At some point the investment might pay off. There's always a market for something like this - the question is "how big."
What might be more important is that MS gets experience building things like a tablet. Even if Surface never takes off, it might make a good basis for industrial control panels, etc.
I don't really remember that well anymore, but Linux and MySQL have always been tied together...probably because mysql was relatively fast out of the box. Even today Postgres' default's suck, and the wiki says so:
"One reason the defaults are low is because on some platforms (like older Solaris versions and SGI), having large values requires invasive action like recompiling the kernel"
I mean, who remembers when there was a Solaris kernel that you could recompile (sunos4). Who gives a shit about IRIX? I mean, do you still have to specify cylinder and sector counts? WTF? It's 2013. Update your config for a Xeon 2ghz box with 8gb of ram already. If you want to be conservative, use a core 2 duo.
I kept expecting something in the doc to say "due to the lack of floating point coprocessors on some 386 systems so that's not assumed" or "CP/M wasn't designed for multi-user time sharing, so we implement manual time slicing."
Maybe they don't update the config because they want to get paid the consulting $$ to tune it?
Correlation is not causation, but correlation by itself does not rule out causation. Not sure why people have a tendency to discount that possibility. Is that an online thing, or does it happen in real life too?
Actually, you should go watch/listen to the shuttle design class at MIT. It's over at iTunes U, and is incredibly interesting.
The o-ring was outside of its thermal envelope, but the managers didn't think it would be a problem. That had nothing to do with safeties. Are you confusing safety (mechanisms to prevent an unwanted event) with safety (the lack of injury)?
In the other shuttle disaster, the real problem was they never thought the foam could hit hard enough to do damage. Foam had come off lots and lots of times and bounced off the shuttle with no issues, so everyone reasonably assumed it wasn't an issue - until it was.
Neither incident had any issues with safeties; they had issues with risk management.
What's the point of these kinds of laws? Just like drugs, these resources will make their way to whomever wants to buy them. Where there's a market, there's a way.
Yeah, I mean, give Apple a break. They only did, uh:
* the first mass-market personal computer (Apple ][) * the first mass-market GUI (Mac) * the dominant music player (iPod) * the dominant online music store (iTunes) * the dominant laptop mouse input device (trackpad) * the dominant laptop form factor (Powerbook) * the dominant laptop form factor (Macbook Pro) * the dominant small laptop form factor (Macbook Air) * the dominant smartphone phone (iPhone)
I mean geez, what a bunch of fuckups. It's not like they're doing anything special. I mean, just look at Tandy, Atari, Creative, Gateway, Leading Edge, Compaq, Tandem, Sandisk, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Panasonic, Commodore, Tower Records, and the rest of the industries in those spaces. It's not like they've been standing still doing nothing - oh wait.
"PUBLICATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE MUST BE IMMEDIATELY STOPPED AT ALL COSTS! This beautiful, educational, erudite, and thoroughly appreciated publication is the heretofore unrecognized instrument of doom which must be erased if we as a country or continent will survive. It is NOT TOO LATE if this warning is heeded!"
Get all the money you want, but it's regulatory compliance that's the problem, not the money - at least if this company's experience is any guide.
"Last September, with great fanfare, Ocean Power Technologies began construction on America's first wave-powered utility. Holding the first - and only - wave energy permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, OPT had planned to deploy a test buoy off the coast of Reedsport by spring.
But a year after the permit, regulatory and technical difficulties have all but halted the project. Federal regulators notified the company earlier this year it had violated the license after failing to file a variety of plans and assessments."
Also, there are a couple of live systems out there that I've heard about in airports. They could add facial recognition, but mainly they're used for object detection.
Really, the data people were pretty marginal in the last election - not because they didn't have the data, but because they didn't know the right question to ask.
The election came down to about 400,000 votes in a few counties. The question should have been: how do we get the most number of voters in those specific counties to show up at the polls?
Obama's organization didn't matter - he got massive amounts of free press, so his get out the vote drive was pretty much moot. It's always a plus when the press is your shill. Plus, when you get 99% of the black and hispanic vote the rest of the vote doesn't really matter.
Romney blew it because his system crashed, according to reports. But even if it didn't, were they targeting the counties that mattered? I doubt it. Even Romney campaign isn't cold enough to focus on the 10 counties that mattered. But they should have. If they can't drag 700,000 people off their asses and to the polls then he has no business being POTUS.
Universities have no real incentive to lower prices. Why should they? They can foist costs onto a third party.
Also, their costs keep going up - healthcare, salaries, maintenance. Their cost structure is basically fixed. The only way they can cover those is by raising tuition.
This isn't a new problem. This is a structural problem that's been pointed out many times. Why is this news?
On 5/28/13 there were 13 million Apple TVs sold, at about $100 each. That's $1.3 billion of revenue. I'm being conservative and assuming those numbers don't include the Apple TV 1.
Given an ultra-low margin of 25%, that means Apple conservatively has made $325 million off of the ATV. And Apple's margins have historically been more than 25%.
Nobody cares enough about Africa to listen in on them. The only thing Africa has is resources, and China already is buying them. Is the infrastructure subject to surveillance? Sure, but every infrastructure is, even heterogeneous ones like the US.
It's not overclocking, it's just that Samsung underclocks their phones to save battery and to stay within the specified thermal envelope.
Only the benchmarking apps run at full speed, because they're the only apps that need the full power of the phone at all times.
Other apps can't handle the full power of the Samsung ecosystem, thus Samsung protects them from the overwhelmingly high power coolness that is the Samsung platform.
So really, everything we do is in the best interest of our customer. We protect our customers from experiencing the full power of our phones to preserve their mental cohesiveness. Anything less would open a wormhole in the fabric of reality, and we wouldn't want that.
"In the case of climate simulations, different models (both physics-wise and code-wise) are run with different computers on the same input data, and yield basically the same results."
Maybe that means that their models are bad and they're all fudging their data?
Drones will eventually provide enough offensive capability that you'll need ground troops only to invade and repel invaders. With ranges > 1000 miles, you can have a swarm of them protecting your shipping lanes. With enough of them, you can overwhelm any seaborne invasion force relatively cheaply. They'd be a good, cheap way to do power projection without the expense.
They need to start thinking about drone carrier bases instead of aircraft carriers.
Swarming technology will get good enough that you'll only need a few real pilots.
They're also prone to jamming, which is why they need some autonomy.
Overall, they're really pretty cost-effective. Link them to some image recognition technology and you'd have an automated seaborne monitoring system that optionally can drop some missiles on someone. What's not to love?
Slashdot Mirror
This will throw one more awkward issue into operational planning for terrorists:
"Does this burqua make me look fat?"
It'll be hard to uStream that attack when you pay for your data by the minute.
"Ahmed, I thought we were on an unlimited plan?"
"We are, Rachman, but we're getting throttled!"
"And why is our username AllahsAngels?"
At some point the investment might pay off. There's always a market for something like this - the question is "how big."
What might be more important is that MS gets experience building things like a tablet. Even if Surface never takes off, it might make a good basis for industrial control panels, etc.
I don't really remember that well anymore, but Linux and MySQL have always been tied together...probably because mysql was relatively fast out of the box. Even today Postgres' default's suck, and the wiki says so:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server
"One reason the defaults are low is because on some platforms (like older Solaris versions and SGI), having large values requires invasive action like recompiling the kernel"
I mean, who remembers when there was a Solaris kernel that you could recompile (sunos4). Who gives a shit about IRIX? I mean, do you still have to specify cylinder and sector counts? WTF? It's 2013. Update your config for a Xeon 2ghz box with 8gb of ram already. If you want to be conservative, use a core 2 duo.
I kept expecting something in the doc to say "due to the lack of floating point coprocessors on some 386 systems so that's not assumed" or "CP/M wasn't designed for multi-user time sharing, so we implement manual time slicing."
Maybe they don't update the config because they want to get paid the consulting $$ to tune it?
Correlation is not causation, but correlation by itself does not rule out causation. Not sure why people have a tendency to discount that possibility. Is that an online thing, or does it happen in real life too?
Actually, you should go watch/listen to the shuttle design class at MIT. It's over at iTunes U, and is incredibly interesting.
The o-ring was outside of its thermal envelope, but the managers didn't think it would be a problem. That had nothing to do with safeties. Are you confusing safety (mechanisms to prevent an unwanted event) with safety (the lack of injury)?
In the other shuttle disaster, the real problem was they never thought the foam could hit hard enough to do damage. Foam had come off lots and lots of times and bounced off the shuttle with no issues, so everyone reasonably assumed it wasn't an issue - until it was.
Neither incident had any issues with safeties; they had issues with risk management.
Unlike the article implies, the safety design was just fine - after all, the bombs didn't go off.
Sure, three out of four of them failed - that's why there were four.
I'd be good for someone with actual statistics knowledge to say what the probability of 3/4/5 safeties failing would be.
What's the point of these kinds of laws? Just like drugs, these resources will make their way to whomever wants to buy them. Where there's a market, there's a way.
Yeah, I mean, give Apple a break. They only did, uh:
* the first mass-market personal computer (Apple ][)
* the first mass-market GUI (Mac)
* the dominant music player (iPod)
* the dominant online music store (iTunes)
* the dominant laptop mouse input device (trackpad)
* the dominant laptop form factor (Powerbook)
* the dominant laptop form factor (Macbook Pro)
* the dominant small laptop form factor (Macbook Air)
* the dominant smartphone phone (iPhone)
I mean geez, what a bunch of fuckups. It's not like they're doing anything special. I mean, just look at Tandy, Atari, Creative, Gateway, Leading Edge, Compaq, Tandem, Sandisk, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola, Sony, Panasonic, Commodore, Tower Records, and the rest of the industries in those spaces. It's not like they've been standing still doing nothing - oh wait.
This article is a classic example of why this sort of reasoning is wrong:
http://www.jir.com/geographic.html
"PUBLICATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE MUST BE IMMEDIATELY STOPPED AT ALL COSTS! This beautiful, educational, erudite, and thoroughly appreciated publication is the heretofore unrecognized instrument of doom which must be erased if we as a country or continent will survive. It is NOT TOO LATE if this warning is heeded!"
Get all the money you want, but it's regulatory compliance that's the problem, not the money - at least if this company's experience is any guide.
"Last September, with great fanfare, Ocean Power Technologies began construction on America's first wave-powered utility. Holding the first - and only - wave energy permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, OPT had planned to deploy a test buoy off the coast of Reedsport by spring.
But a year after the permit, regulatory and technical difficulties have all but halted the project. Federal regulators notified the company earlier this year it had violated the license after failing to file a variety of plans and assessments."
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/08/oregon_wave_energy_stalls_off.html
One government hand giveth, other hands taketh away.
Note: Psychological studies performed on US undergraduates generally don't apply to humans in general.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/17x/beware_of_weird_psychological_samples/
Remembering the people who were Psych majors in school, I'd say that they probably were the least representative sample of humanity possible.
Read all about it:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=mers+bats
I think the article and DHS are a few years behind the curve on this. See these guys:
http://www.nicta.com.au/media/previous_releases3/2012_media_releases/australian_face_recognition_technology_wins_major_international_ict_award
Also, there are a couple of live systems out there that I've heard about in airports. They could add facial recognition, but mainly they're used for object detection.
Really, the data people were pretty marginal in the last election - not because they didn't have the data, but because they didn't know the right question to ask.
The election came down to about 400,000 votes in a few counties. The question should have been: how do we get the most number of voters in those specific counties to show up at the polls?
Obama's organization didn't matter - he got massive amounts of free press, so his get out the vote drive was pretty much moot. It's always a plus when the press is your shill. Plus, when you get 99% of the black and hispanic vote the rest of the vote doesn't really matter.
Romney blew it because his system crashed, according to reports. But even if it didn't, were they targeting the counties that mattered? I doubt it. Even Romney campaign isn't cold enough to focus on the 10 counties that mattered. But they should have. If they can't drag 700,000 people off their asses and to the polls then he has no business being POTUS.
Universities have no real incentive to lower prices. Why should they? They can foist costs onto a third party.
Also, their costs keep going up - healthcare, salaries, maintenance. Their cost structure is basically fixed. The only way they can cover those is by raising tuition.
This isn't a new problem. This is a structural problem that's been pointed out many times. Why is this news?
Any union shop has the same issues.
Is it up to the OEM to backport the patch to all the various android versions that they have? If so, this vulnerability will live forever.
It's like google and its partners are building this huge botnet of vulnerable devices. Every year it gets bigger.
This should be the default github license:
http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
If you don't care enough to specify a license, you should abandon your copyrights to it.
Actually, the Apple TV turns a huge profit.
On 5/28/13 there were 13 million Apple TVs sold, at about $100 each. That's $1.3 billion of revenue. I'm being conservative and assuming those numbers don't include the Apple TV 1.
Given an ultra-low margin of 25%, that means Apple conservatively has made $325 million off of the ATV. And Apple's margins have historically been more than 25%.
We should carve thisxkcdinto granite tablets so the future can have something to look back on and be amused.
Nobody cares enough about Africa to listen in on them. The only thing Africa has is resources, and China already is buying them. Is the infrastructure subject to surveillance? Sure, but every infrastructure is, even heterogeneous ones like the US.
It's not overclocking, it's just that Samsung underclocks their phones to save battery and to stay within the specified thermal envelope.
Only the benchmarking apps run at full speed, because they're the only apps that need the full power of the phone at all times.
Other apps can't handle the full power of the Samsung ecosystem, thus Samsung protects them from the overwhelmingly high power coolness that is the Samsung platform.
So really, everything we do is in the best interest of our customer. We protect our customers from experiencing the full power of our phones to preserve their mental cohesiveness. Anything less would open a wormhole in the fabric of reality, and we wouldn't want that.
"In the case of climate simulations, different models (both physics-wise and code-wise) are run with different computers on the same input data, and yield basically the same results."
Maybe that means that their models are bad and they're all fudging their data?
Drones will eventually provide enough offensive capability that you'll need ground troops only to invade and repel invaders. With ranges > 1000 miles, you can have a swarm of them protecting your shipping lanes. With enough of them, you can overwhelm any seaborne invasion force relatively cheaply. They'd be a good, cheap way to do power projection without the expense.
They need to start thinking about drone carrier bases instead of aircraft carriers.
Swarming technology will get good enough that you'll only need a few real pilots.
They're also prone to jamming, which is why they need some autonomy.
Overall, they're really pretty cost-effective. Link them to some image recognition technology and you'd have an automated seaborne monitoring system that optionally can drop some missiles on someone. What's not to love?
Most Android phones are plastic, a material which doesn't conduct electricity very well.