“We’re excited about the synergies this acquisition brings and see both our existing operation and the Slashdot Media business benefiting significantly as a combined entity,”
The new owner led off with buzzwords - which means Slashdot actually *is* doomed.
no shit - even 10 people watching it simultaneously could rake in up to 85 Pounds Stirling per hour (minus administrative costs, overhead, etc)... not a bad rate of pay.
...disregard it if it continues to exhibit faulty timing.
'course, there really should be a way to correct time in a GPS satellite, if only to avoid making them completely disposable (then again, maybe there is a mechanism to correct/self-diagnose timing issues on-board? One would think/hope so...)
Thinking the exact same thing... where the hell did he live?
Also, a tangent: some skillsets depreciate over time; an HTML/JS webmaster type of job would pay $100k back in 2000... nowadays, you'd be lucky to get $60k for doing the same thing.
In his case though, I'd call bullshit - an experienced C++ coder who knows what he's doing can rake in a six-figure salary out on the West Coast, no sweat. As a ferinstance, Intel wants/needs C++ codemonkeys occasionally, and are willing to pay six figures for someone to do it.
Now there aren't as many open jobs out there for it as there were back then, but...
Not to mention that it had bupkis to do with salary increases up here in Portland**, or further up in Seattle, etc.
** Portland has a "silicon forest" (the city's term, not mine), but the only F500 corp with any real presence here is Intel. The rest is a very wide variety of corps (large and small) who are either up-and-comers (like Puppetlabs and New Relic), branch sites for folks like HP and Microsoft, or huge local corps who need massive in-house tech assets, like Nike and Columbia Sportswear.
You misspelled "Large tech companies" up there - HTH.
Seriously - nearly *all* of the big boys in Silly Valley had, at one time or another, written or unwritten, no-poaching agreements between 'em. Apple is just one glop of ooze in that particular morass.
It all broke down when the startups kept coming, over and over; each of these were also fighting for the finite amount of skilled labor in the area, and trying to import (domestic or otherwise) anyone else that they could get a recruiter to lay hands on.
*Good* CGI can cost a mint. This is because it takes a metric buttload of time to render each frame on a rather high-powered render farm, especially at 4k resolution... enough that most studios usually just rent the time on a farm as opposed to buying the mega-CPU-intensive servers to grand it out.
Even with top-end render engines optimized like crazy, you can expect a decent 6-core server CPU to swallow an entire day to grind out one frame (a still image) at 4k - one second of runtime will take 24 of those CPUs to get it done in a day. Oh, and if something goes wonky and a frame comes out corrupt? Time to re-render that blown frame and hope it doesn't interrupt the flow. Get the lighting wrong (say, the gamma or pixel sampling depth was off just a touch, and now it doesn't blend into the real-life scene), and you get to do it all over again.
There is of course the artists' time - and their equipment (they usually get issued their fave multi-thousand-dollar software suite sitting on amped-up Mac Pros or similarly-expensive desktops).
That said, thanks to AWS and such, it's probably on parity nowadays with the practical special effects guys' time.
Dude - it's astounding how much CG is used in period dramas as well (as a big ferinstance.) The PBS series Mr. Selfridge (based on the real-life, err, way-too-eccentric exploits of an American who plops a department store in London) was incredibly heavy on CG for the external shots.
I've noticed it showing up on a lot of these shows, usually when they want to portray a city/landscape in some historical time, or to amp up battle scenes, etc.
As I happen to be someone who loves to tool around with CG artwork, you would think that I'd have no problems with it. If you think that, you would be wrong.
Unless the entire movie is CG from opening to credits, CG should always be used sparingly, like one could use a spicy sauce or pepper; enough to get the job done and enhance the flavor, but no more. Seriously - a little here and there to show things that would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively expensive to show is great if it's done right. If you just go for an all-out CG-gasm (*cough*Transformers*cough*), then expect to have your movie panned, or at least forgotten within a couple of days by the viewer.
I say this for two reasons:
1) The Uncanny Valley awaits, eager to trap any producer that over-does the CG in a live film (or goes crazy for 'realism' in it). Most folks just don't want to be revolted by the stuff unless the CG itself is central to the story (you know, movies about androids and stuff).
2) A good movie is not just the suspension of disbelief. Acting quality, Storyline, Plots, Chemistry, and more all factor into a great movie. Most of the best movies of all time contain no CG at all, and some even have no special effects... because the acting, story, and flow of the movie produce an inherent quantity of awesome. CG is not going to make up for any shortcomings in any of it.
Sure, some movies are going to need more of it than others. SciFi, Fantasy, and even horror flicks will demand a lot of eye-candy to help the flow. That said, CG should be secondary to the story, not the brain-whoring centerpiece of it.
If it is for a professional environment, you have a few bucks to burn getting a decent IDE. Stop being so cheap.
If you mean to do it anyway, why not install Crouton on your Chromebook, and then run Linux like a "normal" person?
If you are stuck on using the cloud, for a professional project, read the license agreement like a hawk. Make sure that you're not giving a free copy of all of your work to some random stranger on the web.
Quoted for visibility... it's actually not bad advice.
It's simpler... for product owners/developers. Not so much for the sysadmins who have to t-shoot the stuff, but there's benefits on the ops side too.
I should explain. It has benefits:
* Upgrading something high up on the stack (say, a custom node.js app) is as easy as whipping up a docker container for the new version, dropping it on the host server, then swapping out old with new, leaving you with an instant and pristine fallback should something go wonky.
* outage due to code-side corruption or similar garbage? No problem - barf up a new container w/ non-corrupt code and demolish the old. Takes less than a minute for the small stuff.
* scaling? again, no problem - spew out new containers to handle the load, then scale back when you don't need them... the time it takes is astoundingly fast compared to cloning VMs, and if you're using EC2 or the like to provide the expansion hardware, it won't require a huge CapEx spend sitting idle in your datacenter. Note that this requires a lot of infrastructure work underneath, but totally doable - containers just give it the speed to make it happen in short order. Put this way - a spike in user traffic is a cheaper solution when you pay for temporary cloud usage, than it would to have a massive VM farm hanging around doing mostly nothing in-between spikes.
Now it does have drawbacks:
* you really don't want to use this for things like databases. No, really - containerizing your DBs can be done with enough effort, but it's really stupid and expensive with little-to-no benefit.
* if you have a massively dynamic CI/CD environment, finding/t-shooting the problem is going to be a bit more convoluted.
* Security may be a bit harder to keep if you're even a little sloppy about it - now someone just has to pop the underlying server and swipe the entire container, instead of having to loiter on your equipment to find what they want. It's much easier to run that container at home on their own machinery, at leisure, with way less chance of detection.
Marketing is part of the "certified pre-owned" markup, but there is the (promised) pre-replacement of parts that are near the end of their useful lifespan, and a limited warranty to back that up (which you are also paying for in the markup).
The key with used is to get a good deal to start with (which means patience and saying no)...
...and having enough mechanical/electrical ability to know when you're purchasing something that will hold up, or if you're about to buy a rolling money pit.
If you know what to look for, you can avoid the latter most of the time.
Actually, dealers don't really rake in that much off of their new stock... it's the used cars (along with their Parts&Service and F&I departments) that really rake in the bucks.
F&I gives them big margins because there is a bumper crop of people who don't pre-qualify at their bank/credit-union, instead financing at the dealership. F&I is also the place where additional warranties, undercoating, etc can get tacked-on.
Parts&Service get an average 50% margin on selling genuine brand parts to body shops, auto repair joints, etc. Oh, and there's a tidy income from folks who take their car to the dealership for service and non-covered repairs out of fear of voiding their mfr. warranty.
Used Cars is where the big margins come in. Trade-ins on-site are lowballed as hard as possible, and auctions abound at way-below-bluebook pricing (bank repos, rental fleet refreshes, sell-off of vehicles confiscated by the local constabularies, etc)... you can easily buy a decent vehicle at auction for, say, $5k, then mark it up to $9-12k very easily with a quart of Motor Honey, a stray ancillary part or two, and a bit of detailing.
New cars on the other hand? Yeah - they get a markup, but those are also the big-ticket items, usually bought by people who know how to talk a price down... and unless it's a specialty dealership (Benz, Ferrari, Porsche, etc), there's always competition to keep you honest.
It's tempting to blame the victims here given the advertised purpose of the website but keep in mind that making generalizations about any group isn't going to accurately describe all of the members of that group.
I agree, which is why I specified actual cheaters, as opposed to the gawkers, the sleuths, the open-marriage types (who probably wouldn't care if his/her spouse found out), etc.
2) Time-Warner decides to censor your internet? Time to evaluate whether or not you need "wired, high-speed Internet" more than you need your personal freedom. If the latter is a higher priority to you, there' s the local DSL (or cable if you use DSL), Satellite Internet (with at least two major providers that I know of), Fixed-tower Wireless Broadband (there's usually one or two in a given area), 3G/4G Wireless Internet (at least three major carriers), etc. The odds of *all* of them suddenly colluding and deciding that you don't need to see Slashdot (or whatever) is pretty slim at base, so the point still stands.
So what legal mechanism would politicians get out of this? Government would still be hampered from doing anything substantial along the same lines.
Here's the neat part: If Google (or whoever) got stupid about it, competition would quickly rise up. It's not like Google could stop folks from spreading the word about competing search websites, no matter how hard they tried.
Slashdot Mirror
Aww, crap:
From TFA:
“We’re excited about the synergies this acquisition brings and see both our existing operation and the Slashdot Media business benefiting significantly as a combined entity,”
The new owner led off with buzzwords - which means Slashdot actually *is* doomed.
*sigh*... I'll start packing...
The First Amendment says you can broadcast it, but it doesn't say that listeners/viewers should somehow be forced to absorb it.
The idiot in TFA hadn't figured that out yet, apparently.
no shit - even 10 people watching it simultaneously could rake in up to 85 Pounds Stirling per hour (minus administrative costs, overhead, etc)... not a bad rate of pay.
What's a man gotta do to get into that racket?
Gotta admit - they did respond with a bit of class.
Excellent idea! Personally, I would have tossed in a rickroll somewhere towards the end while I was at it.
...disregard it if it continues to exhibit faulty timing.
'course, there really should be a way to correct time in a GPS satellite, if only to avoid making them completely disposable (then again, maybe there is a mechanism to correct/self-diagnose timing issues on-board? One would think/hope so...)
It may be a right-of-way that passes through one of those farms; it's not uncommon.
Thinking the exact same thing... where the hell did he live?
Also, a tangent: some skillsets depreciate over time; an HTML/JS webmaster type of job would pay $100k back in 2000... nowadays, you'd be lucky to get $60k for doing the same thing.
In his case though, I'd call bullshit - an experienced C++ coder who knows what he's doing can rake in a six-figure salary out on the West Coast, no sweat. As a ferinstance, Intel wants/needs C++ codemonkeys occasionally, and are willing to pay six figures for someone to do it.
Now there aren't as many open jobs out there for it as there were back then, but...
Not to mention that it had bupkis to do with salary increases up here in Portland**, or further up in Seattle, etc.
** Portland has a "silicon forest" (the city's term, not mine), but the only F500 corp with any real presence here is Intel. The rest is a very wide variety of corps (large and small) who are either up-and-comers (like Puppetlabs and New Relic), branch sites for folks like HP and Microsoft, or huge local corps who need massive in-house tech assets, like Nike and Columbia Sportswear.
You misspelled "Large tech companies" up there - HTH.
Seriously - nearly *all* of the big boys in Silly Valley had, at one time or another, written or unwritten, no-poaching agreements between 'em. Apple is just one glop of ooze in that particular morass.
It all broke down when the startups kept coming, over and over; each of these were also fighting for the finite amount of skilled labor in the area, and trying to import (domestic or otherwise) anyone else that they could get a recruiter to lay hands on.
Depends...
*Good* CGI can cost a mint. This is because it takes a metric buttload of time to render each frame on a rather high-powered render farm, especially at 4k resolution... enough that most studios usually just rent the time on a farm as opposed to buying the mega-CPU-intensive servers to grand it out.
Even with top-end render engines optimized like crazy, you can expect a decent 6-core server CPU to swallow an entire day to grind out one frame (a still image) at 4k - one second of runtime will take 24 of those CPUs to get it done in a day. Oh, and if something goes wonky and a frame comes out corrupt? Time to re-render that blown frame and hope it doesn't interrupt the flow. Get the lighting wrong (say, the gamma or pixel sampling depth was off just a touch, and now it doesn't blend into the real-life scene), and you get to do it all over again.
There is of course the artists' time - and their equipment (they usually get issued their fave multi-thousand-dollar software suite sitting on amped-up Mac Pros or similarly-expensive desktops).
That said, thanks to AWS and such, it's probably on parity nowadays with the practical special effects guys' time.
Dude - it's astounding how much CG is used in period dramas as well (as a big ferinstance.) The PBS series Mr. Selfridge (based on the real-life, err, way-too-eccentric exploits of an American who plops a department store in London) was incredibly heavy on CG for the external shots.
I've noticed it showing up on a lot of these shows, usually when they want to portray a city/landscape in some historical time, or to amp up battle scenes, etc.
As I happen to be someone who loves to tool around with CG artwork, you would think that I'd have no problems with it. If you think that, you would be wrong.
Unless the entire movie is CG from opening to credits, CG should always be used sparingly, like one could use a spicy sauce or pepper; enough to get the job done and enhance the flavor, but no more. Seriously - a little here and there to show things that would otherwise be impossible or prohibitively expensive to show is great if it's done right. If you just go for an all-out CG-gasm (*cough*Transformers*cough*), then expect to have your movie panned, or at least forgotten within a couple of days by the viewer.
I say this for two reasons:
1) The Uncanny Valley awaits, eager to trap any producer that over-does the CG in a live film (or goes crazy for 'realism' in it). Most folks just don't want to be revolted by the stuff unless the CG itself is central to the story (you know, movies about androids and stuff).
2) A good movie is not just the suspension of disbelief. Acting quality, Storyline, Plots, Chemistry, and more all factor into a great movie. Most of the best movies of all time contain no CG at all, and some even have no special effects... because the acting, story, and flow of the movie produce an inherent quantity of awesome. CG is not going to make up for any shortcomings in any of it.
Sure, some movies are going to need more of it than others. SciFi, Fantasy, and even horror flicks will demand a lot of eye-candy to help the flow. That said, CG should be secondary to the story, not the brain-whoring centerpiece of it.
If it is for a professional environment, you have a few bucks to burn getting a decent IDE. Stop being so cheap.
If you mean to do it anyway, why not install Crouton on your Chromebook, and then run Linux like a "normal" person?
If you are stuck on using the cloud, for a professional project, read the license agreement like a hawk. Make sure that you're not giving a free copy of all of your work to some random stranger on the web.
Quoted for visibility... it's actually not bad advice.
Election or primary?
There's a reason I'm asking for the distinction...
Indeed... I wonder whose wager included "within +/- 0.75 degree C of this year's average" ?
I mean, judging by what's happened so far, if any wager stands to win...
It's simpler... for product owners/developers. Not so much for the sysadmins who have to t-shoot the stuff, but there's benefits on the ops side too.
I should explain. It has benefits:
* Upgrading something high up on the stack (say, a custom node.js app) is as easy as whipping up a docker container for the new version, dropping it on the host server, then swapping out old with new, leaving you with an instant and pristine fallback should something go wonky.
* outage due to code-side corruption or similar garbage? No problem - barf up a new container w/ non-corrupt code and demolish the old. Takes less than a minute for the small stuff.
* scaling? again, no problem - spew out new containers to handle the load, then scale back when you don't need them... the time it takes is astoundingly fast compared to cloning VMs, and if you're using EC2 or the like to provide the expansion hardware, it won't require a huge CapEx spend sitting idle in your datacenter. Note that this requires a lot of infrastructure work underneath, but totally doable - containers just give it the speed to make it happen in short order. Put this way - a spike in user traffic is a cheaper solution when you pay for temporary cloud usage, than it would to have a massive VM farm hanging around doing mostly nothing in-between spikes.
Now it does have drawbacks:
* you really don't want to use this for things like databases. No, really - containerizing your DBs can be done with enough effort, but it's really stupid and expensive with little-to-no benefit.
* if you have a massively dynamic CI/CD environment, finding/t-shooting the problem is going to be a bit more convoluted.
* Security may be a bit harder to keep if you're even a little sloppy about it - now someone just has to pop the underlying server and swipe the entire container, instead of having to loiter on your equipment to find what they want. It's much easier to run that container at home on their own machinery, at leisure, with way less chance of detection.
Marketing is part of the "certified pre-owned" markup, but there is the (promised) pre-replacement of parts that are near the end of their useful lifespan, and a limited warranty to back that up (which you are also paying for in the markup).
The key with used is to get a good deal to start with (which means patience and saying no)...
...and having enough mechanical/electrical ability to know when you're purchasing something that will hold up, or if you're about to buy a rolling money pit.
If you know what to look for, you can avoid the latter most of the time.
Actually, dealers don't really rake in that much off of their new stock... it's the used cars (along with their Parts&Service and F&I departments) that really rake in the bucks.
F&I gives them big margins because there is a bumper crop of people who don't pre-qualify at their bank/credit-union, instead financing at the dealership. F&I is also the place where additional warranties, undercoating, etc can get tacked-on.
Parts&Service get an average 50% margin on selling genuine brand parts to body shops, auto repair joints, etc. Oh, and there's a tidy income from folks who take their car to the dealership for service and non-covered repairs out of fear of voiding their mfr. warranty.
Used Cars is where the big margins come in. Trade-ins on-site are lowballed as hard as possible, and auctions abound at way-below-bluebook pricing (bank repos, rental fleet refreshes, sell-off of vehicles confiscated by the local constabularies, etc)... you can easily buy a decent vehicle at auction for, say, $5k, then mark it up to $9-12k very easily with a quart of Motor Honey, a stray ancillary part or two, and a bit of detailing.
New cars on the other hand? Yeah - they get a markup, but those are also the big-ticket items, usually bought by people who know how to talk a price down... and unless it's a specialty dealership (Benz, Ferrari, Porsche, etc), there's always competition to keep you honest.
Mod me down all you want, kids, but you know I'm right. ;)
It's tempting to blame the victims here given the advertised purpose of the website but keep in mind that making generalizations about any group isn't going to accurately describe all of the members of that group.
I agree, which is why I specified actual cheaters, as opposed to the gawkers, the sleuths, the open-marriage types (who probably wouldn't care if his/her spouse found out), etc.
I have zero sympathy for a cheater who gets one of these letters. If you betray your spouse, then you can suck on the consequences.
On the other hand, extortion is still an illegal act, no matter how righteous it may look when you do it.
1) An ISP is way different from a search engine.
2) Time-Warner decides to censor your internet? Time to evaluate whether or not you need "wired, high-speed Internet" more than you need your personal freedom. If the latter is a higher priority to you, there' s the local DSL (or cable if you use DSL), Satellite Internet (with at least two major providers that I know of), Fixed-tower Wireless Broadband (there's usually one or two in a given area), 3G/4G Wireless Internet (at least three major carriers), etc. The odds of *all* of them suddenly colluding and deciding that you don't need to see Slashdot (or whatever) is pretty slim at base, so the point still stands.
So what legal mechanism would politicians get out of this? Government would still be hampered from doing anything substantial along the same lines.
Here's the neat part: If Google (or whoever) got stupid about it, competition would quickly rise up. It's not like Google could stop folks from spreading the word about competing search websites, no matter how hard they tried.