One of the reasons the US is borrowing so much is that the US Dollar is the world's reserve currency and the world really, REALLY wants to buy it right now. Lots and lots of people, businesses, and countries want a place to park their money that they find safe. They aren't looking for big returns, just a place to keep it. Hence the yields are all kinds of low. The 10 year yield is 1.8%, meaning you actually will lose a big on average, since inflation is normally 2% or above (it is targeted at that). Investors are willing to take a small loss in real terms to make sure they don't take a much bigger loss. Even the 30 year note is only 3%. The 2 year? 0.23%. Basically people are willing to take a real loss of 2ish% per year for a couple years, just to protect the principal.
Well, when you can borrow that cheap, is it any wonder the government is happy to do so? Also when you do a bit more research on the global currency situation and the position of a reserve currency, you find some interesting implications of just what would happen if the government wasn't willing to sell securities. It wouldn't be a good thing for the world economy right now if the US government said "Nah we're good, not issuing new debt, go park your money somewhere else."
Absolute value isn't want you want in a good currency. Doesn't matter the specifics of denomination against other currencies. It is STABILITY. If you are going to park your money in something, do business in something, you want it to be stable. Ideally, perfectly stable, no change in value, would be great. You can't have that in reality because the economy and population change, and there isn't (currently at least) any system that can perfectly map a currency to them. So in general you look for small, predictable changes. Stable currencies see changes on the order of 2-3% per year usually in terms of inflation.
If a currency massively swings in value, it really fucks you. Like say you are a business why tried to pay your employees in Bitcoins. I don't mean set an amount in US Dollars you'd pay them, then bought that many Bitcoins to do it, I mean actually denominated their pay in Bitcoins. You sell all your stuff in Bitcoins, you pay in Bitcoins, you use it as a real currency, not just a quick intermediary for USD.
Then suddenly Bitcoins deflate 100%, they are worth twice what they used to be. That means you have to cut your prices to half of what they were, or people won't buy from you anymore. However now you have a big payroll problem. Your employees are all making twice as much, effectively. The amount of coins you are paying them didn't change, but the value of those coins did. You are bringing in half as many coins, but still owe your employees the same amount.
So now with volatility like that you'd have to link your peoples' salaries to some kind of index. How much they'd get paid would depend on the value of BTC at the time. You think people would be happy with that? With a drastically fluctuating amount of pay. Also, all you really done then is started to peg their pay in another value, like USD.
All this change in value, no matter what direction, is an EXCEEDINGLY BAD thing for Bitcoin if it is to be a currency. Doesn't matter if it goes up and up and up, up and down, down and down, whatever. If the value changes rapidly, it is a bad thing. That makes it unsuitable as a currency.
If you view Bitcoin as an investment or get rich quick scheme, then this is all great. If you think it is the next amazing currency then this should worry you a lot, because it is not how a good currency works.
One where there's lots of speculation. These kind of shifts are NOT what you want for a currency. When a currency changes value by 10% in a YEAR that is a problem governments try to deal with (2-3% is the normal target), never mind doubling or halving in a day. Even a normal stock or commodity would be having some extreme problem for that kind of movement to happen.
It shows all the signs of sever speculation and a bubble. People playing it to try and make a big short term gain, at the expense of others.
Is Linux users have been whining that nVidia should open up their drivers. nVidia won't, so LInux users thing nVidia is the bad guy and "jerking them around" rather than investigating if there might be some valid reasons.
However despite that ideological point, he still uses their products, because they are the best for Linux. That again is a reason I say maybe people should consider that nVidia has reasons behind what they do.
nVidia has reasons for doing things the way they do. Yes, one of them is probably "because we don't want AMD grabbing our work," However there is some validity to that in that it is expensive to have a team of highly qualified people to do your development.
However that aside, there are licensing issues that keep their drivers closed, and there may be good reasons to want to use that code rather than try to re-implement it. Likewise there may be reasons to do their own thing and bypass some of the standard way of interfacing.
nVidia produces Linux drivers that work. They support the latest OpenGL features the hardware can handle, they are fast, and they are stable. That's pretty damn useful. So they are doing something right in their development. People should consider that, rather than just assuming that nVidia could easily deliver everything the same, but just in a format that makes OSS heads happy.
Also consider that maybe working with someone is an easier way to get at least some of what you want than fighting with them.
Thunderbolt has 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 (this new version changes that to 3.0). 10gbps raw data rate, around 8gbps effective. It also has one channel of DisplayPort 1.1a.
So in terms of non-display devices, that means one RAID array of reasonably fast drives can easily overload it. I dunno about you, my RAID controllers usually hand of of 4-8x slots. 1 good SSD can kill half of that on its own. A 10 gig NIC is more than it can handle (look in the thread for a post by someone who implements those). In terms of display, DP 1.1a has enough bandwidth to get you 2560x1600@60fps. Knock on a second display at that rez? Well you don't have enough bandwidth anymore, so you are going to have to reduce rez, or framerate.
Or you could always, you know, have more than one connector and not bitch.
Seriously the one connector thing seems a little silly to me. A marketing solution looking for a problem. Yes, it'll work fine for the kind of stuff Apple likes to do: A laptop connected to a monitor, which then provides USB ports n' such, all over one connector. Ya. Great. Not really that big a deal.
It is not something, at least at present, that you can effectively hang a bunch of shit on one connector and get high performance.
Originally Light Peak was supposed to basically just be an external PCIe bus (and it could be internal too). The idea was a connector for things that need lower overhead than USB, and also hopefully eventually a single connector for all kinds of things. With the original goal of 100gbps, that would have been realistic (optical was the original interface design).
However things got changed pretty quick in part for cost reasons, but also because Apple got involved (meaning gave Intel money). Apple is obsessed with less cables because cables = evil in their mindset. So it got changed to be display + PCIe on one cable.
That had negative implications for the bandwidth, but also for the cost and ability to implement it. If it was just PCIe, well then a PCIe-thunderbolt card would be real feasible, and you could add a thunderbolt port by hanging it off the PCI bus. However with display integrated, it needs to work with the integrated display adapter and all that jazz.
Ultimately more cost, and thus less interest. While some Apple types might salivate over the prospect of one cable that goes from a laptop to a monitor, and then a bunch of non-monitors ports on that monitor, most people don't care.
There's a pretty big leap. All other issues aside, Linux does not have the robust media layer that Windows and MacOS do. Makes a port much more work to do and support.
If MacOS was just an easy step to Linux, well then why isn't there more stuff? I mean take some pro audio and video software:
Steinberg Nuendo: Windows and Mac. Avid Media Composer: Windows and Mac. Adobe Premier: Windows and Mac. Sony Vegas: Windows. Final Cut Pro: Mac. Steinberg Cubase: Windows and Mac. Digital Performer: Windows and Mac. Presonus Studio One: Windows and Mac. Avid Pro Tools: Windows and Mac. Cockos Reaper: Windows and Mac. Abelton Live: Windows and Mac. Cakewalk Sonar: Windows. Apple Logic Pro: Mac.
There's a lot of cross platform software, and some Mac only software. Not seeing anything Linux though. This list is pretty much all the heavy hitters in video and audio. I'm sure I could come up with a few more, if I thought on it, and I'm sure they also would be the same.
So I wouldn't count on Linux software out of Sony suddenly. There's a big difference between doing Mac support and Linux support.
The USPTO is more or less a "deny first, accept later" kind of place. They deny patents out of hand when they are first filed. So, modify, refile, modify, refile, etc, etc eventually you get one. Of course that is easy to do for a big company, not so feasible for a small guy.
You see it in any thread discussing Apple. Anything that reflects badly on Apple, no matter how true and accurate, gets down modded. Usually there are more than enough upmods to offset it, but it happens.
There are Apple fanboys that just cannot, will not, accept that Apple has every done anything wrong, every been anything but 100% innovative, etc. So they just to Apple's defense at every opportunity. Same thing with your post, same thing that is likely to happen to my post. They'll "defend" Apple by trying to silence people who say things unflattering.
The lefties were mad at Bush not for what he was doing, but because he was from The Other Guys(tm). He was one of the other tribe, so what he was doing was bad, and wrong, and evil and all that shit. Some people really believed this to an extreme extent. There were people saying Bush had setup FEMA death camps, would declare martial law and stop the election, that kind of thing.
Well now their guy is in power. Hence you see the same shit from the righties. All of a sudden stuff that under Bush was "necessary for our safety" and "reasonable" they are all bent out of shape and screaming about. You look around, you hear the same FEMA camp shit about Obama.
That's part of the problem is that many people have a "good guy, bad guy" view on politics right now so when their guys are doing things, those things are ok because their guys are the "good guys". That means that people who oppose things at one point will support them later.
By vote. When a department head position or dean position opens up, candidates, internal and external, apply. The faculty then votes on who they want. Technically the dean appoints department heads, the provost appoints deans, and so on up (the regents appoint presidents) but in actuality they do it based on faculty vote.
If you are implying there's some kind of business cabal that runs things and handles the promotions, no, sorry, it is the faculty. Also, most positions seem to get filled from within, and regardless only a tenured faculty is eligible to apply for the job.
The whole thing is stupid period since those devices are all very different markets and kinds of devices. However it is even sillier to compare all of Apple's stuff to just Windows desktops and laptops. If we are going to grab random devices that happen to run stuff, well then there are actually a number of things that run CE, or the embedded versions of Windows.
It actually is not all that impressive to say all of Apple's devices, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and so on managed to outsell Windows desktops and laptops (since let's be real, that's where the numbers are the MS tablets and phones aren't selling hardly at all). All that really says is that the market for electronic gadgets is big, and that MS still has a huge share of computers.
This is not news.
Computers are getting to be a mature market. The growth is leveling off, we will get to a point where it'll largely be replacements getting sold, not new ones. However that doesn't mean it still isn't a huge market, or that it isn't profitable.
So ya, Apple is beating MS left right and center in tablets and phones... However it would seem MS is still the be-all, end-all of desktop and laptops which, despite what teenagers may think, are still where shit gets done in the real world and thus still quite in demand.
Also in terms of talking phones, a fun one would be to have a look at Android. I am betting that one is the real winner in that arena.
When you talk about a governmental overreaction, which we have had for sure, making shit up and being extremely hyperbolic in your response is no more useful.
First off there's your bullshit about the gulag. A Gulag was not a place where there are extra security measures of questionable usefulness. It was a forced labour camp. This is a place where prisoners in the Soviet Union were sent there to work as slaves, abused, underfed, and in general experienced a mortality rate of about 10%.
If you are actually comparing the inconvenience of having to put up with the stupidity of the TSA's ineffective measures to that, you are an idiot.
Then there's the "Oh the coming after the video games is new!" cry. No, it isn't. Perhaps you were not old enough to remember the Columbine shooting in 1999. However it was discovered that the shooters liked to play Doom, and immediately there were morons calling it a "realistic murder simulator" and calling for restrictions on videogames. However that was just more of the same shit. It has been rock music, comic books, TV, movies, etc in the past. Whatever youth likes that is new and different gets targeted at something that is the cause of all the ills. It has been going on forever.
So, if you didn't know these things, then stop posting online rants about the US being a police state until you've spent time getting some historical and world wide perspective. If you talk without understanding, what you say has a much greater chance of being wrong. If you did know these things, then stop being an alarmist ass. It doesn't help. The response to government fear and FUD is not more fear and FUD. It is rational discussion, it is to bring this back down, help people understand that no, everything is NOT going to hell, we really are fine, chill out.
Or, as the Brits said so well "Keep calm, and carry on."
Politicians don't want any part of the mental health issue because it costs a lot of money. A good mental health care setup would be pricey, particularly since you'd also have to combine it with campaigns to work on destigmaizing mental health care, slapping down employers who discriminated because of it, etc, etc.
Right now, if you tell someone you have some illness, acute or chronic, and need to see a doctor, they are sympathetic. You tell someone you have mental problems and need to see a therapist and they look at you like you are toxic and they want nothing to do with you.
The cost and complexity means politicians don't want anything to do with it. They want cheap easy fixes. There aren't any to be had, so they'll just invent them.
She's long been one for getting rid of second amendment rights, without actually repealing the amendment. Something I think people forget is that the controlling/statist types don't stop at just trying to control the things you want them to control. They want to control everything. They'll ignore any rights they don't like.
So this should surprise all of nobody. She's one of the "People have rights only until I decided I don't like them," types. Doesn't really matter what the right is. If they decide that more control is needed, they'll trample on it.
What did you "tell them"? Since you didn't elaborate I fail to see what you are going for or how this is insightful.
I can only guess this is something along the lines of the people crying about "Waaaaa security through obscurity!" in which case I want to hear their solution to code signing/verification on a system that doesn't involve a secret private key. You might note that public/private key signing is how Linux distros secure and verify their application distribution services.
But at the university where I work, which is a pretty large one (about 40,000 students) "business types" in administration is not the problem, but quite the opposite. Administrative positions get appointed from faculty. Deans are faculty members promoted to administration, the president came from outside but is a PhD academic type and so on.
Some of our problems actually stem from this in that it turns out being an academic doesn't necessary mean you understand how to deal with a budget, or handle personnel issues, or the other kinds of business related things that come with running a large department.
The concerns I've Oyua have not been of non-delivery, well other than the Kickstarter haters that claim everything on there is a scam. The concerns I've seen are over functionality. Will it really go anywhere? Will anyone care? Many fanboys just seem to take it for granted that when it comes out, tons of stuff will get released for it and everyone will want one. I'm more skeptical. I think it'll be a toy that the backers and a few others play with for a bit, and then it gets set aside. I don't think it will compete well with smartphones and traditional consoles.
I've seen no plans for how they intend to attract big game publishers and that is what you need if you want to get many games on the platform, and games is what will sustain it long term. It is all well and good to crow on about open source but when you take a look at the number of OSS games, and the quality thereof, it is not very impressive. So to sell it to the masses and keep it rolling, you need more games and I've not seen any indication of what their plan is for that. It seems to be just "Release it and everyone will make cool shit for it!"
History is littered with failed consoles that can testify to that not being the case. Goes double for something that is smartphone level power, which will leave many people saying "So why not just use my phone?"
The challenge was never shipping the thing. They got plenty of money so that was easy, I mean it uses off-the-shelf components internally. It is just standard electronics design, testing, and assembly. The challenge is getting it to sell on the mass market, to be an item of interest that people keep buying, and buy successors to.
Then, well, it was inevitable anyhow and we might as well get it over with and kill them. Seriously, if they are really so thin skinned, so stupid, and so insane as to launch an attack over something like this, then it would happen sooner rather than later do to something else. In that case, let's have it happen sooner and just get it over with.
Please don't mistake this for me saying "We should go to war with NK!" I'm just saying that if something like this really did spark a war, I wouldn't blame the anon 'tards because the level of insanity, stupidity, and insecurity that it would take to start a war over something so trivial means it would get started over something else anyhow.
Bitcoins move around like a thinly traded stock. That's fine... for a thinly traded stock, not for a currency. Any currency that fluctuated like Bitcoin did would be in extreme crisis. Also in the case of Bitcoin it would be the first ever case of hyper-deflation.
Any country with this going on would be reeling, crying to the world for help, the IMF and all the big banks would be involved, etc, etc.
To give people an idea the US Dollar, which is the world's reserve currency (like it or not) changed 2% in value last year (2% inflation) which is a bit below it's 3.2% average (since about 1900). Even when it was having extremely high levels of inflation, high enough to be considered highly problematic, it was only about 13% (in 1979). That is change in value per YEAR. That's similar to other stable currencies you find.
You don't want to rely on a host OpenGL driver since OpenGL isn't the native interface for Windows.
Heck translation might be good even on a GL system, since ES isn't directly compatible with normal OpenGL unless you have a 4.1 or better setup which requires a fairly new card (GeForce 400 or newer in nVidia's case). I don't know of any Intel GPUs that do GL 4.1 yet, even Ivy Bridge is still 3.1.
So regardless of platform, it could make a lot of sense to implement it as a translation system, and then just choose the target of translation based off of what it is running on.
"it seems reasonable to guess that the implementation maps OpenGL to DirectX, thus avoiding Microsoft having to endorse OpenGL use."
No, more likely MS doesn't want to have to rely on vendors providing a working OpenGL driver, since that can be problematic (looking at you here ATi). If you have an accelerated Windows driver, a WDDM driver, it has DirectX support. That is how it works, just part of the spec. OpenGL, however, is an addon. Vendors can provide an OpenGL driver, or any other API they like, if they wish but it isn't an inherent part of the driver. They can choose not to provide them, or can provide broken ones.
So, would make sense for WebGl support to have something that does translation, so it works as long as you have a WDDM driver installed.
1) Generate base load, as in it doesn't vary with the time of day or weather.
2) Provide for power in all parts of the world, from northern latitudes to the equator.
3) Is cost effective.
You can't. That isn't to say other power generation methods aren't useful in some areas. Solar rules in the desert for peak load (when it is the hottest, you need the most energy for cooling and it is also outputting the most usually). However you are going to need something for base load. Nuclear is the best option.
If you think we could just go solar and/or wind and that would be all we need, well you haven't researched the grid very well.
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One of the reasons the US is borrowing so much is that the US Dollar is the world's reserve currency and the world really, REALLY wants to buy it right now. Lots and lots of people, businesses, and countries want a place to park their money that they find safe. They aren't looking for big returns, just a place to keep it. Hence the yields are all kinds of low. The 10 year yield is 1.8%, meaning you actually will lose a big on average, since inflation is normally 2% or above (it is targeted at that). Investors are willing to take a small loss in real terms to make sure they don't take a much bigger loss. Even the 30 year note is only 3%. The 2 year? 0.23%. Basically people are willing to take a real loss of 2ish% per year for a couple years, just to protect the principal.
Well, when you can borrow that cheap, is it any wonder the government is happy to do so? Also when you do a bit more research on the global currency situation and the position of a reserve currency, you find some interesting implications of just what would happen if the government wasn't willing to sell securities. It wouldn't be a good thing for the world economy right now if the US government said "Nah we're good, not issuing new debt, go park your money somewhere else."
Absolute value isn't want you want in a good currency. Doesn't matter the specifics of denomination against other currencies. It is STABILITY. If you are going to park your money in something, do business in something, you want it to be stable. Ideally, perfectly stable, no change in value, would be great. You can't have that in reality because the economy and population change, and there isn't (currently at least) any system that can perfectly map a currency to them. So in general you look for small, predictable changes. Stable currencies see changes on the order of 2-3% per year usually in terms of inflation.
If a currency massively swings in value, it really fucks you. Like say you are a business why tried to pay your employees in Bitcoins. I don't mean set an amount in US Dollars you'd pay them, then bought that many Bitcoins to do it, I mean actually denominated their pay in Bitcoins. You sell all your stuff in Bitcoins, you pay in Bitcoins, you use it as a real currency, not just a quick intermediary for USD.
Then suddenly Bitcoins deflate 100%, they are worth twice what they used to be. That means you have to cut your prices to half of what they were, or people won't buy from you anymore. However now you have a big payroll problem. Your employees are all making twice as much, effectively. The amount of coins you are paying them didn't change, but the value of those coins did. You are bringing in half as many coins, but still owe your employees the same amount.
So now with volatility like that you'd have to link your peoples' salaries to some kind of index. How much they'd get paid would depend on the value of BTC at the time. You think people would be happy with that? With a drastically fluctuating amount of pay. Also, all you really done then is started to peg their pay in another value, like USD.
All this change in value, no matter what direction, is an EXCEEDINGLY BAD thing for Bitcoin if it is to be a currency. Doesn't matter if it goes up and up and up, up and down, down and down, whatever. If the value changes rapidly, it is a bad thing. That makes it unsuitable as a currency.
If you view Bitcoin as an investment or get rich quick scheme, then this is all great. If you think it is the next amazing currency then this should worry you a lot, because it is not how a good currency works.
One where there's lots of speculation. These kind of shifts are NOT what you want for a currency. When a currency changes value by 10% in a YEAR that is a problem governments try to deal with (2-3% is the normal target), never mind doubling or halving in a day. Even a normal stock or commodity would be having some extreme problem for that kind of movement to happen.
It shows all the signs of sever speculation and a bubble. People playing it to try and make a big short term gain, at the expense of others.
Is Linux users have been whining that nVidia should open up their drivers. nVidia won't, so LInux users thing nVidia is the bad guy and "jerking them around" rather than investigating if there might be some valid reasons.
However despite that ideological point, he still uses their products, because they are the best for Linux. That again is a reason I say maybe people should consider that nVidia has reasons behind what they do.
nVidia has reasons for doing things the way they do. Yes, one of them is probably "because we don't want AMD grabbing our work," However there is some validity to that in that it is expensive to have a team of highly qualified people to do your development.
However that aside, there are licensing issues that keep their drivers closed, and there may be good reasons to want to use that code rather than try to re-implement it. Likewise there may be reasons to do their own thing and bypass some of the standard way of interfacing.
nVidia produces Linux drivers that work. They support the latest OpenGL features the hardware can handle, they are fast, and they are stable. That's pretty damn useful. So they are doing something right in their development. People should consider that, rather than just assuming that nVidia could easily deliver everything the same, but just in a format that makes OSS heads happy.
Also consider that maybe working with someone is an easier way to get at least some of what you want than fighting with them.
Thunderbolt has 2 lanes of PCIe 2.0 (this new version changes that to 3.0). 10gbps raw data rate, around 8gbps effective. It also has one channel of DisplayPort 1.1a.
So in terms of non-display devices, that means one RAID array of reasonably fast drives can easily overload it. I dunno about you, my RAID controllers usually hand of of 4-8x slots. 1 good SSD can kill half of that on its own. A 10 gig NIC is more than it can handle (look in the thread for a post by someone who implements those). In terms of display, DP 1.1a has enough bandwidth to get you 2560x1600@60fps. Knock on a second display at that rez? Well you don't have enough bandwidth anymore, so you are going to have to reduce rez, or framerate.
Or you could always, you know, have more than one connector and not bitch.
Seriously the one connector thing seems a little silly to me. A marketing solution looking for a problem. Yes, it'll work fine for the kind of stuff Apple likes to do: A laptop connected to a monitor, which then provides USB ports n' such, all over one connector. Ya. Great. Not really that big a deal.
It is not something, at least at present, that you can effectively hang a bunch of shit on one connector and get high performance.
Originally Light Peak was supposed to basically just be an external PCIe bus (and it could be internal too). The idea was a connector for things that need lower overhead than USB, and also hopefully eventually a single connector for all kinds of things. With the original goal of 100gbps, that would have been realistic (optical was the original interface design).
However things got changed pretty quick in part for cost reasons, but also because Apple got involved (meaning gave Intel money). Apple is obsessed with less cables because cables = evil in their mindset. So it got changed to be display + PCIe on one cable.
That had negative implications for the bandwidth, but also for the cost and ability to implement it. If it was just PCIe, well then a PCIe-thunderbolt card would be real feasible, and you could add a thunderbolt port by hanging it off the PCI bus. However with display integrated, it needs to work with the integrated display adapter and all that jazz.
Ultimately more cost, and thus less interest. While some Apple types might salivate over the prospect of one cable that goes from a laptop to a monitor, and then a bunch of non-monitors ports on that monitor, most people don't care.
There's a pretty big leap. All other issues aside, Linux does not have the robust media layer that Windows and MacOS do. Makes a port much more work to do and support.
If MacOS was just an easy step to Linux, well then why isn't there more stuff? I mean take some pro audio and video software:
Steinberg Nuendo: Windows and Mac.
Avid Media Composer: Windows and Mac.
Adobe Premier: Windows and Mac.
Sony Vegas: Windows.
Final Cut Pro: Mac.
Steinberg Cubase: Windows and Mac.
Digital Performer: Windows and Mac.
Presonus Studio One: Windows and Mac.
Avid Pro Tools: Windows and Mac.
Cockos Reaper: Windows and Mac.
Abelton Live: Windows and Mac.
Cakewalk Sonar: Windows.
Apple Logic Pro: Mac.
There's a lot of cross platform software, and some Mac only software. Not seeing anything Linux though. This list is pretty much all the heavy hitters in video and audio. I'm sure I could come up with a few more, if I thought on it, and I'm sure they also would be the same.
So I wouldn't count on Linux software out of Sony suddenly. There's a big difference between doing Mac support and Linux support.
The USPTO is more or less a "deny first, accept later" kind of place. They deny patents out of hand when they are first filed. So, modify, refile, modify, refile, etc, etc eventually you get one. Of course that is easy to do for a big company, not so feasible for a small guy.
You see it in any thread discussing Apple. Anything that reflects badly on Apple, no matter how true and accurate, gets down modded. Usually there are more than enough upmods to offset it, but it happens.
There are Apple fanboys that just cannot, will not, accept that Apple has every done anything wrong, every been anything but 100% innovative, etc. So they just to Apple's defense at every opportunity. Same thing with your post, same thing that is likely to happen to my post. They'll "defend" Apple by trying to silence people who say things unflattering.
The lefties were mad at Bush not for what he was doing, but because he was from The Other Guys(tm). He was one of the other tribe, so what he was doing was bad, and wrong, and evil and all that shit. Some people really believed this to an extreme extent. There were people saying Bush had setup FEMA death camps, would declare martial law and stop the election, that kind of thing.
Well now their guy is in power. Hence you see the same shit from the righties. All of a sudden stuff that under Bush was "necessary for our safety" and "reasonable" they are all bent out of shape and screaming about. You look around, you hear the same FEMA camp shit about Obama.
That's part of the problem is that many people have a "good guy, bad guy" view on politics right now so when their guys are doing things, those things are ok because their guys are the "good guys". That means that people who oppose things at one point will support them later.
By vote. When a department head position or dean position opens up, candidates, internal and external, apply. The faculty then votes on who they want. Technically the dean appoints department heads, the provost appoints deans, and so on up (the regents appoint presidents) but in actuality they do it based on faculty vote.
If you are implying there's some kind of business cabal that runs things and handles the promotions, no, sorry, it is the faculty. Also, most positions seem to get filled from within, and regardless only a tenured faculty is eligible to apply for the job.
The whole thing is stupid period since those devices are all very different markets and kinds of devices. However it is even sillier to compare all of Apple's stuff to just Windows desktops and laptops. If we are going to grab random devices that happen to run stuff, well then there are actually a number of things that run CE, or the embedded versions of Windows.
It actually is not all that impressive to say all of Apple's devices, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and so on managed to outsell Windows desktops and laptops (since let's be real, that's where the numbers are the MS tablets and phones aren't selling hardly at all). All that really says is that the market for electronic gadgets is big, and that MS still has a huge share of computers.
This is not news.
Computers are getting to be a mature market. The growth is leveling off, we will get to a point where it'll largely be replacements getting sold, not new ones. However that doesn't mean it still isn't a huge market, or that it isn't profitable.
So ya, Apple is beating MS left right and center in tablets and phones... However it would seem MS is still the be-all, end-all of desktop and laptops which, despite what teenagers may think, are still where shit gets done in the real world and thus still quite in demand.
Also in terms of talking phones, a fun one would be to have a look at Android. I am betting that one is the real winner in that arena.
When you talk about a governmental overreaction, which we have had for sure, making shit up and being extremely hyperbolic in your response is no more useful.
First off there's your bullshit about the gulag. A Gulag was not a place where there are extra security measures of questionable usefulness. It was a forced labour camp. This is a place where prisoners in the Soviet Union were sent there to work as slaves, abused, underfed, and in general experienced a mortality rate of about 10%.
If you are actually comparing the inconvenience of having to put up with the stupidity of the TSA's ineffective measures to that, you are an idiot.
Then there's the "Oh the coming after the video games is new!" cry. No, it isn't. Perhaps you were not old enough to remember the Columbine shooting in 1999. However it was discovered that the shooters liked to play Doom, and immediately there were morons calling it a "realistic murder simulator" and calling for restrictions on videogames. However that was just more of the same shit. It has been rock music, comic books, TV, movies, etc in the past. Whatever youth likes that is new and different gets targeted at something that is the cause of all the ills. It has been going on forever.
So, if you didn't know these things, then stop posting online rants about the US being a police state until you've spent time getting some historical and world wide perspective. If you talk without understanding, what you say has a much greater chance of being wrong. If you did know these things, then stop being an alarmist ass. It doesn't help. The response to government fear and FUD is not more fear and FUD. It is rational discussion, it is to bring this back down, help people understand that no, everything is NOT going to hell, we really are fine, chill out.
Or, as the Brits said so well "Keep calm, and carry on."
Politicians don't want any part of the mental health issue because it costs a lot of money. A good mental health care setup would be pricey, particularly since you'd also have to combine it with campaigns to work on destigmaizing mental health care, slapping down employers who discriminated because of it, etc, etc.
Right now, if you tell someone you have some illness, acute or chronic, and need to see a doctor, they are sympathetic. You tell someone you have mental problems and need to see a therapist and they look at you like you are toxic and they want nothing to do with you.
The cost and complexity means politicians don't want anything to do with it. They want cheap easy fixes. There aren't any to be had, so they'll just invent them.
She's long been one for getting rid of second amendment rights, without actually repealing the amendment. Something I think people forget is that the controlling/statist types don't stop at just trying to control the things you want them to control. They want to control everything. They'll ignore any rights they don't like.
So this should surprise all of nobody. She's one of the "People have rights only until I decided I don't like them," types. Doesn't really matter what the right is. If they decide that more control is needed, they'll trample on it.
What did you "tell them"? Since you didn't elaborate I fail to see what you are going for or how this is insightful.
I can only guess this is something along the lines of the people crying about "Waaaaa security through obscurity!" in which case I want to hear their solution to code signing/verification on a system that doesn't involve a secret private key. You might note that public/private key signing is how Linux distros secure and verify their application distribution services.
But at the university where I work, which is a pretty large one (about 40,000 students) "business types" in administration is not the problem, but quite the opposite. Administrative positions get appointed from faculty. Deans are faculty members promoted to administration, the president came from outside but is a PhD academic type and so on.
Some of our problems actually stem from this in that it turns out being an academic doesn't necessary mean you understand how to deal with a budget, or handle personnel issues, or the other kinds of business related things that come with running a large department.
The concerns I've Oyua have not been of non-delivery, well other than the Kickstarter haters that claim everything on there is a scam. The concerns I've seen are over functionality. Will it really go anywhere? Will anyone care? Many fanboys just seem to take it for granted that when it comes out, tons of stuff will get released for it and everyone will want one. I'm more skeptical. I think it'll be a toy that the backers and a few others play with for a bit, and then it gets set aside. I don't think it will compete well with smartphones and traditional consoles.
I've seen no plans for how they intend to attract big game publishers and that is what you need if you want to get many games on the platform, and games is what will sustain it long term. It is all well and good to crow on about open source but when you take a look at the number of OSS games, and the quality thereof, it is not very impressive. So to sell it to the masses and keep it rolling, you need more games and I've not seen any indication of what their plan is for that. It seems to be just "Release it and everyone will make cool shit for it!"
History is littered with failed consoles that can testify to that not being the case. Goes double for something that is smartphone level power, which will leave many people saying "So why not just use my phone?"
The challenge was never shipping the thing. They got plenty of money so that was easy, I mean it uses off-the-shelf components internally. It is just standard electronics design, testing, and assembly. The challenge is getting it to sell on the mass market, to be an item of interest that people keep buying, and buy successors to.
Then, well, it was inevitable anyhow and we might as well get it over with and kill them. Seriously, if they are really so thin skinned, so stupid, and so insane as to launch an attack over something like this, then it would happen sooner rather than later do to something else. In that case, let's have it happen sooner and just get it over with.
Please don't mistake this for me saying "We should go to war with NK!" I'm just saying that if something like this really did spark a war, I wouldn't blame the anon 'tards because the level of insanity, stupidity, and insecurity that it would take to start a war over something so trivial means it would get started over something else anyhow.
Bitcoins move around like a thinly traded stock. That's fine... for a thinly traded stock, not for a currency. Any currency that fluctuated like Bitcoin did would be in extreme crisis. Also in the case of Bitcoin it would be the first ever case of hyper-deflation.
Any country with this going on would be reeling, crying to the world for help, the IMF and all the big banks would be involved, etc, etc.
To give people an idea the US Dollar, which is the world's reserve currency (like it or not) changed 2% in value last year (2% inflation) which is a bit below it's 3.2% average (since about 1900). Even when it was having extremely high levels of inflation, high enough to be considered highly problematic, it was only about 13% (in 1979). That is change in value per YEAR. That's similar to other stable currencies you find.
Now look at Bitcoin.
You'd see that they talk about some of the ways that you can indeed sneak the money back in. Illegal, but easy to do.
You don't want to rely on a host OpenGL driver since OpenGL isn't the native interface for Windows.
Heck translation might be good even on a GL system, since ES isn't directly compatible with normal OpenGL unless you have a 4.1 or better setup which requires a fairly new card (GeForce 400 or newer in nVidia's case). I don't know of any Intel GPUs that do GL 4.1 yet, even Ivy Bridge is still 3.1.
So regardless of platform, it could make a lot of sense to implement it as a translation system, and then just choose the target of translation based off of what it is running on.
"it seems reasonable to guess that the implementation maps OpenGL to DirectX, thus avoiding Microsoft having to endorse OpenGL use."
No, more likely MS doesn't want to have to rely on vendors providing a working OpenGL driver, since that can be problematic (looking at you here ATi). If you have an accelerated Windows driver, a WDDM driver, it has DirectX support. That is how it works, just part of the spec. OpenGL, however, is an addon. Vendors can provide an OpenGL driver, or any other API they like, if they wish but it isn't an inherent part of the driver. They can choose not to provide them, or can provide broken ones.
So, would make sense for WebGl support to have something that does translation, so it works as long as you have a WDDM driver installed.
Give me one that can:
1) Generate base load, as in it doesn't vary with the time of day or weather.
2) Provide for power in all parts of the world, from northern latitudes to the equator.
3) Is cost effective.
You can't. That isn't to say other power generation methods aren't useful in some areas. Solar rules in the desert for peak load (when it is the hottest, you need the most energy for cooling and it is also outputting the most usually). However you are going to need something for base load. Nuclear is the best option.
If you think we could just go solar and/or wind and that would be all we need, well you haven't researched the grid very well.