I have a small driver set (bits for an electric screwdriver) with 14 Torx bits, 7 regular ones and the same sizes in "tamper resistant". Tamper resistant in quotation marks, because it isn't if you get the bits so easily. Purchased it in some ordinary hardware store.
Religious arguments aside, I think it is smarter in the long run to use renewable energy for fuel and reserve fossil fuels for steel and plastics making.
Those are also important, and unlike the use as fuel, I don't see an alternative that is close to being practicable on a large scale here.
The specification that the Fibonacci routine has to be recursive is stupid in the first place. Forget the "unless I can do it in assembly or a language that allows stack-free re-entry and short-circuiting", recursion is not needed at all if you have some leeway in picking the best approach.
A much better solution is starting at the 3rd element, with the 1st and 2nd element being known. Then you go forward through the 4th, 5th element and so on until you reach the Nth element.
I actually got that problem as an exercise in my university days. First I did it as asked, then with a 100 element array, pre-filling the 1st and 2nd element, then working my way up. Arguably the array variant was still a waste of memory, because you can do it in 3 variables with a bit of shifting the numbers around. But even that primitive solution was way better than the recursive approach.
This is an example of the mistake being in the head of the person who generates the questions for the test. By telling the candidates to use a specific approach, (s)he actually suppressed the best answers.
At least in this case, they have given the customer a good reason to update his bad review. With a description of the bricking and a quote from the email by the manufacturer. I guess that would make the impact of the bad review a bit larger;)
I've read it, and it is mimicking that through idiotic and restrictive End User License Agreements. For the software. There is no explicit clause that forbids tinkering with the hardware, but that seems to be enforced by the software. As in, change a part that has a microcontroller and it won't work without a John Deere technician coming and authorizing it.
Besides, if I read paragraph 13 correctly, the owner of the tractor has to indemnify John Deere and its dealers against all and any lawsuits, even if John Deere or the dealer is at fault for the cause of the lawsuit. That goes beyond everything I've seen in software EULAs so far. Those usually demand only indemnification against lawsuits that arise out of actions by the owner.
This could be sidestepped by telling, not asking the software vendors to fix their stuff within 90 days. Because after 90 days, the vulnerability will be made public. Either they fix their stuff or they can watch their customers' IT being raped:-)
About 1 1/2 years ago, AMD was on its way out in the server market because the Opterons were not competitive enough anymore: http://www.eweek.com/servers/amd-aims-to-reinvigorate-x86-server-business.html Now they are going to give it another try with Zen, and I think it is a promising try. But then again, Zen is not more power hungry than comparable Xeons. Maybe less so.
Arguably there is still good music, you just need to find the right stuff. One that is not too far from classic rock, even if it is usually counted under progressive metal: "The Light And Shade Of Things" by Fates Warning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeF3IWLEeHE)
I think a lot of what was independent radio moved online where it can reach a bigger base that isn't limited by physical geography. With the advent of the podcast anyone can have a show about anything and reach the entire planet (Local internet censorship rules apply. Check your country's rules.) which means its possible to support doing that as a full or part time job.
And there is YouTube of course, where people often put up music masquerading as video, showing a still frame and using the audio track of the "video" for playing the music.
Not so much for the big pop stars, their record companies seem to have pretty active lawyers who issue takedown notices pretty fast. But there is a lot of my preferred genre (metal) on YouTube, and those videos tend to last pretty long. It seems that those bands either don't have the money for employing teams of lawyers, or they tolerate a bit of YouTube piracy for its advertisement value.
That advertisement works by the way, my next CD order will contain three albums I discovered on YouTube:
TT Quick - Metal Of Honor
Insomnium - Shadows of a dying sun
Redemption - Snowfall on Judgment day
Does not matter anyway. If the customer insists on Oracle (right or wrong, I agree that many could do nicely with a cheaper or free RDBMS), they get Oracle. Their problem if licenses are too expensive:-)
Not only "workflows" are affected, every long-running job without user interaction is too. Like big downloads on a slow internet connection, those can take several hours. BTW, the computer going into sleep mode can interrupt those too, but at least you can usually resume those by "awakening" your PC.
For my own PC (still on Win7) I use the "No Sleep" tool and have set automatic updates to "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them". Works for me, but I understand that is no longer possible on Win10. Very bad idea and it makes Win10 pretty useless for people who have very long-running jobs.
While I don't have an Echo device, so I cannot try it myself, this sounds like it could be abused by a malicious prankster who researches the correct sequence of commands first.
The next step would be sending something like "Alexa, order me some anal porn" over the speakers in some larger venue. After that, Amazon would certainly backpedal;-)
The statistics from Net Applications (or at least some of them) are available at netmarketshare.com. IMHO you need to take them with a grain of salt. Sometimes these statistics have fluctuations that are not really plausible. For instance, a few months after it fell out of extended support, XP had a strange peak where it increased in popularity by a few percent. Reportedly. I'm skeptical.
Rumors (because that's what they are at this point) talk about 32 PCIe lanes for desktop Zen. That is good but not exceptional, the better Intel E-series CPUs have 40.
But Zen will probably beat the E-series in price while coming (very) close in performance, much better than the situation with Bulldozer. That should be enough to shake up the market, please the AMD fans and maybe force Intel to rethink its very high prices.
In short, I don't expect Zen to be a wonder CPU, but I expect it to bring real competition back.
I agree about Microsoft's business practices, but that is not their only problem.
In the posts here and in the articles by Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34549) Kunedog linked to, the software quality of Windows Store in combination with Windows 10 is described as pretty abysmal. At the same time, Steam works pretty well these days.
So I expect the Windows Store to become a fiasco of Zune proportions;-)
UBI will be nothing more than the current welfare program expanded. And if you think for a second any government will financially approve any more than BASIC bread-and-cheese income, you're delusional.
Yes, it will be a sort of welfare program. But the Finnish are planning a model experiment with UBI anyway, with the UBI being slightly higer than the current welfare rates. There is your government that at least considers the possibility.
And I think the Finnish approach makes sense. There is a growing part of society that won't get a job again, due to automation increasingly killing low-income jobs. Now in most of Europe this means a lot of bureaucracy for making sure that only really poor people get welfare. The finnish government expects more savings on the bureaucracy then the increase in UBI over the old welfare rates will cost.
Probably all correct, but there is also the difference that someone at the seat of the company can do some things better than someone telecommuting. Such as attending meetings where some things happen on paper, checking out hardware problems in jobs that include such tasks...
H1Bs may erode that difference though because they are also local.
As far as I know NetMarketShare is just counting installations based on what peoples user agent strings are reporting during normal web surfing. I don't know of any way to determine an OS date of install from a user agent string.
This.
All you can tell from the numbers is what OS people actually use, and that may be distorted by some people changing their user agent strings. Not many people probably, but (without proof) I suspect that it will be some users with exotic OSes or browsers, who want to pretend having a mainstream system.
Because sometimes, stupid websites decline to serve browsers their developers are not familiar with.
My point is that the previously steady increase of Windows 10 marketshare (which every previous MS operating system had as well) seems to have stopped in recent months. While its predecessors' marketshare appears stable. Something is not going as planned for Microsoft.
BTW, Windows XP is still declining, albeit slowly. Netmarketshare shows it slightly below 8.1 now.
Unless the customers actively hate it. In the data by netmarketshare.com, the market share for Windows 10 on the desktop has not increased since August. That is untypical, usually a new Microsoft OS would rise in percentage until a successor is released.
At the same time, the market share for Windows 8.1 is pretty stable since June. Similar for Windows 7, it seems people REALLY dislike the idea of switching to Win10.
Now the question is, where will those people go when Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 go out of support? My guess is that many of them will keep their systems despite no more security updates, which may have interesting results at some point;-)
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear. These politicians are being capitalists by selling their product, legislation to the highest bidder. Their supposed to sell it to the voters (who appointed them at the ballot box and pay their salaries with taxes) but the voters offer less than the market will bear.
That's capitalism - like it or not.
That's poor oversight by the voters. Because most of them are re-electing the douchebags who made promises to the voters before the elections and then sold out to corporate interests. I'd expect a lot more people voting for third parties, concerns about "lost votes" be damned.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite easy to get here in Germany.
I have a small driver set (bits for an electric screwdriver) with 14 Torx bits, 7 regular ones and the same sizes in "tamper resistant". Tamper resistant in quotation marks, because it isn't if you get the bits so easily. Purchased it in some ordinary hardware store.
Religious arguments aside, I think it is smarter in the long run to use renewable energy for fuel and reserve fossil fuels for steel and plastics making.
Those are also important, and unlike the use as fuel, I don't see an alternative that is close to being practicable on a large scale here.
The specification that the Fibonacci routine has to be recursive is stupid in the first place. Forget the "unless I can do it in assembly or a language that allows stack-free re-entry and short-circuiting", recursion is not needed at all if you have some leeway in picking the best approach.
A much better solution is starting at the 3rd element, with the 1st and 2nd element being known. Then you go forward through the 4th, 5th element and so on until you reach the Nth element.
I actually got that problem as an exercise in my university days. First I did it as asked, then with a 100 element array, pre-filling the 1st and 2nd element, then working my way up.
Arguably the array variant was still a waste of memory, because you can do it in 3 variables with a bit of shifting the numbers around. But even that primitive solution was way better than the recursive approach.
This is an example of the mistake being in the head of the person who generates the questions for the test. By telling the candidates to use a specific approach, (s)he actually suppressed the best answers.
At least in this case, they have given the customer a good reason to update his bad review. ;)
With a description of the bricking and a quote from the email by the manufacturer. I guess that would make the impact of the bad review a bit larger
I've read it, and it is mimicking that through idiotic and restrictive End User License Agreements. For the software.
There is no explicit clause that forbids tinkering with the hardware, but that seems to be enforced by the software. As in, change a part that has a microcontroller and it won't work without a John Deere technician coming and authorizing it.
Besides, if I read paragraph 13 correctly, the owner of the tractor has to indemnify John Deere and its dealers against all and any lawsuits, even if John Deere or the dealer is at fault for the cause of the lawsuit. That goes beyond everything I've seen in software EULAs so far. Those usually demand only indemnification against lawsuits that arise out of actions by the owner.
And why is it even necessary to negotiate here?
This could be sidestepped by telling, not asking the software vendors to fix their stuff within 90 days. Because after 90 days, the vulnerability will be made public. Either they fix their stuff or they can watch their customers' IT being raped :-)
Windows Update already tends to do similar stuff:
https://betanews.com/2016/05/04/windows-10-ruins-pro-gaming-stream/
Really?
About 1 1/2 years ago, AMD was on its way out in the server market because the Opterons were not competitive enough anymore: http://www.eweek.com/servers/amd-aims-to-reinvigorate-x86-server-business.html
Now they are going to give it another try with Zen, and I think it is a promising try. But then again, Zen is not more power hungry than comparable Xeons. Maybe less so.
Nice try, but the lawyers already got this one ;)
Arguably there is still good music, you just need to find the right stuff. One that is not too far from classic rock, even if it is usually counted under progressive metal:
"The Light And Shade Of Things" by Fates Warning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeF3IWLEeHE)
I think a lot of what was independent radio moved online where it can reach a bigger base that isn't limited by physical geography. With the advent of the podcast anyone can have a show about anything and reach the entire planet (Local internet censorship rules apply. Check your country's rules.) which means its possible to support doing that as a full or part time job.
And there is YouTube of course, where people often put up music masquerading as video, showing a still frame and using the audio track of the "video" for playing the music.
Not so much for the big pop stars, their record companies seem to have pretty active lawyers who issue takedown notices pretty fast. But there is a lot of my preferred genre (metal) on YouTube, and those videos tend to last pretty long. It seems that those bands either don't have the money for employing teams of lawyers, or they tolerate a bit of YouTube piracy for its advertisement value.
That advertisement works by the way, my next CD order will contain three albums I discovered on YouTube:
TT Quick - Metal Of Honor
Insomnium - Shadows of a dying sun
Redemption - Snowfall on Judgment day
Does not matter anyway. If the customer insists on Oracle (right or wrong, I agree that many could do nicely with a cheaper or free RDBMS), they get Oracle. Their problem if licenses are too expensive :-)
Not only "workflows" are affected, every long-running job without user interaction is too. Like big downloads on a slow internet connection, those can take several hours.
BTW, the computer going into sleep mode can interrupt those too, but at least you can usually resume those by "awakening" your PC.
For my own PC (still on Win7) I use the "No Sleep" tool and have set automatic updates to "Download updates but let me choose whether to install them". Works for me, but I understand that is no longer possible on Win10. Very bad idea and it makes Win10 pretty useless for people who have very long-running jobs.
I'll give it a try by paraphrasing, based on my understanding of the phrase:
"Malicious persons who are unscheduling things you've scheduled".
Bullies => "malicious persons" is not a quite exact translation, but it should get the meaning across.
While I don't have an Echo device, so I cannot try it myself, this sounds like it could be abused by a malicious prankster who researches the correct sequence of commands first.
The next step would be sending something like "Alexa, order me some anal porn" over the speakers in some larger venue. After that, Amazon would certainly backpedal ;-)
The statistics from Net Applications (or at least some of them) are available at netmarketshare.com. IMHO you need to take them with a grain of salt. Sometimes these statistics have fluctuations that are not really plausible. For instance, a few months after it fell out of extended support, XP had a strange peak where it increased in popularity by a few percent. Reportedly. I'm skeptical.
Rumors (because that's what they are at this point) talk about 32 PCIe lanes for desktop Zen.
That is good but not exceptional, the better Intel E-series CPUs have 40.
But Zen will probably beat the E-series in price while coming (very) close in performance, much better than the situation with Bulldozer. That should be enough to shake up the market, please the AMD fans and maybe force Intel to rethink its very high prices.
In short, I don't expect Zen to be a wonder CPU, but I expect it to bring real competition back.
I agree about Microsoft's business practices, but that is not their only problem.
In the posts here and in the articles by Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34549) Kunedog linked to, the software quality of Windows Store in combination with Windows 10 is described as pretty abysmal. At the same time, Steam works pretty well these days.
So I expect the Windows Store to become a fiasco of Zune proportions ;-)
UBI will be nothing more than the current welfare program expanded. And if you think for a second any government will financially approve any more than BASIC bread-and-cheese income, you're delusional.
Yes, it will be a sort of welfare program. But the Finnish are planning a model experiment with UBI anyway, with the UBI being slightly higer than the current welfare rates. There is your government that at least considers the possibility.
And I think the Finnish approach makes sense. There is a growing part of society that won't get a job again, due to automation increasingly killing low-income jobs. Now in most of Europe this means a lot of bureaucracy for making sure that only really poor people get welfare. The finnish government expects more savings on the bureaucracy then the increase in UBI over the old welfare rates will cost.
I'm just curious, would diamond wafers offer any serious advantages over current silicon? Heat conduction, maybe?
Long version: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369702107703498
Short version:
Diamond promises to be superior in most properties that are important for electronic components.
Probably all correct, but there is also the difference that someone at the seat of the company can do some things better than someone telecommuting. Such as attending meetings where some things happen on paper, checking out hardware problems in jobs that include such tasks...
H1Bs may erode that difference though because they are also local.
As far as I know NetMarketShare is just counting installations based on what peoples user agent strings are reporting during normal web surfing. I don't know of any way to determine an OS date of install from a user agent string.
This.
All you can tell from the numbers is what OS people actually use, and that may be distorted by some people changing their user agent strings.
Not many people probably, but (without proof) I suspect that it will be some users with exotic OSes or browsers, who want to pretend having a mainstream system.
Because sometimes, stupid websites decline to serve browsers their developers are not familiar with.
My point is that the previously steady increase of Windows 10 marketshare (which every previous MS operating system had as well) seems to have stopped in recent months. While its predecessors' marketshare appears stable. Something is not going as planned for Microsoft.
BTW, Windows XP is still declining, albeit slowly. Netmarketshare shows it slightly below 8.1 now.
Unless the customers actively hate it.
In the data by netmarketshare.com, the market share for Windows 10 on the desktop has not increased since August. That is untypical, usually a new Microsoft OS would rise in percentage until a successor is released.
At the same time, the market share for Windows 8.1 is pretty stable since June. Similar for Windows 7, it seems people REALLY dislike the idea of switching to Win10.
Now the question is, where will those people go when Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 go out of support? ;-)
My guess is that many of them will keep their systems despite no more security updates, which may have interesting results at some point
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear. These politicians are being capitalists by selling their product, legislation to the highest bidder. Their supposed to sell it to the voters (who appointed them at the ballot box and pay their salaries with taxes) but the voters offer less than the market will bear.
That's capitalism - like it or not.
That's poor oversight by the voters. Because most of them are re-electing the douchebags who made promises to the voters before the elections and then sold out to corporate interests. I'd expect a lot more people voting for third parties, concerns about "lost votes" be damned.