They already have one of the most open and functional peering systems for ISPs. So much so that it is your own fault if you are an ISP and netflix is taking a significant chunk of your "real" bandwidth. It costs an ISP almost nothing to deploy a netflix appliance, and there are no licensing fees. A home peering device is so impractical I don't even know where to begin... but if you are streaming more than the last ###### cable feet it is because your isp is stupid.
ISPs are insanely stupid about this, even when they sorta try to get it right... For instance: ATT UVerse DNS (which is not configurable on their provided router) bypasses the ATT hosted CDN and connects me (in Texas) up to Seattle. Switch to google DNS servers, and it will use the local ATT hosted CDN. The tech support people (who don't know what DNS is) swear that it is "optimized for digital TV viewing"
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say this is an intentional hobbling of netflix to make their shitty TV service seem better... but I just don't have that kind of confidence in their competence... since they host a Netflix CDN anyway.
I think they just have no damn idea what they are doing.
I think it is also reasonable to mention that by population most "Christians" belong to sects that admit the scientific fact that evolution is reality. Catholicism is a large group, the largest Christian group, and they have accepted evolution as fact, that isn't a recent thing. There are many many groups that worship the Abrahamic god without willful ignorance on this subject.
This isn't Christians vs Science... this is "the craziest of the Christians" vs Science
Both sides will remain unchanged by the debate; but somewhere in Ken Ham's intended audience there is a child just hungry enough to latch on to a morsel of truth and doubt. This will be the child's foundation for escape from that crippling dogmatic world.
This is those children's first and maybe only opportunity for scientific education.
I hope every new earth denialist logs in and lets their children watch as Ken Ham "wins."
no matter what happens, this is a victory for rationality
I think he is obsessing about his charity more and more, and even a ceremonial roll is too much. Also, leaving the board is like a vote of confidence in Nadalla. "See I had to babysit Steve 'developers-developers-developers' Balmer, but this new guy is totally fine."
From day 1 roku had a powerful enough SDK that I could make a "channel" to front-end my locally served content with a picture based menu so my kids could use it...
Roku has some problems (lack of DNLA support) that bug me, but has other problems that bug the wife (Hulu plus sucks on every platform, including roku, but she really believes it is possible to have a device where it works as good as hulu on a computer, I think this is a unicorn)
We are basically willing to try any streaming device that is under 100 dollars, and chromecast was no better than just HDMI-ing my laptop to the TV, since the only sensible/exclusive feature it included was the ability to make a browser window appear on screen, but if it requires a PC in order for chromecast to be worth a damn, well then it is a 50 dollar hdmi cable with added network latency.
I am excited to see the chromecast become more worthwhile.
Anyone with any lick of coding ability is passionate about programming. This is equivalent to hiring an artist to draw logos and saying they must be passionate about art, of course they are, or they wouldn't be an artist.
Compare that to other "less creative" positions... The average call-center person is probably not passionate about call centering.
Consider this:
public String getSum(int numA, int num2) {
if (numA == num2)
{
return "" + numA*2;
}
return ""+(numA + num2);
}
If that was painful for you, congratulations... you are more passionate about programming than 99% of people are about their job.
15% of my customer base uses IE6 or IE7.
not just IE but superbad IE... of course we are business oriented software, which for some reason explains it all... corporate organizations are insanely, dangerously slow at upgrading.
Sometimes our site is run on cash registers and other ancient POS systems... but our "cloud" solution is accessed by IE more than any other browser, and IE6/7 more often than you could possibly imagine.... and it is no simple matter of forcing the customer to upgrade... what are they going to do, re-flash Windows CE and somehow get a decent browser to run on 256 meg of memory?
It is actually less shocking (though still really annoying) that people still use IE6 when you realize how much "modern" stuff you can still do on it. Almost everything in jQuery works, so even fancy active ajax pages are fine, as long as you account for the lack of JSON.stringify and JSON.parse and don't try to use a decent CSS layoyt.
a bajillion mobile devices and home computers that don't make anybody any real money run the latest stuff, but a tiny and extremely profitable segment of the userbase are Microsoft for life, and often, some old and horribly dangerous incarnation of Microsoft...
it uses some kind of "smart routing" I have no idea how it works, but something about peer to peer, bla bla bla... you have no lag with other people on your LAN, but you are still all connected to bnet.
People who demand offline LAN games are either 1) non-customers (people who would only play if they could pirate, so no big loss)
or
2) LAN party operators (this is an actual concern, for paying customers, and is currently hindering the ability of a "smalltime" eSports scene). I assume this has been solved at a pro level, either by holding it at high bandwidth venues, or by some blizzard local server magic not available to your average Joe-6port.
Either way, their online game not supporting offline multiplayer hardly makes them the Metallica of video games.
Ask Millionaires Gooseman (creator of the original Counterstrike mod)
or Garry Newman (Garry's Mod)
or the 2.5 billion dollar corporation: Valve if this is a viable way to do business...
Don't call it a come back, Valve/Steam has been doing it for years.
Because shaving was all but impossible before metal tools that could be sharpened enough to actually shave... copper tools were some 3000 years after this fossil.
I worked for a big corporate overlord for a long time, and for some reason every 3 years or so our cubicle walls got shorter. They started out at 6 feet high, which was great and quiet and semi-private. They got short enough so if you sat up straight and leaned forward, you could barely peak over... which was a little distracting.
The breaking point was when they got lower than the average person's stupid mouth. Then EVERY phone call was basically broadcast across the entire warehouse of an office complex. Seriously, god help you if you are within shouting distance of sales, because you are never ever ever going to get any work done.
As a final insult they shrunk our desks from U shape to L shape, then lowered the cube walls to desk height... so if something rolled off your desk, it could roll down the hall too. It was insanely stupid...
Eventually they just sent all the tech people to work from home... since they had sabotaged our work so much at the office, we might as well take the initial hit on telecommute.
I am all for ruining the office so badly that we no longer regard meat based presence as mandatory, but I wish it could happen faster, rather than the phased "lets ruin everything every 3 years" approach.
It has entropy that has been widely regarded as too high to be gibberish... roughly equivalent to the Latin Vulgate Bible - 1 Kings
On the subject of it being a hoax... The Voynich is a parchment manuscript with many fold-outs, (center cut pieces of parchment were 10 times more expensive than a single leaf), and many expensive inks/dyes. It would have cost a small fortune to create at the time (several years salary for even a skilled bookmaker). If it is a hoax, it was a very well funded one, with no known purpose.
Amazon is like public transportation for "incidentals" In my household and those of my peers, there is no more "run to the store for these few items," it has been replaced with "is it prime?"
Actually California is a special case, and there are several political and economic reasons why Texas is more influential, even though California is bigger.
There are California-centric text books, not just for history - this makes it tough to get the "volume discount" for the rest of the nation.
Texas is one of the few states with a pervasive and separate multi-year state specific history curriculum (throughout your education, you have a "Texas History" class as well as a "History" class). Because of this seperation, "History" books approved in Texas can be used in any state, because the locale specific stuff is an entire separate book.
California and New York have strong unions especially for educators. In Texas, though they exist, Unions are hobbled and have little influence on the board of education, because... conservative. The result is that unilateral decisions are more difficult. It may be more enlightened, but it is a lot more difficult to make a decision when you have to ask someone besides your Minister.
Of California, Texas, and New York... Texas has the lowest spending per pupil. Again, Walmart effect. It is to get your own books if you are able to spend more per pupil than the big 3, but when you have to budget LESS per pupil? you have to buy the cheaper books... the ones Texas bought. CA and NY can insulate themselves from TX textbooks, a few rich smaller states can too... everyone else is on a budget, with either less money or less buying power, or both.
This story is not about textbook selection, but textbook selection is the primary viral decay effect that Texas has on national education, and it is very important.
The problem with Texas textbook selection is that Texas buys its textbooks 4.8m at a time (which is a huge chunk of the textbook market). Publishers cannot afford to lose Texas as a customer, so you get "the walmart effect" - Texas censors national textbooks by approving the one they like, everyone else can pick from the one texas drove the price down on, or they can pay twice as much for a "marginally more correct" textbook.
In this way, Texas can dictate the behavior of national (and even international, to an extent) textbooks, because Texas is giant, organized, and horribly corrupted by the religious reich err, right.
The issue with pubically funded charter schools teaching bullshit mysticism instead of educating children is that charter schools are a convenient back door for this anti-science, conservative consortium to exert its corrupting influence on the texas education system. They are normalizing, perpetuating, and setting legal precident for further fucking over the entire United States education system.
Please care about this. This is important. Our future depends on the nation collectively saying "WTF, Texas"
The lego source code is completely believable in the context of the story IMO. This is a program he used to run the prototype that he built in a cave in a war-torn country. He probably told them "I need a robotics kit" and this was in the bin of crap that they got him. If I was secretly programming an exo-suit in a cave, a mindstorm kit would be a boon. It sends signals based on several kinds of input... what else do you need?
The mindstorm program is a lot more believable than anything state-of-the-art.
There is a kernel of truth there. The 1990s saw a radical re-tooling of our banking infrastructure, especially in home loans (this is where I worked from 1998-2012). Internet transactions allowed banks to outsource, consolidate, and "internetize" things like credit checks (even credit disputes and recoveries), appraisals, surveys, title policies, tax settlement, flood hazard determinations, insurance policies, and even underwriting. By 2005 the large bank I worked for could literally do 100% of the paperwork in 36 seconds (that was the fastest recorded time for all 5 phases while I worked there) once data collection was done on the client side. This was an impossibility before radical adoption of the internet.
30 days and 50 eyeballs would have caught MANY irregularities that slipped through during the subprime heyday. The re-tooling allowed executives free reign to dial in risk to whatever level they wanted, independent of all of the "people" based safety nets in the past. Real people, who are really face to face with a young family aren't going to sell them a foreclosure bomb as eagerly as a system that is told to run at 10% expected default rate will.
So, while widespread subprime exploitation by executive mandate did cause the financial crisis, it is impossible to defeat the conscience of 200,000 employees, but internet enabled lending workflows intentionally had no such safety mechanism.
I heard someone refer to a Lathe as a 3D printer... and my dentist proudly told me that he got a 3D printer for teeth, then showed me his CNC milling machine.
I am just waiting for the swiss army knife "3D printer" pocket knife that allows you to "manually 3D print with Cellulose media"
Slashdot Mirror
They already have one of the most open and functional peering systems for ISPs. So much so that it is your own fault if you are an ISP and netflix is taking a significant chunk of your "real" bandwidth. It costs an ISP almost nothing to deploy a netflix appliance, and there are no licensing fees. A home peering device is so impractical I don't even know where to begin... but if you are streaming more than the last ###### cable feet it is because your isp is stupid.
ISPs are insanely stupid about this, even when they sorta try to get it right... For instance: ATT UVerse DNS (which is not configurable on their provided router) bypasses the ATT hosted CDN and connects me (in Texas) up to Seattle. Switch to google DNS servers, and it will use the local ATT hosted CDN. The tech support people (who don't know what DNS is) swear that it is "optimized for digital TV viewing"
The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say this is an intentional hobbling of netflix to make their shitty TV service seem better... but I just don't have that kind of confidence in their competence... since they host a Netflix CDN anyway.
I think they just have no damn idea what they are doing.
thanks.
They are the organization most likely to be able to wage war on the moon... I am pretty sure that makes 'merka the owner, and NASA the steward.
I think it is also reasonable to mention that by population most "Christians" belong to sects that admit the scientific fact that evolution is reality. Catholicism is a large group, the largest Christian group, and they have accepted evolution as fact, that isn't a recent thing. There are many many groups that worship the Abrahamic god without willful ignorance on this subject.
This isn't Christians vs Science... this is "the craziest of the Christians" vs Science
Both sides will remain unchanged by the debate; but somewhere in Ken Ham's intended audience there is a child just hungry enough to latch on to a morsel of truth and doubt. This will be the child's foundation for escape from that crippling dogmatic world.
This is those children's first and maybe only opportunity for scientific education.
I hope every new earth denialist logs in and lets their children watch as Ken Ham "wins."
no matter what happens, this is a victory for rationality
I think he is obsessing about his charity more and more, and even a ceremonial roll is too much. Also, leaving the board is like a vote of confidence in Nadalla. "See I had to babysit Steve 'developers-developers-developers' Balmer, but this new guy is totally fine."
From day 1 roku had a powerful enough SDK that I could make a "channel" to front-end my locally served content with a picture based menu so my kids could use it...
Roku has some problems (lack of DNLA support) that bug me, but has other problems that bug the wife (Hulu plus sucks on every platform, including roku, but she really believes it is possible to have a device where it works as good as hulu on a computer, I think this is a unicorn)
We are basically willing to try any streaming device that is under 100 dollars, and chromecast was no better than just HDMI-ing my laptop to the TV, since the only sensible/exclusive feature it included was the ability to make a browser window appear on screen, but if it requires a PC in order for chromecast to be worth a damn, well then it is a 50 dollar hdmi cable with added network latency.
I am excited to see the chromecast become more worthwhile.
Anyone with any lick of coding ability is passionate about programming. This is equivalent to hiring an artist to draw logos and saying they must be passionate about art, of course they are, or they wouldn't be an artist.
Compare that to other "less creative" positions... The average call-center person is probably not passionate about call centering.
Consider this:
public String getSum(int numA, int num2) {
if (numA == num2)
{
return "" + numA*2;
}
return ""+(numA + num2);
}
If that was painful for you, congratulations... you are more passionate about programming than 99% of people are about their job.
15% of my customer base uses IE6 or IE7.
not just IE but superbad IE... of course we are business oriented software, which for some reason explains it all... corporate organizations are insanely, dangerously slow at upgrading.
Sometimes our site is run on cash registers and other ancient POS systems... but our "cloud" solution is accessed by IE more than any other browser, and IE6/7 more often than you could possibly imagine.... and it is no simple matter of forcing the customer to upgrade... what are they going to do, re-flash Windows CE and somehow get a decent browser to run on 256 meg of memory?
It is actually less shocking (though still really annoying) that people still use IE6 when you realize how much "modern" stuff you can still do on it. Almost everything in jQuery works, so even fancy active ajax pages are fine, as long as you account for the lack of JSON.stringify and JSON.parse and don't try to use a decent CSS layoyt.
a bajillion mobile devices and home computers that don't make anybody any real money run the latest stuff, but a tiny and extremely profitable segment of the userbase are Microsoft for life, and often, some old and horribly dangerous incarnation of Microsoft...
j/k... please don't sue.
it uses some kind of "smart routing" I have no idea how it works, but something about peer to peer, bla bla bla... you have no lag with other people on your LAN, but you are still all connected to bnet.
People who demand offline LAN games are either
1) non-customers (people who would only play if they could pirate, so no big loss)
or
2) LAN party operators (this is an actual concern, for paying customers, and is currently hindering the ability of a "smalltime" eSports scene). I assume this has been solved at a pro level, either by holding it at high bandwidth venues, or by some blizzard local server magic not available to your average Joe-6port.
Either way, their online game not supporting offline multiplayer hardly makes them the Metallica of video games.
Ask Millionaires Gooseman (creator of the original Counterstrike mod)
or Garry Newman (Garry's Mod)
or the 2.5 billion dollar corporation: Valve if this is a viable way to do business...
Don't call it a come back, Valve/Steam has been doing it for years.
Because shaving was all but impossible before metal tools that could be sharpened enough to actually shave... copper tools were some 3000 years after this fossil.
I worked for a big corporate overlord for a long time, and for some reason every 3 years or so our cubicle walls got shorter. They started out at 6 feet high, which was great and quiet and semi-private. They got short enough so if you sat up straight and leaned forward, you could barely peak over... which was a little distracting.
The breaking point was when they got lower than the average person's stupid mouth. Then EVERY phone call was basically broadcast across the entire warehouse of an office complex. Seriously, god help you if you are within shouting distance of sales, because you are never ever ever going to get any work done.
As a final insult they shrunk our desks from U shape to L shape, then lowered the cube walls to desk height... so if something rolled off your desk, it could roll down the hall too. It was insanely stupid...
Eventually they just sent all the tech people to work from home... since they had sabotaged our work so much at the office, we might as well take the initial hit on telecommute.
I am all for ruining the office so badly that we no longer regard meat based presence as mandatory, but I wish it could happen faster, rather than the phased "lets ruin everything every 3 years" approach.
It has entropy that has been widely regarded as too high to be gibberish... roughly equivalent to the Latin Vulgate Bible - 1 Kings
On the subject of it being a hoax... The Voynich is a parchment manuscript with many fold-outs, (center cut pieces of parchment were 10 times more expensive than a single leaf), and many expensive inks/dyes. It would have cost a small fortune to create at the time (several years salary for even a skilled bookmaker). If it is a hoax, it was a very well funded one, with no known purpose.
Amazon is like public transportation for "incidentals" In my household and those of my peers, there is no more "run to the store for these few items," it has been replaced with "is it prime?"
sorry, I was educated in Texas... We weren't taught what "Pubic" meant.
Actually California is a special case, and there are several political and economic reasons why Texas is more influential, even though California is bigger.
There are California-centric text books, not just for history - this makes it tough to get the "volume discount" for the rest of the nation.
Texas is one of the few states with a pervasive and separate multi-year state specific history curriculum (throughout your education, you have a "Texas History" class as well as a "History" class). Because of this seperation, "History" books approved in Texas can be used in any state, because the locale specific stuff is an entire separate book.
California and New York have strong unions especially for educators. In Texas, though they exist, Unions are hobbled and have little influence on the board of education, because... conservative. The result is that unilateral decisions are more difficult. It may be more enlightened, but it is a lot more difficult to make a decision when you have to ask someone besides your Minister.
Of California, Texas, and New York... Texas has the lowest spending per pupil. Again, Walmart effect. It is to get your own books if you are able to spend more per pupil than the big 3, but when you have to budget LESS per pupil? you have to buy the cheaper books... the ones Texas bought. CA and NY can insulate themselves from TX textbooks, a few rich smaller states can too... everyone else is on a budget, with either less money or less buying power, or both.
This story is not about textbook selection, but textbook selection is the primary viral decay effect that Texas has on national education, and it is very important.
The problem with Texas textbook selection is that Texas buys its textbooks 4.8m at a time (which is a huge chunk of the textbook market). Publishers cannot afford to lose Texas as a customer, so you get "the walmart effect" - Texas censors national textbooks by approving the one they like, everyone else can pick from the one texas drove the price down on, or they can pay twice as much for a "marginally more correct" textbook. In this way, Texas can dictate the behavior of national (and even international, to an extent) textbooks, because Texas is giant, organized, and horribly corrupted by the religious reich err, right.
The issue with pubically funded charter schools teaching bullshit mysticism instead of educating children is that charter schools are a convenient back door for this anti-science, conservative consortium to exert its corrupting influence on the texas education system. They are normalizing, perpetuating, and setting legal precident for further fucking over the entire United States education system.
Please care about this. This is important. Our future depends on the nation collectively saying "WTF, Texas"
That doesn't seem like much, I think the average teen sends 200m text messages per day.
I think in many ways, this was the end of "The Future" The space-age ended the day the Challenger exploded.
so you don't use Pinterest, Reddit, Foursquare, Spotify, Adobe, Etsy, IMDB, PBS, Netflix, or Yelp?
Wow. Such internet. Much isolationism. Very consumer.
The lego source code is completely believable in the context of the story IMO. This is a program he used to run the prototype that he built in a cave in a war-torn country. He probably told them "I need a robotics kit" and this was in the bin of crap that they got him. If I was secretly programming an exo-suit in a cave, a mindstorm kit would be a boon. It sends signals based on several kinds of input... what else do you need?
The mindstorm program is a lot more believable than anything state-of-the-art.
There is a kernel of truth there. The 1990s saw a radical re-tooling of our banking infrastructure, especially in home loans (this is where I worked from 1998-2012). Internet transactions allowed banks to outsource, consolidate, and "internetize" things like credit checks (even credit disputes and recoveries), appraisals, surveys, title policies, tax settlement, flood hazard determinations, insurance policies, and even underwriting. By 2005 the large bank I worked for could literally do 100% of the paperwork in 36 seconds (that was the fastest recorded time for all 5 phases while I worked there) once data collection was done on the client side. This was an impossibility before radical adoption of the internet.
30 days and 50 eyeballs would have caught MANY irregularities that slipped through during the subprime heyday. The re-tooling allowed executives free reign to dial in risk to whatever level they wanted, independent of all of the "people" based safety nets in the past. Real people, who are really face to face with a young family aren't going to sell them a foreclosure bomb as eagerly as a system that is told to run at 10% expected default rate will.
So, while widespread subprime exploitation by executive mandate did cause the financial crisis, it is impossible to defeat the conscience of 200,000 employees, but internet enabled lending workflows intentionally had no such safety mechanism.
I heard someone refer to a Lathe as a 3D printer... and my dentist proudly told me that he got a 3D printer for teeth, then showed me his CNC milling machine.
I am just waiting for the swiss army knife "3D printer" pocket knife that allows you to "manually 3D print with Cellulose media"