There's literally nothing I could say to you that thousands of scientists haven't already tried to tell you. Are you also an antivaxxer, or are you only anti-science on this one subject?
AKA "PhD scientists studying this for the last few decades".
then the changes being proposed won't change the outcome by enough to matter.
There is no one grand solution to AGW. There are a lot of smaller steps that added together might make a difference. Failing to do any of them certainly will not help.
I started buying 5.11 tactical pants made out of lightweight, stretchy nylon with a Teflon finish. They look like business casual pants but move like pajamas, and anything you spill on them rolls or wipes off. I don't think I've worn any other kinds of pants to work since I bought my first pair.
You mean, the governor who defended Texas by sending in the Texas National Guard and preventing the US military from taking over? Because I'd stake money that True Believers think that's exactly what happened.
Yes, thank you. There is no reason whatever that my non-technical family members should be able to easily not update their computers. They don't have the technical knowledge to make an informed decision other than "yes, please".
But the thing is that I like my MacBook. It has its tradeoffs but everything does. My problem is that his statement implies that everyone else has been doing it wrong, and that only he is qualified to judge what's Good Enough, as though sound quality is the foremost or even only concern. Since pretty much no human has the audio sensitivity required to affirm his statements, it's just insulting to everyone who isn't him - or at least it would be if anyone took him seriously.
Ironically, enjoyment of music has very little to do with sound quality and much more to do with music, lyrics, and listening environment. If the audio fidelity were as important as he claims, then no one would be buying junk formats like vinyl. But yet, some people enjoy the tactile process of damaging their audio media as little as possible with their inherently destructive hardware, and that's an important part of their listening experience. Music isn't about bullshit concepts like "staging" and "presence", but about the enjoyment of the whole package. Focusing on one relatively small aspect of it misses the whole point, which is why it blows me away that Neil Freaking Young is making that mistake.
A 256Kbps AAC is objectively equal to CD sound quality, as confirmed by double-blind test after test. Furthermore, a huge portion of listeners will be hearing your angel's choir over cheap-ass ear buds or crap laptop speakers. Maybe you have a golden ear and can tell the difference between a CD and a FLAC file (are those good enough for you, or do they lack the sharp ones and smooth zeros of the digital masters?). Maybe you're not actually a delusional once-great who has lousy hearing and permanent tinnitus after years of playing rock concerts, and, well, being almost 70. Maybe your home hi-fi (do you still call it that?) was hand-wired by a wizened master of recording engineering fame. Maybe you have your own private anechoic chamber so you're not exposed to anything but the pure and sweet sounds of your own singing. But the rest of us listen to normal-person music with a dynamic range that's been shot to hell in the loudness wars, via normal-person audio formats, through normal-person digital-to-analog converters, into normal-person speakers, in a normal-person environment with kids playing and horns honking and dogs barking and coworkers chattering.
Your music, pristine to the heavens though it may be, sounds no better than Miley Cyrus when piping out of my MacBook. You've become a crotchety old curmudgeon trying to remain relevant to those kids who won't stay off your lawn, and maybe it's time to sit down with a hot cup of keep your yap shut and enjoy a nice book.
I work in San Francisco and live in East Bay. My house is a block away from a Transbay bus stop, and with its use of the carpool lanes I can get into the city faster via bus than is possible in a car. Once in the city, I can either stroll for a pleasant walk along the Embarcadero to my office or I can ride a Muni for under a buck, and the latter drops me off next door to Safeway with their Sriracha Sausage Breakfast Burritos ($2.71 including tax).
It's easier, faster, and cheaper to ride the bus than drive, and I get breakfast burritos. I'm living the dream.
This is a wonderful idea, as long as: the people facing backward don't puke on takeoff; flight attendants don't mind breaking up the inevitable fistfights; and you remove the bathrooms so that there's no temptation for the 6'4" next to the window to want to pee mid-flight. Except for all the horrible downsides, I don't see any drawbacks.
The market not IETF process decides which protocols will continue to be used going forward.
The market loves when we have formal documents laid down by the Formal Documents People confirming what we've been telling our bosses for years. I would bet large sums of money that some tech, somewhere, just walked out of a meeting happy because he finally has permission to deprecate a long-broken system.
At least MS isn't as bad as Apple where the literally force you to buy new hardware along with the new O/S (Ipad 1 anyone?)
You seem to be under the impression that backward and forward hardware compatibility are easy things:
1) That an arbitrary OS could be expected to run well on hardware made many years in the past and many years in the future, and
2) That arbitrary hardware can easily support ancient software.
Suppose you'd said this about DOS. Microsoft should support it in perpetuity! OK, then, but where are you going to buy a mouse today that supports the hardware ports that DOS knows how to handle (or would you think mouse makers would spend the effort to write MTRACKPAD.SYS so that a new Apple Magic Trackpad would work on it)? And it's not exactly free or cheap for a modern i7 to maintain 100% 8088 compatibility.
Conversely, should iOS 9 be expected to run on an original iPhone, with CPUs and GPUs many times slower, an eighth the RAM, a fraction of the storage, and utterly obsolete in many other ways? Even if the minimal core could be made to run, so many features would have to be stripped out (at great development and testing expense) that it'd be pointless.
There are good reasons for dropping compatibility. Software isn't easily made to scale down to ancient predecessors, and hardware leaves stuff behind regularly - I don't have serial ports or ISA slots on this motherboard. It's not plausible for Apple to carry iOS all the way back to hardware that almost no one is using, and it's not realistic for Microsoft to drag Windows 7 all the way forward to hardware that hasn't even been conceived yet. At some point, you just have to let go.
"Swift" was a generic noun and a generic adjective long before Taylor's ancestors started using it. I've never seen a wild dylan or ran dylanly down a racetrack, though.
And yet people think it's fair that the artists man up and shoulder the cost of a few months of streaming.
Apple did not do this unilaterally. They approached the rightsholders who actually own the music - that is, the labels and not the artists - and proposed this arrangement. After much negotiation, everyone agreed that this was a solid plan and started moving ahead with it. How much money Apple does or doesn't have is immaterial because they could not legally do this without the consent of the people who own the material, and those people thought it was a fine idea and signed on the dotted line.
So yes, it's perfectly fair: not because you or I think so but because the people capable of vetoing it said it is.
Intra-company transfers for an existing employer (e.g. IBM), limited to a year if you are making £40,000/year; call it $63,500 at todays exchange rate; this is generally not hard for someone employed by IBM, actually
Did I misinterpret that, or did you really mean to say that £40,000/year is a plausible amount for an IBMer to make while living in London? What would you say is a nice salary for a senior engineer?
but if all this does is provide free entertainment I'm not so sure
Don't underestimate the value of free entertainment. Sometimes that guy coming home from his second job really needs to unwind a little before he gets his 6 hours of sleep, and a little YouTube is probably a healthier and cheaper alternative to an after-work beer. Also, entertainment has traditionally proven useful to help prevent the proles from revolting against the bourgeoisie. It's generally not a great idea to insist that the poorest be made more and more miserable for their own good.
Software engineers like me who won't touch the kernel with a 10' poll because I don't need the aggravation of dealing with him.
You shouldn't worry about it. From everything I've seen, he's a lot more sympathetic to new contributors making mistakes than he is to old-timers who should know better. It's fair and reasonable to hold them to a higher standard, and that seems to be exactly what he does.
PHP was built to be a thin wrapper to C libraries. Don't blame PHP for what is not its fault.
It is at fault. It's the job of the wrapper to present a consistent interface to the things being wrapped. Otherwise, why even bother?
It is trivial to build very high performance web, command line, or GUI apps with PHP
And yet the only PHP command line utilities I've ever seen are shells for controlling PHP web apps. I've never seen a PHP GUI app so I can't speak to that.
For being as allegedly suitable for developing those kinds of things, almost no one seems to be doing it.
Yes, it is. There are plenty of languages that can cleanly generate web pages and system and application development. Web frontends are important and popular, but hardly the end-all be-all of modern programming. PHP is losing a lot of ground to single-page frameworks like AngularJS. It never had ground for backend platform development outside a handful of visible companies: for every Facebook, there are 100 companies with Java or Python infrastructure platforms.
I contend that PHP is good at exactly one thing: gathering data from backing stores and formatting it as HTML. That's being quickly superseded by browser JavaScript or portable device apps that fetch the same data through REST and format it themselves.
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There's literally nothing I could say to you that thousands of scientists haven't already tried to tell you. Are you also an antivaxxer, or are you only anti-science on this one subject?
I'm not a Democrat and I've never voted for or endorsed any of the people you mention. You are the partisan, not me.
For all the fear mongering, the oceans haven't risen,
Yes, they have.
the weather is fine,
Is that a joke?
and life has been carrying on.
Well, except for the mass extinction.
If AGW supporters are correct
AKA "PhD scientists studying this for the last few decades".
then the changes being proposed won't change the outcome by enough to matter.
There is no one grand solution to AGW. There are a lot of smaller steps that added together might make a difference. Failing to do any of them certainly will not help.
I started buying 5.11 tactical pants made out of lightweight, stretchy nylon with a Teflon finish. They look like business casual pants but move like pajamas, and anything you spill on them rolls or wipes off. I don't think I've worn any other kinds of pants to work since I bought my first pair.
Why, just this morning I turned on a computer that initialized itself to be compatible with an Intel 8086 from 1978.
You mean, the governor who defended Texas by sending in the Texas National Guard and preventing the US military from taking over? Because I'd stake money that True Believers think that's exactly what happened.
To clarify, I am not a True Believer.
Yes, thank you. There is no reason whatever that my non-technical family members should be able to easily not update their computers. They don't have the technical knowledge to make an informed decision other than "yes, please".
I'm not jo_ham, but I just did that and got about 270Kbps through Apple Music streaming.
But the thing is that I like my MacBook. It has its tradeoffs but everything does. My problem is that his statement implies that everyone else has been doing it wrong, and that only he is qualified to judge what's Good Enough, as though sound quality is the foremost or even only concern. Since pretty much no human has the audio sensitivity required to affirm his statements, it's just insulting to everyone who isn't him - or at least it would be if anyone took him seriously.
Ironically, enjoyment of music has very little to do with sound quality and much more to do with music, lyrics, and listening environment. If the audio fidelity were as important as he claims, then no one would be buying junk formats like vinyl. But yet, some people enjoy the tactile process of damaging their audio media as little as possible with their inherently destructive hardware, and that's an important part of their listening experience. Music isn't about bullshit concepts like "staging" and "presence", but about the enjoyment of the whole package. Focusing on one relatively small aspect of it misses the whole point, which is why it blows me away that Neil Freaking Young is making that mistake.
And more to the point, does it matter?
A 256Kbps AAC is objectively equal to CD sound quality, as confirmed by double-blind test after test. Furthermore, a huge portion of listeners will be hearing your angel's choir over cheap-ass ear buds or crap laptop speakers. Maybe you have a golden ear and can tell the difference between a CD and a FLAC file (are those good enough for you, or do they lack the sharp ones and smooth zeros of the digital masters?). Maybe you're not actually a delusional once-great who has lousy hearing and permanent tinnitus after years of playing rock concerts, and, well, being almost 70. Maybe your home hi-fi (do you still call it that?) was hand-wired by a wizened master of recording engineering fame. Maybe you have your own private anechoic chamber so you're not exposed to anything but the pure and sweet sounds of your own singing. But the rest of us listen to normal-person music with a dynamic range that's been shot to hell in the loudness wars, via normal-person audio formats, through normal-person digital-to-analog converters, into normal-person speakers, in a normal-person environment with kids playing and horns honking and dogs barking and coworkers chattering.
Your music, pristine to the heavens though it may be, sounds no better than Miley Cyrus when piping out of my MacBook. You've become a crotchety old curmudgeon trying to remain relevant to those kids who won't stay off your lawn, and maybe it's time to sit down with a hot cup of keep your yap shut and enjoy a nice book.
Good day, sir.
And 10240 = 10100000000000, which has 12 zeros, and 1+2=3. Half Life 3 confirmed.
Well, Texas has to take pride in something because their barbecue never was up to snuff. #KansasCity
Them's fighting words.
I work in San Francisco and live in East Bay. My house is a block away from a Transbay bus stop, and with its use of the carpool lanes I can get into the city faster via bus than is possible in a car. Once in the city, I can either stroll for a pleasant walk along the Embarcadero to my office or I can ride a Muni for under a buck, and the latter drops me off next door to Safeway with their Sriracha Sausage Breakfast Burritos ($2.71 including tax).
It's easier, faster, and cheaper to ride the bus than drive, and I get breakfast burritos. I'm living the dream.
This is a wonderful idea, as long as: the people facing backward don't puke on takeoff; flight attendants don't mind breaking up the inevitable fistfights; and you remove the bathrooms so that there's no temptation for the 6'4" next to the window to want to pee mid-flight. Except for all the horrible downsides, I don't see any drawbacks.
The market not IETF process decides which protocols will continue to be used going forward.
The market loves when we have formal documents laid down by the Formal Documents People confirming what we've been telling our bosses for years. I would bet large sums of money that some tech, somewhere, just walked out of a meeting happy because he finally has permission to deprecate a long-broken system.
At least MS isn't as bad as Apple where the literally force you to buy new hardware along with the new O/S (Ipad 1 anyone?)
You seem to be under the impression that backward and forward hardware compatibility are easy things:
1) That an arbitrary OS could be expected to run well on hardware made many years in the past and many years in the future, and
2) That arbitrary hardware can easily support ancient software.
Suppose you'd said this about DOS. Microsoft should support it in perpetuity! OK, then, but where are you going to buy a mouse today that supports the hardware ports that DOS knows how to handle (or would you think mouse makers would spend the effort to write MTRACKPAD.SYS so that a new Apple Magic Trackpad would work on it)? And it's not exactly free or cheap for a modern i7 to maintain 100% 8088 compatibility.
Conversely, should iOS 9 be expected to run on an original iPhone, with CPUs and GPUs many times slower, an eighth the RAM, a fraction of the storage, and utterly obsolete in many other ways? Even if the minimal core could be made to run, so many features would have to be stripped out (at great development and testing expense) that it'd be pointless.
There are good reasons for dropping compatibility. Software isn't easily made to scale down to ancient predecessors, and hardware leaves stuff behind regularly - I don't have serial ports or ISA slots on this motherboard. It's not plausible for Apple to carry iOS all the way back to hardware that almost no one is using, and it's not realistic for Microsoft to drag Windows 7 all the way forward to hardware that hasn't even been conceived yet. At some point, you just have to let go.
Hey, it worked for Bob Dylan.
"Swift" was a generic noun and a generic adjective long before Taylor's ancestors started using it. I've never seen a wild dylan or ran dylanly down a racetrack, though.
And yet people think it's fair that the artists man up and shoulder the cost of a few months of streaming.
Apple did not do this unilaterally. They approached the rightsholders who actually own the music - that is, the labels and not the artists - and proposed this arrangement. After much negotiation, everyone agreed that this was a solid plan and started moving ahead with it. How much money Apple does or doesn't have is immaterial because they could not legally do this without the consent of the people who own the material, and those people thought it was a fine idea and signed on the dotted line.
So yes, it's perfectly fair: not because you or I think so but because the people capable of vetoing it said it is.
Intra-company transfers for an existing employer (e.g. IBM), limited to a year if you are making £40,000/year; call it $63,500 at todays exchange rate; this is generally not hard for someone employed by IBM, actually
Did I misinterpret that, or did you really mean to say that £40,000/year is a plausible amount for an IBMer to make while living in London? What would you say is a nice salary for a senior engineer?
but if all this does is provide free entertainment I'm not so sure
Don't underestimate the value of free entertainment. Sometimes that guy coming home from his second job really needs to unwind a little before he gets his 6 hours of sleep, and a little YouTube is probably a healthier and cheaper alternative to an after-work beer. Also, entertainment has traditionally proven useful to help prevent the proles from revolting against the bourgeoisie. It's generally not a great idea to insist that the poorest be made more and more miserable for their own good.
Software engineers like me who won't touch the kernel with a 10' poll because I don't need the aggravation of dealing with him.
You shouldn't worry about it. From everything I've seen, he's a lot more sympathetic to new contributors making mistakes than he is to old-timers who should know better. It's fair and reasonable to hold them to a higher standard, and that seems to be exactly what he does.
PHP was built to be a thin wrapper to C libraries. Don't blame PHP for what is not its fault.
It is at fault. It's the job of the wrapper to present a consistent interface to the things being wrapped. Otherwise, why even bother?
It is trivial to build very high performance web, command line, or GUI apps with PHP
And yet the only PHP command line utilities I've ever seen are shells for controlling PHP web apps. I've never seen a PHP GUI app so I can't speak to that.
For being as allegedly suitable for developing those kinds of things, almost no one seems to be doing it.
Yes, it is. There are plenty of languages that can cleanly generate web pages and system and application development. Web frontends are important and popular, but hardly the end-all be-all of modern programming. PHP is losing a lot of ground to single-page frameworks like AngularJS. It never had ground for backend platform development outside a handful of visible companies: for every Facebook, there are 100 companies with Java or Python infrastructure platforms.
I contend that PHP is good at exactly one thing: gathering data from backing stores and formatting it as HTML. That's being quickly superseded by browser JavaScript or portable device apps that fetch the same data through REST and format it themselves.