I haven't enough experience [with FOSS] to make a proper judgement.
But that didn't stop you from spewing bullshit, anyway.
I, on the other hand, deal with both on a daily basis. Closed software not only costs far more up front than Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), but it costs far more to maintain as well. While I suppose there can be closed software that is more cost effective than FOSS, I have yet to run into it during my 32 years in business.
The retraining costs to my customers are neglible, as most of the significant FOSS systems are either self-explanatory for even semi-literate people within their respective fields, or don't require an investment in up-front training; but rather features and subsystems are learned as the need arises. I find that it's the proprietary software that requires most of the retraining and expensive staff, as online help for proprietary software tends to be obtuse and/or expensive.
I don't really know what I'm going to do when they fuck up Windows 7 just as badly [as Windows 10] or try to [deprecate] it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
You're at that bridge right now. It's time to start switching to Linux, while you still have some breathing room, and not wait until you're in a crisis.
Windows 7 is already deprecated, though support hasn't been complete pulled yet (but all the copies of Windows 7 that will ever be provided to retailers are already in play). And ReactOS will NEVER reach API parity with Windows 7/10+. WINE has been chasing the Windows API for decades, with spotty success at best.
I switched to Linux full time back in 1999, and haven't used Windows at home since then. I weathered the ups and downs of my transition, learning as I went along, but it didn't take long before the Linux way (I settled on Kubuntu) of doing things seemed more natural than the Windows way of doing things.
But I didn't wait until I was at a do-or-die confrontation with life. I switched while I still had plenty of time to learn my new surroundings. This is where you are right now. Don't wait until you are under pressure. Start now by using the same Free and Open Source Software on Windows as you will be using under Linux (to the extent that it is available on Windows). Then, when you switch, you won't be under extreme pressure to replace your software and operating system at the same time.
So in other words... from a small picture of the earth viewed from orbit....
Only if Google already has a high resolution picture of your house with the UPS package already sitting on your doorstep.
The algorithm does NOT enhance pixelated images in any meaningful way. It is only able to match a pixelated image with an already existing high resolution image of the same thing, and only by scaling the high resolution image down to a pixelated form suitable for comparison with the existing pixelated image.
The only thing that makes this at all interesting is that pattern matching algorithms are a bit better than they were in the 80's when every teenage programmer with a home computer thought of the same thing. It has been an introductory programming exercise in computer graphics for decades.
It's been like that since the Internet went mainstream in the 1990's, and even when the Internet was opened up to Universities before going mainstream. The overall proportion of useless forum idiots has probably stayed relatively constant for the last 20+ years (and probably even before Web forums overtook Usenet).
The problem probably seems worse now because the Internet population is much larger than it was back then, making the absolute numbers larger; but the ratio of idiots to the entire population is probably in the same ballpark as back then.
The answer has always been the same: you must ignore them, and don't feed the trolls. At least on Usenet, we had the twit filter that would allow us to list the people we wanted to automatically ignore.
It's going to affect each and everyone of us in subtle and not so subtle ways. It already has.
This statement is like Astrology: so vague that it applies to everything.
Would you mind elaborating on your theme that it's going to hurt us? I'm always open to the possibility that I'm missing something (even something painfully obvious), but I like the idea of gutting the entire H1B Visa program.
The FDA does not evaluate or approve the homeopathic products....
To be fair, the FDA does not evaluate approved pharmaceuticals, either. In the vast majority of cases, the FDA just assumes that the pharmaceutical company is being completely honest about its research and testing, even when it is clearly lying.
Merck is a great example of such a lying company that gets blanket approval by the FDA without any outside verification required.
That being said, not everything labeled as Homeopathic is actually Homeopathic. Hyland's teething tablets, while definitely dangerous, are not Homeopathic since they contain an actual ingredient that is known to have an effect (for better or worse) on the human body.
Hyland's big problem is false advertising regarding ingredient quantity and quality.
Building codes in the U.S. vary by jurisdiction (State, County, City). In many places, a homeowner is allowed to do his own work (given that the proper permits are bought), subject to inspection by local authorities upon completion.
[Internet technology is] something to stand in sheer awe of, not World of Warcraft and Photoshop.
I agree entirely. NONE of those seven things on the list rise to the level of software heroics. The Internet, on the other hand, changed the world in a way that no other software even remotely approaches.
While this Computer History Museum exhibit's purpose is laudable, its choices for the exhibit are shamefully ridiculous.
Don't worry, 3D will come back. And then it will go away again.
You hit the nail on the head. Of course 3D TV will return, because a new generation of ignorant executives will rise through the ranks of media companies, and a new generation of ignorant consumers will have disposable income. Neither of those groups will have any grasp on history, and will repeat the cycle over and over again (failing each time) until someone creates an ACTUAL 3D experience.
That said, my entire previous paragraph will be moot if VR/AR becomes mainstream. That has a far, far better chance of providing a 3D experience than any type of TV.
they tend to be shipped with unskippable junk that you have to watch every single time, before watching the material you are interested in.
On the PS3, press Square to get to the main menu and play the movie. On VLC, right click, select Main Menu, play movie. In both cases, the crap is skipped.
The streaming sites' viewing catalog is paltry compared to what's on DVD. I like streaming stuff, too, but DVD's are so superior to streaming that it boggles my mind how so many supposedly tech-savvy people on this site completely miss the many pro's:
1) Watching a DVD doesn't count against my bandwidth, while streaming does:
2) The perceived quality diffference of DVD vs. streaming and Blu-ray is so minor as to be nearly unnoticeable (except in cases were the streaming is altered due to bandwidth constriction). I have one Blu-ray movie (Avatar), and it is questionable, at best, as to whether it's any better than the DVD version. The two are so close as to not matter. Blu-ray hype has proven to be unfounded as far as I can tell.
3) Ripping a DVD to my media server is easy, and I can watch it for far longer than it will remain in a streaming catalog.
4) If my Internet goes down, I can still watch my DVD's.
5) My Internet speeds are still good if each member of my family wants to watch something different at the same time on different devices.
6) Each member of my family can watching something different at the same time on different devices.
7) No one is logging and tracking my DVD viewing patterns.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. While streaming is nice to augment my DVD collection, it has some severe downsides.
Hate to say it, but a bad idea in search of a problem...
If quality phones were $30 or so, I would agree with you. But considering how absurdly expensive a quality phone is, modular parts would be fantastic. The problem here isn't in the concept, but rather in the execution.
With my PC, I can easily replace: 1) Memory 2) Motherboard 3) Power supply 4) Storage 5) Input devices 6) Output devices 7) CPU
I would love to be able to cheaply and easily upgrade or replace the parts of my phone (or tablet) that have become obsolete (or have been damaged or destroyed) without having to buy an entirely new device. These things should all have pluggable interconnects to make replacement at least as easy as it is with a PC.
Perhaps LG's designers have reached the limits of their abilities, but the concept is very good.
Take this with a great big block of salt, as this comes from the Great Vaccine Liar, Merck, which was caught red handed lying about the effectiveness and deadly side effects of its MMR vaccine.
If you or I drove down a California street without a valid driver's license, the penalty would be anything from a ticket (first time offense, no injuries to others) to an arrest (multiple offender, injuring people) and possible incarceration.
If the standard penalties were applied to whichever Uber executive authorized the law-breaking, then Uber would come into compliance rather quickly.
...[Microsoft] made legal commitments not to assert any patents....
And you have been suckered in by Microsoft's double-speak. Microsoft promised, at best, to not sue you for patent violations when you use a particular version of certain parts of.Net Core. They reserve the right to sue you later for using a slightly different version of those same parts of.Net Core, and to sue you for using the parts of.Net Core not covered by the patent pledge. They're just waiting for you to become dependent on their product before springing the trap some years down the road.
This is the same old Microsoft. They've just changed their sheep skins.
I don't understand why people are so outraged. This is the very nature of cloud services -- you store your information on someone else's servers, depending on their whims to keep that information accessible. There are no guarantees that the information you put on someone's servers today will still be there tomorrow.
What I find the most stunning is that some people are putting, "...valuable resources that users have created and entrusted to you to retain and keep online" on someone else's servers, and expecting that it will still be there when they need it.
I wonder if those companies factor that into their total cost of running Windows.
Business: "So, Windows licensing for our organization is $25,000 this year. Our Windows liability extortion costs due to Windows insecurity are $40,000 this year, and an extra $15,000 a year for security software that pretends to plug Windows' massive blunders."
Microsoft: "So, can we tell the press that your total cost of ownership for Windows is twenty dollars?"
Business: "WTF?!"
Microsoft: "Here's a cool twenty dollar bill if you let us lie."
Slashdot Mirror
If it has commercials, I wouldn't watch it even if it were free.
I haven't enough experience [with FOSS] to make a proper judgement.
But that didn't stop you from spewing bullshit, anyway.
I, on the other hand, deal with both on a daily basis. Closed software not only costs far more up front than Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), but it costs far more to maintain as well. While I suppose there can be closed software that is more cost effective than FOSS, I have yet to run into it during my 32 years in business.
The retraining costs to my customers are neglible, as most of the significant FOSS systems are either self-explanatory for even semi-literate people within their respective fields, or don't require an investment in up-front training; but rather features and subsystems are learned as the need arises. I find that it's the proprietary software that requires most of the retraining and expensive staff, as online help for proprietary software tends to be obtuse and/or expensive.
I don't really know what I'm going to do when they fuck up Windows 7 just as badly [as Windows 10] or try to [deprecate] it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
You're at that bridge right now. It's time to start switching to Linux, while you still have some breathing room, and not wait until you're in a crisis.
Windows 7 is already deprecated, though support hasn't been complete pulled yet (but all the copies of Windows 7 that will ever be provided to retailers are already in play). And ReactOS will NEVER reach API parity with Windows 7/10+. WINE has been chasing the Windows API for decades, with spotty success at best.
I switched to Linux full time back in 1999, and haven't used Windows at home since then. I weathered the ups and downs of my transition, learning as I went along, but it didn't take long before the Linux way (I settled on Kubuntu) of doing things seemed more natural than the Windows way of doing things.
But I didn't wait until I was at a do-or-die confrontation with life. I switched while I still had plenty of time to learn my new surroundings. This is where you are right now. Don't wait until you are under pressure. Start now by using the same Free and Open Source Software on Windows as you will be using under Linux (to the extent that it is available on Windows). Then, when you switch, you won't be under extreme pressure to replace your software and operating system at the same time.
But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching a speed race between cars with no drivers?
This question answers itself if framed within the context of the racing genre:
"But the real question is how the fans are going to feel about watching paint dry, knowing that the paint wasn't applied by a real person?"
Having the cars operated by software rather than by human drivers doesn't change anything.
I got called away before I was finished, so I posted prematurely.
4) They all have invalidating prior art, which the patent office and the patent court uniformly ignore.
Which of the three patents is a shining example and why?
ALL of them.
1) They are all overly broad.
2) They all describe a mathematical process which is not patentable.
3) They are all obvious.
This is another shining example of why software patents need to be abolished.
So in other words... from a small picture of the earth viewed from orbit....
Only if Google already has a high resolution picture of your house with the UPS package already sitting on your doorstep.
The algorithm does NOT enhance pixelated images in any meaningful way. It is only able to match a pixelated image with an already existing high resolution image of the same thing, and only by scaling the high resolution image down to a pixelated form suitable for comparison with the existing pixelated image.
The only thing that makes this at all interesting is that pattern matching algorithms are a bit better than they were in the 80's when every teenage programmer with a home computer thought of the same thing. It has been an introductory programming exercise in computer graphics for decades.
Here is the only link that matters. Pointing to the Verge is pointless.
It's been like that since the Internet went mainstream in the 1990's, and even when the Internet was opened up to Universities before going mainstream. The overall proportion of useless forum idiots has probably stayed relatively constant for the last 20+ years (and probably even before Web forums overtook Usenet).
The problem probably seems worse now because the Internet population is much larger than it was back then, making the absolute numbers larger; but the ratio of idiots to the entire population is probably in the same ballpark as back then.
The answer has always been the same: you must ignore them, and don't feed the trolls. At least on Usenet, we had the twit filter that would allow us to list the people we wanted to automatically ignore.
In Linux's case, it's mostly user interface....
Care to elaborate? I use Kubuntu, and see nothing resembling copying a Mobile interface.
It's going to affect each and everyone of us in subtle and not so subtle ways. It already has.
This statement is like Astrology: so vague that it applies to everything.
Would you mind elaborating on your theme that it's going to hurt us? I'm always open to the possibility that I'm missing something (even something painfully obvious), but I like the idea of gutting the entire H1B Visa program.
The FDA does not evaluate or approve the homeopathic products....
To be fair, the FDA does not evaluate approved pharmaceuticals, either. In the vast majority of cases, the FDA just assumes that the pharmaceutical company is being completely honest about its research and testing, even when it is clearly lying.
Merck is a great example of such a lying company that gets blanket approval by the FDA without any outside verification required.
That being said, not everything labeled as Homeopathic is actually Homeopathic. Hyland's teething tablets, while definitely dangerous, are not Homeopathic since they contain an actual ingredient that is known to have an effect (for better or worse) on the human body.
Hyland's big problem is false advertising regarding ingredient quantity and quality.
Building codes in the U.S. vary by jurisdiction (State, County, City). In many places, a homeowner is allowed to do his own work (given that the proper permits are bought), subject to inspection by local authorities upon completion.
[Internet technology is] something to stand in sheer awe of, not World of Warcraft and Photoshop.
I agree entirely. NONE of those seven things on the list rise to the level of software heroics. The Internet, on the other hand, changed the world in a way that no other software even remotely approaches.
While this Computer History Museum exhibit's purpose is laudable, its choices for the exhibit are shamefully ridiculous.
...and there would be tax incentives and tax credits for companies building high-speed networks.
Translation: "Let's give billions more taxpayer dollars to the worthless telecoms/cable companies."
Don't worry, 3D will come back. And then it will go away again.
You hit the nail on the head. Of course 3D TV will return, because a new generation of ignorant executives will rise through the ranks of media companies, and a new generation of ignorant consumers will have disposable income. Neither of those groups will have any grasp on history, and will repeat the cycle over and over again (failing each time) until someone creates an ACTUAL 3D experience.
That said, my entire previous paragraph will be moot if VR/AR becomes mainstream. That has a far, far better chance of providing a 3D experience than any type of TV.
they tend to be shipped with unskippable junk that you have to watch every single time, before watching the material you are interested in.
On the PS3, press Square to get to the main menu and play the movie. On VLC, right click, select Main Menu, play movie. In both cases, the crap is skipped.
The streaming sites' viewing catalog is paltry compared to what's on DVD. I like streaming stuff, too, but DVD's are so superior to streaming that it boggles my mind how so many supposedly tech-savvy people on this site completely miss the many pro's:
1) Watching a DVD doesn't count against my bandwidth, while streaming does:
2) The perceived quality diffference of DVD vs. streaming and Blu-ray is so minor as to be nearly unnoticeable (except in cases were the streaming is altered due to bandwidth constriction). I have one Blu-ray movie (Avatar), and it is questionable, at best, as to whether it's any better than the DVD version. The two are so close as to not matter. Blu-ray hype has proven to be unfounded as far as I can tell.
3) Ripping a DVD to my media server is easy, and I can watch it for far longer than it will remain in a streaming catalog.
4) If my Internet goes down, I can still watch my DVD's.
5) My Internet speeds are still good if each member of my family wants to watch something different at the same time on different devices.
6) Each member of my family can watching something different at the same time on different devices.
7) No one is logging and tracking my DVD viewing patterns.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. While streaming is nice to augment my DVD collection, it has some severe downsides.
Hate to say it, but a bad idea in search of a problem...
If quality phones were $30 or so, I would agree with you. But considering how absurdly expensive a quality phone is, modular parts would be fantastic. The problem here isn't in the concept, but rather in the execution.
With my PC, I can easily replace:
1) Memory
2) Motherboard
3) Power supply
4) Storage
5) Input devices
6) Output devices
7) CPU
I would love to be able to cheaply and easily upgrade or replace the parts of my phone (or tablet) that have become obsolete (or have been damaged or destroyed) without having to buy an entirely new device. These things should all have pluggable interconnects to make replacement at least as easy as it is with a PC.
Perhaps LG's designers have reached the limits of their abilities, but the concept is very good.
Cyanogen died from a terminal disease it contracted when it got into bed with Microsoft.
Take this with a great big block of salt, as this comes from the Great Vaccine Liar, Merck, which was caught red handed lying about the effectiveness and deadly side effects of its MMR vaccine.
If you or I drove down a California street without a valid driver's license, the penalty would be anything from a ticket (first time offense, no injuries to others) to an arrest (multiple offender, injuring people) and possible incarceration.
If the standard penalties were applied to whichever Uber executive authorized the law-breaking, then Uber would come into compliance rather quickly.
...[Microsoft] made legal commitments not to assert any patents....
And you have been suckered in by Microsoft's double-speak. Microsoft promised, at best, to not sue you for patent violations when you use a particular version of certain parts of .Net Core. They reserve the right to sue you later for using a slightly different version of those same parts of .Net Core, and to sue you for using the parts of .Net Core not covered by the patent pledge. They're just waiting for you to become dependent on their product before springing the trap some years down the road.
This is the same old Microsoft. They've just changed their sheep skins.
I don't understand why people are so outraged. This is the very nature of cloud services -- you store your information on someone else's servers, depending on their whims to keep that information accessible. There are no guarantees that the information you put on someone's servers today will still be there tomorrow.
What I find the most stunning is that some people are putting, "...valuable resources that users have created and entrusted to you to retain and keep online" on someone else's servers, and expecting that it will still be there when they need it.
I wonder if those companies factor that into their total cost of running Windows.
Business: "So, Windows licensing for our organization is $25,000 this year. Our Windows liability extortion costs due to Windows insecurity are $40,000 this year, and an extra $15,000 a year for security software that pretends to plug Windows' massive blunders."
Microsoft: "So, can we tell the press that your total cost of ownership for Windows is twenty dollars?"
Business: "WTF?!"
Microsoft: "Here's a cool twenty dollar bill if you let us lie."
Business: "Awesome! You've got a deal!"