It's not that supporting the old things slows things down, it's that it doesn't speed things up. It actually does cause some problems, because various things in the X11 protocol use 8-bit fields of which a significant space is used by legacy stuff that no one uses anymore, but that's largely worked around in newer extensions.
If you're in a world where most applications are sending commands like 'draw line from x,y to x1,y1' then X11 network transparency is really fast. At the protocol layer, anyway - if you use xlib then performance will suck unless network latency is very low because it adds a synchronous API on top of an asynchronous protocol (XCB fixes this). Modern applications don't do that, they typically render pixmaps and just have the X server composite them. X11 can still do a reasonable job here, with XDAMAGE, XFIXES, and XRENDER, allowing you to keep most of a pixmap (a Picture, in fact) on the server, update image data in selected parts, and do all of the compositing in the server. The problem is that none of the X11 toolkits actually do this very well. Wayland doesn't solve this at all - it simply says 'well, grab an OpenGL context and send drawing commands'. That works okay - the OpenGL protocol allows you to copy textures to the server (and the GPU) and composite them very fast. The problem is that this approach also works fine in X11, and with X11 you get network transparency when you do it (which works reasonably).
The main criticism I'd have of X11 is that it puts too much state on the server. There is no way, at the X protocol layer (or even in the low-level X libraries) of saying 'disconnect this window from this display, reconnect it here', or 'oh, my X server has crashed, recreate my state on this newly restarted version'. The latter worked fine in BeOS almost 20 years ago and works fine in Windows today. The former worked on NeWS 30 years ago. Both are use cases that I'd love to see addressed for modern devices. The Wayland solution to this is 'write a web app'.
The number for nuclear seems right, as the UK government has agreed to guarantee a price of £89.5/MWh for new nuclear plants, but the current wholesale price for electricity in the UK is £44/MWh (from the same source). Given that that's half the cost of all of the generation mechanisms that you describe, I wonder what most of the power is coming from and noticing that oil is conveniently absent from your list. If oil prices keep going up over the next 10 years, then it looks as if nuclear will become a lot more attractive, which is why the government is guaranteeing the price (they're betting that £90/MWh is going to seem cheap by the time the new plants are online).
The problem is regarding management as a position of importance that people are promoted to. Management is a specialisation, just like accounting or programming. You wouldn't say that a good manager should be promoted to being an accountant or to being a programmer, or that people who are accountants are the most important in the organisation. Manager is an administrative position and should be regarded as such, not as a leadership role that is somehow more important (and worthy of more pay) than the people that they are responsible for. HP did this (long ago) with parallel technical and management tracks. Managers were often less senior than the people that they were managing.
No. RAID isn't better handled at other layers. If you don't know about the filesystem semantics then you need NVRAM or journalling at the block level to avoid the RAID-5 write hole. RAID-Z doesn't have this problem. If you're recovering a failed block-level RAID, then you need to copy all of the data, including unused space. With ZFS RAID (all levels), you only copy the used data. There are numerous other advantages to rearranging the layers, including being a lot more flexible in the provisioning.
It's also a mistake to think of ZFS as a layer. ZFS has three layers: the lowest handles physical disks and presents a linear address space, the middle presents a transactional object store, and the top presents something that looks like a filesystem (or a block device, which is useful for things like VM disk images).
2GB/TB is recommended if you're doing deduplication. That said, performance degrades quite smoothly. I've got a machine with 3x4TB drives in RAID-Z with only 8GB of RAM. Disk performance isn't great, but I mostly access it via WiFi and it's absolutely fine for that. Eventually I'll get a new motherboard for that can handle more than 8GB of RAM...
Wow, you have no idea what blackface is, do you? It's not just putting on makeup to look like you have a black face, it's then doing 'comedy' that is all about stereotypes about black people.
But how many of those sources are actually doing investigative journalism? I'd take one source that has the resources to do real investigation over ten that can barely afford to regurgitate press releases and rely on sponsored articles for their income.
Note that mincabs are less strictly regulated than black cabs, but their prices are regulated, as are various other things (insurance that they must carry, the registration of their vehicles, requirement that the vehicles carry a taxi registration license plate, and so on). Uber is ignoring all of this regulation.
Just saying "legal monopoly" doesn't mean much without details.
Licensed black cabs are the only vehicles that are allowed to be flagged down for in London. They're governed by Hackney Carriage laws in the UK[1] and also by some London-specific laws. Getting a license is relatively cheap (no medallion system), but does require passing a test that checks that has questions like 'what is the fastest route from A to B, assuming that it is rush hour and road X has road works?' There are 'mystery shoppers' who audit the taxi system: they flag down black cabs and take rides and, if the driver does not take the most direct route then they can lose their license. The mystery shoppers have varying ethnicities and manners of dress, and refusing to carry one will also result in a loss of the license. Black Cab drivers all know that if they break the regulations requiring them to carry anyone or try to scam a customer, then there's a chance that the customer that they're scamming may have the power to take their license on the spot.
The distinction between taxi and hackney carriage is increasingly irrelevant. I can't flag down a car owned by Generic Taxi Company #47 that's waiting near where I'm standing, but I can call the telephone number printed on the side from my mobile and have the dispatcher tell me that the car next to me is now assigned to me, and then get in. Before mobile phones were widespread, it was very different - you could only call that kind of taxi if you were near a landline (or used a public call box, which added a fairly significant amount to the cost for shortish trips). Uber and other taxi apps are the next step in this. It's now more convenient to press a couple of buttons on the phone than to flag down a passing cab, but the taxi that you get is not regulated in the same way. Uber attempts to claim that their reputation system and pricing model means that they don't need government regulation.
[1] This has caused some confusion in previous discussions: In the UK, legally speaking, a vehicle that can pick up people who flag them down on the street is called a hackney carriage, any vehicle that carries people for money is a taxi. In common usage, taxi is used for all categories.
I don't see that. Black face is intensely offensive. Big Bang Theory only insults people without a sense of humor who can't laugh at themselves
Blackface is offensive because it insults black people be reinforcing stereotypes that are not really true outside of prejudiced perception. The big bang theory, in contrast, insults geeks by reinforcing stereotypes that are not really true outside of a prejudiced perception. It's therefore completely different and not offensive.
It may also be for airflow. If it is only just in its cooling envelope, then the gap underneath allows more air to flow around it and the curve on the top prevents anything else going on top and so allows the top to work as a heatsink.
Depends on how far away from it you sit. I had a monitor that resolution and could see artefacts at a comfortable desktop distance (it was above and behind my laptop screen. Now I have a 4K display there, and I can only see pixels if I lean forward.
Really? Where on earth do you live? I'm not sure anyone in this country still offers two-year contracts. Most people are either on pre-pay or one month rolling contracts. 18 months is about the longest, and they're rarely much cheaper than the one-month version, so there's little incentive to sign up for them (especially given that you're likely to get a better deal in six months, so being locked in for 18 months doesn't make sense even if it is cheaper at the start).
I learned to always wait for the.1 some time ago. 10.4 had a really nasty bug where, if you used File Vault (home directories were encrypted disk images), everything went fine. You could continue using the system and there were no problems. Until after the first reboot (which is something that typically happens less than once a month). At which point, the OS would be unable to mount your home directory and would give you a new, empty, one. The encrypted disk image containing your home directory was completely unusable. It later transpired that 10.3 could still mount it, so if you had an old bootable image around you could restore the data, but it caused a lot of pain. Apparently no one on Apple's QA team was using File Vault...
and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway. (That's not entirely true, there is still a method to disable this new iOS-style lockdown, but it involves booting off El Capitan install media. Which Apple doesn't distribute.)
Bullshit. Boot into recovery mode (from the recovery partition that the installer creates by default) and disable System Integrity Protection, and it's gone.
I'm not sure about that. I have Keynote and PowerPoint installed (and OpenOffice and LibreOffice). For lectures, I still prefer Beamer (including syntax highlighted code snippets in anything else is painful), but Keynote has nothing like the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint, which makes drawing figures a lot easier. It also doesn't have as useful guides and makes it harder to produce useful templates. These days, I generally use PowerPoint for short presentations (though for some things I find the results of Sozi much more effective than anything else for a lot of things. It's still very new and unpolished though).
Old Apple customers aren't a drain on Apple's financials, even in between the times they're buying new shiny Apple products, but that's Apple.
The difference between Apple and Motorola is that Apple owns the app store that they ship on their devices, Motorola ships the Google one. If someone publishes an app that needs the latest OS, then Apple has an incentive to ensure that it runs on the widest possible set of devices so that they can take their 30% cut of the sale price. If Motorola ensures that the app can run on all of their devices, then all that they're doing is adding to Google's profits.
This is why Amazon and Samsung include their own app stores. Eventually Android manufacturers will realise that they're in a low-margin business where all of the profits go to Google.
Right. In the UK, the sale of goods act (which was strengthened last week and extended to cover downloads and a few other things) permits you to return a product as not suitable for the purpose for which sold. That means that not doing anything promised in the ads is grounds for a full refund. Just mentioning the relevant law on a call to their support line was enough for Apple to courier a new battery out to me (which arrived at 9am the next morning) for a 3.5-year-old (our of warranty) MacBook Pro, because it was only holding 20% of its rated maximum charge and the discharge counter was significantly below the 300 charge cycles that their support pages claimed.
If someone buys a phone based on the promise of long-term support, but doesn't receive it, then they are entitled to a full refund from the seller, who is then entitled to a full refund from the manufacturer (and less likely to keep selling phones from a manufacturer if they get too many returns). I'd slightly disagree with this claim though:
Which is why consumer protection legislation exists; so corporations have more responsibility than profit mongering.
Corporations are expected to continue profit mongering, the goal of consumer protection legislation is to align incentives so that failing to take responsibility hurts the profits more than taking responsibility. Having to issue individual refunds to every Moto E customer would cost a lot more than back-porting security fixes and pushing out updates. Especially when you include the accompanying news articles.
Mobile phone vendors make their money selling new phones. You want a new Android, get a new phone.
Sure, but the new phone I get will be from a vendor that I can trust to support it for its lifetime. I may upgrade my phone after 2-3 years, but I'll probably hand the old one off to someone else or use it as a spare. If the phone becomes useless after 1 year, then I'll factor that in when I calculate the value of the phone - if I can amortise the cost over 4 years rather than 2, then the cost of the phone is not as good.
Your contract will be up in 2 years
What kind of idiot signs a 2-year phone contract in 2015?
BASIC gets a bad rep primarily based on older versions of BASIC. Older BASIC didn't have any support for structured programming. Every line had a line number (just as every instruction has an address, because that's the abstraction that people designing it were comfortable with). There was no stack, no scoping. Flow control worked solely by GOTO {line number} statements (and you could do truly evil things with it, because the line number could be computed).
By the time QuickBASIC (and QBASIC, the cut-down version that MS gave away for free, which lacked the compiler) came alone, BASIC had support for subroutines, call and return (by subroutine name), and scoped variables, and typically didn't use line numbers. It wasn't a bad teaching language, as it did contain all of the basic concepts needed for structured programming.
If I want to hide my projects from the public I'm not going to put them on someone else's server.
GitHub also covers this case. They allow you to host your own instances of their code and provide VM appliances that do this. Of course, if you're a small company then you have to balance the risk of hosting with GitHub vs the cost (and risk) of hiring someone who knows about security to manage your internal infrastructure. Generally, the latter only makes sense if you have enough of an internal demand to be able to offset the costs among multiple projects.
Of course, there's not a huge amount of difference in terms of trust between running proprietary code (or open source code that you haven't done even a cursory security audit of) with access to your internal codebase vs hosting it on someone else's servers. In both cases, you need to trust that the company isn't actively malicious and that they're competent at writing secure code. In the latter case, you have to trust that their infrastructure isn't less secure than yours.
Covering the reference implementation means that no one will even seriously evaluate it. Of the major browsers:
Internet explorer (and the new one is called) is proprietary, no GPLv3 code linking allowed.
The WebKit underpinnings of Safari are LGPLv2 (not GPLv3 compatible), so even if Apple (which has a corporate policy not to permit GPLv3 code in the door) wanted to adopt it, they can't.
Chrome has the same issue with regard to LGPLv2 in WebKit.
Firefox is triple licensed, and I think one of the licenses may be GPLv3 compatible, but probably not.
If you can't ship a beta of the browser that supports it, then how do you do things like compare things like page loading time, bandwidth usage, and so on? Doing an open source release under a license that says 'you can't use this code, and if you want to implement this spec then you'd better make sure that you didn't look at our code' strikes me as taking the piss.
How did Poppler end up GPLv3? xpdf (on which it was based) was GPLv2, with no or-later provision and an explicit statement from the author that he did not want the or-later clause.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that supporting the old things slows things down, it's that it doesn't speed things up. It actually does cause some problems, because various things in the X11 protocol use 8-bit fields of which a significant space is used by legacy stuff that no one uses anymore, but that's largely worked around in newer extensions.
If you're in a world where most applications are sending commands like 'draw line from x,y to x1,y1' then X11 network transparency is really fast. At the protocol layer, anyway - if you use xlib then performance will suck unless network latency is very low because it adds a synchronous API on top of an asynchronous protocol (XCB fixes this). Modern applications don't do that, they typically render pixmaps and just have the X server composite them. X11 can still do a reasonable job here, with XDAMAGE, XFIXES, and XRENDER, allowing you to keep most of a pixmap (a Picture, in fact) on the server, update image data in selected parts, and do all of the compositing in the server. The problem is that none of the X11 toolkits actually do this very well. Wayland doesn't solve this at all - it simply says 'well, grab an OpenGL context and send drawing commands'. That works okay - the OpenGL protocol allows you to copy textures to the server (and the GPU) and composite them very fast. The problem is that this approach also works fine in X11, and with X11 you get network transparency when you do it (which works reasonably).
The main criticism I'd have of X11 is that it puts too much state on the server. There is no way, at the X protocol layer (or even in the low-level X libraries) of saying 'disconnect this window from this display, reconnect it here', or 'oh, my X server has crashed, recreate my state on this newly restarted version'. The latter worked fine in BeOS almost 20 years ago and works fine in Windows today. The former worked on NeWS 30 years ago. Both are use cases that I'd love to see addressed for modern devices. The Wayland solution to this is 'write a web app'.
So under your plan, now all the evil geniuses get to rule the world.
It's hard to say whether this is better or worse than the current plan to allow evil idiots to run the world...
The number for nuclear seems right, as the UK government has agreed to guarantee a price of £89.5/MWh for new nuclear plants, but the current wholesale price for electricity in the UK is £44/MWh (from the same source). Given that that's half the cost of all of the generation mechanisms that you describe, I wonder what most of the power is coming from and noticing that oil is conveniently absent from your list. If oil prices keep going up over the next 10 years, then it looks as if nuclear will become a lot more attractive, which is why the government is guaranteeing the price (they're betting that £90/MWh is going to seem cheap by the time the new plants are online).
The problem is regarding management as a position of importance that people are promoted to. Management is a specialisation, just like accounting or programming. You wouldn't say that a good manager should be promoted to being an accountant or to being a programmer, or that people who are accountants are the most important in the organisation. Manager is an administrative position and should be regarded as such, not as a leadership role that is somehow more important (and worthy of more pay) than the people that they are responsible for. HP did this (long ago) with parallel technical and management tracks. Managers were often less senior than the people that they were managing.
No. RAID isn't better handled at other layers. If you don't know about the filesystem semantics then you need NVRAM or journalling at the block level to avoid the RAID-5 write hole. RAID-Z doesn't have this problem. If you're recovering a failed block-level RAID, then you need to copy all of the data, including unused space. With ZFS RAID (all levels), you only copy the used data. There are numerous other advantages to rearranging the layers, including being a lot more flexible in the provisioning.
It's also a mistake to think of ZFS as a layer. ZFS has three layers: the lowest handles physical disks and presents a linear address space, the middle presents a transactional object store, and the top presents something that looks like a filesystem (or a block device, which is useful for things like VM disk images).
2GB/TB is recommended if you're doing deduplication. That said, performance degrades quite smoothly. I've got a machine with 3x4TB drives in RAID-Z with only 8GB of RAM. Disk performance isn't great, but I mostly access it via WiFi and it's absolutely fine for that. Eventually I'll get a new motherboard for that can handle more than 8GB of RAM...
Wow, you have no idea what blackface is, do you? It's not just putting on makeup to look like you have a black face, it's then doing 'comedy' that is all about stereotypes about black people.
But how many of those sources are actually doing investigative journalism? I'd take one source that has the resources to do real investigation over ten that can barely afford to regurgitate press releases and rely on sponsored articles for their income.
Note that mincabs are less strictly regulated than black cabs, but their prices are regulated, as are various other things (insurance that they must carry, the registration of their vehicles, requirement that the vehicles carry a taxi registration license plate, and so on). Uber is ignoring all of this regulation.
Just saying "legal monopoly" doesn't mean much without details.
Licensed black cabs are the only vehicles that are allowed to be flagged down for in London. They're governed by Hackney Carriage laws in the UK[1] and also by some London-specific laws. Getting a license is relatively cheap (no medallion system), but does require passing a test that checks that has questions like 'what is the fastest route from A to B, assuming that it is rush hour and road X has road works?' There are 'mystery shoppers' who audit the taxi system: they flag down black cabs and take rides and, if the driver does not take the most direct route then they can lose their license. The mystery shoppers have varying ethnicities and manners of dress, and refusing to carry one will also result in a loss of the license. Black Cab drivers all know that if they break the regulations requiring them to carry anyone or try to scam a customer, then there's a chance that the customer that they're scamming may have the power to take their license on the spot.
The distinction between taxi and hackney carriage is increasingly irrelevant. I can't flag down a car owned by Generic Taxi Company #47 that's waiting near where I'm standing, but I can call the telephone number printed on the side from my mobile and have the dispatcher tell me that the car next to me is now assigned to me, and then get in. Before mobile phones were widespread, it was very different - you could only call that kind of taxi if you were near a landline (or used a public call box, which added a fairly significant amount to the cost for shortish trips). Uber and other taxi apps are the next step in this. It's now more convenient to press a couple of buttons on the phone than to flag down a passing cab, but the taxi that you get is not regulated in the same way. Uber attempts to claim that their reputation system and pricing model means that they don't need government regulation.
[1] This has caused some confusion in previous discussions: In the UK, legally speaking, a vehicle that can pick up people who flag them down on the street is called a hackney carriage, any vehicle that carries people for money is a taxi. In common usage, taxi is used for all categories.
I don't see that. Black face is intensely offensive. Big Bang Theory only insults people without a sense of humor who can't laugh at themselves
Blackface is offensive because it insults black people be reinforcing stereotypes that are not really true outside of prejudiced perception. The big bang theory, in contrast, insults geeks by reinforcing stereotypes that are not really true outside of a prejudiced perception. It's therefore completely different and not offensive.
It may also be for airflow. If it is only just in its cooling envelope, then the gap underneath allows more air to flow around it and the curve on the top prevents anything else going on top and so allows the top to work as a heatsink.
Depends on how far away from it you sit. I had a monitor that resolution and could see artefacts at a comfortable desktop distance (it was above and behind my laptop screen. Now I have a 4K display there, and I can only see pixels if I lean forward.
Really? Where on earth do you live? I'm not sure anyone in this country still offers two-year contracts. Most people are either on pre-pay or one month rolling contracts. 18 months is about the longest, and they're rarely much cheaper than the one-month version, so there's little incentive to sign up for them (especially given that you're likely to get a better deal in six months, so being locked in for 18 months doesn't make sense even if it is cheaper at the start).
I learned to always wait for the .1 some time ago. 10.4 had a really nasty bug where, if you used File Vault (home directories were encrypted disk images), everything went fine. You could continue using the system and there were no problems. Until after the first reboot (which is something that typically happens less than once a month). At which point, the OS would be unable to mount your home directory and would give you a new, empty, one. The encrypted disk image containing your home directory was completely unusable. It later transpired that 10.3 could still mount it, so if you had an old bootable image around you could restore the data, but it caused a lot of pain. Apparently no one on Apple's QA team was using File Vault...
and the user has no way to "jailbreak" their Mac to allow them anyway. (That's not entirely true, there is still a method to disable this new iOS-style lockdown, but it involves booting off El Capitan install media. Which Apple doesn't distribute.)
Bullshit. Boot into recovery mode (from the recovery partition that the installer creates by default) and disable System Integrity Protection, and it's gone.
I'm not sure about that. I have Keynote and PowerPoint installed (and OpenOffice and LibreOffice). For lectures, I still prefer Beamer (including syntax highlighted code snippets in anything else is painful), but Keynote has nothing like the SmartArt feature of PowerPoint, which makes drawing figures a lot easier. It also doesn't have as useful guides and makes it harder to produce useful templates. These days, I generally use PowerPoint for short presentations (though for some things I find the results of Sozi much more effective than anything else for a lot of things. It's still very new and unpolished though).
Old Apple customers aren't a drain on Apple's financials, even in between the times they're buying new shiny Apple products, but that's Apple.
The difference between Apple and Motorola is that Apple owns the app store that they ship on their devices, Motorola ships the Google one. If someone publishes an app that needs the latest OS, then Apple has an incentive to ensure that it runs on the widest possible set of devices so that they can take their 30% cut of the sale price. If Motorola ensures that the app can run on all of their devices, then all that they're doing is adding to Google's profits.
This is why Amazon and Samsung include their own app stores. Eventually Android manufacturers will realise that they're in a low-margin business where all of the profits go to Google.
If someone buys a phone based on the promise of long-term support, but doesn't receive it, then they are entitled to a full refund from the seller, who is then entitled to a full refund from the manufacturer (and less likely to keep selling phones from a manufacturer if they get too many returns). I'd slightly disagree with this claim though:
Which is why consumer protection legislation exists; so corporations have more responsibility than profit mongering.
Corporations are expected to continue profit mongering, the goal of consumer protection legislation is to align incentives so that failing to take responsibility hurts the profits more than taking responsibility. Having to issue individual refunds to every Moto E customer would cost a lot more than back-porting security fixes and pushing out updates. Especially when you include the accompanying news articles.
Mobile phone vendors make their money selling new phones. You want a new Android, get a new phone.
Sure, but the new phone I get will be from a vendor that I can trust to support it for its lifetime. I may upgrade my phone after 2-3 years, but I'll probably hand the old one off to someone else or use it as a spare. If the phone becomes useless after 1 year, then I'll factor that in when I calculate the value of the phone - if I can amortise the cost over 4 years rather than 2, then the cost of the phone is not as good.
Your contract will be up in 2 years
What kind of idiot signs a 2-year phone contract in 2015?
BASIC gets a bad rep primarily based on older versions of BASIC. Older BASIC didn't have any support for structured programming. Every line had a line number (just as every instruction has an address, because that's the abstraction that people designing it were comfortable with). There was no stack, no scoping. Flow control worked solely by GOTO {line number} statements (and you could do truly evil things with it, because the line number could be computed).
By the time QuickBASIC (and QBASIC, the cut-down version that MS gave away for free, which lacked the compiler) came alone, BASIC had support for subroutines, call and return (by subroutine name), and scoped variables, and typically didn't use line numbers. It wasn't a bad teaching language, as it did contain all of the basic concepts needed for structured programming.
If I want to hide my projects from the public I'm not going to put them on someone else's server.
GitHub also covers this case. They allow you to host your own instances of their code and provide VM appliances that do this. Of course, if you're a small company then you have to balance the risk of hosting with GitHub vs the cost (and risk) of hiring someone who knows about security to manage your internal infrastructure. Generally, the latter only makes sense if you have enough of an internal demand to be able to offset the costs among multiple projects.
Of course, there's not a huge amount of difference in terms of trust between running proprietary code (or open source code that you haven't done even a cursory security audit of) with access to your internal codebase vs hosting it on someone else's servers. In both cases, you need to trust that the company isn't actively malicious and that they're competent at writing secure code. In the latter case, you have to trust that their infrastructure isn't less secure than yours.
If you can't ship a beta of the browser that supports it, then how do you do things like compare things like page loading time, bandwidth usage, and so on? Doing an open source release under a license that says 'you can't use this code, and if you want to implement this spec then you'd better make sure that you didn't look at our code' strikes me as taking the piss.
How did Poppler end up GPLv3? xpdf (on which it was based) was GPLv2, with no or-later provision and an explicit statement from the author that he did not want the or-later clause.
I bought a Moto G directly. They've shipped a fix to 'carrier partners', but it's not yet appearing for direct download.