Facebook is definitely doing this. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows I'm dating someone before I tell anyone about it. I start to see their stuff and name pop up substantially more in my news feed, even without any change in online interaction with them. Pretty sure that location services on both her phone and mine are showing us at the same locations at the same times and their algorithm is putting it all together.
This. Also, standardized pricing is a relatively new phenomenon as far as global history is concerned and even today is mostly true of mass market items only. If you live(d) in a bartering society merchants would absolutely sell you the same thing at different prices different times of the day, etc. Furthermore, in any sort of person to person transaction you are sized up as to what you will pay and that (or a bit more) is probably the price at which it's offered. In dealing with a lot of sales of professional specialized items to small businesses, sole proprietors, non-profits, etc. really anything where you get a "quote" first the price might vary depending on what your ability to pay is.
This type of "big-data pricing" might be doing these things on a larger scale, and it's probably too early say definitively whether this is good or bad for the average consumer (on average it may actually be the same as the current average sales price of a given product), but it's not fundamentally new.
Mea culpa, you're correct that radio stations do pay licensing fees, however when converted to a per song play basis it seems to be remarkably less than what Internet companies are paying.
It showed that if YouTube were to pay the recorded music industry market rates, similar to what other streaming services pay, its economic contributions to the sector would be significantly bigger.
This is the flaw in the study. The music industry has basically strongarmed and set these rates so that streaming services live on the edge of death and can be killed off at any time. If YouTube (and streaming services) paid what radio stations pay (nothing!) it would be a different story. We won't even get into payola and how radio stations were sometimes paid by the music companies to play their songs...
I don't think that's a general statement you can make. It is true in English, much to the chagrin of English teachers everywhere, but there are absolutely languages where there is a body empowered to decide what the correct grammar is. I believe, France is rather notoriously defensive of it's académie française. That's not to say that everyone, especially in speech, does what they say but that there actually is a correct way to do things.
I would actually agree that how much sense DST makes is very dependent on the latitude at which you live. To clarify, I would also agree DST does nothing to help with the winter and I wasn't saying it did, you simply couldn't shift the clock enough to make any substantial difference when it gets dark at 4:30.
In the summer if it's light where you live until 10pm it doesn't make much sense to have it be light until 11pm. A little further south though and it would be dark at 8pm standard time at the solstice, an extra hour would be nice. It's really the Spring and Fall which benefit the most in the northern US though, when whether is nice and you appreciate having that extra hour of daylight. For example, tonight it got dark at about 6pm. Tomorrow it will be very nice to have daylight until 7pm...
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just to clarify if you live in a norther latitude you get over this idea pretty quickly. No matter how much the clock gets adjusted it's going to either be dark when the children leave or when the get home (maybe both!) and there's nothing you can do about it. You may as well try to get as much evening daylight as possible, which is why I like DST.
IIRC there used to be a difference in observing DST as well so a few counties were always on central time, most were on Eastern time, but in the summer most of them did not observe DST so they were in sync with the central time zone counties that DID observe DST, effectively changing the timezone of the state from the perspective of those of us who do observe DST..
Yes. I know DST is incredibly unpopular on Slashdot and I can certainly understand why changing clocks is inconvenient and seems antiquated to the/. crowd. I don't care whether the sun is out while I'm at work/meetings/appointments but when I have free time in the evenings I would very much like it to still be light outside for as much of the year and as long as possible. If you hide in your house or never interact with others you may not care but for those of us who do need to interact with others it's nice to have off time when it's light out. This is especially important for those of us in northern latitudes in the spring and fall...
This study is so obviously flawed in methodology it's laughable. Clearly this is just a bunch of propaganda. First, if you're surveying people around the world you also need to determine what licensed streaming services the person has access to as not all (or even any) services are available in all countries. Second, you need to consider the differences in the catalogs of licensed services from country to country. Because of antiquated business practices and agreements the catalog of Netflix (for example) varies greatly from place to place. In most places it's much worse than the US, which isn't even that great. Third, the study makes the assumption that simply viewing pirated content is in fact illegal (and they report about this with a leading statement, Did not know that simply watching....). While this may be true in some regions globally there is certainly some disagreement about whether only distribution is unlawful or whether consumption is also unlawful. This really smells like media industry propaganda to me.
The ones that won't show X if the display isn't turned on when the system boots are Intel NUCs. The one that won't show X after the screen has been turned off for a while and turned back on is a Zotac ZBOXHD-ID40.
Perhaps then you would like to explain how to force X Windows/Debian Linux to output over HDMI regardless of the CEC and EDID data (or lack thereof) coming back over the link?
Two of the banes of my existence are 1) that if I power off an HDMI TV attached to a Linux box and then power it back on some hours later (e.g. for use with MythTV) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system and 2) that if I power up a Linux box without an attached and powered on HDMI TV (e.g. digital signage which is off during non-business hours and there is a reboot of the box) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system.
Your question is unclear. Are you asking why Google is an also-ran or why AWS/Azure split the way I suggested. I'm going to assume the former. It's got nothing to do with the infrastructure, it's about the business, offerings, service/support, and wherewithal. Simply put Google doesn't have 1) the cloud services customer base that either of the other two do, and 2) the cloud product variety/maturity that the others do. Google also has shown no serious interest in improving their cloud services and/or doing a better job of selling them and competing with the others. Google has pretty much zero track record of selling services (other than ads) to businesses. About the only thing you can come up with is "Google Apps for Business". Compared to other offerings like Office365 that is a joke. Their customer support in all products is terrible. Need I go on? There's just no evidence that they will be a player in outside cloud services, sure they run a huge amazing infrastructure internally but they just don't play well with others.
Google is pretty much an also-ran at this point so the question is AWS vs. Azure (or of course self-hosting but we'll assume you really want to do cloud and I can't talk you out of it). In my experience the answer depends on your application. If you're building a new from the ground up web-based application AWS is probably the front-runner. If you're migrating an existing in-house system and want to do things more incrementally, do something hybrid with your in-house stuff, etc. Azure is far simpler to get that going with. Azure feels designed to be familiar and comfortable for traditional enterprise IT people, AWS feels designed by/for the Silicon Valley startup crowd.
That's easier said than done though. See for example the Amazon AWS status portal which stated things were just fine for far longer than they were because Amazon couldn't update it. Doing cloud based applications right is neither as inexpensive or as simple as a lot of people were led to believe/preached.
This. Clearly a lot of people jumped into cloud "to save boatloads of money" (same reason so many jumped into outsourcing. Saving tons of money is not often a good reason to do something. Usually you can make incremental savings but it's never what the salespeople or service promises because those prices ignore things like redundancy, etc. In the end doing it right ends up costing about the same as you were paying before, maybe a little less or a little more and maybe you gain some more features, but it's also probably more complex.
I caught that too and thought it was interesting. One other interesting thing about an application that really uses cloud services to their full potential (rather than just as an expensive VM/VPS) is that since the services are not commoditized/standardized there is a lot of cloud vendor lock-in. E.g. if you build a huge web app around AWS you're going to have a lot of rework to do (to some extent depending on how well you modularized your code) to migrate to another cloud provider.
If you stick to Prime eligible products, you don't have to deal with the fraud as you're dealing with Amazon and not a third party.
Depends how you define "dealing with" Amazon is not always the seller, they are increasingly a logistics/fulfillment company and not the seller. While it being Prime does mean they have the product in one of their warehouses it absolutely does not mean you are buying it from Amazon. In many cases they are just warehousing products for someone else and they send you the product which has been barcoded by the actual seller when you purchase it. If you have a problem with the product you might soon learn that it isn't Amazon you bought it from, prime or not.
I'll assume you're not kidding and answer your question. Yes, of course people still use RS-485. It's not RS-232 over longer connections though, it's just a different type of serial driver for a UART interface (i.e. it is equal to RS-232 but handles the line driving differently). One such difference is the use of balanced A/B communication lines instead of +/- lines used in RS-232, which yes, gives it better reliability over longer distances.
Specifically the popular Modbus protocol runs over RS-485 and it's used extensively in industrial control systems. DMX, which is still used extensively in the theatrical/concert lighting world is also based on RS-422/485, though there are some differences.
I'm pretty certain it wasn't the travel range of the head that was the problem but the variable spindle speed used in by their GCR format on 400k & 800k disks.
Note that if you want to legally build RF electronics for experimentation that's a very good reason to have a ham license even if talking to people isn't your thing. For example if you want to experiment with 2.4GHz WiFi at power levels much higher than what's allowed for general public use...
Note, I completely agree about the first part of what you said. When describing any kind of portable energy storage to the general public it probably makes the most sense to refer to it as a battery. I disagree about the second part though, I would still argue that if there are multiple small capacitors it's correct to call it a "battery of capacitors" or perhaps a "capacitor based battery" in technical publications.
I beg to differ, chemical energy is not required. See the Oxford English Dictionary...
battery, n. Pronunciation:/batri/ Etymology: French batterie (13th cent.) ‘beating, battering, a group of cannon’, etc. (= Provençal bataria , Spanish batería , Italian battería ), battre to beat: see -ery suffix.
1. The action of beating or battering.... 3. The beating of drums; sometimes a particular kind of drum-beat, perhaps that giving the signal for an assault. 4. A number of pieces of artillery placed in juxtaposition for combined action; in Military use, the smallest division of artillery for tactical purposes... III. A combination of simple instruments, usually to produce a compound instrument of increased power; applied originally with a reference to the discharge of electricity from such a combination. III. 9. Electr. An apparatus consisting of a number of Leyden jars so connected that they may be charged and discharged simultaneously. III. 10. Galvanism. An apparatus consisting of a series of cells, each containing the essentials for producing voltaic electricity, connected together. Also used of any such apparatus for producing voltaic electricity, whether of one cell or more. III. 11. Optics. A combined series of lenses or prisms. III. 13. a. Used gen. for a collection of similar pieces of apparatus grouped together as a set
Note that TFS states that "The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors..." see the definition for battery responsible for why we call groups of electrochemical cells batteries... "a set of units of equipment, typically when connected together" which is based on the traditional usage for artillery batteries. So if there are multiple supercapacitors working together it's absolutely correct to call it a battery (specifically a battery of supercapacitors, instead of a battery of electrochemical cells). Note that I doubt that the author was actually thinking along these lines when they wrote the piece, but I would argue it could still be correct.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook is definitely doing this. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows I'm dating someone before I tell anyone about it. I start to see their stuff and name pop up substantially more in my news feed, even without any change in online interaction with them. Pretty sure that location services on both her phone and mine are showing us at the same locations at the same times and their algorithm is putting it all together.
This. Also, standardized pricing is a relatively new phenomenon as far as global history is concerned and even today is mostly true of mass market items only. If you live(d) in a bartering society merchants would absolutely sell you the same thing at different prices different times of the day, etc. Furthermore, in any sort of person to person transaction you are sized up as to what you will pay and that (or a bit more) is probably the price at which it's offered. In dealing with a lot of sales of professional specialized items to small businesses, sole proprietors, non-profits, etc. really anything where you get a "quote" first the price might vary depending on what your ability to pay is.
This type of "big-data pricing" might be doing these things on a larger scale, and it's probably too early say definitively whether this is good or bad for the average consumer (on average it may actually be the same as the current average sales price of a given product), but it's not fundamentally new.
Mea culpa, you're correct that radio stations do pay licensing fees, however when converted to a per song play basis it seems to be remarkably less than what Internet companies are paying.
I think the key phrase is:
This is the flaw in the study. The music industry has basically strongarmed and set these rates so that streaming services live on the edge of death and can be killed off at any time. If YouTube (and streaming services) paid what radio stations pay (nothing!) it would be a different story. We won't even get into payola and how radio stations were sometimes paid by the music companies to play their songs...
I don't think that's a general statement you can make. It is true in English, much to the chagrin of English teachers everywhere, but there are absolutely languages where there is a body empowered to decide what the correct grammar is. I believe, France is rather notoriously defensive of it's académie française. That's not to say that everyone, especially in speech, does what they say but that there actually is a correct way to do things.
I would actually agree that how much sense DST makes is very dependent on the latitude at which you live. To clarify, I would also agree DST does nothing to help with the winter and I wasn't saying it did, you simply couldn't shift the clock enough to make any substantial difference when it gets dark at 4:30.
In the summer if it's light where you live until 10pm it doesn't make much sense to have it be light until 11pm. A little further south though and it would be dark at 8pm standard time at the solstice, an extra hour would be nice. It's really the Spring and Fall which benefit the most in the northern US though, when whether is nice and you appreciate having that extra hour of daylight. For example, tonight it got dark at about 6pm. Tomorrow it will be very nice to have daylight until 7pm...
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just to clarify if you live in a norther latitude you get over this idea pretty quickly. No matter how much the clock gets adjusted it's going to either be dark when the children leave or when the get home (maybe both!) and there's nothing you can do about it. You may as well try to get as much evening daylight as possible, which is why I like DST.
IIRC there used to be a difference in observing DST as well so a few counties were always on central time, most were on Eastern time, but in the summer most of them did not observe DST so they were in sync with the central time zone counties that DID observe DST, effectively changing the timezone of the state from the perspective of those of us who do observe DST..
Yes. I know DST is incredibly unpopular on Slashdot and I can certainly understand why changing clocks is inconvenient and seems antiquated to the /. crowd. I don't care whether the sun is out while I'm at work/meetings/appointments but when I have free time in the evenings I would very much like it to still be light outside for as much of the year and as long as possible. If you hide in your house or never interact with others you may not care but for those of us who do need to interact with others it's nice to have off time when it's light out. This is especially important for those of us in northern latitudes in the spring and fall...
This study is so obviously flawed in methodology it's laughable. Clearly this is just a bunch of propaganda. First, if you're surveying people around the world you also need to determine what licensed streaming services the person has access to as not all (or even any) services are available in all countries. Second, you need to consider the differences in the catalogs of licensed services from country to country. Because of antiquated business practices and agreements the catalog of Netflix (for example) varies greatly from place to place. In most places it's much worse than the US, which isn't even that great. Third, the study makes the assumption that simply viewing pirated content is in fact illegal (and they report about this with a leading statement, Did not know that simply watching....). While this may be true in some regions globally there is certainly some disagreement about whether only distribution is unlawful or whether consumption is also unlawful. This really smells like media industry propaganda to me.
The ones that won't show X if the display isn't turned on when the system boots are Intel NUCs. The one that won't show X after the screen has been turned off for a while and turned back on is a Zotac ZBOXHD-ID40.
Perhaps then you would like to explain how to force X Windows/Debian Linux to output over HDMI regardless of the CEC and EDID data (or lack thereof) coming back over the link?
Two of the banes of my existence are 1) that if I power off an HDMI TV attached to a Linux box and then power it back on some hours later (e.g. for use with MythTV) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system and 2) that if I power up a Linux box without an attached and powered on HDMI TV (e.g. digital signage which is off during non-business hours and there is a reboot of the box) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system.
Your question is unclear. Are you asking why Google is an also-ran or why AWS/Azure split the way I suggested. I'm going to assume the former. It's got nothing to do with the infrastructure, it's about the business, offerings, service/support, and wherewithal. Simply put Google doesn't have 1) the cloud services customer base that either of the other two do, and 2) the cloud product variety/maturity that the others do. Google also has shown no serious interest in improving their cloud services and/or doing a better job of selling them and competing with the others. Google has pretty much zero track record of selling services (other than ads) to businesses. About the only thing you can come up with is "Google Apps for Business". Compared to other offerings like Office365 that is a joke. Their customer support in all products is terrible. Need I go on? There's just no evidence that they will be a player in outside cloud services, sure they run a huge amazing infrastructure internally but they just don't play well with others.
Google is pretty much an also-ran at this point so the question is AWS vs. Azure (or of course self-hosting but we'll assume you really want to do cloud and I can't talk you out of it). In my experience the answer depends on your application. If you're building a new from the ground up web-based application AWS is probably the front-runner. If you're migrating an existing in-house system and want to do things more incrementally, do something hybrid with your in-house stuff, etc. Azure is far simpler to get that going with. Azure feels designed to be familiar and comfortable for traditional enterprise IT people, AWS feels designed by/for the Silicon Valley startup crowd.
That's easier said than done though. See for example the Amazon AWS status portal which stated things were just fine for far longer than they were because Amazon couldn't update it. Doing cloud based applications right is neither as inexpensive or as simple as a lot of people were led to believe/preached.
This. Clearly a lot of people jumped into cloud "to save boatloads of money" (same reason so many jumped into outsourcing. Saving tons of money is not often a good reason to do something. Usually you can make incremental savings but it's never what the salespeople or service promises because those prices ignore things like redundancy, etc. In the end doing it right ends up costing about the same as you were paying before, maybe a little less or a little more and maybe you gain some more features, but it's also probably more complex.
I caught that too and thought it was interesting. One other interesting thing about an application that really uses cloud services to their full potential (rather than just as an expensive VM/VPS) is that since the services are not commoditized/standardized there is a lot of cloud vendor lock-in. E.g. if you build a huge web app around AWS you're going to have a lot of rework to do (to some extent depending on how well you modularized your code) to migrate to another cloud provider.
If you stick to Prime eligible products, you don't have to deal with the fraud as you're dealing with Amazon and not a third party.
Depends how you define "dealing with" Amazon is not always the seller, they are increasingly a logistics/fulfillment company and not the seller. While it being Prime does mean they have the product in one of their warehouses it absolutely does not mean you are buying it from Amazon. In many cases they are just warehousing products for someone else and they send you the product which has been barcoded by the actual seller when you purchase it. If you have a problem with the product you might soon learn that it isn't Amazon you bought it from, prime or not.
I'll assume you're not kidding and answer your question. Yes, of course people still use RS-485. It's not RS-232 over longer connections though, it's just a different type of serial driver for a UART interface (i.e. it is equal to RS-232 but handles the line driving differently). One such difference is the use of balanced A/B communication lines instead of +/- lines used in RS-232, which yes, gives it better reliability over longer distances.
Specifically the popular Modbus protocol runs over RS-485 and it's used extensively in industrial control systems. DMX, which is still used extensively in the theatrical/concert lighting world is also based on RS-422/485, though there are some differences.
I'm pretty certain it wasn't the travel range of the head that was the problem but the variable spindle speed used in by their GCR format on 400k & 800k disks.
Note that if you want to legally build RF electronics for experimentation that's a very good reason to have a ham license even if talking to people isn't your thing. For example if you want to experiment with 2.4GHz WiFi at power levels much higher than what's allowed for general public use...
Note, I completely agree about the first part of what you said. When describing any kind of portable energy storage to the general public it probably makes the most sense to refer to it as a battery. I disagree about the second part though, I would still argue that if there are multiple small capacitors it's correct to call it a "battery of capacitors" or perhaps a "capacitor based battery" in technical publications.
I beg to differ, chemical energy is not required. See the Oxford English Dictionary...
battery, n.
Pronunciation:/batri/
Etymology: French batterie (13th cent.) ‘beating, battering, a group of cannon’, etc. (= Provençal bataria , Spanish batería , Italian battería ), battre to beat: see -ery suffix.
1. The action of beating or battering. ... ...
3. The beating of drums; sometimes a particular kind of drum-beat, perhaps that giving the signal for an assault.
4. A number of pieces of artillery placed in juxtaposition for combined action; in Military use, the smallest division of artillery for tactical purposes
III. A combination of simple instruments, usually to produce a compound instrument of increased power; applied originally with a reference to the discharge of electricity from such a combination.
III. 9. Electr. An apparatus consisting of a number of Leyden jars so connected that they may be charged and discharged simultaneously.
III. 10. Galvanism. An apparatus consisting of a series of cells, each containing the essentials for producing voltaic electricity, connected together. Also used of any such apparatus for producing voltaic electricity, whether of one cell or more.
III. 11. Optics. A combined series of lenses or prisms.
III. 13. a. Used gen. for a collection of similar pieces of apparatus grouped together as a set
Note that TFS states that "The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors..." see the definition for battery responsible for why we call groups of electrochemical cells batteries... "a set of units of equipment, typically when connected together" which is based on the traditional usage for artillery batteries. So if there are multiple supercapacitors working together it's absolutely correct to call it a battery (specifically a battery of supercapacitors, instead of a battery of electrochemical cells). Note that I doubt that the author was actually thinking along these lines when they wrote the piece, but I would argue it could still be correct.
I don't know that cc:Mail has that functionality ;)