You set up a nice strawman there. Yes, EA is guilty of everything you state, and more. However, a certain class of gamers appear to thrive off of what they're selling, so they'll continue selling it. They may just have squeezed the turnip too hard, and are backing off. If they're lucky, they did it in time and will regain a portion of those gamers they were in danger of losing, and thus increase their profit.
Regarding Indies, I still root for them. I buy them on occasion just to support them. However mostly, when I play, I tend to play older games that don't require network connectivity and DRM services and don't require spending 8 hours a day to play or you'll be a bottom feeder always. In fact, I'm not much of a team gamer, preferring solo games that can be played in as little as 10 minute chunks across days or weeks. Then again, I'm not EA's target audience.
You must live in one of the fairy tale climate areas. Most of us don't. My lowest electric bill I've had in 20 years was more than $100. My highest has been somewhere around $600. This is across multiple properties in several non-adjacent states. I've also paid as much as $0.15 kW/h, hence the high bill, which happens to coincide with multiple 100+ degree days in summer. Solar would definitely make a dent, but various things, such as moving or planning to move, have prevented me from spending the 30K or so to install solar (a mostly off-grid solution) I could do partial for around 12K and have a less than 8 year ROI. But that involves an 8 year commitment.
It isn't the poor people, at least not in the 1st world, they are all sitting at home on welfare. Currently they are enjoying better lifestyle than 3/4 of the rest of the planet while breeding like rabbits.
And this is the utterly misguided and provably incorrect statement. People in the 1st world aren't breeding like rabbits. It's more like corncrakes. Without immigration, most 1st world countries would have shrinking populations. Population growth also isn't majority Chinese, nor Indian (might as well pop those bubbles too) The majority of population growth through 2050 is projected to be in Africa. I give you wikipedia merely because it correlates and summarizes relatively succinctly all the points made across numerous other studies and reports I've come across over time. Feel free to dispute it.
it enables individual voters to verify that their vote was actually included in the final tally, but without enabling them to prove to anyone else how they voted.
This is the logical equivalence of stating "true" is "false". If you can verify your vote was included in the final tally, ie, I cast my vote for candidate A, then yes, you can prove to someone else you voted for candidate A. Otherwise, you cannot verify that your vote for candidate A was included in the final tally. QED
I skimmed it. It seems a touch convoluted to maintain privacy, et al. What I'm talking about is a more general approach that's simple and secure. As soon as I started reading about invisible ink and revealing codes to select candidates, well, I kind of lost interest. Add on top of that the lack of recording devices on site only adds to the potential of box stuffing, unless I stopped reading too early there. Needless to say, integrity in voting needs only the following:
1) Accuracy of count of votes cast
2) Anonymity of vote cast
3) Only 1 vote per voter
4) Ability to audit 1 and 3 without violating 2
Electronic only systems fail on 1, 2, 3, and 4 currently. Absolutely nothing prevents cheating within the system and the systems themselves are subject to hacking making 4 inherently impossible to state for sure. Paper ballots can fail on 1 and 3, but because 4 is fundamentally supported by paper ballots the integrity is maintained. As far as I'm concerned, if electronic systems are used, they should merely make voting easier, faster, and more accurate. The process should be backed by paper no matter what. Yes, that means that there are printers. The fall back is pure paper.
There is a valid argument for the use of electronic voting machines for accessibility. Large touch screens are easier to use, especially for people with disabilities, but they should merely be an interface to collect information for printing on a human-readable paper ballot.
I've argued this for a long time. There should always be paper involved. Electronic machines are only good for generating a paper ballot, IMNSHO. Per your statement on paper backed with math - blockchain actually becomes somewhat interesting in this, as voting is essentially one of the largest one time ledgers you could create and validate. It'd be interesting to see how it could address some of the issues related to voter fraud while keeping voting essentially anonymous.
The battery drain is definitely there - it's between 2 and 4 times as bad as with iOS 10. This would be after disabling all background processing, and removing cellular data from most apps. My suspicion is the mail app is still processing in the background, based on the fact that the battery drain shows mail in the top 2 at 10% drain in "background"... and mail is supposed to not run in background at all, and does have access to cellular. I've noticed that in weak cell service areas, the battery drains like you're mining bitcoin, so it's likely that mail is the primary culprit in my case, I'm considering testing by removing cellular data from mail just for a short while.
I installed iOS 11 to test a few things, on my personal phone, in a moment of forgetfulness. I normally don't install an update until the x.1 version comes out, because that's usually the beta, IMNSHO. Everything before that is not ready based on personal experience and testing since the iOS 9 release. Before that iOS was reasonably solid. If I could, I'd actually run on iOS 8, it was rock solid and didn't have any of the irritating bugs that really bother me with 10 and 11.
That is a difference between iphones and android. Android requires an active sim for verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile updates, at least. AFAIK, iPhones can be updated without a SIM, although you cannot setup a new phone without a sim, whereas with Android you can.
It's kind of like removing diesel engined vehicles from the roadways. They make up 5% of the vehicles, but something like 80% of the particulate pollution. Reducing them by 20% reduces the overall pollution by the largest margin, comparatively.
I'm pretty sure there are predecessors to that as well since dual lens cameras date to 1870. Now the purposes for dual lenses have varied, so there needs to be a very feature that's novel included for it to be patentable (theoretically)
I guess it depends upon if you grew up with smoking everywhere and your grade school art project was making that wonderful clay ashtray to grace your parents coffee table. I suspect if you're a millennial, you "missed out" on that facet of society and culture.
Despite your insightful post, I just came here to post:
ROFLMAO
BTW, as an aside, I did setup a supposed Orange Book C test system. With Windows NT 4.0. It was largely unusable. Windows NT 4.0 reached C2 certification in Dec, 2000. Note that Win 2K had already been released as had the first betas of XP. AFAIK those were never certified.
Just watch the original Pinocchio... the smoking, drinking, and general adult behavior in a "kid's" show may surprise you. What's even more surprising is that few adults remember any of those things when they saw it as kids, they do remember Pinocchio made some bad choices, but mostly his nose grew when he lied, and he was a wooden puppet. Oh, and he turned into a real boy.
Backups that used to take 10s of minutes or even hours now complete in a few minutes, and I can keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly snapshots for each backup....without the abysmal performance of something like rdiff-backup.
I've been considering moving to ZFS for a few years now, just never got the hardware/time together to test the functionality so I'm comfortable with it, and I still want an offsite copy. As for rsync being slow, it can be, but for my particular use case it's not bad at all. I'm not backing up millions of files with this one, just a write seldom, read a lot store devices (photos, music, movies etc) There's little change once the items get dropped here, and not too much writing. rsync works fine for this. That said, ZFS brings a few features to the table that are appealing and the reason I'm looking to change to it.
Regarding your upgrading, building a power efficient headless small box, no discrete GPU needed, for a host of functions your desktop is doing now seems pretty cost effective, maybe a couple of hundred with what you already have and you can offload a bunch of stuff (seems like bind, squid, dhcpd, asterisk, postfix, apache, etc could all run on such a dedicated box) Throw it in a closet and you're done for the next 5 years, as long as you don't run out of disk space. Heck, the PSU would probably be your single most expensive item, since the case just has to be functional.
I think you partly misunderstood my V/ATT reference, at least how it relates to AMP. Back in the pre iPhone days, Verizon and AT&T both had "proxy" web services that would facilitate "faster" service by compressing and caching web content for remote sites, which they then served to you. So you never knew if you were getting a real web site or something cached, along with ads as favored by ATT/V, injected into the cached pages and/or from proxy'd sites.
That's actually a big part of the motivation for my upcoming upgrade to a Threadripper CPU with 64GB RAM.
I use both chromium and firefox (simultaneously, for different things), currently chromium has 14 windows open with a total of 91 tabs. firefox has 16 windows open with a total of 216 tabs. chromium ( v61.0.3163.100) is currently using 11GB of RAM, and Firefox (v56.0) is using 5GB....that's a large chunk of my 32GB. With everything else that's running on my system, I'm always on the edge of running out of RAM.
OK, I have something like 23 windows with multiple tabs each (multiple meaning more than 4, not much reason for a window with less the way I organize them) in Safari,I have 24GB, run roughly 3-7 IDEs concurrently (different needs made it easier to customize each IDE for its respective environment) 3 servers, 2 DBs, multiple builds, mail, FireFox for debugging specific performance issues on web pages and host of minor other programs, and I still have 3GB free after 50 days of uptime. (I run all this on a 980X hackintosh build) If you're running out of RAM you're doing something seriously memory hogging, or, let's face it, there's likely some underlying piece of software that's a problem.
After reading the rest of your use case - perhaps you may move this system to ZFS duty and other non main desktop services, and replace your desktop with something geared just for desktop duty? Seems like a better use across the boards. I've personally not jumped onto ZFS yet, instead choosing to just rsync my file storage across 2-3 external drives and snapshotting one every month or so for offsite storage. Rotating them that way has resulted in zero loss and there's enough warning when a drive is going to die, so far.
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You set up a nice strawman there. Yes, EA is guilty of everything you state, and more. However, a certain class of gamers appear to thrive off of what they're selling, so they'll continue selling it. They may just have squeezed the turnip too hard, and are backing off. If they're lucky, they did it in time and will regain a portion of those gamers they were in danger of losing, and thus increase their profit.
Regarding Indies, I still root for them. I buy them on occasion just to support them. However mostly, when I play, I tend to play older games that don't require network connectivity and DRM services and don't require spending 8 hours a day to play or you'll be a bottom feeder always. In fact, I'm not much of a team gamer, preferring solo games that can be played in as little as 10 minute chunks across days or weeks. Then again, I'm not EA's target audience.
I'd say Roy Moore may be a tipping point. If he remains in the running, and it seems he's intent on it, watch the results.
Samsung, Brother, Canon. I can refill all 3.
You must live in one of the fairy tale climate areas. Most of us don't. My lowest electric bill I've had in 20 years was more than $100. My highest has been somewhere around $600. This is across multiple properties in several non-adjacent states. I've also paid as much as $0.15 kW/h, hence the high bill, which happens to coincide with multiple 100+ degree days in summer. Solar would definitely make a dent, but various things, such as moving or planning to move, have prevented me from spending the 30K or so to install solar (a mostly off-grid solution) I could do partial for around 12K and have a less than 8 year ROI. But that involves an 8 year commitment.
It isn't the poor people, at least not in the 1st world, they are all sitting at home on welfare. Currently they are enjoying better lifestyle than 3/4 of the rest of the planet while breeding like rabbits.
And this is the utterly misguided and provably incorrect statement. People in the 1st world aren't breeding like rabbits. It's more like corncrakes. Without immigration, most 1st world countries would have shrinking populations. Population growth also isn't majority Chinese, nor Indian (might as well pop those bubbles too) The majority of population growth through 2050 is projected to be in Africa. I give you wikipedia merely because it correlates and summarizes relatively succinctly all the points made across numerous other studies and reports I've come across over time. Feel free to dispute it.
it enables individual voters to verify that their vote was actually included in the final tally, but without enabling them to prove to anyone else how they voted.
This is the logical equivalence of stating "true" is "false". If you can verify your vote was included in the final tally, ie, I cast my vote for candidate A, then yes, you can prove to someone else you voted for candidate A. Otherwise, you cannot verify that your vote for candidate A was included in the final tally. QED
Electronic only systems fail on 1, 2, 3, and 4 currently. Absolutely nothing prevents cheating within the system and the systems themselves are subject to hacking making 4 inherently impossible to state for sure. Paper ballots can fail on 1 and 3, but because 4 is fundamentally supported by paper ballots the integrity is maintained. As far as I'm concerned, if electronic systems are used, they should merely make voting easier, faster, and more accurate. The process should be backed by paper no matter what. Yes, that means that there are printers. The fall back is pure paper.
There is a valid argument for the use of electronic voting machines for accessibility. Large touch screens are easier to use, especially for people with disabilities, but they should merely be an interface to collect information for printing on a human-readable paper ballot.
I've argued this for a long time. There should always be paper involved. Electronic machines are only good for generating a paper ballot, IMNSHO. Per your statement on paper backed with math - blockchain actually becomes somewhat interesting in this, as voting is essentially one of the largest one time ledgers you could create and validate. It'd be interesting to see how it could address some of the issues related to voter fraud while keeping voting essentially anonymous.
Go is a successful language.
So is PHP.
So is COBOL.
The battery drain is definitely there - it's between 2 and 4 times as bad as with iOS 10. This would be after disabling all background processing, and removing cellular data from most apps. My suspicion is the mail app is still processing in the background, based on the fact that the battery drain shows mail in the top 2 at 10% drain in "background"... and mail is supposed to not run in background at all, and does have access to cellular. I've noticed that in weak cell service areas, the battery drains like you're mining bitcoin, so it's likely that mail is the primary culprit in my case, I'm considering testing by removing cellular data from mail just for a short while.
I installed iOS 11 to test a few things, on my personal phone, in a moment of forgetfulness. I normally don't install an update until the x.1 version comes out, because that's usually the beta, IMNSHO. Everything before that is not ready based on personal experience and testing since the iOS 9 release. Before that iOS was reasonably solid. If I could, I'd actually run on iOS 8, it was rock solid and didn't have any of the irritating bugs that really bother me with 10 and 11.
That is a difference between iphones and android. Android requires an active sim for verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile updates, at least. AFAIK, iPhones can be updated without a SIM, although you cannot setup a new phone without a sim, whereas with Android you can.
I'd be fine with reverting the females to non-bloodsucking variety. Leave the males as males that cause further devolution.
I believe this week he'd just point to himself and say - "I'm in India!"
It's kind of like removing diesel engined vehicles from the roadways. They make up 5% of the vehicles, but something like 80% of the particulate pollution. Reducing them by 20% reduces the overall pollution by the largest margin, comparatively.
I'm pretty sure there are predecessors to that as well since dual lens cameras date to 1870. Now the purposes for dual lenses have varied, so there needs to be a very feature that's novel included for it to be patentable (theoretically)
I guess it depends upon if you grew up with smoking everywhere and your grade school art project was making that wonderful clay ashtray to grace your parents coffee table. I suspect if you're a millennial, you "missed out" on that facet of society and culture.
Despite your insightful post, I just came here to post:
ROFLMAO
BTW, as an aside, I did setup a supposed Orange Book C test system. With Windows NT 4.0. It was largely unusable. Windows NT 4.0 reached C2 certification in Dec, 2000. Note that Win 2K had already been released as had the first betas of XP. AFAIK those were never certified.
Grimm's Fairy Tales, IIRC, weren't meant for kids, nor were Aesop's Fables. They were primarily a vehicle for teaching ethics among other things.
Just watch the original Pinocchio... the smoking, drinking, and general adult behavior in a "kid's" show may surprise you. What's even more surprising is that few adults remember any of those things when they saw it as kids, they do remember Pinocchio made some bad choices, but mostly his nose grew when he lied, and he was a wooden puppet. Oh, and he turned into a real boy.
I'm not sure why everyone doesn't do this. Why would you connect a spy device voluntarily to your network? Also, focusing on the monitor functionality versus soon to be obsolete "smart services" would seem to be a much better deal for all involved.
Backups that used to take 10s of minutes or even hours now complete in a few minutes, and I can keep hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly snapshots for each backup....without the abysmal performance of something like rdiff-backup.
I've been considering moving to ZFS for a few years now, just never got the hardware/time together to test the functionality so I'm comfortable with it, and I still want an offsite copy. As for rsync being slow, it can be, but for my particular use case it's not bad at all. I'm not backing up millions of files with this one, just a write seldom, read a lot store devices (photos, music, movies etc) There's little change once the items get dropped here, and not too much writing. rsync works fine for this. That said, ZFS brings a few features to the table that are appealing and the reason I'm looking to change to it.
Regarding your upgrading, building a power efficient headless small box, no discrete GPU needed, for a host of functions your desktop is doing now seems pretty cost effective, maybe a couple of hundred with what you already have and you can offload a bunch of stuff (seems like bind, squid, dhcpd, asterisk, postfix, apache, etc could all run on such a dedicated box) Throw it in a closet and you're done for the next 5 years, as long as you don't run out of disk space. Heck, the PSU would probably be your single most expensive item, since the case just has to be functional.
I think you partly misunderstood my V/ATT reference, at least how it relates to AMP. Back in the pre iPhone days, Verizon and AT&T both had "proxy" web services that would facilitate "faster" service by compressing and caching web content for remote sites, which they then served to you. So you never knew if you were getting a real web site or something cached, along with ads as favored by ATT/V, injected into the cached pages and/or from proxy'd sites.
I'm sure you're seeing where that's leading me.
So Google's trying to do what Verizon and AT&T were doing back in the days of mobile lock in? How history repeats itself.
That's actually a big part of the motivation for my upcoming upgrade to a Threadripper CPU with 64GB RAM.
I use both chromium and firefox (simultaneously, for different things), currently chromium has 14 windows open with a total of 91 tabs. firefox has 16 windows open with a total of 216 tabs. chromium ( v61.0.3163.100) is currently using 11GB of RAM, and Firefox (v56.0) is using 5GB....that's a large chunk of my 32GB. With everything else that's running on my system, I'm always on the edge of running out of RAM.
OK, I have something like 23 windows with multiple tabs each (multiple meaning more than 4, not much reason for a window with less the way I organize them) in Safari,I have 24GB, run roughly 3-7 IDEs concurrently (different needs made it easier to customize each IDE for its respective environment) 3 servers, 2 DBs, multiple builds, mail, FireFox for debugging specific performance issues on web pages and host of minor other programs, and I still have 3GB free after 50 days of uptime. (I run all this on a 980X hackintosh build) If you're running out of RAM you're doing something seriously memory hogging, or, let's face it, there's likely some underlying piece of software that's a problem.
After reading the rest of your use case - perhaps you may move this system to ZFS duty and other non main desktop services, and replace your desktop with something geared just for desktop duty? Seems like a better use across the boards. I've personally not jumped onto ZFS yet, instead choosing to just rsync my file storage across 2-3 external drives and snapshotting one every month or so for offsite storage. Rotating them that way has resulted in zero loss and there's enough warning when a drive is going to die, so far.
I'd argue half that list can't sing.