There is no way I can go to a Barnes and Nobels to buy books. There aren't two in my city alone, and also their website. There also aren't other general purpose retailers who sell books and tons of other good like Amazon. We certainly don't have 5 Targets, 10 Walmarts, 3 Costcos (and associated websites) in town. There also aren't any local booksellers or anything. And of course you can't buy eBooks from anyone else, certainly not from Apple, who's market capitalization far exceeds Amazon's.
I think some geeks like the GP need to get out of their house more often.
We might need to spend more money on helping people improve their memory so that they don't, say, just as a random example, post the same shit twice in one thread on Slashdot.
Is that there is no way they were complicit in anything.
So the crazy nutball shithead argument for the OKC bombing is something along the lines of the government being evil, the workers in that building being part of some government conspiracy, etc, etc. You can see that kind of bullshit logic in one of the other replies to the grandparent, who talks about "McVeigh's actual targets" and gets all conspiracy nut as though it was the government's fault.
Ok fine, but even if you accept that BS, there's the issue of the kids present. They weren't involved, they weren't complicit, etc. So it is a pretty hard action to defend. Even if someone buys in to the fact that government agents some how "deserve it" you have to deal with the fact that he chose a target where employees bring their children (and there are other federal facilities where that's not allowed).
Just because his conviction wasn't proper, doesn't mean he's not an asshat, or even that he didn't break the law. Note that his conviction was overturned because of the venue (meaning it was tried in the wrong court) not because of a problem with the charge or evidence. Now that's a good thing, the state needs to do everything properly in a trial, and if they fail to do so, the defendant gets to walk. That is a cornerstone of the American justice system.
This is just him showing more asshattery, and a pretty good indication that his time free is likely to be only temporary. Anyone with that level of delusion and self grandeur is likely to do something illegal again, and sooner rather than later, and the state will probably make sure to do everything right the second time around.
Like a friend of mine used to work in the PD's office. He got a client who had been arrested for tagging (graffiti) since a cop stopped him and found sharpie markers in his pockets. The kid had sure as shit been tagging and had used said markers to do it, but the cop hadn't seen that, and had no reason to search him, so my friend got it tossed out. So what happened? Same kid went and tagged again, but this time the cops watched him do it and caught him in the act. The kid was miffed my friend couldn't do anything the second time.
I've no issue with it, but I wouldn't want to buy one. The main reason is just cost and maintenance. It is very unlikely I'll ever use my guns for anything except at the range given that I don't carry and my home is very unlikely to be broken in to for a number of reasons. so that being the case, why wouldn't I want one? Well because it is something else that can, and thus probably will, go wrong and it'll add cost. Guns are already not cheap, at least not for high quality ones. I really don't want to pay more for a component that I don't find useful.
The reason I say it isn't useful is because I wouldn't trust such a thing as the be-all, end-all of safety. So I'd still need to own physical safety devices like a safe, and I'd still need to make sure to use proper firearm handling (as in not pointing it at people, not messing with the trigger, etc). I just can't see what I'd gain from it, and as such I wouldn't care to spend the money on it.
I'm fine if others see a useful situation for them and wish to own one, but I wouldn't want it forced on me because I cannot see how it would make my firearms any safer, and you can guarantee it would make them more expensive.
I find it rather surprising, but generally it is a position based almost entirely on fear, and not on fact. They may well be people who are generally rational in their life, but when it comes to this issue fear and propaganda motivate their position, not facts and logic. They want guns banned because they are scared of them, not because they've done any research and concluded it would make things safer.
You can clearly see it in the grandparent post. Not only the name calling, but the complete detachment from the reality of things. The fact that he believes that a small group of crazies are synonymous with the greater gun owning population. Same deal with how people will generalize the nut jobs at the Cliven Bundy ranch to be the greater gun owning populace.
None stop to think that around 40-50% of all households own a gun in the US, meaning that you know someone who owns a gun, even if you don't know it, and that if that behaviour and thought were the norm for gun owners it would be rampant rather than aberrant.
They are the same as people who will point the finger at religious or environmental extremists and declare that all people of that religion or viewpoint must be extremists and scary.
It is sad, because an informed debate on gun control could be very useful, but it is really hard to have when so much of the "control" side is actually wanting a ban and the reason they want it is fear, not logic. They don't do any research, except maybe to try and look up numbers that support their view. They don't want information, since emotion is the driving factor.
Citing things against a commodity like gold is even funnier. By that logic, there was no inflation from 1980 to 2005 since the price of gold was $590 in 1980 and $520 in 2005 (and much lower in between).
Netburst did seem like a reasonable idea, in testing. While it was low IPC, it looked like it would scale bigtime in the speed area. They had test ALUs running at 10GHz.
So I can see the logic: You make an architecture that can scale to high frequencies easily, and that gets you the speed.
Obviously it didn't scale, and wasn't a good idea, but I can see what they were going for. It wasn't like it was completely nuts.
I would -love- to see AMD truly competitive with Intel on every level because it is only good for us consumers. It would be great if both companies made chips so fast, efficient, stable, and capable that you didn't buy AMD or Intel based on anything but who had the better deal that week.
However I'm not interested in hype and bullshit. As you say, "put up or shut up." I get tired of hearing about how great your shit will be in the future. Guess what? Intel's shit will be great in the future too, probably. It is great right now.
So less with the hype, more with the making a good CPU.
My point is simply that your argument for Thunderbolt isn't actually an argument for it. You like DisplayPort, not Thunderbolt. An argument for Thunderbolt is if you are using one connector for display and for other things. If you are just using it for display, well then it could be DP for all you'd know/care.
That's the thing: Doesn't matter how good it looks on paper, doesn't matter how technically perfect it is, what matters is if it gets used in a meaningful way, such that people want to buy devices with it. If not, it gets relegated to being a small-time thing that few care about.
So if the argument is "It lets me use high rez displays!" then people will say "Ya but so does the DP I already have so I don't care," and won't seek it out. The less people who look for/ask for it and buy it, the more niche it becomes.
Like when I bought my motherboard, there were two candidates: An Intel DZ77GA-70K and an Intel DZ77RE-75K. The main difference was the 75K had Thunderbolt. So I thought about it, and just couldn't come up with any scenario where I'd want Thunderbolt, and opted for the cheaper board. I don't regret the decision at all, and when the 99X boards come out, I am again going to pass on Thunderbolt, unless it happens to be part of a board I want anyhow.
So that's the thing: You need use cases that people care about that require it. Then people will start wanting it, and it'll grow. Otherwise, it'll be the thing that is limited to very few systems. Same shit that happened with Firewire.
DisplayPort lets you connect a 4k DisplayPort screen, or multiple streams (specifically the 1.2 MST). Thunderbolt is not required. It's fine that it is a Thunderbolt connector as well bunt don't get confused here. A DP connector coming off a regular videocard in a desktop will drive the monitor just the same. It is the DP 1.2 signaling that matters, not the PCIe lane of Thunderbolt.
If all you are doing with your Thunderbolt connector is hooking up displays, that's an argument AGAINST Thunderbolt since you aren't using it, you are just using DisplayPort.
CPUs have gotten really, really, fast and for many things are seriously undertasked. Like I said, not knocking Thunderbolt for certain uses, but they are limited. USB3 on a modern system is capable of being "good enough" for most things. Audio? No problem, even USB2 has that licked. Video? Yep, USB3 can handle that. Data transfer? Well it is fast enough that even fast sticks are slower than it so no big deal. Network? It'll do 1gbps no issue.
Thunderbolt is faster, and lower latency, no question, but for most uses it isn't relevant. Same deal as it was with Firewire. That was not common at all.
Actually Thunderbolt has the additional issue of USB now being much better. Back when Firewire was first introduced, USB was not able to do many of the things it could do, at all. So it was use it or do without. However for quite a few things all Thunderbolt can claim over USB3 is that it is lower latency, or lower CPU load. Ok, fine, maybe that matters, but USB can still do it and so people will just use it.
I work in IT and I've seen next to zero uptake on Thunderbolt. Most of the places I've seen it is A/V type places, and mostly because they use Macs. They'll buy a thunderbolt LaCie drive not because they need it, but because that's what the new Macs use. That's only for the lower end stuff too. The higher end still seems to be all PCIe directly. For example the Avid Nitris DX won't work with the new Macs via Thudnerbolt. That's coming, but will be a separate adapter, in place of their native PCIe card.
You might want such a thing with a Mac Mini or Mac Pro since they are more or less totally un-upgradable. So you might want an external card, even a graphics card.
For a standard desktop? No, you'd put it inside. Much cleaner, easier, and more sensible.
A niche technology, used mainly by Apple fans. Part of it is just lack of need, and increased cost. Most devices work just fine on USB and Thunderbolt, being a PCIe bus more or less, has more hardware requirements on the device side than USB.
However it is also because of Apple's meddling. Apple got involved with it back when it was an Intel project called Lightpeak and paid Intel to influence the development. They wanted an exclusive on it, since Apple loves being "first", for a year and convinced Intel to integrate it with DisplayPort video. The problem with the DP integration is that it means you could no longer just drop in a PCIe card that would add it to a system, it has to be integrated in to a device to work with the GPU. So there's been little interest in it overall.
That'll probably continue for the foreseeable future. It isn't totally worthless, but there are few cases where it would matter much instead of USB, so its adoption is likely to be lackluster not so much because USB keeps getting better (though that helps) but because most of the things people want to do with an external connector, USB3 does "good enough" and everything has USB of some sort or another.
I've yet to see any DRM that prevents content mods. There are some games that aren't very moddable, their files are all binary and they don't release any tools and such, but I've yet to see one with DRM that stopped mods. The ones that are moddable, well they are more so than ever. Have a look at the Skyrim mods sometime. Even the ones that aren't moddable per se can usually be modded. The new Xcom is a good example. It has no mod tools, and wasn't designed with modding in mind, much like the original Xcom. However enterprising modders have figured out how to bust in to various files and mod the game. Not nearly to the extent as a game with tools, but there was nothing stopping them. The game doesn't have some DRM locking them out.
Moddability has been increasing. For one, there's more interest in it, what with the internet to distribute mods. Also there's the fact that increased CPU power allows for more user accessible files. The original Civ was hard to mod, since everything was binary. You needed to do that for efficiency. Civ 4 and 5 use scripting languages, XML, and SQL for most of their stuff, with only the engine and AI core being in C++, since it takes so little time for a modern computer to parse all that. Finally there's channels to integrate modding in to your game like Steam Workshop, that make it much easier for developers to integrate, and easier for modders to distribute.
They don't mean it is "life and death" to not have a gun. They mean that if there is a situation where you need your gun, it IS a life and death situation and thus you want it to work first time, every time.
You have life and death situations like that in your country. I don't know where you live, but I don't need to. Every country has murders, rapes, home invasions, etc. Those are the kind of situations where in the US, and some other nations, deadly force is justified.
So if you are in one of those situations, and you have a gun, you have the option to use it to defend yourself. However it'd damn well better work. If it doesn't it'll make things worse. It's reliability is life and death.
So no, having a gun in the US is not a life and death thing. Most people are pretty safe. The murder rate is reasonably low and lower still for the general population (the murders are more concentrated to certain subgroups, like people involved with the drug trade and so on). You can happily live your life without owning a firearm, indeed about half of the families in the US do.
There are, thankfully, not many cases where you need a gun for self defense (I say this as a gun rights advocate and gun owner). Also the few cases where it does happen, it isn't likely your gun will get grabbed unless you are very silly about things.
Most of the actual cases of a "gun getting grabbed" (which are quite rare) are when someone pulls out a gun without the intent/will to fire it, and thus someone can approach and take it away.
Having your gun grabbed and used against you is just not a real likely situation.
And that aside, there's the problem of things being tasked to capacity being unable to deal with surges when they happen. Like where I work we hire students to help (since we are a university). It is expected they'll spend a non-trivial amount of time sitting around, doing homework, etc. Why? Because when someone needs something done, we want to have a student to assign to it. If the students are working 100% of the time, well then anytime the workload increases, it means we have to delay things, we can't handle it then.
Of course it isn't like they'd focus on work 100% of the time, even if we did have them fully tasked.
There are just all kinds of reasons it doesn't work, and it is not unique to modern society. The past was NOT full of extremely hard working people who did nothing but focus on the job. That has never been true.
You are always going to need more people to do a job then if each person theoretically worked to 100% capacity 100% of the time. Since in most places work loads vary, that'll also make you need more people since you need enough to deal with the peaks, not the nominal amount.
This is life, this is how it has always been, and there's nothing wrong with it.
All countries have some corruption, since all countries have humans and humans are imperfect. However the corruption you see in the US and most or western Europe is nothing the scale you see in some places. They've never had to deal with having to pay out bribes for everyday activities (nevermind the bribed for big things), with having to have contracts cost 5, 10, 20 times as much as they should due to all the money that gets siphoned off, and so on.
None of that means corruption should be tolerated, of course, it is one of those things to be fought in all its forms. However pretending that the US is as bad or worse as some other places shows a laughable amount of ignorance about the world.
Often people think their own problems are the worst when they don't have direct experience with a place that actually has worse problems.
You have one point, and you are overgeneralizing to the whole nation. Gotcha.
Your friend had Internet problem. Guess what? It happens. He should have worked on getting them fixed, you can do that. Mine doesn't have problems, I haven't talked to tech support for them in years.
As for the slow rates, ever consider maybe your server's connection was the issue? Where were those servers? If you were hosting them at home, well it may be your ISP isn't as great as you think. They may give you a big link, and they may get that data to a few areas, but they may have crap backhaul and thus be low speed to places like the US and Europe.
So ya, you had a bad experience, without much in the way of testing or diagnosis, and you now think an entire country of 350,000,000 people and 3.8 million square miles is the same... Project/overgeneralize much?
I was worried for a minute that there might be a discussion about a country other than the US on Slashdot. However no need to fear, the egocentric dipstick brigade is on it, making sure to try and steer any and all discussion back to America. I mean we can't possibly want to talk about the rest of the world, nobody is from there, nobody cares what happens. Instead let's make sure to focus any and all discussion on America. That's the only way!
Seriously, knock it the fuck off. There is a wider world out there, and some of that world visits Slashdot. They might be interested in some stories about thing other than the US. Heck, for that matter people in the US might be interested in stories about the rest of the world since it is all interconnected.
I get really tired of the ego brigade on/. that has to try and steer every single conversation back to the US. Story about Russia? Talk about how the US is worse and then rail on about that. Story about Canada? Talk about how it would be if the US did it and then rail on about that. No matter what the story, move the discussion back to the US.
Just stop it. If there's a topic about Russia, well let's talk about that. If that doesn't interest you, kindly keep your silence so that people can talk about it. If the NSA spying interests you, then comment in those discussions, of which there are many.
Slashdot is an American site and thus American centric in its reporting but it is not US exclusive. Stop trying to make it that way. Your ego can deal with something not being about the US once and awhile.
Because I get real tired of hearing stuff like this completely context free.
Where were you? What kind of net connection did you have? Where are you from? What kind of net connection do you have there? What kind of latency do you see? What kind of download speeds do you get from large download providers? What is your packet loss like? Etc, etc.
Reason I say that is because I live in the US and if my Internet is "like being in a third-world country" then we've reached the point where the third-world is connected pretty well and I'd love to know what you think is good.
I have 150/20mbps cable Internet. Speedtests bear that out, the connection has the backhaul to support that speed. I get those kind of speeds to another ISP/server about 350 miles away, and get close to them (120ish) to one across the entire nation (1700 miles away). Steam downloads go at 17-18MBytes/sec. Latency is very low, the biggest part being the first hop going from Ethernet to HFC to the CMTS, which is like 6-8ms. My ISP is pretty well peered so latency stays low, around under 100ms to pretty much all of the US (remember the US is larger then western Europe) and usually 30ms or so to things in my geographic region. Packet loss is more or less non-existent, less than 0.01% normally.
Then of course there's work. Right now I see 338mbits down 429mbits up, again to a test server in another state (350 miles away or so) and on a different ISP. Even that is as much their limit as ours, realistically we have more speed.
So what, precisely, is third world about my connection? What am I lacking that is so much better in your country?
Because in general, I'm calling bullshit. I've actually traveled a fair bit, and I find that the Internet elsewhere is not nearly as amazing as advertised by uninformed geeks on Slashdot. I find I have it pretty good at home, that it is rare anyone can compete.
Of course the US is pretty big, and pretty varied. You could tuck all of western Europe inside it and still have room to spare for a number of other nations. So it might not be that huge a surprise to find out that it varies quite a bit, and what is true in one place is not true the whole country through.
Good anti-virus still has high detection rates. AV Comparitives puts most virus scanners above 90% detection in their March real world protection test. The better ones are in the 98%+ range. http://www.av-comparatives.org...
Of course Symantec isn't on that list... perhaps there's a reason:).
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way I can go to a Barnes and Nobels to buy books. There aren't two in my city alone, and also their website. There also aren't other general purpose retailers who sell books and tons of other good like Amazon. We certainly don't have 5 Targets, 10 Walmarts, 3 Costcos (and associated websites) in town. There also aren't any local booksellers or anything. And of course you can't buy eBooks from anyone else, certainly not from Apple, who's market capitalization far exceeds Amazon's.
I think some geeks like the GP need to get out of their house more often.
We might need to spend more money on helping people improve their memory so that they don't, say, just as a random example, post the same shit twice in one thread on Slashdot.
Is that there is no way they were complicit in anything.
So the crazy nutball shithead argument for the OKC bombing is something along the lines of the government being evil, the workers in that building being part of some government conspiracy, etc, etc. You can see that kind of bullshit logic in one of the other replies to the grandparent, who talks about "McVeigh's actual targets" and gets all conspiracy nut as though it was the government's fault.
Ok fine, but even if you accept that BS, there's the issue of the kids present. They weren't involved, they weren't complicit, etc. So it is a pretty hard action to defend. Even if someone buys in to the fact that government agents some how "deserve it" you have to deal with the fact that he chose a target where employees bring their children (and there are other federal facilities where that's not allowed).
Just because his conviction wasn't proper, doesn't mean he's not an asshat, or even that he didn't break the law. Note that his conviction was overturned because of the venue (meaning it was tried in the wrong court) not because of a problem with the charge or evidence. Now that's a good thing, the state needs to do everything properly in a trial, and if they fail to do so, the defendant gets to walk. That is a cornerstone of the American justice system.
This is just him showing more asshattery, and a pretty good indication that his time free is likely to be only temporary. Anyone with that level of delusion and self grandeur is likely to do something illegal again, and sooner rather than later, and the state will probably make sure to do everything right the second time around.
Like a friend of mine used to work in the PD's office. He got a client who had been arrested for tagging (graffiti) since a cop stopped him and found sharpie markers in his pockets. The kid had sure as shit been tagging and had used said markers to do it, but the cop hadn't seen that, and had no reason to search him, so my friend got it tossed out. So what happened? Same kid went and tagged again, but this time the cops watched him do it and caught him in the act. The kid was miffed my friend couldn't do anything the second time.
I've no issue with it, but I wouldn't want to buy one. The main reason is just cost and maintenance. It is very unlikely I'll ever use my guns for anything except at the range given that I don't carry and my home is very unlikely to be broken in to for a number of reasons. so that being the case, why wouldn't I want one? Well because it is something else that can, and thus probably will, go wrong and it'll add cost. Guns are already not cheap, at least not for high quality ones. I really don't want to pay more for a component that I don't find useful.
The reason I say it isn't useful is because I wouldn't trust such a thing as the be-all, end-all of safety. So I'd still need to own physical safety devices like a safe, and I'd still need to make sure to use proper firearm handling (as in not pointing it at people, not messing with the trigger, etc). I just can't see what I'd gain from it, and as such I wouldn't care to spend the money on it.
I'm fine if others see a useful situation for them and wish to own one, but I wouldn't want it forced on me because I cannot see how it would make my firearms any safer, and you can guarantee it would make them more expensive.
I find it rather surprising, but generally it is a position based almost entirely on fear, and not on fact. They may well be people who are generally rational in their life, but when it comes to this issue fear and propaganda motivate their position, not facts and logic. They want guns banned because they are scared of them, not because they've done any research and concluded it would make things safer.
You can clearly see it in the grandparent post. Not only the name calling, but the complete detachment from the reality of things. The fact that he believes that a small group of crazies are synonymous with the greater gun owning population. Same deal with how people will generalize the nut jobs at the Cliven Bundy ranch to be the greater gun owning populace.
None stop to think that around 40-50% of all households own a gun in the US, meaning that you know someone who owns a gun, even if you don't know it, and that if that behaviour and thought were the norm for gun owners it would be rampant rather than aberrant.
They are the same as people who will point the finger at religious or environmental extremists and declare that all people of that religion or viewpoint must be extremists and scary.
It is sad, because an informed debate on gun control could be very useful, but it is really hard to have when so much of the "control" side is actually wanting a ban and the reason they want it is fear, not logic. They don't do any research, except maybe to try and look up numbers that support their view. They don't want information, since emotion is the driving factor.
Hence, name calling, scare rhetoric, and so on.
"4,000 or so people in the US die every year because they're accidentally shot by children"
So deaths would indeed be the standard you were asking people to consider, specifically deaths by children.
Are you really that stupid as to not be able to remember what you wrote?
Another of the many 'net crazies who like to cite random blogs to support their point. Ok, well here's a random blog to refute your blog!
http://azizonomics.com/2013/06...
Citing things against a commodity like gold is even funnier. By that logic, there was no inflation from 1980 to 2005 since the price of gold was $590 in 1980 and $520 in 2005 (and much lower in between).
Netburst did seem like a reasonable idea, in testing. While it was low IPC, it looked like it would scale bigtime in the speed area. They had test ALUs running at 10GHz.
So I can see the logic: You make an architecture that can scale to high frequencies easily, and that gets you the speed.
Obviously it didn't scale, and wasn't a good idea, but I can see what they were going for. It wasn't like it was completely nuts.
I would -love- to see AMD truly competitive with Intel on every level because it is only good for us consumers. It would be great if both companies made chips so fast, efficient, stable, and capable that you didn't buy AMD or Intel based on anything but who had the better deal that week.
However I'm not interested in hype and bullshit. As you say, "put up or shut up." I get tired of hearing about how great your shit will be in the future. Guess what? Intel's shit will be great in the future too, probably. It is great right now.
So less with the hype, more with the making a good CPU.
My point is simply that your argument for Thunderbolt isn't actually an argument for it. You like DisplayPort, not Thunderbolt. An argument for Thunderbolt is if you are using one connector for display and for other things. If you are just using it for display, well then it could be DP for all you'd know/care.
That's the thing: Doesn't matter how good it looks on paper, doesn't matter how technically perfect it is, what matters is if it gets used in a meaningful way, such that people want to buy devices with it. If not, it gets relegated to being a small-time thing that few care about.
So if the argument is "It lets me use high rez displays!" then people will say "Ya but so does the DP I already have so I don't care," and won't seek it out. The less people who look for/ask for it and buy it, the more niche it becomes.
Like when I bought my motherboard, there were two candidates: An Intel DZ77GA-70K and an Intel DZ77RE-75K. The main difference was the 75K had Thunderbolt. So I thought about it, and just couldn't come up with any scenario where I'd want Thunderbolt, and opted for the cheaper board. I don't regret the decision at all, and when the 99X boards come out, I am again going to pass on Thunderbolt, unless it happens to be part of a board I want anyhow.
So that's the thing: You need use cases that people care about that require it. Then people will start wanting it, and it'll grow. Otherwise, it'll be the thing that is limited to very few systems. Same shit that happened with Firewire.
DisplayPort lets you connect a 4k DisplayPort screen, or multiple streams (specifically the 1.2 MST). Thunderbolt is not required. It's fine that it is a Thunderbolt connector as well bunt don't get confused here. A DP connector coming off a regular videocard in a desktop will drive the monitor just the same. It is the DP 1.2 signaling that matters, not the PCIe lane of Thunderbolt.
If all you are doing with your Thunderbolt connector is hooking up displays, that's an argument AGAINST Thunderbolt since you aren't using it, you are just using DisplayPort.
CPUs have gotten really, really, fast and for many things are seriously undertasked. Like I said, not knocking Thunderbolt for certain uses, but they are limited. USB3 on a modern system is capable of being "good enough" for most things. Audio? No problem, even USB2 has that licked. Video? Yep, USB3 can handle that. Data transfer? Well it is fast enough that even fast sticks are slower than it so no big deal. Network? It'll do 1gbps no issue.
Thunderbolt is faster, and lower latency, no question, but for most uses it isn't relevant. Same deal as it was with Firewire. That was not common at all.
Actually Thunderbolt has the additional issue of USB now being much better. Back when Firewire was first introduced, USB was not able to do many of the things it could do, at all. So it was use it or do without. However for quite a few things all Thunderbolt can claim over USB3 is that it is lower latency, or lower CPU load. Ok, fine, maybe that matters, but USB can still do it and so people will just use it.
I work in IT and I've seen next to zero uptake on Thunderbolt. Most of the places I've seen it is A/V type places, and mostly because they use Macs. They'll buy a thunderbolt LaCie drive not because they need it, but because that's what the new Macs use. That's only for the lower end stuff too. The higher end still seems to be all PCIe directly. For example the Avid Nitris DX won't work with the new Macs via Thudnerbolt. That's coming, but will be a separate adapter, in place of their native PCIe card.
You might want such a thing with a Mac Mini or Mac Pro since they are more or less totally un-upgradable. So you might want an external card, even a graphics card.
For a standard desktop? No, you'd put it inside. Much cleaner, easier, and more sensible.
A niche technology, used mainly by Apple fans. Part of it is just lack of need, and increased cost. Most devices work just fine on USB and Thunderbolt, being a PCIe bus more or less, has more hardware requirements on the device side than USB.
However it is also because of Apple's meddling. Apple got involved with it back when it was an Intel project called Lightpeak and paid Intel to influence the development. They wanted an exclusive on it, since Apple loves being "first", for a year and convinced Intel to integrate it with DisplayPort video. The problem with the DP integration is that it means you could no longer just drop in a PCIe card that would add it to a system, it has to be integrated in to a device to work with the GPU. So there's been little interest in it overall.
That'll probably continue for the foreseeable future. It isn't totally worthless, but there are few cases where it would matter much instead of USB, so its adoption is likely to be lackluster not so much because USB keeps getting better (though that helps) but because most of the things people want to do with an external connector, USB3 does "good enough" and everything has USB of some sort or another.
I've yet to see any DRM that prevents content mods. There are some games that aren't very moddable, their files are all binary and they don't release any tools and such, but I've yet to see one with DRM that stopped mods. The ones that are moddable, well they are more so than ever. Have a look at the Skyrim mods sometime. Even the ones that aren't moddable per se can usually be modded. The new Xcom is a good example. It has no mod tools, and wasn't designed with modding in mind, much like the original Xcom. However enterprising modders have figured out how to bust in to various files and mod the game. Not nearly to the extent as a game with tools, but there was nothing stopping them. The game doesn't have some DRM locking them out.
Moddability has been increasing. For one, there's more interest in it, what with the internet to distribute mods. Also there's the fact that increased CPU power allows for more user accessible files. The original Civ was hard to mod, since everything was binary. You needed to do that for efficiency. Civ 4 and 5 use scripting languages, XML, and SQL for most of their stuff, with only the engine and AI core being in C++, since it takes so little time for a modern computer to parse all that. Finally there's channels to integrate modding in to your game like Steam Workshop, that make it much easier for developers to integrate, and easier for modders to distribute.
They don't mean it is "life and death" to not have a gun. They mean that if there is a situation where you need your gun, it IS a life and death situation and thus you want it to work first time, every time.
You have life and death situations like that in your country. I don't know where you live, but I don't need to. Every country has murders, rapes, home invasions, etc. Those are the kind of situations where in the US, and some other nations, deadly force is justified.
So if you are in one of those situations, and you have a gun, you have the option to use it to defend yourself. However it'd damn well better work. If it doesn't it'll make things worse. It's reliability is life and death.
So no, having a gun in the US is not a life and death thing. Most people are pretty safe. The murder rate is reasonably low and lower still for the general population (the murders are more concentrated to certain subgroups, like people involved with the drug trade and so on). You can happily live your life without owning a firearm, indeed about half of the families in the US do.
There are, thankfully, not many cases where you need a gun for self defense (I say this as a gun rights advocate and gun owner). Also the few cases where it does happen, it isn't likely your gun will get grabbed unless you are very silly about things.
Most of the actual cases of a "gun getting grabbed" (which are quite rare) are when someone pulls out a gun without the intent/will to fire it, and thus someone can approach and take it away.
Having your gun grabbed and used against you is just not a real likely situation.
And that aside, there's the problem of things being tasked to capacity being unable to deal with surges when they happen. Like where I work we hire students to help (since we are a university). It is expected they'll spend a non-trivial amount of time sitting around, doing homework, etc. Why? Because when someone needs something done, we want to have a student to assign to it. If the students are working 100% of the time, well then anytime the workload increases, it means we have to delay things, we can't handle it then.
Of course it isn't like they'd focus on work 100% of the time, even if we did have them fully tasked.
There are just all kinds of reasons it doesn't work, and it is not unique to modern society. The past was NOT full of extremely hard working people who did nothing but focus on the job. That has never been true.
You are always going to need more people to do a job then if each person theoretically worked to 100% capacity 100% of the time. Since in most places work loads vary, that'll also make you need more people since you need enough to deal with the peaks, not the nominal amount.
This is life, this is how it has always been, and there's nothing wrong with it.
All countries have some corruption, since all countries have humans and humans are imperfect. However the corruption you see in the US and most or western Europe is nothing the scale you see in some places. They've never had to deal with having to pay out bribes for everyday activities (nevermind the bribed for big things), with having to have contracts cost 5, 10, 20 times as much as they should due to all the money that gets siphoned off, and so on.
None of that means corruption should be tolerated, of course, it is one of those things to be fought in all its forms. However pretending that the US is as bad or worse as some other places shows a laughable amount of ignorance about the world.
Often people think their own problems are the worst when they don't have direct experience with a place that actually has worse problems.
You have one point, and you are overgeneralizing to the whole nation. Gotcha.
Your friend had Internet problem. Guess what? It happens. He should have worked on getting them fixed, you can do that. Mine doesn't have problems, I haven't talked to tech support for them in years.
As for the slow rates, ever consider maybe your server's connection was the issue? Where were those servers? If you were hosting them at home, well it may be your ISP isn't as great as you think. They may give you a big link, and they may get that data to a few areas, but they may have crap backhaul and thus be low speed to places like the US and Europe.
So ya, you had a bad experience, without much in the way of testing or diagnosis, and you now think an entire country of 350,000,000 people and 3.8 million square miles is the same... Project/overgeneralize much?
I was worried for a minute that there might be a discussion about a country other than the US on Slashdot. However no need to fear, the egocentric dipstick brigade is on it, making sure to try and steer any and all discussion back to America. I mean we can't possibly want to talk about the rest of the world, nobody is from there, nobody cares what happens. Instead let's make sure to focus any and all discussion on America. That's the only way!
Seriously, knock it the fuck off. There is a wider world out there, and some of that world visits Slashdot. They might be interested in some stories about thing other than the US. Heck, for that matter people in the US might be interested in stories about the rest of the world since it is all interconnected.
I get really tired of the ego brigade on /. that has to try and steer every single conversation back to the US. Story about Russia? Talk about how the US is worse and then rail on about that. Story about Canada? Talk about how it would be if the US did it and then rail on about that. No matter what the story, move the discussion back to the US.
Just stop it. If there's a topic about Russia, well let's talk about that. If that doesn't interest you, kindly keep your silence so that people can talk about it. If the NSA spying interests you, then comment in those discussions, of which there are many.
Slashdot is an American site and thus American centric in its reporting but it is not US exclusive. Stop trying to make it that way. Your ego can deal with something not being about the US once and awhile.
Either you don't do what you say you do, or your AFDB is too tight and it is causing you to hallucinate.
Because I get real tired of hearing stuff like this completely context free.
Where were you? What kind of net connection did you have? Where are you from? What kind of net connection do you have there? What kind of latency do you see? What kind of download speeds do you get from large download providers? What is your packet loss like? Etc, etc.
Reason I say that is because I live in the US and if my Internet is "like being in a third-world country" then we've reached the point where the third-world is connected pretty well and I'd love to know what you think is good.
I have 150/20mbps cable Internet. Speedtests bear that out, the connection has the backhaul to support that speed. I get those kind of speeds to another ISP/server about 350 miles away, and get close to them (120ish) to one across the entire nation (1700 miles away). Steam downloads go at 17-18MBytes/sec. Latency is very low, the biggest part being the first hop going from Ethernet to HFC to the CMTS, which is like 6-8ms. My ISP is pretty well peered so latency stays low, around under 100ms to pretty much all of the US (remember the US is larger then western Europe) and usually 30ms or so to things in my geographic region. Packet loss is more or less non-existent, less than 0.01% normally.
Then of course there's work. Right now I see 338mbits down 429mbits up, again to a test server in another state (350 miles away or so) and on a different ISP. Even that is as much their limit as ours, realistically we have more speed.
So what, precisely, is third world about my connection? What am I lacking that is so much better in your country?
Because in general, I'm calling bullshit. I've actually traveled a fair bit, and I find that the Internet elsewhere is not nearly as amazing as advertised by uninformed geeks on Slashdot. I find I have it pretty good at home, that it is rare anyone can compete.
Of course the US is pretty big, and pretty varied. You could tuck all of western Europe inside it and still have room to spare for a number of other nations. So it might not be that huge a surprise to find out that it varies quite a bit, and what is true in one place is not true the whole country through.
Good anti-virus still has high detection rates. AV Comparitives puts most virus scanners above 90% detection in their March real world protection test. The better ones are in the 98%+ range. http://www.av-comparatives.org...
Of course Symantec isn't on that list... perhaps there's a reason :).