I used to work for a place with manufacturing facilities in Oregon and California. All of production (stupidly) relied on a BI cluster located in OR. In spite of numerous demands to have it made redundant, the dumbass IT head insisted that dual connections (through two differing carriers) would supply sufficient redundancy.
What he didn't count on was a (IMHO drunk) CAL-TRANS worker accidentally digging up a few fibers, which in turn knocked all of Ventura County into the dark for almost a day - including both carriers. When that went down, so did production. 17+ hours at ~$4500/minute downtime gets awful expensive. A backup/replicated cluster at the CA site would have only cost about 3-4 hours of that time at most, but would have saved them a whole lot more.
Very few (and let's face it, wacky) sects out there actually refuse to accept Darwin's theories of evolution these days, so I'm not really seeing the story here.
Let me make that clearer still: Most Christian sects have no problems with Darwin or evolution, and the largest/original sect has never formally condemned it, even back when it was new and untested. That link also is an example of it being embraced by Christianity.
Certainly, again, there are nuts who take the Bible waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too literally. But really... how many of them actually read Slashdot again? I mean, it's cool that Leakey is thinking that things will be easier to understand for the kids and all, but it's not like there's nothing really new you will ever dig up in the lineage of Homo Sapiens Sapiens that going to convince anyone not otherwise convinced by now.
So, err, what was the point of this again? Outside of allowing posters to post various bigotries in a socially acceptable manner, I'm not seeing why the story should be given anything more than just a 'oh, okay - cool.' attitude. Mod me down all you like, because I know it'll come, but seriously - Evolution is a non-issue these days.
Let's see... A politician who performs an obviously illegal act in full violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution - check. A politician who tries nuking a website/server that is parked somewhere across state lines - check.
Yep. I can see a good warrant coming off of this one. And given the interstate angle, it's not odd at all.
Really? How easy is it to sell your house, find a new house, buy the new house
Err, a 30-day courtesy note to the landlord is all I need to give. 'course, that's the problem with generalizations... they're just too, well, general.
If I did own a home and went to sell it, I'd just put it on the market and move anyway (I know because I've done just that).
get a new job
...done that lots of times too; it's usually the first thing I do before I move.
and locate good schools for your children??
If I had kids, I'd just look for a good local parochial school (Google is your friend), and make inquiries from there.
If you think that's easy, then it's just as easy to move to another country like Canada.
Err, no.
Moving to Canada requires... * either a job offer in hand, or at least $300k in liquid assets ready to deposit in a Canadian bank. * a thorough background/criminal/credit check (to insure you're not a fugitive, dodging child support, dodging large debts, etc) * likely health checks or verifiable medical records (to insure you're not just moving there to leech off the health care system) * a waiting period for all that crap to happen * having a place to rent once you arrive * getting a moving truck twice - one to the border, then waiting for all your household stuff to get through customs, and a second time to get it from customs to your new digs.
Moving to another state requires... * a job once you get there or enough money to live off of until you find one * a moving truck. * somewhere to rent once you arrive
re. Outer Banks: I don't think you'd lose their buffer characteristics overnight; you'd have to wait until they were under something like 30' of ocean. They're still there and able to temper/stop any storm surge from hurricanes.
re. aquifers: why would you want to pump it anywhere? You fill the aquifer with the water that is still uphill by damming it up while it's up there - it's less energy-intensive that way. Problem is (if Oregon is any indication), building a dam is politically impossible these days.
re: ground water: A big problem is that some aquifers (e.g. the Ogallala) span multiple states. Who gets to pay for, manage, and regulate that?
One more bit: In most of the Western US, water is a very touchy subject. Water rights and ownership is separate from property and mineral rights (e.g. you can often own the dirt, but not the water to be found in, under, or on it). Except for parts of Oregon and Washington, you will find water rights, ownership, and laws to be a byzantine and brain-hurting mess to sort through. That it works at all without physical violence breaking out is a miracle.
If I killed a guy with 10 kids, I affected his whole family by removing their main source of income. If I killed the only oncologist in a small city, I affected everyone in that city who has cancer. If I killed a guy who would have otherwise invented cheap FTL space travel had he lived, I affected the whole frickin' human race....you still want to travel down that rabbit hole?
Long story short - it does not work that way. Otherwise, you place one behavior or characteristic as being more valuable than any other.
There is one small difference that isn't addressed here:
Judging based on the defendant's alleged intent (which is indeed the difference between crime and accident) without regard to who or what the victim inherently is, is one thing.
Differentiating degrees of intent (thus punishment) just because of a victim's lifestyle/color/religion/whatever, flies in the face of equal protection under the law.
Unless that cloud service also comes with a guarantee* that the physical disks they park your data on are separate and distinct from anyone else's (and that no two customers share the same disks), you're just as borked as the perp when someone shows up at the colo with a warrant.
* Good luck with that. It would either cost you a mint, or you'd at best get your own LUN, which means approximately bupkis.
I don't know if this case applies, but juries are often instructed to say liable/not-liable (or similar) on each given count, and are further instructed that the fine for each is $n (or $n + some other factor). Oftentimes, the rest just falls all by itself.
I mean, people have done dumber things on larger scales over lesser causes. If a nut can blow up a building in Oklahoma City over a stoked fears of government, imagine what someone who has been sentenced to a lifetime of financial slavery (over mp3s!?) would want to do.
I tell you right now that I would never condone it, but I could damned sure understand it.
Most wage garnishments are up to 25% of one's pre-tax income, though I think some states go as high as 50%.
That would suck to basically watch 25% of everything you'll ever do go to some exec who spends more money on gold-thread toilet paper than he'll ever see from you.
I honestly don't give a crap what party he's in - if he can get at least some good tech/engineer representation in that parliament of whores that we call Congress, it's win-win as far as I'm concerned.
I don't mind supporting the local channels at all, in spite of living in a rural area well over 50 miles away from all the local stores they advertise for. It's the only time I really don't even mind the adverts. Everything else gets DVR'd and skipped.
OTOH, I only watch the local newscasts, and maybe live local events if/when they're broadcast.
Dish has already had the ability to skip forward in 30-second intervals on their DVR anyway... the only diff is that now you can completely avoid catching a glimpse of an advert. It's part of why I rarely bother with live TV anymore (outside of the local news stations, anyway) - I'll just DVR what I want in advance, and watch that.
As for the channel owners? Screw 'em. I'm sorry, but I already pay for the service, and paid a bit extra for the channels. Why the hell should I be forced to become a source of further income to them?
$126 x 66m units through January 2012? $8.3 billion so far if it were a constant, but we know that MSFT reported profits sometime in late 2010, so we use the cumulative numbers for 2010... call it 46m, and allow for slop in MSFT's favor to account for shifting in both directions (pricier early on, cheaper later on), and we get $5.7 billion loss so far. Add the RROD fiasco, which Microsoft says lost them over $1bn more, and we come to around $7 billion bucks in unpaid money sunk, just for the 360. So far, it's only been a couple of years, and unless someone can point to where Microsoft has made $7 billion in XBox profits over the past three years (let alone whatever they lost in the pre-360 XBoxes), my point is easily made.
HTH a little. It's back-of-the-envelope, but I favored MSFT heavily in the whole thing to make it fair.
First, the lighting sucks - as in there is no lighting: No shadows, ambient color is all cranked to maximum, no gloss (even on the shiny bits), no reflectivity (any surface that has a shine will reflect even a little). Next, the rez is way off. After that, the 'handles' are still showing (those white lines moving off at right angles).
If that's going to be a drop-in replacement, at least render it first. Problem is, you'll have to light and render it so the lighting matches (perfectly!) with whatever scene you intend to drop it into. Then you'll have to work very hard on making sure that the item's own shadows cast on the model's hand matches perfectly in strength, contour, and blur (or lack thereof). Oh, and you'd better hope that it still doesn't look like it's floating off the hand, instead of resting on it....that was just a little 2-minute review of it, and I likely missed a lot more.
romantic bullshit, CGI replacement of photography and motion pictures is already happening.
Yes and no.
I sincerely doubt you could get some guy with a copy of, say, Poser to whomp out something that an ordinary Joe would look at and go "neat photo!" (I picked on Poser because it doesn't cost thousands of bucks to get, unlike most of the high-end packages).
Most CGI replacements in motion pictures happen either with non-human figures, or with massive crowds in the background where detail is a low priority, and most of it is fuzzed by motion or distance. Also notice that I only said motion pictures - still photography requires a hell of a lot more attention to detail; it's something that requires a shit-ton more skill than the average Dave of Mumbai is going to have, even with a script to guide him.
Right now, even the absolute best efforts don't fail to completely escape the uncanny valley, and the few that almost do usually require days of postwork and effort after the main render, just to get them that far. I won't even mention the hundreds of man-hours required to get up a proper mesh, get the lighting and composition just right, and then to wait out the render times (LuxRender, one of the better ones out there, will consume endless hours on end just to get up a complete render on a small image.)
As someone who has had a lot of fun in the CG realm for over a decade now, I know that it is *almost* possible, but won't be for a long time - especially not to the point where fully photorealistic images can be rendered out of thin air by some CG sweatshop in China.
Slowly but certainly, yes it is losing market share - and badly.
Once you factor in the mobile devices, Apple is the largest personal computer maker going right now. Claim what you will otherwise, but if the iPad is so inconsequential, then why is Microsoft desperately trying to make one? Because they see that drop happening as well.
Is it profitable?
Is what profitable? Overall, yes Microsoft is still cashing in on their eroding OS/Office monopoly, but they have yet to realize significant profit on anything else. Even XBox, which many Microsofties gleefully point to, just barely began making any profit at all, and has not yet cleared ROI. Whether they manage to before next-gen shoves them back into the red is unclear.
Is there any major threat to the company in the future?
Hell yes there is. The whole mobile computing thing for starters. The fact that the enterprise at large has turned their noses up at automatically upgrading with every new version is another significant threat to income. The continually sliding loss in market share for both the browsers and smartphones are other major threats.
I mentioned the web because if folks get cozy with the idea of using non-IE browsers, and with using web-based email (hint: half the population already is), then it's not much of a stretch to sell them something cheaper (Android tablets) or of better reputation (iOS/Macs) in which to do that. Where does that leave Microsoft in the consumer space?
Slashdot Mirror
Even a "private cloud" can cause troubles.
I used to work for a place with manufacturing facilities in Oregon and California. All of production (stupidly) relied on a BI cluster located in OR. In spite of numerous demands to have it made redundant, the dumbass IT head insisted that dual connections (through two differing carriers) would supply sufficient redundancy.
What he didn't count on was a (IMHO drunk) CAL-TRANS worker accidentally digging up a few fibers, which in turn knocked all of Ventura County into the dark for almost a day - including both carriers. When that went down, so did production. 17+ hours at ~$4500/minute downtime gets awful expensive. A backup/replicated cluster at the CA site would have only cost about 3-4 hours of that time at most, but would have saved them a whole lot more.
Can Windows 8 succeed in a cloud-based world where ISP/carrier bandwidth caps are becoming prevalent?
Very few (and let's face it, wacky) sects out there actually refuse to accept Darwin's theories of evolution these days, so I'm not really seeing the story here.
Let me make that clearer still: Most Christian sects have no problems with Darwin or evolution, and the largest/original sect has never formally condemned it, even back when it was new and untested. That link also is an example of it being embraced by Christianity.
Certainly, again, there are nuts who take the Bible waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too literally. But really... how many of them actually read Slashdot again? I mean, it's cool that Leakey is thinking that things will be easier to understand for the kids and all, but it's not like there's nothing really new you will ever dig up in the lineage of Homo Sapiens Sapiens that going to convince anyone not otherwise convinced by now.
So, err, what was the point of this again? Outside of allowing posters to post various bigotries in a socially acceptable manner, I'm not seeing why the story should be given anything more than just a 'oh, okay - cool.' attitude. Mod me down all you like, because I know it'll come, but seriously - Evolution is a non-issue these days.
Or just use TOR. And don't say "tor can be compromised". That's only true if they are already monitoring you.
...unless you happen to pass through an FBI-run exit node.
Let's see...
A politician who performs an obviously illegal act in full violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution - check.
A politician who tries nuking a website/server that is parked somewhere across state lines - check.
Yep. I can see a good warrant coming off of this one. And given the interstate angle, it's not odd at all.
Really? How easy is it to sell your house, find a new house, buy the new house
Err, a 30-day courtesy note to the landlord is all I need to give. 'course, that's the problem with generalizations... they're just too, well, general.
If I did own a home and went to sell it, I'd just put it on the market and move anyway (I know because I've done just that).
get a new job
...done that lots of times too; it's usually the first thing I do before I move.
and locate good schools for your children??
If I had kids, I'd just look for a good local parochial school (Google is your friend), and make inquiries from there.
If you think that's easy, then it's just as easy to move to another country like Canada.
Err, no.
Moving to Canada requires...
* either a job offer in hand, or at least $300k in liquid assets ready to deposit in a Canadian bank.
* a thorough background/criminal/credit check (to insure you're not a fugitive, dodging child support, dodging large debts, etc)
* likely health checks or verifiable medical records (to insure you're not just moving there to leech off the health care system)
* a waiting period for all that crap to happen
* having a place to rent once you arrive
* getting a moving truck twice - one to the border, then waiting for all your household stuff to get through customs, and a second time to get it from customs to your new digs.
Moving to another state requires...
* a job once you get there or enough money to live off of until you find one
* a moving truck.
* somewhere to rent once you arrive
So yeah - to quote you:
Moron.
re. Outer Banks: I don't think you'd lose their buffer characteristics overnight; you'd have to wait until they were under something like 30' of ocean. They're still there and able to temper/stop any storm surge from hurricanes.
re. aquifers: why would you want to pump it anywhere? You fill the aquifer with the water that is still uphill by damming it up while it's up there - it's less energy-intensive that way. Problem is (if Oregon is any indication), building a dam is politically impossible these days.
re: ground water: A big problem is that some aquifers (e.g. the Ogallala) span multiple states. Who gets to pay for, manage, and regulate that?
One more bit: In most of the Western US, water is a very touchy subject. Water rights and ownership is separate from property and mineral rights (e.g. you can often own the dirt, but not the water to be found in, under, or on it). Except for parts of Oregon and Washington, you will find water rights, ownership, and laws to be a byzantine and brain-hurting mess to sort through. That it works at all without physical violence breaking out is a miracle.
If I killed a guy with 10 kids, I affected his whole family by removing their main source of income. ...you still want to travel down that rabbit hole?
If I killed the only oncologist in a small city, I affected everyone in that city who has cancer.
If I killed a guy who would have otherwise invented cheap FTL space travel had he lived, I affected the whole frickin' human race.
Long story short - it does not work that way. Otherwise, you place one behavior or characteristic as being more valuable than any other.
There is one small difference that isn't addressed here:
Judging based on the defendant's alleged intent (which is indeed the difference between crime and accident) without regard to who or what the victim inherently is, is one thing.
Differentiating degrees of intent (thus punishment) just because of a victim's lifestyle/color/religion/whatever, flies in the face of equal protection under the law.
This, right here.
Unless that cloud service also comes with a guarantee* that the physical disks they park your data on are separate and distinct from anyone else's (and that no two customers share the same disks), you're just as borked as the perp when someone shows up at the colo with a warrant.
* Good luck with that. It would either cost you a mint, or you'd at best get your own LUN, which means approximately bupkis.
I don't know if this case applies, but juries are often instructed to say liable/not-liable (or similar) on each given count, and are further instructed that the fine for each is $n (or $n + some other factor). Oftentimes, the rest just falls all by itself.
I'm kind of wondering that myself.
I mean, people have done dumber things on larger scales over lesser causes. If a nut can blow up a building in Oklahoma City over a stoked fears of government, imagine what someone who has been sentenced to a lifetime of financial slavery (over mp3s!?) would want to do.
I tell you right now that I would never condone it, but I could damned sure understand it.
Most wage garnishments are up to 25% of one's pre-tax income, though I think some states go as high as 50%.
That would suck to basically watch 25% of everything you'll ever do go to some exec who spends more money on gold-thread toilet paper than he'll ever see from you.
"declaring bankruptcy is like an option that you're completely ignoring." - someone not as dumb as you
"bankruptcy does not automatically clear court-imposed judgments" - someone an order of magnitude not as dumb as you.
I honestly don't give a crap what party he's in - if he can get at least some good tech/engineer representation in that parliament of whores that we call Congress, it's win-win as far as I'm concerned.
Depends on the channel. Some are overflowing with adverts, while others are ad-free.
And some channels are nothing but continuous advertisement, 24/7/365.
Welcome to variety. :)
I don't mind supporting the local channels at all, in spite of living in a rural area well over 50 miles away from all the local stores they advertise for. It's the only time I really don't even mind the adverts. Everything else gets DVR'd and skipped.
OTOH, I only watch the local newscasts, and maybe live local events if/when they're broadcast.
Dish has already had the ability to skip forward in 30-second intervals on their DVR anyway... the only diff is that now you can completely avoid catching a glimpse of an advert. It's part of why I rarely bother with live TV anymore (outside of the local news stations, anyway) - I'll just DVR what I want in advance, and watch that.
As for the channel owners? Screw 'em. I'm sorry, but I already pay for the service, and paid a bit extra for the channels. Why the hell should I be forced to become a source of further income to them?
I know all about D|S (err, search my history, hit Google, etc...) :)
I only left it out because it wasn't germane to the discussion.
As late as 2005, Microsoft was eating a $126/unit loss per XBox 360 (just the unit, not peripherals, controllers, etc): http://www.gamespot.com/news/microsoft-taking-126-hit-per-xbox-360-6140383 iSupply priced $470 to build each unit based on teardown and accounting for scale.
$126 x 66m units through January 2012? $8.3 billion so far if it were a constant, but we know that MSFT reported profits sometime in late 2010, so we use the cumulative numbers for 2010... call it 46m, and allow for slop in MSFT's favor to account for shifting in both directions (pricier early on, cheaper later on), and we get $5.7 billion loss so far. Add the RROD fiasco, which Microsoft says lost them over $1bn more, and we come to around $7 billion bucks in unpaid money sunk, just for the 360. So far, it's only been a couple of years, and unless someone can point to where Microsoft has made $7 billion in XBox profits over the past three years (let alone whatever they lost in the pre-360 XBoxes), my point is easily made.
HTH a little. It's back-of-the-envelope, but I favored MSFT heavily in the whole thing to make it fair.
Well...
First, the lighting sucks - as in there is no lighting: No shadows, ambient color is all cranked to maximum, no gloss (even on the shiny bits), no reflectivity (any surface that has a shine will reflect even a little). Next, the rez is way off. After that, the 'handles' are still showing (those white lines moving off at right angles).
If that's going to be a drop-in replacement, at least render it first. Problem is, you'll have to light and render it so the lighting matches (perfectly!) with whatever scene you intend to drop it into. Then you'll have to work very hard on making sure that the item's own shadows cast on the model's hand matches perfectly in strength, contour, and blur (or lack thereof). Oh, and you'd better hope that it still doesn't look like it's floating off the hand, instead of resting on it. ...that was just a little 2-minute review of it, and I likely missed a lot more.
romantic bullshit, CGI replacement of photography and motion pictures is already happening.
Yes and no.
I sincerely doubt you could get some guy with a copy of, say, Poser to whomp out something that an ordinary Joe would look at and go "neat photo!" (I picked on Poser because it doesn't cost thousands of bucks to get, unlike most of the high-end packages).
Most CGI replacements in motion pictures happen either with non-human figures, or with massive crowds in the background where detail is a low priority, and most of it is fuzzed by motion or distance. Also notice that I only said motion pictures - still photography requires a hell of a lot more attention to detail; it's something that requires a shit-ton more skill than the average Dave of Mumbai is going to have, even with a script to guide him.
Exactly.
Right now, even the absolute best efforts don't fail to completely escape the uncanny valley, and the few that almost do usually require days of postwork and effort after the main render, just to get them that far. I won't even mention the hundreds of man-hours required to get up a proper mesh, get the lighting and composition just right, and then to wait out the render times (LuxRender, one of the better ones out there, will consume endless hours on end just to get up a complete render on a small image.)
As someone who has had a lot of fun in the CG realm for over a decade now, I know that it is *almost* possible, but won't be for a long time - especially not to the point where fully photorealistic images can be rendered out of thin air by some CG sweatshop in China.
Has the company lost market share?
Slowly but certainly, yes it is losing market share - and badly.
Once you factor in the mobile devices, Apple is the largest personal computer maker going right now. Claim what you will otherwise, but if the iPad is so inconsequential, then why is Microsoft desperately trying to make one? Because they see that drop happening as well.
Is it profitable?
Is what profitable? Overall, yes Microsoft is still cashing in on their eroding OS/Office monopoly, but they have yet to realize significant profit on anything else. Even XBox, which many Microsofties gleefully point to, just barely began making any profit at all, and has not yet cleared ROI. Whether they manage to before next-gen shoves them back into the red is unclear.
Is there any major threat to the company in the future?
Hell yes there is. The whole mobile computing thing for starters. The fact that the enterprise at large has turned their noses up at automatically upgrading with every new version is another significant threat to income. The continually sliding loss in market share for both the browsers and smartphones are other major threats.
I mentioned the web because if folks get cozy with the idea of using non-IE browsers, and with using web-based email (hint: half the population already is), then it's not much of a stretch to sell them something cheaper (Android tablets) or of better reputation (iOS/Macs) in which to do that. Where does that leave Microsoft in the consumer space?
In that vein, I agree, big-time.
I'm personally hoping he packs even more square tiles and ribbons into everything Microsoft makes - the bigger and gaudier, the better.