I don't really have an issue with piracy when the media companies make it difficult to view the content legally. I have a major issue when someone is making money off piracy. Screw these people. Throw the book at them.
I would agree with you, except I have a much, much bigger problem with corporations sending UNDERCOVER FUCKING AGENTS into people's homes under false pretenses.
If you can't gather enough evidence of criminal activity to convince a rubberstamp-wielding judge to issue a warrant, served by people at least superficially trained in such silly little issues as chain-of-custody, then you drop the issue. You don't hire plumbers to break in and go through your enemies' files.
'We have to learn how to control ourselves.' The rally was sponsored by a rabbinical group, Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, that is linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews
...Aaaaaand, the irony meter explodes with a massive "whooosh!"
Hey, guys - Leave my porn alone and go choke on a bacon cheeseburger, 'kay? The internet? Not yours!
Try this shithead - the next time you're barreling down the freeway, close your eyes and count off 7 seconds. And then ask yourself, do you really feel safe?
Try this, shithead - Read the post to which you respond before getting all fighty. I neither supported nor rejected 4.6 seconds as "enough", merely commented on the silliness of using a football field as a frame of reference.
Stay out of their internal affairs. This is not news for nerds.
Whenever one human oppresses another, particularly with ridiculous superstitious nonsense, it becomes the business of all of us. And when whole governments do it, the situation escalates into not just offensive, but an outright human rights issue.
What the article does say is that 16% of accidents caused by drivers under 20 is caused by distraction
Wait - Only 16%? Seriously? And that includes "talking with passengers" and "adjusting the radio"? Wow, way to make exactly the opposite of the intended point, TFA!
Shouldn't we perhaps worry about the other 84% before we go crazy talking about things like motion sensors to disable cell phones when in motion above some arbitrary speed?
First, let me say that I consider it nothing short of suicidally (or even homicidally) stupid to text while driving.
That said...
which at 55 mph, means they were driving the length of a football field without looking,' said David Hosansky.
Why does any car-motion reference need to point out distances in multiples of football fields, as though that means anything? On a highway, you can see many times that distance around you, and unless something drastically changes, 120 yards really doesn't mean much. You already know about everything within that range, so merely measuring distance doesn't say much of anything.
More usefully, can a deer reach the road from the trees in 4.6 seconds? How long does it take for someone with a blowout to swerve into your lane? Will you hit the car in front of you (also moving at a similar speed, so absolute distance means nothing) within 4.6 seconds if it slams on its brakes for no particular reason?
I get the idea that most people probably have a good idea of what it feels like to walk the length of a football field; that sense of "big"ness simply doesn't meaningfully apply under highway traffic conditions.
I thought the OEM key sticker on my box was a VAR for that maker only. The key wont work unless you use the supplied disks by the company? The OEM is a different version with keys. Isn't it?
The key goes with a VAR, yes; at least through Vista (I haven't tried it with 7, but have read that the same still works), however, you can use any install media (for that major OS version) with any key and get whatever type of install that key corresponds to... And that works for later releases as well... Have a two-year old system in need of a reinstall anyway, and MS just released SP5? You can install off clean SP5 media with your crappy old original-release key just fine n' dandy.
It also used to work with server versions (the same media would install XP or 2003), though I have less confidence that still holds true (but have not heard or seen otherwise, so it may well still work).
You are talking over $99 anyway. Losing battle as many places wont sell you the OEM and only the expensive $299 one which is half the cost of an OEM machine.
You realize your OEM key will work with any "real" media - Whether home or pro or ultimate? That has held true since the days of Win95, and simple economics (only needing to produce one "official" disc) mean it will continue to hold true for the foreseeable future.
So you don't need to go out and buy your own $99 or $199 or $299 or whatever copy of Windows to do a reinstall. Hunt down any ol' install media (including pirated, makes no difference), and use your OEM key. Voila, perfectly legit reinstall.
If a government pays a price for something, then that nullifies the claim that the thing has become affordable. China is paying for your solar cells. Now, it might be either good or bad for China to be paying for your solar cells, but let's not pretend that the solar cells are actually cheap.
Seriously? If the Chinese government wants to subsidize US energy independence - Fucking LET them!
Whew! Doesn't that just take a load off all our minds?
For a while there, it looked like solar had finally reached a price where the mainstream could realistically afford them and the electricity savings would eventually pay back the initial investment. Won't someone think of all the poor, poor coal-fired power plants in the midwest? I mean, if everyone had a solar array on their roof (perhaps even enforced by building codes), Dear Lord! We might manage to get by purely with some sort of socialist-inspired nightmare of on-demand clean gas-fired turbines!
And I, for one, know I will sleep better knowing that somewhere, a solid American union worker makes more than I do to press the red button and pull the lever every 49 seconds.
/ And if anyone considers this trolling, well, Greece would probably love your input on its current situation.
Schmidt will be replaced by Michael Daniel, currently the head of the White House budget office's intelligence branch.
Um, come again?
Someone kindly point out what makes this manager-of-auditors-of-bean-counters, with a background totally unrelated to cybersecurity or even IT in general, qualified to coordinate the nation's response to Chinese and Iranian hackers?
WISP != 3G. I have a WISP about two miles from me, but a large hill between us, so, no love; with Verizon 3G, however, I get 3 (out of 5) bars (with a cute little antenna in the attic - No ugly outside parabolic crap required) even living in the middle of nowhere.
And as for the price, yes, I could easily go over my cap; I'd have to go WAAAAAY over it to pay $340 a month, however, which the parent post suggested as what he'd pay for a T1.
I work remotely and will burn through the caps even though they say the VPN speeds are decent now
As someone recently off satellite - They lie, and hard.
With satellite, the throughput doesn't suck... Even the daily caps, while they suck hard the first few times you hit it, you can learn to live with.
But the latency! Any sort of interactive connection, from online gaming to VPN to even visiting any website that uses SSL, will absolutely crawl. Expect to search for 10YO clients that let you jack the timeouts up to insane levels (and then, still pray the server-side puts up with you taking literally half a second per roundtrip).
As one option shy of getting a T1, I recently switched to a 3G modem. Still has a fairly crappy cap, but the penalty for exceeding it costs basically the same as your basic service prorated to more bandwidth (I pay $80/10G, with $10/G over). And while it costs basically the same as the halfway-decent tier of satellite, it actually works for what I need (like VPN'ing in to work). I couldn't use it to truly telecommute 40+ hours a week, but for the occasional server-babysitting on the weekend, it saves me a drive.
So the "any" is clearly restricted to the GPUs embedded in the CPUs not discrete GPUs in huge cards.
Okay - So talking about AMD having 384 stream processors per die in the 7660, vs... 16 for Intel in the HD4000. Not even the same game, never mind the same ballpark.
Sorry, but AMD wins this round. And although the average Joe hasn't yet realized it, the "number of cores" war has turned a corner, in that the CPU has already started serving merely as an "overseer" of massive numbers of GPU SPs/CUs. If you do, specifically and exclusively, transaction processing - The CPU still wins. In scientific computing, cryptography, signal analysis, physical simulations, CAD, and yes, even gaming - No one cares if you have a 12-way Xeon or an AMD Geode, it matters that you have an AMD 59/69/79xx (and yes, I do mean AMD - despite their overall gaming performance, for GPU computing, even NVidia doesn't even come close, though the uber-expensive Tesla does at least get to share the playing field).
/ Note that the recent Slashdot article on media transcoding dealt specifically with mass-market solutions using hacked-up shader routines, not optimized OpenCL kernels.
Wait... So someone hacks in and steals a million and a half valid prepaid card numbers - And they bother with resorting to identity theft based on the payment info used to purchase those cards?
That seems somehow... Inefficient. Like breaking into Fort Knox so you can steal the copper plumbing.
Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors
That does not give an exhaustive list - URI, for example, has (had?) not just the "big" one everyone knew about (as listed on that page), but at least one other that I've personally seen (an open-pool reactor with an output on the order of a hundred watts - And for the record, pictures of Cerenkov radiation just don't do it justice); and I recall hearing about (from a reliable source, not student gossip) a third.
Your last line is not just nonsense, it shows signs of either severe ignorance of how world works, or schizophrenia
Ignoring your generous evaluation of my sanity, I will attribute your failure to comprehend that as a result of your country of residence - As I see from the last part of your post that you live in the UK, you may simply lack a suitable frame of reference as to why we Yanks devoted our ten most sacred laws to "silly" crap like quartering soldiers in peoples' houses.
So... First of all, "right of way" does not even remotely compare to "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" - Any more than eating red meat on Friday compares to murder.
Second, yes, you can certainly choose to give up your rights. You can choose to speak to the police without a lawyer present, you can choose to wave your right to a speedy trial, you can choose not to carry a handgun at all times, and yes, I suppose you can even yield the "right" of way to an oncoming car. All of those involve you and only you making that decision, however - No one has asked you to do so, and more importantly, the government has not asked you to do so.
Do I sound paranoid about this? Quick question - Do I (and you) have a better chance of dying in a terrorist attack, or under "suspicious circumstances" while in police custody? And before you write that off as an American problem, I'd suggest Googling for "Sean Rigg".
I'm sorry to break it to you, but OpenCL is not as simple as you make it out to be.
Sorry to break this to you, but I write OpenCL, and yes, it really does work that simply.
Now, I will readily admit that getting every last drop of performance out of a given GPU still requires hand-tuning your code to target the specifics of its architecture; But you could say the same for CPUs, as well.
Don't even dare to think that nVidia and ATI chips like the same kinds of optimizations - they don't.
Very true - Yet irrelevant. At 50% efficient (and in practice, you - or at least, I - can do comfortably better than that), whether you run on an HD5870 or a GTX480, you will make the CPU look like a relic from the 1980s by comparison.
and actually had nothing to hide in his car. So why not let the police officer search the car
No... You didn'tactually just say that if you have nothing to hide, why not let them look... Did you?
It's his right to choose whether to forego his rights or not. Not yours or anyone else's.
The cop forced him to make that choice in the first place, and things may well have gone poorly for him had he tried to enforce his rights. Police have a somewhat dangerous job, and deal with that by acting as total control freaks; they respond to the word "no" with tasers and pepper-spray.
Is that a crime in the eyes of "you must enforce your rights against pigs at all time or else..." crowd?
We either all have rights, all the time, by default, no positive action required - Or none of us do.
EDI can be embedded in XML before storing it in your SQL database. I'm sure there's a Java library for doing this.
You laugh, but I actually have to support an *cough* EDI *cough* extract from one of my company's service providers that comes as EDI-via-XML.
Typical conversation - "So how often does the schema change?" "Oh, it doesn't ever change, not since we went live with this system" "I only ask because last night's run violates its XSD" "Oh, huh... We'll look into that (and send a bill for our time)". Followed by me simply turning off schema checking and coding a whole shitload of sanity-checks that the data contains something vaguely like what it should.
For anything under a meg, just give me a goddamned flat file - Fixed width, tab-delimited, or if their "what do you mean we can't put commas inside an unquoted field?" underpaid interns/H1Bs can figure out the spooooooky double-quote character, CSV (and don't get me started on escaping literal double-quotes, even Microsoft screws that one up in Excel).
You need a cause for firing people after a certain amount of time.
Not in most of the US, you don't.
Now, executives generally work under an actual contract (how else would they spell out the terms of their golden parachute?), so the same at-will employment laws they lord over their peons don't really apply to them. But "length of employ" doesn't mean as much as most people thing it does.
Simple example, I always get a kick out of "probationary" periods in at-will states... "So for the next six months, you can terminate me at any time for no reason at all; after which, you can terminate me at any time for no reason at all?" - Most HR people laugh when I point that out to them, and I once received the entirely reasonable explanation that if you make people think they have less rights up front, the real losers put up less of a fuss when you send them packing. So basically all just simple mind-games.
who cares how fast it completes a task if it's failing? Nobody gives little jimmy props when he finishes the hour-long test in 5 minutes but scores a 37% on it.
I agree that presents something of a problem for current implementations; the concept of GPU transcoding doesn't fail, however. Only the fact that those currently pushing it have tried to show at least modest gains for everbody - meaning those with massively inappropriate hardware - has made it such an abysmal failure to date.
To repeat my earlier post, if you target an OpenCL-capable GPU, you will get consistent results; and if you target a card with a reasonable number of compute units, (58xx/59xx/68xx/69xx/tesla), you'll see performance far beyond what a modern CPU can give.
Does that make GPU transcoding the best choice for the general public at present? No! But for those with the hardware, the comparison counts as literally laughable.
Because behind the scenes your "encoder" program is actually using several different encoders. Generally the encoder has to be custom written specifically for the specialized GPU hardware it is targeting.
This has largely ceased to present a problem, thanks to OpenCL.
GPU code no longer needs to run as custom-written shaders targetting 20 different platforms. One program, written in fairly straightforward C, will run on just about any modern platform. And it will do so at speeds that absolutely dwarf a CPU - The Radeon x9yy cards (for x>=5) easily crush a modern CPU at OpenCL code by a factor of a thousand. The x8yy cards still perform admirably, over three hundred to one. For NVidia, the Tesla series do well, while the GX... Well, ten to fifty times faster doesn't exactly suck...
The real problem here? Most people have really crappy GPUs. Even compared to the $100 card range, your GPU sucks ass, and hard. And you can't really blame people, because honestly, even modern IGPs will run just about anything fairly well, so why would you pay for more?
But don't blame the GPUs, or the concept in general. If you target OpenCL and the user has a halfway decent modern GPU, it will give consistent, reliable results, and will blow away your CPU many times over.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really have an issue with piracy when the media companies make it difficult to view the content legally. I have a major issue when someone is making money off piracy. Screw these people. Throw the book at them.
I would agree with you, except I have a much, much bigger problem with corporations sending UNDERCOVER FUCKING AGENTS into people's homes under false pretenses.
If you can't gather enough evidence of criminal activity to convince a rubberstamp-wielding judge to issue a warrant, served by people at least superficially trained in such silly little issues as chain-of-custody, then you drop the issue. You don't hire plumbers to break in and go through your enemies' files.
'We have to learn how to control ourselves.' The rally was sponsored by a rabbinical group, Ichud Hakehillos Letohar Hamachane, that is linked to a software company that sells Internet filtering software to Orthodox Jews
...Aaaaaand, the irony meter explodes with a massive "whooosh!"
Hey, guys - Leave my porn alone and go choke on a bacon cheeseburger, 'kay? The internet? Not yours!
There is no argument. Kirk is obviously the superior one. All who claim otherwise are simply deluded.
But how do we feel about Archer vs. Janeway?
And does "greater than" in this case mean better, or worse in the sense that both sucked so much as to wrap around to cult-good?
Try this shithead - the next time you're barreling down the freeway, close your eyes and count off 7 seconds. And then ask yourself, do you really feel safe?
Try this, shithead - Read the post to which you respond before getting all fighty. I neither supported nor rejected 4.6 seconds as "enough", merely commented on the silliness of using a football field as a frame of reference.
Stay out of their internal affairs. This is not news for nerds.
Whenever one human oppresses another, particularly with ridiculous superstitious nonsense, it becomes the business of all of us. And when whole governments do it, the situation escalates into not just offensive, but an outright human rights issue.
What the article does say is that 16% of accidents caused by drivers under 20 is caused by distraction
Wait - Only 16%? Seriously? And that includes "talking with passengers" and "adjusting the radio"? Wow, way to make exactly the opposite of the intended point, TFA!
Shouldn't we perhaps worry about the other 84% before we go crazy talking about things like motion sensors to disable cell phones when in motion above some arbitrary speed?
First, let me say that I consider it nothing short of suicidally (or even homicidally) stupid to text while driving.
That said...
which at 55 mph, means they were driving the length of a football field without looking,' said David Hosansky.
Why does any car-motion reference need to point out distances in multiples of football fields, as though that means anything? On a highway, you can see many times that distance around you, and unless something drastically changes, 120 yards really doesn't mean much. You already know about everything within that range, so merely measuring distance doesn't say much of anything.
More usefully, can a deer reach the road from the trees in 4.6 seconds? How long does it take for someone with a blowout to swerve into your lane? Will you hit the car in front of you (also moving at a similar speed, so absolute distance means nothing) within 4.6 seconds if it slams on its brakes for no particular reason?
I get the idea that most people probably have a good idea of what it feels like to walk the length of a football field; that sense of "big"ness simply doesn't meaningfully apply under highway traffic conditions.
I thought the OEM key sticker on my box was a VAR for that maker only. The key wont work unless you use the supplied disks by the company? The OEM is a different version with keys. Isn't it?
The key goes with a VAR, yes; at least through Vista (I haven't tried it with 7, but have read that the same still works), however, you can use any install media (for that major OS version) with any key and get whatever type of install that key corresponds to... And that works for later releases as well... Have a two-year old system in need of a reinstall anyway, and MS just released SP5? You can install off clean SP5 media with your crappy old original-release key just fine n' dandy.
It also used to work with server versions (the same media would install XP or 2003), though I have less confidence that still holds true (but have not heard or seen otherwise, so it may well still work).
You are talking over $99 anyway. Losing battle as many places wont sell you the OEM and only the expensive $299 one which is half the cost of an OEM machine.
You realize your OEM key will work with any "real" media - Whether home or pro or ultimate? That has held true since the days of Win95, and simple economics (only needing to produce one "official" disc) mean it will continue to hold true for the foreseeable future.
So you don't need to go out and buy your own $99 or $199 or $299 or whatever copy of Windows to do a reinstall. Hunt down any ol' install media (including pirated, makes no difference), and use your OEM key. Voila, perfectly legit reinstall.
My apologies - I didn't mean my response to sound so caustic - Probably should have put a smiley at the end of it.
"So you'll only let me out of this prison if I sleep with a supermodel? Well twist my arm - Bring 'er on!"
If a government pays a price for something, then that nullifies the claim that the thing has become affordable. China is paying for your solar cells. Now, it might be either good or bad for China to be paying for your solar cells, but let's not pretend that the solar cells are actually cheap.
Seriously? If the Chinese government wants to subsidize US energy independence - Fucking LET them!
Whew! Doesn't that just take a load off all our minds?
For a while there, it looked like solar had finally reached a price where the mainstream could realistically afford them and the electricity savings would eventually pay back the initial investment. Won't someone think of all the poor, poor coal-fired power plants in the midwest? I mean, if everyone had a solar array on their roof (perhaps even enforced by building codes), Dear Lord! We might manage to get by purely with some sort of socialist-inspired nightmare of on-demand clean gas-fired turbines!
And I, for one, know I will sleep better knowing that somewhere, a solid American union worker makes more than I do to press the red button and pull the lever every 49 seconds.
/ And if anyone considers this trolling, well, Greece would probably love your input on its current situation.
Schmidt will be replaced by Michael Daniel, currently the head of the White House budget office's intelligence branch.
Um, come again?
Someone kindly point out what makes this manager-of-auditors-of-bean-counters, with a background totally unrelated to cybersecurity or even IT in general, qualified to coordinate the nation's response to Chinese and Iranian hackers?
Read that comment again there.
WISP != 3G. I have a WISP about two miles from me, but a large hill between us, so, no love; with Verizon 3G, however, I get 3 (out of 5) bars (with a cute little antenna in the attic - No ugly outside parabolic crap required) even living in the middle of nowhere.
And as for the price, yes, I could easily go over my cap; I'd have to go WAAAAAY over it to pay $340 a month, however, which the parent post suggested as what he'd pay for a T1.
I work remotely and will burn through the caps even though they say the VPN speeds are decent now
As someone recently off satellite - They lie, and hard.
With satellite, the throughput doesn't suck... Even the daily caps, while they suck hard the first few times you hit it, you can learn to live with.
But the latency! Any sort of interactive connection, from online gaming to VPN to even visiting any website that uses SSL, will absolutely crawl. Expect to search for 10YO clients that let you jack the timeouts up to insane levels (and then, still pray the server-side puts up with you taking literally half a second per roundtrip).
As one option shy of getting a T1, I recently switched to a 3G modem. Still has a fairly crappy cap, but the penalty for exceeding it costs basically the same as your basic service prorated to more bandwidth (I pay $80/10G, with $10/G over). And while it costs basically the same as the halfway-decent tier of satellite, it actually works for what I need (like VPN'ing in to work). I couldn't use it to truly telecommute 40+ hours a week, but for the occasional server-babysitting on the weekend, it saves me a drive.
So the "any" is clearly restricted to the GPUs embedded in the CPUs not discrete GPUs in huge cards.
Okay - So talking about AMD having 384 stream processors per die in the 7660, vs... 16 for Intel in the HD4000. Not even the same game, never mind the same ballpark.
Sorry, but AMD wins this round. And although the average Joe hasn't yet realized it, the "number of cores" war has turned a corner, in that the CPU has already started serving merely as an "overseer" of massive numbers of GPU SPs/CUs. If you do, specifically and exclusively, transaction processing - The CPU still wins. In scientific computing, cryptography, signal analysis, physical simulations, CAD, and yes, even gaming - No one cares if you have a 12-way Xeon or an AMD Geode, it matters that you have an AMD 59/69/79xx (and yes, I do mean AMD - despite their overall gaming performance, for GPU computing, even NVidia doesn't even come close, though the uber-expensive Tesla does at least get to share the playing field).
/ Note that the recent Slashdot article on media transcoding dealt specifically with mass-market solutions using hacked-up shader routines, not optimized OpenCL kernels.
Wait... So someone hacks in and steals a million and a half valid prepaid card numbers - And they bother with resorting to identity theft based on the payment info used to purchase those cards?
That seems somehow... Inefficient. Like breaking into Fort Knox so you can steal the copper plumbing.
Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors
That does not give an exhaustive list - URI, for example, has (had?) not just the "big" one everyone knew about (as listed on that page), but at least one other that I've personally seen (an open-pool reactor with an output on the order of a hundred watts - And for the record, pictures of Cerenkov radiation just don't do it justice); and I recall hearing about (from a reliable source, not student gossip) a third.
Your last line is not just nonsense, it shows signs of either severe ignorance of how world works, or schizophrenia
Ignoring your generous evaluation of my sanity, I will attribute your failure to comprehend that as a result of your country of residence - As I see from the last part of your post that you live in the UK, you may simply lack a suitable frame of reference as to why we Yanks devoted our ten most sacred laws to "silly" crap like quartering soldiers in peoples' houses.
So... First of all, "right of way" does not even remotely compare to "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" - Any more than eating red meat on Friday compares to murder.
Second, yes, you can certainly choose to give up your rights. You can choose to speak to the police without a lawyer present, you can choose to wave your right to a speedy trial, you can choose not to carry a handgun at all times, and yes, I suppose you can even yield the "right" of way to an oncoming car. All of those involve you and only you making that decision, however - No one has asked you to do so, and more importantly, the government has not asked you to do so.
Do I sound paranoid about this? Quick question - Do I (and you) have a better chance of dying in a terrorist attack, or under "suspicious circumstances" while in police custody? And before you write that off as an American problem, I'd suggest Googling for "Sean Rigg".
I'm sorry to break it to you, but OpenCL is not as simple as you make it out to be.
Sorry to break this to you, but I write OpenCL, and yes, it really does work that simply.
Now, I will readily admit that getting every last drop of performance out of a given GPU still requires hand-tuning your code to target the specifics of its architecture; But you could say the same for CPUs, as well.
Don't even dare to think that nVidia and ATI chips like the same kinds of optimizations - they don't.
Very true - Yet irrelevant. At 50% efficient (and in practice, you - or at least, I - can do comfortably better than that), whether you run on an HD5870 or a GTX480, you will make the CPU look like a relic from the 1980s by comparison.
and actually had nothing to hide in his car. So why not let the police officer search the car
No... You didn't actually just say that if you have nothing to hide, why not let them look... Did you?
It's his right to choose whether to forego his rights or not. Not yours or anyone else's.
The cop forced him to make that choice in the first place, and things may well have gone poorly for him had he tried to enforce his rights. Police have a somewhat dangerous job, and deal with that by acting as total control freaks; they respond to the word "no" with tasers and pepper-spray.
Is that a crime in the eyes of "you must enforce your rights against pigs at all time or else..." crowd?
We either all have rights, all the time, by default, no positive action required - Or none of us do.
EDI can be embedded in XML before storing it in your SQL database. I'm sure there's a Java library for doing this.
;)
You laugh, but I actually have to support an *cough* EDI *cough* extract from one of my company's service providers that comes as EDI-via-XML.
Typical conversation - "So how often does the schema change?" "Oh, it doesn't ever change, not since we went live with this system" "I only ask because last night's run violates its XSD" "Oh, huh... We'll look into that (and send a bill for our time)". Followed by me simply turning off schema checking and coding a whole shitload of sanity-checks that the data contains something vaguely like what it should.
For anything under a meg, just give me a goddamned flat file - Fixed width, tab-delimited, or if their "what do you mean we can't put commas inside an unquoted field?" underpaid interns/H1Bs can figure out the spooooooky double-quote character, CSV (and don't get me started on escaping literal double-quotes, even Microsoft screws that one up in Excel).
/ And get off my lawn!
You need a cause for firing people after a certain amount of time.
Not in most of the US, you don't.
Now, executives generally work under an actual contract (how else would they spell out the terms of their golden parachute?), so the same at-will employment laws they lord over their peons don't really apply to them. But "length of employ" doesn't mean as much as most people thing it does.
Simple example, I always get a kick out of "probationary" periods in at-will states... "So for the next six months, you can terminate me at any time for no reason at all; after which, you can terminate me at any time for no reason at all?" - Most HR people laugh when I point that out to them, and I once received the entirely reasonable explanation that if you make people think they have less rights up front, the real losers put up less of a fuss when you send them packing. So basically all just simple mind-games.
who cares how fast it completes a task if it's failing? Nobody gives little jimmy props when he finishes the hour-long test in 5 minutes but scores a 37% on it.
I agree that presents something of a problem for current implementations; the concept of GPU transcoding doesn't fail, however. Only the fact that those currently pushing it have tried to show at least modest gains for everbody - meaning those with massively inappropriate hardware - has made it such an abysmal failure to date.
To repeat my earlier post, if you target an OpenCL-capable GPU, you will get consistent results; and if you target a card with a reasonable number of compute units, (58xx/59xx/68xx/69xx/tesla), you'll see performance far beyond what a modern CPU can give.
Does that make GPU transcoding the best choice for the general public at present? No! But for those with the hardware, the comparison counts as literally laughable.
Because behind the scenes your "encoder" program is actually using several different encoders. Generally the encoder has to be custom written specifically for the specialized GPU hardware it is targeting.
This has largely ceased to present a problem, thanks to OpenCL.
GPU code no longer needs to run as custom-written shaders targetting 20 different platforms. One program, written in fairly straightforward C, will run on just about any modern platform. And it will do so at speeds that absolutely dwarf a CPU - The Radeon x9yy cards (for x>=5) easily crush a modern CPU at OpenCL code by a factor of a thousand. The x8yy cards still perform admirably, over three hundred to one. For NVidia, the Tesla series do well, while the GX... Well, ten to fifty times faster doesn't exactly suck...
The real problem here? Most people have really crappy GPUs. Even compared to the $100 card range, your GPU sucks ass, and hard. And you can't really blame people, because honestly, even modern IGPs will run just about anything fairly well, so why would you pay for more?
But don't blame the GPUs, or the concept in general. If you target OpenCL and the user has a halfway decent modern GPU, it will give consistent, reliable results, and will blow away your CPU many times over.