Discoverability and trust are major problems for many small developers. I.e. you can throw up a webpage with your product but first people need to find it and then they need to trust you enough to enter their credit card details in some random webpage. Those are two major hurdles to overcome and it can be worth a lot of money to small devs to solve this. Of course right now the Windows store isn't a big player so the benefit is limited, but that's what MS want to solve here. By getting more devs on board they hope to make the Windows store the #1 place people go to buy Windows apps. Only time will tell if they will succeed.
8k monitors are also great for working on 4k content. That way you can view your content at 1:1 while still having room for the UI around it when working in Premiere/AfterFX/whatever.
People tend to bring up the "why would anyone work" thing in UBI discussions all the time. The thing is UBI is supposed to be basic (that's the B). A UBI where everyone gets $80k/year wouldn't work (not until everything is 100% automated anyway). Most schemes talk about something around $10k/year. Enough to survive but with very little left for anything extra. Want a nice car? Fancy vacations? Private school for your kids? Then you will work.
UBI just makes the welfare system simpler, ensures it is easier for people to get the help they need and prevents poverty traps where it makes more sense not to work because losing access to welfare would leave you worse off. It also removes the need for a minimum wage on top of that. Lastly it helps to take care of the ~10% of the population that has an IQ of under ~85 and is therefore pretty much impossible to employ in a way that is a net gain in productivity. Right now most welfare systems require you to look for work (if you are able bodied) in order to qualify, which leaves a number of unemployable people bouncing from job to job just to get fired over and over, costing productivity for no gain. UBI would also remove this inefficiency.
Why wouldn't they work? 40% tax would mean take home of $60k plus they get the UBI too. Meanwhile UBI would be set around $10k/year. You still come out way ahead if you work. In fact that is a key part of UBI, you should always be better off working unlike now where in many cases the way that unemployment benefits are structured often does mean that you are better off not working.
Even if it is around 100ms ping, that's good enough for most Internet usage (especially if the jitter is low). Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?
If it is cheap and bandwidth is high this could be a game changer for a lot of places. If you are currently on fibre of course you don't care, this (probably) won't beat that, but if you are living in the outback with shitty 1mbit DSL, then this could be huge. And that's a huge potential customer base that right now doesn't have a lot of great options, plus depending on just how good this is, there are also a lot of folks living in cities with poor connections due to contention that might be interested.
What baffles me the most is the fact that we know that there is a unicode whitelist. I get that allowing all of unicode causes all sorts of issues, but why is it so hard to add the few smart quotes to the whitelist? That alone would solve most of the problems. If you then add like maybe 5-10 other common used unicode characters to the list and it would probably fix 99% of the remaining problems. Is it really that hard?
No, this is nothing like the content-aware algorithms used in Photoshop (the function is the same but the underlying technology is radically different). A content-aware algorithm simply analyses what is left of the picture and uses that information to guess what should go into the missing parts. The algorithm described here is a deep learning system trained on thousands of similar images. It can then use this data to help it guess how to fill in the missing pieces. This means it is capable of data synthesis that is not present within the image being processed. That's huge.
All that said the example picture shown in the article had some rather obvious flaws. If that's a best-case outcome then I think they still have some work to do frankly (might just need training on more data).
I had the same experience. Ran Vista for years without an issue and I found it a huge step up from XP (where simple stuff like alt-tabbing from a fullscreen game to media player window would frequently result in a BSOD). Of course I turned UAC off on day one, and ran it on a decent system (4GB+ of RAM).
What also gets me about this whole story is that they apparently didn't have a procedure in place for issuing a "oops, our bad, ignore the last message" message on the system. I mean the ability for an emergency alert to cause a panic is blindingly obvious, and no matter the safety systems in place there is always a chance that a wrong message might be sent out. It shouldn't happen but it can, so there should have been an obvious way to retract erroneous message.
Except Bitcoin is crap. It serves no useful function whatsoever. Other cryptokens like Ethereum are far more promising. Sooner or later bitcoin will crash and vanish and none of the bandaid fixes being thrown at it will save it. And I won't trust any cryptoken that can't be mined (such as Ripple), they all reek of complete and utter scams to me.
No, the problem is idealism of any form. Idealism is just intellectual laziness and the inability to process complex issues. The answer isn't communism, Marxism, capitalism and any other stupid ism you can come up with (except pragmatism). Problems in complex systems have complex solutions.
Exactly this. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is an investment or store of value is an idiot. The only value Bitcoin could have is if it actually worked as a currency (except it doesn't). The underlying technology is actually rather impressive and I suspect some other cryptocurrency will eventually fulfil the promise of Bitcoin (despite what some of the extreme detractors say, because a currency doesn't require an underlying value, the value can be simply in providing a medium of exchange).
It's the same as alcoholics. For most people alcohol isn't a problem. Even getting totally smashed on occasion isn't a problem (at least not a mental health one). And yet for some individuals it becomes an addiction and a serious problem. Same thing with games. It is also important to realise here that not all games are the same. Many types of games aren't addictive, which I think is why a lot of people are laughing this off. Nobody is going to end up addicted to Uncharted or Mass Effect for example. Most mobile games and MMORPGs on the other hand are designed with a core loop of action and reward designed specifically to hook players on an endless grind, and that's where addiction is very possible for some individuals.
Inflation is a feature not a bug in a currency. I won't trust any cryptocurrency unless it set up to inflate the supply by 1-2% per year. Dogecoin actually almost gets it right - it is set up to mine an additional number of coins per year, but the number is fixed (rather than a percentage of the current supply) so over time it becomes less and less inflationary.
Depends on your definition of intelligent. Is a dog intelligent? What about a rat? A nematode? Where is the cut-off? Can you say with certainty that the human brain is much more than a souped-up classifier? I don't see humans doing anything interesting that a really complex pattern recognizer could't also do.
Bitcoin is 100% a bubble and will eventually crash but I'm not so sure that we are near the tipping point yet. It is ridiculously easy to invest in (any fool can create an account with an exchange and buy some BTC), and the pool is vast (anyone in the world with Internet access can theoretically buy in). A lot of people still don't know about BTC and it is only just starting to get some mainstream attention (just because people that visit Slashdot have been bombarded with BTC news doesn't mean everyone else has). I expect the real fools (people with not even a cursory understanding of how cryptocurrencies work) are only just beginning to buy in. I wouldn't be surprised to see BTC skyrocket to $100,000 in a year or so, maybe even more before crashing spectacularly to basically 0 in the span of days. Cautious people tend to underestimate just how irrational the market can go, while the idiots think it will go up forever.
Shooting down the missile is fine. Waiting to see where the missile goes and retaliating if it hits anything is fine. Striking North Korea for shooting a warning shot across Japan (or wherever) is not. If a missile wipes out "Tokyo or Portland" the US can respond, but doing an early retaliation strike gains you nothing (the missile is in the air). This isn't a MAD scenario like with the USSR, where you had to respond while the missiles were flying because otherwise there's a good chance your entire launch capability is destroyed. North Korea is pretty far away from having that sort of capability.
Honestly, I find it shocking that there are actually people who think that military action in North Korea is a good idea, short of North Korea landing a major blow to the US or its allies. It will be guaranteed to end with Seoul and Pusan being flattened into rubble and a death toll upwards of 100,000, probably in the millions. How does that seem acceptable to anyone?
That would be a point if they were planning to just run loops of Prime95 on these things, but that's not what they are doing. The idea is that they will also be doing real work on them at the same time, work that would be done anyway, just with the waste heat pumped out of a data centre into the atmosphere. Like this the waste heat will be used productively instead. That doesn't mean this is a good idea (maybe it is, I don't know) but it can afford to be really inefficient heating since that's just a by-product.
Then we need to accept that some people won't work. No problem. As someone with a "brainy" job I have exactly 0 problem with part of my paycheck going to taxes that pay for those less fortunate to sit around and do nothing. That's fine, because that's progress and exactly how society should work.
But there's a tipping point. As more cars become electric more petrol stations will close due to no longer being profitable (they run on razor thin margins as is). Once large numbers of petrol stations start to close (or convert to charging electric cars), it will become increasingly inconvenient to drive an ICE car, snowballing the popularity of electric vehicles.
Actually early on conditions for life were likely more favourable on Mars than on Earth for several hundred million years. In fact there is a very credible hypothesis that life began on Mars and was transferred to Earth later (meteorites with Martian material have been found on Earth).
But there's nothing inherently unreadable about goto. In fact it is really obvious what it does and how it works, and I think a lot of code would be more readable if goto wasn't so demonised. The problem with goto is that it is easy to abuse, you can replace most other constructs (functions, loops, etc...) with creative goto usage and then you end up with unreadable spaghetti code. Using it to break out of a nested loop or to handle an error condition is perfectly fine and more readable than alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Discoverability and trust are major problems for many small developers. I.e. you can throw up a webpage with your product but first people need to find it and then they need to trust you enough to enter their credit card details in some random webpage. Those are two major hurdles to overcome and it can be worth a lot of money to small devs to solve this. Of course right now the Windows store isn't a big player so the benefit is limited, but that's what MS want to solve here. By getting more devs on board they hope to make the Windows store the #1 place people go to buy Windows apps. Only time will tell if they will succeed.
8k monitors are also great for working on 4k content. That way you can view your content at 1:1 while still having room for the UI around it when working in Premiere/AfterFX/whatever.
People tend to bring up the "why would anyone work" thing in UBI discussions all the time. The thing is UBI is supposed to be basic (that's the B). A UBI where everyone gets $80k/year wouldn't work (not until everything is 100% automated anyway). Most schemes talk about something around $10k/year. Enough to survive but with very little left for anything extra. Want a nice car? Fancy vacations? Private school for your kids? Then you will work.
UBI just makes the welfare system simpler, ensures it is easier for people to get the help they need and prevents poverty traps where it makes more sense not to work because losing access to welfare would leave you worse off. It also removes the need for a minimum wage on top of that. Lastly it helps to take care of the ~10% of the population that has an IQ of under ~85 and is therefore pretty much impossible to employ in a way that is a net gain in productivity. Right now most welfare systems require you to look for work (if you are able bodied) in order to qualify, which leaves a number of unemployable people bouncing from job to job just to get fired over and over, costing productivity for no gain. UBI would also remove this inefficiency.
Why wouldn't they work? 40% tax would mean take home of $60k plus they get the UBI too. Meanwhile UBI would be set around $10k/year. You still come out way ahead if you work. In fact that is a key part of UBI, you should always be better off working unlike now where in many cases the way that unemployment benefits are structured often does mean that you are better off not working.
Even if it is around 100ms ping, that's good enough for most Internet usage (especially if the jitter is low). Outside of FPS/MOBA players, who really cares about sub 100ms pings anyway?
If it is cheap and bandwidth is high this could be a game changer for a lot of places. If you are currently on fibre of course you don't care, this (probably) won't beat that, but if you are living in the outback with shitty 1mbit DSL, then this could be huge. And that's a huge potential customer base that right now doesn't have a lot of great options, plus depending on just how good this is, there are also a lot of folks living in cities with poor connections due to contention that might be interested.
What baffles me the most is the fact that we know that there is a unicode whitelist. I get that allowing all of unicode causes all sorts of issues, but why is it so hard to add the few smart quotes to the whitelist? That alone would solve most of the problems. If you then add like maybe 5-10 other common used unicode characters to the list and it would probably fix 99% of the remaining problems. Is it really that hard?
No, this is nothing like the content-aware algorithms used in Photoshop (the function is the same but the underlying technology is radically different). A content-aware algorithm simply analyses what is left of the picture and uses that information to guess what should go into the missing parts. The algorithm described here is a deep learning system trained on thousands of similar images. It can then use this data to help it guess how to fill in the missing pieces. This means it is capable of data synthesis that is not present within the image being processed. That's huge.
All that said the example picture shown in the article had some rather obvious flaws. If that's a best-case outcome then I think they still have some work to do frankly (might just need training on more data).
Yeah, I fully expect Bitcoin to fade away over the next few years. It is pretty much useless for anything, but other tokens certainly look promising.
I had the same experience. Ran Vista for years without an issue and I found it a huge step up from XP (where simple stuff like alt-tabbing from a fullscreen game to media player window would frequently result in a BSOD). Of course I turned UAC off on day one, and ran it on a decent system (4GB+ of RAM).
What also gets me about this whole story is that they apparently didn't have a procedure in place for issuing a "oops, our bad, ignore the last message" message on the system. I mean the ability for an emergency alert to cause a panic is blindingly obvious, and no matter the safety systems in place there is always a chance that a wrong message might be sent out. It shouldn't happen but it can, so there should have been an obvious way to retract erroneous message.
Except Bitcoin is crap. It serves no useful function whatsoever. Other cryptokens like Ethereum are far more promising. Sooner or later bitcoin will crash and vanish and none of the bandaid fixes being thrown at it will save it. And I won't trust any cryptoken that can't be mined (such as Ripple), they all reek of complete and utter scams to me.
No, the problem is idealism of any form. Idealism is just intellectual laziness and the inability to process complex issues. The answer isn't communism, Marxism, capitalism and any other stupid ism you can come up with (except pragmatism). Problems in complex systems have complex solutions.
Exactly this. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is an investment or store of value is an idiot. The only value Bitcoin could have is if it actually worked as a currency (except it doesn't). The underlying technology is actually rather impressive and I suspect some other cryptocurrency will eventually fulfil the promise of Bitcoin (despite what some of the extreme detractors say, because a currency doesn't require an underlying value, the value can be simply in providing a medium of exchange).
It's the same as alcoholics. For most people alcohol isn't a problem. Even getting totally smashed on occasion isn't a problem (at least not a mental health one). And yet for some individuals it becomes an addiction and a serious problem. Same thing with games. It is also important to realise here that not all games are the same. Many types of games aren't addictive, which I think is why a lot of people are laughing this off. Nobody is going to end up addicted to Uncharted or Mass Effect for example. Most mobile games and MMORPGs on the other hand are designed with a core loop of action and reward designed specifically to hook players on an endless grind, and that's where addiction is very possible for some individuals.
Inflation is a feature not a bug in a currency. I won't trust any cryptocurrency unless it set up to inflate the supply by 1-2% per year. Dogecoin actually almost gets it right - it is set up to mine an additional number of coins per year, but the number is fixed (rather than a percentage of the current supply) so over time it becomes less and less inflationary.
Depends on your definition of intelligent. Is a dog intelligent? What about a rat? A nematode? Where is the cut-off? Can you say with certainty that the human brain is much more than a souped-up classifier? I don't see humans doing anything interesting that a really complex pattern recognizer could't also do.
Bitcoin is 100% a bubble and will eventually crash but I'm not so sure that we are near the tipping point yet. It is ridiculously easy to invest in (any fool can create an account with an exchange and buy some BTC), and the pool is vast (anyone in the world with Internet access can theoretically buy in). A lot of people still don't know about BTC and it is only just starting to get some mainstream attention (just because people that visit Slashdot have been bombarded with BTC news doesn't mean everyone else has). I expect the real fools (people with not even a cursory understanding of how cryptocurrencies work) are only just beginning to buy in. I wouldn't be surprised to see BTC skyrocket to $100,000 in a year or so, maybe even more before crashing spectacularly to basically 0 in the span of days. Cautious people tend to underestimate just how irrational the market can go, while the idiots think it will go up forever.
Shooting down the missile is fine. Waiting to see where the missile goes and retaliating if it hits anything is fine. Striking North Korea for shooting a warning shot across Japan (or wherever) is not. If a missile wipes out "Tokyo or Portland" the US can respond, but doing an early retaliation strike gains you nothing (the missile is in the air). This isn't a MAD scenario like with the USSR, where you had to respond while the missiles were flying because otherwise there's a good chance your entire launch capability is destroyed. North Korea is pretty far away from having that sort of capability.
Honestly, I find it shocking that there are actually people who think that military action in North Korea is a good idea, short of North Korea landing a major blow to the US or its allies. It will be guaranteed to end with Seoul and Pusan being flattened into rubble and a death toll upwards of 100,000, probably in the millions. How does that seem acceptable to anyone?
That would be a point if they were planning to just run loops of Prime95 on these things, but that's not what they are doing. The idea is that they will also be doing real work on them at the same time, work that would be done anyway, just with the waste heat pumped out of a data centre into the atmosphere. Like this the waste heat will be used productively instead. That doesn't mean this is a good idea (maybe it is, I don't know) but it can afford to be really inefficient heating since that's just a by-product.
Then we need to accept that some people won't work. No problem. As someone with a "brainy" job I have exactly 0 problem with part of my paycheck going to taxes that pay for those less fortunate to sit around and do nothing. That's fine, because that's progress and exactly how society should work.
Because who gets promoted to management is entirely based on merit, right? If you actually believe that then your naivete is staggering.
But there's a tipping point. As more cars become electric more petrol stations will close due to no longer being profitable (they run on razor thin margins as is). Once large numbers of petrol stations start to close (or convert to charging electric cars), it will become increasingly inconvenient to drive an ICE car, snowballing the popularity of electric vehicles.
Actually early on conditions for life were likely more favourable on Mars than on Earth for several hundred million years. In fact there is a very credible hypothesis that life began on Mars and was transferred to Earth later (meteorites with Martian material have been found on Earth).
But there's nothing inherently unreadable about goto. In fact it is really obvious what it does and how it works, and I think a lot of code would be more readable if goto wasn't so demonised. The problem with goto is that it is easy to abuse, you can replace most other constructs (functions, loops, etc...) with creative goto usage and then you end up with unreadable spaghetti code. Using it to break out of a nested loop or to handle an error condition is perfectly fine and more readable than alternatives.
And next year is 1 AD (After Donald)?