You're assuming he had access to the hardware that held in information in an unencrypted state. One would assume that the NSA protects this level of information with layers of encryption to try and prevent all of it from residing together on hardware in an unencrypted state. I would speculate that he need to perform the equivalent "sudo -su kalexander" in order to convince the system to give him the files unencrypted.
One would assume, but one would be wrong apparently. According to several of the linked articles, the NSA state of security is fantastically sophisticated in many ways, but stone aged in others. In short, there is an entire class of sysadmins that the NSA has no good way of keeping track of, and worse, they don't even necessarily know who they all are...
Umm, ok, now you have to be brilliant to "sudo su ".
This guy was a sysadmin. He had physical level access to the hardware. Anybody who is in that job and is competent can do what Snowden did. (or am I missing some as yet undisclosed salient detail?)
Your best bet for how to support a FOSS project like that is to hire an intern for 6 months to write code / debug / whatever for the project. Take your favorite OSS project, and think of what features would be useful for it to have, and take on an intern to implement it for you. The resulting patches could then be submitted for mainline inclusion, and thereby benefit everyone. Everyone wins. You get even better software tools, the project gets badly needed programmer resources, and you have managed to spend your budget in a way that doesn't set off every alarm bell from your CFO to the IRS. Plus you have helped to employ one more American in need of work.
He expected exactly what he got: A chance to publicly drag the various and sundry problems with the terrorism laws out and expose them to the light of day. He expected to be stopped, he expected to be searched, knowing they would find nothing, and wanted the opportunity to make a big deal out of it. Our various governments are either stupid enough to fall for it, or are so arrogant in their new found powers that they just don't care anymore.
Politicians drawing up the laws similarly don't want to be responsible for having to let people go just because "didn't smell right" was not acceptable.
Why not? That persons effectiveness as a terrorist just went effectively to zero. You know who they are individually. They themselves can never again take direct part in a plot, or they will expose others. Even indirectly, their involvement in a future plot endangers all of the conspirators. Unless the terrorist is a complete moron, they will avoid any of their former terrorist contacts, thus effectively removing them from the conspiracy. This is far cheaper than imprisonment, and thousands of times as effective at stamping out conspiracies because often you'll get the dumb one who will expose the entire conspiracy for you. Best of all, you have no martyrs to help the terrorist propaganda machine. The smart way to handle them is to let them go (having subsequently been relieved of their weapons), and watch where they go. Just one of these "moles" could be far more valuable than the entire NSA intelligence machine. Nothing can expose a conspiracy like a stupid conspirator...
It is unreasonable to expect public debate of every law when understanding such laws in detail (as opposed to misunderstanding it or falling for a caricature the opposition spreads in the popular press) requires considerable legal training.
And therein lies the problem. Laws are a lousy solution to the ages old problem of holding your fellow people accountable for their actions. Just because we have always done it that way doesn't mean it isn't incredibly stupid.
While there will always be some tiny amount of votes who read the text of a law and write in to their representatives to voice their opinion, the general public is simply incapable of following the detailed legalese involved.
The legalese is solely for the purpose of enumerating every possibly situation. This "solution" is patently absurd as any AI software engineer can tell you. It is simply the wrong way to go about making decisions. It is understandable that the concept of law was created the way it was, but we now know a great deal more about how to create decision making process' thanks to Computer Science. Its time to abandon the concept of laws, get the poly-sci guys talking to the comp-sci guys and lets see if we cant come up with something that makes better use of a half century of control theory and information theory...
Oh yeah, I forgot, there is a whole army of lawyers out there who'd be out of a job if we actually made a system that works, and for some stupid reason we had put them in charge...
True, but as you say that is true for all laws and we certainly cannot have a society without laws
And why, pray tell, can't we have a society with no laws? How about consequences instead of laws. The only rule of law should be: do nothing that people will take you to task for. People generally know right and wrong, whether there are laws against whatever the are doing or not. Laws serve only to muddy the process of accountability and allow the possibility of consequences not being appropriate to the transgression.
Why? this is perfect for CARS. Dishwasher sized will fit into most full size cars right now. creates electricity at low heat, which mean actual practical electric cars.
you change the fuel source to something other than oil.
Even better at 25kw that is enough to run the majority of homes.
The problem is that it isn't the size of a dishwasher, its closer to the size of a fridge. There's a picture of a guy standing next to the prototype from five days ago, and its frickin huge. Calling that dishwasher sized is a gross exaggeration. Plus, when you think about it, your "hybrid" has to have this thing in there, plus a small battery (I would use an ultra-cap for that btw), plus the electric motor, plus a tank for Compressed gas, and soon there's no room left for anything else.
Although they would like it to be ready for transportation use, its just not there yet. Maybe soon, maybe not: It all depends on how much more they can improve the power density.
I for one recommend you switch to a more efficient form of heating. Electricity is terribly inefficient way to heat a house. (we burn say, coal, (at a energy loss) to generate steam to turn turbines, to turn generators to make electricity, to transmit over lines (at a bit of a loss) to heat up resistor, (at a hilarious loss) to warm air.
Or, you pipe gas to the house, burn it, and get warm from all the heat the gas makes. I for one, choose the latter.
Technically, resistive heating is 100% efficient (it converts 100% of the energy to heat). The problem is the transmission and generation, which you mentioned is very low efficiency. Using electricity for resistive heating is pretty stupid these days, What you want is a heat pump. It uses much less energy to move existing heat energy "uphill" to where you want it than it does to create it out of electricity. You can make a gas powered heat pump, but its easier to make electric powered ones. Of all the heating and cooling options, air source heat pumps are the second most energy efficient (and second cheapest under most conditions), and a ground source heat pump is the most efficient and cheapest under all conditions. In 100 years, people wont even be installing fuel sourced boilers or hot water heaters at all.
That having been said, it may be economically viable to install one of these fuel cells to generate the electricity that future heat pumps will use. I sat down and did the math: at a price point of around 10k USD, it becomes worth the cost for me to install a 10kW unit. I can justify more if I assume (which I can) that this will prevent me from having to get a generator for power outages as well.
Microsoft is not Apple. People don't wait in line for Microsoft products just because they are Microsoft products. Apple built a cult following around top notch products. They repeatedly made good products. That didn't happen overnight, and it damn near killed apple. Microsoft has to stop producing garbage. Until *All* of Microsoft products are top tier for an extended period of time, no one will trust Microsoft enough to buy into the lock-in. Microsoft has had too many Zunes, and too many Bobs for people to shell out top dollar expecting a good user experience. Now they do the wait and see, and a wait and see product is never good enough to get the top of the market, no matter how good it is because those same customers bought the competitions product already.
Microsoft only has one hope of remaining relevant. They have to make awesome products repeatedly for a period of years to decades, and accept that their products will go unnoticed for a long time. Eventually, a core of loyal Microsoft customers will form, and if the top notch products continue to flow, the core will continue to grow. One piece of junk like windows 8 makes it onto the shelves, and Microsoft is back at square one again. This will be a long and expensive process for Microsoft, but the longer they wait, the more likely the process will kill them.
So, in other words, the first project had to fail miserably before the boss was ready to sign off on solution B for the Y he really wanted because the first time round, the good contractor couldn't get him to sign off on B. he would only sign off on A providing X. (that would be the second sentence of my first paragraph).
I should have made that clearer, they were two unrelated projects.
You're also trying to compare a contract where one contractor was able to actually understand the entire scope in 1 week to a payroll system that nobody there fully understands at all.
I'm sorry, but payroll just isn't that complicated a concept if you take some time to see how its really done. Sure there are lots of interacting rules that have to be observed, but the very first thing the guy would have learned from sitting in the seat for a week is that every so often the rules change, so the software needs to have a dynamic rule update function so that it can be easily adjusted for new laws, labor contracts, etc. down the road. Once that basic functionality has been achieved, updating the system to correct any oversights in the original specification should be relatively trivial. Given that, I would not have quoted $10M for a static "all or nothing" payroll system, I would have quoted $30M for a dynamic rule set driven solution with a quote for updating rule sets as a separate line item at a reasonable cost. Thus guaranteeing a happy customer first and foremost, as well as establishing a very likely steady income stream from a basic maintenance contract down the road. Designing the system right in the first place would make rule changes a snap to implement, and the return on effort would be very high down the road for this simple work. End of the day, everyone wins. Customer gets the system they really wanted, contractor gets another good reference as well as future income from the project. Asking the guy who is going to foot the bill how it has to work is the wrong way to go about designing anything. Asking the guy that has to use it how it should work is marginally better. Performing the actual function yourself to the level of proficiency is the best method of all.
disclaimer: I spent a significant amount of time working payroll at a medium sized (1000ish employes) company at one time in my life, so I have a good idea of how payroll for a good sized company should work.
No amount of expertise will tell you that while the client insists they want X, they really want Y.
You are absolutely wrong on that score, and it marks the difference between a good contractor and a bad one. A good contractor (or contracting agency) knows very well how to extract a functional spec from a customer who hasn't the foggiest idea what they want, what they could get, or how much it should cost. I have recently had experiences with both kinds. The bad contractor came in full of recommendations and suggestions, and basically led my boss down the primrose path, all the while convincing him it was all his idea. The good contractor we got came in for a week *before* meeting with the boss, and learned how to do the job of the folks who were going to have to use the system. As you will undoubtedly be shocked to learn, the first product was a miserable failure, and the second was a resounding success. Both involved my boss (who is not qualified to tie his own shoes without help), and both involved high price contractors. The second one was 10% under budget and arrived a whopping three months early. The bad one arrived on budget and on time but was completely useless, and was never put in service (thank god).
India Business Machines is among the worst information technology outsourcing and consulting services in the world.
You're talking about a completely different company. "IBM" in this context refers to "Itty Bitty Machines". Or the opposite, as in "an elephant is a mouse with an IBM operating system". Take your pick...
I thought he was talking about the American company: "I've Been Misled".
There's nothing wrong with letting the capitalists run the efficiency show, as long as we are agree efficiency itself is not the goal, but a fair and fulfilling life for all people. The market outcome is not the end goal, the price system is just a way to rationalize the use of resources. Social justice and equal opportunity is the task of the state. Fuck trickle down and assorted fallacies. Progressive taxes impossible to dodge, government subsidies for education and health, massive intervention in the labor market, rentier euthanasia via macroeconomics, estate and inheritance taxes - this are the tools of the social progressive, not fudging with the incentive structure of the firm.
There is very much wrong in letting the capitalists run the economy. Until very recently, a large portion of the population (90%+) were required to actively participate in the maintenance of society (manufacture goods, distribute them, provide services). Increasingly these functions can be automated, and they will be. This situation should logically lead to a reduction in the amount of people who need to work, and a reduction in the length of service they need to provide. Capitalism however has the perverse effect of ensuring that a lack of need for workers translates into falling value of those workers. This effect causes power to concentrate at the top of society, and ultimately leads to extreme poverty at the other end. When society only requires active participation of 1% of the population, under capitalism the other 99% starve to death. That's just plain F'ed up. Capitalism worked OK (as in better than everything else), when workers were required to maintain society, this worked acceptably well. Today, it is a dismal failure of an economic policy known as "trickle down". Its time to cut capitalism loose the way the more progressive countries have done by moving to a mix of socialism and capitalism. Long term, capitalism will have to succumb entirely to something else. That something isn't going to be socialism because in many ways socialism is worse. I expect it will be some kind of socially enforced anarchy or something entirely different, that we haven't even glimpsed yet.
As a side note, the only reason companies need to grow is to satisfy the capitalists running things. In fact, companies are only needed in order to take products from the idea stage and get the products to the masses. For this, capitalism works exceptionally well, but it is not the only way to achieve this goal, and as labor is less and less needed, its evils are starting to outweigh its benefits.
If you're not making money, you're losing money. But only a government can simply tax you for more or worse borrow it and let your kids pay it back.
Put the government in charge of the Sahara desert and in five years it will run out of sand. Any organization tends toward inefficiency. A free and open competitive market tends to put pressure on participants to be efficient.
Governments have no idea how to run a tech (or any) business except to make it late, over budget and under spec. Every decision is made for political rather than economic reasons. The only people who think that's a good idea are fools that thing government is always good, or wolves that want the power.
Which are you?
Inefficient organizations are not the worst things that can happen to society. Far from it in fact. Tyranny and monopoly abuse are by far the greater evils. In the so called land of the free, we have millions of workers being squeezed for every penny in the name of efficiency, so that the tyrants on top can have more and more. Meanwhile, they use their powers to control access to resources that should cost almost nothing so that those in the middle and on the bottom can have less and less even though the availability of resources continues to grow.
The simple fact is that efficiency of markets under capitalism only benefits the already wealthy. It does practically nothing for the middle class, and actively hurts the poor. The phrase a "rising tide lifts all ships" is not true with our broken economic system. What we need is a new economic system that severely limits how far ahead of the curve any individual can get. We used to have such a system, it was called progressive taxation. What we have now is a shambles.
The solution is relatively simple. Wipe out corporations the way they stand now. The socialists got the problem right, just botched the solution. You cant take the power away from one group of greedy scuzzballs, and give it to another group of greedy scuzzballs and expect everything to get better. A better suggestion I have heard is to give ownership of all corporations to the workers who are employed by the company. Each employee gets 1 vote in selecting those that run the company. Limit companies to a maximum number of employees to keep super-conglomerates from swamping individuals with raw numbers. To be sure, some economies of scale would be lost. The wealthy would never permit it if they have any say in the matter. Our current system of government will not allow it to happen because the wealthy have too much power and there is no way to get it back from them.
Our government has been completely and wholly pwned by the wealthy. Unless they are willing to give up the power permanently and in ways that can be enforced, the peoples of the democratic nations of the world may have no alternative than to replace capitalism at the point of a gun.
That is the reason that gun control is so dangerous to the average person. Once you have no ability to do violence, you have very little power to enforce your authority, and authority that cant be enforced isn't real. Remember that the next time you vote to "make our streets safer". Its not us they're making the streets safer for...
As for "significant power cost", this has long been since resolved by "good" CPU design; and shutting down areas of the CPU that are not in use. Don't need eight CPU's right now? The OS 'can' shut down 2 (or 4).
Its not the power cost of the extra cores that is the single biggest reason not to have them, it is the actual increase in cost of the processor. Increasing die size reduces yield in non linear ways. Doubling the die size can have an exponential increase in the cost of the final product. Most cell phones have relatively small margins. Only a few players can get away with high margin hardware, but even they would balk at adding $40 to the cost of the hardware if the majority of their users would never even know the difference.
As far as the power cost, the optimizations you mentioned are the very reason not to have 8 cores. You get all the power you will neef, fr the immediate future with 4 cores. There simply isn't a big enough improvement in performance with 8 cores for it to be worth the increased cost to manufacture *and* reduced battery life.
Uhhmmm. Rendering libraries? You know, the ones used by games.
I'm pretty sure no one is playing the latest call of duty on their cell phone, nor would they do so even if they could. In the unlikely event that I am wrong about both of the above, the cell phones just don't have the raw pixel count to require so much raw compute power.
Uhhmmm. Speech recognition? Speech Synthesis?
I seem to remember half way decent speech recognition back in '99, so I doubt that recognition requires that much compute power. Syntheis seems like pretty much the same deal. Just simply not enough value need to be calculated in any given second to require the phenominal compute power that 4 cores provide, much less 8.
You might make an argument for video compression / processing, but the abundance of bandwidth is making this less and less important. The abundance of storage is removing much of the need for good image compression for cameras as well. Although the images are huge (13 Mpixel! or better), there is so much storage available that the phone can store the images uncompressed and compress them at leisure, and it would take a backlog of hundreds of images before the phone would be in danger of running out of storage.
Ever open Task Manager (in windows)? There are other things going on in every OS besides just the application you are running.
Ever run more than one application?
Short sided people - are not (still?) not using - or seeing, or bothering to code for multi-core systems.
There are only so many things that need processing in the background. The leap from 1 processor to 2 had huge advantages in that regard: The background tasks no longer truly used resources that the active tasks needed. Even some applications could be paralleled for a significant performance enhancement on their own. Even going from 2 cores to 4 offers some advantage, even in the mobile sector, where some of the eye candy apps need some horsepower behind them, but graphics are your biggest resource hogs when it comes to CPU, and the mobile devices just don't have the pixel count to make any reasonable demand for that much compute power. As mentioned above, additional parallel compute power comes at a significant efficiency cost, and as such is not usually a good idea unless raw compute power is significantly more important that power consumption. This whole thread boils down to Qualcomm understanding their market segment very very well, and you not so much.
I would think that an eight core processor might make sense for a high end smartphone; you could have four cores with scalable clock speed for high performance computing (gaming, video editing, etc.) and switch to four low-power cores on the fly, which will still multitask very well but will conserve power. If only any smartphone manufacturer would introduce such a beast.
Cost is a far more important factor in smartphones (even the high end) than performance. Paying for 8 cores when you only use 4 is just plain idiotic. You could just get a more power efficient 4 core setup and have done with it. Most of the 4 core systems can quite happily scale power levels up and down with utilization, so using 8 cores to achieve 4 cores with adjustable power consumption is, as stated, idiotic.
Battery life? My eight cores run off of atomic power and masses of water flowing through the Niagra power facility.
Qualcomm isn't making desktop or server CPUs, they make low power mobile CPUs. It is nearly by definition that all of their products are battery driven.
I would think that a highly multithreaded app combined with a highly parallel CPU would actually be more power efficient, as you're doing the same work in less clocks.
Granted, all tasks cannot be highly multithreaded, but that particular street goes both ways.
Then you would think wrong. Efficiency is a tricky measure. It would be efficient for an equal task, but any task that is written to take full advantage of 8 cores is quite likely to be a completely frivolous waste of compute power. As such, how many people are going to be willing to use an app that burns through your entire battery in 20 minutes just because it has nice eye candy. If it is something more worthwhile, then they are almost guaranteed to use a more permanently installed computer (one with permanent power supply) to do the task. It is simply a case of a solution to a problem that does not exist (yet?). Maybe in 10 years there may be a problem for which 20 minute battery life is an acceptable tradeoff, but I doubt it.
What is wrong with social security?
It is fully funded for decades and simply upping the cut for contributions with inflation would extend it even further.
Social security is not properly funded. The Social security administration has (by congressional decree) taken a very sizable position in Special US government bonds. There is no Cash in those accounts, just US government iou's. If congress decides to welch on those debts, then social security is bankrupt. These are not small amounts of money. By most estimates the debt is as large as 4 Trillion dollars. With our current "discretionary" budget this would take the U.S. approximately 40 years to repay not including interest due, and not spending any money on any other discretionary expense like infrastructure maintenance, or NASA, etc... This debt is cripplingly high, and the debt maintenance on the bonds alone is high enough to cause a massive budget deficit every year. Congress spent the money over two decades starting in the early 80's, and all thats left are the iou's. Social security is bankrupt in all but name.
They made bad loans to the US, and congress wants to welch on those debts.
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You're assuming he had access to the hardware that held in information in an unencrypted state. One would assume that the NSA protects this level of information with layers of encryption to try and prevent all of it from residing together on hardware in an unencrypted state. I would speculate that he need to perform the equivalent "sudo -su kalexander" in order to convince the system to give him the files unencrypted.
One would assume, but one would be wrong apparently. According to several of the linked articles, the NSA state of security is fantastically sophisticated in many ways, but stone aged in others. In short, there is an entire class of sysadmins that the NSA has no good way of keeping track of, and worse, they don't even necessarily know who they all are...
Umm, ok, now you have to be brilliant to "sudo su ".
This guy was a sysadmin. He had physical level access to the hardware. Anybody who is in that job and is competent can do what Snowden did. (or am I missing some as yet undisclosed salient detail?)
Your best bet for how to support a FOSS project like that is to hire an intern for 6 months to write code / debug / whatever for the project. Take your favorite OSS project, and think of what features would be useful for it to have, and take on an intern to implement it for you. The resulting patches could then be submitted for mainline inclusion, and thereby benefit everyone. Everyone wins. You get even better software tools, the project gets badly needed programmer resources, and you have managed to spend your budget in a way that doesn't set off every alarm bell from your CFO to the IRS. Plus you have helped to employ one more American in need of work.
what did the guy expect?
He expected exactly what he got: A chance to publicly drag the various and sundry problems with the terrorism laws out and expose them to the light of day. He expected to be stopped, he expected to be searched, knowing they would find nothing, and wanted the opportunity to make a big deal out of it. Our various governments are either stupid enough to fall for it, or are so arrogant in their new found powers that they just don't care anymore.
Politicians drawing up the laws similarly don't want to be responsible for having to let people go just because "didn't smell right" was not acceptable.
Why not? That persons effectiveness as a terrorist just went effectively to zero. You know who they are individually. They themselves can never again take direct part in a plot, or they will expose others. Even indirectly, their involvement in a future plot endangers all of the conspirators. Unless the terrorist is a complete moron, they will avoid any of their former terrorist contacts, thus effectively removing them from the conspiracy. This is far cheaper than imprisonment, and thousands of times as effective at stamping out conspiracies because often you'll get the dumb one who will expose the entire conspiracy for you. Best of all, you have no martyrs to help the terrorist propaganda machine. The smart way to handle them is to let them go (having subsequently been relieved of their weapons), and watch where they go. Just one of these "moles" could be far more valuable than the entire NSA intelligence machine. Nothing can expose a conspiracy like a stupid conspirator...
It is unreasonable to expect public debate of every law when understanding such laws in detail (as opposed to misunderstanding it or falling for a caricature the opposition spreads in the popular press) requires considerable legal training.
And therein lies the problem. Laws are a lousy solution to the ages old problem of holding your fellow people accountable for their actions. Just because we have always done it that way doesn't mean it isn't incredibly stupid.
While there will always be some tiny amount of votes who read the text of a law and write in to their representatives to voice their opinion, the general public is simply incapable of following the detailed legalese involved.
The legalese is solely for the purpose of enumerating every possibly situation. This "solution" is patently absurd as any AI software engineer can tell you. It is simply the wrong way to go about making decisions. It is understandable that the concept of law was created the way it was, but we now know a great deal more about how to create decision making process' thanks to Computer Science. Its time to abandon the concept of laws, get the poly-sci guys talking to the comp-sci guys and lets see if we cant come up with something that makes better use of a half century of control theory and information theory...
Oh yeah, I forgot, there is a whole army of lawyers out there who'd be out of a job if we actually made a system that works, and for some stupid reason we had put them in charge...
True, but as you say that is true for all laws and we certainly cannot have a society without laws
And why, pray tell, can't we have a society with no laws? How about consequences instead of laws. The only rule of law should be: do nothing that people will take you to task for. People generally know right and wrong, whether there are laws against whatever the are doing or not. Laws serve only to muddy the process of accountability and allow the possibility of consequences not being appropriate to the transgression.
Why? this is perfect for CARS. Dishwasher sized will fit into most full size cars right now. creates electricity at low heat, which mean actual practical electric cars.
you change the fuel source to something other than oil.
Even better at 25kw that is enough to run the majority of homes.
The problem is that it isn't the size of a dishwasher, its closer to the size of a fridge. There's a picture of a guy standing next to the prototype from five days ago, and its frickin huge. Calling that dishwasher sized is a gross exaggeration. Plus, when you think about it, your "hybrid" has to have this thing in there, plus a small battery (I would use an ultra-cap for that btw), plus the electric motor, plus a tank for Compressed gas, and soon there's no room left for anything else.
Although they would like it to be ready for transportation use, its just not there yet. Maybe soon, maybe not: It all depends on how much more they can improve the power density.
I for one recommend you switch to a more efficient form of heating. Electricity is terribly inefficient way to heat a house. (we burn say, coal, (at a energy loss) to generate steam to turn turbines, to turn generators to make electricity, to transmit over lines (at a bit of a loss) to heat up resistor, (at a hilarious loss) to warm air. Or, you pipe gas to the house, burn it, and get warm from all the heat the gas makes. I for one, choose the latter.
Technically, resistive heating is 100% efficient (it converts 100% of the energy to heat). The problem is the transmission and generation, which you mentioned is very low efficiency. Using electricity for resistive heating is pretty stupid these days, What you want is a heat pump. It uses much less energy to move existing heat energy "uphill" to where you want it than it does to create it out of electricity. You can make a gas powered heat pump, but its easier to make electric powered ones. Of all the heating and cooling options, air source heat pumps are the second most energy efficient (and second cheapest under most conditions), and a ground source heat pump is the most efficient and cheapest under all conditions. In 100 years, people wont even be installing fuel sourced boilers or hot water heaters at all.
That having been said, it may be economically viable to install one of these fuel cells to generate the electricity that future heat pumps will use. I sat down and did the math: at a price point of around 10k USD, it becomes worth the cost for me to install a 10kW unit. I can justify more if I assume (which I can) that this will prevent me from having to get a generator for power outages as well.
Microsoft is not Apple. People don't wait in line for Microsoft products just because they are Microsoft products. Apple built a cult following around top notch products. They repeatedly made good products. That didn't happen overnight, and it damn near killed apple. Microsoft has to stop producing garbage. Until *All* of Microsoft products are top tier for an extended period of time, no one will trust Microsoft enough to buy into the lock-in. Microsoft has had too many Zunes, and too many Bobs for people to shell out top dollar expecting a good user experience. Now they do the wait and see, and a wait and see product is never good enough to get the top of the market, no matter how good it is because those same customers bought the competitions product already.
Microsoft only has one hope of remaining relevant. They have to make awesome products repeatedly for a period of years to decades, and accept that their products will go unnoticed for a long time. Eventually, a core of loyal Microsoft customers will form, and if the top notch products continue to flow, the core will continue to grow. One piece of junk like windows 8 makes it onto the shelves, and Microsoft is back at square one again. This will be a long and expensive process for Microsoft, but the longer they wait, the more likely the process will kill them.
So, in other words, the first project had to fail miserably before the boss was ready to sign off on solution B for the Y he really wanted because the first time round, the good contractor couldn't get him to sign off on B. he would only sign off on A providing X. (that would be the second sentence of my first paragraph).
I should have made that clearer, they were two unrelated projects.
You're also trying to compare a contract where one contractor was able to actually understand the entire scope in 1 week to a payroll system that nobody there fully understands at all.
I'm sorry, but payroll just isn't that complicated a concept if you take some time to see how its really done. Sure there are lots of interacting rules that have to be observed, but the very first thing the guy would have learned from sitting in the seat for a week is that every so often the rules change, so the software needs to have a dynamic rule update function so that it can be easily adjusted for new laws, labor contracts, etc. down the road. Once that basic functionality has been achieved, updating the system to correct any oversights in the original specification should be relatively trivial. Given that, I would not have quoted $10M for a static "all or nothing" payroll system, I would have quoted $30M for a dynamic rule set driven solution with a quote for updating rule sets as a separate line item at a reasonable cost. Thus guaranteeing a happy customer first and foremost, as well as establishing a very likely steady income stream from a basic maintenance contract down the road. Designing the system right in the first place would make rule changes a snap to implement, and the return on effort would be very high down the road for this simple work. End of the day, everyone wins. Customer gets the system they really wanted, contractor gets another good reference as well as future income from the project. Asking the guy who is going to foot the bill how it has to work is the wrong way to go about designing anything. Asking the guy that has to use it how it should work is marginally better. Performing the actual function yourself to the level of proficiency is the best method of all.
disclaimer: I spent a significant amount of time working payroll at a medium sized (1000ish employes) company at one time in my life, so I have a good idea of how payroll for a good sized company should work.
No amount of expertise will tell you that while the client insists they want X, they really want Y.
You are absolutely wrong on that score, and it marks the difference between a good contractor and a bad one. A good contractor (or contracting agency) knows very well how to extract a functional spec from a customer who hasn't the foggiest idea what they want, what they could get, or how much it should cost. I have recently had experiences with both kinds. The bad contractor came in full of recommendations and suggestions, and basically led my boss down the primrose path, all the while convincing him it was all his idea. The good contractor we got came in for a week *before* meeting with the boss, and learned how to do the job of the folks who were going to have to use the system. As you will undoubtedly be shocked to learn, the first product was a miserable failure, and the second was a resounding success. Both involved my boss (who is not qualified to tie his own shoes without help), and both involved high price contractors. The second one was 10% under budget and arrived a whopping three months early. The bad one arrived on budget and on time but was completely useless, and was never put in service (thank god).
India Business Machines is among the worst information technology outsourcing and consulting services in the world.
You're talking about a completely different company. "IBM" in this context refers to "Itty Bitty Machines". Or the opposite, as in "an elephant is a mouse with an IBM operating system". Take your pick...
I thought he was talking about the American company: "I've Been Misled".
Not only will news and current affairs be restricted by the government, so too will access to any data, that the government want to restrict.
Yeah because the for-profit news outlets we have no are so good we cant afford to lose them...
Was hoping for a Surface Pro 2 that's lighter and with better battery life.
Not likely, that performance has a wight and power penalty that you simply cant avoid.
Heres laughing at you Balmer
There's nothing wrong with letting the capitalists run the efficiency show, as long as we are agree efficiency itself is not the goal, but a fair and fulfilling life for all people. The market outcome is not the end goal, the price system is just a way to rationalize the use of resources. Social justice and equal opportunity is the task of the state. Fuck trickle down and assorted fallacies. Progressive taxes impossible to dodge, government subsidies for education and health, massive intervention in the labor market, rentier euthanasia via macroeconomics, estate and inheritance taxes - this are the tools of the social progressive, not fudging with the incentive structure of the firm.
There is very much wrong in letting the capitalists run the economy. Until very recently, a large portion of the population (90%+) were required to actively participate in the maintenance of society (manufacture goods, distribute them, provide services). Increasingly these functions can be automated, and they will be. This situation should logically lead to a reduction in the amount of people who need to work, and a reduction in the length of service they need to provide. Capitalism however has the perverse effect of ensuring that a lack of need for workers translates into falling value of those workers. This effect causes power to concentrate at the top of society, and ultimately leads to extreme poverty at the other end. When society only requires active participation of 1% of the population, under capitalism the other 99% starve to death. That's just plain F'ed up. Capitalism worked OK (as in better than everything else), when workers were required to maintain society, this worked acceptably well. Today, it is a dismal failure of an economic policy known as "trickle down". Its time to cut capitalism loose the way the more progressive countries have done by moving to a mix of socialism and capitalism. Long term, capitalism will have to succumb entirely to something else. That something isn't going to be socialism because in many ways socialism is worse. I expect it will be some kind of socially enforced anarchy or something entirely different, that we haven't even glimpsed yet.
As a side note, the only reason companies need to grow is to satisfy the capitalists running things. In fact, companies are only needed in order to take products from the idea stage and get the products to the masses. For this, capitalism works exceptionally well, but it is not the only way to achieve this goal, and as labor is less and less needed, its evils are starting to outweigh its benefits.
If you're not making money, you're losing money. But only a government can simply tax you for more or worse borrow it and let your kids pay it back.
Put the government in charge of the Sahara desert and in five years it will run out of sand. Any organization tends toward inefficiency. A free and open competitive market tends to put pressure on participants to be efficient.
Governments have no idea how to run a tech (or any) business except to make it late, over budget and under spec. Every decision is made for political rather than economic reasons. The only people who think that's a good idea are fools that thing government is always good, or wolves that want the power.
Which are you?
Inefficient organizations are not the worst things that can happen to society. Far from it in fact. Tyranny and monopoly abuse are by far the greater evils. In the so called land of the free, we have millions of workers being squeezed for every penny in the name of efficiency, so that the tyrants on top can have more and more. Meanwhile, they use their powers to control access to resources that should cost almost nothing so that those in the middle and on the bottom can have less and less even though the availability of resources continues to grow.
The simple fact is that efficiency of markets under capitalism only benefits the already wealthy. It does practically nothing for the middle class, and actively hurts the poor. The phrase a "rising tide lifts all ships" is not true with our broken economic system. What we need is a new economic system that severely limits how far ahead of the curve any individual can get. We used to have such a system, it was called progressive taxation. What we have now is a shambles.
The solution is relatively simple. Wipe out corporations the way they stand now. The socialists got the problem right, just botched the solution. You cant take the power away from one group of greedy scuzzballs, and give it to another group of greedy scuzzballs and expect everything to get better. A better suggestion I have heard is to give ownership of all corporations to the workers who are employed by the company. Each employee gets 1 vote in selecting those that run the company. Limit companies to a maximum number of employees to keep super-conglomerates from swamping individuals with raw numbers. To be sure, some economies of scale would be lost. The wealthy would never permit it if they have any say in the matter. Our current system of government will not allow it to happen because the wealthy have too much power and there is no way to get it back from them.
Our government has been completely and wholly pwned by the wealthy. Unless they are willing to give up the power permanently and in ways that can be enforced, the peoples of the democratic nations of the world may have no alternative than to replace capitalism at the point of a gun.
That is the reason that gun control is so dangerous to the average person. Once you have no ability to do violence, you have very little power to enforce your authority, and authority that cant be enforced isn't real. Remember that the next time you vote to "make our streets safer". Its not us they're making the streets safer for...
As for "significant power cost", this has long been since resolved by "good" CPU design; and shutting down areas of the CPU that are not in use. Don't need eight CPU's right now? The OS 'can' shut down 2 (or 4).
Its not the power cost of the extra cores that is the single biggest reason not to have them, it is the actual increase in cost of the processor. Increasing die size reduces yield in non linear ways. Doubling the die size can have an exponential increase in the cost of the final product. Most cell phones have relatively small margins. Only a few players can get away with high margin hardware, but even they would balk at adding $40 to the cost of the hardware if the majority of their users would never even know the difference.
As far as the power cost, the optimizations you mentioned are the very reason not to have 8 cores. You get all the power you will neef, fr the immediate future with 4 cores. There simply isn't a big enough improvement in performance with 8 cores for it to be worth the increased cost to manufacture *and* reduced battery life.
Uhhmmm. Rendering libraries? You know, the ones used by games.
I'm pretty sure no one is playing the latest call of duty on their cell phone, nor would they do so even if they could. In the unlikely event that I am wrong about both of the above, the cell phones just don't have the raw pixel count to require so much raw compute power.
Uhhmmm. Speech recognition? Speech Synthesis?
I seem to remember half way decent speech recognition back in '99, so I doubt that recognition requires that much compute power. Syntheis seems like pretty much the same deal. Just simply not enough value need to be calculated in any given second to require the phenominal compute power that 4 cores provide, much less 8.
You might make an argument for video compression / processing, but the abundance of bandwidth is making this less and less important. The abundance of storage is removing much of the need for good image compression for cameras as well. Although the images are huge (13 Mpixel! or better), there is so much storage available that the phone can store the images uncompressed and compress them at leisure, and it would take a backlog of hundreds of images before the phone would be in danger of running out of storage.
Ever open Task Manager (in windows)? There are other things going on in every OS besides just the application you are running. Ever run more than one application? Short sided people - are not (still?) not using - or seeing, or bothering to code for multi-core systems.
There are only so many things that need processing in the background. The leap from 1 processor to 2 had huge advantages in that regard: The background tasks no longer truly used resources that the active tasks needed. Even some applications could be paralleled for a significant performance enhancement on their own. Even going from 2 cores to 4 offers some advantage, even in the mobile sector, where some of the eye candy apps need some horsepower behind them, but graphics are your biggest resource hogs when it comes to CPU, and the mobile devices just don't have the pixel count to make any reasonable demand for that much compute power. As mentioned above, additional parallel compute power comes at a significant efficiency cost, and as such is not usually a good idea unless raw compute power is significantly more important that power consumption. This whole thread boils down to Qualcomm understanding their market segment very very well, and you not so much.
I would think that an eight core processor might make sense for a high end smartphone; you could have four cores with scalable clock speed for high performance computing (gaming, video editing, etc.) and switch to four low-power cores on the fly, which will still multitask very well but will conserve power. If only any smartphone manufacturer would introduce such a beast.
Cost is a far more important factor in smartphones (even the high end) than performance. Paying for 8 cores when you only use 4 is just plain idiotic. You could just get a more power efficient 4 core setup and have done with it. Most of the 4 core systems can quite happily scale power levels up and down with utilization, so using 8 cores to achieve 4 cores with adjustable power consumption is, as stated, idiotic.
Battery life? My eight cores run off of atomic power and masses of water flowing through the Niagra power facility.
Qualcomm isn't making desktop or server CPUs, they make low power mobile CPUs. It is nearly by definition that all of their products are battery driven.
I would think that a highly multithreaded app combined with a highly parallel CPU would actually be more power efficient, as you're doing the same work in less clocks.
Granted, all tasks cannot be highly multithreaded, but that particular street goes both ways.
Then you would think wrong. Efficiency is a tricky measure. It would be efficient for an equal task, but any task that is written to take full advantage of 8 cores is quite likely to be a completely frivolous waste of compute power. As such, how many people are going to be willing to use an app that burns through your entire battery in 20 minutes just because it has nice eye candy. If it is something more worthwhile, then they are almost guaranteed to use a more permanently installed computer (one with permanent power supply) to do the task. It is simply a case of a solution to a problem that does not exist (yet?). Maybe in 10 years there may be a problem for which 20 minute battery life is an acceptable tradeoff, but I doubt it.
What is wrong with social security? It is fully funded for decades and simply upping the cut for contributions with inflation would extend it even further.
Social security is not properly funded. The Social security administration has (by congressional decree) taken a very sizable position in Special US government bonds. There is no Cash in those accounts, just US government iou's. If congress decides to welch on those debts, then social security is bankrupt. These are not small amounts of money. By most estimates the debt is as large as 4 Trillion dollars. With our current "discretionary" budget this would take the U.S. approximately 40 years to repay not including interest due, and not spending any money on any other discretionary expense like infrastructure maintenance, or NASA, etc... This debt is cripplingly high, and the debt maintenance on the bonds alone is high enough to cause a massive budget deficit every year. Congress spent the money over two decades starting in the early 80's, and all thats left are the iou's. Social security is bankrupt in all but name. They made bad loans to the US, and congress wants to welch on those debts.