weren't all the ATI (now AMD) fanboys claiming a couple years ago that because ATI was developing more "open" drivers that they would rule the linux landscape?
That merely killed Nvidia. Intel dodged that bullet and then shot it right back at AMD, better aimed and with an explosive warhead attached. It passed through AMD (wounding them) and and then exploded inside Nvidia's skull.
Open is necessary, but if you intend to open (AMD) while your competitor (Intel) actually does it and then also writes the drivers too (!), then you're too slow. Too little, too late.
Last I heard, talking to AMDs video decoder was still a proprietary trade secret. Video decoders, as late as 2012! As if people are still waiting to build their HTPCs. AMD hasn't even entered the market yet, while Intel is selling. There go your customers.
otherwise AMD is stuck with a chip that will only run correctly on an OS that looks to be the most hated Windows since MS Bob.
WTF are you talking about? Nearly all OSes work just fine with Bulldozer modules. You just happened to cherry-pick three example that don't, and one that does but which you happen to not like.
Interesting that all 4 OSes you mentioned, just happen to be from one team/company.
You remind me of the kind of people who complain about Democrats and Republicans, and then go out and vote for Democrats and Republicans.
"I tried Tree Top apple juice, a local farm's apple juice, the supermarket's generic apple juice, and all 3 of them completely lack citrusy character! Why can't any make a citrusy juice, something that tastes like, oh I don't know, oranges? Should I try yet another brand of apple juice?"
The main thing I'm getting out of TFA has nothing to do with TSA or my country's increasingly high tolerance for tyranny.
What I'm seeing here is strong evidence that Delta doesn't honor the tickets that they sell. Delta (not TSA) kicked him off, and for no even half-sensible reason, to the point that it almost sides like an excuse (did someone else happen to board and take the seat?). It was totally arbitrary.
I don't happen to have any anti-TSA T-shirts, but I do own T-shirts, and some of them have words, and I have no fucking idea what some random employee might find offensive. ("Eek! Your shirt has the name of a metal band on it! That's the devil's music!") This time it was a comedic/mocking logo. It could also be for a competing logo (your shirt contains the word "southwest" and that's making me uncomfortable) or a political party, or the fact that you wore a T-shirt at all instead of something with buttons (yes, people who care about such things really do exist and I have no way of knowing whether or not Delta has hired one of them), or hair length, or a beard style, or skin color, or whatever.
If it happened to this guy, it could happen to anyone. It could happen to me. And for no good reason.
If you buy an airline ticket from Delta, the ticket might not "work," and not for reasons beyond anyone's control (e.g. weather) but some jerk's arbitrary whim, and you can't reasonably predict or prevent it. That sounds like an untrustworthy business. Hopefully this guy will at least have the sense to report the fraud to BBB.
And hopefully Delta will be tripping over themselves to assure the public that the guy got paid back, with a lot of extra to cover his trouble and embarrassment, and do anything and everything they can to assure people their ticket sales business is not some kind of fly-by-night scam.
Watermarks aren't talked about, because almost no one cares. Lots of stuff on my fileserver has "personal identifiers" but you don't see me deleting my copy of my tax records. Ah.. but that's just it: you don't see me. That's why I don't care about whatever personal info is in the file.
If you're concerned about theft or something like that, look into dm-crypt, and don't run malware whenever you have that stuff mounted.
WTF are you talking about? I've been buying DRM-free music for decades. The only time I saw DRM was on one iffy CD about ten years ago, and even that one's DRM turned out to not really work right (i.e. the CD did work after all, it just didn't work in name-brand players). Don't buy any CDs published by Virgin between 2001 and 2004 and you'll probably miss the DRM fad.
Video is where the DRM problems still are. (And I hear lots of proprietary software has DRM too, though that's second-hand so take that rumor with a grain of salt.)
Apparently a big part of this whole situation, is where you are. Where I am, the idea that T-Mobile provides anything less than excellent service, is laughable. But yes, if I leave the city and get away from the interstates, the situation does indeed change quickly.
Although your turning phone off/on making a difference, suggests you also have hardware problems. Are you sure you even know whether or not T-Mobile service works? If your machine is dying and needs its NIC hardware occasionally reset, then you don't know shit about the network.
The worst part about that situation, is if the prisoner stands up for themselves, the guard kicks them out of the prison. Some people say, "you can always find another prison to be incarcerated within," not realizing how overcrowded they've all become. When there are too many prisoners and not enough prisons, the prisons get to set the terms. And if you don't give your gangbook password and they kick you out for that, they can always pretend it was for some other reason. "That guy? Oh, we kicked him out because his crime didn't seem serious enough. Murderer schmurderer, we need the cells for marijuana farmers."
(4) For the purposes of this subsection, "social networking website" means an Internet-based service that allows
individuals to:
(A) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, created by the service;
(B) create a list of other users with whom they share a connection within the system; and
(C) view and navigate their list of connections and those made by others within the system.
"Social networking website" shall not include electronic mail.
Great, now I have to look up the definition of electronic mail. Is it going to be things which talk rfc822? Or it is going to be things which transmit messages between different users? (I just checked Facebook and it has some kind of messaging thing in it; would be hilarious if Facebook didn't qualify.)
I bet most sites which use logins, could be made to become social networking. Even banks, if you get creative.
I hate laws like this, which are so needlessly specific to handle ephemeral trends. Why didn't they just make it illegal to impersonate other people? Who profited by lobbying against that?
It's an excuse, and we old people are always looking for excuses to talk about "old" things (not that the C64 is old; it's not like we're talking about VIC20s).
Will there be another article in a years time : C=64 turns 31
Hopefully. It'll be introduced as the 30th anniversary of the price dropping from $595 to $195, but yeah, it'll happen, because that's how old people roll (most of us not in our wheelchairs yet, though).
Some day, you'll be old. We'll be dead but you'll be old and it will be hilarious, you fucking old fogee goddamn piece of shit crippled old motherfucker.
Where have I heard all this before? Oh right, 30-35 years ago when pretty much everyone was saying the exact same thing about the F-14. Everyone except the taxpayers, that is. We all know it's dumb to buy this stuff, but when they ask us to pay for it, we can't vote for the people who open our wallets, fast enough. Spend more money please, and I'll vote for you.
To be fair, you wouldn't have had to use an Android phone; you'd have to use an Android device. Think cheapest commodity hardware, running free software. Right now that's under $100 and before too long it will be under $40. "Remotes" are on the cusp of obsolescence, to be replaced by "smartremotes."
But yeah, $300 was way too much for a neato "smartamp" and the weird Google services lock-in made it not really even good for that kind of job.
Google just has to let go of their fears of it being used for piracy and open the device.
Just reading about the [lack of] capabilities of the device, it was clear what Google's concern was, and ultimately what is going to drive the company to evil. In 5 years, when we talk about what went wrong with Google so that they became the next Apple, my next paragraph is what we're going to be talking about.
It's not piracy. It's anything that doesn't involve looking at Google ads. That's the only explanation for the otherwise-capable device's shocking crippledness. They want you to use their streaming services, but that's not anything that anyone wants. Only lock-in will get people to use that stuff, so they're trying lock-in, without even disguising it with some stupid pretense.
Let's hope the whole proprietary streaming industry collapses. Not just Netflix, but Amazon's and Apple's too. If you need a weirdo client to play the videos, then you have taken a technological step backward from OTA TV or analog cable TV. I am not going to pay for their weird luddite religion.
The current state of the art is offered by pirates: here's the file and it Just Works, with whatever software you want to use, on any box that you want to play it on, to be played at any time of day that you want.
Solutions which generate revenue for the industry, need to become at least as good as that. Nothing less, will ever get a cent from me. Until then, piracy will both serve consumer needs, and also (two birds with one stone!) deny revenue/reward to the industry which is doing everything it can to retard (and even regress) progress. Starve them until they offer what we want.
The world won't miss Netflix. We already have something much better, more convenient, more reliable, more interoperative, which also come with that good feeling that the technophobes in Hollywood aren't getting your money. The best part of it all, is that when they match all the technical aspects (the convenience, the reliability, the interoperability) then the good feeling will flip at the same moment, and money will start falling into their laps. It's all so easily solvable; just say yes to customers, like every other industry learns to do. Hollywood, you're not a special exception to this ancient principle.
Our politics has been infested with the corporate tendency to think short term
"Short term" means "next campaign." The problem with science and education investment, is that it NEVER pays off, even in the very long term. If you vote to increase that spending, it will never result in you getting an advertising budget advantage over your opponent.
It might help the country, but nobody ever votes for people who help the country; they only vote for people who buy ads. Ad budgets are voters' primary means of selecting who we vote for.
Look at everyone on your next ballot: which of those names didn't spend significant money on advertising? Virtually none of them; maybe some local judge, though even that's rare. WHO writes in choices for everything on the ballot? Most people don't even do it for the presidential race, much less the state senator race or county treasurer race, etc.
So why would anyone spend money on science? We never reward them for it, and we usually punish them for it.
Are you willing to "throw away your vote" by voting against the Democrat and the Republican on your ballot, in favor of writing in the name of the guy who nobody else has heard of, because he's in favor of education, instead of paying favors to industry in exchange for ad money? Keep in mind that nobody else knows about your guy, so he will almost certainly lose. Will you do it anyway, Mr. Voter?
We created this problem and cannot fix it without risking losing many elections, and the "risk" will be nearly 100% for several elections in a row. You have to lose 99-1, then 98-2, and so on, hoping that somebody notices that the guy who didn't advertise, got a few votes.
IMHO nobody has the patience or faith for that. I'm not sure even I do.
If you want a platform to be commercially viable for third-party software developers, you have to lock it down.
Well, at least now we know why MS Windows never took off and never got any developers. I always wondered why that platform so quickly faded into obscurity in the early 1990s.
There is nothing wrong with using high-level tools rather than, every day and every hour, getting bogged down in the details. In a basic sense, at first you (rather than your son) appear to have the right idea.
But you have to use the right tools, and the fact that you would recommend "visual editors" or use the absolutely web-alien acronym of WYSIWYG, suggests you don't know what the right tools are. And guess how you learn what tools are good: by learning the details that you hoped to not get bogged down in, and letting your self get bogged, even if briefly. That is the only way you will ever see the patterns which cry out for being generalized. If you don't do that, then you will never know what the problems are, which tools are intended to solve. And not knowing that, is what leads to people pounding in screws with a soldering iron. Or, in this case, using pseudo-WYSIWYG editors to write web pages.
If he's hand-writing web pages, then he still some day may get there. You, OTOH, are actually further, because you thought flexibly about using tools rather that doing everything by hand (good!) and took a step, but in the wrong direction (away from leveraging power, toward a more labor-intensive approach).
That's beside the point. The point is that Apple rehearsed their demo and the rehearsals predicted the live demo in every way except one -- which in hindsight is a "duh!" but nevertheless is a situation where exact conditions weren't recreated. (Do you have any doubt, even despite its shitty antenna, Apple's product did well in rehearsal when there was likely an access point in same room with it, and not thousands of other devices?)
You'd expect the same of most companies who are good at cultivating an image. But Microsoft couldn't be bothered to even pre-alpha test, much less rehearse.
Or they rehearsed, it locked up, and the people involved said, "Well, everyone expects their computers to occasionally lock up, so this is no big deal. Maybe it'll happen during the live demo and maybe it won't, but lockups and bluescreens are a fact of life and sort of like the weather. You just never know."
Can't run C++?! What is this, 1983? If nobody ports compilers for the newest, hippest languages to your box anymore, maybe it's time to trade in your ZX81 for a shiny new PC AT running MS-DOS 3.1.
I'm not familiar with two weird brands you mention (what are those, PET ST Archimedes Model 80 variants?) but I'm sure you'll find that C++ runs on all modern computers these days.
Perhaps most people do not want to tracked? If people want to be tracked, let them opt in.
On the street, everyone says they want fair government. In the voting booth, everyone says they don't care.
On the street, everyone says they don't want to be tracked. In the preferences window, everyone says they don't care.
When you say most people do not want to be tracked, I just don't know whether or not to believe you. You understand my confusion, don't you?
My fellow Americans, you have public and informal passion, yet you have private and formal apathy. Weird. I thought we were all trying to act cool and unconcerned on the outside while secretly harboring inner terror and desperation. WTF. Am I doing everything backwards, or are you?
Being young means not having been around a long time, so you necessarily won't have memories of failures. And it's a harder to see risks of failures, when your life isn't full of repeated experiences over the decades, of shit breaking all the time, to your disappointment.
"I think ownership is access, you don't have to have music on your local hard drive to own it,"
This is a person who hasn't had access problems yet, or who hasn't yet noticed existing access problems (limited music selection, limited client software selection, whatever).
Slashdot Mirror
That merely killed Nvidia. Intel dodged that bullet and then shot it right back at AMD, better aimed and with an explosive warhead attached. It passed through AMD (wounding them) and and then exploded inside Nvidia's skull.
Open is necessary, but if you intend to open (AMD) while your competitor (Intel) actually does it and then also writes the drivers too (!), then you're too slow. Too little, too late.
Last I heard, talking to AMDs video decoder was still a proprietary trade secret. Video decoders, as late as 2012! As if people are still waiting to build their HTPCs. AMD hasn't even entered the market yet, while Intel is selling. There go your customers.
WTF are you talking about? Nearly all OSes work just fine with Bulldozer modules. You just happened to cherry-pick three example that don't, and one that does but which you happen to not like.
Interesting that all 4 OSes you mentioned, just happen to be from one team/company.
You remind me of the kind of people who complain about Democrats and Republicans, and then go out and vote for Democrats and Republicans.
"I tried Tree Top apple juice, a local farm's apple juice, the supermarket's generic apple juice, and all 3 of them completely lack citrusy character! Why can't any make a citrusy juice, something that tastes like, oh I don't know, oranges? Should I try yet another brand of apple juice?"
The main thing I'm getting out of TFA has nothing to do with TSA or my country's increasingly high tolerance for tyranny.
What I'm seeing here is strong evidence that Delta doesn't honor the tickets that they sell. Delta (not TSA) kicked him off, and for no even half-sensible reason, to the point that it almost sides like an excuse (did someone else happen to board and take the seat?). It was totally arbitrary.
I don't happen to have any anti-TSA T-shirts, but I do own T-shirts, and some of them have words, and I have no fucking idea what some random employee might find offensive. ("Eek! Your shirt has the name of a metal band on it! That's the devil's music!") This time it was a comedic/mocking logo. It could also be for a competing logo (your shirt contains the word "southwest" and that's making me uncomfortable) or a political party, or the fact that you wore a T-shirt at all instead of something with buttons (yes, people who care about such things really do exist and I have no way of knowing whether or not Delta has hired one of them), or hair length, or a beard style, or skin color, or whatever.
If it happened to this guy, it could happen to anyone. It could happen to me. And for no good reason.
If you buy an airline ticket from Delta, the ticket might not "work," and not for reasons beyond anyone's control (e.g. weather) but some jerk's arbitrary whim, and you can't reasonably predict or prevent it. That sounds like an untrustworthy business. Hopefully this guy will at least have the sense to report the fraud to BBB.
And hopefully Delta will be tripping over themselves to assure the public that the guy got paid back, with a lot of extra to cover his trouble and embarrassment, and do anything and everything they can to assure people their ticket sales business is not some kind of fly-by-night scam.
Or if you're retarded.
Yes, back in 1980 my computer had limited-length filenames too.
No, we lost, because Iraq's Scud missiles wiped out the US' entire stegosaurus and dodo bird population. The only way to win, is to not play.
Watermarks aren't talked about, because almost no one cares. Lots of stuff on my fileserver has "personal identifiers" but you don't see me deleting my copy of my tax records. Ah.. but that's just it: you don't see me. That's why I don't care about whatever personal info is in the file.
If you're concerned about theft or something like that, look into dm-crypt, and don't run malware whenever you have that stuff mounted.
WTF are you talking about? I've been buying DRM-free music for decades. The only time I saw DRM was on one iffy CD about ten years ago, and even that one's DRM turned out to not really work right (i.e. the CD did work after all, it just didn't work in name-brand players). Don't buy any CDs published by Virgin between 2001 and 2004 and you'll probably miss the DRM fad.
Video is where the DRM problems still are. (And I hear lots of proprietary software has DRM too, though that's second-hand so take that rumor with a grain of salt.)
Apparently a big part of this whole situation, is where you are. Where I am, the idea that T-Mobile provides anything less than excellent service, is laughable. But yes, if I leave the city and get away from the interstates, the situation does indeed change quickly.
Although your turning phone off/on making a difference, suggests you also have hardware problems. Are you sure you even know whether or not T-Mobile service works? If your machine is dying and needs its NIC hardware occasionally reset, then you don't know shit about the network.
I get your point about breaching UK law, but why do you say he has breached US or Swedish law?
The worst part about that situation, is if the prisoner stands up for themselves, the guard kicks them out of the prison. Some people say, "you can always find another prison to be incarcerated within," not realizing how overcrowded they've all become. When there are too many prisoners and not enough prisons, the prisons get to set the terms. And if you don't give your gangbook password and they kick you out for that, they can always pretend it was for some other reason. "That guy? Oh, we kicked him out because his crime didn't seem serious enough. Murderer schmurderer, we need the cells for marijuana farmers."
Great, now I have to look up the definition of electronic mail. Is it going to be things which talk rfc822? Or it is going to be things which transmit messages between different users? (I just checked Facebook and it has some kind of messaging thing in it; would be hilarious if Facebook didn't qualify.)
I bet most sites which use logins, could be made to become social networking. Even banks, if you get creative.
I hate laws like this, which are so needlessly specific to handle ephemeral trends. Why didn't they just make it illegal to impersonate other people? Who profited by lobbying against that?
Hopefully. It'll be introduced as the 30th anniversary of the price dropping from $595 to $195, but yeah, it'll happen, because that's how old people roll (most of us not in our wheelchairs yet, though).
Some day, you'll be old. We'll be dead but you'll be old and it will be hilarious, you fucking old fogee goddamn piece of shit crippled old motherfucker.
Where have I heard all this before? Oh right, 30-35 years ago when pretty much everyone was saying the exact same thing about the F-14. Everyone except the taxpayers, that is. We all know it's dumb to buy this stuff, but when they ask us to pay for it, we can't vote for the people who open our wallets, fast enough. Spend more money please, and I'll vote for you.
To be fair, you wouldn't have had to use an Android phone; you'd have to use an Android device. Think cheapest commodity hardware, running free software. Right now that's under $100 and before too long it will be under $40. "Remotes" are on the cusp of obsolescence, to be replaced by "smartremotes."
But yeah, $300 was way too much for a neato "smartamp" and the weird Google services lock-in made it not really even good for that kind of job.
Just reading about the [lack of] capabilities of the device, it was clear what Google's concern was, and ultimately what is going to drive the company to evil. In 5 years, when we talk about what went wrong with Google so that they became the next Apple, my next paragraph is what we're going to be talking about.
It's not piracy. It's anything that doesn't involve looking at Google ads. That's the only explanation for the otherwise-capable device's shocking crippledness. They want you to use their streaming services, but that's not anything that anyone wants. Only lock-in will get people to use that stuff, so they're trying lock-in, without even disguising it with some stupid pretense.
Let's hope the whole proprietary streaming industry collapses. Not just Netflix, but Amazon's and Apple's too. If you need a weirdo client to play the videos, then you have taken a technological step backward from OTA TV or analog cable TV. I am not going to pay for their weird luddite religion.
The current state of the art is offered by pirates: here's the file and it Just Works, with whatever software you want to use, on any box that you want to play it on, to be played at any time of day that you want.
Solutions which generate revenue for the industry, need to become at least as good as that. Nothing less, will ever get a cent from me. Until then, piracy will both serve consumer needs, and also (two birds with one stone!) deny revenue/reward to the industry which is doing everything it can to retard (and even regress) progress. Starve them until they offer what we want.
The world won't miss Netflix. We already have something much better, more convenient, more reliable, more interoperative, which also come with that good feeling that the technophobes in Hollywood aren't getting your money. The best part of it all, is that when they match all the technical aspects (the convenience, the reliability, the interoperability) then the good feeling will flip at the same moment, and money will start falling into their laps. It's all so easily solvable; just say yes to customers, like every other industry learns to do. Hollywood, you're not a special exception to this ancient principle.
"Short term" means "next campaign." The problem with science and education investment, is that it NEVER pays off, even in the very long term. If you vote to increase that spending, it will never result in you getting an advertising budget advantage over your opponent.
It might help the country, but nobody ever votes for people who help the country; they only vote for people who buy ads. Ad budgets are voters' primary means of selecting who we vote for.
Look at everyone on your next ballot: which of those names didn't spend significant money on advertising? Virtually none of them; maybe some local judge, though even that's rare. WHO writes in choices for everything on the ballot? Most people don't even do it for the presidential race, much less the state senator race or county treasurer race, etc.
So why would anyone spend money on science? We never reward them for it, and we usually punish them for it.
Are you willing to "throw away your vote" by voting against the Democrat and the Republican on your ballot, in favor of writing in the name of the guy who nobody else has heard of, because he's in favor of education, instead of paying favors to industry in exchange for ad money? Keep in mind that nobody else knows about your guy, so he will almost certainly lose. Will you do it anyway, Mr. Voter?
We created this problem and cannot fix it without risking losing many elections, and the "risk" will be nearly 100% for several elections in a row. You have to lose 99-1, then 98-2, and so on, hoping that somebody notices that the guy who didn't advertise, got a few votes.
IMHO nobody has the patience or faith for that. I'm not sure even I do.
Well, at least now we know why MS Windows never took off and never got any developers. I always wondered why that platform so quickly faded into obscurity in the early 1990s.
There is nothing wrong with using high-level tools rather than, every day and every hour, getting bogged down in the details. In a basic sense, at first you (rather than your son) appear to have the right idea.
But you have to use the right tools, and the fact that you would recommend "visual editors" or use the absolutely web-alien acronym of WYSIWYG, suggests you don't know what the right tools are. And guess how you learn what tools are good: by learning the details that you hoped to not get bogged down in, and letting your self get bogged, even if briefly. That is the only way you will ever see the patterns which cry out for being generalized. If you don't do that, then you will never know what the problems are, which tools are intended to solve. And not knowing that, is what leads to people pounding in screws with a soldering iron. Or, in this case, using pseudo-WYSIWYG editors to write web pages.
If he's hand-writing web pages, then he still some day may get there. You, OTOH, are actually further, because you thought flexibly about using tools rather that doing everything by hand (good!) and took a step, but in the wrong direction (away from leveraging power, toward a more labor-intensive approach).
'Human rights.' Why, the very name is racist. -- Azetbur
That's beside the point. The point is that Apple rehearsed their demo and the rehearsals predicted the live demo in every way except one -- which in hindsight is a "duh!" but nevertheless is a situation where exact conditions weren't recreated. (Do you have any doubt, even despite its shitty antenna, Apple's product did well in rehearsal when there was likely an access point in same room with it, and not thousands of other devices?)
You'd expect the same of most companies who are good at cultivating an image. But Microsoft couldn't be bothered to even pre-alpha test, much less rehearse.
Or they rehearsed, it locked up, and the people involved said, "Well, everyone expects their computers to occasionally lock up, so this is no big deal. Maybe it'll happen during the live demo and maybe it won't, but lockups and bluescreens are a fact of life and sort of like the weather. You just never know."
Can't run C++?! What is this, 1983? If nobody ports compilers for the newest, hippest languages to your box anymore, maybe it's time to trade in your ZX81 for a shiny new PC AT running MS-DOS 3.1.
I'm not familiar with two weird brands you mention (what are those, PET ST Archimedes Model 80 variants?) but I'm sure you'll find that C++ runs on all modern computers these days.
On the street, everyone says they want fair government. In the voting booth, everyone says they don't care.
On the street, everyone says they don't want to be tracked. In the preferences window, everyone says they don't care.
When you say most people do not want to be tracked, I just don't know whether or not to believe you. You understand my confusion, don't you?
My fellow Americans, you have public and informal passion, yet you have private and formal apathy. Weird. I thought we were all trying to act cool and unconcerned on the outside while secretly harboring inner terror and desperation. WTF. Am I doing everything backwards, or are you?
Being young means not having been around a long time, so you necessarily won't have memories of failures. And it's a harder to see risks of failures, when your life isn't full of repeated experiences over the decades, of shit breaking all the time, to your disappointment.
This is a person who hasn't had access problems yet, or who hasn't yet noticed existing access problems (limited music selection, limited client software selection, whatever).