The $0.50/GB for flash is for the very cheapest SSDs available, and only when they're on a good sale. More likely is $0.75/GB on the low and, and it goes up from there.
The Samsung 840 EVO is regularly available at $0.55-$0.60/GB for the 1TB model. And while it uses TLC (with a SLC-based cache to improve endurance), it isn't generally considered a "low end" product - 840 EVO got quite good reviews from various hardware sites.
And then they vote according to whichever way their ideological predisposition leads them.
That's true for a wide variety of Supreme Court decisions, but doesn't actually seem to be the case in patent law. It's not unusual to see, for example, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the same side of a patent ruling, which almost never happens on the kind of politically charged cases that make front-page national news.
It's not surprising that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is looking to side with Oracle. They're notorious for favoring an absurdly over-broad interpretation of patent law, and have been described as a "rogue court". Fortunately, the Supreme Court has shown a great deal of skepticism for the Federal Circuit's decisions, and this crosses traditional party lines (many of the rulings overriding the FC were unanimous or near-unanimous).
My prediction is that the patent shills on the Federal Circuit will side with Oracle, but that the ruling will then be appealed to the Supreme Court, where it will be overturned, setting a binding precedent that APIs cannot be copyrighted.
I as an enthusiast car driver wish I could buy cars with less safety equipment. There is actually a demand for that sort of thing because they're faster, better handling and yes, more fun. The drawback is, you must know what you're doing.
The problem is that if you're driving an unsafe vehicle on public roads, you're not just putting your own life at risk, but that of other drivers (and pedestrians) as well. You might be willing to take the risk of not having Electronic Stability Control and anti-lock braking, but why should the other people on the roads have to put up with the unnecessarily increased risk that you'll crash into them?
Unfortunately, we've got all this ridiculous analysis when the reality is actually quite simple. A couple of guys went out for a joyride, wrecked and died. It's no different than when some kid does the same in a Honda Civic.
Except that a Honda Civic has a lot more safety features than this overpriced pile of crap.
I know I'm probably going to get flamed and/or modded down for this, but people injured in Carrera GT crashes should seriously consider consulting a lawyer and suing Porsche over this.
Hear me out. First of all, IANAL, but based on some cursory research on product liability, a product is considered to have a design defect if "the foreseeable risks of harm posed by the product could have been reduced or avoided by the adoption of a reasonable alternative design, and failure to use the alternative design renders the product not reasonably safe." How does that not apply here? The Carrera GT is considered by the professional drivers cited in the OP to be considerably less safe than other sports cars. And an alternative design is clearly reasonable, given the number of other high-performance sports car designs out there, including some of Porsche's own.
Probably the most sympathetic plaintiff would be someone injured by another driver's Carrera GT, in an accident where the plaintiff was clearly not at fault. In that case, Porsche can't claim that the victim assumed risk by choosing the GT.
'Cause, uh, it's a sports car designed for racing?
But it's being sold through normal retail channels as a street-legal road car. As such, drivers have a right to expect that it will meet the basic safety standards that you'd see in other cars.
What twisted logic tells you that little difference would be noticed on a TV, but monitors would be greatly improved? They are both displays that show an increasingly amount of the same content.
Well, for one thing, you usually sit much closer to a monitor than to a TV set.
For another, you aren't usually reading text at small point sizes on a TV set. Anyone who's used a smartphone or tablet with a high-DPI display knows it makes a big difference in the clarity and readability of text.
The average viewer would probably notice little difference on a 4K TV even if corresponding content were readily available (which, at this time, it is not). But I'm still hoping for the success of 4K, because it will make a big difference on monitors. Higher production volumes means cheaper panels. Currently, to get a 4K monitor (based on a 32" IGZO panel) that supports 60 Hz, you need to shell out $3500; but once the 4K monitors based on cheaper 39" VA panels hit the market, this should drop to $1000 or less. Seiki can sell TVs with those panels for $500, but the big drawback is that these only support 30 Hz due to limitations of the input controller.
My car insurance doesn't cover oil changes; my homeowner's insurance isn't going to cover replacing a screen door that went kaput during the storms last weekend; so why the hell does health insurance cover routine check-up visits?
Because if it doesn't, then a lot of financially strapped people will skip those visits, and incipient problems won't show up until later, when they are much more expensive to fix. Funding preventive care actually saves money in the long run.
What kind of materials (if any) are effective in blocking cosmic rays? Would it be possible to integrate cosmic radiation shielding into an average-sized PC case? If that's impractical, are there building materials that can be used in roofs and/or walls to block this stuff without breaking the bank?
Considering that the "terms and conditions outlined by the Wikimedia Community" include a specific directive to "ignore all rules" if they get in the way of improving the encyclopedia, it's going to be really hard to make this stick. I don't see this legal threat going anywhere and I suspect it will simply be disregarded and forgotten.
Most users won't care about the change
on
POV-Ray Is Now FLOSS
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This isn't a case of a previously commercial program going open-source. It is a relatively minor licensing alteration to an existing product.
The changes may be of interest to die-hard Stallmanites, and to companies that want to make a profit from POV-Ray derivative works (assuming there are any), but to average users it's a big nothingburger.
To me, these two paragraphs from the court document are the most damning evidence against Childs:
Disabling Console Ports. The jury learned that if the console port – the physical means of access to the network on the device itself – is disabled, then the administrator cannot login to the system using what is regarded as the "port of last resort." On July 8 – the day before he was placed on administrative leave – Childs disabled the console ports on all five core devices, preventing the possibility of any password recovery.
Applying Access Controls. Childs also applied access controls to core devices that required that all administrative access had to be achieved by means of one particular computer, even if the access codes were known. He set up these access controls on core devices on the morning of July 9.
It's not just that he did these things – which were highly questionable, but might possibly have had some legitimate justification – but that he did them immediately before being placed on administrative leave, when he knew his employers wanted to relocate or fire him. The timing leaves little doubt of his intent.
Good luck proving whether it was him or his co-driver actually behind the wheel at any given time.
"Co-driver" is another word for "co-conspirator".
In a normal driving situation, obviously only the person in the driver's seat is considered at fault for traffic infractions. But in this particular case, these two people conspired to perform an illegal cross-country road race. Each of them are guilty of all the infractions. The conspiracy was openly admitted in their public statements.
Just feed the receiver with the right frequency to tell it how fast you want it to read. Imagine the look on the cop's face when you scream by at 100+ and the gun reads "55".
I don't know where YOU live, but I'm in Kansas and you can do 100+ easily out here, even on the state highways because roads are so straight.
Sure, there are some areas of the country where you can safely do 100+ MPH on the highway (assuming you don't blow out a tire). But there's no way someone can average that speed the whole distance between NY and LA without compromising road safety.
Look, we all know everyone speeds. 5-10 MPH over the speed limit is socially acceptable and tacitly condoned (it's rare to get pulled over by the cops for that, unless they want to bust you for some unrelated reason). But this is entirely different – it seems to be a clear case of reckless driving. On most interstates, you can do 75 MPH no problem, and on the better ones, 85 MPH is reasonable during the daytime if there is no inclement weather. There are a few interstates where you can safely do 90-100 MPH, but these are not all that common, and even then, extreme caution is required. I don't see any possible way that someone could safely average nearly 100 MPH on a cross-country road trip. Safety comes by going with the flow of traffic, and this driver must have been blowing past the majority of other cars during most of his trip. It's amazing that he made it there in one piece.
Painfully obvious in hindsight. Why was it patented before google came into existence?
Because at that time the patent office let anyone patent anything they wanted, no matter how trivial, as long as they stuck "on a computer" or "on the Internet" in front of it.
I need to download the comments to this story and do a find/replace on "Plasma" and "Plasma TV" and replace it with Betamax and see how it reads.
I really don't understand how Betamax came to become one of the canonical examples of a superior technology brought down by a lesser competitor.
In its original form, Betamax was not appreciably superior to VHS in terms of resolution. The difference was maybe 5%-10% at most. A videophile might notice the difference, especially if he had an expensive Trinitron set, but the average viewer watching the tapes on an average TV set would not.
On the other hand, VHS was clearly superior to Betamax in one way that many consumers cared about a great deal: runtime. Remember that when home VCRs were first released, a blank cassette could cost $20 or more (and I'm not even adjusting for inflation). The earliest Betamax units could only get 1 hour out of a standard L-500 tape. In contrast, VHS started at 2 hours on the typical T-120 tape. Both formats eventually added extra modes which allowed more runtime in exchange for a slight loss of quality, and most consumers used these modes as soon as they were available. When the dust had settled, Betamax only managed to get up to 4.5 hours on the longest mode (Sony had also increased the standard tape length by 50%). VHS, in contrast, got up to 6 hours on EP mode on a standard tape.
Add to that the licensing issues (JVC licensed VHS to pretty much anyone who wanted it, while Sony was much more jealous about their format), and it's not at all surprising that VHS won. It wasn't about the marketing, it was that VHS offered a better cost/benefit ratio to the average viewer.
Yes, traditionally Sony, Apple etc. have actually opened factories to make the devices in Brazil because it's better for their bottom line than expecting customers to spend the import levy.
And this is the primary reason that those tariffs exist. Brazil wants to build up its industrial base, rather than just serve as a cheap source of raw materials. High tariffs are a good way to do this, and that strategy is not at all new or unique. Prior to the 20th century, tariffs provided a majority of the U.S. government's revenue. It was a deliberate choice of industrial policy – Henry Clay's "American System" – to protect the growth of domestic industry by making imported products more expensive in comparison. The South, which primarily exported raw materials, disliked this policy, but they lost, and by the 1880s, the U.S. was the world's dominant industrial power. In Germany, Otto von Bismarck did much the same thing with his "marriage of iron and rye". The result is that a country which was weak and divided until 1871 became powerful enough to take on the rest of Europe and almost win.
Economists don't like to hear it, but history proves that protectionism works.
the console will require activation via the internet or a special disk before it will play Blu-ray or DVDs; media servers, MP3s, and audio CDs are not supported
This is why Sony needs to spin off its media division, as Dan Loeb has proposed.
As long as Sony is both a consumer electronics company and a major movie/recording studio, the consumer electronics division will always be compromised by the need to serve the overall corporate goals rather than the customer's needs.
You just know that the "no media server" and "have to activate on the Internet for DVD/Blu-ray" restrictions were added at the insistence of the suits on the studio side. These restrictions do nothing for customers, and a pure consumer electronics company would have no reason to hurt the functionality of their product by inflicting them.
While cheap geothermal would be nice I actually don't mind if they're hesitant to start poking the magma filled bubble that is eventually going to burst and wipe out the continent.
Wouldn't poking holes in the caldera help keep it from building up pressure, therefore making an eruption less likely, not more?
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The $0.50/GB for flash is for the very cheapest SSDs available, and only when they're on a good sale. More likely is $0.75/GB on the low and, and it goes up from there.
The Samsung 840 EVO is regularly available at $0.55-$0.60/GB for the 1TB model. And while it uses TLC (with a SLC-based cache to improve endurance), it isn't generally considered a "low end" product - 840 EVO got quite good reviews from various hardware sites.
And then they vote according to whichever way their ideological predisposition leads them.
That's true for a wide variety of Supreme Court decisions, but doesn't actually seem to be the case in patent law. It's not unusual to see, for example, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the same side of a patent ruling, which almost never happens on the kind of politically charged cases that make front-page national news.
It's not surprising that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is looking to side with Oracle. They're notorious for favoring an absurdly over-broad interpretation of patent law, and have been described as a "rogue court". Fortunately, the Supreme Court has shown a great deal of skepticism for the Federal Circuit's decisions, and this crosses traditional party lines (many of the rulings overriding the FC were unanimous or near-unanimous).
My prediction is that the patent shills on the Federal Circuit will side with Oracle, but that the ruling will then be appealed to the Supreme Court, where it will be overturned, setting a binding precedent that APIs cannot be copyrighted.
I as an enthusiast car driver wish I could buy cars with less safety equipment. There is actually a demand for that sort of thing because they're faster, better handling and yes, more fun. The drawback is, you must know what you're doing.
The problem is that if you're driving an unsafe vehicle on public roads, you're not just putting your own life at risk, but that of other drivers (and pedestrians) as well. You might be willing to take the risk of not having Electronic Stability Control and anti-lock braking, but why should the other people on the roads have to put up with the unnecessarily increased risk that you'll crash into them?
Unfortunately, we've got all this ridiculous analysis when the reality is actually quite simple. A couple of guys went out for a joyride, wrecked and died. It's no different than when some kid does the same in a Honda Civic.
Except that a Honda Civic has a lot more safety features than this overpriced pile of crap.
I know I'm probably going to get flamed and/or modded down for this, but people injured in Carrera GT crashes should seriously consider consulting a lawyer and suing Porsche over this.
Hear me out. First of all, IANAL, but based on some cursory research on product liability, a product is considered to have a design defect if "the foreseeable risks of harm posed by the product could have been reduced or avoided by the adoption of a reasonable alternative design, and failure to use the alternative design renders the product not reasonably safe." How does that not apply here? The Carrera GT is considered by the professional drivers cited in the OP to be considerably less safe than other sports cars. And an alternative design is clearly reasonable, given the number of other high-performance sports car designs out there, including some of Porsche's own.
Probably the most sympathetic plaintiff would be someone injured by another driver's Carrera GT, in an accident where the plaintiff was clearly not at fault. In that case, Porsche can't claim that the victim assumed risk by choosing the GT.
'Cause, uh, it's a sports car designed for racing?
But it's being sold through normal retail channels as a street-legal road car. As such, drivers have a right to expect that it will meet the basic safety standards that you'd see in other cars.
What twisted logic tells you that little difference would be noticed on a TV, but monitors would be greatly improved? They are both displays that show an increasingly amount of the same content.
Well, for one thing, you usually sit much closer to a monitor than to a TV set.
For another, you aren't usually reading text at small point sizes on a TV set. Anyone who's used a smartphone or tablet with a high-DPI display knows it makes a big difference in the clarity and readability of text.
The average viewer would probably notice little difference on a 4K TV even if corresponding content were readily available (which, at this time, it is not). But I'm still hoping for the success of 4K, because it will make a big difference on monitors. Higher production volumes means cheaper panels. Currently, to get a 4K monitor (based on a 32" IGZO panel) that supports 60 Hz, you need to shell out $3500; but once the 4K monitors based on cheaper 39" VA panels hit the market, this should drop to $1000 or less. Seiki can sell TVs with those panels for $500, but the big drawback is that these only support 30 Hz due to limitations of the input controller.
My car insurance doesn't cover oil changes; my homeowner's insurance isn't going to cover replacing a screen door that went kaput during the storms last weekend; so why the hell does health insurance cover routine check-up visits?
Because if it doesn't, then a lot of financially strapped people will skip those visits, and incipient problems won't show up until later, when they are much more expensive to fix. Funding preventive care actually saves money in the long run.
What kind of materials (if any) are effective in blocking cosmic rays? Would it be possible to integrate cosmic radiation shielding into an average-sized PC case? If that's impractical, are there building materials that can be used in roofs and/or walls to block this stuff without breaking the bank?
Considering that the "terms and conditions outlined by the Wikimedia Community" include a specific directive to "ignore all rules" if they get in the way of improving the encyclopedia, it's going to be really hard to make this stick. I don't see this legal threat going anywhere and I suspect it will simply be disregarded and forgotten.
This isn't a case of a previously commercial program going open-source. It is a relatively minor licensing alteration to an existing product.
The changes may be of interest to die-hard Stallmanites, and to companies that want to make a profit from POV-Ray derivative works (assuming there are any), but to average users it's a big nothingburger.
To me, these two paragraphs from the court document are the most damning evidence against Childs:
It's not just that he did these things – which were highly questionable, but might possibly have had some legitimate justification – but that he did them immediately before being placed on administrative leave, when he knew his employers wanted to relocate or fire him. The timing leaves little doubt of his intent.
You send junior techs out to reset the password on the server by console. Its that easy.
The court document says that Childs had disabled the console ports.
Good luck proving whether it was him or his co-driver actually behind the wheel at any given time.
"Co-driver" is another word for "co-conspirator".
In a normal driving situation, obviously only the person in the driver's seat is considered at fault for traffic infractions. But in this particular case, these two people conspired to perform an illegal cross-country road race. Each of them are guilty of all the infractions. The conspiracy was openly admitted in their public statements.
Just feed the receiver with the right frequency to tell it how fast you want it to read. Imagine the look on the cop's face when you scream by at 100+ and the gun reads "55".
I think they did that on Knight Rider once.
I don't know where YOU live, but I'm in Kansas and you can do 100+ easily out here, even on the state highways because roads are so straight.
Sure, there are some areas of the country where you can safely do 100+ MPH on the highway (assuming you don't blow out a tire). But there's no way someone can average that speed the whole distance between NY and LA without compromising road safety.
Look, we all know everyone speeds. 5-10 MPH over the speed limit is socially acceptable and tacitly condoned (it's rare to get pulled over by the cops for that, unless they want to bust you for some unrelated reason). But this is entirely different – it seems to be a clear case of reckless driving. On most interstates, you can do 75 MPH no problem, and on the better ones, 85 MPH is reasonable during the daytime if there is no inclement weather. There are a few interstates where you can safely do 90-100 MPH, but these are not all that common, and even then, extreme caution is required. I don't see any possible way that someone could safely average nearly 100 MPH on a cross-country road trip. Safety comes by going with the flow of traffic, and this driver must have been blowing past the majority of other cars during most of his trip. It's amazing that he made it there in one piece.
Painfully obvious in hindsight. Why was it patented before google came into existence?
Because at that time the patent office let anyone patent anything they wanted, no matter how trivial, as long as they stuck "on a computer" or "on the Internet" in front of it.
I need to download the comments to this story and do a find/replace on "Plasma" and "Plasma TV" and replace it with Betamax and see how it reads.
I really don't understand how Betamax came to become one of the canonical examples of a superior technology brought down by a lesser competitor.
In its original form, Betamax was not appreciably superior to VHS in terms of resolution. The difference was maybe 5%-10% at most. A videophile might notice the difference, especially if he had an expensive Trinitron set, but the average viewer watching the tapes on an average TV set would not.
On the other hand, VHS was clearly superior to Betamax in one way that many consumers cared about a great deal: runtime. Remember that when home VCRs were first released, a blank cassette could cost $20 or more (and I'm not even adjusting for inflation). The earliest Betamax units could only get 1 hour out of a standard L-500 tape. In contrast, VHS started at 2 hours on the typical T-120 tape. Both formats eventually added extra modes which allowed more runtime in exchange for a slight loss of quality, and most consumers used these modes as soon as they were available. When the dust had settled, Betamax only managed to get up to 4.5 hours on the longest mode (Sony had also increased the standard tape length by 50%). VHS, in contrast, got up to 6 hours on EP mode on a standard tape.
Add to that the licensing issues (JVC licensed VHS to pretty much anyone who wanted it, while Sony was much more jealous about their format), and it's not at all surprising that VHS won. It wasn't about the marketing, it was that VHS offered a better cost/benefit ratio to the average viewer.
Yes, traditionally Sony, Apple etc. have actually opened factories to make the devices in Brazil because it's better for their bottom line than expecting customers to spend the import levy.
And this is the primary reason that those tariffs exist. Brazil wants to build up its industrial base, rather than just serve as a cheap source of raw materials. High tariffs are a good way to do this, and that strategy is not at all new or unique. Prior to the 20th century, tariffs provided a majority of the U.S. government's revenue. It was a deliberate choice of industrial policy – Henry Clay's "American System" – to protect the growth of domestic industry by making imported products more expensive in comparison. The South, which primarily exported raw materials, disliked this policy, but they lost, and by the 1880s, the U.S. was the world's dominant industrial power. In Germany, Otto von Bismarck did much the same thing with his "marriage of iron and rye". The result is that a country which was weak and divided until 1871 became powerful enough to take on the rest of Europe and almost win.
Economists don't like to hear it, but history proves that protectionism works.
the console will require activation via the internet or a special disk before it will play Blu-ray or DVDs; media servers, MP3s, and audio CDs are not supported
This is why Sony needs to spin off its media division, as Dan Loeb has proposed.
As long as Sony is both a consumer electronics company and a major movie/recording studio, the consumer electronics division will always be compromised by the need to serve the overall corporate goals rather than the customer's needs.
You just know that the "no media server" and "have to activate on the Internet for DVD/Blu-ray" restrictions were added at the insistence of the suits on the studio side. These restrictions do nothing for customers, and a pure consumer electronics company would have no reason to hurt the functionality of their product by inflicting them.
While cheap geothermal would be nice I actually don't mind if they're hesitant to start poking the magma filled bubble that is eventually going to burst and wipe out the continent.
Wouldn't poking holes in the caldera help keep it from building up pressure, therefore making an eruption less likely, not more?
I don't see Dell being able to pull out of this. He has no control of the OS, so he has no control of the user experience.
Dell is one of Microsoft's biggest customers. They have more control over the Windows user experience than you think.