I mean let's see what's in the thread right now: An energizer bunny joke about the US mars rovers, someone saying good luck to the Chinese and how this transcends politics, someone saying Jade Rabbit is awesome, someone who hopes they resolve the problem, someone correcting the use of shi-fu, and then this.
So basically, he's making shit up. The higher rated comments are nearly all encouragement, and the one referencing the US rovers is a joke. This moron wants there to be a bunch of US nationalism for him to hate on, but there's not, so he just pretends like there is anyhow. He's making up reasons for US hate/China strong.
Also there's the stupid crap of trying to make the US look bad because "Your country is the biggest melting pot of foreign scientists and researchers in the world." As though the US is so stupid and has to import foreigners to do any work. No, quite the opposite actually: American universities are still some of the very best research institutions in the world, despite all the cuts and problems, and people come from around the world to work at them and do research. The US is a melting pot precisely because of the excellence of its research institutions, and in allowing people from all over to come, it helps to continue that excellence and enrich the world's knowledge.
The grandparent is just a jackass. He really wants this to be some kind of China hate thread so he can hate on that to try and deflect things from the rover's problem. Instead it is a thread largely of people saying "Good luck China, we hope you fix the problem and your rover continues to work."
GPL could possibly be abused in a "rent everything" situation. So, you are required to distribute the source code of a GPL'd program if you distribute the binaries. The first must come with the second. However, distribution is when it is required. If you modify GPL code and use it internally, no distribution is needed since you aren't distributing binaries.
So, go all "cloud" on that shit. Use and modify GPL'd software, but run it only on your servers. Everyone of your users interacts with it, but they don't get to have a copy, and they have to pay you monthly.
Wouldn't happen where I work (a state university). We don't "just sign it and scan it." You send us a contract, it goes over to contracting. If it is one they recognize, they change it, initial it, and sign it on behalf of the Regents. If not, it goes over to the general council's office and they work with contracting on it. Either way, it is getting changed and sent back to you to sign.
That copyright assignment thing? Right out. They'd agree to GPL, probably, but never to copyright assignment. All work by the university is copyright to the board of regents (and by extension the state).
For that matter the US government wouldn't be able to sign it. While they don't copyright their work that's the issue: Work by the federal government is public domain. They can't go and assign the copyright. Doesn't matter that it would be something "open", for them "open" means "public domain".
Most people who love to post these high speedtest numbers are people who's provider runs a speedtest server. Ok, so you can get that speed to their central office. Big deal, I get those speeds to our speedtest server at work... because it is down the hall from me.
A real speed test involves going off network and a good distance away. I generally test to FastServ Networks in California because they have a solid network on their test server, it is off my ISP (at home and at work) and in a different state. If my speed is good to them, I can confidently say my Internet connection is fast: I have a good uplink all the way to the outside world, off my network.
Also there is the question of congestion, or rather lack of it. I can't imagine Google is doing point-to-point fiber. It is probably GPON. That means the more subscribers in an area, the less speed.
I just question his gushing a bit because at work, I have "gigabit" speeds. I'm on a gig link, to a 10gig building link to our central systems. I'm not sure what our total off campus speed is, it's around 2gig to the Internet, 10gig to I2, but I haven't looked. Speedtests to FastServ show about 400mbits up and down generally during the work day. Downloads are nice and zippy, a Linux torrent just screams, and we have Akamai cache engines on the network so things like Windows updates are almost wire speed.
However for all that, I don't notice much difference over my home network, which is about 30mbit. I do for big downloads, of course, but not for general browsing. The speed of page loads seems to be limited mostly by rendering all the javascript and DHTML they use these days, not by the line, and I can stream whatever I like with no issues.
In particular, not everyone agrees with his rather narrow definition of "freedom". Some developers like the whole BSD thing, which gives more freedom to the person who uses and implements the software, rather than the original developer. It is akin to the CC-BY license, where you want to have your stuff acknowledged as a source, but you welcome people to do with it as they please.
I have no problem with the GPL, but the zealots that seem to think it is the only way EVAR that is ok and that people who want a less restrictive license like BSD are bad get on my nerves.
Not to say I like Firefox, but I am currently hating it the least. All the browsers are problematic in my opinion, just in different ways. I used FF for a long time but its Flash issues were just too much, among other things, so I switched to Chrome. Now I'm back on FF. I really like a lot about IE, but it has too many problems rendering a number of websites correctly so it is out.
Nobody can seem to make a good browser, just a less bad one:P.
If they'd just come out and said "Yes, some evil hax0rs got in to our system and stole lots of cards. Stupid haxors, everyone hates those guys. Here's how they did it, here's what we are doing, and here's some security experts that are helping us," well people would probably be fine with it.
Instead they are being all secretive and it makes people worry. They also are doing shit for notification. I always use my Target card when I shop at Target because it has the best bribes (5% off anything, since they actually run their own bank and don't have to pay payment processing fees on it). I have received zero notifications from Target about the compromise, and no new card. I know my card was hit, since I have friends who shop at the same store using non-Target cards that got notified, but Target hasn't done anything.
I'm not worried, they have to deal with all the fallout of any unauthorized charges and the card can only be used at Target, but it is just extremely bad form. It shows a real lack of care and understand as to the severity of this. It really makes them look bad.
If there's something history has show with regards to people and companies it is that you need to admit you fucked up, even if it wasn't your fault really, and show people how you are making it right. Then, they are happy and forgive. Get all secretive and hostile, and they'll get hostile right back.
I get real tired of this "XBox one cannot do 1080p" crap that Sony/ Nintendo fans keep trotting out. Yes, it can. FIFA Soccer 14, Forza Motorsport 5, NBA 2K14, Need for Speed Rivals, all run at 1080 internally. Yes, a number of games run at less and I imagine that'll only be more common as time goes on, but it doesn't change the fact that the system is perfectly capable of 1080. Heck for that matter, not all PS4 titles run at 1080, BF4 being an example.
I have no stake in this fight, I don't do console games I'm all PC all the time. I say "lolconsoles" to 1080p30, I do my gaming at 2560x1600 @ 60fps please and thanks. However don't go spreading misinformation, particularly technical information on a tech site.
ATMs don't have to worry about viruses n' such generally because users can't get at them. You can only use their custom interface, you can't surf the web with them. There also isn't USB access (or rather shouldn't be, I'm not saying there has never been a stupidly designed one). So a lot of the threats you'd face on a normal desktop don't apply.
Plus there's the unequal relationship with the bank, in that an ATM trusts it completely. They don't actually process your account, they just send data back to the bank, via special purpose built encryption cards. It hands off what you want to do to the bank, which then tells it what it can do. It doesn't deal with data security in a normal sense.
So what the OS on an ATM does is present a user interface to the users, and communicate to the hardware (the encryption device, the cash dispenser, that kind of thing). Hence their concern is something that is easy to develop a UI for, and supports the devices in the system. Not something that is hardened against security issues since that really isn't a problem in the way it is used.
Amazon operates on very thin margins. This is partially because they want to give customers a good price, which means they don't make a lot of profit per sale. It is also because they reinvest their profits in their business, buying more infrastructure, that kind of thing.
They are not like Apple, just hoarding tons of cash, they don't actually have a tone of money left over.
The limit in the new Sim City is 2km x 2km. That is pathetic. Literally all you can create is a couple city blocks, or a very tiny small town. I mean I live close enough to work to bike in, and I live a good deal further than that (8km).
While there are always limits as to what you can do reasonably in a game, this limit is way too small to be fun. It isn't a matter of being able to create a "big city" it is a matter that almost all small towns are far larger than that.
Apparently they aren't fixing it either. They say the performance isn't good on larger cities, which translates to "We fucked our engine up bad so it can't scale at all."
Unless that is fixed as well, I wouldn't get it. Offline mode is a requisite for sure, but if gameplay is still broken then it isn't worth money.
You might, but then again you might on consoles too. Games cost full retail on Steam. Assassin's Creed 4 is $60, same as for the PS4 and the Xboner. It is, in fact cheaper for the PS3 and 360, only $50. Now, it was on sale for a day on Steam's winter sale for $45 (still more expensive than the Wii U version now) but only for that short sale. If you want it now, $60 it is.
What about older titles? Say, Crysis 2. Only $30 in the Steam Store now. From Amazon? $20 for the PS3/360.
Yes Steam has sales, but they are limited time only sales. Guess what? Amazon, Gamestop, etc all do that too. If you shop sales, and if you buy older titles, you can have games cheaper. You want the newest titles around release? You are paying $50-60, regardless of platform.
Don't get me wrong, I love Steam, I'm a PC-only gamer, I have 200 games in my Steam library. However don't kid yourself in to thinking you spend more getting a Steam machine and the save money on all games. No such luck.
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that on the old generation consoles, you could spend even less if you stuck strictly to older games, because used is an option. Like again take Crysis 2. If you buy on Steam, you pay Steam's price, period. $30 right now, and even assuming a big 75% sale $7.50. Right now Amazon has used copies for sale for $5 for the 360. There are never any used Steam games, since you cannot resell them.
So sorry, but for most consumers it isn't going to equal some amazing cost savings, unless Valve drops their prices a lot. They can't do that though, because they let publishers set the prices and the big publishers require agency pricing anyhow.
Yes, MS may eventually go out of business, or discontinue Windows. They also might eventually change the way it works so substantially as to break things. However, it is a pretty unlikely scenario, they have pretty good history and a good definition of their support lifecycle.
Nothing in the universe is certain, of course, but neither would be something like Steam Box. Being Linux based doesn't mean anything. I mean, suppose all of a sudden Intel, AMD, and nVidia got together and decided to totally change everything. New ISA, no more DirectX or OpenGL, etc, etc. Everything would need to be reported, redeveloped, and it would be a massive problem.
Now that is exceedingly unlikely to happen, but just another example that you can't have some solution that is perfect, forever, and will never go away no matter what.
Hell look at the console market. You can't rely on shit there, yet it still seems to do well. You don't know if a new console will come out, if it does when, when it does if it'll be backwards compatible, etc, etc.
This idea that a Steam Box is needed for some kind of stability is silly. The parent has it right: It is an ego thing, and a thing to try and protect Steam. Valve loves Steam because it means they can fuck around and do as they please, no worries about money because it rolls in for very little effort. However if people started using the Windows Store to get their software instead (not likely, Microsoft is making a big hash of it) then Steam's market could dry up and that would suck for Valve.
Traditional game consoles are subsidized. When they launch they are sold for a very thin profit at most, and generally are sold for a loss (sometimes a fair sized one). The money is then made up on games (each game sold pays a license fee to the console maker).
That's not the case with Steam boxes. Valve isn't subsidizing it, they aren't even participating the the building. They are having others do it. Well Dell doesn't mind, they are open to sell PC hardware anywhere they can. But they require a profit on it. They aren't going to take a loss, because the only money they'll see from it is the up front sale.
Also, something that does help the consoles price wise this generation is the AMD chip. Their GPU and CPU is one unit. That costs less than two separate units. Also AMD is giving the makers a very deep discount to win the contract.
Hence, it is gonna be more expensive. That is one of the major problems a Steam box will have: It'll cost more than a console of roughly equal performance.
If you read posts from many Bitcoin supporters, you will discover that they actually believe that deflation is a good thing. They think that deflation will make the money in their piggy bank worth more, and thus they like it. They have a poor understanding of the overall economic impact so they believe it would be positive. They also tend to conflate the ideas of saving and hoarding so while Bitcoin encourages the latter, they believe that's the same thing as the former.
What's even funnier to me, is that these are often the same people that get mad about "the 1%". What they fail to realize is that deflation is something that would benefit the rich and the very most and harm the poor the very most. The more money you have, and the less debt you have, the better deflation would be for you. If you've got a massive bank account, more than you need for the rest of your life, deflation is great. You keep all your money in cash, spend it only as you need, and the remaining money gets worth more. You don't need to invest it or take any risk, just keeping cash increases your value.
On the other side, if you owe money, deflation is a big problem. A loan becomes increasingly difficult to pay back as your nominal payment stays the same, but the real value that you are having to pay out increases. It works to keep you poor and to make it more difficult for you to ever become financially self-sufficient.
Really what it comes down to is many Bitcoin supporters just have a very poor understanding of economics. They don't understand the downsides of Bitcoin, because they actually believe many of them to the upsides. Really, Bitcoin is a dream for the rich robber barons. They would love something outside of any government regulation, something that works to make the rich richer, something where there's no recourse if they take money from you, no chargeback that kind of thing. It really isn't something that the rest of us should be that interested in seeing.
The idea of a crypto currency is an interesting one, but Bitcoin is very poorly implemented from an economic standpoint, if nothing else.
Also there's a difference between saving and hoarding. What happens during deflation, in particular severe deflation is hoarding more than saving. Saving is setting aside some percent of your income for rainy day, and for later in life when you won't work. It's a negative feedback mechanism to put it in electrical engineering terms and, as with electrical circuits, it add stability to a system. With deflation what goes on is hoarding. People hold on to as much money as possible, spend as little as possible, because the money will be worth more in the future. That's very different than saving. While fundamentally yes, we're talking about spending less than you make it's a difference in attitude.
Money is only useful if it is spent, if it circulates. Money is not a magical force, it's not an end of itself, it's a theoretical construct to facilitate trade. So it only does it job if it is facilitating trade, and for that to happen it has to flow it has to be spent. Deflation runs directly counter to that since it encourages people, particularly those with more monies that are rich, to hoard as much as possible. Spend only what you need right now, because it'll all be worth more later.
1) Why the heck are you still here? If you truly believe that the US is an oppressive police state, yet they are still clearly letting people freely travel across their borders (I just got back from Canada a couple weeks ago) then why are you not getting out now? If you really believe that the US has fallen in the police state, but it hasn't figured this out in isn't restricting the populace from leaving, then the logical thing to do is get the hell out before they do. That you would stay yet believe this is rather odd.
2) Why are you posting things against the government online? Again, if you believe that this is a police state and that the government goes after those that speak against it, why would you tempted by speaking against it online? It's not like a post like this on Slashdot is going to do any good, it won't start a revolution, or even change anybody's mind for that matter, so the only possible result would be the you would get in trouble. As such it makes no sense that you would call attention to yourself, with no gain it all.
Or, maybe, like so many people online you just like to whine and bitch, and you lack any real worldwide or historical perspective. If that's the case, please do us all a favor and quit it. It gets rather old hearing people cry that the US is evil, a police state, fascist, a dictatorship, whatever, and yet do nothing about it.
If you truly believe that this is the case, then you need to do something. If you want to stay, then you either need to keep your head down, your nose clean, and try to make yourself as invisible to the state as possible so you don't get in trouble. Or, you need to rebel you need to fight against the power, you need to try to make things better. If neither of those appeal to you, then leaving is the logical conclusion, since they aren't stopping you.
If I believe that the US was as bad as many of the whiners online do, I would leave. I wouldn't want to live in continual fear, I wouldn't want to live in a society where I couldn't speak freely, so I get out. I don't believe that's the case, as is evidenced by the fact that I speak freely online, so I'm happy to stay.
So please clarify what you believe, and don't just whine online.
What some people seem to forget is that we dealt with the easy stuff in medicine already. We are getting to tougher and tougher problems to tackle, hence why it takes longer and more research to deal with.
Cancer is very tricky. As you note it is a type of issue, not a single disease (much like the flu is a type of viral infection, not a single virus) and it really is the body turning against itself, it isn't an outside pathogen that can be dealt with.
Problems with using social media aside, headhunters are fucking lazy morons. I've never personally had to deal with them, thankfully, but one of my friends, being a consultant, does often and they are universally wastes of flesh. They are not concerned with trying to find the best candidate for the job, carefully vetting resumes and checking experience. Rather they are interested in finding someone as fast as possible and mating them with a job so they can get their fee. They rarely have the faintest idea of what they are talking about in terms of technical requirements and so on.
So ya, I'm sure this doesn't help. Particularly since what people put on their social networking sites varies a ton. Some people have lots of work related things, some have none. Doesn't really translate to job performance, just to what they like to share or not share.
Sounds like more what they are doing, particularly based on the discrimination report, is finding people they think "look good" meaning largely white and particularly good looking female, and sending them on.
The "S" in SEC stands for Securities. It is their job to regulate that kind of thing.
As you say, Kickstarter is different. Not only are you not getting any equity in the company, you aren't getting any financial stake in the project or anything. It is an investment for creative return, not financial, and thus not something that would be covered.
You need to pay income tax on Kickstarter funds, of course, but that's all. They aren't an investment as far as the SEC is concerned.
It is just entering the consumer arena. Hence it is expensive. However since it is entering the consumer arena, we see companies like Youtube starting to support it.
1) That's not a US rule, that's a merchant/payment processor rule, because they are worried about fraud. Not saying it makes the most sense, but that is why it is. In Europe you'll find that ordering from some Eastern European countries can be difficult/impossible for the same reason.
2) Duh. That is true of all countries. In any country the authorities can legally compel access to things in the country. That is kinda part of being a country. The issue is them doing it illegally, or at least in ways that ought to be illegal. However complaining that they can legally access data is silly, since all countries operate like that. If you think that France cannot or does not get warrants to look at servers in their country when they suspect wrong doing, you are naive.
3) This one is a real problem, though I wonder how it stands in other countries. I know Canada can do it as well, I haven't looked in to the laws in other countries. Many may actually allow it. The US really shouldn't, but I fear it may not be alone in this.
Well let's see, what do we use at work... Cadence. No. HFSS. No. Hyper-V. No. ADS. No.
Hmmm... Maybe not so much. There's plenty of shit that doesn't use OpenCL, but where you want speed and big memory, but there's little to no GPU use.
Also you find a lot of stuff that does GPU acceleration, wants CUDA. The research labs we have that do GPU based work are all NVidia all the time on account of CUDA.
Say, RAID-6? That's what you do for drive failures. The problem with drive failure isn't replacing the drive, but the data and the downtime.
With most workstations, this is easy, you can get a RAID controller, usually integrated on the board (Dell's PERC 710s are great) and you can knock in a bunch of drives and go. High performance, high resilience. No such luck on this new Pro.
Another option would be a good external system. Maybe a heavy hitting iSCSI or FC array. That's where you go for really high end, lots of storage, reliability, etc. Ahh well you are kinda screwed there too. No cards to add FC to the pro, and OS-X has no iSCSI initiator, which is shocking for a modern OS, Windows got it in 2003 and Linux in 2005.
Also you might want to look in to SSD failure rates. They aren't particularly high, but they aren't particularly low either. Oh, and they are workload dependent as well. I loves me some SSDs, but don't think they are rocks on which you can build your house.
This is the thing all Mac fans seem to miss: Apple often throws in expensive shit that people don't need, and would rather not pay for. You discover that with SSDs, they are pretty much all "fast enough" for most tasks, meaning they are not a significant bottleneck, if one at all. You can see this upgrading a SATA 2 SSD to SATA 3. You get twice the bandwidth, and benchmarks bear that out, but you notice no operational difference. It was already fast enough for what it is tasked with.
Even high end stuff in nearly all cases. Like streaming audio samples. SSDs are the best shit EVAR as far as those of us that play with audio samplers (NI Kontakt and the like ) are concerned. What you find is that all limits go away with regards to the drive. Want to stream 2000 voices at once? No problem, even "slow" SSDs are fast enough for that no problems.
So the "givashit" quotient on these hyper-fast SSDs is pretty low. If I was running a heavy hitting database maybe. Of course one wouldn't do that on a Mac Pro. For AV work? Nope, regular SSDs are fast enough and space is more of an issue than speed. You can do uncompressed 4:4:4 HD video on any SSD no problem. However you need 13GB/minute to hold it. So 1200MB/sec doesn't matter 225MB/sec is all you need and a SATA-2 SSD could do that. What you need is space for cheap. A comparatively slow 1TB SSD is more use than a lightning fast 250GB one.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean let's see what's in the thread right now: An energizer bunny joke about the US mars rovers, someone saying good luck to the Chinese and how this transcends politics, someone saying Jade Rabbit is awesome, someone who hopes they resolve the problem, someone correcting the use of shi-fu, and then this.
So basically, he's making shit up. The higher rated comments are nearly all encouragement, and the one referencing the US rovers is a joke. This moron wants there to be a bunch of US nationalism for him to hate on, but there's not, so he just pretends like there is anyhow. He's making up reasons for US hate/China strong.
Also there's the stupid crap of trying to make the US look bad because "Your country is the biggest melting pot of foreign scientists and researchers in the world." As though the US is so stupid and has to import foreigners to do any work. No, quite the opposite actually: American universities are still some of the very best research institutions in the world, despite all the cuts and problems, and people come from around the world to work at them and do research. The US is a melting pot precisely because of the excellence of its research institutions, and in allowing people from all over to come, it helps to continue that excellence and enrich the world's knowledge.
The grandparent is just a jackass. He really wants this to be some kind of China hate thread so he can hate on that to try and deflect things from the rover's problem. Instead it is a thread largely of people saying "Good luck China, we hope you fix the problem and your rover continues to work."
GPL could possibly be abused in a "rent everything" situation. So, you are required to distribute the source code of a GPL'd program if you distribute the binaries. The first must come with the second. However, distribution is when it is required. If you modify GPL code and use it internally, no distribution is needed since you aren't distributing binaries.
So, go all "cloud" on that shit. Use and modify GPL'd software, but run it only on your servers. Everyone of your users interacts with it, but they don't get to have a copy, and they have to pay you monthly.
There you go, GPL avoided n' abused.
Wouldn't happen where I work (a state university). We don't "just sign it and scan it." You send us a contract, it goes over to contracting. If it is one they recognize, they change it, initial it, and sign it on behalf of the Regents. If not, it goes over to the general council's office and they work with contracting on it. Either way, it is getting changed and sent back to you to sign.
That copyright assignment thing? Right out. They'd agree to GPL, probably, but never to copyright assignment. All work by the university is copyright to the board of regents (and by extension the state).
For that matter the US government wouldn't be able to sign it. While they don't copyright their work that's the issue: Work by the federal government is public domain. They can't go and assign the copyright. Doesn't matter that it would be something "open", for them "open" means "public domain".
Most people who love to post these high speedtest numbers are people who's provider runs a speedtest server. Ok, so you can get that speed to their central office. Big deal, I get those speeds to our speedtest server at work... because it is down the hall from me.
A real speed test involves going off network and a good distance away. I generally test to FastServ Networks in California because they have a solid network on their test server, it is off my ISP (at home and at work) and in a different state. If my speed is good to them, I can confidently say my Internet connection is fast: I have a good uplink all the way to the outside world, off my network.
Also there is the question of congestion, or rather lack of it. I can't imagine Google is doing point-to-point fiber. It is probably GPON. That means the more subscribers in an area, the less speed.
I just question his gushing a bit because at work, I have "gigabit" speeds. I'm on a gig link, to a 10gig building link to our central systems. I'm not sure what our total off campus speed is, it's around 2gig to the Internet, 10gig to I2, but I haven't looked. Speedtests to FastServ show about 400mbits up and down generally during the work day. Downloads are nice and zippy, a Linux torrent just screams, and we have Akamai cache engines on the network so things like Windows updates are almost wire speed.
However for all that, I don't notice much difference over my home network, which is about 30mbit. I do for big downloads, of course, but not for general browsing. The speed of page loads seems to be limited mostly by rendering all the javascript and DHTML they use these days, not by the line, and I can stream whatever I like with no issues.
In particular, not everyone agrees with his rather narrow definition of "freedom". Some developers like the whole BSD thing, which gives more freedom to the person who uses and implements the software, rather than the original developer. It is akin to the CC-BY license, where you want to have your stuff acknowledged as a source, but you welcome people to do with it as they please.
I have no problem with the GPL, but the zealots that seem to think it is the only way EVAR that is ok and that people who want a less restrictive license like BSD are bad get on my nerves.
Not to say I like Firefox, but I am currently hating it the least. All the browsers are problematic in my opinion, just in different ways. I used FF for a long time but its Flash issues were just too much, among other things, so I switched to Chrome. Now I'm back on FF. I really like a lot about IE, but it has too many problems rendering a number of websites correctly so it is out.
Nobody can seem to make a good browser, just a less bad one :P.
If they'd just come out and said "Yes, some evil hax0rs got in to our system and stole lots of cards. Stupid haxors, everyone hates those guys. Here's how they did it, here's what we are doing, and here's some security experts that are helping us," well people would probably be fine with it.
Instead they are being all secretive and it makes people worry. They also are doing shit for notification. I always use my Target card when I shop at Target because it has the best bribes (5% off anything, since they actually run their own bank and don't have to pay payment processing fees on it). I have received zero notifications from Target about the compromise, and no new card. I know my card was hit, since I have friends who shop at the same store using non-Target cards that got notified, but Target hasn't done anything.
I'm not worried, they have to deal with all the fallout of any unauthorized charges and the card can only be used at Target, but it is just extremely bad form. It shows a real lack of care and understand as to the severity of this. It really makes them look bad.
If there's something history has show with regards to people and companies it is that you need to admit you fucked up, even if it wasn't your fault really, and show people how you are making it right. Then, they are happy and forgive. Get all secretive and hostile, and they'll get hostile right back.
I get real tired of this "XBox one cannot do 1080p" crap that Sony/ Nintendo fans keep trotting out. Yes, it can. FIFA Soccer 14, Forza Motorsport 5, NBA 2K14, Need for Speed Rivals, all run at 1080 internally. Yes, a number of games run at less and I imagine that'll only be more common as time goes on, but it doesn't change the fact that the system is perfectly capable of 1080. Heck for that matter, not all PS4 titles run at 1080, BF4 being an example.
I have no stake in this fight, I don't do console games I'm all PC all the time. I say "lolconsoles" to 1080p30, I do my gaming at 2560x1600 @ 60fps please and thanks. However don't go spreading misinformation, particularly technical information on a tech site.
ATMs don't have to worry about viruses n' such generally because users can't get at them. You can only use their custom interface, you can't surf the web with them. There also isn't USB access (or rather shouldn't be, I'm not saying there has never been a stupidly designed one). So a lot of the threats you'd face on a normal desktop don't apply.
Plus there's the unequal relationship with the bank, in that an ATM trusts it completely. They don't actually process your account, they just send data back to the bank, via special purpose built encryption cards. It hands off what you want to do to the bank, which then tells it what it can do. It doesn't deal with data security in a normal sense.
So what the OS on an ATM does is present a user interface to the users, and communicate to the hardware (the encryption device, the cash dispenser, that kind of thing). Hence their concern is something that is easy to develop a UI for, and supports the devices in the system. Not something that is hardened against security issues since that really isn't a problem in the way it is used.
Amazon operates on very thin margins. This is partially because they want to give customers a good price, which means they don't make a lot of profit per sale. It is also because they reinvest their profits in their business, buying more infrastructure, that kind of thing.
They are not like Apple, just hoarding tons of cash, they don't actually have a tone of money left over.
The limit in the new Sim City is 2km x 2km. That is pathetic. Literally all you can create is a couple city blocks, or a very tiny small town. I mean I live close enough to work to bike in, and I live a good deal further than that (8km).
While there are always limits as to what you can do reasonably in a game, this limit is way too small to be fun. It isn't a matter of being able to create a "big city" it is a matter that almost all small towns are far larger than that.
Apparently they aren't fixing it either. They say the performance isn't good on larger cities, which translates to "We fucked our engine up bad so it can't scale at all."
Unless that is fixed as well, I wouldn't get it. Offline mode is a requisite for sure, but if gameplay is still broken then it isn't worth money.
You might, but then again you might on consoles too. Games cost full retail on Steam. Assassin's Creed 4 is $60, same as for the PS4 and the Xboner. It is, in fact cheaper for the PS3 and 360, only $50. Now, it was on sale for a day on Steam's winter sale for $45 (still more expensive than the Wii U version now) but only for that short sale. If you want it now, $60 it is.
What about older titles? Say, Crysis 2. Only $30 in the Steam Store now. From Amazon? $20 for the PS3/360.
Yes Steam has sales, but they are limited time only sales. Guess what? Amazon, Gamestop, etc all do that too. If you shop sales, and if you buy older titles, you can have games cheaper. You want the newest titles around release? You are paying $50-60, regardless of platform.
Don't get me wrong, I love Steam, I'm a PC-only gamer, I have 200 games in my Steam library. However don't kid yourself in to thinking you spend more getting a Steam machine and the save money on all games. No such luck.
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that on the old generation consoles, you could spend even less if you stuck strictly to older games, because used is an option. Like again take Crysis 2. If you buy on Steam, you pay Steam's price, period. $30 right now, and even assuming a big 75% sale $7.50. Right now Amazon has used copies for sale for $5 for the 360. There are never any used Steam games, since you cannot resell them.
So sorry, but for most consumers it isn't going to equal some amazing cost savings, unless Valve drops their prices a lot. They can't do that though, because they let publishers set the prices and the big publishers require agency pricing anyhow.
Yes, MS may eventually go out of business, or discontinue Windows. They also might eventually change the way it works so substantially as to break things. However, it is a pretty unlikely scenario, they have pretty good history and a good definition of their support lifecycle.
Nothing in the universe is certain, of course, but neither would be something like Steam Box. Being Linux based doesn't mean anything. I mean, suppose all of a sudden Intel, AMD, and nVidia got together and decided to totally change everything. New ISA, no more DirectX or OpenGL, etc, etc. Everything would need to be reported, redeveloped, and it would be a massive problem.
Now that is exceedingly unlikely to happen, but just another example that you can't have some solution that is perfect, forever, and will never go away no matter what.
Hell look at the console market. You can't rely on shit there, yet it still seems to do well. You don't know if a new console will come out, if it does when, when it does if it'll be backwards compatible, etc, etc.
This idea that a Steam Box is needed for some kind of stability is silly. The parent has it right: It is an ego thing, and a thing to try and protect Steam. Valve loves Steam because it means they can fuck around and do as they please, no worries about money because it rolls in for very little effort. However if people started using the Windows Store to get their software instead (not likely, Microsoft is making a big hash of it) then Steam's market could dry up and that would suck for Valve.
The hardware makers have to make money on it.
Traditional game consoles are subsidized. When they launch they are sold for a very thin profit at most, and generally are sold for a loss (sometimes a fair sized one). The money is then made up on games (each game sold pays a license fee to the console maker).
That's not the case with Steam boxes. Valve isn't subsidizing it, they aren't even participating the the building. They are having others do it. Well Dell doesn't mind, they are open to sell PC hardware anywhere they can. But they require a profit on it. They aren't going to take a loss, because the only money they'll see from it is the up front sale.
Also, something that does help the consoles price wise this generation is the AMD chip. Their GPU and CPU is one unit. That costs less than two separate units. Also AMD is giving the makers a very deep discount to win the contract.
Hence, it is gonna be more expensive. That is one of the major problems a Steam box will have: It'll cost more than a console of roughly equal performance.
If you read posts from many Bitcoin supporters, you will discover that they actually believe that deflation is a good thing. They think that deflation will make the money in their piggy bank worth more, and thus they like it. They have a poor understanding of the overall economic impact so they believe it would be positive. They also tend to conflate the ideas of saving and hoarding so while Bitcoin encourages the latter, they believe that's the same thing as the former.
What's even funnier to me, is that these are often the same people that get mad about "the 1%". What they fail to realize is that deflation is something that would benefit the rich and the very most and harm the poor the very most. The more money you have, and the less debt you have, the better deflation would be for you. If you've got a massive bank account, more than you need for the rest of your life, deflation is great. You keep all your money in cash, spend it only as you need, and the remaining money gets worth more. You don't need to invest it or take any risk, just keeping cash increases your value.
On the other side, if you owe money, deflation is a big problem. A loan becomes increasingly difficult to pay back as your nominal payment stays the same, but the real value that you are having to pay out increases. It works to keep you poor and to make it more difficult for you to ever become financially self-sufficient.
Really what it comes down to is many Bitcoin supporters just have a very poor understanding of economics. They don't understand the downsides of Bitcoin, because they actually believe many of them to the upsides. Really, Bitcoin is a dream for the rich robber barons. They would love something outside of any government regulation, something that works to make the rich richer, something where there's no recourse if they take money from you, no chargeback that kind of thing. It really isn't something that the rest of us should be that interested in seeing.
The idea of a crypto currency is an interesting one, but Bitcoin is very poorly implemented from an economic standpoint, if nothing else.
Also there's a difference between saving and hoarding. What happens during deflation, in particular severe deflation is hoarding more than saving. Saving is setting aside some percent of your income for rainy day, and for later in life when you won't work. It's a negative feedback mechanism to put it in electrical engineering terms and, as with electrical circuits, it add stability to a system. With deflation what goes on is hoarding. People hold on to as much money as possible, spend as little as possible, because the money will be worth more in the future. That's very different than saving. While fundamentally yes, we're talking about spending less than you make it's a difference in attitude.
Money is only useful if it is spent, if it circulates. Money is not a magical force, it's not an end of itself, it's a theoretical construct to facilitate trade. So it only does it job if it is facilitating trade, and for that to happen it has to flow it has to be spent. Deflation runs directly counter to that since it encourages people, particularly those with more monies that are rich, to hoard as much as possible. Spend only what you need right now, because it'll all be worth more later.
Then I have two questions for you:
1) Why the heck are you still here? If you truly believe that the US is an oppressive police state, yet they are still clearly letting people freely travel across their borders (I just got back from Canada a couple weeks ago) then why are you not getting out now? If you really believe that the US has fallen in the police state, but it hasn't figured this out in isn't restricting the populace from leaving, then the logical thing to do is get the hell out before they do. That you would stay yet believe this is rather odd.
2) Why are you posting things against the government online? Again, if you believe that this is a police state and that the government goes after those that speak against it, why would you tempted by speaking against it online? It's not like a post like this on Slashdot is going to do any good, it won't start a revolution, or even change anybody's mind for that matter, so the only possible result would be the you would get in trouble. As such it makes no sense that you would call attention to yourself, with no gain it all.
Or, maybe, like so many people online you just like to whine and bitch, and you lack any real worldwide or historical perspective. If that's the case, please do us all a favor and quit it. It gets rather old hearing people cry that the US is evil, a police state, fascist, a dictatorship, whatever, and yet do nothing about it.
If you truly believe that this is the case, then you need to do something. If you want to stay, then you either need to keep your head down, your nose clean, and try to make yourself as invisible to the state as possible so you don't get in trouble. Or, you need to rebel you need to fight against the power, you need to try to make things better. If neither of those appeal to you, then leaving is the logical conclusion, since they aren't stopping you.
If I believe that the US was as bad as many of the whiners online do, I would leave. I wouldn't want to live in continual fear, I wouldn't want to live in a society where I couldn't speak freely, so I get out. I don't believe that's the case, as is evidenced by the fact that I speak freely online, so I'm happy to stay.
So please clarify what you believe, and don't just whine online.
That makes it harder to deal with.
What some people seem to forget is that we dealt with the easy stuff in medicine already. We are getting to tougher and tougher problems to tackle, hence why it takes longer and more research to deal with.
Cancer is very tricky. As you note it is a type of issue, not a single disease (much like the flu is a type of viral infection, not a single virus) and it really is the body turning against itself, it isn't an outside pathogen that can be dealt with.
Problems with using social media aside, headhunters are fucking lazy morons. I've never personally had to deal with them, thankfully, but one of my friends, being a consultant, does often and they are universally wastes of flesh. They are not concerned with trying to find the best candidate for the job, carefully vetting resumes and checking experience. Rather they are interested in finding someone as fast as possible and mating them with a job so they can get their fee. They rarely have the faintest idea of what they are talking about in terms of technical requirements and so on.
So ya, I'm sure this doesn't help. Particularly since what people put on their social networking sites varies a ton. Some people have lots of work related things, some have none. Doesn't really translate to job performance, just to what they like to share or not share.
Sounds like more what they are doing, particularly based on the discrimination report, is finding people they think "look good" meaning largely white and particularly good looking female, and sending them on.
The "S" in SEC stands for Securities. It is their job to regulate that kind of thing.
As you say, Kickstarter is different. Not only are you not getting any equity in the company, you aren't getting any financial stake in the project or anything. It is an investment for creative return, not financial, and thus not something that would be covered.
You need to pay income tax on Kickstarter funds, of course, but that's all. They aren't an investment as far as the SEC is concerned.
It is just entering the consumer arena. Hence it is expensive. However since it is entering the consumer arena, we see companies like Youtube starting to support it.
1) That's not a US rule, that's a merchant/payment processor rule, because they are worried about fraud. Not saying it makes the most sense, but that is why it is. In Europe you'll find that ordering from some Eastern European countries can be difficult/impossible for the same reason.
2) Duh. That is true of all countries. In any country the authorities can legally compel access to things in the country. That is kinda part of being a country. The issue is them doing it illegally, or at least in ways that ought to be illegal. However complaining that they can legally access data is silly, since all countries operate like that. If you think that France cannot or does not get warrants to look at servers in their country when they suspect wrong doing, you are naive.
3) This one is a real problem, though I wonder how it stands in other countries. I know Canada can do it as well, I haven't looked in to the laws in other countries. Many may actually allow it. The US really shouldn't, but I fear it may not be alone in this.
Well let's see, what do we use at work... Cadence. No. HFSS. No. Hyper-V. No. ADS. No.
Hmmm... Maybe not so much. There's plenty of shit that doesn't use OpenCL, but where you want speed and big memory, but there's little to no GPU use.
Also you find a lot of stuff that does GPU acceleration, wants CUDA. The research labs we have that do GPU based work are all NVidia all the time on account of CUDA.
Say, RAID-6? That's what you do for drive failures. The problem with drive failure isn't replacing the drive, but the data and the downtime.
With most workstations, this is easy, you can get a RAID controller, usually integrated on the board (Dell's PERC 710s are great) and you can knock in a bunch of drives and go. High performance, high resilience. No such luck on this new Pro.
Another option would be a good external system. Maybe a heavy hitting iSCSI or FC array. That's where you go for really high end, lots of storage, reliability, etc. Ahh well you are kinda screwed there too. No cards to add FC to the pro, and OS-X has no iSCSI initiator, which is shocking for a modern OS, Windows got it in 2003 and Linux in 2005.
Also you might want to look in to SSD failure rates. They aren't particularly high, but they aren't particularly low either. Oh, and they are workload dependent as well. I loves me some SSDs, but don't think they are rocks on which you can build your house.
This is the thing all Mac fans seem to miss: Apple often throws in expensive shit that people don't need, and would rather not pay for. You discover that with SSDs, they are pretty much all "fast enough" for most tasks, meaning they are not a significant bottleneck, if one at all. You can see this upgrading a SATA 2 SSD to SATA 3. You get twice the bandwidth, and benchmarks bear that out, but you notice no operational difference. It was already fast enough for what it is tasked with.
Even high end stuff in nearly all cases. Like streaming audio samples. SSDs are the best shit EVAR as far as those of us that play with audio samplers (NI Kontakt and the like ) are concerned. What you find is that all limits go away with regards to the drive. Want to stream 2000 voices at once? No problem, even "slow" SSDs are fast enough for that no problems.
So the "givashit" quotient on these hyper-fast SSDs is pretty low. If I was running a heavy hitting database maybe. Of course one wouldn't do that on a Mac Pro. For AV work? Nope, regular SSDs are fast enough and space is more of an issue than speed. You can do uncompressed 4:4:4 HD video on any SSD no problem. However you need 13GB/minute to hold it. So 1200MB/sec doesn't matter 225MB/sec is all you need and a SATA-2 SSD could do that. What you need is space for cheap. A comparatively slow 1TB SSD is more use than a lightning fast 250GB one.