Will the 2016 Mac minis be as pathetic as the 2014 models?
Currently, it looks like the 2016 Mac minis will be the exact same model as the 2014 model. It's been almost two years without and update. Even worse on the Mac Pro side of things as it's getting near three years. Cook says that they expect users to upgrade their computer every three years, but we're certainly not going to do it when they are literally the same model when it comes time. I can deal with a lot of things such as loss of ports, but I expect at least yearly updates.
Between WWW and Streaming video you've got 99.9999% of all internet traffic. Your SSH session or video game isn't even a single percentage of internet traffic. For all intents and purposes the internet is the WWW and streaming..
I'm not so sure about that. Business interfaces are a lot of automated traffic handling a lot of data 24/7/365. While most is restricted to the LAN, many businesses communicate between each other. Banks, for example, are constantly talking to each other in what would not be WWW or steaming video. Same goes for government departments, hospitals and other businesses with multiple sites, vendor/client application communication, etc. Then there's still email. However, looking around briefly, I can't really seem to find decent data on what is what.
So the local management started pushing for higher wages in order to reduce turnover and keep the quality people.
Here is your problem. I worked for a large international call centre once years ago and became "friends" with one of the female trainers. She explained that the business model doesn't expect worker retention. Customer Service has a short burnout time, which they calculated at an average of 18 months to 2 years which got factored that into the business. Their training process could train any monkey with sufficient language skills to do the job, and if they got 2 years out of each employee it was a win.
Why pay people more if you can just as easily replace them? If you have the training and QA process in place, retention is unnecessary.
I know this sucks, but if you are "quality" then customer service should only be a stepping stone onto bigger and better things.
Funny enough, this perfectly described what my friends that have worked for Amazon have described. The starting pay and needed competency may be much higher, but the logic behind it is the same. Like Tier 1 tech support, anybody with a clue is dealing with the grind only so they can make it a resume builder for their next job which they are already looking for.
Probably didn't believe. As someone that's done Tier 2 support I can't even count how many times the problem could have been resolved at Tier 1.
Could have, but there are several issues there. One, and most importantly, Tier 1 is judged by their average time on a call, so anytime they can punt it, they will. There is also no shortage of customers that will immediately ask to go to Tier 2 without prompting and even more that will ask with prompting. Two, It takes training and a few months of constant problem solving to really know a product to give good support. Usually about the time that that happens, the Tier 1 can solve about every problem that comes up, they realize their job sucks ass for shitty pay while more than often routes to better positions like even Tier 2 have been closed off by the company, and move on to greener pastures. This causes Tier 1 to be constantly stocked by green tech except for the few that can't get a better job (and have excelled at Point One).
I've never owed a new car, I don't think its a very good value. Cars lose like half their value in the first few years, and the insurance kills you (and road taxes, some places charge road fees based on how old the car is.).
I always heard that from my father too. However, he also usually got his used cars from my grandparents. Meanwhile, during college, I went through two of his used cars, and one of my own, in a few years, all of which constantly broke down and bled money. For my second car, I did my research, checked consumer reports lemon list, and went searching. I checked every car lot I could find in the city and seriously, ever small, economic car on every lot was on that consumer report lemon list. Instead I bought a '94 Toyota Tercel brand new and I still have it 22 years later and it's only been in the shop once, for a pre-emptive clutch, water pump change along with a dent in the gas tank that was seriously limiting my range. Insurance didn't go up as I never had full coverage anyway (why get full coverage on a used car? my father would say) and I didn't notice any great rise in any other expenses either. Next time I a car, I'll be buying new again and driving it till I die. All those cars in used car lots are there for a reason.
It would be impossible to launch an industry invigorating service like MTV, or VH1 today.
True, but it was only even possible back in the day because lots of British bands already had videos made for Top of the Pops sitting around doing nothing and were willing to let MTV use them for free at the time for advertising. The US record companies quickly got money out of MTV even when MTV became the 800 pound gorilla in the music industry. Unfortunately, an 800-pound gorilla in the music industry doesn't make as much money as the 300-pound gorilla in the reality TV show industry so it's doubtful that any industry invigorating service would be able to not degenerate into sometime much more shallow that makes a bit more money.
-1 = "I don't like your opinion, you're a troll" far too often. Politically incorrect wording of a factual statement is likely to be modded -1 almost all the time. The issue is that the system needs more Meta Moderation, so that people who are wounded by chalk marks aren't allowed to get Mod points very often, leaving the discussion to people who are adults who merely disagree on a particular subject.
Political Correctness is censorship, and the worst kind.
Whatever. I would think that people showing up to your house, putting a bullet in your head and burning your letters and manuscripts would be a much worse kind of censorship, but everybody has their own degrees of comfort with this sort of thing. Still, if posts are getting modded to -1, in many cases they are an AC and highly probably a troll, or they are being such an asshole they have pissed off at least three people to the point of modding them down, and fit a pretty good definition of being a troll. Still, training is needed as we are onboarding new moderators probably every day. Brining up the topic of how to mod is fruitful. Sometimes, if modding up a rebuttal, it may be even advantageous to mod up the thing you don't agree with so that the conversation is preserved in an easier to read format.
People probably choose to veer away from hitting people because they don't realize they might kill themselves - they just see what is in front of them and sure to happen, and don't have the time or wherewithall to consider the unknown consequences.
Yep. Lots of people die every year due to rabbits. Traveling fast through places like Nevada only to have a rabbit run suicidally in front of the car. people instinctlivly swerve which can and does cause cars to go off the road or flip causing deaths of the people in the cars. It takes repeated telling to people "do not swerve for the rabbits, just keep going forward" and reason why and even then they might have to have it happen, swerve and not wreck to really kill the muscle memory reaction.
"It will be interesting to see where the hard sci-fi authors go now."
Huh? There are differing opinions on what constitutes "hard sci-fi", but I thought that "No time travel" and "No FTL" were generally agreed upon principles for defining the genre.
Not really. You always have things like Tippler's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (Physical Review D 9 (8): 2203–2206. Bibcode:1974PhRvD...9.2203T ) but Hawking has a paper out there saying it's impossible, but Hawking loses bets all the time so there might be another physicist who would disagree with their own paper. Continue till one gets a t-shirt. For other ways, it's probably possible to come up with exotic topologies of Reinmannian space so that the math works out and would probably depend on how the author explained and described the process as much as the actual science behind it.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. In my experience, all the hospitals do it the wrong way - which is to write down the actual password.
The correct way to do it is simple, right down a password that is systematically wrong.
If the password is 845, write down 734.
If the password is EmerC@rE, write down eMERc2Re, or perhaps R,rV#tR (check your keyboard).
simple cryptography works fine.
Except that the many of the people who are writing it down are the people who have issues getting it correct even when written down correctly, mostly older doctors and staff. The rest are people who have so many passwords for som many systems that are used so seldomly, that they can't remember them. This would include what their system of cryptography is too. Add in that many of these systems are vendor controlled and they all have different constraints on how passwords can be created so that any such system would be about as complicated as just remembering the things in the first place.
Well, I didn't read that anywhere... Where can one read about that, the formation of matter and antimatter? And how is hydrogen the byproduct of that? I thought hydrogen was matter, not the leftovers of matter/antimatter?
Hydrogen is matter and what we see around us in the leftovers of the original matter/antimatter created at the beginning of the universe. In this case, matter and anti-matter were created roughly equally from energy in the beginning of the universe. It all pretty much annihilated with each other and turned back into energy which formed matter and antimatter again. For some reason, matter had a slight edge, so after the anti-matter turned back into energy there was still matter left over, which caused the next cycle to happen even quicker as the anti-matter was surrounded by more matter. This continued till only matter existed as at those pressures, any anti-matter was eventually annihilated before it could travel very far preventing any substantial amounts being left behind by time the density of the universe had decreased to the point that lone nuclei could travel without interacting with it's opposite. That's why we don't see anti-matter galaxies or planets around.
And by following links at any point that seems confusing you can find even more information. For books, there are some nice ones by Brian Greene that I think address this as well as things like dark matter and the make up of the early universe, but I can't remember which one off the top of my head.
The trick here is to get a 'loyalty card' and not fill in the info. I don't have a facebook account or any social media junk except google+ and LinkedIn.
And where I feel it necessary I pay cash or use a greendot money card.
I hope that where you feel necessary is everywhere you use a loyalty card, every single time you use it without fail. Use a credit or debit card with a loyalty card even once, and they'll be linked with your information forever.
There are no bandwidth caps on delivery through Amazon Prime. 4K Blu-ray quality HDR video with theatrical sound? Not a problem. Exclusive streaming-media deals? Not a problem if you pre-order the disk.
I have Comcast Internet. If Comcast puts a cap out then it doesn't matter what Amazon does.
I think what they are alluding to is Amazon Prime shipping a physical disk for an optical drive. Do not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives speeding down the highway, nor a delivery truck bringing blue-ray disks.
This has about as much to do with scientific research as [insert something funny here].
This is China. This is the South China Sea. This is about sovereignty. It is about establishing "use" and "continued presence" to extend national boarders or to strengthen their position in that regard.
Please. This is about thumping ones chest and making claims that will never pan out to make themselves look bigger. China has made claims to aircraft carriers, supersonic stealth jets, their own space station, missions to the Moon and Mars. As far as I can tell, they are mostly bluster with an unoperational Soviet carrier that still has to be towed, a photoshopped stealth jet, and no missions to anywhere significant. I'm not going to claim that they aren't making technological headway, or that they aren't capable, but as far as people saying "China has the vision and will to do what the US won't or can't", I'll pay attention when they actually start catching up instead of just announcing ambitious plans that sound just like things Bush said the US would do years back.
Firstly - why not ? We have no proof that there were NOT technologically advanced dinosaurs, at best we have strong reason to doubt there were spacefaring dinosaurs. You are underestimating just how massive an amount of deep time 65-million years was. Dinosaurs could have built cities five times bigger than New York and not a shred would have survived for us to find. If we go extinct tomorrow, it's unlikely that in 10-million years there will be any evidence whatsoever that we existed - except maybe a few primate fossils, even our best mummies can't make it that far. A hundred million ? Not a chance, by that point even our satelites would have decayed and crashed.
There will still be lots of evidence that we existed and likewise there is similar evidence that dinosaurs did not have a highly advanced technological society. The matter of the fact is that although our artifacts and relics may have deteriated, we have long since created disturbances in the geological records with mining to form evidence on the period of tectonic crust renewal. Evidence that we have mined gold, silver, copper, iron, etc let alone quarries where we have mined limestone, marble, and other mountains of hard stone will be buried in the earth and be obvious to anybody looking. Looking at dinosaur fossils, we can tell where they have dug into the earth to create nests for eggs, and we have never seen evidence that there are fire pits, mining, or even stone tools. Layers of stone such as marble, granite, and limestone will not heal. That there are still ore, oil, and stone to mine and no signs it has ever been mined before humans means that there was no widespread dinosaur technological civilization.
With the IoT controlling many physical aspects of our lives, e.g., door locks, indoor climate control, etc.,we are making it more and more difficult to take back control of the "intelligence" we are creating.
Slashdot Mirror
Will the 2016 Mac minis be as pathetic as the 2014 models?
Currently, it looks like the 2016 Mac minis will be the exact same model as the 2014 model. It's been almost two years without and update. Even worse on the Mac Pro side of things as it's getting near three years. Cook says that they expect users to upgrade their computer every three years, but we're certainly not going to do it when they are literally the same model when it comes time. I can deal with a lot of things such as loss of ports, but I expect at least yearly updates.
Between WWW and Streaming video you've got 99.9999% of all internet traffic. Your SSH session or video game isn't even a single percentage of internet traffic. For all intents and purposes the internet is the WWW and streaming..
I'm not so sure about that. Business interfaces are a lot of automated traffic handling a lot of data 24/7/365. While most is restricted to the LAN, many businesses communicate between each other. Banks, for example, are constantly talking to each other in what would not be WWW or steaming video. Same goes for government departments, hospitals and other businesses with multiple sites, vendor/client application communication, etc. Then there's still email. However, looking around briefly, I can't really seem to find decent data on what is what.
So the local management started pushing for higher wages in order to reduce turnover and keep the quality people.
Here is your problem. I worked for a large international call centre once years ago and became "friends" with one of the female trainers. She explained that the business model doesn't expect worker retention. Customer Service has a short burnout time, which they calculated at an average of 18 months to 2 years which got factored that into the business. Their training process could train any monkey with sufficient language skills to do the job, and if they got 2 years out of each employee it was a win. Why pay people more if you can just as easily replace them? If you have the training and QA process in place, retention is unnecessary. I know this sucks, but if you are "quality" then customer service should only be a stepping stone onto bigger and better things.
Funny enough, this perfectly described what my friends that have worked for Amazon have described. The starting pay and needed competency may be much higher, but the logic behind it is the same. Like Tier 1 tech support, anybody with a clue is dealing with the grind only so they can make it a resume builder for their next job which they are already looking for.
Probably didn't believe. As someone that's done Tier 2 support I can't even count how many times the problem could have been resolved at Tier 1.
Could have, but there are several issues there. One, and most importantly, Tier 1 is judged by their average time on a call, so anytime they can punt it, they will. There is also no shortage of customers that will immediately ask to go to Tier 2 without prompting and even more that will ask with prompting. Two, It takes training and a few months of constant problem solving to really know a product to give good support. Usually about the time that that happens, the Tier 1 can solve about every problem that comes up, they realize their job sucks ass for shitty pay while more than often routes to better positions like even Tier 2 have been closed off by the company, and move on to greener pastures. This causes Tier 1 to be constantly stocked by green tech except for the few that can't get a better job (and have excelled at Point One).
I've never owed a new car, I don't think its a very good value. Cars lose like half their value in the first few years, and the insurance kills you (and road taxes, some places charge road fees based on how old the car is.).
I always heard that from my father too. However, he also usually got his used cars from my grandparents. Meanwhile, during college, I went through two of his used cars, and one of my own, in a few years, all of which constantly broke down and bled money. For my second car, I did my research, checked consumer reports lemon list, and went searching. I checked every car lot I could find in the city and seriously, ever small, economic car on every lot was on that consumer report lemon list. Instead I bought a '94 Toyota Tercel brand new and I still have it 22 years later and it's only been in the shop once, for a pre-emptive clutch, water pump change along with a dent in the gas tank that was seriously limiting my range. Insurance didn't go up as I never had full coverage anyway (why get full coverage on a used car? my father would say) and I didn't notice any great rise in any other expenses either. Next time I a car, I'll be buying new again and driving it till I die. All those cars in used car lots are there for a reason.
It would be impossible to launch an industry invigorating service like MTV, or VH1 today.
True, but it was only even possible back in the day because lots of British bands already had videos made for Top of the Pops sitting around doing nothing and were willing to let MTV use them for free at the time for advertising. The US record companies quickly got money out of MTV even when MTV became the 800 pound gorilla in the music industry. Unfortunately, an 800-pound gorilla in the music industry doesn't make as much money as the 300-pound gorilla in the reality TV show industry so it's doubtful that any industry invigorating service would be able to not degenerate into sometime much more shallow that makes a bit more money.
At least it's better than a 200 story black pyramid
Debatable.
I think the term you are looking for would be menagerie.
-1 = "I don't like your opinion, you're a troll" far too often. Politically incorrect wording of a factual statement is likely to be modded -1 almost all the time. The issue is that the system needs more Meta Moderation, so that people who are wounded by chalk marks aren't allowed to get Mod points very often, leaving the discussion to people who are adults who merely disagree on a particular subject.
Political Correctness is censorship, and the worst kind.
Whatever. I would think that people showing up to your house, putting a bullet in your head and burning your letters and manuscripts would be a much worse kind of censorship, but everybody has their own degrees of comfort with this sort of thing. Still, if posts are getting modded to -1, in many cases they are an AC and highly probably a troll, or they are being such an asshole they have pissed off at least three people to the point of modding them down, and fit a pretty good definition of being a troll. Still, training is needed as we are onboarding new moderators probably every day. Brining up the topic of how to mod is fruitful. Sometimes, if modding up a rebuttal, it may be even advantageous to mod up the thing you don't agree with so that the conversation is preserved in an easier to read format.
People probably choose to veer away from hitting people because they don't realize they might kill themselves - they just see what is in front of them and sure to happen, and don't have the time or wherewithall to consider the unknown consequences.
Yep. Lots of people die every year due to rabbits. Traveling fast through places like Nevada only to have a rabbit run suicidally in front of the car. people instinctlivly swerve which can and does cause cars to go off the road or flip causing deaths of the people in the cars. It takes repeated telling to people "do not swerve for the rabbits, just keep going forward" and reason why and even then they might have to have it happen, swerve and not wreck to really kill the muscle memory reaction.
The second law of thermodynamics forbids travelling backwards in time, as this would decrease the entropy of the universe the traveller observes.
Unless they can pull energy out of another universe to make up for it. Laws of thermodynamics only hold for closed systems.
"It will be interesting to see where the hard sci-fi authors go now."
Huh? There are differing opinions on what constitutes "hard sci-fi", but I thought that "No time travel" and "No FTL" were generally agreed upon principles for defining the genre.
Not really. You always have things like Tippler's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (Physical Review D 9 (8): 2203–2206. Bibcode:1974PhRvD...9.2203T ) but Hawking has a paper out there saying it's impossible, but Hawking loses bets all the time so there might be another physicist who would disagree with their own paper. Continue till one gets a t-shirt. For other ways, it's probably possible to come up with exotic topologies of Reinmannian space so that the math works out and would probably depend on how the author explained and described the process as much as the actual science behind it.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. In my experience, all the hospitals do it the wrong way - which is to write down the actual password.
The correct way to do it is simple, right down a password that is systematically wrong.
If the password is 845, write down 734. If the password is EmerC@rE, write down eMERc2Re, or perhaps R,rV#tR (check your keyboard).
simple cryptography works fine.
Except that the many of the people who are writing it down are the people who have issues getting it correct even when written down correctly, mostly older doctors and staff. The rest are people who have so many passwords for som many systems that are used so seldomly, that they can't remember them. This would include what their system of cryptography is too. Add in that many of these systems are vendor controlled and they all have different constraints on how passwords can be created so that any such system would be about as complicated as just remembering the things in the first place.
1234?
Your luggage has special characters?
Well, I didn't read that anywhere... Where can one read about that, the formation of matter and antimatter? And how is hydrogen the byproduct of that? I thought hydrogen was matter, not the leftovers of matter/antimatter?
Hydrogen is matter and what we see around us in the leftovers of the original matter/antimatter created at the beginning of the universe. In this case, matter and anti-matter were created roughly equally from energy in the beginning of the universe. It all pretty much annihilated with each other and turned back into energy which formed matter and antimatter again. For some reason, matter had a slight edge, so after the anti-matter turned back into energy there was still matter left over, which caused the next cycle to happen even quicker as the anti-matter was surrounded by more matter. This continued till only matter existed as at those pressures, any anti-matter was eventually annihilated before it could travel very far preventing any substantial amounts being left behind by time the density of the universe had decreased to the point that lone nuclei could travel without interacting with it's opposite. That's why we don't see anti-matter galaxies or planets around.
You can read about it here: Baryogenesis.
With a follow up here: Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.
And by following links at any point that seems confusing you can find even more information. For books, there are some nice ones by Brian Greene that I think address this as well as things like dark matter and the make up of the early universe, but I can't remember which one off the top of my head.
We need a Forbidden Planet.
What about Mickey and Goofy?
It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.
Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?
There will be no asteroid mining. It's never going to be cost effective.
But there will certainly be experimentation, and depending on what this asteroid is made of, it could probably be a good candidate for testing.
Laugh at them.
They'll just be convinced that next we'll try and stop them, and then they'll win.
The trick here is to get a 'loyalty card' and not fill in the info. I don't have a facebook account or any social media junk except google+ and LinkedIn.
And where I feel it necessary I pay cash or use a greendot money card.
I hope that where you feel necessary is everywhere you use a loyalty card, every single time you use it without fail. Use a credit or debit card with a loyalty card even once, and they'll be linked with your information forever.
No, the point of loyalty cards is to get me to consolidate all my buying with that retailer instead of with a variety of retailers.
Not really as you'll find that the same loyalty card will work at that variety of retailers regardless of what name is printed on it.
Why does anything need an optical drive in 2016?
There are no bandwidth caps on delivery through Amazon Prime. 4K Blu-ray quality HDR video with theatrical sound? Not a problem. Exclusive streaming-media deals? Not a problem if you pre-order the disk.
I have Comcast Internet. If Comcast puts a cap out then it doesn't matter what Amazon does.
I think what they are alluding to is Amazon Prime shipping a physical disk for an optical drive. Do not underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives speeding down the highway, nor a delivery truck bringing blue-ray disks.
HA lol!
This has about as much to do with scientific research as [insert something funny here].
This is China. This is the South China Sea. This is about sovereignty. It is about establishing "use" and "continued presence" to extend national boarders or to strengthen their position in that regard.
Please. This is about thumping ones chest and making claims that will never pan out to make themselves look bigger. China has made claims to aircraft carriers, supersonic stealth jets, their own space station, missions to the Moon and Mars. As far as I can tell, they are mostly bluster with an unoperational Soviet carrier that still has to be towed, a photoshopped stealth jet, and no missions to anywhere significant. I'm not going to claim that they aren't making technological headway, or that they aren't capable, but as far as people saying "China has the vision and will to do what the US won't or can't", I'll pay attention when they actually start catching up instead of just announcing ambitious plans that sound just like things Bush said the US would do years back.
Firstly - why not ? We have no proof that there were NOT technologically advanced dinosaurs, at best we have strong reason to doubt there were spacefaring dinosaurs. You are underestimating just how massive an amount of deep time 65-million years was. Dinosaurs could have built cities five times bigger than New York and not a shred would have survived for us to find. If we go extinct tomorrow, it's unlikely that in 10-million years there will be any evidence whatsoever that we existed - except maybe a few primate fossils, even our best mummies can't make it that far. A hundred million ? Not a chance, by that point even our satelites would have decayed and crashed.
There will still be lots of evidence that we existed and likewise there is similar evidence that dinosaurs did not have a highly advanced technological society. The matter of the fact is that although our artifacts and relics may have deteriated, we have long since created disturbances in the geological records with mining to form evidence on the period of tectonic crust renewal. Evidence that we have mined gold, silver, copper, iron, etc let alone quarries where we have mined limestone, marble, and other mountains of hard stone will be buried in the earth and be obvious to anybody looking. Looking at dinosaur fossils, we can tell where they have dug into the earth to create nests for eggs, and we have never seen evidence that there are fire pits, mining, or even stone tools. Layers of stone such as marble, granite, and limestone will not heal. That there are still ore, oil, and stone to mine and no signs it has ever been mined before humans means that there was no widespread dinosaur technological civilization.
With the IoT controlling many physical aspects of our lives, e.g., door locks, indoor climate control, etc.,we are making it more and more difficult to take back control of the "intelligence" we are creating.
Reminds me of Westworld.