His numbers are way off. First a gaming computer is not "three refrigerators." A fridge/freezer combo uses like 400-800 watts when spun up depending on size and if it is frostless or not. Your typical reasonably high end gaming computer (high end quad core processor, single high end GPU) uses in the 300-400 watt range when fully spun up. There are, of course, higher end systems but they are not common as they cost a lot, for not a ton of gain.
Well the idea that there are tons of components or settings that'll just tank energy use is stupid. In terms of settings, ya those are default. By default a system will put its processor and GPU in to an idle state when not heavily loaded, and indeed most systems draw 90 watts or less when idle. In terms of componentry, there really isn't a ton of room for gain.
Like with PSUs. Any reasonable quality PSU that you might see in a gamer build is at least 80% efficient, and usually more like 85%. Go all the way to the high end, which many gamers already do, and you are only pushing 90-92% max. A gain, sure, but not much. If a system draws 300 watts DC going from an 85% (bronze) PSU to a 92% (platinum) PSU is the difference between 350 and 326 watts at the wall.
Then there's things like GPUs and CPUs. Well guess what? A give one is as efficient as it can be at a given performance level. There aren't the better and worse ones. You can't buy the efficient model GTX 980 and the inefficient model. They are the same. You can swap one kind of component for another and maybe gain efficiency. Like you can swap an AMD 390X for an nVidia GTX 980Ti and that'll use less power, but what if you want the AMD card?
Also there's the issue that usually the new ones are more efficient than older ones. Fair enough but in addition to the cost of upgrading that ignores the energy cost of producing the cards. Suggesting that everyone buy the newest shit all the time is not realistic, or energy efficient (a lot of our energy use goes in to making things).
This guy just doesn't know anything about computers. He's convinced that there's these vast optimizations that could happen, if only people wanted it. Not really the case.
I would be perfectly happy if they just said "Know what? OS-X is a home user OS. We don't support the enterprise. We are going to remove support for these enterprise features with the next version. Use something else." That would be great because then I could tell all the Macheads to suck it up and use Windows or Linux.
However Apple likes to play at enterprise support, they've played at it for years. They act like they care, but as you note they half-ass it to the extreme.
Even internally. I remember not long after Apple stopped the Xserve I was talking to one of their engineers and I ask him what they were going to do. Apple had started doing the MS thing of "eating their own dogfood" and was heavily using OS-X on Xserve for their own stuff. He said "I have no idea. They didn't tell us this was coming. We'll probably start using IBM hardware again."
It drives me up the wall as we waste an inordinate amount of time dealing with Macs because people want a shiny toy and can't understand they are unsuited for enterprise use.
How about, well, learning to support an enterprise? Stop treating every device like it is a consumer toy. Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.
It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.
Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."
His claims that if he went to Sweden they'd send him to the US. Ummmm, really? Because if there were a nation I would be worried about handing me off to the US clandestinely, it would be the UK. The UK and US cooperate to a ridiculous extent on international matters. So I have trouble believing that you could go there and feel like they'd protect you, but be worried about Sweden handing you over.
The validity of the charges in Sweden aren't his only problem. They could drop the case, he'd still be in trouble with the UK because he fled bail. Bail is an agreement between you and the court. You agree to appear as ordered, and they let you out of jail. Often there is also a monetary component to try and ensure your compliance. However regardless of the details, you are legally required to present yourself in court when ordered.
So when Sweden said they wanted him, the UK arrested him. In the EU there's some pretty strong extradition rules so even though the UK had no issue with him, their extradition treaty with Sweden required them to arrest him. He was granted bail, and the monetary component was paid for by supporters. At the point, he had to wait for a court date when the UK courts would determine if the extradition request was valid. At that point if they did, they'd hand him off to Sweden, give back his bail money, and would be all done as far as they were concerned.
They did find it was a valid request, he challenged that finding, and so on up to the UK's high court. They ruled that yes, it was a valid request. Remember this has nothing to do with guilt, they are not interested in that. Their only interest is if the extradition request is a valid one per the treaty. It was, so they said "Ok, you have to turn yourself in and we'll ship you off to Sweden." He decided not to, and instead fled.
Well at that point he become a criminal in the UK. They now had a criminal interest in him since he'd broken UK law by skipping bail. Doesn't matter anything about the original charges. This is a separate crime, and it is an ongoing one, so no statute of limitations.
That's how it works basically everywhere. If the court says you have to how up, and you don't, that by itself is a crime.
Comparing EA and Rovio is silly. Rovio has one product and a couple of other tiny ones. An accurate comparison of Rovio would be to one of EA's development studios, not to all of EA itself.
260 people is a ton for a studio. Even if you look at the really big studios working on the really big titles for EA and Activision, it is usually only a couple hundred people at most. That's to produce things like Battlefield (and it's associated engine, which is quite advanced) not to produce a silly mobile game where you fling birds at pigs.
It sounds like Rovio had way more people than could be useful.
That describes none of the grocers I shop at. Most of them have the cheese up front with the deli. The trend seems to be various cheeses at the deli you can get sliced, and then a separate display of a bunch of other block cheeses you can browse. As I said, they like to locate the deli up front.
Milk varies. At Safeway it is directly back from the deli. You have deli, liquor, bakery, milk heading back in a straight line. At Sprouts it is at the other corner of the store, as far away from the deli as it could be. At Target, it is in the front, along with the other refrigerated foods (meats, produce, cheese, etc).
Most places seem to lay their stores out based on themed isles. A given isle will be devoted to like items. So you walk along the isles until you find what you are after, then walk down one to find the item you want.
Comcast are real dicks about their cap in many locations. My boss got charged $10 for going over his 300GB cap. That is a stupidly low cap and a stupid high charge (only gets you 50GB more). On my Cox connection, which is a similar speed, I get a 2TB cap (and no overages charges if I exceed it).
While data caps are needed to keep people playing nice, since all network resources are shared at some point, Comcast are real jerks about it and keep the caps very low, and charge a stupid amount for overages.
If it was about limiting use thy'd do it like Cox. With Cox, when you exceed the cap nothing happens, it is a soft cap. Depending on how much and how often, they may call you and yell at you. Particularly if you have a lower tier service they'll call and encourage you to move up to a higher tier one (which has a larger cap). They reserve the right to cancel your service if it becomes a problem, but I am not aware of this happening in any cases.
For a great many of them, the motivating factor isn't making society safer. It is not a reasoned position of "Firearms cause too many injuries and deaths, however research indicates that by implementing X, Y and Z controls we can reduce that number significantly and thus we should to make things safer. Usually it is an emotional "Ahhhh! Guns are scary! I hate guns, I hate the people who like guns, get rid of them!" type of reaction. They've done little to no actual research and study on firearms (or other weapons) and just want it to all disappear by magic.
Unsurprisingly this leads to a lot of bad and ineffective laws.
Also for some it is a statist type of position: They want more weapons control because they believe the government should have more power. It again isn't about safety, it is about control. They want the government to have all the guns.
Hence you get things like trying to ban Tasers and other laws that vilify less-lethal weapons as much or more than firearms. It seems strange from a public safety standpoint, but you have to understand that for those behind it, public safety isn't the concern.
T-Mobile has gained a lot, and those customers have largely come from the other three carriers. There's not a lot of room for pure growth, everyone has a cellphone these days, so they mostly steal customers from each other.
T-Mobile's marketing was effective. Also their voice over WiFi proved to be a winner since it is a way to extend coverage without needing to buy a pico cell.
T-Mobile's plan is $50/month to get unlimited talk, text, 1GB of high speed data, and the ability to have 1 phone. Back when Verizon was doing contracts it was about $90/month from them for the same. Now, if you get an expensive phone from T-Mobile and take the 24 month finance, the plan ends up being around $90/month with the payment and taxes.
Here they thing though: You pay off the phone, your rate drops down to $55ish/month (base plus taxes). It'll then stay at that rate as long as you keep your phone. Also, the rate is less if you get a less expensive phone. Get a cheaper phone, either used or less features, and you pay less because it cost less.
You save money so long as you are willing to keep older hardware, or buy cheaper hardware. It costs about the same only if you buy expensive hardware. Even then it is cheaper, because whereas T-Mobile wants about $90/month with an expensive phone, Verizon wanted that plus $200 up front.
Looking at Verizon now, it looks the same. $50/month (they divide it as $30/month for the plan, $20/month for the phone) gets you unlimited/unlimited/1GB. If you buy a phone up front, that's your rate. Finance it, and it depends on the phone price. That's much lower than when it was subsidized.
Sprint was the #3 carrier in the nation, T-Mobile was #4. Now T-Mobile is #3. Not all the new customers came from Sprint, of course, but it shows that it was effective. Sprint lost enough and T-Mobile gained enough to change their positions in terms of market share rank.
I live in Arizona, which is one of the very best places to do solar since it is very sunny, very hot, and a significant portion of your electrical use is for cooling so the panels generate the most when you need it the most AND shade your roof. However they aren't available in this area. Really? I'd the the desert of the southwest would be the first place since, well, that is THE place for solar. I mean ya solar can be used and have some benefit anywhere in the world but the hot, sunny, dry places are where it really works well.
People just cannot remain 100% focused and productive 100% of the time. It doesn't work that way. Never has in human history, never will. Thus if you try to force that, all you'll do is burn people out. So in the long run, it'll just decrease productivity over all. Better to have people able to goof off, take breaks, and then get back on task then just getting frazzled, working at low efficiency, and staring off in to space.
I am willing to play fair and tolerate some advertising, but it finally got too invasive and so I got adblock. I am fine with ads, but only so long as they don't disturb me using the web. No autoplay video/audio, no popups, no interstitial. When they start pulling that crap, well sorry but I'm going to have to opt out. If it kills a site off, too bad, maybe you shouldn't have been so annoying.
Advertisers are going to have to learn to keep it reasonable if they want me to stop using adblocking. As it stands now I block by default and only whitelist sites I know aren't bad about it.
The pro industry can get on whatever they like, it doesn't matter as to what people will use. That'll be whatever the big streaming services go for. Youtube, Netflix, Twitch, Amazon, these are the places that matter.
Hardware makers will get on board too. If Youtube needs a certain kind of acceleration to work well, smartphone processors will get it. Doesn't matter if the media industry says it should be something different, they want to sell new phones and something that'll do that is it working well with the streaming services people want.
Also there's the simple issue that they are fighting against existing codecs that already work well. H.264 gives a "good enough" result at speeds that modern Internet connections can cope with. So if new shit costs a lot more and/or has unacceptable restrictions, people just won't use it. Connections aren't getting slower. So you'll have a hard time convincing people to switch to save bandwidth if their bandwidth keeps going up and what they have now is "good enough".
The reason they have a high conviction rate is because they very rarely go to court frivolously. They go in ready. They are methodical about their evidence collection and they make sure they have someone 100% before they indict. A friend sat on a federal grand jury and he was stunned by the amount of evidence they presented. This was just a grand jury, the standard is much, much lower than trial but it didn't matter, they went in fully prepared all the time.
That's a good thing. A low conviction rate is not something we want to see in a court because it means either that the prosecutors are incompetent, or that they are abusing the court system and hauling in innocent people just to fuck up their lives. Ideally conviction rate would be 100%: They'd never bring in anyone unless they had iron clad proof of guilt, and they'd never make any mistakes. Of course we don't have that, but we should try to be as close to it as we can.
A high conviction rate does not imply a kangaroo court that just convicts anyone. Certainly those have high conviction rate, but a well functioning justice system does as well.
That is actually how it works. The FBI it not, by and large, dumb about investigations. They are arguably one of the best in the business. Part of that is they know that you can't always get the evidence you want. So they'll subpoena records, but so long as you make a good faith effort to comply, they tend to be happy.
At work (a university) we get FBI subpoenas once and awhile. Quite often it is for shit that we don't have, like someone's e-mail from a long time ago. We look, see if we have a backup, and if not let them know. They are then on their way.
When people get in trouble is when they try to jam them up or break their own rules. Like if you have a company rule that says you keep all documents of X type for Y years, and they are asking for something that is Y-3 years old, they may well get miffed and go after you if you don't have it. However if you do not retain document type X, and there is no law requiring it, simply letting them know that will make them happy.
This isn't to say nobody ever gets a bad/vindictive/whatever agent that tries to create problems, but if you were to do a study, I bet you'd find that most of the interactions are very professional and they are perfectly understanding if you don't have the information they want. In the cases where a hissing match started it was because someone had the information and refused (or made it sound like that) or otherwise jammed them up.
They just co-exist. He's wrong about efficiency of AC/DC conversion. Even inefficient devices are usually 80% or better these days and the good stuff s 95% or more. So it gets converted back and forth as needed.
There are HVDC distribution lines in the US power grid (and of course other grids). They just get converted back to AC. Often they are converted from AC as well, since most generators are AC. There is some loss, but not a ton, and everything has loss, that's just life.
Likewise there are data centers that are DC powered. No magic, they just have big AC/DC power supplies (generally the bigger you go the more efficient they are) and then run DC power to the servers, often with DC-DC voltage conversion at various points.
So no current wars, we'll just have both, and they can be interconnected as needed. The tech isn't a big deal these days, and isn't all that expensive.
Switched mode PSUs, which is what basically every electronic device uses, have gotten real efficient. No surprise, there has been a big efficiency push as of late. Just how efficient does vary, of course, but it can be as high as the mid 90s (like 95%) for the real good ones, and is pretty much about 80% in all cases. It just isn't that expensive to design a reasonably efficient PSU these days.
If you look at a wall wart or line lump type adapter, they generally have a roman numeral in a circle, which is an efficiency metric. These days the US and Canada are requiring IV, the EU requires V. The exact efficiency level that needs varies with wattage, but above 50 watts it is 85% or higher.
So sure, you could save some energy going all DC in you converted the AC with a large, high voltage, SMPS as they are more efficient, but not near as much as he indicated.
You have to be careful about letting perfect be the enemy of better. Sometimes you don't have a perfect solution to a problem, or even a good one. But you may have one that is better than what you have now. It then makes sense to go with that.
Now please note I'm not saying this is one of those cases, just that it is not political logic, but practical. If your current situation is awful and you can improve it to just bad, well that is worth doing.
While the interconnects are certainly a very important part of a supercomptuer, they aren't the hardest part. Building a high performance CPU takes a shit ton of research and infrastructure. The barrier for entry is exceedingly high and takes a long time to spin up. You can see that with China's Longsoon processor which for all the hyped ended up being a license of a MIPS core, built on an old process technology. Building a ton end CPU is just tough stuff.
Of course then there's the other fact that there are plenty of interconnect makers that are not Chinese. The big names in high speed interconnects are Cray (US), IBM (US), and Infiniband (which is made by many companies like Intel and Mellanox). It's not like China has the high speed interconnect market cornered.
Finally there's the silliness of focusing on #1. Yes, they have the #1 computer at the linpack benchmark (which is not good at representing performance in all things). However the US has the #2, 3, 5, 8, and 10. In other words, half of the top 10. The idea that only the top spot matters is very, very silly.
Slashdot has been crying wolf since they are a geek site and geeks seem to like that kind of thing and also like new technology, no matter the cost and issues.
However there have been actual depletions of IPv4 space of various kinds. First it was that all available networks were allocated to regional registrars. Now some of those regional registrars are allocating all their remaining addresses.
That doesn't mean doomsday, of course, it means that for any additional allocation to go on, something would have to be reclaimed. That has happened in the past, organizations have given back part of their allocations so they could be reassigned. It may lead to IPs being worth more. Company A might want some IPs and Company B could cut their usage with renumbering, NAT, etc so they'll agree to sell them.
Since IPs aren't used up in the sens of being destroyed, there'll never be some doomsday where we just "run out" but as time goes on the available space vs demand will make things more difficult. As that difficulty increases, IPv6 makes more sense and we'll see more of it.
We are already getting there in many ways. You see a lot of US ISPs preparing to roll it out, despite having large IPv4 allocations themselves, because they are seeing the need for it.
Slashdot Mirror
His numbers are way off. First a gaming computer is not "three refrigerators." A fridge/freezer combo uses like 400-800 watts when spun up depending on size and if it is frostless or not. Your typical reasonably high end gaming computer (high end quad core processor, single high end GPU) uses in the 300-400 watt range when fully spun up. There are, of course, higher end systems but they are not common as they cost a lot, for not a ton of gain.
Well the idea that there are tons of components or settings that'll just tank energy use is stupid. In terms of settings, ya those are default. By default a system will put its processor and GPU in to an idle state when not heavily loaded, and indeed most systems draw 90 watts or less when idle. In terms of componentry, there really isn't a ton of room for gain.
Like with PSUs. Any reasonable quality PSU that you might see in a gamer build is at least 80% efficient, and usually more like 85%. Go all the way to the high end, which many gamers already do, and you are only pushing 90-92% max. A gain, sure, but not much. If a system draws 300 watts DC going from an 85% (bronze) PSU to a 92% (platinum) PSU is the difference between 350 and 326 watts at the wall.
Then there's things like GPUs and CPUs. Well guess what? A give one is as efficient as it can be at a given performance level. There aren't the better and worse ones. You can't buy the efficient model GTX 980 and the inefficient model. They are the same. You can swap one kind of component for another and maybe gain efficiency. Like you can swap an AMD 390X for an nVidia GTX 980Ti and that'll use less power, but what if you want the AMD card?
Also there's the issue that usually the new ones are more efficient than older ones. Fair enough but in addition to the cost of upgrading that ignores the energy cost of producing the cards. Suggesting that everyone buy the newest shit all the time is not realistic, or energy efficient (a lot of our energy use goes in to making things).
This guy just doesn't know anything about computers. He's convinced that there's these vast optimizations that could happen, if only people wanted it. Not really the case.
I would be perfectly happy if they just said "Know what? OS-X is a home user OS. We don't support the enterprise. We are going to remove support for these enterprise features with the next version. Use something else." That would be great because then I could tell all the Macheads to suck it up and use Windows or Linux.
However Apple likes to play at enterprise support, they've played at it for years. They act like they care, but as you note they half-ass it to the extreme.
Even internally. I remember not long after Apple stopped the Xserve I was talking to one of their engineers and I ask him what they were going to do. Apple had started doing the MS thing of "eating their own dogfood" and was heavily using OS-X on Xserve for their own stuff. He said "I have no idea. They didn't tell us this was coming. We'll probably start using IBM hardware again."
It drives me up the wall as we waste an inordinate amount of time dealing with Macs because people want a shiny toy and can't understand they are unsuited for enterprise use.
How about, well, learning to support an enterprise? Stop treating every device like it is a consumer toy. Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.
It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.
Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."
His claims that if he went to Sweden they'd send him to the US. Ummmm, really? Because if there were a nation I would be worried about handing me off to the US clandestinely, it would be the UK. The UK and US cooperate to a ridiculous extent on international matters. So I have trouble believing that you could go there and feel like they'd protect you, but be worried about Sweden handing you over.
The validity of the charges in Sweden aren't his only problem. They could drop the case, he'd still be in trouble with the UK because he fled bail. Bail is an agreement between you and the court. You agree to appear as ordered, and they let you out of jail. Often there is also a monetary component to try and ensure your compliance. However regardless of the details, you are legally required to present yourself in court when ordered.
So when Sweden said they wanted him, the UK arrested him. In the EU there's some pretty strong extradition rules so even though the UK had no issue with him, their extradition treaty with Sweden required them to arrest him. He was granted bail, and the monetary component was paid for by supporters. At the point, he had to wait for a court date when the UK courts would determine if the extradition request was valid. At that point if they did, they'd hand him off to Sweden, give back his bail money, and would be all done as far as they were concerned.
They did find it was a valid request, he challenged that finding, and so on up to the UK's high court. They ruled that yes, it was a valid request. Remember this has nothing to do with guilt, they are not interested in that. Their only interest is if the extradition request is a valid one per the treaty. It was, so they said "Ok, you have to turn yourself in and we'll ship you off to Sweden." He decided not to, and instead fled.
Well at that point he become a criminal in the UK. They now had a criminal interest in him since he'd broken UK law by skipping bail. Doesn't matter anything about the original charges. This is a separate crime, and it is an ongoing one, so no statute of limitations.
That's how it works basically everywhere. If the court says you have to how up, and you don't, that by itself is a crime.
Comparing EA and Rovio is silly. Rovio has one product and a couple of other tiny ones. An accurate comparison of Rovio would be to one of EA's development studios, not to all of EA itself.
260 people is a ton for a studio. Even if you look at the really big studios working on the really big titles for EA and Activision, it is usually only a couple hundred people at most. That's to produce things like Battlefield (and it's associated engine, which is quite advanced) not to produce a silly mobile game where you fling birds at pigs.
It sounds like Rovio had way more people than could be useful.
That describes none of the grocers I shop at. Most of them have the cheese up front with the deli. The trend seems to be various cheeses at the deli you can get sliced, and then a separate display of a bunch of other block cheeses you can browse. As I said, they like to locate the deli up front.
Milk varies. At Safeway it is directly back from the deli. You have deli, liquor, bakery, milk heading back in a straight line. At Sprouts it is at the other corner of the store, as far away from the deli as it could be. At Target, it is in the front, along with the other refrigerated foods (meats, produce, cheese, etc).
Most places seem to lay their stores out based on themed isles. A given isle will be devoted to like items. So you walk along the isles until you find what you are after, then walk down one to find the item you want.
Comcast are real dicks about their cap in many locations. My boss got charged $10 for going over his 300GB cap. That is a stupidly low cap and a stupid high charge (only gets you 50GB more). On my Cox connection, which is a similar speed, I get a 2TB cap (and no overages charges if I exceed it).
While data caps are needed to keep people playing nice, since all network resources are shared at some point, Comcast are real jerks about it and keep the caps very low, and charge a stupid amount for overages.
If it was about limiting use thy'd do it like Cox. With Cox, when you exceed the cap nothing happens, it is a soft cap. Depending on how much and how often, they may call you and yell at you. Particularly if you have a lower tier service they'll call and encourage you to move up to a higher tier one (which has a larger cap). They reserve the right to cancel your service if it becomes a problem, but I am not aware of this happening in any cases.
For a great many of them, the motivating factor isn't making society safer. It is not a reasoned position of "Firearms cause too many injuries and deaths, however research indicates that by implementing X, Y and Z controls we can reduce that number significantly and thus we should to make things safer. Usually it is an emotional "Ahhhh! Guns are scary! I hate guns, I hate the people who like guns, get rid of them!" type of reaction. They've done little to no actual research and study on firearms (or other weapons) and just want it to all disappear by magic.
Unsurprisingly this leads to a lot of bad and ineffective laws.
Also for some it is a statist type of position: They want more weapons control because they believe the government should have more power. It again isn't about safety, it is about control. They want the government to have all the guns.
Hence you get things like trying to ban Tasers and other laws that vilify less-lethal weapons as much or more than firearms. It seems strange from a public safety standpoint, but you have to understand that for those behind it, public safety isn't the concern.
T-Mobile has gained a lot, and those customers have largely come from the other three carriers. There's not a lot of room for pure growth, everyone has a cellphone these days, so they mostly steal customers from each other.
T-Mobile's marketing was effective. Also their voice over WiFi proved to be a winner since it is a way to extend coverage without needing to buy a pico cell.
T-Mobile's plan is $50/month to get unlimited talk, text, 1GB of high speed data, and the ability to have 1 phone. Back when Verizon was doing contracts it was about $90/month from them for the same. Now, if you get an expensive phone from T-Mobile and take the 24 month finance, the plan ends up being around $90/month with the payment and taxes.
Here they thing though: You pay off the phone, your rate drops down to $55ish/month (base plus taxes). It'll then stay at that rate as long as you keep your phone. Also, the rate is less if you get a less expensive phone. Get a cheaper phone, either used or less features, and you pay less because it cost less.
You save money so long as you are willing to keep older hardware, or buy cheaper hardware. It costs about the same only if you buy expensive hardware. Even then it is cheaper, because whereas T-Mobile wants about $90/month with an expensive phone, Verizon wanted that plus $200 up front.
Looking at Verizon now, it looks the same. $50/month (they divide it as $30/month for the plan, $20/month for the phone) gets you unlimited/unlimited/1GB. If you buy a phone up front, that's your rate. Finance it, and it depends on the phone price. That's much lower than when it was subsidized.
Sprint was the #3 carrier in the nation, T-Mobile was #4. Now T-Mobile is #3. Not all the new customers came from Sprint, of course, but it shows that it was effective. Sprint lost enough and T-Mobile gained enough to change their positions in terms of market share rank.
We don't pay a whole lot, we have multiple generation stations, and sell power to California. Also cost of living is generally fairly low in Arizona.
Solar is becoming fairly popular. Most new houses have it, and many businesses do. Older houses are not as often retrofitted though, due to cost.
I live in a condo, so I can't just have it installed, it would have to be a thing the association does.
I live in Arizona, which is one of the very best places to do solar since it is very sunny, very hot, and a significant portion of your electrical use is for cooling so the panels generate the most when you need it the most AND shade your roof. However they aren't available in this area. Really? I'd the the desert of the southwest would be the first place since, well, that is THE place for solar. I mean ya solar can be used and have some benefit anywhere in the world but the hot, sunny, dry places are where it really works well.
People just cannot remain 100% focused and productive 100% of the time. It doesn't work that way. Never has in human history, never will. Thus if you try to force that, all you'll do is burn people out. So in the long run, it'll just decrease productivity over all. Better to have people able to goof off, take breaks, and then get back on task then just getting frazzled, working at low efficiency, and staring off in to space.
I'm not sure what aesthetic they were going for, but they missed the mark. You can argue about features and such, but it is ugly.
I am willing to play fair and tolerate some advertising, but it finally got too invasive and so I got adblock. I am fine with ads, but only so long as they don't disturb me using the web. No autoplay video/audio, no popups, no interstitial. When they start pulling that crap, well sorry but I'm going to have to opt out. If it kills a site off, too bad, maybe you shouldn't have been so annoying.
Advertisers are going to have to learn to keep it reasonable if they want me to stop using adblocking. As it stands now I block by default and only whitelist sites I know aren't bad about it.
The pro industry can get on whatever they like, it doesn't matter as to what people will use. That'll be whatever the big streaming services go for. Youtube, Netflix, Twitch, Amazon, these are the places that matter.
Hardware makers will get on board too. If Youtube needs a certain kind of acceleration to work well, smartphone processors will get it. Doesn't matter if the media industry says it should be something different, they want to sell new phones and something that'll do that is it working well with the streaming services people want.
Also there's the simple issue that they are fighting against existing codecs that already work well. H.264 gives a "good enough" result at speeds that modern Internet connections can cope with. So if new shit costs a lot more and/or has unacceptable restrictions, people just won't use it. Connections aren't getting slower. So you'll have a hard time convincing people to switch to save bandwidth if their bandwidth keeps going up and what they have now is "good enough".
The reason they have a high conviction rate is because they very rarely go to court frivolously. They go in ready. They are methodical about their evidence collection and they make sure they have someone 100% before they indict. A friend sat on a federal grand jury and he was stunned by the amount of evidence they presented. This was just a grand jury, the standard is much, much lower than trial but it didn't matter, they went in fully prepared all the time.
That's a good thing. A low conviction rate is not something we want to see in a court because it means either that the prosecutors are incompetent, or that they are abusing the court system and hauling in innocent people just to fuck up their lives. Ideally conviction rate would be 100%: They'd never bring in anyone unless they had iron clad proof of guilt, and they'd never make any mistakes. Of course we don't have that, but we should try to be as close to it as we can.
A high conviction rate does not imply a kangaroo court that just convicts anyone. Certainly those have high conviction rate, but a well functioning justice system does as well.
That is actually how it works. The FBI it not, by and large, dumb about investigations. They are arguably one of the best in the business. Part of that is they know that you can't always get the evidence you want. So they'll subpoena records, but so long as you make a good faith effort to comply, they tend to be happy.
At work (a university) we get FBI subpoenas once and awhile. Quite often it is for shit that we don't have, like someone's e-mail from a long time ago. We look, see if we have a backup, and if not let them know. They are then on their way.
When people get in trouble is when they try to jam them up or break their own rules. Like if you have a company rule that says you keep all documents of X type for Y years, and they are asking for something that is Y-3 years old, they may well get miffed and go after you if you don't have it. However if you do not retain document type X, and there is no law requiring it, simply letting them know that will make them happy.
This isn't to say nobody ever gets a bad/vindictive/whatever agent that tries to create problems, but if you were to do a study, I bet you'd find that most of the interactions are very professional and they are perfectly understanding if you don't have the information they want. In the cases where a hissing match started it was because someone had the information and refused (or made it sound like that) or otherwise jammed them up.
They just co-exist. He's wrong about efficiency of AC/DC conversion. Even inefficient devices are usually 80% or better these days and the good stuff s 95% or more. So it gets converted back and forth as needed.
There are HVDC distribution lines in the US power grid (and of course other grids). They just get converted back to AC. Often they are converted from AC as well, since most generators are AC. There is some loss, but not a ton, and everything has loss, that's just life.
Likewise there are data centers that are DC powered. No magic, they just have big AC/DC power supplies (generally the bigger you go the more efficient they are) and then run DC power to the servers, often with DC-DC voltage conversion at various points.
So no current wars, we'll just have both, and they can be interconnected as needed. The tech isn't a big deal these days, and isn't all that expensive.
Switched mode PSUs, which is what basically every electronic device uses, have gotten real efficient. No surprise, there has been a big efficiency push as of late. Just how efficient does vary, of course, but it can be as high as the mid 90s (like 95%) for the real good ones, and is pretty much about 80% in all cases. It just isn't that expensive to design a reasonably efficient PSU these days.
If you look at a wall wart or line lump type adapter, they generally have a roman numeral in a circle, which is an efficiency metric. These days the US and Canada are requiring IV, the EU requires V. The exact efficiency level that needs varies with wattage, but above 50 watts it is 85% or higher.
So sure, you could save some energy going all DC in you converted the AC with a large, high voltage, SMPS as they are more efficient, but not near as much as he indicated.
You have to be careful about letting perfect be the enemy of better. Sometimes you don't have a perfect solution to a problem, or even a good one. But you may have one that is better than what you have now. It then makes sense to go with that.
Now please note I'm not saying this is one of those cases, just that it is not political logic, but practical. If your current situation is awful and you can improve it to just bad, well that is worth doing.
While the interconnects are certainly a very important part of a supercomptuer, they aren't the hardest part. Building a high performance CPU takes a shit ton of research and infrastructure. The barrier for entry is exceedingly high and takes a long time to spin up. You can see that with China's Longsoon processor which for all the hyped ended up being a license of a MIPS core, built on an old process technology. Building a ton end CPU is just tough stuff.
Of course then there's the other fact that there are plenty of interconnect makers that are not Chinese. The big names in high speed interconnects are Cray (US), IBM (US), and Infiniband (which is made by many companies like Intel and Mellanox). It's not like China has the high speed interconnect market cornered.
Finally there's the silliness of focusing on #1. Yes, they have the #1 computer at the linpack benchmark (which is not good at representing performance in all things). However the US has the #2, 3, 5, 8, and 10. In other words, half of the top 10. The idea that only the top spot matters is very, very silly.
Slashdot has been crying wolf since they are a geek site and geeks seem to like that kind of thing and also like new technology, no matter the cost and issues.
However there have been actual depletions of IPv4 space of various kinds. First it was that all available networks were allocated to regional registrars. Now some of those regional registrars are allocating all their remaining addresses.
That doesn't mean doomsday, of course, it means that for any additional allocation to go on, something would have to be reclaimed. That has happened in the past, organizations have given back part of their allocations so they could be reassigned. It may lead to IPs being worth more. Company A might want some IPs and Company B could cut their usage with renumbering, NAT, etc so they'll agree to sell them.
Since IPs aren't used up in the sens of being destroyed, there'll never be some doomsday where we just "run out" but as time goes on the available space vs demand will make things more difficult. As that difficulty increases, IPv6 makes more sense and we'll see more of it.
We are already getting there in many ways. You see a lot of US ISPs preparing to roll it out, despite having large IPv4 allocations themselves, because they are seeing the need for it.