Eliminating diseases is laudable. But what do you do when you're the President of a poor nation in the middle of an epidemic and a non-profit with a seemingly bottomless budget comes along and says 'we'll buy you enough vaccine for your entire population, but the companies that produce it won't let us send it to you unless you sign a treaty with the USA that protects US patents in your country'. Most of the time, you sign, because even though the treaty will harm your economy and increase your dependence on foreign aid and make it harder for local businesses to succeed, the alternative is to stand up in front of your people and explain why you're willing to let them die.
The B&MGF has a history of doing this. Coincidentally, the portfolios of the Foundation's biggest backers have benefitted considerably from this spread of US IP laws.
I know a couple of people (not counting people I know that work at MSR) that have them and they seem to like them. The Metro UI is actually not completely terrible on a touchscreen device (though Microsoft's attempt to make a UI that works well on small touchscreens and large non-touch monitors has been a disaster). I don't think I'd buy one, but they don't seem too bad (once you get beyond the fact that Microsoft still puts the buttons the wrong way around in every single dialog box in the entire OS).
Yes it is. Pumpkin Tart, however, is open at the top. The same is true for a sweet potato tart. American English's rush to reduce the number of words is reminiscent of Newspeak.
An old PC is probably not worth it, if you're keeping it powered all of the time. A PC-Engines APU2 board will use 6-10W and cost around $100. An old PC will use 50-100W and cost $0. Power costs a little over 1$/W/year, so after one to two years you've paid more in power for the old PC than the TCO for the newer board.
The PC-Engines and Soekris boards are designed to be used as routers and do a pretty good job. They're low power (7W or so in heavy use), and typically have multiple GigE connections and either WiFi on board or miniPCI slots for WiFi and boot from Compat Flash. They fit nicely in a 6" square case and will happily run either a full OS or something more appliance-focused like pfSense. I ran an older one for years without issues.
That's a dumb theory considering everyone and their mom believes that Trump will kill off TPP. It's practically the only thing he has said he will do that people actually believe he will do.
As with the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK, there are two kinds of people in the general population when it comes to TPP: Those that are against it and those that haven't heard of it. The latter group is a lot larger. If there's something that will make the second group happy, it will more than offset doing something that will make the first group unhappy. And Trump can always smile and say 'well, you know, I was against TPP when Crooked Hillary was behind it, but we've made some changes and the new one is a lot better. A lot of the people who were moaning about it, they hadn't read it, and I hadn't read it. Now I know what it says, and now that we've removed the bits that Crooked Hillary really liked, now we can pass it and it will make America great again.'
Technically, we have a written, but not codified constitution.
1. Brexit: Cameron just 'randomly' "CHOSE" majority (50%+1) as the requirement for Brexit
Nope, he didn't choose anything. Unlike the previous referendum, there was nothing in the act about what would happen if it passed, which was part of the problem.
There was no provision in the bill stating requirements for either side to win, nor what happened if they did. As a result, the referendum has no more legal force than an opinion poll. That's not a problem with not having a codified constitution (the US, for example, has no provisions for referenda in its constitution, so would be in a similar situation if a poorly worded referendum act passed in Congress), that's a problem with politicians not thinking through the consequences of their actions. If you have a solution for that problem, most of the world would be interested in hearing it...
2. Scottish Independence vote... again... just randomly made up rules at the time by the PM to decide things
This referendum was held because it was an election promise by the party that won the majority (if memory serves, in fact all) of the seats representing Scotland.
The Queen can just DISSOLVE Parliament whenever she wants... and force new elections
That's technically true, but not really relevant as it would trigger a constitutional crisis if it ever did happen (as I recall, Australia and Canada have similar clauses in their constitutions). As of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, the government can no longer call a general election with a simple vote and a majority of one of the MPs that bother to turn up. That's largely a superficial distinction though, because a general election can be triggered by a vote of no confidence, which requires a simple majority.
This nonsense that can't even be challenged in court because there is no such thing as a "First Amendment" in the UK
This can be challenged in court, and almost certainly will be (I know of one challenge that's already been launched, there will no doubt be others). It's likely to be in violation of the ECHR, so can be challenged in all of the way up to the European Court of Human Rights. In this respect, the UK is luckier than the USA, because to bring a case to overturn a law in the USA, you must show someone who has been harmed by the law in question. In the UK, laws can be challenged on the basis that they permit hypothetical harm and the judiciary can require that they be amended to avoid that hypothetical from becoming reality. This is particularly important in cases like this, where it's very difficult to prove harm because the evidence is classified and exempt from FOIA requests because of national security.
Carl Sagan wrote (I think in Demon Haunted World) that as a government consultant and having top secret clearance that he never saw anything that led him to believe that the government was hiding anything to do with UFOs.
Even if his clearance would have been adequate to see such evidence (top secret clearance doesn't mean that you can see everything that's classified top secret, it just means that you can see anything for which you can demonstrate a need to know), having the clearance would have prevented him from talking about it. Edward Snowden is a far more compelling argument: given that the FBI is far less secretive than the NSA, do you really think that they'd have managed to keep it a secret without someone walking out with disks full of evidence and dumping them in the public? UFO conspiracy theories that depend on FBI competence never seem credible.
It's not just that. Police don't just have to be beyond reproach, they have to be seen to be beyond reproach. A police force can't do its job without the consent and assistance of the general population and that assistance only comes when the police are trusted. They need to jump on anything that erodes that trust: corrupt police officers need to suffer harsh penalties and be disavowed by the establishment.
His point is that there aren't really any oil companies left anymore. Most of the 'big oil' companies are now fairly diversified energy companies. Fusion would be great for them, because it has very large capital costs, but huge return on investment, meaning that only companies with experience in power systems and a lot of spare capital will be in a good place to be first movers. They wouldn't want to kill this, they'd want to own it and be the first to provide electricity in the kinds of quantities promised by fusion.
I'm in my 50s, and I've been hearing that practical fusion generators were only 10-15 years off since I was a little nerdling
There was an article a few years back that put these in perspective. They pointed out that N years in the future really means $M dollars more spending in the future and that these predictions have been quite consistent: if we'd kept funding at the anticipated rate in the '60s, we might have working fusion already.
From one device, you're right. From a few tens of thousands or more, it does, and the costs of storing it all on the server add up very quickly. Even if it's only 9.6Kb/s (enough for telephony), ten thousand users adds up to around 100MB/s, or about 7.7 TB/day. With a million users, that's a pretty difficult cost to justify.
Typically, these things use a very low-power DSP to recognise the pattern of plosives and sonorants that match the trigger word. They keep a very small ring buffer of audio and wake up a more power-hungry chip if there's a possible match. They won't record all of the audio, because it would be too power hungry and they won't stream it all to a remote server because the bandwidth costs would be too high.
And California would be sucking pretty badly without Silicon Valley too.
Without Silicon Valley, California would still have Hollywood, which adds a lot to the state's economy. California would look pretty bad if you took out San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their surrounding areas, but most states would look pretty bad if you took away 75% of their population.
My understanding is most server farms are connected to dedicated nuclear power plants anyway, so power consumption isn't an issue. Heat dissipation? Yeah, that might be an issue.
Heat and power are the same issue. The conservation of energy means that power in is power out, and the power out is heat that needs to be dissipated. A rule of thumb for data centres is that every dollar you pay in electricity for the computers, you need to pay another dollar in electricity for cooling. If you want high density, then you hit hard limits in the amount of heat that you can physically extract (faster fans hit diminishing returns quickly). This is why AMD's presence in the server room went from close to 100% to close to 0%: Intel was much better at low power.
Intels problem is that it cannot sell FAB time because they are vertically integrated
This is true. Intel will fab chips for other people, but they've had very few customers because everyone knows that the priority customer at Intel fabs is Intel and if yields are lower than expected it won't be Intel chips that get delayed.
Intel builds a FAB and runs its next gen chips off of it for a few years, then they are stuck looking for something to do with the FAB when it is no longer current-gen
This is simply not true. Slashdot likes to think of Intel as a a CPU vendor, but that's actually quite a small part of their business. They make a lot of other kinds of chip and a great many of these don't require the latest and greatest fab technology. This has always been a big part of their advantage over AMD: they have products that will use the fab for 10+ years, so they can amortise the construction costs over that long a period.
TSMC's revenue is now approaching Intel's, and unlike Intel they can keep all their FABs busy making money, so the outlook for Intel is grim without a serious restructuring, which they are doing (see recent massive layoffs, and bullshit marketing about their new "cloud strategy")
This is the important part and is where the ARM ecosystem has an advantage over Intel. No single processor vendor has to compete head-to-head with Intel. As long as the total size of the ecosystem is large enough, the foundries can invest in process improvements.
They may not do as well in the mobile and Server spaces
When you put it like that, it doesn't sound too bad. Until you realise that mobile is the largest overall market segment, and that mobile and server are both the highest-margin and fastest-growing segments of the market.
AMD had a unique market opportunity to build up a good manufacturing base w/ quality fabs for their CPUs, but didn't. Intel gave top priority to their fabs, and are the standard
AMD spun off their fabs for precisely this reason. Building fabs is insanely expensive and the only way to do is to amortise the cost over a lot of chips. Even at its peak, Intel was producing 4-5 times as many CPUs as AMD and had a load of lower-end products (e.g. network interfaces) that they'd start using the fabs for once they were a generation old. There was absolutely no way for AMD to compete head to head with Intel in fab technology, because they couldn't get the economies of scale.
This does; however, highlight just how bad Intel is at CPU design. AMD has been able to achieve rough parity for decades (and been ahead a couple of times, with the original Athlons and Opterons) in spite of always being at least one process generation behind in fabrication technology.
Linked lists are just traditionally implemented linked lists. Hash tables are just traditionally implemented hash tables
Linked lists suck for caches, but hash tables don't have to. There's a trend for libraries to provide things like hopscotch hash tables as the default hash table implementation and these are very much cache aware. The real problem is the trend towards languages that favour composition by reference rather than by inclusion, which means that you do a lot of pointer chasing, which is very bad for both caches and modern pipelines.
I think that this is less of a problem in Paris, but it's crazy in some other places. I used to live in Swansea, and for the last few years I lived there the cost of a day ticket was less than most fares (which the drivers knew, so they'd give you the day pass if you asked for most things). At £2.30/day, it wasn't too bad, but for 3-4 of you it was often cheaper to get a taxi. We went back a few months ago and it was cheaper for one person to get a taxi for shortish hops than to take the bus and the cost of the day tickets had gone up enough that it wasn't worth it.
The city council had spent millions remodelling the city centre to allow larger bendy busses when I was there. I never saw one more than 50% full and apparently a year or two ago they discontinued them. If they'd spent the same amount of money on more frequent, subsidised, minibuses, treating it as infrastructure that encourages people to do things that raise tax revenue rather than as a profit centre, then they'd have had far more people using public transport. Instead, privately owned bus companies have made a lot of money and it's now at a point where it's cheaper to drive than to take the bus.
Every week I drive to the supermarket and pick up 20-30 kg of stuff[*].
Why do you do this? I haven't done a big supermarket shop in person for over 10 years. It takes 10-20 minutes to drive each way, an hour wandering around the shop, I have to queue for the checkouts, and it's just a horrible experience. All of the major supermarket chains deliver and it takes about 10-20 minutes to do the shop online (5 minutes for a routine shop where I'm just adding stuff from my favourites) and then it's delivered to my door, by a van that's delivering to a dozen other people on the way.
I'm doing pretty well just to walk through the store and COLLECT the stuff. And no, nobody will deliver it, even if I had two pennies to rub together to pay them with.
Delivery from most supermarkets here is free and even from the rest it's far cheaper than the cost of driving there, even if you don't factor in the cost of your time.
I thought the game looked okay (especially for a one-hour thing), but then I saw what he'd actually had to do. The things that were done for him:
Drawing the game board.
Collision detection between ball and player, goal, and walls
The bounce logic.
Events delivered for the buttons.
The mechanic for introducing a new ball into the game.
The score management.
This is like those lego sets that have about half a dozen pieces and can be quickly assembled into a single design of spaceship. Yes, sure, you've built something, but there was little creativity or effort involved. It's not a bad learning tool (and for something that expects people with no programming experience to get something done in an hour, it's fine) but if he doesn't realise how much harder all of the pre-defined bits were to write than the simple logic for gluing them all together then he's now dangerously ignorant.
There was a lawsuit against Apple for the original iPod for a similar reason. Steve Jobs was mostly deaf, so insisted that he be able to hear the sound, so the maximum volume was loud enough to be dangerous. Airline in-flight entertainment systems are the worst: they give you crappy headphones so that you have to turn the volume to max to hear anything if you use them, but if you buy a decent set of noise-cancelling ones then you want the volume down at around 20-40%. This is all fine, until they do an announcement, when they pause the movie and slam the volume up to 100% with no warning.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of jobs that would be quite fun if you worked for a company that didn't have to do more than approximately break even.
Right, because I take photos of everyone I know using their computer...
Eliminating diseases is laudable. But what do you do when you're the President of a poor nation in the middle of an epidemic and a non-profit with a seemingly bottomless budget comes along and says 'we'll buy you enough vaccine for your entire population, but the companies that produce it won't let us send it to you unless you sign a treaty with the USA that protects US patents in your country'. Most of the time, you sign, because even though the treaty will harm your economy and increase your dependence on foreign aid and make it harder for local businesses to succeed, the alternative is to stand up in front of your people and explain why you're willing to let them die.
The B&MGF has a history of doing this. Coincidentally, the portfolios of the Foundation's biggest backers have benefitted considerably from this spread of US IP laws.
I know a couple of people (not counting people I know that work at MSR) that have them and they seem to like them. The Metro UI is actually not completely terrible on a touchscreen device (though Microsoft's attempt to make a UI that works well on small touchscreens and large non-touch monitors has been a disaster). I don't think I'd buy one, but they don't seem too bad (once you get beyond the fact that Microsoft still puts the buttons the wrong way around in every single dialog box in the entire OS).
Hmm, Pumpkin Pie isn't fully enclosed in pastry.
Yes it is. Pumpkin Tart, however, is open at the top. The same is true for a sweet potato tart. American English's rush to reduce the number of words is reminiscent of Newspeak.
An old PC is probably not worth it, if you're keeping it powered all of the time. A PC-Engines APU2 board will use 6-10W and cost around $100. An old PC will use 50-100W and cost $0. Power costs a little over 1$/W/year, so after one to two years you've paid more in power for the old PC than the TCO for the newer board.
The PC-Engines and Soekris boards are designed to be used as routers and do a pretty good job. They're low power (7W or so in heavy use), and typically have multiple GigE connections and either WiFi on board or miniPCI slots for WiFi and boot from Compat Flash. They fit nicely in a 6" square case and will happily run either a full OS or something more appliance-focused like pfSense. I ran an older one for years without issues.
That's a dumb theory considering everyone and their mom believes that Trump will kill off TPP. It's practically the only thing he has said he will do that people actually believe he will do.
As with the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK, there are two kinds of people in the general population when it comes to TPP: Those that are against it and those that haven't heard of it. The latter group is a lot larger. If there's something that will make the second group happy, it will more than offset doing something that will make the first group unhappy. And Trump can always smile and say 'well, you know, I was against TPP when Crooked Hillary was behind it, but we've made some changes and the new one is a lot better. A lot of the people who were moaning about it, they hadn't read it, and I hadn't read it. Now I know what it says, and now that we've removed the bits that Crooked Hillary really liked, now we can pass it and it will make America great again.'
UK (AFAIK) doesn't have a written constitution
Technically, we have a written, but not codified constitution.
1. Brexit: Cameron just 'randomly' "CHOSE" majority (50%+1) as the requirement for Brexit
Nope, he didn't choose anything. Unlike the previous referendum, there was nothing in the act about what would happen if it passed, which was part of the problem. There was no provision in the bill stating requirements for either side to win, nor what happened if they did. As a result, the referendum has no more legal force than an opinion poll. That's not a problem with not having a codified constitution (the US, for example, has no provisions for referenda in its constitution, so would be in a similar situation if a poorly worded referendum act passed in Congress), that's a problem with politicians not thinking through the consequences of their actions. If you have a solution for that problem, most of the world would be interested in hearing it...
2. Scottish Independence vote... again... just randomly made up rules at the time by the PM to decide things
This referendum was held because it was an election promise by the party that won the majority (if memory serves, in fact all) of the seats representing Scotland.
The Queen can just DISSOLVE Parliament whenever she wants... and force new elections
That's technically true, but not really relevant as it would trigger a constitutional crisis if it ever did happen (as I recall, Australia and Canada have similar clauses in their constitutions). As of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, the government can no longer call a general election with a simple vote and a majority of one of the MPs that bother to turn up. That's largely a superficial distinction though, because a general election can be triggered by a vote of no confidence, which requires a simple majority.
This nonsense that can't even be challenged in court because there is no such thing as a "First Amendment" in the UK
This can be challenged in court, and almost certainly will be (I know of one challenge that's already been launched, there will no doubt be others). It's likely to be in violation of the ECHR, so can be challenged in all of the way up to the European Court of Human Rights. In this respect, the UK is luckier than the USA, because to bring a case to overturn a law in the USA, you must show someone who has been harmed by the law in question. In the UK, laws can be challenged on the basis that they permit hypothetical harm and the judiciary can require that they be amended to avoid that hypothetical from becoming reality. This is particularly important in cases like this, where it's very difficult to prove harm because the evidence is classified and exempt from FOIA requests because of national security.
Carl Sagan wrote (I think in Demon Haunted World) that as a government consultant and having top secret clearance that he never saw anything that led him to believe that the government was hiding anything to do with UFOs.
Even if his clearance would have been adequate to see such evidence (top secret clearance doesn't mean that you can see everything that's classified top secret, it just means that you can see anything for which you can demonstrate a need to know), having the clearance would have prevented him from talking about it. Edward Snowden is a far more compelling argument: given that the FBI is far less secretive than the NSA, do you really think that they'd have managed to keep it a secret without someone walking out with disks full of evidence and dumping them in the public? UFO conspiracy theories that depend on FBI competence never seem credible.
It's not just that. Police don't just have to be beyond reproach, they have to be seen to be beyond reproach. A police force can't do its job without the consent and assistance of the general population and that assistance only comes when the police are trusted. They need to jump on anything that erodes that trust: corrupt police officers need to suffer harsh penalties and be disavowed by the establishment.
His point is that there aren't really any oil companies left anymore. Most of the 'big oil' companies are now fairly diversified energy companies. Fusion would be great for them, because it has very large capital costs, but huge return on investment, meaning that only companies with experience in power systems and a lot of spare capital will be in a good place to be first movers. They wouldn't want to kill this, they'd want to own it and be the first to provide electricity in the kinds of quantities promised by fusion.
I'm in my 50s, and I've been hearing that practical fusion generators were only 10-15 years off since I was a little nerdling
There was an article a few years back that put these in perspective. They pointed out that N years in the future really means $M dollars more spending in the future and that these predictions have been quite consistent: if we'd kept funding at the anticipated rate in the '60s, we might have working fusion already.
From one device, you're right. From a few tens of thousands or more, it does, and the costs of storing it all on the server add up very quickly. Even if it's only 9.6Kb/s (enough for telephony), ten thousand users adds up to around 100MB/s, or about 7.7 TB/day. With a million users, that's a pretty difficult cost to justify.
Typically, these things use a very low-power DSP to recognise the pattern of plosives and sonorants that match the trigger word. They keep a very small ring buffer of audio and wake up a more power-hungry chip if there's a possible match. They won't record all of the audio, because it would be too power hungry and they won't stream it all to a remote server because the bandwidth costs would be too high.
And California would be sucking pretty badly without Silicon Valley too.
Without Silicon Valley, California would still have Hollywood, which adds a lot to the state's economy. California would look pretty bad if you took out San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their surrounding areas, but most states would look pretty bad if you took away 75% of their population.
My understanding is most server farms are connected to dedicated nuclear power plants anyway, so power consumption isn't an issue. Heat dissipation? Yeah, that might be an issue.
Heat and power are the same issue. The conservation of energy means that power in is power out, and the power out is heat that needs to be dissipated. A rule of thumb for data centres is that every dollar you pay in electricity for the computers, you need to pay another dollar in electricity for cooling. If you want high density, then you hit hard limits in the amount of heat that you can physically extract (faster fans hit diminishing returns quickly). This is why AMD's presence in the server room went from close to 100% to close to 0%: Intel was much better at low power.
Intels problem is that it cannot sell FAB time because they are vertically integrated
This is true. Intel will fab chips for other people, but they've had very few customers because everyone knows that the priority customer at Intel fabs is Intel and if yields are lower than expected it won't be Intel chips that get delayed.
Intel builds a FAB and runs its next gen chips off of it for a few years, then they are stuck looking for something to do with the FAB when it is no longer current-gen
This is simply not true. Slashdot likes to think of Intel as a a CPU vendor, but that's actually quite a small part of their business. They make a lot of other kinds of chip and a great many of these don't require the latest and greatest fab technology. This has always been a big part of their advantage over AMD: they have products that will use the fab for 10+ years, so they can amortise the construction costs over that long a period.
TSMC's revenue is now approaching Intel's, and unlike Intel they can keep all their FABs busy making money, so the outlook for Intel is grim without a serious restructuring, which they are doing (see recent massive layoffs, and bullshit marketing about their new "cloud strategy")
This is the important part and is where the ARM ecosystem has an advantage over Intel. No single processor vendor has to compete head-to-head with Intel. As long as the total size of the ecosystem is large enough, the foundries can invest in process improvements.
They may not do as well in the mobile and Server spaces
When you put it like that, it doesn't sound too bad. Until you realise that mobile is the largest overall market segment, and that mobile and server are both the highest-margin and fastest-growing segments of the market.
AMD had a unique market opportunity to build up a good manufacturing base w/ quality fabs for their CPUs, but didn't. Intel gave top priority to their fabs, and are the standard
AMD spun off their fabs for precisely this reason. Building fabs is insanely expensive and the only way to do is to amortise the cost over a lot of chips. Even at its peak, Intel was producing 4-5 times as many CPUs as AMD and had a load of lower-end products (e.g. network interfaces) that they'd start using the fabs for once they were a generation old. There was absolutely no way for AMD to compete head to head with Intel in fab technology, because they couldn't get the economies of scale.
This does; however, highlight just how bad Intel is at CPU design. AMD has been able to achieve rough parity for decades (and been ahead a couple of times, with the original Athlons and Opterons) in spite of always being at least one process generation behind in fabrication technology.
Linked lists are just traditionally implemented linked lists. Hash tables are just traditionally implemented hash tables
Linked lists suck for caches, but hash tables don't have to. There's a trend for libraries to provide things like hopscotch hash tables as the default hash table implementation and these are very much cache aware. The real problem is the trend towards languages that favour composition by reference rather than by inclusion, which means that you do a lot of pointer chasing, which is very bad for both caches and modern pipelines.
The city council had spent millions remodelling the city centre to allow larger bendy busses when I was there. I never saw one more than 50% full and apparently a year or two ago they discontinued them. If they'd spent the same amount of money on more frequent, subsidised, minibuses, treating it as infrastructure that encourages people to do things that raise tax revenue rather than as a profit centre, then they'd have had far more people using public transport. Instead, privately owned bus companies have made a lot of money and it's now at a point where it's cheaper to drive than to take the bus.
Every week I drive to the supermarket and pick up 20-30 kg of stuff[*].
Why do you do this? I haven't done a big supermarket shop in person for over 10 years. It takes 10-20 minutes to drive each way, an hour wandering around the shop, I have to queue for the checkouts, and it's just a horrible experience. All of the major supermarket chains deliver and it takes about 10-20 minutes to do the shop online (5 minutes for a routine shop where I'm just adding stuff from my favourites) and then it's delivered to my door, by a van that's delivering to a dozen other people on the way.
I'm doing pretty well just to walk through the store and COLLECT the stuff. And no, nobody will deliver it, even if I had two pennies to rub together to pay them with.
Delivery from most supermarkets here is free and even from the rest it's far cheaper than the cost of driving there, even if you don't factor in the cost of your time.
There was a lawsuit against Apple for the original iPod for a similar reason. Steve Jobs was mostly deaf, so insisted that he be able to hear the sound, so the maximum volume was loud enough to be dangerous. Airline in-flight entertainment systems are the worst: they give you crappy headphones so that you have to turn the volume to max to hear anything if you use them, but if you buy a decent set of noise-cancelling ones then you want the volume down at around 20-40%. This is all fine, until they do an announcement, when they pause the movie and slam the volume up to 100% with no warning.