the default language they send to Canadians. Eventually got it, and the install was... well, after a couple attempts it worked. Don't get me wrong, it was still easier than installing Windows, but it wasn't fun.
I assume they've gotten better in the last decade, but I definitely identify with the previous poster about his ProTools experience. When Apple stuff works, it works well and in harmony with everything else. When it doesn't, it's not pretty.
I only used Jaguar (10.2, released 2002) in testing. At the time I viewed OS X 10.2 as basically a beta release. 10.1 was clearly unfinished. 10.2 was getting closer, but still had a long ways to go, and the system APIs were still in a great flux. We (production usage at work) actually kept running all of our Macs on OS 9 until 10.4 (2003/2004) came out and had at least one computer still running OS 9 until maybe 2009.
You're right that things have changed a lot in the last 15 years :-P
I assume they've gotten better in the last decade, but I definitely identify with the previous poster about his ProTools experience. When Apple stuff works, it works well and in harmony with everything else. When it doesn't, it's not pretty.
Operating system updates breaking old software is nothing even remotely specific to Apple, and I don't even think Apple is particularly bad about it.
About six months later the hard drive in the iBook croaked. I can assure you that "fucking pile of grief" is exactly the way to describe the process to replace the hard disk in an iBook G4 [ifixit.com]. What kind of psychopath assembles the entire device around the part with the shortest expected lifespan?
Yeah, I've replaced my share of hard drives in Apples, and the process is rarely fun (excepting the classic Mac Pro--incredibly elegant design there). I had to buy a plunger just for putting an SSD in an iMac!
No. He's complaining about a new Apple iPhone requiring a gratuitous O/S update of another Apple product.
Can't be that gratuitous. The current version of iTunes runs on any of the last 4 OS revisions, covering about 4 years and probably 10 years of hardware at a minimum. IIRC, earlier iTunes generally supported older operating systems, but they started moving the requirements up once they started glomping on more cloud functionality. You won't get any defense of iTunes out of me--it's a horrible mess and I hate it.
This same thing happened to my wife a while ago... she got an iPod Nano, which required a new version of iTunes, which required a newer version of OS/X (Jaguar on the iBook, IIRC), which... well, that was a fucking pile of grief for stuff that's supposed to Just Work, isn't it?
One nice thing about Macs is, no, it's really not a "fucking pile of grief." OSX upgrades are basically seamless with the very rare (very rare!) exception of some software like Quark or ProTools that doesn't work. The OS upgrades have also been free for what--5-6 years (the last version I remember paying for was Snow Leopard, 10.6, and I think it cost $5)? I generally tell my parents and other relatives to just let the system autoupdate when it asks.
Yeah, third party software might have some issues too, but the core problem is that Apple regularly screws over people who work witihin their ecosystem but for whatever reason don't run all the latest stuff.
Point is, Apple allows a lot of people (more specifically, a lot of hardware) to run the latest stuff without any additional cost. They were ahead of the curve in this regard. Windows is now basically versionless. Chrome/Firefox/everything autoupdates and is basically versionless to the enduser. Hell, I imagine the same type of behavior is even coming to Linux through systemd.
Another friend had a Mac Laptop old enough that she couldn't upgrade it to the current rev of Mac O/S. When she purchased a new Airport Express, the version of the Airport Utility on her laptop wasn't compatible. She had to borrow an iPad from a friend to manage the Airport Express, which is just a home router. Every other home router on the planet is managed through a web browser GUI, but Apple makes you use their proprietary utility and that's how it is with everything Apple. It's all proprietary and you pay through the nose for it.
I realized upon further checking that the 6th-gen airport isn't covered in this list, and I'm not sure what the software specs for it are (which versions of the utility will manage it). It's quite possible it's the same as the other generations. The current version of the Airport Utility requires OSX 10.7 (release 2011).
I have a friend who had a 4 year old Mac laptop. He was big into recording his own music with ProTools. When he got a new iPhone 6, iTunes wouldn't work with it. He was instructed to upgrade Mac O/S, which did get his iTunes working but then broke ProTools. 4 years of recording work was lost unless he purchased a new ProTools license.
So what you're really complaining about here is a 3rd-party software package (ProTools) not working on a recent operating system release? How exactly is that Apple's fault? My company uses Quark XPress with a license server. Quark v8 (released 2009) no longer works with OSX Mavericks or above, due to a deprecated system library--OpenTransport--used by the license checkout client. OpenTransport has been officially deprecated since OS X 10.4 was released in *2004*. Quark was using a library deprecated for over 5 years. Quark's fault or Apple's that my software will no longer work with new computers?
I will also note that these kind of incompatibilities are, in my experience, very rare. Parallels and Quark are the only programs I have had issues with when upgrading OS. I still run Adobe CS1 on 10.10!
Another friend had a Mac Laptop old enough that she couldn't upgrade it to the current rev of Mac O/S. When she purchased a new Airport Express, the version of the Airport Utility on her laptop wasn't compatible. She had to borrow an iPad from a friend to manage the Airport Express, which is just a home router. Every other home router on the planet is managed through a web browser GUI, but Apple makes you use their proprietary utility and that's how it is with everything Apple. It's all proprietary and you pay through the nose for it.
This didn't sound quite right to me either, so I checked the Apple support site:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201669
This appears to show that as long as you're running 10.5 or higher, you can manage every single version of the Airport ever released. I may be missing something, but this seems to cover it. I won't argue that it would be nice if the Airport had a web interface as well, but the client works just fine. It evens support syslogging to external hosts!
My employer gave me an Apple Mac to use, which I hate. But it's that or Windows, which I also hate. I much prefer Ubuntu running the Windowmaker window manager. The Mac is adequate as a desktop, but I'd never spend money on a product that expensive with a 3 year useful lifespan. After 3 years, most anything Apple won't work with anything Apple which is new, which is why people keep buying the latest Mac toys that come out. It's a great business model, one which Microsoft ran for years.
Nice rant, though completely afactual. Apple is actually very good about supporting old hardware. My personal laptop remains a MacBook Pro 3,1 (June 2007). To this day it runs the latest OS and all software. Apple similarly supports most other aged hardware. The only big transitions recently have been from PowerPC to Intel and 32-bit to 64-bit. A few slightly newer than 2007 models have been left behind due to 32-but uefi. My macpro 1,1 from 2006 is in this boat--luckily with a custom compiled bootloader (Darwin is open source, remember) it's good to go with 10.10 and soon 10.11 too.
My eldest was tracking the lower 95th percentile for weight since he was born, and is still a skinny 10 year old despite eating adult sized portions. At first we were told we needed to feed him more, and almost ended up with social services assigned to the case, but after reviewing a food diary which showed him eating more quantity of more nutritious food than most toddlers his age, they finally left us alone.
Ugh, I hate that kind of thing so much. With our oldest child (now 6), the pediatrician gave us such a hard time about him being *2 oz* below the targeted weight for this particular appointment (and the implicit threats of getting outside forces involved), that my wife started bawling in the office. I just said look, the kid just had a wet diaper five minutes ago, there's your 2 ounces, and we'll be finding a new pediatrician now.
When I worked in retail 15 years ago I had someone pay with a credit card, and while checking the signature, which matched perfectly, I saw the card number on the receipt didn't match the card. I only paid attention because they were suspiciously easy to up-sell to.
So what did you do?
Finnish (Uralic), Semitic, and Indo-European aren't enough for you?
Odd comment then, that I commented on how much much more expensive large SSDs are. Typical desktop-sized SSDs are dirt cheap. Like I said, we're a small business. We run typical business apps in addition to a few people doing graphical and multimedia production work. Out of about 25 desktops, I don't think a single user is using more than 250gb of local storage. We have absolutely no need for 2tb of space--it would just be totally wasted. a 200gb SSD makes for a _far_ better desktop experience and is well under $100.
Did you miss where I said our current server holds 4tb (we have about 1tb free)? Why would I even want 8tb?
... on high capacity SSD's being over what you'd pay for an equivalent amount of storage on a hard drive is the single biggest issue with flash storage, in general.
There's a bit of an exponential curve where high capacity SSDs get much more expensive. Smaller SSDs are dirt cheap.
Until that issue is settled, SSD's can really only replace the floppy, IMO... but not the hard drive.
That battle is over. The SSD has ALREADY replaced the hard drive. We haven't bought a new computer with a spinning platter in our office in probably 3 years. We're a small business without huge data needs and our one server, built circa 2011, currently has a 4tb ZFS pool, and about 1/2 of that is snapshots and workstation backups (for which speed doesn't particularly matter). Next time I build a new server (another year or two I would guess), I'm expecting to put in only SSDs, because why not? A 1tb SATA SSD can be had for less than $400 today. I'll keep platters in the backup server.
But that's not at all the point of this article. The point of this article is that a computer program learned--in a manner SOMEWHAT analogous to human learning--through practicing how to play certain video games without having any game-specific special programming. AI opponents have existed as long as there have been video games (or close to it) and you're right, if that's what this article was about, it would be be boring. Neural net learning by examining visual output--now that's pretty cool.
But all performances of the song are still owned by the original authors?
Do you mean the original performers? (Assuming they had the "right" to publicly perform the work to begin with.)
Is this a serious comment? Why would you assume they _wouldn't_ make any changes to a given subsystem?
And there are still conservative groups that go into a rage about women going to college.
Citation needed?