Windows XP was still being sold on new PCs until two or three years ago, guy. Those PCs are still perfectly capable of doing most things that most of their users want to do. Why should they dump them just because Microsoft won't support its products?
However zero regulation turns a free market into survival of the fittest with that survivor killing off the rest
Only in socialist fantasy land.
In the real world, there's always a smaller, smarter, hungrier competitor, so the most politically-connected company gets the regulators to write rules that keep them out of the market.
As exemplified by the popularity of Ann Rand conservative political philosophy "looking out for number one"?
Who's Ann Rand?
I'd have thought it was exemplified by the popularity of socialist 'I should have everything for free without working for it' political philosophies. Hard to get more self-centered and greedy than that.
Not that many people will agree with this assessment.
No, I've been thinking that too. The more they try to make Linux like Windows, the less reason there is not to consider other operating systems.
It's certainly true that making startup work reliably with init scripts can be hard: service foo has to start after service bar, which can only start after the network is up, or whatever. But none of the alternatives seem appealing yet.
Except you're then in a circular argument: the purpose of having humans in space is to study humans in space. Why is that important enough to spend $100,000,000,000+ on over the last few decades?
I'm guessing the only reason they got CPU wins for the consoles is because they got the GPU wins for those consoles. And while volumes may be high, the margins will be minimal compared to a desktop CPU sale.
How do you determine 'human influence' without first knowing how the climate changes naturally?
OK, the Climate Change Deniers have their 'Hockey Stick', where the temperature was perfectly flat until EVIL SUVS appeared, but no sensible scientist should take them seriously. Earth's climate has been changing ever since it reached the point where it could sensibly be said to have one.
As Eisenhowr said, in the paragraphs everyone ignores just after he warned of the growing Military-Industrial Complex:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
So long as politicians fund science with taxpayers' money, it will be politicized.
Had Congress protected the solar industry as well as it did a maker of motorcycles, our economy would be a bit stronger.
You don't 'make the economy stronger' by increasing the costs of things people buy. If the Chinese were dumping solar cells below cost price, American companies should have said 'give us all you got' and taken advantage of Chinese stupidity.
You probably think the US government should have kept US RAM manufacturers in business when Asian companies decided to own the RAM market years ago. Now they make a ton of RAM with tiny profit margins, while US companies make CPUs with huge margins.
You 'make the economy stronger' by concentrating on things other countries can't do. Protecting buggy-whip makers makes you weak.
The system has failed because a business charges lower prices for the exact same product than other businesses?
You forget. 'The system' in France doesn't exist to allow people to buy things as cheaply as possible, it exists to keep politically-connected business making fat profits at their expense.
That system will inevitably fail as the people try to sidestep it to avoid handing over their hard-earned income to politically-connected fat cats.
Yes, we all saw that in 1969 when all those competing private corporations sent people on the Moon.
"If we could put a man on the Moon, why can't we put a man on the Moon?"
Only private companies have any chance of sending men to the Moon in the next decade. SpaceX will probably have tourists waiting there to watch the next NASA landing, if they aren't just flying the astronauts there as passengers on what would otherwise be a tourist flight.
Companies don't build such cars because people don't want to buy them when they can buy a Civic for the same price or less.
Sure, in theory you could build a $5,000 electric car, but by the time you've redesigned it to meet global auto construction rules it will cost several times as much.
No, they would decrease, but not because the cars have instantaneous reactions, instead, because the cars would communicate with each other, so that none of them has to react to the one in front breaking.
Yeah, because it's not like a car ever has a mechanical problem or runs into something unexpectedly (like a bad guy dropping a concrete block off a bridge).
It's been a lousy search engine for the last few years ('why give them the five results they asked for when we can give them five million results they didn't?'), so this is only just step down into the steaming pit of suck.
On the other hand, the pollution from the car you drove for 20 years amounts to how much exactly?
Practically nothing.
Probably less than the additional pollution you've caused by cycling along with a queue of a dozen cars running inefficiently in low gears stuck behind as they wait to try to pass you.
I have watched some HD content that showed details that I found to be distracting and preferred lower resolutions.
Old TV shows like Space 1999 are good examples of why HD isnt always better. They were only ever intended to be seen on crappy old 1970s TVs, so at 1920x1080 with a digital signal, you can clearly see the soft focus shots and the true crappiness of the special effects.
1080 to 4K, is "Yeah, I think I can see some improvement....maybe?"
I know plenty of people who really can't see much difference between NTSC and HD. This is one of the reasons why they still watch DVDs, and not Blu-Rays.
They're definitely not going to be rushing out to upgrade their HD TV to 4k.
Sitting 2 feet away from a 42" display makes you a moron unqualified to continue this conversation.
Admit it, you're one of those people who refuse to sit in the front rows of a cinema, and prefers sitting at the back where the screen looks as tiny as your TV seen from your couch.
The humans are OK. It's the bots that stopped me contributing.
'This page does not have the Stupid Crap Policy macro indicating some stupid crap. If this macro is not added in seven days, this page will be deleted. This comment was added by a mindless bot.'
And that, even though the page met all the requirements of having that information in HUMAN-READABLE text on the page. Why bother adding anything when you'll get hassled by some bot every few months to change it again?
Can programmers really not manage to present two different ways of presenting information.
They could, if the web had been designed to separate content from presentation. Then different devices could display the same information in whatever form they thought best.
Oh, hang on, that's what HTML was supposed to do in the first place, until 'web designers' decided they needed the page to look exactly the way they wanted it to look.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been over a decade, guys.
Windows XP was still being sold on new PCs until two or three years ago, guy. Those PCs are still perfectly capable of doing most things that most of their users want to do. Why should they dump them just because Microsoft won't support its products?
However zero regulation turns a free market into survival of the fittest with that survivor killing off the rest
Only in socialist fantasy land.
In the real world, there's always a smaller, smarter, hungrier competitor, so the most politically-connected company gets the regulators to write rules that keep them out of the market.
As exemplified by the popularity of Ann Rand conservative political philosophy "looking out for number one"?
Who's Ann Rand?
I'd have thought it was exemplified by the popularity of socialist 'I should have everything for free without working for it' political philosophies. Hard to get more self-centered and greedy than that.
Not that many people will agree with this assessment.
No, I've been thinking that too. The more they try to make Linux like Windows, the less reason there is not to consider other operating systems.
It's certainly true that making startup work reliably with init scripts can be hard: service foo has to start after service bar, which can only start after the network is up, or whatever. But none of the alternatives seem appealing yet.
Except you're then in a circular argument: the purpose of having humans in space is to study humans in space. Why is that important enough to spend $100,000,000,000+ on over the last few decades?
I'm guessing the only reason they got CPU wins for the consoles is because they got the GPU wins for those consoles. And while volumes may be high, the margins will be minimal compared to a desktop CPU sale.
When Windows breaks, it's because I installed an update that went horribly wrong.
When Linux breaks, it's because I installed an update that went horribly wrong.
The real problem is of course how anybody in power can step so far outside of common human decency and not be called out on it.
Who watches the watchmen?
In this world, no-one. Which is why they don't care.
How do you determine 'human influence' without first knowing how the climate changes naturally?
OK, the Climate Change Deniers have their 'Hockey Stick', where the temperature was perfectly flat until EVIL SUVS appeared, but no sensible scientist should take them seriously. Earth's climate has been changing ever since it reached the point where it could sensibly be said to have one.
How do we keep politics out of this?
By eliminating all taxpayer funding of 'science'.
As Eisenhowr said, in the paragraphs everyone ignores just after he warned of the growing Military-Industrial Complex:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
So long as politicians fund science with taxpayers' money, it will be politicized.
Had Congress protected the solar industry as well as it did a maker of motorcycles, our economy would be a bit stronger.
You don't 'make the economy stronger' by increasing the costs of things people buy. If the Chinese were dumping solar cells below cost price, American companies should have said 'give us all you got' and taken advantage of Chinese stupidity.
You probably think the US government should have kept US RAM manufacturers in business when Asian companies decided to own the RAM market years ago. Now they make a ton of RAM with tiny profit margins, while US companies make CPUs with huge margins.
You 'make the economy stronger' by concentrating on things other countries can't do. Protecting buggy-whip makers makes you weak.
Maybe you can buy a few books less, but in exchange some workers can actually feed their families and also buy books.
They could feed their families more easily if prices weren't kept artificially high to keep buggy-whip makers in business.
That's freaking brilliant. Now I can set up a multinational in the EU that does all its business outside the EU, and not have to pay any tax!
The system has failed because a business charges lower prices for the exact same product than other businesses?
You forget. 'The system' in France doesn't exist to allow people to buy things as cheaply as possible, it exists to keep politically-connected business making fat profits at their expense.
That system will inevitably fail as the people try to sidestep it to avoid handing over their hard-earned income to politically-connected fat cats.
"Also, central planning doesn't work."
Yes, we all saw that in 1969 when all those competing private corporations sent people on the Moon.
"If we could put a man on the Moon, why can't we put a man on the Moon?"
Only private companies have any chance of sending men to the Moon in the next decade. SpaceX will probably have tourists waiting there to watch the next NASA landing, if they aren't just flying the astronauts there as passengers on what would otherwise be a tourist flight.
Companies don't build such cars because people don't want to buy them when they can buy a Civic for the same price or less.
Sure, in theory you could build a $5,000 electric car, but by the time you've redesigned it to meet global auto construction rules it will cost several times as much.
No, they would decrease, but not because the cars have instantaneous reactions, instead, because the cars would communicate with each other, so that none of them has to react to the one in front breaking.
Yeah, because it's not like a car ever has a mechanical problem or runs into something unexpectedly (like a bad guy dropping a concrete block off a bridge).
It's been a lousy search engine for the last few years ('why give them the five results they asked for when we can give them five million results they didn't?'), so this is only just step down into the steaming pit of suck.
On the other hand, the pollution from the car you drove for 20 years amounts to how much exactly?
Practically nothing.
Probably less than the additional pollution you've caused by cycling along with a queue of a dozen cars running inefficiently in low gears stuck behind as they wait to try to pass you.
I have watched some HD content that showed details that I found to be distracting and preferred lower resolutions.
Old TV shows like Space 1999 are good examples of why HD isnt always better. They were only ever intended to be seen on crappy old 1970s TVs, so at 1920x1080 with a digital signal, you can clearly see the soft focus shots and the true crappiness of the special effects.
NTSC to 720 or 1080 was "stunning."
1080 to 4K, is "Yeah, I think I can see some improvement....maybe?"
I know plenty of people who really can't see much difference between NTSC and HD. This is one of the reasons why they still watch DVDs, and not Blu-Rays.
They're definitely not going to be rushing out to upgrade their HD TV to 4k.
Sitting 2 feet away from a 42" display makes you a moron unqualified to continue this conversation.
Admit it, you're one of those people who refuse to sit in the front rows of a cinema, and prefers sitting at the back where the screen looks as tiny as your TV seen from your couch.
JJ Abrams is a douche, for picking someone else, instead of the authentic deal, here.
To be fair, he'd have to have actually watched 'Star Trek' to know what Scotty looked and sounded like.
The humans are OK. It's the bots that stopped me contributing.
'This page does not have the Stupid Crap Policy macro indicating some stupid crap. If this macro is not added in seven days, this page will be deleted. This comment was added by a mindless bot.'
And that, even though the page met all the requirements of having that information in HUMAN-READABLE text on the page. Why bother adding anything when you'll get hassled by some bot every few months to change it again?
Can programmers really not manage to present two different ways of presenting information.
They could, if the web had been designed to separate content from presentation. Then different devices could display the same information in whatever form they thought best.
Oh, hang on, that's what HTML was supposed to do in the first place, until 'web designers' decided they needed the page to look exactly the way they wanted it to look.