I don't understand why they would be screwing around with anesthetics like Propofol. Wouldn't it make more sense to go to the local vet or dog pound and get the same kind of drugs that are used to euthanize pets? We know these work effectively, and they shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering because they are specifically designed not to. I was in the room a couple of years ago when our family's elderly Basset hound (who could barely walk any more) was put to sleep; she was gone before the vet even finished pushing the plunger.
For what it's worth, I oppose the death penalty, largely on pragmatic grounds. (If we could limit it to only the Ted Bundys and Timothy McVeighs of the world, I'd be fine with it, but in practice we're more likely to execute some poor bastard who committed a robbery gone wrong and couldn't afford a good lawyer. Or, worse, someone who had the misfortune to be a poor African-American in the wrong place at the wrong time.) But if we're going to do it, I don't know why it has to be so complicated.
You're quoting reviews that are months old. The newer driver updates were designed specifically to fix these problems, and for the most part, they have succeeded. (There are still issues in some specific CrossFire and/or multi-monitor configurations, but these won't affect most users.)
One of the reviews you cited was from The Tech Report, which did a good job of documenting these frame pacing issues with hard numbers a couple of months back. Well, let's see what they have to say about the R9 290X now:
You can see from the raw plots that the 290X looks good, with more frames produced and generally lower frame rendering times than anything else we tested. Every card encounters a few slowdowns, and the spikes on the 290X aren't anything exceptional.
Our "badness" index concentrates on those frames that take a long time to produce. For the first two thresholds of 50 and 33 ms, the results are pretty similar among the newer GPUs, which again suggests a CPU bottleneck or the like. However, for slinging out frames 60 times per second, once every 16.7 milliseconds, the R9 290X is easily the best choice.
AMD pushed the new Hawaii chip pretty hard to get these results. It will usually bump up against the thermal wall (max 95 degrees C) when gaming at full load, and on 'Uber' mode (there's a switch to choose between that and 'Silent'), it's quite loud. Part of the problem is that AMD is using a mediocre blower-style cooler, which can't run at or near 100% fan speed without putting off an unacceptable level of noise, and can't dissipate enough heat to keep the card from running up against the thermal wall. To compound matters further, the first wave of cards are all made by AMD, so there are no third-party coolers yet (though EK has compatible waterblocks, for people who swing that way).
If you want to buy a R9 290X, it would probably be a good idea to wait a couple months for AMD to start letting third-party vendors make their own boards. I suspect that the custom coolers from vendors like Asus and MSI will do a lot better than the cheap AMD blower. A non-reference R9 290X has the potential to not only perform better (less or no thermal throttling), but also stay quieter under load.
The GTX Titan is a double-precision computing card that happens to do very well at gaming. It's not really a fair comparison. Ever since the GTX 780 was released, pretty much every review site has recommended it over the Titan for gamers on price/performance grounds.
Are there any contractors that don't have a history of security failures?
The problem isn't with this company, it's with the federal procurement process, which favors large corporations that can handle ridiculous amounts of paperwork over companies that might actually be able to get the job done.
Frankly, I'm amazed the PPACA website came out as well as it did. Most large IT contract jobs, whether public or private sector, are much, much worse. The typical outcome for a multi-million-dollar IT contract project is massive delays, substantial budget overruns, and poor/missing functionality.
Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer? You just can't fire people for no reason (well, you're not supposed to.) I mean if an employee is doing their job, performing well, and secretly bashing you on twitter, is that really a legal ground for termination?
Most private-sector jobs in the U.S. are "employment at will". That means employees can be fired for any reason or no reason, as long as it's not for a reason specifically prohibited by federal law (race, gender, etc.) I don't think this is good policy, but it is how things currently work in most places (pretty much all non-union shops). And one reason that it hasn't changed is that most Americans don't realize how bad it actually is: that as workers they essentially have no rights.
Federal civil service jobs are different. A rank-and-file Federal employee can pretty much say anything he/she wants about the government, as long as it's not on the clock. But the most high-ranking staff members at government agencies don't have civil service protections; they are political appointees and are expected to support the administration's goals and objectives. A random clerk processing Social Security claims can tweet all he/she wants about politics, but if the Secretary of State shoots his/her mouth off against the President's wishes, they will soon be "asked to resign".
just like PDF.js can replace PDF plugins in browser
pdf.js is garbage. I never thought that anyone could write a PDF reader worse than Adobe Reader, but they did. It butchers at least half of the documents I view – other open source alternatives such as Sumatra handle them just fine. And even when it does work, it's incredibly slow, and the rendering is crap quality.
The Mozilla team really needs to give up on the experiment of PDF via JavaScript, and add a working viewer that uses native code.
One of the things that annoys the hell out of me is the change to the bookmarks system. It's no longer a simple html file (used to work fine and was easy to backup) instead it's some closed system that's not human readable and if something pukes, you loose all of your bookmarks including the fucking backups. Makes me want to puke as I've had that happen 3 times since they switched.
SQLite isn't exactly a 'closed system'. And you can still export your bookmarks to HTML (as well as import them back if something happens or you move to a different system). In fact, if you go into about:config and set browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true, and put a path name in browser.bookmarks.file, this export will be done automatically when Firefox closes. (I use this to back up my bookmarks to Dropbox.)
Yes, some of the other changes are annoying (I had to resort to userChrome.css alterations to get rid of tabs), but with most users now having hundreds or even thousands of bookmarks, moving them to a real database was a definite improvement.
People say that, yet immediately turn around and say you should not expect a program written for Windows 95, or Linux in 1995, to run on a modern computer.
There is a difference between incremental upgrades and wholesale rewrites. Windows 7 (to take one example) isn't a new OS written from scratch, but an incremental improvement on NT, which dates back to 1993. Rewriting from scratch is almost always a bad idea.
Hillary will win easily if she runs in the Democratic primaries. The Democrats won't attack her like they did to Romney in the primary last year.
What are you talking about? Romney was the general election opponent, running on the Republican ticket. He was never in the Democratic primaries.
And I'm not at all sure that Hillary's path to the 2016 nomination is assured. Hillary represents establishment neoliberalism, and much of the Democratic Party base has had enough of that. Remember, primary elections tend to attract an electorate that is a lot more partisan than that of general elections. If Elizabeth Warren runs, she could give Hillary a hard time, since her positions are closer to those of the Democratic Party base.
Doesn't GCC warn for this by default? I'm pretty sure I remember getting compiler warnings from it in cases when I deliberately had an assignment operator in an if conditional.
And you would have suggested what? Voting for John Edwards (he'd already dropped out by the time my state had its 2008 primaries)? Wasting a vote on some meaningless third party? Or do you think I should have voted for McCain instead in the general election? You honestly believe his record on drones and surveillance would have been better? This is a guy who never saw a war he didn't like.
In a first-past-the-post system, there is always going to be two parties – political science proves it. So we're stuck with the lesser of two evils. Yes, I overestimated the degree to which Obama was going to be different from the usual neoliberal Third Way Democrat. The point is that people who voted for Obama in the primaries and general election did so because we were specifically promised an end to unnecessary wars, Gitmo, and the incessant violations of civil liberties that followed 9/11. None of that happened. The problems are structural, not limited to one candidate or one party.
I voted for change in 2008. So did millions of other Americans, and our candidate won. But the U.S. political system makes meaningful change effectively impossible.
If that were true, then no one else would have been able to write any third-party software for Windows during that time frame. There's nothing special about a word processor; it's just a standard client-side application.
First of all, even if this was true, it wouldn't justify violating the privacy rights of third parties.
Secondly, the DEA considers any doctor who prescribes a lot of painkillers to be a "shady doctor", even if there is a legitimate medical reason. Doctors who treat people with chronic pain are in real danger of being prosecuted by these witch-hunters.
Focus on the professional/business desktop and server markets, which, hype aside, aren't going away or even substantially shrinking any time in the near future.
Admit that Windows 8 was a mistake and a failure, and base Windows 9 on the Windows 7 code base. Focus on backward compatibility. Consider bringing back Visual Basic 6 support in Visual Studio.
Recognize that MS is a mature company that isn't going to be posting record-breaking profits. Their stock should be paying out 3%-6% annual dividends and showing modest capital appreciation, at or slightly above the rate of inflation.
One could easily have said the same thing about Microsoft Word. It was a copycat and it sucked compared to Word Perfect when it first came out.
WordPerfect lost because it botched the transition from character-mode to WSYIWYG GUI. And it botched this because of crappy and shortsighted management that thought Windows was a fad.
If anything, Microsoft's modern strategy with Surface is analogous to WP's errors: they came late to the party with a subpar entry, and expected to win because they won the last market.
Every man and his dog seems to own one. If they're not in profit yet, where did the money go?! I know they lost a lot on the notoriously high failure rate of the early models, but was it really *that* bad?
The XBOX 1 lost 4 billion dollars. It's now a solid market that Microsoft dominates.
First of all, Microsoft doesn't "dominate" – they are one of several big players. (And the Xbox One definitely looks like it's going to play second fiddle to the PS4.) Secondly, market share is only important to a publicly traded corporation insofar as it translates into current or future profit. Microsoft burned so much money ramping up the Xbox line that they still have barely broken even, and when you consider the time value of money, they're probably still in the hole. They would have been better off paying that money out as dividends.
Scientology is a mystery religion; this kind of thing was actually quite common in the ancient world, where the specific beliefs of a cult were often restricted to a small group of initiates. (How many of these groups were started by Hubbard-style scam artists? We don't know, but I'm guessing the number was nonzero.) For instance, modern scholars know comparatively little about Mithraism, since the religion was limited to initiates (mostly army veterans) and what little was written down was kept secret and lost when the original copies crumbled. (Ancient texts today are almost all copies of copies, except for a handful preserved by chance in desert climates.) And Mithraism is one of the best-known of the mystery religions; about some others nothing at all can be said.
Of course, it's a lot harder to keep a religion secret in the Information Age than it was in the late Roman Empire.
Christianity (and Islam) specifically rejected this notion of religion. From the start they went out of their way to tell everyone, in great detail, exactly what the faith consisted of. (And to argue over it when they disagreed on the details.)
How can it possibly be justified to use scarce instructional time on this industry propaganda? California public schools have enough trouble teaching the stuff that society expects and needs them to teach, and they're seriously considering this garbage?
In the post-WWII era, there was an architectural trend called Brutalism. This school of thought held that ornamentation was unnecessary and that buildings were "machines for living in". They should therefore be made out of raw, unadorned concrete. These buildings are still around, especially in large cities, and most people hate them. Turns out that functionality isn't enough; people actually want things to look nice.
It appears that UI designers are in the process of making the same mistakes that architects did decades ago. The new crusade against "skeuomorphism" is, in practice, a campaign for ugly square boxes with low-color icons. It's basically a return to the graphics of the early 1990s, except this time there isn't the excuse of technical limitations to justify it. I had hoped that this trend would stop with Windows 8, but for some inexplicable reason, Apple seems to have decided to degrade their far superior touch OS to a similar degree. The sublime beauty of Aero and iOS 6 gives way to the stark ugliness of Metro and iOS 7. For God's sake, why?
A 4TB hdd can be had for roughly USD$200, or less. A 4TB SDD is USD$29k.
Apples to oranges. You're comparing a cheap consumer-grade HDD to a low-volume enterprise-grade SSD.
The 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD is currently going for $635.99 at Newegg. So 4GB of SSD storage would cost $2543.96 – less than 10% of the figure you quoted. So it's about 13x what the magnetic HDD would cost, not 10x – close enough.
The fact that you can't get more than 1TB in a SSD unit without paying insane enterprise prices is beside the point. It's unusual to see a modern ATX motherboard without at least six SATA ports – and if you can afford $2500 in storage, you can certainly afford an add-on SATA host card if you need more.
OCZ's failure rates are higher than the rest of the industry's by an order of magnitude. Also, earlier SandForce drives have reliability problems because the firmware was written by paranoid loons who were deathly afraid of reverse-engineering and the drive goes into irrecoverable 'panic mode' when any abnormality of any kind is sensed. I think that newer SandForces (post-LSI acquisition), especially Intel's, are less likely to do this, but the original failures still taint the brand with the stigma of flakiness.
If you stick with Samsung, Intel, and SanDisk, you should be fine. Stay away from OCZ at all costs, and be skeptical of any SandForce drive not made by Intel.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why they would be screwing around with anesthetics like Propofol. Wouldn't it make more sense to go to the local vet or dog pound and get the same kind of drugs that are used to euthanize pets? We know these work effectively, and they shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering because they are specifically designed not to. I was in the room a couple of years ago when our family's elderly Basset hound (who could barely walk any more) was put to sleep; she was gone before the vet even finished pushing the plunger.
For what it's worth, I oppose the death penalty, largely on pragmatic grounds. (If we could limit it to only the Ted Bundys and Timothy McVeighs of the world, I'd be fine with it, but in practice we're more likely to execute some poor bastard who committed a robbery gone wrong and couldn't afford a good lawyer. Or, worse, someone who had the misfortune to be a poor African-American in the wrong place at the wrong time.) But if we're going to do it, I don't know why it has to be so complicated.
You're quoting reviews that are months old. The newer driver updates were designed specifically to fix these problems, and for the most part, they have succeeded. (There are still issues in some specific CrossFire and/or multi-monitor configurations, but these won't affect most users.)
One of the reviews you cited was from The Tech Report, which did a good job of documenting these frame pacing issues with hard numbers a couple of months back. Well, let's see what they have to say about the R9 290X now:
AMD pushed the new Hawaii chip pretty hard to get these results. It will usually bump up against the thermal wall (max 95 degrees C) when gaming at full load, and on 'Uber' mode (there's a switch to choose between that and 'Silent'), it's quite loud. Part of the problem is that AMD is using a mediocre blower-style cooler, which can't run at or near 100% fan speed without putting off an unacceptable level of noise, and can't dissipate enough heat to keep the card from running up against the thermal wall. To compound matters further, the first wave of cards are all made by AMD, so there are no third-party coolers yet (though EK has compatible waterblocks, for people who swing that way).
If you want to buy a R9 290X, it would probably be a good idea to wait a couple months for AMD to start letting third-party vendors make their own boards. I suspect that the custom coolers from vendors like Asus and MSI will do a lot better than the cheap AMD blower. A non-reference R9 290X has the potential to not only perform better (less or no thermal throttling), but also stay quieter under load.
The GTX Titan is a double-precision computing card that happens to do very well at gaming. It's not really a fair comparison. Ever since the GTX 780 was released, pretty much every review site has recommended it over the Titan for gamers on price/performance grounds.
Are there any contractors that don't have a history of security failures?
The problem isn't with this company, it's with the federal procurement process, which favors large corporations that can handle ridiculous amounts of paperwork over companies that might actually be able to get the job done.
Frankly, I'm amazed the PPACA website came out as well as it did. Most large IT contract jobs, whether public or private sector, are much, much worse. The typical outcome for a multi-million-dollar IT contract project is massive delays, substantial budget overruns, and poor/missing functionality.
Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer? You just can't fire people for no reason (well, you're not supposed to.) I mean if an employee is doing their job, performing well, and secretly bashing you on twitter, is that really a legal ground for termination?
Most private-sector jobs in the U.S. are "employment at will". That means employees can be fired for any reason or no reason, as long as it's not for a reason specifically prohibited by federal law (race, gender, etc.) I don't think this is good policy, but it is how things currently work in most places (pretty much all non-union shops). And one reason that it hasn't changed is that most Americans don't realize how bad it actually is: that as workers they essentially have no rights.
Federal civil service jobs are different. A rank-and-file Federal employee can pretty much say anything he/she wants about the government, as long as it's not on the clock. But the most high-ranking staff members at government agencies don't have civil service protections; they are political appointees and are expected to support the administration's goals and objectives. A random clerk processing Social Security claims can tweet all he/she wants about politics, but if the Secretary of State shoots his/her mouth off against the President's wishes, they will soon be "asked to resign".
just like PDF.js can replace PDF plugins in browser
pdf.js is garbage. I never thought that anyone could write a PDF reader worse than Adobe Reader, but they did. It butchers at least half of the documents I view – other open source alternatives such as Sumatra handle them just fine. And even when it does work, it's incredibly slow, and the rendering is crap quality.
The Mozilla team really needs to give up on the experiment of PDF via JavaScript, and add a working viewer that uses native code.
One of the things that annoys the hell out of me is the change to the bookmarks system. It's no longer a simple html file (used to work fine and was easy to backup) instead it's some closed system that's not human readable and if something pukes, you loose all of your bookmarks including the fucking backups. Makes me want to puke as I've had that happen 3 times since they switched.
SQLite isn't exactly a 'closed system'. And you can still export your bookmarks to HTML (as well as import them back if something happens or you move to a different system). In fact, if you go into about:config and set browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true, and put a path name in browser.bookmarks.file, this export will be done automatically when Firefox closes. (I use this to back up my bookmarks to Dropbox.)
Yes, some of the other changes are annoying (I had to resort to userChrome.css alterations to get rid of tabs), but with most users now having hundreds or even thousands of bookmarks, moving them to a real database was a definite improvement.
People say that, yet immediately turn around and say you should not expect a program written for Windows 95, or Linux in 1995, to run on a modern computer.
There is a difference between incremental upgrades and wholesale rewrites. Windows 7 (to take one example) isn't a new OS written from scratch, but an incremental improvement on NT, which dates back to 1993. Rewriting from scratch is almost always a bad idea.
Hillary will win easily if she runs in the Democratic primaries. The Democrats won't attack her like they did to Romney in the primary last year.
What are you talking about? Romney was the general election opponent, running on the Republican ticket. He was never in the Democratic primaries.
And I'm not at all sure that Hillary's path to the 2016 nomination is assured. Hillary represents establishment neoliberalism, and much of the Democratic Party base has had enough of that. Remember, primary elections tend to attract an electorate that is a lot more partisan than that of general elections. If Elizabeth Warren runs, she could give Hillary a hard time, since her positions are closer to those of the Democratic Party base.
Doesn't GCC warn for this by default? I'm pretty sure I remember getting compiler warnings from it in cases when I deliberately had an assignment operator in an if conditional.
And you would have suggested what? Voting for John Edwards (he'd already dropped out by the time my state had its 2008 primaries)? Wasting a vote on some meaningless third party? Or do you think I should have voted for McCain instead in the general election? You honestly believe his record on drones and surveillance would have been better? This is a guy who never saw a war he didn't like.
In a first-past-the-post system, there is always going to be two parties – political science proves it. So we're stuck with the lesser of two evils. Yes, I overestimated the degree to which Obama was going to be different from the usual neoliberal Third Way Democrat. The point is that people who voted for Obama in the primaries and general election did so because we were specifically promised an end to unnecessary wars, Gitmo, and the incessant violations of civil liberties that followed 9/11. None of that happened. The problems are structural, not limited to one candidate or one party.
You voted for them!
I voted for change in 2008. So did millions of other Americans, and our candidate won. But the U.S. political system makes meaningful change effectively impossible.
If that were true, then no one else would have been able to write any third-party software for Windows during that time frame. There's nothing special about a word processor; it's just a standard client-side application.
the DEA is just trying to catch shady doctors
First of all, even if this was true, it wouldn't justify violating the privacy rights of third parties.
Secondly, the DEA considers any doctor who prescribes a lot of painkillers to be a "shady doctor", even if there is a legitimate medical reason. Doctors who treat people with chronic pain are in real danger of being prosecuted by these witch-hunters.
What other choice does Microsoft have?
Focus on the professional/business desktop and server markets, which, hype aside, aren't going away or even substantially shrinking any time in the near future.
Admit that Windows 8 was a mistake and a failure, and base Windows 9 on the Windows 7 code base. Focus on backward compatibility. Consider bringing back Visual Basic 6 support in Visual Studio.
Recognize that MS is a mature company that isn't going to be posting record-breaking profits. Their stock should be paying out 3%-6% annual dividends and showing modest capital appreciation, at or slightly above the rate of inflation.
One could easily have said the same thing about Microsoft Word. It was a copycat and it sucked compared to Word Perfect when it first came out.
WordPerfect lost because it botched the transition from character-mode to WSYIWYG GUI. And it botched this because of crappy and shortsighted management that thought Windows was a fad.
If anything, Microsoft's modern strategy with Surface is analogous to WP's errors: they came late to the party with a subpar entry, and expected to win because they won the last market.
Every man and his dog seems to own one. If they're not in profit yet, where did the money go?! I know they lost a lot on the notoriously high failure rate of the early models, but was it really *that* bad?
Yes, it was. The RROD fiasco cost Microsoft well over a billion dollars to fix.
The XBOX 1 lost 4 billion dollars. It's now a solid market that Microsoft dominates.
First of all, Microsoft doesn't "dominate" – they are one of several big players. (And the Xbox One definitely looks like it's going to play second fiddle to the PS4.) Secondly, market share is only important to a publicly traded corporation insofar as it translates into current or future profit. Microsoft burned so much money ramping up the Xbox line that they still have barely broken even, and when you consider the time value of money, they're probably still in the hole. They would have been better off paying that money out as dividends.
That's CC-BY-ND.
Sounds like scientology to me...
Scientology is a mystery religion; this kind of thing was actually quite common in the ancient world, where the specific beliefs of a cult were often restricted to a small group of initiates. (How many of these groups were started by Hubbard-style scam artists? We don't know, but I'm guessing the number was nonzero.) For instance, modern scholars know comparatively little about Mithraism, since the religion was limited to initiates (mostly army veterans) and what little was written down was kept secret and lost when the original copies crumbled. (Ancient texts today are almost all copies of copies, except for a handful preserved by chance in desert climates.) And Mithraism is one of the best-known of the mystery religions; about some others nothing at all can be said.
Of course, it's a lot harder to keep a religion secret in the Information Age than it was in the late Roman Empire.
Christianity (and Islam) specifically rejected this notion of religion. From the start they went out of their way to tell everyone, in great detail, exactly what the faith consisted of. (And to argue over it when they disagreed on the details.)
How can it possibly be justified to use scarce instructional time on this industry propaganda? California public schools have enough trouble teaching the stuff that society expects and needs them to teach, and they're seriously considering this garbage?
In the post-WWII era, there was an architectural trend called Brutalism. This school of thought held that ornamentation was unnecessary and that buildings were "machines for living in". They should therefore be made out of raw, unadorned concrete. These buildings are still around, especially in large cities, and most people hate them. Turns out that functionality isn't enough; people actually want things to look nice.
It appears that UI designers are in the process of making the same mistakes that architects did decades ago. The new crusade against "skeuomorphism" is, in practice, a campaign for ugly square boxes with low-color icons. It's basically a return to the graphics of the early 1990s, except this time there isn't the excuse of technical limitations to justify it. I had hoped that this trend would stop with Windows 8, but for some inexplicable reason, Apple seems to have decided to degrade their far superior touch OS to a similar degree. The sublime beauty of Aero and iOS 6 gives way to the stark ugliness of Metro and iOS 7. For God's sake, why?
A 4TB hdd can be had for roughly USD$200, or less. A 4TB SDD is USD$29k.
Apples to oranges. You're comparing a cheap consumer-grade HDD to a low-volume enterprise-grade SSD.
The 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD is currently going for $635.99 at Newegg. So 4GB of SSD storage would cost $2543.96 – less than 10% of the figure you quoted. So it's about 13x what the magnetic HDD would cost, not 10x – close enough.
The fact that you can't get more than 1TB in a SSD unit without paying insane enterprise prices is beside the point. It's unusual to see a modern ATX motherboard without at least six SATA ports – and if you can afford $2500 in storage, you can certainly afford an add-on SATA host card if you need more.
OCZ's failure rates are higher than the rest of the industry's by an order of magnitude. Also, earlier SandForce drives have reliability problems because the firmware was written by paranoid loons who were deathly afraid of reverse-engineering and the drive goes into irrecoverable 'panic mode' when any abnormality of any kind is sensed. I think that newer SandForces (post-LSI acquisition), especially Intel's, are less likely to do this, but the original failures still taint the brand with the stigma of flakiness.
If you stick with Samsung, Intel, and SanDisk, you should be fine. Stay away from OCZ at all costs, and be skeptical of any SandForce drive not made by Intel.