There is a substantial gold-worshiping cult online that thinks that it is something magical that solves any and all currency and banking woes. I guess none of them have studied enough history to know about the great depression or what backed the currency at the time.
Not so much because of the military, but because of the 2nd amendment. There are a ton, like 300 million, firearms in civilian hands in the US. What's more, many of these aren't little.25 purse guns, or break action hunting shotguns, they are weapons with military value. As many people have cried about in the press recently, AR-15 variants are quite popular, but they are hardly the only ones.
Well, that makes for a rather bitch of a civilian resistance to overcome. An external invader is going to be pretty universally loathed, their uniforms make for nice "shoot me" targets and it would be pretty literally a situation of getting shot at from every house, every building.
Is is a pretty impossible occupation scenario, and thus makes any sort of real invasion of the US pretty much a non-starter. I mean you aren't going to get all that many troops to the US alive on account of the massive US military, and its suberb intelligence support, but once you do, there are an awful lot of armed citizens.
If a western nation ever did anything bad, at any point in their history, that is remotely like something a non-western nation is doing today, well then the non-western nation gets a total pass. You can't criticize them because at one time something bad happened somewhere else!
This false moral equivalency bullshit is just retarded. Every country has done bad shit in the past. Every country does bad shit now. That doesn't mean that we cannot, or should not, point out when it happens. This idea that every country that isn't the US, or at least every country that isn't western gets an automatic pass on everything they do because of bad shit that happen sin other places is beyond stupid and counter productive.
"The "2GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz 32-bit [multicore] processor" is more than a lot of PC owners had during the Windows XP era."
You try editing video on a desktop back in that era? You were only doing SD, and it was rather painful. You did a lot of waiting, a lot of bouncing to disk. Hence you saw professional work done almost exclusively on hardware assisted systems. Now? Not too bad to edit HD video on a desktop, particularly if you have a GPU to assist with rendering.
Technology progresses, what we can do with it changes. A time may come when editing video is a trivial on a smartphone. That time is not now. It only recently became pretty decent on good desktop hardware.
Ok I think you need to step back for a glass of perspective and soda. Smart phones and tablets are cool devices. In particular smart phones because it means you can get e-mail, web, etc anywhere you are. That is really useful. However they are really only good at content consumption. A touch screen interface is not very efficient for most software out there, at least at this point, and isn't very good for most creation in general since you hand obscure what you are working on.
The bigger problem is just power. For example I have a Galaxy Note II, one of the most powerful smartphones you can get right now. For all that it features 2GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz 32-bit processor that gets maybe 2 MIPS per MHz per core in the real world, and 16GB of total storage. Compare that to my desktop, which is not all that pricey, that has 2GB just for video RAM, 16GB of system RAM a 3.6GHz 64-bit processor that pulls 114 GIPS no problem on a real world benchmark and has a few TB of storage.
For A/V work, you really, really, want a real system. Heck for pretty much any creation, you want a real system. A tablet is fine for watching a video, it would suck for editing one. A smartphone is fine for reading a website, but I sure wouldn't want tot type this post out on one.
Also, perhaps you should define your desired use better, since Blender is really a 3D creation program, not an A/V editor. Sony Vegas would be an example of an A/V editor.
If you are just fishing for programs, well then stop. There's no reason. Programs on any platform, smartphone, desktop, whatever, exist to solve problems, to do things we need done. So figure out what it is you need to do, then you can ask about software.
However keep it realistic. If you want a suggestion for something to read eBooks, I can give you a good one. If you want an SSH or RDP client, I can suggest one though you'll find they are really good for emergencies only, real work is best done on a computer. If you want to cut a movie, then put down the tablet, and grab a real system.
It's easy to get all mad about the CC processing fee, but do you think cash is free? CCs have the advantage of being 100% electronic, nothing has to move around, computers and just adjust numbers in databases. Nice n' easy. Not so with cash.
One cost with cash is just the time to deal with it and move it around. You have to count it, move it to a safe, and then ship it off to a bank for deposit. Imagine the amount of that for a large retailer like a Target if all their transactions were in cash.
Then there's the problem of theft. Employees can more easily steal cash the more of it there is around, and it also makes for a more tempting target for other thieves. If a store does $100k in sales a day and that's all in cash, that is something they can come in and take. If it is mostly electronic, no such luck.
There's also the cost to the banks given that their processing is going to go up massively. They will be getting loads of cash from stores on a regular basis, and then handing that cash back out to people. Even with ATMs and so on it isn't free and you are talking a big increase.
Of course there's also a cost to all of us taxpayers who have to pay for the operation of the US mint and treasury. There are going to need to be a whole lot more bills and coins in circulation if you want to do all cash all the time and those have to all be produced, tracked, refreshed, recycled and all that shit.
There's also costs to the end user, you, who has to go out to the bank regularly to fetch more cash, and who has to carry more easily stealable cash on your person.
Yes, CC companies do charge a fee for their services... Ever think maybe it is worth it? Cash isn't free. There may not be a straight up fee involved, but there is a lot of overhead involved in dealing with it.
My parents ran a small business and it was about 90% credit, 10% cash. Despite the credit surcharge, my dad would have preferred cash go away. Why? A lot more work. To close out at the end of the day, all you had to do for CC was have the Verifone machine print out the day's info.
The cash had to be counted, checked against yesterday's float, a new float put in to the register, and then taken back to the safe. Coins had to be rolled up in to packs and so on. That then all had to be taken to the bank periodicly for deposit. It was a lot of damn work.
Also there was the issue of cash being a limiting factor for purchases. Sometimes they'd get a customer that wanted, and could afford, more stuff but didn't have enough cash and didn't want to use a card (it was mostly tourists at their shop) and thus wouldn't buy everything they wanted. Retailers hate that, of course, they want you to spend as much as you were willing. None of the customers ever ran out, found a bank/ATM, got more money, and came back, they just bought less.
The fee charged on CCs was just not a big deal, small part of the cost of doing business, and they would have rathered it was all done that way. Cash is a pain.
8 of their 11 current fabs are in the USA, one is in Ireland, one is in Israel, one is in China. The Chinese plant doesn't do CPUs, as far as I know, as it is an older process. They do some packaging in Asia, in Singapore if I remember correctly, but you don't tend to see those chips in the US and EU as they have closer packaging plants (in the US you mostly see products from the US packaging plant and their Costa Rica plant).
AMD also isn't Asia focused for CPUs. They have them manufactured at Global Foundries which has a fab in the US, Germany, and Singapore.
Discrete GPUs are all fabbed in Asia these days, specifically in Taiwan by TSMC. Now that may change as TSMC has been badly fucking up they may switch to someone else but for now, all TSMC.
In terms of other stuff, like mobile processors, it can vary highly. For example Samsung is a big player in that market and you might expect Korea to be where they fab. While that's true for flash, for processors it is most in Texas. If you have a phone with a 32nm Samsung processor, Texas ware probably where it was made.
Some games hit the CPU much heavier these days than they used to. Many games really don't perform well if they aren't given multi-core CPUs with reasonable speed.
So how much upgrading a given component makes a difference depends on what else you have in your computer. If your system has a CPU that was top of the line 5 years ago, but an integrated GPU, then ya a new GPU will probably be the best use of money. However if the CPU is underpowered, then a new GPU will do little if anything.
Also you are right in that integrated GPUs have gotten way better. Time was, integrated Intel GPUs sucked even at desktop operations. Back in the P3 days I recommended a discrete GPU to everyone because the integrated ones were that bad. Now with Sandy/Ivy Bridge they are quite good. You can game on them, even new games. No they don't do as well as a discrete GPU, but they really are more powerful than you might think.
Go ahead and show me the home/business alarm you think will stop me. Go ahead. I can more or less guarantee you can't do it. The reason is I know quite a bit about how they work, since my grandpa has been in the business of selling them all his life, and how they can be defeated. Particularly if you are talking something public where you can look around innocuously and find out what is there. Ultimately they are at their core just a circuit board in a box that connects to sensors, sirens, and maybe a phone line. Break the board, they stop working. If you have one in your house open it up and see what's inside. It is simplistic, and not at all attack resistant other than the thin metal box it lives in.
For that matter, defeating an alarm really isn't necessary if taking something, like say physical data (files and so on) is your objective. All they do is make noise and if they are good ones, call a security company who will eventually call the police who will eventually respond (they aren't that fast, false alarms happen often). That doesn't stop people with guns from kicking in your door, grabbing what they want, and leaving.
Same shit with security guards. You ever have a look at the security that public places like office buildings and malls use? They are unarmed, and low paid. Their job is to call the police if shit happens. It doesn't take much to out-class them, you bring a pistol with you, you've already got them hopelessly outgunned. You think they are going to throw their life on the line if someone holds them at gunpoint? Hell no. For that matter there usually aren't very many. The mall near me has one car that patrols their parking lot at night (I overlook the parking lot). That is it for perimeter security. I don't know what they have inside, but you can bet it isn't much more (maybe not even anyone).
Physical security at homes and businesses keeps out the causal crooks, nothing more. Now that's all they really face, people wouldn't bother with a targeted, planned, attack, they just don't have enough of value. They face low level thugs that do vandalism, smash and grabs, that kind of shit. And oh, by the way, it DOES happen. The mall near me gets broken in to at least once a year, usually dumbass teens just causing trouble, and by the fact that they got in, it means security failed to stop them.
They don't get fired, their job isn't to stop everything, it is to report anything they see, and to drive around and look conspicuous (their car is marked, and has a flashing yellow light) so as to scare troublemakers off.
If your house has never been broken in to it isn't because you have amazing security. A burglar alarm and a crap lock do not make great security. It is because nobody has tried. They good news is most of us don't face much in the way of threats to security in the physical world. Nobody tries to break in, or attack us, or the like. It is quite uncommon.
Now that doesn't mean we should just be all lax with computer security, but it does mean that this silly demand of perfection needs to stop. Nothing is perfectly secure.
Well, if you want to see "so what" go read your state's legal code, or the US code. If that is too complex or theoretical for you, go break a law, may I suggest a small one, and get caught. You'll quickly find out "so what."
That's what happened to this guy. He broke the rules, he faced the consequences.
In the physical world, there is NO SUCH THING as perfect security. You can't design a setup that someone else cannot overcome. All you can do it make it so hard that nobody would try, and multi layered so you hopefully catch something if there is a failure at one level. There's no perfect security, no magic bullet.
Likewise there is nothing that is invincible, nothing that can withstand any and all attacks without problems. Everything has failure points, everything can be broken. You have to use things properly or they WILL fail.
We all accept this as part of every day life. However then when it comes to the virtual world, to computers, geeks seem to think things should be perfect. No system should ever have any security flaw, ever. No system should break or fail, even when subjected to deliberate attack. Everything should be built flawlessly.
Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way. While it is a lot easier to make things more resilient than in the physical world, you still have to assume that failure is possible, that flaws are present and not known. That is just life.
Go ahead and go in to a bank, or better yet a government agency. Barge in to the "Employees Only" area, open up a confidential filing cabinet, and start rifling through for your data. See how well you do in court with the "I was just checking to see if my data was being mishandled!"
You learned these rules in Kindergarten: Don't touch what isn't yours, don't break someone else's stuff. You don't get to go and try to bust in to systems you don't own, or have permission from the owner. It isn't just the law, it is common courtesy/sense.
Geeks really need to get it through their skulls that just because you are technically capable of something, doesn't make it ok.
Akamai has done this kind of thing forever. When I worked at Network Operations for the university I work at, Akamai approached us. They wanted to install cache engines in our data center. They would provide us all the hardware, 3 fairly high end servers and a switch, as well as support for setting them up. All we had to do was put them in.
Net result? About an immediate 5 mbps average drop in our traffic, more at peak times. This was back in like 2002, and we only had like 100 mbps of Internet total.
It was all kinds of great. We had less network traffic, people got much faster videos, MS updates, and so on (Akamai is used by a lot of companies), and of course Akamai saves on bandwidth on their end. Everyone won, it was better service/less cost for all parties.
I've asked numerous people, and they've chosen to respond. This is online, on open forums like Slashdot. Not me tracking someone down and cornering them. So far, nobody has given me anything remotely useful in terms of A/V software. Yes, I've actually tried it. I can't actually find anyone who does it on the level I do in Linux, probably because Linux lacks the software to do it well. All the people I know who do pro A/V work do it on Windows or MacOS.
In terms of hardware compatibility, yes I do use somewhat niche hardware, though I guess that depends on your definition. All of it is stuff you can find on Amazon or Newegg.
In particular the devices that would be problematic are my Auzentech HTHD card and my NEC 2690/i1 Display Pro combo. There is apparently a generic Linux driver that kinda works for the HTHD, but only for the optical out which is of no use to me, the reason I own it is multi-channel sound over HDMI since I use a surround sound system. The hardware I plan on replacing it with, a MOTU HDX-SDI, doesn't work at all.
The NEC monitor will work, of course, but there's no way to use the i1 to calibrate its hardware lookup tables which is the reason to own such an expensive monitor. You need software that can talk to the i1 and then program the NEC, and I am not aware of any for Linux, Windows and MacOS only.
A more minor issue would be my Logitech G500. It works, but isn't programmable. There is no way to alter the mouse's onboard settings (it can have custom button mappings, DPI settings and so on). You'd have to program it in Windows, and then Linux could use the programming since it is internal.
My MCU Pro might be an issue too. It shouldn't be since it is basically just a MIDI device over USB, but there's not a lot of information in that regard out there.
In terms of media playback, Blu-ray is the big issue. More generally though I am not aware of any licensed H.264 decoders (or encoders). H.264 is an open standard, but not free, you do have to pay a license fee for it. This is not a big issue for playback I guess as one could simply choose to ignore it, but for production and distribution being legit is rather a good idea.
However this all misses my real point. It isn't that people don't know. That is fine, it is 100% ok to say "I dunno about that," or to just not respond. It is when people can't find an answer, that they like to then reframe things as "Well you shouldn't want to do that." Same shit with the games. Someone says "I want to play AAA games," and the response was "Those games suck." That's pretty stupid. That's a cop out, trying to say "You shouldn't want to play those games, you should do something else."
If I had just never gotten a response to my A/V questions, or if people had said "Dunno, can't help you man, maybe Linux can't do that," fine. However people half-assedly tried to help and/or claimed that sure, Linux would do great, and then when presented with things I needed decided that I shouldn't want those things because they couldn't find a way to provide them in Linux.
Any time they can't do something on Linux, they say it isn't something you should want to do, or something you should do with your computer.
"You want to play games? Sure Linux is GREAT for games we have Tux racers, Battle of Westnoth, Nethack, all kinds of shit! Oh you want to play a new AAA game? You shouldn't want to do that, you should only want to play free games. AAA titles are stupid."
I get the same shit when I talk about audio production and video editing, which is something I do with my system. I've asked in all seriousness of self proclaimed Linux experts if there are programs I can get to do this kind of thing and go in to the particulars of what is needed. Predictably I get an initial list of software that was just gotten from a web search, with no consideration of actual use (which I've tried and found woefully problematic and inadequate). After some more back and forth often I get told that I "Shouldn't do that on my primary desktop," I should have something dedicated for A/V production.
The reason is a way to try and pass the buck, to make it not a problem with going to Linux, but reframe it as me doing something wrong. Because of course if you take away A/V production, games, media playback, and hardware compatibility, well then Linux can do everything I need!... since at that point we are pretty much left with web, e-mail, and remote systems administration. They just declare what you are doing as not the right thing, until you only do things Linux does well.
I've tried the "dual boot to Linux thing." I end up never booting in to Linux. I'll encounter something I wish to do that I can't do in Linux, boot back to Windows, and stay there, since there's nothing I wish to do that I can't do in Windows but can do in Linux.
That's the problem you suggestion has, particularly with regards to gamers. I have a massive list of games that'll run on Windows, a few hundred. Of that list, maybe 10 will also run on Linux. So while Linux would work fine for web/e-mail stuff, as soon as I want to fire up a game, back to Windows it is and Windows also does the web/e-mail stuff real well.
They seem to go out of the way to try and impress foreigners with how awesome shit is, they just fail badly. I think it may be a case that they've been drinking their own kool aid for so long they forget the outside world doesn't buy the bullshit. They are used to their propaganda defining their reality, they don't have a good understanding of places where it doesn't.
Because they make any real, useful, gun control much less likely to happen. Their grandstanding is counter productive.
For example you try and say "Hey, we really should register firearms. After all you register your car, why not guns too? It would allow for some tracking and accountability, and in the event someone becomes a prohibited person easier allow courts to determine if they have any guns that need to be surrendered." Well the gun lobby shoots back with "No, unacceptable, if you have a registry it can be used to target gun owners." You respond "That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Then, this happens, in a place that has a gun registry. Now the gun lobby doesn't have to talk in hypotheticals, or other nations, they can point to something that happened right in America that is precisely the kind of shit they are talking about. Now more moderate gun owners, who might have been amenable, or at least accepting, of the idea hate it because they believe what the gun lobby is saying.
Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned, period, end of story, unless the second amendment is repealed. All kinds of arguments have been tried and all have failed, the supreme court has ruled that the 2nd does in fact mean that gun ownership is a protected, individual, right.
As such trying stupid shit to do things that are bans but not in name, or to harass or make things difficult for gun owners are counter productive. All they do is polarize things, convince gun owners that any and all controls are bad because they'll be abused.
When you are presenting a separate image per eye, you have to consider the rez per eye. They like to talk about 1280x800 because it sounds better, but it is 640x800 per eye, quite low rez. If you want to see why, look at your screen, now close one eye. Does everything suddenly get blurry? No? There you go then.
Rez is a major issue for this thing. They haven't addressed it because they do not have an answer at this time.
The Occulus VR really isn't very exciting because it doesn't seem to have solved any of the problems that have been present in past "VR glasses" solutions. I think some people forget this idea isn't new and it has been done before.
One of the problems is glasses, that it is somewhat difficult to make the headset in such a way that it easily accommodates people's glasses.
Another one is resolution. Right now the Occulus VR is 640x800 per eye, so quite low rez, just a little over standard definition. With the display being so visually big, that equals really large pixels. They say the final version is supposed to be higher resolution, but with no details, meaning they hope they can do it, not that they have a way to.
Now I'm not saying these, or other, problems are insoluble, but if they aren't solved, it'll really make this less useful and appealing. It also makes it not so different from the stuff in the past, which means it is reasonable to assume it won't succeed.
I like the idea, but so far it strikes me as people who think VR is cool, and don't have any solutions to the problems it faces.
A good, somewhat simplified, way of looking at thing is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We have needs on different levels, and only once those lower levels are adequately met can we spend a lot of time on the higher level stuff. So you go way back, and it was almost all getting food. The majority of the populace spent time trying to get enough to eat. Agriculture, such as it was, was what most people did. Well we nailed that one pretty good, doesn't take a large percentage of people now to feed the nation so they can move on to higher level needs.
Same sort of deal with other things. If we figure out ways to automate it, then those people are freed up to do other things.
Now that doesn't mean we can be careless, and just assume people can instantly retrain for new jobs or more markets will spring up overnight. However, you can transition over time and all that happens is things are more efficient and better for everyone because the more menial shit is being automated.
You really see this working in IT. We are always working on how to automate tasks, to make things we had to spend a lot of time on take little to no time. Yet for all that, we keep finding more work. Why? Well because there are other things that would be nice to do, that make for a better user experience, but are lower priority. If we can automate the higher priority, and particularly menial and time consuming, stuff then we have time to move on to other stuff. Automate that, and move on and so on.
You just have to accept that what we as humans do now, produce now, isn't all that we can. We can shift our resources to other things. There are plenty of things we can make a list that we'd like done, and if more resources were free for it they could be allocated there, and that doesn't even include things we haven't thought of/invented yet.
The thing is companies don't usually want to play that sort of game in situations like this because the chance to get sued is too high. They'll often help each other stop it. A dude tried to sell Coke's recipe to Pepsi, Pepsi called the FBI.
Goes double here, since nVidia seems to have the superior technology as of late. AMD's GPUs aren't bad, but they aren't as high performance as nVidia's parts, and their drivers are not as polished. There just isn't any magic juju that nVidia would want to steal, particularly given the risks.
My guess is this isn't an orchestrated defection. My guess is it is one of two things:
1) Some morons figured that they could make it big doing this, stole the documents on their own, and went over to nVidia. Perhaps this is even a result of a tip from nVidia.
2) This is a smokescreen on AMD's part, to try and keep these guys away from nVidia.
I just don't find it likely that nVidia would buy them off to do this. Too much to lose, not enough to gain. While they might want the people, which is totally legal, the tech isn't worth the risk.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a substantial gold-worshiping cult online that thinks that it is something magical that solves any and all currency and banking woes. I guess none of them have studied enough history to know about the great depression or what backed the currency at the time.
Not so much because of the military, but because of the 2nd amendment. There are a ton, like 300 million, firearms in civilian hands in the US. What's more, many of these aren't little .25 purse guns, or break action hunting shotguns, they are weapons with military value. As many people have cried about in the press recently, AR-15 variants are quite popular, but they are hardly the only ones.
Well, that makes for a rather bitch of a civilian resistance to overcome. An external invader is going to be pretty universally loathed, their uniforms make for nice "shoot me" targets and it would be pretty literally a situation of getting shot at from every house, every building.
Is is a pretty impossible occupation scenario, and thus makes any sort of real invasion of the US pretty much a non-starter. I mean you aren't going to get all that many troops to the US alive on account of the massive US military, and its suberb intelligence support, but once you do, there are an awful lot of armed citizens.
If a western nation ever did anything bad, at any point in their history, that is remotely like something a non-western nation is doing today, well then the non-western nation gets a total pass. You can't criticize them because at one time something bad happened somewhere else!
This false moral equivalency bullshit is just retarded. Every country has done bad shit in the past. Every country does bad shit now. That doesn't mean that we cannot, or should not, point out when it happens. This idea that every country that isn't the US, or at least every country that isn't western gets an automatic pass on everything they do because of bad shit that happen sin other places is beyond stupid and counter productive.
"The "2GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz 32-bit [multicore] processor" is more than a lot of PC owners had during the Windows XP era."
You try editing video on a desktop back in that era? You were only doing SD, and it was rather painful. You did a lot of waiting, a lot of bouncing to disk. Hence you saw professional work done almost exclusively on hardware assisted systems. Now? Not too bad to edit HD video on a desktop, particularly if you have a GPU to assist with rendering.
Technology progresses, what we can do with it changes. A time may come when editing video is a trivial on a smartphone. That time is not now. It only recently became pretty decent on good desktop hardware.
You want to edit A/V stuff... on a cell phone?
Ok I think you need to step back for a glass of perspective and soda. Smart phones and tablets are cool devices. In particular smart phones because it means you can get e-mail, web, etc anywhere you are. That is really useful. However they are really only good at content consumption. A touch screen interface is not very efficient for most software out there, at least at this point, and isn't very good for most creation in general since you hand obscure what you are working on.
The bigger problem is just power. For example I have a Galaxy Note II, one of the most powerful smartphones you can get right now. For all that it features 2GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz 32-bit processor that gets maybe 2 MIPS per MHz per core in the real world, and 16GB of total storage. Compare that to my desktop, which is not all that pricey, that has 2GB just for video RAM, 16GB of system RAM a 3.6GHz 64-bit processor that pulls 114 GIPS no problem on a real world benchmark and has a few TB of storage.
For A/V work, you really, really, want a real system. Heck for pretty much any creation, you want a real system. A tablet is fine for watching a video, it would suck for editing one. A smartphone is fine for reading a website, but I sure wouldn't want tot type this post out on one.
Also, perhaps you should define your desired use better, since Blender is really a 3D creation program, not an A/V editor. Sony Vegas would be an example of an A/V editor.
If you are just fishing for programs, well then stop. There's no reason. Programs on any platform, smartphone, desktop, whatever, exist to solve problems, to do things we need done. So figure out what it is you need to do, then you can ask about software.
However keep it realistic. If you want a suggestion for something to read eBooks, I can give you a good one. If you want an SSH or RDP client, I can suggest one though you'll find they are really good for emergencies only, real work is best done on a computer. If you want to cut a movie, then put down the tablet, and grab a real system.
It's easy to get all mad about the CC processing fee, but do you think cash is free? CCs have the advantage of being 100% electronic, nothing has to move around, computers and just adjust numbers in databases. Nice n' easy. Not so with cash.
One cost with cash is just the time to deal with it and move it around. You have to count it, move it to a safe, and then ship it off to a bank for deposit. Imagine the amount of that for a large retailer like a Target if all their transactions were in cash.
Then there's the problem of theft. Employees can more easily steal cash the more of it there is around, and it also makes for a more tempting target for other thieves. If a store does $100k in sales a day and that's all in cash, that is something they can come in and take. If it is mostly electronic, no such luck.
There's also the cost to the banks given that their processing is going to go up massively. They will be getting loads of cash from stores on a regular basis, and then handing that cash back out to people. Even with ATMs and so on it isn't free and you are talking a big increase.
Of course there's also a cost to all of us taxpayers who have to pay for the operation of the US mint and treasury. There are going to need to be a whole lot more bills and coins in circulation if you want to do all cash all the time and those have to all be produced, tracked, refreshed, recycled and all that shit.
There's also costs to the end user, you, who has to go out to the bank regularly to fetch more cash, and who has to carry more easily stealable cash on your person.
Yes, CC companies do charge a fee for their services... Ever think maybe it is worth it? Cash isn't free. There may not be a straight up fee involved, but there is a lot of overhead involved in dealing with it.
My parents ran a small business and it was about 90% credit, 10% cash. Despite the credit surcharge, my dad would have preferred cash go away. Why? A lot more work. To close out at the end of the day, all you had to do for CC was have the Verifone machine print out the day's info.
The cash had to be counted, checked against yesterday's float, a new float put in to the register, and then taken back to the safe. Coins had to be rolled up in to packs and so on. That then all had to be taken to the bank periodicly for deposit. It was a lot of damn work.
Also there was the issue of cash being a limiting factor for purchases. Sometimes they'd get a customer that wanted, and could afford, more stuff but didn't have enough cash and didn't want to use a card (it was mostly tourists at their shop) and thus wouldn't buy everything they wanted. Retailers hate that, of course, they want you to spend as much as you were willing. None of the customers ever ran out, found a bank/ATM, got more money, and came back, they just bought less.
The fee charged on CCs was just not a big deal, small part of the cost of doing business, and they would have rathered it was all done that way. Cash is a pain.
Doesn't have anything to do with that. Rooting your phone is different than SIM unlocking it.
8 of their 11 current fabs are in the USA, one is in Ireland, one is in Israel, one is in China. The Chinese plant doesn't do CPUs, as far as I know, as it is an older process. They do some packaging in Asia, in Singapore if I remember correctly, but you don't tend to see those chips in the US and EU as they have closer packaging plants (in the US you mostly see products from the US packaging plant and their Costa Rica plant).
AMD also isn't Asia focused for CPUs. They have them manufactured at Global Foundries which has a fab in the US, Germany, and Singapore.
Discrete GPUs are all fabbed in Asia these days, specifically in Taiwan by TSMC. Now that may change as TSMC has been badly fucking up they may switch to someone else but for now, all TSMC.
In terms of other stuff, like mobile processors, it can vary highly. For example Samsung is a big player in that market and you might expect Korea to be where they fab. While that's true for flash, for processors it is most in Texas. If you have a phone with a 32nm Samsung processor, Texas ware probably where it was made.
They never used much, just in solder, but due to RoHS it is all gone now.
Some games hit the CPU much heavier these days than they used to. Many games really don't perform well if they aren't given multi-core CPUs with reasonable speed.
So how much upgrading a given component makes a difference depends on what else you have in your computer. If your system has a CPU that was top of the line 5 years ago, but an integrated GPU, then ya a new GPU will probably be the best use of money. However if the CPU is underpowered, then a new GPU will do little if anything.
Also you are right in that integrated GPUs have gotten way better. Time was, integrated Intel GPUs sucked even at desktop operations. Back in the P3 days I recommended a discrete GPU to everyone because the integrated ones were that bad. Now with Sandy/Ivy Bridge they are quite good. You can game on them, even new games. No they don't do as well as a discrete GPU, but they really are more powerful than you might think.
Go ahead and show me the home/business alarm you think will stop me. Go ahead. I can more or less guarantee you can't do it. The reason is I know quite a bit about how they work, since my grandpa has been in the business of selling them all his life, and how they can be defeated. Particularly if you are talking something public where you can look around innocuously and find out what is there. Ultimately they are at their core just a circuit board in a box that connects to sensors, sirens, and maybe a phone line. Break the board, they stop working. If you have one in your house open it up and see what's inside. It is simplistic, and not at all attack resistant other than the thin metal box it lives in.
For that matter, defeating an alarm really isn't necessary if taking something, like say physical data (files and so on) is your objective. All they do is make noise and if they are good ones, call a security company who will eventually call the police who will eventually respond (they aren't that fast, false alarms happen often). That doesn't stop people with guns from kicking in your door, grabbing what they want, and leaving.
Same shit with security guards. You ever have a look at the security that public places like office buildings and malls use? They are unarmed, and low paid. Their job is to call the police if shit happens. It doesn't take much to out-class them, you bring a pistol with you, you've already got them hopelessly outgunned. You think they are going to throw their life on the line if someone holds them at gunpoint? Hell no. For that matter there usually aren't very many. The mall near me has one car that patrols their parking lot at night (I overlook the parking lot). That is it for perimeter security. I don't know what they have inside, but you can bet it isn't much more (maybe not even anyone).
Physical security at homes and businesses keeps out the causal crooks, nothing more. Now that's all they really face, people wouldn't bother with a targeted, planned, attack, they just don't have enough of value. They face low level thugs that do vandalism, smash and grabs, that kind of shit. And oh, by the way, it DOES happen. The mall near me gets broken in to at least once a year, usually dumbass teens just causing trouble, and by the fact that they got in, it means security failed to stop them.
They don't get fired, their job isn't to stop everything, it is to report anything they see, and to drive around and look conspicuous (their car is marked, and has a flashing yellow light) so as to scare troublemakers off.
If your house has never been broken in to it isn't because you have amazing security. A burglar alarm and a crap lock do not make great security. It is because nobody has tried. They good news is most of us don't face much in the way of threats to security in the physical world. Nobody tries to break in, or attack us, or the like. It is quite uncommon.
Now that doesn't mean we should just be all lax with computer security, but it does mean that this silly demand of perfection needs to stop. Nothing is perfectly secure.
Well, if you want to see "so what" go read your state's legal code, or the US code. If that is too complex or theoretical for you, go break a law, may I suggest a small one, and get caught. You'll quickly find out "so what."
That's what happened to this guy. He broke the rules, he faced the consequences.
In the physical world, there is NO SUCH THING as perfect security. You can't design a setup that someone else cannot overcome. All you can do it make it so hard that nobody would try, and multi layered so you hopefully catch something if there is a failure at one level. There's no perfect security, no magic bullet.
Likewise there is nothing that is invincible, nothing that can withstand any and all attacks without problems. Everything has failure points, everything can be broken. You have to use things properly or they WILL fail.
We all accept this as part of every day life. However then when it comes to the virtual world, to computers, geeks seem to think things should be perfect. No system should ever have any security flaw, ever. No system should break or fail, even when subjected to deliberate attack. Everything should be built flawlessly.
Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way. While it is a lot easier to make things more resilient than in the physical world, you still have to assume that failure is possible, that flaws are present and not known. That is just life.
Go ahead and go in to a bank, or better yet a government agency. Barge in to the "Employees Only" area, open up a confidential filing cabinet, and start rifling through for your data. See how well you do in court with the "I was just checking to see if my data was being mishandled!"
You learned these rules in Kindergarten: Don't touch what isn't yours, don't break someone else's stuff. You don't get to go and try to bust in to systems you don't own, or have permission from the owner. It isn't just the law, it is common courtesy/sense.
Geeks really need to get it through their skulls that just because you are technically capable of something, doesn't make it ok.
Akamai has done this kind of thing forever. When I worked at Network Operations for the university I work at, Akamai approached us. They wanted to install cache engines in our data center. They would provide us all the hardware, 3 fairly high end servers and a switch, as well as support for setting them up. All we had to do was put them in.
Net result? About an immediate 5 mbps average drop in our traffic, more at peak times. This was back in like 2002, and we only had like 100 mbps of Internet total.
It was all kinds of great. We had less network traffic, people got much faster videos, MS updates, and so on (Akamai is used by a lot of companies), and of course Akamai saves on bandwidth on their end. Everyone won, it was better service/less cost for all parties.
I've asked numerous people, and they've chosen to respond. This is online, on open forums like Slashdot. Not me tracking someone down and cornering them. So far, nobody has given me anything remotely useful in terms of A/V software. Yes, I've actually tried it. I can't actually find anyone who does it on the level I do in Linux, probably because Linux lacks the software to do it well. All the people I know who do pro A/V work do it on Windows or MacOS.
In terms of hardware compatibility, yes I do use somewhat niche hardware, though I guess that depends on your definition. All of it is stuff you can find on Amazon or Newegg.
In particular the devices that would be problematic are my Auzentech HTHD card and my NEC 2690/i1 Display Pro combo. There is apparently a generic Linux driver that kinda works for the HTHD, but only for the optical out which is of no use to me, the reason I own it is multi-channel sound over HDMI since I use a surround sound system. The hardware I plan on replacing it with, a MOTU HDX-SDI, doesn't work at all.
The NEC monitor will work, of course, but there's no way to use the i1 to calibrate its hardware lookup tables which is the reason to own such an expensive monitor. You need software that can talk to the i1 and then program the NEC, and I am not aware of any for Linux, Windows and MacOS only.
A more minor issue would be my Logitech G500. It works, but isn't programmable. There is no way to alter the mouse's onboard settings (it can have custom button mappings, DPI settings and so on). You'd have to program it in Windows, and then Linux could use the programming since it is internal.
My MCU Pro might be an issue too. It shouldn't be since it is basically just a MIDI device over USB, but there's not a lot of information in that regard out there.
In terms of media playback, Blu-ray is the big issue. More generally though I am not aware of any licensed H.264 decoders (or encoders). H.264 is an open standard, but not free, you do have to pay a license fee for it. This is not a big issue for playback I guess as one could simply choose to ignore it, but for production and distribution being legit is rather a good idea.
However this all misses my real point. It isn't that people don't know. That is fine, it is 100% ok to say "I dunno about that," or to just not respond. It is when people can't find an answer, that they like to then reframe things as "Well you shouldn't want to do that." Same shit with the games. Someone says "I want to play AAA games," and the response was "Those games suck." That's pretty stupid. That's a cop out, trying to say "You shouldn't want to play those games, you should do something else."
If I had just never gotten a response to my A/V questions, or if people had said "Dunno, can't help you man, maybe Linux can't do that," fine. However people half-assedly tried to help and/or claimed that sure, Linux would do great, and then when presented with things I needed decided that I shouldn't want those things because they couldn't find a way to provide them in Linux.
Any time they can't do something on Linux, they say it isn't something you should want to do, or something you should do with your computer.
"You want to play games? Sure Linux is GREAT for games we have Tux racers, Battle of Westnoth, Nethack, all kinds of shit! Oh you want to play a new AAA game? You shouldn't want to do that, you should only want to play free games. AAA titles are stupid."
I get the same shit when I talk about audio production and video editing, which is something I do with my system. I've asked in all seriousness of self proclaimed Linux experts if there are programs I can get to do this kind of thing and go in to the particulars of what is needed. Predictably I get an initial list of software that was just gotten from a web search, with no consideration of actual use (which I've tried and found woefully problematic and inadequate). After some more back and forth often I get told that I "Shouldn't do that on my primary desktop," I should have something dedicated for A/V production.
The reason is a way to try and pass the buck, to make it not a problem with going to Linux, but reframe it as me doing something wrong. Because of course if you take away A/V production, games, media playback, and hardware compatibility, well then Linux can do everything I need! ... since at that point we are pretty much left with web, e-mail, and remote systems administration. They just declare what you are doing as not the right thing, until you only do things Linux does well.
I've tried the "dual boot to Linux thing." I end up never booting in to Linux. I'll encounter something I wish to do that I can't do in Linux, boot back to Windows, and stay there, since there's nothing I wish to do that I can't do in Windows but can do in Linux.
That's the problem you suggestion has, particularly with regards to gamers. I have a massive list of games that'll run on Windows, a few hundred. Of that list, maybe 10 will also run on Linux. So while Linux would work fine for web/e-mail stuff, as soon as I want to fire up a game, back to Windows it is and Windows also does the web/e-mail stuff real well.
They seem to go out of the way to try and impress foreigners with how awesome shit is, they just fail badly. I think it may be a case that they've been drinking their own kool aid for so long they forget the outside world doesn't buy the bullshit. They are used to their propaganda defining their reality, they don't have a good understanding of places where it doesn't.
Because they make any real, useful, gun control much less likely to happen. Their grandstanding is counter productive.
For example you try and say "Hey, we really should register firearms. After all you register your car, why not guns too? It would allow for some tracking and accountability, and in the event someone becomes a prohibited person easier allow courts to determine if they have any guns that need to be surrendered." Well the gun lobby shoots back with "No, unacceptable, if you have a registry it can be used to target gun owners." You respond "That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Then, this happens, in a place that has a gun registry. Now the gun lobby doesn't have to talk in hypotheticals, or other nations, they can point to something that happened right in America that is precisely the kind of shit they are talking about. Now more moderate gun owners, who might have been amenable, or at least accepting, of the idea hate it because they believe what the gun lobby is saying.
Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned, period, end of story, unless the second amendment is repealed. All kinds of arguments have been tried and all have failed, the supreme court has ruled that the 2nd does in fact mean that gun ownership is a protected, individual, right.
As such trying stupid shit to do things that are bans but not in name, or to harass or make things difficult for gun owners are counter productive. All they do is polarize things, convince gun owners that any and all controls are bad because they'll be abused.
Stunts like this are nothing but harmful.
When you are presenting a separate image per eye, you have to consider the rez per eye. They like to talk about 1280x800 because it sounds better, but it is 640x800 per eye, quite low rez. If you want to see why, look at your screen, now close one eye. Does everything suddenly get blurry? No? There you go then.
Rez is a major issue for this thing. They haven't addressed it because they do not have an answer at this time.
The Occulus VR really isn't very exciting because it doesn't seem to have solved any of the problems that have been present in past "VR glasses" solutions. I think some people forget this idea isn't new and it has been done before.
One of the problems is glasses, that it is somewhat difficult to make the headset in such a way that it easily accommodates people's glasses.
Another one is resolution. Right now the Occulus VR is 640x800 per eye, so quite low rez, just a little over standard definition. With the display being so visually big, that equals really large pixels. They say the final version is supposed to be higher resolution, but with no details, meaning they hope they can do it, not that they have a way to.
Now I'm not saying these, or other, problems are insoluble, but if they aren't solved, it'll really make this less useful and appealing. It also makes it not so different from the stuff in the past, which means it is reasonable to assume it won't succeed.
I like the idea, but so far it strikes me as people who think VR is cool, and don't have any solutions to the problems it faces.
A good, somewhat simplified, way of looking at thing is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We have needs on different levels, and only once those lower levels are adequately met can we spend a lot of time on the higher level stuff. So you go way back, and it was almost all getting food. The majority of the populace spent time trying to get enough to eat. Agriculture, such as it was, was what most people did. Well we nailed that one pretty good, doesn't take a large percentage of people now to feed the nation so they can move on to higher level needs.
Same sort of deal with other things. If we figure out ways to automate it, then those people are freed up to do other things.
Now that doesn't mean we can be careless, and just assume people can instantly retrain for new jobs or more markets will spring up overnight. However, you can transition over time and all that happens is things are more efficient and better for everyone because the more menial shit is being automated.
You really see this working in IT. We are always working on how to automate tasks, to make things we had to spend a lot of time on take little to no time. Yet for all that, we keep finding more work. Why? Well because there are other things that would be nice to do, that make for a better user experience, but are lower priority. If we can automate the higher priority, and particularly menial and time consuming, stuff then we have time to move on to other stuff. Automate that, and move on and so on.
You just have to accept that what we as humans do now, produce now, isn't all that we can. We can shift our resources to other things. There are plenty of things we can make a list that we'd like done, and if more resources were free for it they could be allocated there, and that doesn't even include things we haven't thought of/invented yet.
The thing is companies don't usually want to play that sort of game in situations like this because the chance to get sued is too high. They'll often help each other stop it. A dude tried to sell Coke's recipe to Pepsi, Pepsi called the FBI.
Goes double here, since nVidia seems to have the superior technology as of late. AMD's GPUs aren't bad, but they aren't as high performance as nVidia's parts, and their drivers are not as polished. There just isn't any magic juju that nVidia would want to steal, particularly given the risks.
My guess is this isn't an orchestrated defection. My guess is it is one of two things:
1) Some morons figured that they could make it big doing this, stole the documents on their own, and went over to nVidia. Perhaps this is even a result of a tip from nVidia.
2) This is a smokescreen on AMD's part, to try and keep these guys away from nVidia.
I just don't find it likely that nVidia would buy them off to do this. Too much to lose, not enough to gain. While they might want the people, which is totally legal, the tech isn't worth the risk.