$1/minute for realistically at best 4800 baud isn't a data win. A $1/kb SMS capability makes it cheaper than SMS on a traditional cell phone ($2.24 for the same data) hilariously enough, but that's only because my local carriers are completely unashamed about blatantly ripping people off on SMS.
I don't think this is ever going to happen. That's a crapton of satellites to launch, and the market just isn't there to support it. People who are going to be able to afford this are generally going to already have internet service, and it will never be cheaper per bit than a landline. The physics are just against it. I think this announcement is just Google putting out feelers and doing some thought exercises.
We already have a lot of "AI" hidden all around us. Just look at what google can do with a few keywords and ask yourself how much better a person could do with "real" intelligence.
What the Singularity people never seem to think about is natural limiting factors. It's the same problem the Grey Goo handwringers rarely consider. The idea that an AI would grow exponentially smarter just because it was a machine never really worked for me. It's going to run into the same limiting factors (access to information, available compute time, thermodynamics!) that prevent biological organisms from running unchecked. The Grey Goo scenario is especially bad, since we already have a real world analoge (bacteria, and other microorganisms) that have completely failed to transmute the entire mass of the planet, despite having billions of years to try. Anytime someone tells you to worry about Grey Goo, make sure you ask them what is going to power all of those nanomachines. Anytime someone tells you to worry about the AI Singularity, ask them where all of the knowledge is coming from.
My impression is that the IETF was doing a pretty good job until the businesses started taking the internet seriously and instead of being a group of engineers trying to make the best protocols it became a bunch of business interests trying to push their preferred solution because it gives them an advantage in the market. Get a few of those in the same room and deadlock is the result.
That's what I was thinking. Some smallish spoilers that can be extended out of the sides of the car would add a tremendous amount of braking power at 1000mph.
Other police work, is clearly not. There is no revenue from solving a murder, or a missing person, nor for catching a rapist, or theif.
Oh? You've never heard of civil asset forfeitures? Busting a suspected drug runner can be extremely profitable for a police department, even if he's later found to be innocent. In general you don't get your money or property back unless you're willing to fight tooth and nail in the courts for a few years, against a system that assumes you're just a lucky drug running asshole that found a loophole and wants to get back into his life of crime.
I would have believed that, except that my state lowered the gas tax as the same time they added the flat tax for efficient vehicles. It was just the state government sticking it to the eco-hippies so they can get a break on their gas budget for their enormous pickup trucks.
But, but what about our conflict of interest? How are we supposed to operate a law enforcement and public safety organization without making revenue collection part of enforcement? How are we going to make the system unfair if we start eliminating inherent conflicts of interest? It's totally unfair to the government, we must punish those people for not breaking the law by making them pay a fine. I mean that's what we already do in some states (like mine) to punish people who try to help the environment by driving green vehicles.
Seems to me that if enforcement actions are no longer necessary, then you won't need as big of a police force so the loss of revenue will be offset by not having to pay the salaries of all of those traffic cops. This is a non-issue.
It's worse than that. This thing has a 3:2 screen. You know how many people would buy a laptop with a 3:2 screen and this many pixels? A lot. But laptop manufacturers are so in freaking love with widescreen now that it's just not going to happen. It's so frustrating. I've been on the hunt for a new laptop for a year and a half now, and nothing fits my needs. I'm not even asking for super low cost here. A $1000 or $1200 laptop would be totally fine, but manufacturers treat these tablet level displays as $2000 premium parts for some reason.
Getting VR right is very difficult. Early VR companies all discovered that not only was the technology not quite there (good VR would have been too expensive), but there are millions of little implementation details that you have to get right as well. Oculus has been struggling with that for years now, but they're finally getting close to a mass market product. I hope this company is as committed to getting the details right and realizes that there is more to the product than the bullet list of features on the box.
If they aren't careful, this could be like the old days (and some say current day) of smartphones, where you could go to Asia and pick up a phone that had an incredible laundry list of features on the box (full web browser! Tunes AM/FM/TV! Integrated music player! push email! etc...) but none of the features worked right and the interface was a convoluted mess and the thing crashed all of the time.
It's one of those things where it makes amazing scores on benchmarks, but struggles in the real world.
The longtime complaint about P4s is that they were a marketing ploy. People buy the chips with the most Hz, so we're going to give them the biggest numbers ever! Oh, and they'll look amazing in benchmarks. But then AMD's marketing guys came up with the crazy notion of just making up numbers to compare against Intel's mostly meaningless Ghz number and the marketing advantage never materialized. Plus sites got really into doing "real life" benchmarks where they ran real life applications with scripted inputs instead of synthetic benchmarks.
For years SNMP has been referred to as "Security's Not My Problem". SNMP v.1 and v.2 are horrendously insecure, and v.3 is only marginally better and at the same time too complicated for most people to set up. I would hope that most home routers would not open a SNMP port to the internet. If they do, I would consider that a major security flaw in the device, even if it doesn't choose some stupidly obvious default community string, like "public".
Sadly, fixing this is sometimes quite difficult. I have a printer that opens up SNMP to the network. It has the option to change the community string and even the option to go to SNMP v.3, but if you change the community string all of the vendor supplied utilities and drivers can no longer communicate with the printer, and there doesn't appear to be any way to change it. So that feature ends up be entirely useless. Then again, you would have to be mental to hook up a printer directly to the internet in the first place.
This guy is looking at the market and going "Electric cars are scary, batteries are a sure thing. Ditch the cars and take the safer investment." It's investor thinking, but Musk isn't an investor, he's an inventor. The battery route would probably be good for long slow growth, but it wouldn't revolutionize the world the way he intends to with the cars. It's a riskier position, but one with much bigger potential payoffs. One where he crashes through the stodgy old boys club that is the existing automakers with his disruptive technology and becomes a dominant automaker in the world.
I don't know about your case specifically, but the rule of thumb is that for low to mid range stuff you can get an AMD solution for about the same price that is going to have a slower CPU and faster GPU. It's pretty easy to beat a HD4000 GPU in any case. Of course this shoehorns you in a bit. If you went with the Intel solution, then you could drop a discrete GPU in later. If you go with a CPU that is too slow you often have to change more of the base system to upgrade (memory and motherboard).
I have to admit, I found the AMD64 moniker a little confusing when I first read it. I had to Google around to make sure my Core2 chip would support it and that it wasn't using some AMD proprietary extension top of the 64 bit extension. x86_64 is less confusing, even if it is more awkward to type out.
AMD was dominant while Intel was chasing dead ends (Netburst and Itanium). Once Intel woke up and started working on sane chip designs again AMD's goose was cooked. They just can't compete with Intel's R&D budget. Plus, AMD made some boneheaded decisions of their own, like firing a bunch of their R&D staff in the belief that computer automated chip layout would prove superior to human designed layouts.
Put up or shut up AMD. I don't care how awesome your chips will be in 2 years, I care how good they are now, and right now they aren't so good. 2 years is a long time in the CPU world, I hope your gains aren't completely eaten away before you launch the chip, again.
This is really a low quality article. "In the distant future we plan to release faster chips!" What a scoop!
So you have to have a legitimate reason to be let in there, and they won't let random crazy people without documentation wander the facilities? Must be a military conspiracy.
OCZ always struggles with reliability, and buying their Lambo performance hardware always seems like a recipe for lost data. The fact that they're pushing MLC flash chips to the limit is not reassuring.
I've only ever been through college and the post-college job hunt (ok, during college job hunt) once, so I don't have enough data to form even a line, but my experience is that everything I did outside of actual classwork ended up being the most important parts of getting a job. If you only do the assigned classwork, then when you graduate you'll be competing with however many students are in your class who also did the same projects and learned the same skills. If you do something outside of the curriculum you'll stand out from your classmates for anybody looking for your particular skills.
Developing some software or even a useful web page will also help a ton once you get past the HR drones. It doesn't have to be the next Google, but having something to show the people you'll be working with is a huge help. Open source projects are great for this.
The final note: Don't think you have to do all of your partying in College because you'll be a family man the instant you graduate. Unless you are one of those guys who immediately has kids after graduating (or before!), there isn't nearly as much difference between college life and graduate life as movies/tv/etc... would make you think. This means it's ok to miss some parties because you're working on your cool side project. Just don't miss all of them because making friends and having fun is important too. It's a really hard balance and we don't make it easy on kids by giving only ridiculously one-sided advice that doesn't pass the real world test. I will say that you will regret it if you party too much and have to take a year of school all over again. Student loans suck big time. Oh, and paid internships/co-op opportunities that let you avoid having to take big loans? Solid gold.
Slashdot Mirror
$1/minute for realistically at best 4800 baud isn't a data win. A $1/kb SMS capability makes it cheaper than SMS on a traditional cell phone ($2.24 for the same data) hilariously enough, but that's only because my local carriers are completely unashamed about blatantly ripping people off on SMS.
I don't think this is ever going to happen. That's a crapton of satellites to launch, and the market just isn't there to support it. People who are going to be able to afford this are generally going to already have internet service, and it will never be cheaper per bit than a landline. The physics are just against it. I think this announcement is just Google putting out feelers and doing some thought exercises.
We already have a lot of "AI" hidden all around us. Just look at what google can do with a few keywords and ask yourself how much better a person could do with "real" intelligence.
What the Singularity people never seem to think about is natural limiting factors. It's the same problem the Grey Goo handwringers rarely consider. The idea that an AI would grow exponentially smarter just because it was a machine never really worked for me. It's going to run into the same limiting factors (access to information, available compute time, thermodynamics!) that prevent biological organisms from running unchecked. The Grey Goo scenario is especially bad, since we already have a real world analoge (bacteria, and other microorganisms) that have completely failed to transmute the entire mass of the planet, despite having billions of years to try. Anytime someone tells you to worry about Grey Goo, make sure you ask them what is going to power all of those nanomachines. Anytime someone tells you to worry about the AI Singularity, ask them where all of the knowledge is coming from.
What else would you use?
My impression is that the IETF was doing a pretty good job until the businesses started taking the internet seriously and instead of being a group of engineers trying to make the best protocols it became a bunch of business interests trying to push their preferred solution because it gives them an advantage in the market. Get a few of those in the same room and deadlock is the result.
That's what I was thinking. Some smallish spoilers that can be extended out of the sides of the car would add a tremendous amount of braking power at 1000mph.
Oh? You've never heard of civil asset forfeitures? Busting a suspected drug runner can be extremely profitable for a police department, even if he's later found to be innocent. In general you don't get your money or property back unless you're willing to fight tooth and nail in the courts for a few years, against a system that assumes you're just a lucky drug running asshole that found a loophole and wants to get back into his life of crime.
I would have believed that, except that my state lowered the gas tax as the same time they added the flat tax for efficient vehicles. It was just the state government sticking it to the eco-hippies so they can get a break on their gas budget for their enormous pickup trucks.
But, but what about our conflict of interest? How are we supposed to operate a law enforcement and public safety organization without making revenue collection part of enforcement? How are we going to make the system unfair if we start eliminating inherent conflicts of interest? It's totally unfair to the government, we must punish those people for not breaking the law by making them pay a fine. I mean that's what we already do in some states (like mine) to punish people who try to help the environment by driving green vehicles.
Seems to me that if enforcement actions are no longer necessary, then you won't need as big of a police force so the loss of revenue will be offset by not having to pay the salaries of all of those traffic cops. This is a non-issue.
It's worse than that. This thing has a 3:2 screen. You know how many people would buy a laptop with a 3:2 screen and this many pixels? A lot. But laptop manufacturers are so in freaking love with widescreen now that it's just not going to happen. It's so frustrating. I've been on the hunt for a new laptop for a year and a half now, and nothing fits my needs. I'm not even asking for super low cost here. A $1000 or $1200 laptop would be totally fine, but manufacturers treat these tablet level displays as $2000 premium parts for some reason.
Getting VR right is very difficult. Early VR companies all discovered that not only was the technology not quite there (good VR would have been too expensive), but there are millions of little implementation details that you have to get right as well. Oculus has been struggling with that for years now, but they're finally getting close to a mass market product. I hope this company is as committed to getting the details right and realizes that there is more to the product than the bullet list of features on the box.
If they aren't careful, this could be like the old days (and some say current day) of smartphones, where you could go to Asia and pick up a phone that had an incredible laundry list of features on the box (full web browser! Tunes AM/FM/TV! Integrated music player! push email! etc...) but none of the features worked right and the interface was a convoluted mess and the thing crashed all of the time.
It's one of those things where it makes amazing scores on benchmarks, but struggles in the real world.
The longtime complaint about P4s is that they were a marketing ploy. People buy the chips with the most Hz, so we're going to give them the biggest numbers ever! Oh, and they'll look amazing in benchmarks. But then AMD's marketing guys came up with the crazy notion of just making up numbers to compare against Intel's mostly meaningless Ghz number and the marketing advantage never materialized. Plus sites got really into doing "real life" benchmarks where they ran real life applications with scripted inputs instead of synthetic benchmarks.
For years SNMP has been referred to as "Security's Not My Problem". SNMP v.1 and v.2 are horrendously insecure, and v.3 is only marginally better and at the same time too complicated for most people to set up. I would hope that most home routers would not open a SNMP port to the internet. If they do, I would consider that a major security flaw in the device, even if it doesn't choose some stupidly obvious default community string, like "public".
Sadly, fixing this is sometimes quite difficult. I have a printer that opens up SNMP to the network. It has the option to change the community string and even the option to go to SNMP v.3, but if you change the community string all of the vendor supplied utilities and drivers can no longer communicate with the printer, and there doesn't appear to be any way to change it. So that feature ends up be entirely useless. Then again, you would have to be mental to hook up a printer directly to the internet in the first place.
This guy is looking at the market and going "Electric cars are scary, batteries are a sure thing. Ditch the cars and take the safer investment." It's investor thinking, but Musk isn't an investor, he's an inventor. The battery route would probably be good for long slow growth, but it wouldn't revolutionize the world the way he intends to with the cars. It's a riskier position, but one with much bigger potential payoffs. One where he crashes through the stodgy old boys club that is the existing automakers with his disruptive technology and becomes a dominant automaker in the world.
Because I want the news from last week of course.
"The current design is bad, are you going to use a better design?"
"We won't say, it's a secret!"
What a compelling article.
I don't know about your case specifically, but the rule of thumb is that for low to mid range stuff you can get an AMD solution for about the same price that is going to have a slower CPU and faster GPU. It's pretty easy to beat a HD4000 GPU in any case. Of course this shoehorns you in a bit. If you went with the Intel solution, then you could drop a discrete GPU in later. If you go with a CPU that is too slow you often have to change more of the base system to upgrade (memory and motherboard).
I have to admit, I found the AMD64 moniker a little confusing when I first read it. I had to Google around to make sure my Core2 chip would support it and that it wasn't using some AMD proprietary extension top of the 64 bit extension. x86_64 is less confusing, even if it is more awkward to type out.
AMD was dominant while Intel was chasing dead ends (Netburst and Itanium). Once Intel woke up and started working on sane chip designs again AMD's goose was cooked. They just can't compete with Intel's R&D budget. Plus, AMD made some boneheaded decisions of their own, like firing a bunch of their R&D staff in the belief that computer automated chip layout would prove superior to human designed layouts.
Put up or shut up AMD. I don't care how awesome your chips will be in 2 years, I care how good they are now, and right now they aren't so good. 2 years is a long time in the CPU world, I hope your gains aren't completely eaten away before you launch the chip, again.
This is really a low quality article. "In the distant future we plan to release faster chips!" What a scoop!
Are you sure you didn't forget to enable TRIM support in your OS? Without that any SSD will start to bog down after a few months of regular use.
So you have to have a legitimate reason to be let in there, and they won't let random crazy people without documentation wander the facilities? Must be a military conspiracy.
OCZ always struggles with reliability, and buying their Lambo performance hardware always seems like a recipe for lost data. The fact that they're pushing MLC flash chips to the limit is not reassuring.
I've only ever been through college and the post-college job hunt (ok, during college job hunt) once, so I don't have enough data to form even a line, but my experience is that everything I did outside of actual classwork ended up being the most important parts of getting a job. If you only do the assigned classwork, then when you graduate you'll be competing with however many students are in your class who also did the same projects and learned the same skills. If you do something outside of the curriculum you'll stand out from your classmates for anybody looking for your particular skills.
Developing some software or even a useful web page will also help a ton once you get past the HR drones. It doesn't have to be the next Google, but having something to show the people you'll be working with is a huge help. Open source projects are great for this.
The final note: Don't think you have to do all of your partying in College because you'll be a family man the instant you graduate. Unless you are one of those guys who immediately has kids after graduating (or before!), there isn't nearly as much difference between college life and graduate life as movies/tv/etc... would make you think. This means it's ok to miss some parties because you're working on your cool side project. Just don't miss all of them because making friends and having fun is important too. It's a really hard balance and we don't make it easy on kids by giving only ridiculously one-sided advice that doesn't pass the real world test. I will say that you will regret it if you party too much and have to take a year of school all over again. Student loans suck big time. Oh, and paid internships/co-op opportunities that let you avoid having to take big loans? Solid gold.
The very very small times.
More commonly the response you get is "God damn fucking TiVo users."