I have a 7 year old PC that is still going strong. Sure, I could plop down about $600 bucks to buy one that is twice as fast, but why do that when it works just fine. Now...my 2007 iMac with only 2 GB RAM...that is another story. I would have upgraded a while ago if Apple didn't charge an arm and a leg for their stuff.
So...they are building a solar plant in the most favorable place on this planet for that technology, and one of the least favorable for coal (have to ship it in from far away); and we still are not sure if the ACTUAL cost of power production is better for solar. This is some kind of bid that might lead to huge losses or need big government subsidies.
Maybe the software is tied to the processor speed. Some old DOS games I played back in the day worked that way. When you upgraded your computer to a faster processor, the characters in the game moved so fast you couldn't even keep up. If they moved it to a faster machine, the car would idle at 3000 rpm!
I am still surprised when I connect to some website with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari and basic things do not work. I can't print their document or fill out their form or get some basic thing to work. It spits out some obscure error message or just does nothing. Then I go to the same site with IE and it works fine. This drives me insane.
I agree. Until a company has its shares on the open market, and the total market evaluation stays above $1B because lots of people are willing to buy the shares at the current price and the existing shareholders won't sell for anything less...then is it really isn't worth a billion? If existing owners are not dumping their stock because they know it is overvalued, then the value is more likely real.
Maybe your default configuration is different than mine. I'm sure that if I wanted to spend the time, I could go figure out some special setting to change my system so that it doesn't happen again, but all I know is that it happened to me and it sounds like it has happened to others as well...so your insults don't phase me.
To prove the speed of the product I created. I am building a new general-purpose data management system that is designed to replace file systems and databases. It is lightning fast and manages metadata in a very efficient manner. I wanted to show that the speed wasn't just fast because I had everything loaded into memory or disk caches so I rebooted the machine to show how fast I could get the containers (with tens of millions of objects in them) mounted and do queries against them when we had to load everything from disk.
After installing Windows 10, you get updates pushed to you on a regular basis. During a demo, I needed to reboot. The update facility decided that would be a perfect time to spend about 10 minutes updating my machine. It did not give me a choice to postpone it to a more convenient time.
Apple has some nice products, but many of them are lacking in some areas. It appeals to a certain crowd who is willing to pay a big premium for status and form. If you want a super fast machine, you don't buy Apple. I like quality products, but I refuse to pay a huge premium for just a little sticker that claims "I am premium". When Apple stops charging 8x the market rate for memory or storage upgrades; or it stops charging $1500 for a laptop that should cost $800, then I will return to being an Apple customer.
You can't trust anything on the Internet anymore. If you go to a review website hoping to find legitimate reviews by real customers for a product, service, or company; be prepared to encounter hundreds of "phony reviews" that are posted by paid shills to write glowing reviews for crappy products. People are paid to hype things on social media and programmers are busy creating bots to automate stuff like that too. You might see two comments on a forum; one has hundreds of "likes" and the other has none; but all the likes are generated to give the false sense of popularity. As usual, the crooks and scammers are ruining it for everyone else.
Given its track record, I have little faith that the government would use taxpayer funds to get promising ideas developed by people who would otherwise not have the resources to do it on their own. More than likely, this would be just another avenue to funnel tons of cash to the friends and donors of those in power (on both sides of the aisle).
I disagree. There is nothing in Microsoft's compiler (or anyone else's) that requires the programs it compiles to use some kind of "phone home mechanism" or have an internet connection in order for a program to continue to run (unless of course, the program itself was a browser, or something else that used the internet to perform its basic task).
If your game won't run, or your movie won't play, or your software won't load because it can't contact the mother ship, then you don't own it or control it. This has nothing to do with whether the source is open or not.
Scambaiting can be fun. I had a scammer who wanted me to send him money for a fake car he listed for sale. It was amazing how much work he/she was willing to do when they thought I might actually fall for it. I never spent more than 1 minute putting together a response to each email, but I would ask stupid questions that required a detailed response on their part. I pretended I didn't understand their instructions so they had to write them differently instead of just sending canned responses.
I am fully aware that a file system doesn't "find" anything. I didn't say it did. But if you have an application that displays pictures and you have a hard drive with 10 million files on it without any idea which folders contain pictures; your application must search through that file system using file system APIs in order to find them all. This can take an hour or more unless you use some kind of indexing service that runs for hours in the background; doesn't work well on portable drives; and doesn't necessarily index everything.
Thanks for the advice. I actually have no problem telling technical people what it does. Potential customers know what I am talking about when I say 'it is hundreds of times faster than NTFS or Ext3 at finding documents or pictures", or "it can do database table queries faster than PostgreSQL without needing indexes".
But when I try to explain it to those who have money to invest, they give you a blank stare and ask "what is a file system" or "what is a database index"? They don't want to take the time to find out why that is important. Even though companies spend $ Billions every year trying to get better performance from their data managers, investors seem to have trouble figuring out why a product that offers breakthrough technology in this area, has any value. I'm sure it is just that I haven't found the right investor yet, but after so many rejections it is hard to understand why and persevere.
I have a startup that I have been trying to get funding for in order to finish the product. It is highly technical but all the features I have finished work great. I think it will be 10x better than anything else on the market that it will compete against (it does data management). Yet I can't seem to get any attention from investors. If they can't understand it in a 20 second elevator pitch, they have no interest.
Now if we can just do that to all the scammers out there. Give them all so much bogus information that it takes them too much time/resources to figure out what is legit that they could use to scam someone.
Remember the good old days when hard drive capacities doubled or tripled every single year? There was a time when if a 20 GB drive was the biggest thing this year; you could expect 60 GB or 80 GB drives next year. Those days are over. We see higher capacities, but they take a lot longer between cycles. The same thing is happening with CPUs. Once the dies got below about 50 nm, it became increasingly hard to keep shrinking it further. I'm not saying that 1 nm is impossible, but it's going to be very difficult to get there. It's also kind of like clock speeds. Once they reached the GHz range, it started hitting physical barriers (e.g power and heat) and stopped doubling every generation.
Wait until you get the 20 pages of tax forms (and the 100 pages of instructions) required to claim this tax deduction. You might have to keep track of every line of code you wrote and document how long it took you to code it. If you make more than $50,000 in income, be prepared to have this deduction reduced or completely eliminated by the AMT or some other tax tacked on. Also save everything for 7 years in case of an audit (claiming this deduction will also increase your chances of being audited).
Can we do like Hillary Clinton did with her emails? Print the source code out on paper; release them a few pages at a time over a few years; and black out large portions of it after swearing that it didn't exist in the first place? Can we leave out whole functions or classes of objects while insisting they were private and only used to schedule our yoga classes or daughter's wedding? Can we make it so the only way certain people can get the code is with an FBI investigation and subpoenas from Congress?
If I need to see ads (or I have been too lazy to block them), I guess I would rather see ads for tech related stuff or other things I have searched for; than have to see a bunch of ads for things like feminine hygiene products.
And yet....we can't seem to track down and prosecute those scumbags who try to scam old people and other tech novices on the Internet. Most scammers know there is little or no chance of them getting caught or facing some kind of consequences for lying and cheating to get money online.
I can spend about $8000 on a solar system that will save me about $1200 per year ($100 per month on average) in electricity costs. ROI needs to be 7 years or less. A system that takes 20+ years to pay for itself (and then only if nothing goes wrong), does not interest me.
It's like an electric car. If I have to pay an extra $20,000 to buy one, it doesn't make any sense to buy one and only save $100 per month in gas.
Someone needs to invent a RW 'bar' that is long enough to go from the spindle to the outmost track. Any point on the bar would be capable of reading or writing. Instead of moving a narrow head on an actuator arm, you just 'activate' (electronically) the part of the bar that is currently over the track you want to access. If cheap enough, you could install a dozen of these bars all around the disk so that you would never need to rotate more than 30 degrees of a circle before a sector you want is under one of the bars. Rotational latency would be very low even on a 2000 rpm drive. Even better would be the ability to activate multiple points on the bar simultaneously so that you could read or write multiple tracks at the same time.
If Apple CAN unlock this particular iPhone, then Apple can unlock ANY iPhone. If it is already technically possible to comply with the judge's order (i.e. get the data off an existing phone that was running previously released software), then Apple doesn't want anyone to know that.
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I have a 7 year old PC that is still going strong. Sure, I could plop down about $600 bucks to buy one that is twice as fast, but why do that when it works just fine. Now...my 2007 iMac with only 2 GB RAM...that is another story. I would have upgraded a while ago if Apple didn't charge an arm and a leg for their stuff.
So...they are building a solar plant in the most favorable place on this planet for that technology, and one of the least favorable for coal (have to ship it in from far away); and we still are not sure if the ACTUAL cost of power production is better for solar. This is some kind of bid that might lead to huge losses or need big government subsidies.
Maybe the software is tied to the processor speed. Some old DOS games I played back in the day worked that way. When you upgraded your computer to a faster processor, the characters in the game moved so fast you couldn't even keep up. If they moved it to a faster machine, the car would idle at 3000 rpm!
I am still surprised when I connect to some website with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari and basic things do not work. I can't print their document or fill out their form or get some basic thing to work. It spits out some obscure error message or just does nothing. Then I go to the same site with IE and it works fine. This drives me insane.
I agree. Until a company has its shares on the open market, and the total market evaluation stays above $1B because lots of people are willing to buy the shares at the current price and the existing shareholders won't sell for anything less...then is it really isn't worth a billion? If existing owners are not dumping their stock because they know it is overvalued, then the value is more likely real.
Maybe your default configuration is different than mine. I'm sure that if I wanted to spend the time, I could go figure out some special setting to change my system so that it doesn't happen again, but all I know is that it happened to me and it sounds like it has happened to others as well...so your insults don't phase me.
To prove the speed of the product I created. I am building a new general-purpose data management system that is designed to replace file systems and databases. It is lightning fast and manages metadata in a very efficient manner. I wanted to show that the speed wasn't just fast because I had everything loaded into memory or disk caches so I rebooted the machine to show how fast I could get the containers (with tens of millions of objects in them) mounted and do queries against them when we had to load everything from disk.
After installing Windows 10, you get updates pushed to you on a regular basis. During a demo, I needed to reboot. The update facility decided that would be a perfect time to spend about 10 minutes updating my machine. It did not give me a choice to postpone it to a more convenient time.
Apple has some nice products, but many of them are lacking in some areas. It appeals to a certain crowd who is willing to pay a big premium for status and form. If you want a super fast machine, you don't buy Apple. I like quality products, but I refuse to pay a huge premium for just a little sticker that claims "I am premium". When Apple stops charging 8x the market rate for memory or storage upgrades; or it stops charging $1500 for a laptop that should cost $800, then I will return to being an Apple customer.
You can't trust anything on the Internet anymore. If you go to a review website hoping to find legitimate reviews by real customers for a product, service, or company; be prepared to encounter hundreds of "phony reviews" that are posted by paid shills to write glowing reviews for crappy products. People are paid to hype things on social media and programmers are busy creating bots to automate stuff like that too. You might see two comments on a forum; one has hundreds of "likes" and the other has none; but all the likes are generated to give the false sense of popularity. As usual, the crooks and scammers are ruining it for everyone else.
Given its track record, I have little faith that the government would use taxpayer funds to get promising ideas developed by people who would otherwise not have the resources to do it on their own. More than likely, this would be just another avenue to funnel tons of cash to the friends and donors of those in power (on both sides of the aisle).
I disagree. There is nothing in Microsoft's compiler (or anyone else's) that requires the programs it compiles to use some kind of "phone home mechanism" or have an internet connection in order for a program to continue to run (unless of course, the program itself was a browser, or something else that used the internet to perform its basic task). If your game won't run, or your movie won't play, or your software won't load because it can't contact the mother ship, then you don't own it or control it. This has nothing to do with whether the source is open or not.
Scambaiting can be fun. I had a scammer who wanted me to send him money for a fake car he listed for sale. It was amazing how much work he/she was willing to do when they thought I might actually fall for it. I never spent more than 1 minute putting together a response to each email, but I would ask stupid questions that required a detailed response on their part. I pretended I didn't understand their instructions so they had to write them differently instead of just sending canned responses.
I am fully aware that a file system doesn't "find" anything. I didn't say it did. But if you have an application that displays pictures and you have a hard drive with 10 million files on it without any idea which folders contain pictures; your application must search through that file system using file system APIs in order to find them all. This can take an hour or more unless you use some kind of indexing service that runs for hours in the background; doesn't work well on portable drives; and doesn't necessarily index everything.
Thanks for the advice. I actually have no problem telling technical people what it does. Potential customers know what I am talking about when I say 'it is hundreds of times faster than NTFS or Ext3 at finding documents or pictures", or "it can do database table queries faster than PostgreSQL without needing indexes". But when I try to explain it to those who have money to invest, they give you a blank stare and ask "what is a file system" or "what is a database index"? They don't want to take the time to find out why that is important. Even though companies spend $ Billions every year trying to get better performance from their data managers, investors seem to have trouble figuring out why a product that offers breakthrough technology in this area, has any value. I'm sure it is just that I haven't found the right investor yet, but after so many rejections it is hard to understand why and persevere.
I have a startup that I have been trying to get funding for in order to finish the product. It is highly technical but all the features I have finished work great. I think it will be 10x better than anything else on the market that it will compete against (it does data management). Yet I can't seem to get any attention from investors. If they can't understand it in a 20 second elevator pitch, they have no interest.
Now if we can just do that to all the scammers out there. Give them all so much bogus information that it takes them too much time/resources to figure out what is legit that they could use to scam someone.
Remember the good old days when hard drive capacities doubled or tripled every single year? There was a time when if a 20 GB drive was the biggest thing this year; you could expect 60 GB or 80 GB drives next year. Those days are over. We see higher capacities, but they take a lot longer between cycles. The same thing is happening with CPUs. Once the dies got below about 50 nm, it became increasingly hard to keep shrinking it further. I'm not saying that 1 nm is impossible, but it's going to be very difficult to get there. It's also kind of like clock speeds. Once they reached the GHz range, it started hitting physical barriers (e.g power and heat) and stopped doubling every generation.
Wait until you get the 20 pages of tax forms (and the 100 pages of instructions) required to claim this tax deduction. You might have to keep track of every line of code you wrote and document how long it took you to code it. If you make more than $50,000 in income, be prepared to have this deduction reduced or completely eliminated by the AMT or some other tax tacked on. Also save everything for 7 years in case of an audit (claiming this deduction will also increase your chances of being audited).
Can we do like Hillary Clinton did with her emails? Print the source code out on paper; release them a few pages at a time over a few years; and black out large portions of it after swearing that it didn't exist in the first place? Can we leave out whole functions or classes of objects while insisting they were private and only used to schedule our yoga classes or daughter's wedding? Can we make it so the only way certain people can get the code is with an FBI investigation and subpoenas from Congress?
If I need to see ads (or I have been too lazy to block them), I guess I would rather see ads for tech related stuff or other things I have searched for; than have to see a bunch of ads for things like feminine hygiene products.
And yet....we can't seem to track down and prosecute those scumbags who try to scam old people and other tech novices on the Internet. Most scammers know there is little or no chance of them getting caught or facing some kind of consequences for lying and cheating to get money online.
I can spend about $8000 on a solar system that will save me about $1200 per year ($100 per month on average) in electricity costs. ROI needs to be 7 years or less. A system that takes 20+ years to pay for itself (and then only if nothing goes wrong), does not interest me. It's like an electric car. If I have to pay an extra $20,000 to buy one, it doesn't make any sense to buy one and only save $100 per month in gas.
Someone needs to invent a RW 'bar' that is long enough to go from the spindle to the outmost track. Any point on the bar would be capable of reading or writing. Instead of moving a narrow head on an actuator arm, you just 'activate' (electronically) the part of the bar that is currently over the track you want to access. If cheap enough, you could install a dozen of these bars all around the disk so that you would never need to rotate more than 30 degrees of a circle before a sector you want is under one of the bars. Rotational latency would be very low even on a 2000 rpm drive. Even better would be the ability to activate multiple points on the bar simultaneously so that you could read or write multiple tracks at the same time.
If Apple CAN unlock this particular iPhone, then Apple can unlock ANY iPhone. If it is already technically possible to comply with the judge's order (i.e. get the data off an existing phone that was running previously released software), then Apple doesn't want anyone to know that.