Just get a lot of database licenses on the cloud, and then Oracle can raise the prices again. As Oracle is a master in the art of gouging the clients, they will design a complex update-upgrade-improve set of changes, new platforms and services, that will make very difficult to ever compare prices with what you were paying before (because now you are getting MOAH), or what other people are paying now.
It has the added advantage that Oracle can make arbitrarily difficult to return to your own metal if you are unsatisfied. I'm sure there is some subtle change in your license when you move to the cloud, or will be when some new "platform" is unveiled, that will hinder you when moving away. I'm also sure that the tools and support for moving to the cloud are far better than the tools and support for moving away from the cloud. If you thought that your organization was Oracle-dependent due to the quantity of code developed for the platform, just wait until you run on their servers. In due time, you won't be able to just get a full copy of all your data and metadata in a local computer.
Reading the ordeal and expense that is putting a microphone jack in an iPhone, I must say that now I understand the reason why Apple took it away. It's simply not worth it!
I have had (for the moment) a good experience with iDrive. Not the cheapest, but the client is flexible, you can have several machines, and it seems to have plenty of bandwidth, I also tried the free tests of backblaze y carbonite, and found the clients sorely lacking in features, and IIRC, the allowed only one machne.
iDrive makes incremental backups, saving only the changed pieces of big files. That is interesting if you have big files that change fairly often, as it's my case. Never have had to recover from any disaster with them, but up to now, I can recommend them, cross my fingers.
Killer autonomous robots is one of the things that must be, once the tech is there.
ISIS is already using small drones to bomb their enemies. You can watch the videos online. Those are small commercial drones like the ones you can find in your local store, modified to hold a grenade. Is anybody capable to think of a possible way of avoiding that, once the proper intelligence is so easy to buy or download like small drones are today, ISIS or their offspring will use it in the same way? Once you have the first swarm of killer autonomous drones let loose by terrorists in an American city, does anybody really think that any government is going to stand by that (possible) treaty?
This is not something like chemical weapons. You could say that the attack with sarin in Tokyo did not destroy the agreement on chemical weapons. But chemical weapons cannot be used for defense, and also they are not really a useful weapon in general. Killer autonomous robots (lets create the obvious KILLAR acronym here and now) are going to be precise, and probably the only way of defense against other KILLARs. Nobody is going to renounce to that.
Also, everything about a KILLAR will be double use. If you think that dual use equipment is a nightmare to control, like it has been in the Iran embargo, just wait until you have to decide if a particular neural network program can be used to detect armed people instead of drowning people. Good luck with that.
Now the moon, the last quiet place, will be polluted with the sound of incessant dumb yapping. ""Here, I'm here, on the Moon". "No, the MOON, you know, just look up and you'll see me. Ha, ha, ha""I'm waving, can you see me?"
Now this incredible advancement will be joined with the many upcoming improvements in battery technology and the no less fabulous breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence and create a car that prints itself when you need it, and then takes a while to decide that you really don't need to go where you wanted to go.
Well, it's only for public-oriented business. That's a lot of course, but far from the majority. Public offices are open usually only in the morning, as are banks. Offices do usually a rather standard 9 to 5.
And the reason for that is convenience. Convenience for the client, of course. You can leave your office work at at about five, then go shopping till eight or nine, or go to the dentist, without having to ask for permission at work or missing a meeting.
So the custom remains in the business where there is competence and depend on the public. And it won't disappear as people find it convenient. In segments where people's retail business is not so important, like banks, it has already disappeared. But you would have to implant a strong opening-hours curfew to make an effect. If you leave it voluntary, people will vote with their wallets and flock to the open businesses.
And yes, it's a bitch. I've worked that kind of hours, and it sucks. I even had the unusual luxury of having my flat at a ten minutes' walk from work. So I could go home, eat in peace, have a short siesta certainly, and go back to work. But the workdays felt terribly long, and you went home just ready for bed.
Now, everybody has seen Terminator, and Matrix, but it seems like some viewers keep the suspension of disbelief long after exiting the cinema.
AI may be advancing with giant strides, but robotics is still far, far away from doing anything remotely similar to a Terminator, even the simplest models;-) Somebody as familiar with the limitations of current batteries as Mr.Musk must be, should think about how these killer robots are going to kill more than a handful humans before the batteries run out. Although I suppose they could hijack electric car's batteries, once those are ubiquitous. Or perhaps he was really referring to autonomous cars getting self-conscious and killing every pedestrian in sight for some reason. Again, first show a car that can drive fully autonomous, and then start worrying about how smart it's going to be.
Autonomous robot fighters will come, once the AI is in place. They will take the form of autonomous tanks, I suppose, at first. Something big that will have enough fuel to last some time. Second step I suppose would be swarms of small drones, every one with a camera and a small explosive load that will attach to foes and explode. Other devices will follow. That is unavoidable. If a country legislates against them, the other countries will gain an insurmountable advantage in the battlefield. And certainly rogue operators could use these devices and mount terrorist attacks with them. That's also mostly unavoidable. When the technology is there, you cannot legislate it away.
I don't know exactly why Mr.Musk did these declarations, perhaps he is genuinely worried about an apocalyptic future. But a public figure from the business world asking for regulation to politicians always smells like advantage-seeking or damage control of some kind to me.
The past monthI had to buy a new laptop. I ended up buying an used T450 on e-bay, instead of a new T470, because the model from two years ago was more than enough for my needs, and it was almost $1k cheaper. I've been a serial buyer of PCs since the concept existed, and, being on the power user end of the spectrum, it's the first time that such a thing has happened to me. Always I had to have the new whatever, be it 16Mb RAM, or a color screen, or USB... This time that would be M.2 NVMe SSD (the acronyms are starting to pile up), and USB 3.1. But you know, the difference is not so big in daily use, for a laptop at least. I can live with SATA SSD and USB 3.0. And in a couple of years, get the novelties at a reduced price.
Also my wife wanted a sexy extremely light ultrabook like the Zen, but she has ended up with my old laptop. Another unrealized sale.
What I mean is that those are two purchases that don't appear in the statistics, simply because good enough keeps being good enough for longer.
Another study that cannot distinguish if it's causation of just correlation. A very simple explanation for the second possibility comes to mind: Perhaps people with low blood pressure like to have more coffee as it's an stimulant. And that same people will, by virtue of their low blood pressure, not of the coffee, have less risk of stroke. More complex explanations can apply.
I understand the difficulties of making a double-blind controlled experiment in this case, but the fact that doing it right is difficult shouldn't be an excuse for doing it wrong.
...but it seems rather reasonable that if a court of law orders you to submit something, the fact that you had stored in another country shouldn't be much of an excuse for not doing so.
2 million people generating 448 million posts a year? That's about two posts a working day per person. Either they are horribly inefficient, or one of these numbers is wrong. My guess, both are wrong.
The future is mobile, and in mobile RISC wins (for now). First you emulate, then you go native. Microsoft has seen the new Samsung S8 working as a desktop replacement with a dock, and is sweating cold. If that trend goes on (and why shouldn't it, as phones become more powerful), and mobile apps adapt to the "desktop mode", soon Windows will have a real competitor. I can see plane stewardesses distributing keyboards to the passengers, so as to use the entertainment screens with your "desktop mobile". I can see "laptops" that are just a screen, a keyboard, a humongous battery and a dock bay for your phone.
You cannot fight the tide. In three years smartphones will ship with 1 Tb storage, 16 Gb memory, and 16 cores CPU. All of them itching to do something more demanding than displaying your last photo of your cat. If Microsoft doesn't emulate in firmware, VMWare will emulate in software, and soon you won't care in which OS is your app working. You will have one and only one computer, that will incidentally have the capacity of making phone calls. Congratulations everybody, we are just now entering the era of the PC.
You remind me of my father, who wouldn't buy a color TV until 1998 because they weren't "perfected" yet.
My father didn't want to buy a VHS VCR because, after the Beta debacle, he was sure that VHS was next, and the final standard would be the 8mm tape. Some smartass at work had convinced him of it.
That. For some reason planes are to be safer than a mother's lap, no matter the direct and indirect cost, the inconvenience and stress generated. But if you are in a metro car, in a concert, in a convention, you are on your own. For all places except airplanes, cost and convenience are a deterrent for more intrusion/security. But not for planes, no. There you have the big line in the sand. We'll protect that 1% of transport (or whatever), and leave the rest to the wolves, but that 1% will be secure, no matter how many anal probes we have to make.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the FBI was distributing child pornography for two weeks. This kind of things are always contentious, because setting the limits is tricky. Can a policeman pay a confident with drugs? Can an FBI agent watch a child being raped without intervening because they hope to free more children that way? Can a undercover agent kill some innocent person to keep their cover? As said, the limits are difficult to set.
In the end it's the old question: Does the end justify the means? The answer has always been "It depends". You can say that in this particular case, the answer for you is "yes". But the question is nott, in my opinion, something to dismiss so cavalierly.
Suppose you have a cleaning woman in your home (that's the most likely employee anybody has). She cleans everything to your like, but you discover that, when you are not at home, she spends some time watching your TV. Or she leaves early.
You fire her, and hire a new one. She never does less than her time, and spends the whole time cleaning, but the end results are less satisfactory. Many things aren't really clean. You fire her too.
After some further trials you find one that cleans perfectly. If she has spare time, she uses it for extra chores like deep cleaning the backside of the fridge, and never misses a date. Regrettably, in six months' time she leaves you to set up a cleaning business.
Now you wish you had kept the first one.
Convert cleaning woman to engineer, If she's doing side work on 'your' time, and also doing her job properly, then you aren't giving her enough work. If she's not doing her job properly, it doesn't really matter much why, you should fire her. Anything else is a recognition that you cannot properly evaluate her work and so you are incompetent as engineers supervisor, and should fire yourself.
...how all the technical and scientific capabilities of humankind cannot develop an antibody for a particular virus, but our immune systems do it in a couple of days, no sweat. Or rather, possibly lots of sweat, but they do it. One would thing that it would be possible to replicate the process somehow.
Note: I understand that, in the case indicated in the article, it goes beyond that, offering some kind of general-purpose antibody, probably targeting parts of the virus cover that are more hidden, and usually don't mutate. But anyway. That we cannot design that peptide, and must rely on the blind watchmaker to find it for us, is a bit baffling.
Of course, but you keep all your noxious code always in the stack, rendered inactive by a script that you bring in your USB stick, and manually execute every six months. Then when you are no longer there to execute the script...
Much safer than having to hack the network to delete things and leaving a trail and all that. Of course it's a lot of work, and perhaps your wife is right, and if you had used all that work for the benefit of your company, perhaps they wouldn't have fired you.
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Just get a lot of database licenses on the cloud, and then Oracle can raise the prices again. As Oracle is a master in the art of gouging the clients, they will design a complex update-upgrade-improve set of changes, new platforms and services, that will make very difficult to ever compare prices with what you were paying before (because now you are getting MOAH), or what other people are paying now.
It has the added advantage that Oracle can make arbitrarily difficult to return to your own metal if you are unsatisfied. I'm sure there is some subtle change in your license when you move to the cloud, or will be when some new "platform" is unveiled, that will hinder you when moving away. I'm also sure that the tools and support for moving to the cloud are far better than the tools and support for moving away from the cloud. If you thought that your organization was Oracle-dependent due to the quantity of code developed for the platform, just wait until you run on their servers. In due time, you won't be able to just get a full copy of all your data and metadata in a local computer.
Time to buy Oracle stock, I'd say.
Reading the ordeal and expense that is putting a microphone jack in an iPhone, I must say that now I understand the reason why Apple took it away. It's simply not worth it!
I have had (for the moment) a good experience with iDrive. Not the cheapest, but the client is flexible, you can have several machines, and it seems to have plenty of bandwidth, I also tried the free tests of backblaze y carbonite, and found the clients sorely lacking in features, and IIRC, the allowed only one machne.
iDrive makes incremental backups, saving only the changed pieces of big files. That is interesting if you have big files that change fairly often, as it's my case. Never have had to recover from any disaster with them, but up to now, I can recommend them, cross my fingers.
Killer autonomous robots is one of the things that must be, once the tech is there.
ISIS is already using small drones to bomb their enemies. You can watch the videos online. Those are small commercial drones like the ones you can find in your local store, modified to hold a grenade. Is anybody capable to think of a possible way of avoiding that, once the proper intelligence is so easy to buy or download like small drones are today, ISIS or their offspring will use it in the same way? Once you have the first swarm of killer autonomous drones let loose by terrorists in an American city, does anybody really think that any government is going to stand by that (possible) treaty?
This is not something like chemical weapons. You could say that the attack with sarin in Tokyo did not destroy the agreement on chemical weapons. But chemical weapons cannot be used for defense, and also they are not really a useful weapon in general. Killer autonomous robots (lets create the obvious KILLAR acronym here and now) are going to be precise, and probably the only way of defense against other KILLARs. Nobody is going to renounce to that.
Also, everything about a KILLAR will be double use. If you think that dual use equipment is a nightmare to control, like it has been in the Iran embargo, just wait until you have to decide if a particular neural network program can be used to detect armed people instead of drowning people. Good luck with that.
Now the moon, the last quiet place, will be polluted with the sound of incessant dumb yapping. ""Here, I'm here, on the Moon". "No, the MOON, you know, just look up and you'll see me. Ha, ha, ha""I'm waving, can you see me?"
Now this incredible advancement will be joined with the many upcoming improvements in battery technology and the no less fabulous breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence and create a car that prints itself when you need it, and then takes a while to decide that you really don't need to go where you wanted to go.
as early as 2020.
I don't get used to those kind of years being "early". They always seem far in the distant future.
Well, it's only for public-oriented business. That's a lot of course, but far from the majority. Public offices are open usually only in the morning, as are banks. Offices do usually a rather standard 9 to 5.
And the reason for that is convenience. Convenience for the client, of course. You can leave your office work at at about five, then go shopping till eight or nine, or go to the dentist, without having to ask for permission at work or missing a meeting.
So the custom remains in the business where there is competence and depend on the public. And it won't disappear as people find it convenient. In segments where people's retail business is not so important, like banks, it has already disappeared. But you would have to implant a strong opening-hours curfew to make an effect. If you leave it voluntary, people will vote with their wallets and flock to the open businesses.
And yes, it's a bitch. I've worked that kind of hours, and it sucks. I even had the unusual luxury of having my flat at a ten minutes' walk from work. So I could go home, eat in peace, have a short siesta certainly, and go back to work. But the workdays felt terribly long, and you went home just ready for bed.
Now, everybody has seen Terminator, and Matrix, but it seems like some viewers keep the suspension of disbelief long after exiting the cinema.
AI may be advancing with giant strides, but robotics is still far, far away from doing anything remotely similar to a Terminator, even the simplest models ;-) Somebody as familiar with the limitations of current batteries as Mr.Musk must be, should think about how these killer robots are going to kill more than a handful humans before the batteries run out. Although I suppose they could hijack electric car's batteries, once those are ubiquitous. Or perhaps he was really referring to autonomous cars getting self-conscious and killing every pedestrian in sight for some reason. Again, first show a car that can drive fully autonomous, and then start worrying about how smart it's going to be.
Autonomous robot fighters will come, once the AI is in place. They will take the form of autonomous tanks, I suppose, at first. Something big that will have enough fuel to last some time. Second step I suppose would be swarms of small drones, every one with a camera and a small explosive load that will attach to foes and explode. Other devices will follow. That is unavoidable. If a country legislates against them, the other countries will gain an insurmountable advantage in the battlefield. And certainly rogue operators could use these devices and mount terrorist attacks with them. That's also mostly unavoidable. When the technology is there, you cannot legislate it away.
I don't know exactly why Mr.Musk did these declarations, perhaps he is genuinely worried about an apocalyptic future. But a public figure from the business world asking for regulation to politicians always smells like advantage-seeking or damage control of some kind to me.
The past monthI had to buy a new laptop. I ended up buying an used T450 on e-bay, instead of a new T470, because the model from two years ago was more than enough for my needs, and it was almost $1k cheaper. I've been a serial buyer of PCs since the concept existed, and, being on the power user end of the spectrum, it's the first time that such a thing has happened to me. Always I had to have the new whatever, be it 16Mb RAM, or a color screen, or USB... This time that would be M.2 NVMe SSD (the acronyms are starting to pile up), and USB 3.1. But you know, the difference is not so big in daily use, for a laptop at least. I can live with SATA SSD and USB 3.0. And in a couple of years, get the novelties at a reduced price.
Also my wife wanted a sexy extremely light ultrabook like the Zen, but she has ended up with my old laptop. Another unrealized sale.
What I mean is that those are two purchases that don't appear in the statistics, simply because good enough keeps being good enough for longer.
..did they have the copyright?
Another study that cannot distinguish if it's causation of just correlation. A very simple explanation for the second possibility comes to mind: Perhaps people with low blood pressure like to have more coffee as it's an stimulant. And that same people will, by virtue of their low blood pressure, not of the coffee, have less risk of stroke. More complex explanations can apply.
I understand the difficulties of making a double-blind controlled experiment in this case, but the fact that doing it right is difficult shouldn't be an excuse for doing it wrong.
...but it seems rather reasonable that if a court of law orders you to submit something, the fact that you had stored in another country shouldn't be much of an excuse for not doing so.
2 million people generating 448 million posts a year? That's about two posts a working day per person. Either they are horribly inefficient, or one of these numbers is wrong. My guess, both are wrong.
But it was done twice!. We can try now for the third one, see if this time it sticks!
...the writing on the wall?
The future is mobile, and in mobile RISC wins (for now). First you emulate, then you go native. Microsoft has seen the new Samsung S8 working as a desktop replacement with a dock, and is sweating cold. If that trend goes on (and why shouldn't it, as phones become more powerful), and mobile apps adapt to the "desktop mode", soon Windows will have a real competitor. I can see plane stewardesses distributing keyboards to the passengers, so as to use the entertainment screens with your "desktop mobile". I can see "laptops" that are just a screen, a keyboard, a humongous battery and a dock bay for your phone.
You cannot fight the tide. In three years smartphones will ship with 1 Tb storage, 16 Gb memory, and 16 cores CPU. All of them itching to do something more demanding than displaying your last photo of your cat. If Microsoft doesn't emulate in firmware, VMWare will emulate in software, and soon you won't care in which OS is your app working. You will have one and only one computer, that will incidentally have the capacity of making phone calls. Congratulations everybody, we are just now entering the era of the PC.
You remind me of my father, who wouldn't buy a color TV until 1998 because they weren't "perfected" yet.
My father didn't want to buy a VHS VCR because, after the Beta debacle, he was sure that VHS was next, and the final standard would be the 8mm tape. Some smartass at work had convinced him of it.
...that the links of Britney Spears with the Russian counterintelligence and propaganda units are investigated.
He shouldn't be allowed to call himself an engineer
The guy is an engineer. Why should he have to lie about that fact?
Yup, the term "licensed engineer" just springs to mind.
I don't think that it would make much of use for me, to resign.
There, fixed that for you. Commas are important.
That. For some reason planes are to be safer than a mother's lap, no matter the direct and indirect cost, the inconvenience and stress generated. But if you are in a metro car, in a concert, in a convention, you are on your own. For all places except airplanes, cost and convenience are a deterrent for more intrusion/security. But not for planes, no. There you have the big line in the sand. We'll protect that 1% of transport (or whatever), and leave the rest to the wolves, but that 1% will be secure, no matter how many anal probes we have to make.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the FBI was distributing child pornography for two weeks. This kind of things are always contentious, because setting the limits is tricky. Can a policeman pay a confident with drugs? Can an FBI agent watch a child being raped without intervening because they hope to free more children that way? Can a undercover agent kill some innocent person to keep their cover? As said, the limits are difficult to set.
In the end it's the old question: Does the end justify the means? The answer has always been "It depends". You can say that in this particular case, the answer for you is "yes". But the question is nott, in my opinion, something to dismiss so cavalierly.
Suppose you have a cleaning woman in your home (that's the most likely employee anybody has). She cleans everything to your like, but you discover that, when you are not at home, she spends some time watching your TV. Or she leaves early.
You fire her, and hire a new one. She never does less than her time, and spends the whole time cleaning, but the end results are less satisfactory. Many things aren't really clean. You fire her too.
After some further trials you find one that cleans perfectly. If she has spare time, she uses it for extra chores like deep cleaning the backside of the fridge, and never misses a date. Regrettably, in six months' time she leaves you to set up a cleaning business.
Now you wish you had kept the first one.
Convert cleaning woman to engineer, If she's doing side work on 'your' time, and also doing her job properly, then you aren't giving her enough work. If she's not doing her job properly, it doesn't really matter much why, you should fire her. Anything else is a recognition that you cannot properly evaluate her work and so you are incompetent as engineers supervisor, and should fire yourself.
...how all the technical and scientific capabilities of humankind cannot develop an antibody for a particular virus, but our immune systems do it in a couple of days, no sweat. Or rather, possibly lots of sweat, but they do it. One would thing that it would be possible to replicate the process somehow.
Note: I understand that, in the case indicated in the article, it goes beyond that, offering some kind of general-purpose antibody, probably targeting parts of the virus cover that are more hidden, and usually don't mutate. But anyway. That we cannot design that peptide, and must rely on the blind watchmaker to find it for us, is a bit baffling.
Of course, but you keep all your noxious code always in the stack, rendered inactive by a script that you bring in your USB stick, and manually execute every six months. Then when you are no longer there to execute the script...
Much safer than having to hack the network to delete things and leaving a trail and all that. Of course it's a lot of work, and perhaps your wife is right, and if you had used all that work for the benefit of your company, perhaps they wouldn't have fired you.