You don't survive widespread nuclear war without some pretty drastic measures. If the options were between martial law and severe curtailing of rights, or the complete collapse of society, I know which one I would pick.
Except Lucas didn't direct or write Empire, and he didn't direct or solely write Jedi. He came up with the story, and then other people wrote the screenplay and directed it. I think George Lucas isn't too bad at coming up with plot, but he's not so great at writing or directing. We've all heard the stories about how Star Wars was originally a rather terrible film that was saved in editing, but compare the quality of the dialog between Star Wars and Empire. There's a huge improvement between the two...
Many of my problems with Into Darkness had to do with problems with the film itself, rather than as a Star Trek fan. Now, I've still got problems with it as a Star Trek film, but more on the level that they poorly copied something existing instead of coming up with something new. I think that the elements that they copied didn't work because they were trying to force many of them in for the purpose of making references rather than to make the film work. Even then, that's not really a problem because I'm a fan, it's a problem because of lack of originality, something not unique to Trek.
My main problems, though, were that they decided to fill the film with too much deus ex machina. It's like they wrote themselves into corners, and then decided to just do crazy stuff to resolve it that didn't make much sense, or that seem like they didn't think through the plot consequences. Like the whole "Did they just cure death with the magic blood? So death isn't a problem going forward?" issue.
Musk has stated that due to lack of geographic obstructions, there could be up to an order of magnitude less hops in space while passing the signal from satellite to satellite. Of course, that assumes that the routing latency in the satellites is similar to a traditional router.
Let me know when I can call up NASA for a ride to space that I can afford on the salary of a software developer and then I'll care about the negative implications of the private sector developing ultra-cheap spaceflight.
These are low-earth orbit satellites. Musk says he's expecting latency around 20-30ms. That's much higher than DSL or cable are capable of, but should be low enough for twitch gaming.
The satellites aren't very far away, and light travels much faster in vacuum than through fibre optic cable.
So, having never seen the original episode that they're continuing, you don't really have any basis for comparison, then, do you? You've just seen a bunch of spinoff stuff that didn't live up to the original.
One satellite per $10 million launch (what Virgin is claiming with their network), or ten satellites per $60 million launch (what SpaceX is actually doing with Iridium NEXT). Which one is costing less per satellite?
The 5% was including both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Their marketshare has tanked in the recent past, and it's likely that people were only using them because they were free. Once free alternatives like Google Docs came around that better integrated with other stuff users were doing, the free desktop office suites took a big hit.
The Office Open XML format (ending in.docx for word documents) is supported by Microsoft Office 2007 (released in 2006) and newer, as well as OpenOffice. In order to find a release of Office that doesn't support it, you'd have to go back to Office 2003.
Unfortunately, as of a little over a year ago, Office 2003 was still in use by ~28% of businesses. Of course, there's overlap, so 85% also used Office 2010.
Notably, OpenOffice's marketshare has crashed. The same statistics show that it was at 13% usage in 2011, and 5% usage in 2013. It seems to have been largely replaced by cloud solutions, since things like Google Docs has the primary feature that most people used OpenOffice for: the price.
Proprietary formats can't be universally judged as good or bad. There are plenty of counter-examples in both directions. For example, the lack of DRM in the Atari 2600 killed the videogame industry by allowing a huge flood of low quality games to flood the market, and the presence of DRM in the NES revived it by allowing Nintendo to act as a gatekeeper to stop that from happening.
It has landing legs. When it hits at a 45 degree angle (that's a lot more than "slightly wrong"), the legs on that side break and the engine assembly smashes into the landing pad.
SpaceX is putting six Orbcomm G2 satellites in orbit per F9 launch, and they're putting ten Iridium NEXT satellites in orbit per F9 launch. Neither set of launches seem to be anywhere close to mass limited, which would indicate possible cost saving measures when building the satellites (you can build them a bit heavier if it saves money or increases on-orbit endurance).
What the actual limit per launch is, I don't know, but it's demonstrably much higher than two satellites. I suspect it would be more limited by the number of times the second stage can reliably relight, or how much delta v each satellite is capable of after release.
They just announced today that the rocket that will be putting these things up will cost $10 million and have a LEO payload capacity of 225 kg... making it one of the most expensive launchers in the world, nearly ten times the cost per kilo of SpaceX. How they expect this to work with such insanely high costs is beyond me.
I don't pretend to know much about the American tax system, but I use TurboTax for my taxes in Quebec (where I have the privilege of basically doing my tax twice because the provincial and federal government each have complete sets of tax forms to fill out, but only in Quebec). TurboTax standard costs $18 and is what around 82% of people use (based on the number of reviews for each version). But if I didn't want to use TurboTax, there are something like 20 other tax programs out there, many of them cheaper, some of them free.
So, what's the big deal? Don't like what TurboTax charges, use something else.
RAM that doesn't get wiped when I lose power? Well, modern operating systems basically simulate that anyhow. Who actually turns off a laptop instead of just closing the lid to sleep it? And even when you do turn something like Windows off, these days it actually just goes to sleep or hibernates in the background. There are also diminishing returns for throwing more RAM at problems, so going from the current, say, 16GB to 1TB isn't going to change much. Loading games, for example, still would take time, because the system still has to decompress stuff. Going from SSDs that can do 100MB/s to SSDs that can do 500MB/s didn't reduce load times by 80%.
1) per-byte accessing doesn't matter for secondary storage, because your filesystem is still going to want to write things in blocks. You'll still want to have logical chunks of data to have checksums for and such.
2) Modern SSDs already do the whole hybrid approach, mixing SLC and MLC/TLC. And I'm not talking enterprise drives, I'm talking the cheapest budget drives. Samsung, for example, calls this "TurboWrite", and they include it in their "EVO" drives, which are some of the lowest cost-per-gig drives on the market. They allocate a small portion of each TLC drive as SLC, and all the writes hit the SLC first. This provides both a nice speed boost (since SLC erases so much faster), and a nice reduction in write amplification (since SLC has an effectively unlimited lifespan from a practical standpoint).
So, replacing that SLC with RRAM would certainly provide a performance improvement, but it wouldn't be a huge difference.
10 years ago? Sure, that's in the ballpark of when consumer SSDs started to become a thing. Intel getting into the game 7 years ago blew it open, but they weren't the first. So ten years ago, you wouldn't have been crazy for following Moore's Law and making a prediction that flash-based storage arrays would eventually make sense.
In terms of legacy disks being as dead in 10 years as tape is today, there are a few problems with that. First is that tape isn't dead, it's still in widespread use in enterprise (it's still the best medium for corporate backups), and second is that there are enough new developments in the works for keep magnetic discs competitive with flash for years.
I'm not saying that it'll be the case forever, but saying that legacy HDDs will be dead in 10 years sounds like a radical prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't survive widespread nuclear war without some pretty drastic measures. If the options were between martial law and severe curtailing of rights, or the complete collapse of society, I know which one I would pick.
That was his entire point.
Except Lucas didn't direct or write Empire, and he didn't direct or solely write Jedi. He came up with the story, and then other people wrote the screenplay and directed it. I think George Lucas isn't too bad at coming up with plot, but he's not so great at writing or directing. We've all heard the stories about how Star Wars was originally a rather terrible film that was saved in editing, but compare the quality of the dialog between Star Wars and Empire. There's a huge improvement between the two...
Many of my problems with Into Darkness had to do with problems with the film itself, rather than as a Star Trek fan. Now, I've still got problems with it as a Star Trek film, but more on the level that they poorly copied something existing instead of coming up with something new. I think that the elements that they copied didn't work because they were trying to force many of them in for the purpose of making references rather than to make the film work. Even then, that's not really a problem because I'm a fan, it's a problem because of lack of originality, something not unique to Trek.
My main problems, though, were that they decided to fill the film with too much deus ex machina. It's like they wrote themselves into corners, and then decided to just do crazy stuff to resolve it that didn't make much sense, or that seem like they didn't think through the plot consequences. Like the whole "Did they just cure death with the magic blood? So death isn't a problem going forward?" issue.
That's not bad Trek, that's bad film-making.
Musk has stated that due to lack of geographic obstructions, there could be up to an order of magnitude less hops in space while passing the signal from satellite to satellite. Of course, that assumes that the routing latency in the satellites is similar to a traditional router.
I was referring to the mirror episodes, not the series in general.
Let me know when I can call up NASA for a ride to space that I can afford on the salary of a software developer and then I'll care about the negative implications of the private sector developing ultra-cheap spaceflight.
These are low-earth orbit satellites. Musk says he's expecting latency around 20-30ms. That's much higher than DSL or cable are capable of, but should be low enough for twitch gaming.
The satellites aren't very far away, and light travels much faster in vacuum than through fibre optic cable.
So, having never seen the original episode that they're continuing, you don't really have any basis for comparison, then, do you? You've just seen a bunch of spinoff stuff that didn't live up to the original.
I found episode 1 a bit iffy, but episode 3 (the mirror-mirror continuation) was much better. I haven't had a chance to watch episode 2 yet.
One satellite per $10 million launch (what Virgin is claiming with their network), or ten satellites per $60 million launch (what SpaceX is actually doing with Iridium NEXT). Which one is costing less per satellite?
While true, a good chunk of the PC market and all of the mobile market is going through DRM protected solutions such as Steam.
The 5% was including both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Their marketshare has tanked in the recent past, and it's likely that people were only using them because they were free. Once free alternatives like Google Docs came around that better integrated with other stuff users were doing, the free desktop office suites took a big hit.
I prefer Tassimo :P
The Office Open XML format (ending in .docx for word documents) is supported by Microsoft Office 2007 (released in 2006) and newer, as well as OpenOffice. In order to find a release of Office that doesn't support it, you'd have to go back to Office 2003.
Unfortunately, as of a little over a year ago, Office 2003 was still in use by ~28% of businesses. Of course, there's overlap, so 85% also used Office 2010.
Notably, OpenOffice's marketshare has crashed. The same statistics show that it was at 13% usage in 2011, and 5% usage in 2013. It seems to have been largely replaced by cloud solutions, since things like Google Docs has the primary feature that most people used OpenOffice for: the price.
Proprietary formats can't be universally judged as good or bad. There are plenty of counter-examples in both directions. For example, the lack of DRM in the Atari 2600 killed the videogame industry by allowing a huge flood of low quality games to flood the market, and the presence of DRM in the NES revived it by allowing Nintendo to act as a gatekeeper to stop that from happening.
It has landing legs. When it hits at a 45 degree angle (that's a lot more than "slightly wrong"), the legs on that side break and the engine assembly smashes into the landing pad.
SpaceX is putting six Orbcomm G2 satellites in orbit per F9 launch, and they're putting ten Iridium NEXT satellites in orbit per F9 launch. Neither set of launches seem to be anywhere close to mass limited, which would indicate possible cost saving measures when building the satellites (you can build them a bit heavier if it saves money or increases on-orbit endurance).
What the actual limit per launch is, I don't know, but it's demonstrably much higher than two satellites. I suspect it would be more limited by the number of times the second stage can reliably relight, or how much delta v each satellite is capable of after release.
They just announced today that the rocket that will be putting these things up will cost $10 million and have a LEO payload capacity of 225 kg... making it one of the most expensive launchers in the world, nearly ten times the cost per kilo of SpaceX. How they expect this to work with such insanely high costs is beyond me.
They had only dug a little more than a quarter of the ring when it was cancelled.
Tesla's comparable car isn't the Model S, it's the Model 3. It does not promise double the range, and it will also only be out in two years.
I don't pretend to know much about the American tax system, but I use TurboTax for my taxes in Quebec (where I have the privilege of basically doing my tax twice because the provincial and federal government each have complete sets of tax forms to fill out, but only in Quebec). TurboTax standard costs $18 and is what around 82% of people use (based on the number of reviews for each version). But if I didn't want to use TurboTax, there are something like 20 other tax programs out there, many of them cheaper, some of them free.
So, what's the big deal? Don't like what TurboTax charges, use something else.
RAM that doesn't get wiped when I lose power? Well, modern operating systems basically simulate that anyhow. Who actually turns off a laptop instead of just closing the lid to sleep it? And even when you do turn something like Windows off, these days it actually just goes to sleep or hibernates in the background. There are also diminishing returns for throwing more RAM at problems, so going from the current, say, 16GB to 1TB isn't going to change much. Loading games, for example, still would take time, because the system still has to decompress stuff. Going from SSDs that can do 100MB/s to SSDs that can do 500MB/s didn't reduce load times by 80%.
Two points to make:
1) per-byte accessing doesn't matter for secondary storage, because your filesystem is still going to want to write things in blocks. You'll still want to have logical chunks of data to have checksums for and such.
2) Modern SSDs already do the whole hybrid approach, mixing SLC and MLC/TLC. And I'm not talking enterprise drives, I'm talking the cheapest budget drives. Samsung, for example, calls this "TurboWrite", and they include it in their "EVO" drives, which are some of the lowest cost-per-gig drives on the market. They allocate a small portion of each TLC drive as SLC, and all the writes hit the SLC first. This provides both a nice speed boost (since SLC erases so much faster), and a nice reduction in write amplification (since SLC has an effectively unlimited lifespan from a practical standpoint).
So, replacing that SLC with RRAM would certainly provide a performance improvement, but it wouldn't be a huge difference.
10 years ago? Sure, that's in the ballpark of when consumer SSDs started to become a thing. Intel getting into the game 7 years ago blew it open, but they weren't the first. So ten years ago, you wouldn't have been crazy for following Moore's Law and making a prediction that flash-based storage arrays would eventually make sense.
In terms of legacy disks being as dead in 10 years as tape is today, there are a few problems with that. First is that tape isn't dead, it's still in widespread use in enterprise (it's still the best medium for corporate backups), and second is that there are enough new developments in the works for keep magnetic discs competitive with flash for years.
I'm not saying that it'll be the case forever, but saying that legacy HDDs will be dead in 10 years sounds like a radical prediction.