I've found that there are really no issues with regards to running a new OS for long periods of time. There was a time when regular reinstalls were a part of my regimen but that is long past. I reinstall only when there's a specific need. That doesn't mean I just put up with a slow computer either, I demand very fast performance from my systems. A reinstall just isn't needed to maintain that.
Likewise, components have gotten much better, and upgrades more incremental, so I've found the need to buy new hardware that would necessitate a reinstall to be less.
My guess? This person either has crap on their system that causes issues, or this is just a "magic incantation" they've always done for supposedly better performance without understanding or examination.
Everyone should just go and learn C and how to do POSIX programming, attain enough mastery in it to be able to diagnose code for obscure security issues (that have eluded many programmers for years) and then design a secure fix.
And they should do that in a day.
Ya that sounds reasonable.
FYI not only are most people not programmers, and have no interest in becoming programmers, but most lack the kind of brain it takes to be a good programmer. The whole "Oh it is OSS fix it yourself!" argument is a really stupid one.
If you set foot in a country, they can arrest you for violating their laws. Doesn't matter if you aren't a citizen and live overseas. If you come there, they can arrest you. So let's say you regularly trash Islam and the Ayatollah and are well known for this. Then you travel to Iran. They very well can arrest you for that. They can't do much if you don't go there but if you show up, they can grab you.
Now in terms of if this particular arrest is legit for the American legal system, almost certainly. Doesn't matter that he was living in a foreign country. If he sold something that is illegal to Americans and using American services, he broke American law. Doesn't matter if he wasn't in America at the time, you don't have to be in a country to break their law. Let me give you a couple examples of how one can easily break a country's law from another country:
1) Ordering someone murdered. Let's say you have yourself a little gang with members in a few countries. You don't like someone over in Sweden so you order one of your Swedish members to murder them. That person broke Swedish law, but so did you. Doesn't matter you weren't there, you orchestrated a murder, that's illegal, and if they can get their hands on you you'll stand trial for it (the US would happily extradite you for that).
2) You set up a gun smuggling business for Canadians. You go and buy guns that are legal in the US, but illegal in Canada. You have them smuggled up and warehoused there, and then sell them to Canadians. You've broken Canadian law. Even if you are operating everything out of the US, what you are doing isn't legal in Canada and that's where it is being done. You house the guns in Canada and sell them to Canadians, that makes it a Canadian issue (you'd get extradited for that too).
So if this dude is selling his shit from AWS, to Americans, the courts will have no problems with the claim that American law applies.
Intent matters in the law. There are things that can be legal or illegal depending on the intent behind it. This can apply to tools as well as actions. If you sell a tool for legitimate uses, you are generally fine even if the tool has some illegitimate uses too. So long as your actions, as in marketing and such, show that you intend it for legit uses, you are fine.
A good example would be all the fine burglary tools for sale at Home Depot. A large number of the tools they sell would work very well for breaking in to houses or cars. However it is very clear that isn't why they sell them, nor why 99.99% of their customers buy them. Not only do the tools have a substantial legitimate use, but that it what all their marketing is about. They don't try to convince you that you need a hammer drill because you could drill open most locks, they try to convince you that you need a hammer drill because you want to put up shelves in concrete or the like. They intend their tools to be used for legitimate activities.
The more shady the product, the more careful you'd better be about how you sell it because the easier it could show intent to have it used for criminal purposes. If it looks like you are just paying lip service to legit uses but really trying to sell your stuff for illegal uses, you are likely to get in trouble.
They know this is an issue they'll win in the long run. There is no justification for the states doing what they are doing, they've just been paid off by the auto dealers. Tesla has won every fight about this I'm aware of. So they want it, they want to get this straightened out in the courts.
If you try to do something to skirt the law, you risk it biting you in the ass later. If you get a court ruling saying "You are allowed to do this, the state has to F off," then you are good to go.
Also, you might notice it gets them press. Nothing like looking like the poor trod on underdog to get more people sympathetic to your cause an interested in your product. They go about everything above board, get stepped on, fight back, win, and then get their way, plus good PR.
No kidding. The whole reason there's a time between "due" and "late" is so that you've time to get a payment out and deal with any issues. Hence it behooves you to pay when something comes due, or shortly after, rather than wait.
Like one time I get a call from some business who just got a check from me to them by mistake. It was for my association dues. My bank mails out a cashier's check, at my behest, each month to the property manager. They had done so properly, but the USPS fucked up and sent it to the wrong address. Now this was no issue as I still had 25 days until payment was late. So I called the bank, they voided the first check and issued a new one. Everything got there no problem.
Now had I waited till the last second it would have been ok, I wouldn't have been out of house and home or anything, but it would have been a hassle getting things all straightened out, and I might have had to pay a late fee. Probably not, as they need to be nice to the owners since we hire them, but they would have the right to charge it.
You want to build slack in to your schedule in case something goes wrong, and that applies to finance as well as it does travel or the like. Well, that time between "due" and "late" is the slack.
I wouldn't presume reporters did their job, they rarely do these days. It is amazing how lazy most reporting is. I generally assume when you hear a story with no discussion of it that all they did was get that person/company's story and print it and did no checking. Usually, I'm right in that:P.
While I'm not saying we should take the word of the lenders without verification, neither should we take the word of the people who are on the receiving end. They may very well not be telling the whole story. Some people who have financial troubles have them because of their own choices, but they rarely admit it.
I had a roommate like that. He was an alcoholic who wouldn't admit it or deal with it. He continually made bad choices in his life, but would never admit anything was his fault. In terms of finance he never paid things when they came due, he didn't pay until he was forced to. It was "due" according to him when they were about to shut off his service, or the like. So he'd get mad about his cellphone getting shut down when he was "a day late" by which he really mean "45 days past the due date, over 30 days late, and had 2 threatening letters to disconnect."
So before you go jumping to the defense of the people in the article, you might want to see what the terms of something like this is. I don't know, and I'm not saying it isn't a "you have to pay by the second it is due or we shut it off," but it also might well be a normal "It is due on day X, late on day X+15, and we shut it off on day X+20," and the people involved have just decided that "X+20" is the day it is "due".
With regards to #2, where in the US if you call 911 do you not get an ambulance? They are not taxpayer funded, but they are required to take ALL calls. If there's a medical emergency, you'll get transport and treatment, even if you lack the means to pay. That is part of the problem with high healthcare costs (the costs of people who don't pay get rolled in to the people who do) and an excellent argument for universal healthcare at least for emergency treatment.
They were mad at Dell because Dell wasn't in Apple's market. Apple was exploding with growth, whereas Dell "only" had a stable market that they did well in. They didn't like all the server sales because that wasn't a growth market with huge margins.
With high end boutique computers would be a similar issue. While margins might be good, volume would be low and would never go up. It will always be a specialty market. Hence not something investors want money being "wasted" on. Doesn't matter there's money to be made, it isn't enough money fast enough with the promise of infinite growth.
Well, sounds like the private investors that own Dell now are a bit more sensible. They realize that there's something to be said for making money in smaller markets.
It is AMD fanboy sour grapes. For some reason some people get really personally invested in their choice of graphics card. So when the other company comes out with a card that is substantially better than what their company has, they get all ass hurt and start trying to make excuses as to what it is bad. The nVidia fans did that back when the AMD 5870 came out and nVidia had no response. Same deal here. The GeForce 900 series are a reasonable bit faster than the AMD 200 series, and way more power efficient. At this time, AMD doesn't have a response, so the AMD fanboys are going on the defensive.
The real answer is, of course, buy the card that works best for your usage, which will vary person to person.
I always thought it was an awesome idea to have a bigass set of computers at home... Ya well now I get paid to manage a bigass set of computers professionally and I'd rather just leave them there, thanks. Also there's no compelling reason to want my own servers for the sort of things I do, VMs work so well. I'll just lease one from somewhere, or spin one up at work.
At home, all my gear is related to, well, home use. More than a non-geek would have for sure but no data center.
Because if it is, you need to pull your head out of your ass and go and do some extremely basic, cursory, research on the situation in the US. There are for sure some loud fundy Christian that like to whine about science, evolution in particular. However they have had little and less success in pushing their agenda and the US remains a powerful center of scientific research.
Neither am I willing to take the word of some random dude on the Internet. Barring any more proof, I don't think we should be putting any stock in this.
You can to think about that. So it doesn't prevent gun suicides. The fact aside that someone can commit suicide with something else, the person doing it would be an authorized user of the gun. So no help there.
It doesn't prevent gun homicides. Again, these are done by authorized users of the gun, or people who have time to modify the gun. Remember for all the clever electronics, in the end guns are mechanical devices. So ultimately the electronics have to be something that mechanically disables the gun like a standard mechanical safety. A trigger disconnect, a firing pin block, that kind of thing. Ya well those are dead simple to bypass. So no help for stolen guns, the criminals would just remove the safety.
It doesn't prevent accidental shooting by any authorized user of the gun. Since they are authorized, it will fire. So any drunken games, etc, are still just as dangerous as they were before.
Already here we have, by far, most of the shootings that happen.
It may not prevent shooting where a gun is taken away from someone. Depends on how it works. If it has some way of reading the fingerprint when the trigger is depressed, then ok it could work. However if it works like a safety where you disengage it when you grab the gun, it'll still be disengaged if someone takes it away.
It would prevent accidental shootings where an unauthorized user gets their hands on the gun, like a kid coming across it.
Ok well, that doesn't seem very useful to me. The correct answer to the problem of kids is to lock up your guns. That is much more secure, particularly since something like this would only be effective if you didn't authorize you kids to use it, or remembered to remove their authorization when they were done at the range. Having them secured in a safe fixes the problem nicely. Likewise, that provides pretty good protection against theft.
So I really don't see what this will solve, and it will make things more expensive and complicated. It just doesn't strike me as very useful.
Maybe 6-10 hours of staff time. What I mean is you have to factor what your people cost you. If someone costs $50/hour when you count in salary + ERE (meaning payroll tax, benefits, insurance and all other expenses) then 6 hours of their time costs $300. So, if your transition wastes more than 6 hours of their time, it is a net loss.
You always have to keep that cost in mind when you talk about anything: What does it cost your employees to do? This is the same deal with old hardware. It can actually cost you more money, because it takes more IT time to support. Like if you have an IT guy whose salary + ERE is $30/hour and you have them spend 20 hours a year repairing and maintaining an old P4 system that keeps failing, well that is a huge waste as that $600 could have easily bought a new system that would work better and take up little, if any, of their time.
That is a reason commercial software wins out in some cases. It isn't that you cannot do something without it, just that it saves more staff time than it costs. That's why places will pay for things like iDRAC or other lights-out management, remote KVMs, and so on. They cost a lot but the time they save in maintenance can easily exceed their cost.
Just remember that unless employees are paid very poorly, $300 isn't a lot of time. So you want to analyze how much time your new system will cost (all new systems will cost some time in transition if nothing else) and make sure it is worth it.
Then you've never worked in an enterprise environment that uses it. You'll have a ton of tech support and maintenance costs with Linux. You not only have all the regular user shit, people who can't figure out how to use their computer, administrative stuff, etc. However I've also observed that a good bit of the stuff in Linux requires a lot of sysadmin work, scripting and such. We do Linux and Windows in our environment and we certainly make Linux work on a large enterprise scale, but our Linux lead spends an awful lot of time messing with puppet, shell scripts, and so on to make it all happen. A lot more than we spend with AD and group policy to make similar things happen in Windows.
Licensing savings are certainly something you can talk about savings for, however you aren't getting out of support and maintenance. That is just part of running an enterprise. The question is what would their costs be, compared to Windows? that is likely to vary per environment.
If you aren't a known developer, people want to see some evidence that you have the ability to make good on your plans. Game development isn't simple, and many people are not prepared for what they are going to have to do to bring a successful game to market.
So Doublefine or inXile can get a good bit of funding with nothing but a design doc for a game because people have faith they'll be able to deliver since they are experienced game devs. New crews are going to have to show something to get people to trust them.
Particularly in light of past KS failures in that regard. I've backed a number of games on KS and two of them I knew were fairly high risk: They were being done by an individual who hadn't done a game before, and there wasn't any sort of demo up front, just some basic concepts. I decided to take a risk on it, but fully understood that failure was likely.
Sure enough, both are floundering/failing. One hasn't had any updates in months, the other does update periodically but it is still extremely rudimentary, despite being way past the planned launch date, and it is pretty clear the dev just doesn't have a good idea how to proceed from here.
On the flip side, the games by established studios have either delivered or are well on track (Shadowrun Returns was brilliant, Wasteland 2 ships next Friday, Pillars of Eternity is in beta, etc). Likewise the indy titles that had a demo and were a good bit along with development have delivered, like FTL.
So no surprise many people aren't willing to take the risk. They want a better chance of return so they stick with established devs or with things that have some proof.
For one thing that is a work of fiction, and there is plenty in there to give it away as something that will never be reality. Then there's also the fact that Minecraft is a poorly optimized Java game with graphics from the 1990s, not the foundation for some world wide universe.
Off the top of my head DirectX, Visio, Internet Explorer, Bungie, and Wininternals all worked out very well for them. Not saying you personally like all the products there, but they were all commercially successful in a number of ways.
I mean seriously, why would you want Mojang? Minecraft itself has already made most of its money. You'd never make $2 billion on it going forward, it's big sales have already happened. So you'd be buying the talent/IP for future games... ya, about that. Mojang seems to have little or nothing at all in the pipe to speak of. 0x10c has gone all of nowhere, Scrolls has very little interest anymore and that's about it.
When you look at Minecraft, particularly what it started as, where it came from (Infiniminer) and how much has come form community contribution, it is fairly apparent that Notch is not some genius game designer, he just had the right idea at the right time, and got lucky that it went viral. Minecraft was not some amazing feat of design, it was a digital lego game that struck a chord with people. Fair enough, and he deserves his success, but that isn't the kind of thing worth buying in to, particularly given 0x10c's complete lack of development.
I can't see what MS hopes to gain. Maybe the Minecraft name? I guess, in theory, that is worth some money but I don't really think so. I think people will happily play a good builder game, regardless of title.
6mbps is about as good as it gets. That's what Youtube and Netflix use for 1080p stuff. So that is the standard you need to worry about for streaming in general. Yes, I know that Blu-ray is higher bitrate, but little if anything streams at that rate. For the web, 6mbps is "high quality". You might not care for that definition, but it is what it is.
If you asked them not to change the definition because "broadband" technically refers to how data is transferred (10gbit ethernet is not broadband, despite the speed, it is baseband) then ok, you can be cpt pedantic.
However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet. Currently I find the breakpoint to be about 20mbps. That is the point after which normal users won't notice much, if any, improvement. As such, that is my baseline for recommendation to people. 10mbps is serviceable I guess, but is a pain for video streaming. 4mbps would be a real issue, even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.
The minimum needs to keep rising. We keep finding more to do with our net connections. These companies are just whiny because they don't want to have to roll out FTTH, they want to keep doing DSL and pretending like that works.
The way they design their CPUs it is easy to have pretty much any number that is divisible by 2. It isn't a big deal to have something that is any particular amount more or less. So then it comes down to power, thermal, and die size limits.
Apparently 18 cores is what they cap out at, this time around. I'm sure you'll be able to get 16 core, and less, chips, that is just the most they could stuff in there before exceeding whatever design limitations they'd set.
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Nope. I find none of that stuff helps. All I do is:
1) Run a good AV scanner (NOD32) as a last line of defense to make sure I don't get malware.
2) Uninstall shit when I don't need it.
3) Have normal maintenance shit like have trim run on the drives at regular intervals and such.
I've found that there are really no issues with regards to running a new OS for long periods of time. There was a time when regular reinstalls were a part of my regimen but that is long past. I reinstall only when there's a specific need. That doesn't mean I just put up with a slow computer either, I demand very fast performance from my systems. A reinstall just isn't needed to maintain that.
Likewise, components have gotten much better, and upgrades more incremental, so I've found the need to buy new hardware that would necessitate a reinstall to be less.
My guess? This person either has crap on their system that causes issues, or this is just a "magic incantation" they've always done for supposedly better performance without understanding or examination.
Everyone should just go and learn C and how to do POSIX programming, attain enough mastery in it to be able to diagnose code for obscure security issues (that have eluded many programmers for years) and then design a secure fix.
And they should do that in a day.
Ya that sounds reasonable.
FYI not only are most people not programmers, and have no interest in becoming programmers, but most lack the kind of brain it takes to be a good programmer. The whole "Oh it is OSS fix it yourself!" argument is a really stupid one.
If you set foot in a country, they can arrest you for violating their laws. Doesn't matter if you aren't a citizen and live overseas. If you come there, they can arrest you. So let's say you regularly trash Islam and the Ayatollah and are well known for this. Then you travel to Iran. They very well can arrest you for that. They can't do much if you don't go there but if you show up, they can grab you.
Now in terms of if this particular arrest is legit for the American legal system, almost certainly. Doesn't matter that he was living in a foreign country. If he sold something that is illegal to Americans and using American services, he broke American law. Doesn't matter if he wasn't in America at the time, you don't have to be in a country to break their law. Let me give you a couple examples of how one can easily break a country's law from another country:
1) Ordering someone murdered. Let's say you have yourself a little gang with members in a few countries. You don't like someone over in Sweden so you order one of your Swedish members to murder them. That person broke Swedish law, but so did you. Doesn't matter you weren't there, you orchestrated a murder, that's illegal, and if they can get their hands on you you'll stand trial for it (the US would happily extradite you for that).
2) You set up a gun smuggling business for Canadians. You go and buy guns that are legal in the US, but illegal in Canada. You have them smuggled up and warehoused there, and then sell them to Canadians. You've broken Canadian law. Even if you are operating everything out of the US, what you are doing isn't legal in Canada and that's where it is being done. You house the guns in Canada and sell them to Canadians, that makes it a Canadian issue (you'd get extradited for that too).
So if this dude is selling his shit from AWS, to Americans, the courts will have no problems with the claim that American law applies.
Intent matters in the law. There are things that can be legal or illegal depending on the intent behind it. This can apply to tools as well as actions. If you sell a tool for legitimate uses, you are generally fine even if the tool has some illegitimate uses too. So long as your actions, as in marketing and such, show that you intend it for legit uses, you are fine.
A good example would be all the fine burglary tools for sale at Home Depot. A large number of the tools they sell would work very well for breaking in to houses or cars. However it is very clear that isn't why they sell them, nor why 99.99% of their customers buy them. Not only do the tools have a substantial legitimate use, but that it what all their marketing is about. They don't try to convince you that you need a hammer drill because you could drill open most locks, they try to convince you that you need a hammer drill because you want to put up shelves in concrete or the like. They intend their tools to be used for legitimate activities.
The more shady the product, the more careful you'd better be about how you sell it because the easier it could show intent to have it used for criminal purposes. If it looks like you are just paying lip service to legit uses but really trying to sell your stuff for illegal uses, you are likely to get in trouble.
They know this is an issue they'll win in the long run. There is no justification for the states doing what they are doing, they've just been paid off by the auto dealers. Tesla has won every fight about this I'm aware of. So they want it, they want to get this straightened out in the courts.
If you try to do something to skirt the law, you risk it biting you in the ass later. If you get a court ruling saying "You are allowed to do this, the state has to F off," then you are good to go.
Also, you might notice it gets them press. Nothing like looking like the poor trod on underdog to get more people sympathetic to your cause an interested in your product. They go about everything above board, get stepped on, fight back, win, and then get their way, plus good PR.
Have to take the long view on these things.
No kidding. The whole reason there's a time between "due" and "late" is so that you've time to get a payment out and deal with any issues. Hence it behooves you to pay when something comes due, or shortly after, rather than wait.
Like one time I get a call from some business who just got a check from me to them by mistake. It was for my association dues. My bank mails out a cashier's check, at my behest, each month to the property manager. They had done so properly, but the USPS fucked up and sent it to the wrong address. Now this was no issue as I still had 25 days until payment was late. So I called the bank, they voided the first check and issued a new one. Everything got there no problem.
Now had I waited till the last second it would have been ok, I wouldn't have been out of house and home or anything, but it would have been a hassle getting things all straightened out, and I might have had to pay a late fee. Probably not, as they need to be nice to the owners since we hire them, but they would have the right to charge it.
You want to build slack in to your schedule in case something goes wrong, and that applies to finance as well as it does travel or the like. Well, that time between "due" and "late" is the slack.
I wouldn't presume reporters did their job, they rarely do these days. It is amazing how lazy most reporting is. I generally assume when you hear a story with no discussion of it that all they did was get that person/company's story and print it and did no checking. Usually, I'm right in that :P.
While I'm not saying we should take the word of the lenders without verification, neither should we take the word of the people who are on the receiving end. They may very well not be telling the whole story. Some people who have financial troubles have them because of their own choices, but they rarely admit it.
I had a roommate like that. He was an alcoholic who wouldn't admit it or deal with it. He continually made bad choices in his life, but would never admit anything was his fault. In terms of finance he never paid things when they came due, he didn't pay until he was forced to. It was "due" according to him when they were about to shut off his service, or the like. So he'd get mad about his cellphone getting shut down when he was "a day late" by which he really mean "45 days past the due date, over 30 days late, and had 2 threatening letters to disconnect."
So before you go jumping to the defense of the people in the article, you might want to see what the terms of something like this is. I don't know, and I'm not saying it isn't a "you have to pay by the second it is due or we shut it off," but it also might well be a normal "It is due on day X, late on day X+15, and we shut it off on day X+20," and the people involved have just decided that "X+20" is the day it is "due".
With regards to #2, where in the US if you call 911 do you not get an ambulance? They are not taxpayer funded, but they are required to take ALL calls. If there's a medical emergency, you'll get transport and treatment, even if you lack the means to pay. That is part of the problem with high healthcare costs (the costs of people who don't pay get rolled in to the people who do) and an excellent argument for universal healthcare at least for emergency treatment.
They were mad at Dell because Dell wasn't in Apple's market. Apple was exploding with growth, whereas Dell "only" had a stable market that they did well in. They didn't like all the server sales because that wasn't a growth market with huge margins.
With high end boutique computers would be a similar issue. While margins might be good, volume would be low and would never go up. It will always be a specialty market. Hence not something investors want money being "wasted" on. Doesn't matter there's money to be made, it isn't enough money fast enough with the promise of infinite growth.
Well, sounds like the private investors that own Dell now are a bit more sensible. They realize that there's something to be said for making money in smaller markets.
It is AMD fanboy sour grapes. For some reason some people get really personally invested in their choice of graphics card. So when the other company comes out with a card that is substantially better than what their company has, they get all ass hurt and start trying to make excuses as to what it is bad. The nVidia fans did that back when the AMD 5870 came out and nVidia had no response. Same deal here. The GeForce 900 series are a reasonable bit faster than the AMD 200 series, and way more power efficient. At this time, AMD doesn't have a response, so the AMD fanboys are going on the defensive.
The real answer is, of course, buy the card that works best for your usage, which will vary person to person.
I always thought it was an awesome idea to have a bigass set of computers at home... Ya well now I get paid to manage a bigass set of computers professionally and I'd rather just leave them there, thanks. Also there's no compelling reason to want my own servers for the sort of things I do, VMs work so well. I'll just lease one from somewhere, or spin one up at work.
At home, all my gear is related to, well, home use. More than a non-geek would have for sure but no data center.
Because if it is, you need to pull your head out of your ass and go and do some extremely basic, cursory, research on the situation in the US. There are for sure some loud fundy Christian that like to whine about science, evolution in particular. However they have had little and less success in pushing their agenda and the US remains a powerful center of scientific research.
Trying to equate the US to ISIS is beyond stupid.
Neither am I willing to take the word of some random dude on the Internet. Barring any more proof, I don't think we should be putting any stock in this.
You can to think about that. So it doesn't prevent gun suicides. The fact aside that someone can commit suicide with something else, the person doing it would be an authorized user of the gun. So no help there.
It doesn't prevent gun homicides. Again, these are done by authorized users of the gun, or people who have time to modify the gun. Remember for all the clever electronics, in the end guns are mechanical devices. So ultimately the electronics have to be something that mechanically disables the gun like a standard mechanical safety. A trigger disconnect, a firing pin block, that kind of thing. Ya well those are dead simple to bypass. So no help for stolen guns, the criminals would just remove the safety.
It doesn't prevent accidental shooting by any authorized user of the gun. Since they are authorized, it will fire. So any drunken games, etc, are still just as dangerous as they were before.
Already here we have, by far, most of the shootings that happen.
It may not prevent shooting where a gun is taken away from someone. Depends on how it works. If it has some way of reading the fingerprint when the trigger is depressed, then ok it could work. However if it works like a safety where you disengage it when you grab the gun, it'll still be disengaged if someone takes it away.
It would prevent accidental shootings where an unauthorized user gets their hands on the gun, like a kid coming across it.
Ok well, that doesn't seem very useful to me. The correct answer to the problem of kids is to lock up your guns. That is much more secure, particularly since something like this would only be effective if you didn't authorize you kids to use it, or remembered to remove their authorization when they were done at the range. Having them secured in a safe fixes the problem nicely. Likewise, that provides pretty good protection against theft.
So I really don't see what this will solve, and it will make things more expensive and complicated. It just doesn't strike me as very useful.
Maybe 6-10 hours of staff time. What I mean is you have to factor what your people cost you. If someone costs $50/hour when you count in salary + ERE (meaning payroll tax, benefits, insurance and all other expenses) then 6 hours of their time costs $300. So, if your transition wastes more than 6 hours of their time, it is a net loss.
You always have to keep that cost in mind when you talk about anything: What does it cost your employees to do? This is the same deal with old hardware. It can actually cost you more money, because it takes more IT time to support. Like if you have an IT guy whose salary + ERE is $30/hour and you have them spend 20 hours a year repairing and maintaining an old P4 system that keeps failing, well that is a huge waste as that $600 could have easily bought a new system that would work better and take up little, if any, of their time.
That is a reason commercial software wins out in some cases. It isn't that you cannot do something without it, just that it saves more staff time than it costs. That's why places will pay for things like iDRAC or other lights-out management, remote KVMs, and so on. They cost a lot but the time they save in maintenance can easily exceed their cost.
Just remember that unless employees are paid very poorly, $300 isn't a lot of time. So you want to analyze how much time your new system will cost (all new systems will cost some time in transition if nothing else) and make sure it is worth it.
Then you've never worked in an enterprise environment that uses it. You'll have a ton of tech support and maintenance costs with Linux. You not only have all the regular user shit, people who can't figure out how to use their computer, administrative stuff, etc. However I've also observed that a good bit of the stuff in Linux requires a lot of sysadmin work, scripting and such. We do Linux and Windows in our environment and we certainly make Linux work on a large enterprise scale, but our Linux lead spends an awful lot of time messing with puppet, shell scripts, and so on to make it all happen. A lot more than we spend with AD and group policy to make similar things happen in Windows.
Licensing savings are certainly something you can talk about savings for, however you aren't getting out of support and maintenance. That is just part of running an enterprise. The question is what would their costs be, compared to Windows? that is likely to vary per environment.
If you aren't a known developer, people want to see some evidence that you have the ability to make good on your plans. Game development isn't simple, and many people are not prepared for what they are going to have to do to bring a successful game to market.
So Doublefine or inXile can get a good bit of funding with nothing but a design doc for a game because people have faith they'll be able to deliver since they are experienced game devs. New crews are going to have to show something to get people to trust them.
Particularly in light of past KS failures in that regard. I've backed a number of games on KS and two of them I knew were fairly high risk: They were being done by an individual who hadn't done a game before, and there wasn't any sort of demo up front, just some basic concepts. I decided to take a risk on it, but fully understood that failure was likely.
Sure enough, both are floundering/failing. One hasn't had any updates in months, the other does update periodically but it is still extremely rudimentary, despite being way past the planned launch date, and it is pretty clear the dev just doesn't have a good idea how to proceed from here.
On the flip side, the games by established studios have either delivered or are well on track (Shadowrun Returns was brilliant, Wasteland 2 ships next Friday, Pillars of Eternity is in beta, etc). Likewise the indy titles that had a demo and were a good bit along with development have delivered, like FTL.
So no surprise many people aren't willing to take the risk. They want a better chance of return so they stick with established devs or with things that have some proof.
For one thing that is a work of fiction, and there is plenty in there to give it away as something that will never be reality. Then there's also the fact that Minecraft is a poorly optimized Java game with graphics from the 1990s, not the foundation for some world wide universe.
But funny thing about money, people always want more.
Off the top of my head DirectX, Visio, Internet Explorer, Bungie, and Wininternals all worked out very well for them. Not saying you personally like all the products there, but they were all commercially successful in a number of ways.
I mean seriously, why would you want Mojang? Minecraft itself has already made most of its money. You'd never make $2 billion on it going forward, it's big sales have already happened. So you'd be buying the talent/IP for future games... ya, about that. Mojang seems to have little or nothing at all in the pipe to speak of. 0x10c has gone all of nowhere, Scrolls has very little interest anymore and that's about it.
When you look at Minecraft, particularly what it started as, where it came from (Infiniminer) and how much has come form community contribution, it is fairly apparent that Notch is not some genius game designer, he just had the right idea at the right time, and got lucky that it went viral. Minecraft was not some amazing feat of design, it was a digital lego game that struck a chord with people. Fair enough, and he deserves his success, but that isn't the kind of thing worth buying in to, particularly given 0x10c's complete lack of development.
I can't see what MS hopes to gain. Maybe the Minecraft name? I guess, in theory, that is worth some money but I don't really think so. I think people will happily play a good builder game, regardless of title.
Just seems like a bad use of money to me.
6mbps is about as good as it gets. That's what Youtube and Netflix use for 1080p stuff. So that is the standard you need to worry about for streaming in general. Yes, I know that Blu-ray is higher bitrate, but little if anything streams at that rate. For the web, 6mbps is "high quality". You might not care for that definition, but it is what it is.
If you asked them not to change the definition because "broadband" technically refers to how data is transferred (10gbit ethernet is not broadband, despite the speed, it is baseband) then ok, you can be cpt pedantic.
However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet. Currently I find the breakpoint to be about 20mbps. That is the point after which normal users won't notice much, if any, improvement. As such, that is my baseline for recommendation to people. 10mbps is serviceable I guess, but is a pain for video streaming. 4mbps would be a real issue, even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.
The minimum needs to keep rising. We keep finding more to do with our net connections. These companies are just whiny because they don't want to have to roll out FTTH, they want to keep doing DSL and pretending like that works.
The way they design their CPUs it is easy to have pretty much any number that is divisible by 2. It isn't a big deal to have something that is any particular amount more or less. So then it comes down to power, thermal, and die size limits.
Apparently 18 cores is what they cap out at, this time around. I'm sure you'll be able to get 16 core, and less, chips, that is just the most they could stuff in there before exceeding whatever design limitations they'd set.