I'd like to feel smug and superior and laugh at the stupid Americans, but in the UK we have precisely one MP who has a degree in a science subject (Jullian Huppert, Cambridge, PhD in biological chemistry). Many of the rest didn't even do a science subject at A-level, so their last science education finished at age 16. These people are simply not qualified to be making decisions about scientific matters.
My mobile provider (3, in the UK) has started rolling out a thing that lets you use your inclusive minutes and data allowance in other countries without any extra charge (the costs if you go over those limits are pretty dire). It was actually cheaper for me to use data on my mobile when I visit the US than it was for the people I was visiting, on my last trip. I think they've seen the writing on the wall and started making these agreements long before they were needed. They're able to do this and charge 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text and 1p/MB for data (pre-pay - if you get a bundle and buy in bulk then things are cheaper, but the bundles are time limited).
You go to university to understand the depths of your ignorance. It's then up to you whether you just get the piece of paper, or whether you do something to correct this situation. University won't teach you everything you need to know, but it will tell you what some of the things that you don't realise that you should know are.
The system requirements for Windows are higher. If the machine is basically an RDP client, then there isn't much benefit in running a thick-client OS on a higher-end machine. The savings are partly from the Windows license and partly from the cheaper machines. A minimal *NIX install with FreeRDP is probably what they actually want, but the ChromeBook lets you have something that's a bit like this, with frequent vendor-provided software updates and no need to have someone in house configuring it.
SourceForge started bundling crapware with downloads under the last overlords. They're flailing around trying to find a business model. GitHub has one (design a decent service, give it away free to hippies, sell it to people with money), SourceForge never did, and can't have the same one (would you pay for SourceForge?).
The nice thing about 'cloud' services is that you don't need your computers to be on at the same time. There's nothing special about 'the cloud' that makes that work, it's just about having one dedicated machine or group of machines that is guaranteed to be on and reachable. The thing that makes this attractive for most home users is that buying and running such a machine is expensive. This is more or less the point of the FreedomBox (remember that?) which was supposed to provide such services from your home Internet connection, wherever you are. Of course, that doesn't work if you turn off the power to your router when you go away on holiday, but still want to be able to sync your photos...
I've just started using OwnCloud, but having such a large blob of PHP on a public-facing IP is slightly terrifying. In a jail it isn't too bad - at least it can't compromise the rest of the system - but I still wouldn't put anything in it that I'd worry to much about if it were compromised...
I read both, but it's hard for Soylent to call the Slashdot community 'passive consumers' when most articles scroll off the front page of Soylent with only 10-20 comments, whereas here a story with under a hundred comments is seen as a low-traffic one...
From what I understand, they didn't retain the raw greenscreen footage. The space scenes actually don't look too bad on DVD, but the green screen'd actors with CGI backgrounds look really really dated. Those are the ones that most need redoing and there's no way for fans to do them. It would also be nice to have the space shots redone, because modern video games manage to look better with realtime rendering, but they no longer have the original model (and they'd probably need redoing anyway). This is something that fan art could easily solve, but it's the easy part of the problem.
I rewatched B5 last year, and I don't think it would really gain much from the effort involved in redoing all of the effects. If someone were to invest that much in B5, I'd rather see new stories in the same universe.
How do H1B visas drive down wages when it's vastly more expensive to hire an H1B than to hire a local? That's the part of the anti-H1B thing I just don't get.
There are some significant costs associated with hiring, however once they're hired you only have to pay them the prevailing wage for the industry. This sounds good, but 'the industry' can be interpreted very broadly, so when you're hiring someone to do realtime C programming they count as being in the same industry as a guy who dropped out of high school and writes PHP. They're also in a very weak position when it comes to bargaining, because if they lose their job they have a very short time to find another sponsor for their visa before they are deported.
If you want to avoid this, the solution is to offer a full work permit to anyone who has skills in one of the shortage industries, so they can go to the US and work at the real (i.e. defined by the market, not defined by some fixed spreadsheet) prevailing wage. Immigrants don't depress wages when they expect the same standard of living and have the same bargaining power as their native colleagues.
Nobody uses SourceForge for new projects anymore because it became too commercialized and the interfaces became cluttered and a pain to use. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to GitHub, eventually.
I'm not sure it will. SourceForge had a confusing business model that included selling ads and bundling crapware. GitHub's model is quite simple: they sell project hosting. The open-source-hosting GitHub site is just an advert. Their business model relies on people using their free product, becoming familiar with it, and advocating it within their organisations. If they start doing the same sorts of things to their UI that SourceForge did then their revenue stream dries up.
A VPS is like $15/month these days.
There are also quite a few OSS-friendly VPS companies (not surprising, since they're mostly using infrastructure built entirely from OSS) that will either give big discounts or free VMs to open source developers.
Not really. Intel CPUs were inferior to the likes of Alpha, POWER, and even MIPS and PA-RISC quite a lot of the time, but they could sell them for a lot less because of their economies of scale. When Intel was welling 100 times as many processors as their closest competitor, they could sell a processor that was half the speed for a quarter of the price and still make more profit. As the PC market grew and the workstation market shrank, that became Intel selling 1,000 times as many as their nearest competitor, and even with a CPU twice the speed it's hard to get enough sales to cover the development costs if you're selling it for ten times the cost of an Intel chip half the speed.
Add to that, Intel managed to convince HP (who owned the PA-RISC and Alpha lines at the time) and SGI (MIPS) that they should outsource CPU design and that Itanium was the future. That left IBM and Sun/Fujitsu as the only real competitors and both focussed on the extreme high end at the expense of the mass market. If you don't know how that story ends, ask SGI and nVidia...
It's quite possible. ARM is a tiny company compared to Intel, and Intel has a history of outspending its opponents by an order of magnitude until they go away. The advantage that ARM has is the ecosystem - companies like Marvell and even Apple can design their own custom ARM-compatible cores, with assistance from ARM, and produce them in any of a number of ARM's partners' fabs. This makes them a bit harder to trample than the other RISC manufacturers.
The big problem for Intel is the same as for Microsoft, and now Google. They're a very big company in a lot of parts of the supply chain and it's difficult to get anyone to work with them because everyone knows that they'll decide in a few years that the part of the chain where you were making money looks attractive and squeeze you out of it. ARM is sufficiently small that the other companies like having them as a mostly neutral arbiter.
Things like the Pandaboad and Wandaboard have been faster than most Netbooks for a while. The RPi wasn't, but it was never meant to be - it was meant to be so cheap you could buy them as almost disposable things and not worry about children breaking them. The SoC they used was cheap because it was originally designed for set-top boxes, where GPU performance was important and the CPU was an afterthought, but was a few generations old so now the GPU was no longer a major selling point.
You might be surprised. If you've set up your own router using an off-the-shelf open source OS, then doing DynDNS-type things can be a bit complicated. A lot of cheap consumer routers, however, support it out of the box - you just provide it with your credentials and it works. Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface. It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).
The new law actually takes this into account. If you buy something in a format with 'digital locks' that prevent format shifting, you may write to the Secretary of State for permission to break the locks. This will be granted, unless the same item is available in a format without digital locks. The upshot of this is that if you sell DRM-free media in the UK, then you can force people to buy a second copy to format shift (but only once), but if you don't then they can format shift whatever encumbered format they want.
This means that breaking DRM is explicitly legal in the UK, unless the same media is available without DRM (in which case there's little reason to bother breaking the DRM - you could just buy it in a more friendly format). I'm really looking forward to the Secretary of State receiving thousands of letters a day from people asking to rip their DVDs. Don't forget: you can send one letter per DVD you own...
Try carrying a kitchen knife in your pocket sometime and pulling it out in such a way that results in your doing more damage to someone else than to yourself. The reason kitchen knives are one of the most common murder weapons is that most murders are crimes of passion in the home and a kitchen knife is readily available in a convenient knife block or draw (corollary: don't insult the cook!). They're a lot less common in situations involving premeditation.
Would you have been fine with it if he had donated money to a campaign to promote that belief? Probably, that comes under the heading of free speech. What about if that donation had had your company name attached? Maybe not so much, because that's linking you and your employer to that belief. What about if his job was to be the public face of the company (i.e. the CEO)? Maybe even less, because now the company (and, indirectly, you) are endorsing those beliefs.
Zero-information summary, but according to Wikipedia he donated $1000 to the campaign against California Prop 8 (to legalise gay marriage). The main controversy, as far as I can see, was that the donation had his employer's name attached in the public database. This is something of a concern for a potential CEO: I'd say that you're free to privately hold whatever idiotic opinions you want (as long as they don't impact your ability to run the company), but when you make pubic statements that are, implicitly or explicitly, tied to the company that you represent then you have to be a lot more careful.
It doesn't allow exchange of funds, it allows the updating of a ledger. The problem is that there's no stable mechanism for getting value in and out of system. Modern currencies do this by creating money for loans. Money is created to generate liquidity from an asset. When someone goes to a bank and asks for a mortgage on a house or a loan on a new business, the bank (in collaboration with the central bank) can inject new money into the system to reflect the fact that the asset that is backing the loan (e.g. the house) is now part of the system of value backing the currency. Then either the person pays back the loan and the money is removed from the system (effectively destroyed), or the person defaults on the loan and the bank repossesses and sells the house, repaying the loan and having the same effect on the money supply.
In bitcoin, the mechanism for adding value to the system is tied to the transaction processing and is completely independent of anything else. This makes it very difficult to map any real economic system to bitcoin.
Taxi companies are not the ones that will implement something like this. The disruptive system will be fleets of self-driving vehicles ranging from small cars up to minibusses, where you'll specify your journey on a smartphone and get a range of quotes based on how much slack you're willing to have in your schedule and how many people you're willing to share with, ranging from close to the price of a taxi to close to the price of a bus.
If the value of gold were tied solely to its utility, it would be about 10-20% of what it is today. If the value of Bitcoin were tied solely to its utility, it would be 0% of what it is today.
Replace marijuana with alcohol and you could have made exactly the same argument during prohibition.
I'm mildly allergic to marijuana (its only effect on my brain is to make it hurt, a lot), so I have no personal stake in legalisation. But I do want to see people who smoke it taxed at the same rate that I am when I buy a beer.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to feel smug and superior and laugh at the stupid Americans, but in the UK we have precisely one MP who has a degree in a science subject (Jullian Huppert, Cambridge, PhD in biological chemistry). Many of the rest didn't even do a science subject at A-level, so their last science education finished at age 16. These people are simply not qualified to be making decisions about scientific matters.
My mobile provider (3, in the UK) has started rolling out a thing that lets you use your inclusive minutes and data allowance in other countries without any extra charge (the costs if you go over those limits are pretty dire). It was actually cheaper for me to use data on my mobile when I visit the US than it was for the people I was visiting, on my last trip. I think they've seen the writing on the wall and started making these agreements long before they were needed. They're able to do this and charge 3p/minute for calls, 2p/text and 1p/MB for data (pre-pay - if you get a bundle and buy in bulk then things are cheaper, but the bundles are time limited).
You go to university to understand the depths of your ignorance. It's then up to you whether you just get the piece of paper, or whether you do something to correct this situation. University won't teach you everything you need to know, but it will tell you what some of the things that you don't realise that you should know are.
The system requirements for Windows are higher. If the machine is basically an RDP client, then there isn't much benefit in running a thick-client OS on a higher-end machine. The savings are partly from the Windows license and partly from the cheaper machines. A minimal *NIX install with FreeRDP is probably what they actually want, but the ChromeBook lets you have something that's a bit like this, with frequent vendor-provided software updates and no need to have someone in house configuring it.
SourceForge started bundling crapware with downloads under the last overlords. They're flailing around trying to find a business model. GitHub has one (design a decent service, give it away free to hippies, sell it to people with money), SourceForge never did, and can't have the same one (would you pay for SourceForge?).
The nice thing about 'cloud' services is that you don't need your computers to be on at the same time. There's nothing special about 'the cloud' that makes that work, it's just about having one dedicated machine or group of machines that is guaranteed to be on and reachable. The thing that makes this attractive for most home users is that buying and running such a machine is expensive. This is more or less the point of the FreedomBox (remember that?) which was supposed to provide such services from your home Internet connection, wherever you are. Of course, that doesn't work if you turn off the power to your router when you go away on holiday, but still want to be able to sync your photos...
I've just started using OwnCloud, but having such a large blob of PHP on a public-facing IP is slightly terrifying. In a jail it isn't too bad - at least it can't compromise the rest of the system - but I still wouldn't put anything in it that I'd worry to much about if it were compromised...
I read both, but it's hard for Soylent to call the Slashdot community 'passive consumers' when most articles scroll off the front page of Soylent with only 10-20 comments, whereas here a story with under a hundred comments is seen as a low-traffic one...
From what I understand, they didn't retain the raw greenscreen footage. The space scenes actually don't look too bad on DVD, but the green screen'd actors with CGI backgrounds look really really dated. Those are the ones that most need redoing and there's no way for fans to do them. It would also be nice to have the space shots redone, because modern video games manage to look better with realtime rendering, but they no longer have the original model (and they'd probably need redoing anyway). This is something that fan art could easily solve, but it's the easy part of the problem.
I rewatched B5 last year, and I don't think it would really gain much from the effort involved in redoing all of the effects. If someone were to invest that much in B5, I'd rather see new stories in the same universe.
Thank Slashdot for putting the little white bird on a blue background icon next to spammers...
How do H1B visas drive down wages when it's vastly more expensive to hire an H1B than to hire a local? That's the part of the anti-H1B thing I just don't get.
There are some significant costs associated with hiring, however once they're hired you only have to pay them the prevailing wage for the industry. This sounds good, but 'the industry' can be interpreted very broadly, so when you're hiring someone to do realtime C programming they count as being in the same industry as a guy who dropped out of high school and writes PHP. They're also in a very weak position when it comes to bargaining, because if they lose their job they have a very short time to find another sponsor for their visa before they are deported.
If you want to avoid this, the solution is to offer a full work permit to anyone who has skills in one of the shortage industries, so they can go to the US and work at the real (i.e. defined by the market, not defined by some fixed spreadsheet) prevailing wage. Immigrants don't depress wages when they expect the same standard of living and have the same bargaining power as their native colleagues.
Nobody uses SourceForge for new projects anymore because it became too commercialized and the interfaces became cluttered and a pain to use. I have no doubt that the same thing will happen to GitHub, eventually.
I'm not sure it will. SourceForge had a confusing business model that included selling ads and bundling crapware. GitHub's model is quite simple: they sell project hosting. The open-source-hosting GitHub site is just an advert. Their business model relies on people using their free product, becoming familiar with it, and advocating it within their organisations. If they start doing the same sorts of things to their UI that SourceForge did then their revenue stream dries up.
A VPS is like $15/month these days.
There are also quite a few OSS-friendly VPS companies (not surprising, since they're mostly using infrastructure built entirely from OSS) that will either give big discounts or free VMs to open source developers.
Don't be too hard on them. SourceForge has sucked for about 10 years, so it's not the current overlord's fault...
Not really. Intel CPUs were inferior to the likes of Alpha, POWER, and even MIPS and PA-RISC quite a lot of the time, but they could sell them for a lot less because of their economies of scale. When Intel was welling 100 times as many processors as their closest competitor, they could sell a processor that was half the speed for a quarter of the price and still make more profit. As the PC market grew and the workstation market shrank, that became Intel selling 1,000 times as many as their nearest competitor, and even with a CPU twice the speed it's hard to get enough sales to cover the development costs if you're selling it for ten times the cost of an Intel chip half the speed.
Add to that, Intel managed to convince HP (who owned the PA-RISC and Alpha lines at the time) and SGI (MIPS) that they should outsource CPU design and that Itanium was the future. That left IBM and Sun/Fujitsu as the only real competitors and both focussed on the extreme high end at the expense of the mass market. If you don't know how that story ends, ask SGI and nVidia...
It's quite possible. ARM is a tiny company compared to Intel, and Intel has a history of outspending its opponents by an order of magnitude until they go away. The advantage that ARM has is the ecosystem - companies like Marvell and even Apple can design their own custom ARM-compatible cores, with assistance from ARM, and produce them in any of a number of ARM's partners' fabs. This makes them a bit harder to trample than the other RISC manufacturers.
The big problem for Intel is the same as for Microsoft, and now Google. They're a very big company in a lot of parts of the supply chain and it's difficult to get anyone to work with them because everyone knows that they'll decide in a few years that the part of the chain where you were making money looks attractive and squeeze you out of it. ARM is sufficiently small that the other companies like having them as a mostly neutral arbiter.
Things like the Pandaboad and Wandaboard have been faster than most Netbooks for a while. The RPi wasn't, but it was never meant to be - it was meant to be so cheap you could buy them as almost disposable things and not worry about children breaking them. The SoC they used was cheap because it was originally designed for set-top boxes, where GPU performance was important and the CPU was an afterthought, but was a few generations old so now the GPU was no longer a major selling point.
You might be surprised. If you've set up your own router using an off-the-shelf open source OS, then doing DynDNS-type things can be a bit complicated. A lot of cheap consumer routers, however, support it out of the box - you just provide it with your credentials and it works. Port forwarding is similarly handled via a pointy-clicky interface. It's definitely something that you can explain to a technically illiterate person who to do (although explaining what they're doing and why is a bit more tricky).
The new law actually takes this into account. If you buy something in a format with 'digital locks' that prevent format shifting, you may write to the Secretary of State for permission to break the locks. This will be granted, unless the same item is available in a format without digital locks. The upshot of this is that if you sell DRM-free media in the UK, then you can force people to buy a second copy to format shift (but only once), but if you don't then they can format shift whatever encumbered format they want.
This means that breaking DRM is explicitly legal in the UK, unless the same media is available without DRM (in which case there's little reason to bother breaking the DRM - you could just buy it in a more friendly format). I'm really looking forward to the Secretary of State receiving thousands of letters a day from people asking to rip their DVDs. Don't forget: you can send one letter per DVD you own...
Try carrying a kitchen knife in your pocket sometime and pulling it out in such a way that results in your doing more damage to someone else than to yourself. The reason kitchen knives are one of the most common murder weapons is that most murders are crimes of passion in the home and a kitchen knife is readily available in a convenient knife block or draw (corollary: don't insult the cook!). They're a lot less common in situations involving premeditation.
Would you have been fine with it if he had donated money to a campaign to promote that belief? Probably, that comes under the heading of free speech. What about if that donation had had your company name attached? Maybe not so much, because that's linking you and your employer to that belief. What about if his job was to be the public face of the company (i.e. the CEO)? Maybe even less, because now the company (and, indirectly, you) are endorsing those beliefs.
Zero-information summary, but according to Wikipedia he donated $1000 to the campaign against California Prop 8 (to legalise gay marriage). The main controversy, as far as I can see, was that the donation had his employer's name attached in the public database. This is something of a concern for a potential CEO: I'd say that you're free to privately hold whatever idiotic opinions you want (as long as they don't impact your ability to run the company), but when you make pubic statements that are, implicitly or explicitly, tied to the company that you represent then you have to be a lot more careful.
It doesn't allow exchange of funds, it allows the updating of a ledger. The problem is that there's no stable mechanism for getting value in and out of system. Modern currencies do this by creating money for loans. Money is created to generate liquidity from an asset. When someone goes to a bank and asks for a mortgage on a house or a loan on a new business, the bank (in collaboration with the central bank) can inject new money into the system to reflect the fact that the asset that is backing the loan (e.g. the house) is now part of the system of value backing the currency. Then either the person pays back the loan and the money is removed from the system (effectively destroyed), or the person defaults on the loan and the bank repossesses and sells the house, repaying the loan and having the same effect on the money supply.
In bitcoin, the mechanism for adding value to the system is tied to the transaction processing and is completely independent of anything else. This makes it very difficult to map any real economic system to bitcoin.
Taxi companies are not the ones that will implement something like this. The disruptive system will be fleets of self-driving vehicles ranging from small cars up to minibusses, where you'll specify your journey on a smartphone and get a range of quotes based on how much slack you're willing to have in your schedule and how many people you're willing to share with, ranging from close to the price of a taxi to close to the price of a bus.
If the value of gold were tied solely to its utility, it would be about 10-20% of what it is today. If the value of Bitcoin were tied solely to its utility, it would be 0% of what it is today.
Replace marijuana with alcohol and you could have made exactly the same argument during prohibition.
I'm mildly allergic to marijuana (its only effect on my brain is to make it hurt, a lot), so I have no personal stake in legalisation. But I do want to see people who smoke it taxed at the same rate that I am when I buy a beer.