All MS needs to do is set up an API for software to register itself for updates. System owners could have full visibility into what is going on, and OK only security updates, or functional updates as well, etc.
MS doesn't need to host any files to do it. Software could just register a URL to obtain updates from, maybe using RSS/etc. MS could also centrally host the update data stream, but not the actual files. They could even charge for the privilege, maybe offering different levels of service (host nothing, host update RSS feed/etc, host it all).
Bottom line is that Windows could certainly use a package manager. Many linux distros create packages even for proprietary apps - they just don't redistribute the actual copyrighted code (prompting for CDs, or having users put the installer in a given place, etc).
Its you that are playing the 'lottery' by sniping, where you hope to snag an item for a given amount, and have the auction close before the other participants can reconsider or react to your bid.
I don't quite see how that is playing the lottery.
Playing the lottery is investing money in something that statistically is guaranteed to lose me money, but there is a very small chance of a big payout.
Sniping is using a tactic that at worst results in me paying what I'd otherwise have been willing to pay, and is likely to result in me paying less.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Sniping is a tax on people who are bad at proxy bidding...:)
Perhaps, or perhaps it is just genetic. Perhaps that is less likely, but you really can't know for sure. I don't see how ordinary kids could reach those kinds of weights otherwise, unless you strapped them down to a table and pumped food into their digestive systems 24x7.
Ok, you've grappled the object. Where do you want to send it?
Sending it down requires a drag chute of some kind. Or it requires just enough delta-v to drop its perigee just a little lower into the atmosphere.
Suppose we had the mother of all factories sitting in equatorial orbit. Suppose your space junk is in a 35 degree orbit. Both objects are traveling at around 27Kkm/h if they're in a relatively low orbit. However, one object is moving 27Kkm/h due east, and one is moving 27Kkm/h 35 degrees north of east. Relative to each other they are moving at thousands of kilometers per hour when they pass each other. To collect the object you need to apply that much of a velocity change to it, which is a huge amount of energy (not quite what it took to launch, but we're getting into that kind of magnitude).
Think of it this way - you're on a racetrack going 200mph. Another car is going 200mph the other way. You want to collect it. How do you do this without massively changing its velocity?
One of the first rules of orbital mechanics is that plane changes are expensive. That's why the shuttle can't visit the ISS and the hubble on the same mission. They're both in similar altitude orbits, but in different planes. The shuttle doesn't have enough fuel to change planes (at least, not that far - and without looking up the numbers that is probably only 10 degrees or so).
Or, you could employ a smarter strategy. Find 35 of those widgets you want, and tell your software to snipe all of them, winning only one (or however many you want). The software will bid on one item at a time in the last 5 mins until you get one.
If you bid on items anyway in the order their auctions end, you don't waste all that much time even if you don't snipe. When that item goes over your max bid, then you bid on an item ending in a day - not in a week. If auctions are a week apart, then you're going to end up waiting a week with any bidding strategy.
The only reasons eBay allows it is because it creates uncertainty, thus encouraging people to bid higher than they really want to (translating into higher prices and more profit for eBay).
No, it encourages them to bid what they REALLY want, not what they think they want.
Face it, you're not going to really get an $800 brand new digital camera for $200, no matter how many auctions you bid on, or what strategy you employ. Sniping might get it for $790 instead of $800, but it is rare for there to be genuine bargains on an auction. Sure, you can get items that aren't in mint condition for less than mint-condition prices, but that isn't a bargain.
Now, if people really did put in their max prices all the time, sniping would end pretty quickly (for the most part). It would add no advantage. However, most people don't actually bid their match, which means sniping involves less competition with other buyers, which means there will always be incentive to do it.
I snipe, and I always set it to my max bid, and I'm always happy when I lose (I usually do), because I set the amount I did because that's what I think the item is worth.
If somebody gets upset because they don't understand proxy bidding, I might suggest that they try going out and buying a lottery ticket instead. That system seems to be designed for them.
If you extend the auction, sniping software will be re-optimized accordingly. You set your max bid, and the sniping software will wait until 2 minutes before the end and bid 1 increment higher max. Then it will wait a day or whatever until it is 2 minutes before the end, and again up the bid unless you're past the max. The buyer doing the sniping doesn't care if the auction runs 3 months, since they're doing this on 300 other items in parallel and one of them will eventually win, at which point they abandon all the others. At no point do they hold more than one winning bid, so they have no real risk. The only person who loses out is the seller, and anybody who actually wanted to win an auction in a timely manner...
Max bid only works if you're willing to risks of paying out the nose for something or you only have a casual interest in getting the item to begin with.
Not at all. You bid what you're willing to pay. If somebody else wins the bid for one cent more, you're happy that they overpaid for it. If you get it for exactly your max, then you got it for what you think it is really worth. If you get it for less, well, that's just great!
If you absolutely have to have the item now, then go buy it from amazon, or bid $100k or something.
However, sniping is clearly a more effective strategy to get items for good prices. Why?
Well, suppose there are 35 listings for a 1GB DIMM that you want. Which one do you bid on? You could bid on all 35, and then end up having to sell 34 of them. Or, you can set up a snipe on all of them and you'll never end up with more than one.
Plus, most people don't actually bid their max, so by sniping you end up with less competition - only those who really do bid their max or who also use sniping. Of course, when sniping you should bid your max on the snipe.
I don't have a problem with it. It only causes problems for people who get upset because they thought they were really going to get some $300 item for only $50 only to find out that this was too good to be true. Well, even if there were sniping they still wouldn't have gotten it.
"I'm not religious at all, but even I know this is the 'correct' interpretation."
This sounds like total bullshit.
Obviously... How can there even be a "correct" interpretation of a sacred text absent some kind of universal standard for truthfulness. How can you accept that there is such a standard, without being "religious?"
No doubt. Still, doesn't make it their phone, which means they can't dictate how it is used.
If they care that much about their data, they wouldn't store it on phones they don't control. They just care about productivity more than they care about their data...
As the other poster hinted at, btrfs is considered the future zfs-like filesystem for linux. In many ways it is superior to zfs, except for the fact that it isn't really production-ready yet. Its potential feature list is very nice.
ZFS is clearly a superior solution RIGHT NOW. In a year, I'm not so sure.
Yup - looking forward to this feature coming out so that my phone is no longer blacklisted.
Of course, the first thing I'll do is disable the feature (have OS report "sure, I'll self destruct" and then ignore any messages received to do so. Ditto with passwords/etc.
If the company wants to own my phone, they're welcome to buy me one...:)
Yup - no longer the good old days when you could just throw immigrants at the problem. I shudder to think how many died digging tunnels under someplace like NYC.
Sure, zoning could be done with less red tape, but much of the cost is out of necessity, unless you don't care about the occasional building collapse.
If you'd read that site you'd realize that merely using the initials of our favorite three-letter agency is apparently illegal unless authorized. I feel bad for Fred Beavis Iacocco - maybe they'll give him a license.
I'm not sure which is dumber - that congress would pass a law this stupid, or that somebody would actually try to enforce it...
Worse the rotation rates for each depend on where the instrument is pointing, so you also have to have inputs for that.
Why?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just examine successive images taken from the scope, look for drift, and then correct for drift? Sure, the first 5 shots you take will be streaky, but it would very quickly learn.
Most likely any system controlling an azimuth mount would know where the scope is and where it wants to point anyway.
Sure, it would be useless except as part of a computer-automated observation system. However, if you do have a computer-automated observation system why pay all that money for equipment that is optimized to simplify non-computerized observation?
I think that if you're looking for concepts, youtube is a great place to look. If you're looking for execution, it is a lousy place to look. Plus, if you do actually find anything you want to keep you get to try to extract the FLV and extract its audio track so that you can listen to it on something other than your web browser. What fun - especially if you have to transcode it (either to another format (lossy), or to FLAC (lots of space and most players don't support it))...
I agree with the audiophile bit, but I do shoot RAW for everything (casual or not). The reason is bit depth - JPEG is limited to 8-bits (at least, in almost all implementations of it - there is no reason you couldn't compress at 16-bits using the same technique). With RAW I get all 12 bits that my sensor captures. That means that marginal photos are much easier to rescue in post-processing.
I'd actually argue that studio portraits/etc are where you need RAW the least. In controlled conditions you can get the perfect exposure up-front, and then you don't need to clean it up so much after-the-fact. However, if somebody is paying you for shots it seems silly to let 0.2cents of disk space keep you from capturing everything you can.
When I shoot photos of family events/etc, they are almost always candid shots. If I capture a nice moment and the exposure locked onto a window in the background, I'm not going to ask everybody to line up and pose like models laughing or whatever while I tweak my shutter. If I have a 12-bit image, that gives me 4 stops more light in the shadows when I clean it up.
For a properly-exposed image, however, I have no expectation to be able to see the quality difference between a 12-bit RAW and any reasonably-sized 8-bit JPEG. The disk savings are considerable obviously - that JPEG is easily 10% or less the size of the RAW.
If I actually processed all my photos after taking them I might convert final images (and a copy of a bare-bones-processed RAW) to JPEG only and discard originals. However, I tend to only go back and process images later (I'm not selling them or anything like that), so I tend to just keep the RAW files around.
Trust me, you're far more likely to get away with not having an ID in the hills of Kentucky than boarding a spacecraft...
Maybe AFTER we terraform mars that might be an option. Actually, I'm not sold on terraforming, just living in orbit in space stations is probably more sensible - AFTER the technology exists to allow this to be done cost-effectively.
Hadn't thought about that. However, if you take lots of short exposures and combine them, you could correct for the field rotation. At very high magnifications you could still get rotation during even a short exposure I guess.
Part of me wants to suggest just adding a third axis to the mount (rotation). I guess that would depend on the relative cost of building that motor. I suspect it might depend quite a bit on the weight supported by the mount - for a very heavy telescope it might be cheaper to rotate it than to build an equatorial mount (especially close to the equator where basically you're hanging the whole telescope sideways).
Disclaimer - I'm but no means a seasoned amateur astronomer - I have interest, but I don't actually own a telescope at the moment unless you count my DSLR.:)
I'm not one to suggest that eliminating ALL subsidies is going to be practical. Sometimes it just makes more sense to have treasury write a check than to figure out who to send the bill.
However, some externalities aren't hard at all to deal with.
Oil cleanup is simple - just tariff oil to pay for it. Ditto for wars in the Middle East.
It isn't uncommon around major cities - and the poster above apparently works in the NYC metro area. However, most people would just move - especially if they work at CompUSA of all places (I have to assume it was at a warehouse or office building or something - I'd never commute 65 miles to a retail store unless I literally owned it).
Most people in a typical suburban area dive 5-10 miles to work. Generally too far to bike, but something that only takes 20-30min. Once you get over the 30 minute mark you cross a threshold. The one hour mark is a very big threshold and most people will find some reason to move at that point.
Well, the causal relationship isn't 100% clear, but it seems likely to me that if so much money wasn't available to go to college that colleges would make do with less (or face bankruptcy).
Suppose the most you could borrow for college was $4k/yr, in total (including parent loans/etc). This would mean that most people would either have to attend a college that costs not much more than this, or not attend college at all. This increases the demand for inexpensive schools, and decreases the demand for expensive schools. The market supply will adjust accordingly.
Sure, you might not get as much for a $20k education, but I've yet to be convinced that you get a whole lot more for a $150k education. Students graduating college today as undergrads don't seem to really know anything I didn't know graduating 15 years ago, but in inflation-adjusted dollars they're paying a LOT more for their education. They aren't really any more well-rounded either, or whatever term is used to justify the lack of tangible outcomes in education.
Stuff like this makes me think that we're really missing some opportunities in amateur astronomy. Computers and software have the potential ability to revolutionize how much of it is done.
Why do you need an equatorial mount in the first place, when a computer can do the math to emulate this with an azimuthal mount? Why futz with calibration and guide scopes, when the computer can just analyze every shot from the main scope and calculate drift in near-realtime?
It seems like much of the equipment is optimized to gain the most benefit from doing things the old way, where there might be opportunity to reach a better optimum if you aim for a different way. Maybe sensors should be optimized to take thousands of fast exposures rather than a few noise-free long ones, etc?
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All MS needs to do is set up an API for software to register itself for updates. System owners could have full visibility into what is going on, and OK only security updates, or functional updates as well, etc.
MS doesn't need to host any files to do it. Software could just register a URL to obtain updates from, maybe using RSS/etc. MS could also centrally host the update data stream, but not the actual files. They could even charge for the privilege, maybe offering different levels of service (host nothing, host update RSS feed/etc, host it all).
Bottom line is that Windows could certainly use a package manager. Many linux distros create packages even for proprietary apps - they just don't redistribute the actual copyrighted code (prompting for CDs, or having users put the installer in a given place, etc).
Its you that are playing the 'lottery' by sniping, where you hope to snag an item for a given amount, and have the auction close before the other participants can reconsider or react to your bid.
I don't quite see how that is playing the lottery.
Playing the lottery is investing money in something that statistically is guaranteed to lose me money, but there is a very small chance of a big payout.
Sniping is using a tactic that at worst results in me paying what I'd otherwise have been willing to pay, and is likely to result in me paying less.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Sniping is a tax on people who are bad at proxy bidding... :)
Perhaps, or perhaps it is just genetic. Perhaps that is less likely, but you really can't know for sure. I don't see how ordinary kids could reach those kinds of weights otherwise, unless you strapped them down to a table and pumped food into their digestive systems 24x7.
Ok, you've grappled the object. Where do you want to send it?
Sending it down requires a drag chute of some kind. Or it requires just enough delta-v to drop its perigee just a little lower into the atmosphere.
Suppose we had the mother of all factories sitting in equatorial orbit. Suppose your space junk is in a 35 degree orbit. Both objects are traveling at around 27Kkm/h if they're in a relatively low orbit. However, one object is moving 27Kkm/h due east, and one is moving 27Kkm/h 35 degrees north of east. Relative to each other they are moving at thousands of kilometers per hour when they pass each other. To collect the object you need to apply that much of a velocity change to it, which is a huge amount of energy (not quite what it took to launch, but we're getting into that kind of magnitude).
Think of it this way - you're on a racetrack going 200mph. Another car is going 200mph the other way. You want to collect it. How do you do this without massively changing its velocity?
One of the first rules of orbital mechanics is that plane changes are expensive. That's why the shuttle can't visit the ISS and the hubble on the same mission. They're both in similar altitude orbits, but in different planes. The shuttle doesn't have enough fuel to change planes (at least, not that far - and without looking up the numbers that is probably only 10 degrees or so).
Or, you could employ a smarter strategy. Find 35 of those widgets you want, and tell your software to snipe all of them, winning only one (or however many you want). The software will bid on one item at a time in the last 5 mins until you get one.
If you bid on items anyway in the order their auctions end, you don't waste all that much time even if you don't snipe. When that item goes over your max bid, then you bid on an item ending in a day - not in a week. If auctions are a week apart, then you're going to end up waiting a week with any bidding strategy.
The only reasons eBay allows it is because it creates uncertainty, thus encouraging people to bid higher than they really want to (translating into higher prices and more profit for eBay).
No, it encourages them to bid what they REALLY want, not what they think they want.
Face it, you're not going to really get an $800 brand new digital camera for $200, no matter how many auctions you bid on, or what strategy you employ. Sniping might get it for $790 instead of $800, but it is rare for there to be genuine bargains on an auction. Sure, you can get items that aren't in mint condition for less than mint-condition prices, but that isn't a bargain.
Now, if people really did put in their max prices all the time, sniping would end pretty quickly (for the most part). It would add no advantage. However, most people don't actually bid their match, which means sniping involves less competition with other buyers, which means there will always be incentive to do it.
I snipe, and I always set it to my max bid, and I'm always happy when I lose (I usually do), because I set the amount I did because that's what I think the item is worth.
If somebody gets upset because they don't understand proxy bidding, I might suggest that they try going out and buying a lottery ticket instead. That system seems to be designed for them.
If you extend the auction, sniping software will be re-optimized accordingly. You set your max bid, and the sniping software will wait until 2 minutes before the end and bid 1 increment higher max. Then it will wait a day or whatever until it is 2 minutes before the end, and again up the bid unless you're past the max. The buyer doing the sniping doesn't care if the auction runs 3 months, since they're doing this on 300 other items in parallel and one of them will eventually win, at which point they abandon all the others. At no point do they hold more than one winning bid, so they have no real risk. The only person who loses out is the seller, and anybody who actually wanted to win an auction in a timely manner...
Max bid only works if you're willing to risks of paying out the nose for something or you only have a casual interest in getting the item to begin with.
Not at all. You bid what you're willing to pay. If somebody else wins the bid for one cent more, you're happy that they overpaid for it. If you get it for exactly your max, then you got it for what you think it is really worth. If you get it for less, well, that's just great!
If you absolutely have to have the item now, then go buy it from amazon, or bid $100k or something.
However, sniping is clearly a more effective strategy to get items for good prices. Why?
Well, suppose there are 35 listings for a 1GB DIMM that you want. Which one do you bid on? You could bid on all 35, and then end up having to sell 34 of them. Or, you can set up a snipe on all of them and you'll never end up with more than one.
Plus, most people don't actually bid their max, so by sniping you end up with less competition - only those who really do bid their max or who also use sniping. Of course, when sniping you should bid your max on the snipe.
I don't have a problem with it. It only causes problems for people who get upset because they thought they were really going to get some $300 item for only $50 only to find out that this was too good to be true. Well, even if there were sniping they still wouldn't have gotten it.
"I'm not religious at all, but even I know this is the 'correct' interpretation."
This sounds like total bullshit.
Obviously... How can there even be a "correct" interpretation of a sacred text absent some kind of universal standard for truthfulness. How can you accept that there is such a standard, without being "religious?"
No doubt. Still, doesn't make it their phone, which means they can't dictate how it is used.
If they care that much about their data, they wouldn't store it on phones they don't control. They just care about productivity more than they care about their data...
As the other poster hinted at, btrfs is considered the future zfs-like filesystem for linux. In many ways it is superior to zfs, except for the fact that it isn't really production-ready yet. Its potential feature list is very nice.
ZFS is clearly a superior solution RIGHT NOW. In a year, I'm not so sure.
Yup - looking forward to this feature coming out so that my phone is no longer blacklisted.
Of course, the first thing I'll do is disable the feature (have OS report "sure, I'll self destruct" and then ignore any messages received to do so. Ditto with passwords/etc.
If the company wants to own my phone, they're welcome to buy me one... :)
Yup - no longer the good old days when you could just throw immigrants at the problem. I shudder to think how many died digging tunnels under someplace like NYC.
Sure, zoning could be done with less red tape, but much of the cost is out of necessity, unless you don't care about the occasional building collapse.
Yup - if you're under this thing when it decides to turn that could get really interesting. Hope you were planning to get off at that exit... :)
If you'd read that site you'd realize that merely using the initials of our favorite three-letter agency is apparently illegal unless authorized. I feel bad for Fred Beavis Iacocco - maybe they'll give him a license.
I'm not sure which is dumber - that congress would pass a law this stupid, or that somebody would actually try to enforce it...
Worse the rotation rates for each depend on where the instrument is pointing, so you also have to have inputs for that.
Why?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just examine successive images taken from the scope, look for drift, and then correct for drift? Sure, the first 5 shots you take will be streaky, but it would very quickly learn.
Most likely any system controlling an azimuth mount would know where the scope is and where it wants to point anyway.
Sure, it would be useless except as part of a computer-automated observation system. However, if you do have a computer-automated observation system why pay all that money for equipment that is optimized to simplify non-computerized observation?
I think that if you're looking for concepts, youtube is a great place to look. If you're looking for execution, it is a lousy place to look. Plus, if you do actually find anything you want to keep you get to try to extract the FLV and extract its audio track so that you can listen to it on something other than your web browser. What fun - especially if you have to transcode it (either to another format (lossy), or to FLAC (lots of space and most players don't support it))...
I agree with the audiophile bit, but I do shoot RAW for everything (casual or not). The reason is bit depth - JPEG is limited to 8-bits (at least, in almost all implementations of it - there is no reason you couldn't compress at 16-bits using the same technique). With RAW I get all 12 bits that my sensor captures. That means that marginal photos are much easier to rescue in post-processing.
I'd actually argue that studio portraits/etc are where you need RAW the least. In controlled conditions you can get the perfect exposure up-front, and then you don't need to clean it up so much after-the-fact. However, if somebody is paying you for shots it seems silly to let 0.2cents of disk space keep you from capturing everything you can.
When I shoot photos of family events/etc, they are almost always candid shots. If I capture a nice moment and the exposure locked onto a window in the background, I'm not going to ask everybody to line up and pose like models laughing or whatever while I tweak my shutter. If I have a 12-bit image, that gives me 4 stops more light in the shadows when I clean it up.
For a properly-exposed image, however, I have no expectation to be able to see the quality difference between a 12-bit RAW and any reasonably-sized 8-bit JPEG. The disk savings are considerable obviously - that JPEG is easily 10% or less the size of the RAW.
If I actually processed all my photos after taking them I might convert final images (and a copy of a bare-bones-processed RAW) to JPEG only and discard originals. However, I tend to only go back and process images later (I'm not selling them or anything like that), so I tend to just keep the RAW files around.
Trust me, you're far more likely to get away with not having an ID in the hills of Kentucky than boarding a spacecraft...
Maybe AFTER we terraform mars that might be an option. Actually, I'm not sold on terraforming, just living in orbit in space stations is probably more sensible - AFTER the technology exists to allow this to be done cost-effectively.
Hadn't thought about that. However, if you take lots of short exposures and combine them, you could correct for the field rotation. At very high magnifications you could still get rotation during even a short exposure I guess.
Part of me wants to suggest just adding a third axis to the mount (rotation). I guess that would depend on the relative cost of building that motor. I suspect it might depend quite a bit on the weight supported by the mount - for a very heavy telescope it might be cheaper to rotate it than to build an equatorial mount (especially close to the equator where basically you're hanging the whole telescope sideways).
Disclaimer - I'm but no means a seasoned amateur astronomer - I have interest, but I don't actually own a telescope at the moment unless you count my DSLR. :)
I'm not one to suggest that eliminating ALL subsidies is going to be practical. Sometimes it just makes more sense to have treasury write a check than to figure out who to send the bill.
However, some externalities aren't hard at all to deal with.
Oil cleanup is simple - just tariff oil to pay for it. Ditto for wars in the Middle East.
It isn't uncommon around major cities - and the poster above apparently works in the NYC metro area. However, most people would just move - especially if they work at CompUSA of all places (I have to assume it was at a warehouse or office building or something - I'd never commute 65 miles to a retail store unless I literally owned it).
Most people in a typical suburban area dive 5-10 miles to work. Generally too far to bike, but something that only takes 20-30min. Once you get over the 30 minute mark you cross a threshold. The one hour mark is a very big threshold and most people will find some reason to move at that point.
Well, the causal relationship isn't 100% clear, but it seems likely to me that if so much money wasn't available to go to college that colleges would make do with less (or face bankruptcy).
Suppose the most you could borrow for college was $4k/yr, in total (including parent loans/etc). This would mean that most people would either have to attend a college that costs not much more than this, or not attend college at all. This increases the demand for inexpensive schools, and decreases the demand for expensive schools. The market supply will adjust accordingly.
Sure, you might not get as much for a $20k education, but I've yet to be convinced that you get a whole lot more for a $150k education. Students graduating college today as undergrads don't seem to really know anything I didn't know graduating 15 years ago, but in inflation-adjusted dollars they're paying a LOT more for their education. They aren't really any more well-rounded either, or whatever term is used to justify the lack of tangible outcomes in education.
Hence the question as to why taxpayers should be subsidizing the cars in the first place, if the people who buy them can afford them without subsidy?
Stuff like this makes me think that we're really missing some opportunities in amateur astronomy. Computers and software have the potential ability to revolutionize how much of it is done.
Why do you need an equatorial mount in the first place, when a computer can do the math to emulate this with an azimuthal mount? Why futz with calibration and guide scopes, when the computer can just analyze every shot from the main scope and calculate drift in near-realtime?
It seems like much of the equipment is optimized to gain the most benefit from doing things the old way, where there might be opportunity to reach a better optimum if you aim for a different way. Maybe sensors should be optimized to take thousands of fast exposures rather than a few noise-free long ones, etc?
My point was that it should have been built so that things like gyros are replaceable, or that they don't break.
As far as launching robots goes - it is a LOT cheaper to launch a robot than a shuttle.
The cost of necessary repairs should of course be factored into the decision to launch the thing in the first place.
In any case, the decision to junk the Hubble and launch an entirely new scope seems to already have been made. :)