Who needs cheap(-ish) decoys when you have capacitors with bad electrolyte, flash that pretends to have double its real capacity and just overwrites itself if you fill it more than halfway, and self-diagnostics that lie & insist that everything is fine, even when it's not? The US defense industry spends millions of dollars per year trying to keep fraudulent components out of its supply chain (as in, fake and bad, not just IP-violating), and still fails occasionally. There's no way in HELL Chinese defense companies would be able to do any better. What are they going to do, swallow their pride and buy capacitors and flash from Japan, because their own capacitors and flash are too fucked to use for storing old pr0n, let alone nuclear missile flight firmware?
A patent for this could be a good thing, or a bad thing. Out of necessity, only a very tiny bit of data could viably be sent to a group with the phone making enough noise to be heard, without overwhelming the phone's speaker or getting stomped by background noise. But that tiny bit of data can only have meaning in the context of a subsequent lookup... ie, it sends something like a 128-bit value over the span of 2 seconds, then the phone goes online and looks it up a-la-tinyurl. The thing is, if there are 500 different contexts in which that value could be evaluated, it's basically useless. Users would have to manually tell it where to do the lookup. An ideal situation would be a patent held by some benign open organization who allows it to be used freely, but basically says, "if you're going to use our protocol and output a recognizable 128-bit value, you have to register an id with us that tells others where to go to fetch the details they'll need to look up the rest of the value". Highly-federated and decentralized, with the bare minimum of dictated control, but enough so that if a phone hears something it thinks is a 128-bit value encoded in this manner, it'll be able to make certain assumptions and deal with it automatically.
Of course, that's how we ended up with the mess we currently have with QR codes and NFC URLs that either contain javascript, or redirect to javascript, and try to crash the browser by redirecting it 257 times and causing a buffer overflow...
Serious question: do kitchens in metric countries have ultra-wide 750mm dishwashers and slightly-narrow 750mm ranges, or do people there have to suffer the indignity of knowing their dishwasher is 609.6mm, that their electric range is precisely 762mm wide, and have built-in cabinets that are sized in multiples of 76.2mm (3 inches) instead of 75 or 100mm? I've heard conflicting stories, most of which seem to suggest that kitchens are almost always built to standard American dimensions, but people pretend that they're built to some multiple of 75mm when talking about them.
In South Florida, the sun in your eyes is annoying, but evening traffic in general becomes several orders of magnitude worse after DST ends. When the sun goes down after 7, people with kids still bolt for the door around 4:30, but most people don't really start to head home until 5:30 or 6, and quite a few don't hit the road until 6:30 or 7. The day after DST ends, everybody goes running for the door at 5pm, and we end up with total gridlock that turns a drive that takes 30-40 minutes during the summer into an hour or more (not to mention the accidents and carnage daily that amplifies it and makes it even worse). The later the sun goes down, the more spread out evening traffic becomes, and the less time it takes to get home (with fewer accidents). Worse, that gridlock persists until 8pm or later during the winter, because everybody's drive home ends up being slower. The traffic surges at 4, stacks up at 5, and is at a complete standstill by 5:30... everywhere... from the beach to the everglades, north to south, from Port St. Lucie all the way south to Homestead, if not Key Largo... just total, complete gridlock everywhere.
I think going to somewhere like Las Vegas is even freakier... one minute, it's twilight and just starting to get dark. Then, all of a sudden, the sun dips behind the mountains, you're in the shadow, and within a matter of seconds, it's pitch black.
Of course, my favorite once-in-a-lifetime experience was the time I was on a jet taking off from Memphis *right* as the sun set... we were on the runway, it got darker and darker, night decisively arrived as we began to taxi... and 30 seconds later, the sun came back up again, and stayed up for another 5-10 minutes until the earth finally outran us and it went back down again. Apparently, back in the Concorde era, there were flights that departed from London & Paris after dark, delighted passengers got to watch the sun rise from the west, then landed in New York an hour or so before sunset.
You're preaching to the choir. I'd *kill* for a totally-open & unlocked best-of-breed awe-inspiring Moto Nexus-M w/4000mAH extended battery. Hell, I don't even care if it's chained to AT&T, as long as the bootloader isn't locked & the kernel modules are either open source or built for the latest kernel's ABI. Moto makes awesome hardware, crippled by management-imposed crippled & locked down firmware.
You're right. Vendor lock-in dispenses with the unpleasant moral messiness of human trafficking, and goes straight to the more profitable involuntary servitude part.
What? You want to demonstrate your freedom and not renew your annual license for ${expensive-relational-database}? OK, fine. We're exercising the right we gave ourselves on page 427, section 18, paragraph 62, to terminate your license immediately and refund 50% of your final 2 months of prorated license costs. Shut the database down and take your website offline immediately, or we'll sue you for statutory damages that start at $300,000. What? You don't want to terminate your license after all? Well then, you'd better pay for next year's license, then... and by the way, the renewal cost just went up by 50% since you allowed it to lapse (even though we're the ones who terminated it 2 months early), and there's a $18,000 license reinstatement fee unless you agree to maintain your license for the next 10 years (with early termination fee equal to 80% of the license fees for any remaining years).
Bullshit. Just TRY recovering data from an OCZ Vertex or Agility 2 drive that decided to spontaneously bork itself. If you're LUCKY, the drive won't interpret dd_rescue as a hack attack, and brick itself into "Panic Mode" as a countermeasure, and "all" you'll have to do to "fix" the drive is run "secure format" to wipe the drive clean and start over again.
SMART is almost useless for predicting failure with SSDs, because SSD failures fall into two categories:
* Long-term degradation due to limited write life... maybe 1% of SSD failures. This is the failure mode everyone THINKS is important, but it actually causes almost ZERO real-world failures.
* Spontaneous, often idiopathic, controller failures that instantly render the entire drive inaccessible. Roughly 99% of Sandforce SSD failures fall into this category. Sometimes, it happens because the drive lost power at precisely the worst possible moment. Often, it happens for no obvious reason in particular besides "Sandforce drives suck donkey shit, and commit data-suicide if you so much as have an impure thought or near occasion of computer sin.
> The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.
SSDs might not the only devices to suffer from critical failures, but they're pretty much the only large-scale storage devices that routinely suffer from critical failures almost at random, with zero advanced warning, and metaphorically go up in smoke & instantly trash gigabytes of data for almost no discernible reason.
So many people have gotten burned by SSDs (especially Sandforce drives), an entire generation of elite users have come to regard SSDs as the equivalent of automatic data-suicide, barely safe enough to even use as a write-through cache. If you gave me a 512-gig sandforce drive for free tomorrow, the box would probably still be sitting unopened on my desk 6 months later, because I'm so loath to taint my computer with them anymore. SSDs, especially Sandforce-based drives, are the most toxic computer hardware in history. Few things have caused more concentrated misery to so many users within so little time.
True story: my local CompUSA had a BIN full of (comparatively) cheap 256-gig OCZ SSDs on Black Friday. People saw the price, pounced on a drive or ten, pulled out their phones, did some quick research, and threw the drives BACK into the bin in disgust 10-90 minutes later as if they were radioactive trash. The only sale items in the entire store that got less love than the Sandforce drives were the $39 copies of Windows 8.
Get the fastest computer you can, and set your browser's default homepage to (blank).
I find that my worst temptations to hit Slashdot at work are whenever I go to do something that just... ends... up... being... painfully... slow. It's rare for me to stop mid-thought and go hit Slashdot. It's common for me to go launch something, get stuck waiting 30 seconds for something to time out before the network will let me continue, get frustrated, angrily jump over to Slashdot for a minute, and end up having the next 20 minutes to an hour or more go up in smoke. Anything that breaks your concentration is dangerous.
It's absolutely *sick* how many companies spend thousands recruiting highly-paid employees with relatively rare skills, then turn around and squander their time by skimping on their computer hardware. Seriously. Add up the marginal cost of the most outrageously gamer-grade Intel Extreme Edition i7 Xeon, 16 gigs of ram (vs 4), a large Intel SSD (no Sandforce, unless it's merely acting as a write-through read cache for a real drive), and 3 24" monitors (compared to the hardware you'd give the receptionist or someone in sales), then compare it to the opportunity cost of having just 2-4 10-minute periods of that same employees' productivity get incinerated every day. If you view the computer as at least a 2 year investment, with the monitors being good for 3-4 years, the extra kilobuck or two you'd spend on top-notch hardware will pay for itself within a month or two.
High-end hardware pays for itself in the form of reduced support costs, too. It's a fact -- slow computers running Windows have WAY more problems than fast computers running Windows, because the slower and more resource-constrained the computer is, the more likely it is to get itself into a state where just about anything can kick it past the tipping point and cause problems to start piling up, especially when users get pissed and cycle the power or repeatedly flood the event queue by clicking unresponsive buttons. It's times like those that Bad Things(tm) just start to happen, and happen, and happen.
Likewise, change your browser homepage to (blank), and try to disable anything that throws up things like "article of the day", random breaking news, etc. Get in the habit of searching from Firefox's search bar instead of going to en.wikipedia.org or google.com.
> Eminently sensible. ".com" should have been "us.co." from the start
No, forcing everything into country-level hierarchies makes about as much sense as forcing people to go to some abomination like www.microsoft.co.wa.us.
Country-level domains are useful for identifying sites applicable to residents of a particular country.
> Not really, you are only working with a small subset of imperial units.
Newsflash: NOBODY, not even AMERICANS, uses the "full set" of imperial units in daily life. The main POINT Of imperial units, and why they persist, is because for some specific problem domains, they happen to work with nicer whole units that are more convenient for that purpose. Americans happily buy Diet Mountain Dew in 12oz cans and 2-liter bottles.
Not quite... the Wiimote DOES have a proper 8-way digital gamepad with buttons a-la-NES. They kind of suck, in a middle school finger pain kind of way, but they DO exist.
That said, it's hard to think of ways to make good use of an accelerometer and gyro in a proper digital+analog 360-like gamepad, even though the Sixaxis tries. You can't really hold one confidently with one hand, and if you're holding it with two and using the digital or analog sticks/pads, chances are you DON'T want it reading intentions into the controller's orientation or motion. IMHO, the Gamecube and 360 reached the pinnacle of ergonomic gamepad controller design, and adding motion to them isn't necessarily an improvement. I'd rather just have a gamepad for games where a gamepad is appropriate, and Wii-type wiimote + nunchuck for games where THOSE controls are appropriate. And a nice high-resolution rotary encoder with a bit of mass & inertia, and no Atari 2600-like jitter, so somebody can port a quality versions of Warlords & Arkanoid to the next generation of consoles;-)
Great. So I can use my phone as a third-rate shitty gamepad that's going to misfire, register phantom touches, ignore deliberate ones, kill me 7 times before I make it to level 2, and lag by at least 50-100ms under the most ideal circumstances possible.
Now, if someone makes a case for the Galaxy S3 that works with an extended battery & gives it a nice slide-out gamepad that's at least as good as the one on a GBA, or a clamp that lets me attach my S3 to a PS3 or 360 controller (with extended battery and case attached) so I can use it as a second display, I might be interested...
A stock touchscreen phone (Android or otherwise) might be good enough for playing something lame like Farmville, or playing card games with people 2,000 miles away, but phones just don't have the controls they need to be real game controllers. Internet latency is just the fatality move that finishes it off once and for all.
The constitution might say that, but I can say with 100% confidence that the Supreme Court would NEVER overrule an American law based upon a treaty unless the Senate itself were the plaintiff.
In other words, if the Senate ratifies a treaty, Congress passes enabling legislation that doesn't quite go far enough, or flat-out contradicts part of that treaty, and a similarly-deficient/contradictory bill ultimately gets ratified by the Senate, reconciled, and signed by the President (or veto-overridden), the Supreme Court would never, ever, in a million years, allow a treaty to be used as a weapon against the Senate (or a law passed by the Senate afterwards). To do otherwise would put the Supreme Court in a role of determining foreign policy... a role it neither has nor wants.
If the Senate ratified a treaty requiring the President to conduct foreign policy in some particular way, and the President ignored the treaty, the SENATE might petition the Supreme Court to hear the case, but that's the farthest I can imagine it going.
In all likelihood, the Supreme Court would just ignore the whole issue and look the other way. Remember, the Supreme Court determines its own agenda, and hears only cases it wants to hear. If the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could ultimately compel the Senate to do something because of a treaty it ratified, it would be shocking, uncharacteristic, and basically without precedent in US history.
The expected response of the Supreme Court to such a petition (assuming it even acknowledged it) would be, "If the Senate intentionally violated a treaty it signed, or knowingly approved a law that allows a treaty to be violated, that's its own problem to deal with, and within the scope of its authority. If the Senate signed a treaty, and couldn't get Congress to go along with it by passing appropriate enabling legislation, that's a clear sign that it shouldn't have been signed in the first place."
> International Treaties have a force of law higher than FISA
No they don't. They have *zero* legal weight without enabling legislation (passed by the House & Senate, then signed by the President or veto-overridden).
> If people hate Windows 8 so much, why do they even bother commenting on it, as they aren't going to use it anyway,
For the same reason why the British (among others) obsess and whinge about American politics. Indirectly, they're affected by our elected officials too... at least, eventually.
We (Windows 7 users) might bitch about Windows 8 endlessly, but someday, we're going to get stuck with its fallout and be forced to suffer with it. Thus, it's in our best interests to give Microsoft as much grief about it as we possibly can, in the hope that by the time it gets rammed down our throats (if only in the form of a friend or family member's computer), it might hopefully be a bit more tolerable and less awful.
It depends. Plenty of us have had brief love affairs with Linux at one time or another, before discovering that the grass on the other side of the fence had clumps of dogshit strewn around, too. Until fairly recently, Linux sucked at handling laptops that were occasionally connected to second displays (especially if you wanted to use the external display as your primary display in an adhoc manner). Likewise, Windows has historically done a MUCH better job of making sure that even apps that are oblivious to SMP and multithreading benefit to some degree from having multiple cores and CPUs. Windows might be bloated, but KDE & Gnome (not to mention Xfree86) make Windows Explorer look like hand-tuned assembly language at a Scandinavian demoscene conference. On the other hand, Windows' networking (especially pre-7) had so many single-threaded chokepoints, and so many things that ran into them (especially Explorer), that Windows has become practically *unusable* on a true single-CPU single-core system without even hyperthreading to fake it.
Truth be told, I occasionally wonder whether the ultimate pushback to Windows might be a full-blown port of KDE or Gnome to Windows, in a way that allowed it to become Windows' primary desktop shell... kicking Metro to the curb, and acting as the primary window manager for Windows ITSELF. On one hand, Microsoft would still make money from licensing Windows. On the other hand, Microsoft would lose control over their own platform's look and feel. Since KDE & Gnome are free, all it would really take is one or two popular apps that required it, and the ability to run without causing compatibility problems with "normal" win32/64 apps.
This isn't entirely a new idea... Window Blinds kind of started it years ago by being one of the first/only Explorer alternatives/enhancements in history. If someone could leverage the 70% or so of KDE or Gnome that would be relevant to Windows, Microsoft would be *hating* life. Remember, Explorer/Metro might be firmly enmeshed within Windows, but so was Internet Explorer... and Firefox eventually motivated roughly half of Windows users to kick IE to the curb anyway. The key is to enhance and extend Windows, without forcing users to burn bridges behind them. Firefox duplicated functionality from IE, but did it in a way that left IE itself unharmed (just ignored and unloved). If KDE or Gnome could pull off the same feat, it would be a HUGE blow against Microsoft's "Platform Power"
Think about it for a moment... how many kernel-level things about Windows 8 are truly intolerable? Or driver architecture? Windows 8's suckiness is almost entirely due to its UI and window manager. Dump them for open-source alternatives, and we can have our cake & eat it too. Now, we just have to get Miguel de Icaza on board with our little scheme to corrosively topple Microsoft's power by "embracing and extending" Windows in ways beyond Microsoft's own control;-)
> Windows 95 and 98 both got a lot of negative press at the time,
Are you kidding? When Windows 95 came out, it was like god himself opened up the skies while everyone yelled, "it is good". Stores had launch parties at midnight, and there were lines out the door of people buying it like twinkies & toilet paper after a nuclear attack, along with pretty much ANYTHING that had the number "95" printed on the box.
People bitched about 98 because ActiveDesktop made your shiny new 60-100MHz Pentium crawl like a 33MHz 486SX. For years, Win95 OSR2 was the gold standard against which everything was judged, especially if your USB needs began and ended with "mouse" (95OSR2 could deal with USB mice, though I don't remember whether it was 'out of the box', or 'by hand-copying a few DLLs ripped from a 98 system').
Win2k Pro was either the best or worst OS Microsoft has ever made, and your opinion depends almost entirely upon whether you cared about using software and hardware that was supported by NT Workstation 4. If you (like me) came from NT4W, it was a gift from ${deity}. If you cared about running "Pooh's Alphabet Adventure" from 1993 on your old PC, it sucked.
People's opinions of XP were pretty much their opposite opinion of Win2k. People who loved Win2k's compromise-free perfection hated XP's compromises made in the name of legacy compatibility (especially its endless reboots for everything). People who loved Win95OSR2 and hated Win2k loved XP's compatibility and prettyness. Most of the Win2k camp grudgingly ended up with XP 2-3 years later, when XP's superior SMP won them over, and Win2kSP3 or SP4 made Win2k need reboots as often as XP, anyway.
Everyone hated Vista, or at least had a grudging love-hate relationship that left them feeling like a battered spouse. I loved the real symlinks, but hated its video driver dysfunction. It was my All in Wonder 128 Pro's deathblow.
Then came Windows 7. Ahhh. Flawless perfection, especially once I discovered that Win7/64 requires signed drivers, but I can sign OTHER people's binary drivers MYSELF with my own self-signed certificate & Windows will quit nagging and leave me alone to install them as I please (this is a big, huge deal for anyone who does embedded development, especially anything that involves a legacy parallel port).
Windows 8? Endless suck. I suspect that, like 98(SE) with 98Lite to make it tolerable (98Lite removed Active Desktop & basically let you have 98's guts with 95OSR2's much faster Explorer), I'll probably end up with 8 eventually... but I have zero desire to put myself through Win8's misery just to make it tolerable. Plus, I'm still hoping that Microsoft will see the light, and quickly release Windows 9... giving us back Aero Glass, and allowing us to apply the translucent-titlebar effect to the ENTIRE WINDOW when it's being dragged. Assuming, of course, that Microsoft is willing to compromise and let us HAVE multiple windows again, instead of turning "Windows 8" into "Window 9" (no "s").
Truth be told, Vista briefly pushed me over the edge to Ubuntu. Ubuntu's then-dysfunctional handling of dynamic multiple monitor configurations on a laptop killed it for me, but apparently Linux/Xfree86 *finally* fixed that problem sometime around 2009 or 2010. Early in the Vista era, I used Ubuntu 6... right around the time Compiz became official, and booting a laptop configured to use monitor #2 as the primary desktop meant having to boot into single-user mode and hand-edit xinetd.conf (I think... it was a few years ago) to put it back to single-monitor with laptop = main display. Oh, and circa 2007 or so, Linux's handling of multiple cores with non-SMP-aware apps basically sucked. The prevailing attitude was, "If the application's author wanted to make use of multiple cores, he should have made it properly multithreaded", as opposed to "application authors are lazy, so make the OS itself as aggressively multithreaded as possible so that even single-threaded apps kind of benefit from multiple cores by virtue of their implicit library calls". From what I've read, it was kind of a kernel-level holy war between the purists and pragmatists, but the pragmatists won, and Linux is now about as good at faking SMP support in single-threaded apps as Windows is.
If your salary is $1,250/week, payable in Bitcoins at the Mtgox exchange rate in effect at noon eastern on payday, or 95% of the highest rate between 9am & 5pm, whichever is higher, but you end up exchanging half of them for US Dollars 9 months later for 50% more, your reported income would be $1,250, and it's up to you to report the currency-speculation windfall to the IRS the way you would with any other currency. The fact that your employer did the speculation for you, with your permission, is irrelevant. What matters is that your salary is *defined* in Dollars, regardless of the currency in which payment is made.
If your salary were INVOLUNTARILY paid in bitcoins, your employer would be breaking federal law (legally, you'd have the right to demand payment in dollars if you're employed in the US... and you can't wave that right in a contract. You can choose to not exercise it, but the right is always there. They can offer you a bonus for payment in bitcoins, but ultimately your salary or wages must be Dollar-defined and equal or greater than minimum wage.)
Isn't there a FAT-ish filesystem for Linux developed sometime around 1998 for running Linux under FAT that works kind of like RockRidge extensions, and allows files larger than 2gb to be chained together as two or more smaller files? From what I remember, there is, and it's even readable by Windows (using a utility to reassemble 2gb+ files), and view the long filenames. "FAT64", maybe?
From what I recall, the main problem with it is the ease with which a nontechnical user can corrupt large files (by opening the first under an OS that thinks it's just a normal FAT16 filesystem, not realizing it's just part one of several, and appending something to it).
The main reason companies like Nikon pay Microsoft is because the royalties max out at some amount they hit per-unit by mid-February in a typical year, so it's not worth dealing with the tech support costs of telling Aunt Mabel that she has to download and use a thirdparty utility to copy her "FAT64" files to NTFS to view them under Windows.
Couldn't Nikon skirt the whole patent (the enforceable and legally-tested claims, anyway) by just shipping the camera with unformatted flash, making users format them on a PC, and ignoring long VFAT filenames by only looking at the 8.3 part? AFAIK, Microsoft's chief patent narrowly covers the act of formatting a blank card as ExFAT (but not its use), long VFAT filenames (expiration imminent, if it hasn't happened already), and NTFS.
Nikon could easily save $10 by making their cameras only use FAT16 (or FAT32 filesystems created by Windows) and ext2/3/4.
Scroll wheels on mice aren't 20 years old, and to the best of my knowledge, they came straight from Microsoft. Once in a great while, Microsoft *does* get *something* right.
Easy. If salaries are pegged to the Bitcoin equivalent of some US Dollar value, their taxable salary is that dollar value. If they literally have a stable salary denominated in Bitcoins that doesn't change when Bitcoin's value does, handle it the same way you'd handle the salary of someone who lives in the US and works remotely for a European company & gets paid in Euros.
Slashdot Mirror
Who needs cheap(-ish) decoys when you have capacitors with bad electrolyte, flash that pretends to have double its real capacity and just overwrites itself if you fill it more than halfway, and self-diagnostics that lie & insist that everything is fine, even when it's not? The US defense industry spends millions of dollars per year trying to keep fraudulent components out of its supply chain (as in, fake and bad, not just IP-violating), and still fails occasionally. There's no way in HELL Chinese defense companies would be able to do any better. What are they going to do, swallow their pride and buy capacitors and flash from Japan, because their own capacitors and flash are too fucked to use for storing old pr0n, let alone nuclear missile flight firmware?
A patent for this could be a good thing, or a bad thing. Out of necessity, only a very tiny bit of data could viably be sent to a group with the phone making enough noise to be heard, without overwhelming the phone's speaker or getting stomped by background noise. But that tiny bit of data can only have meaning in the context of a subsequent lookup... ie, it sends something like a 128-bit value over the span of 2 seconds, then the phone goes online and looks it up a-la-tinyurl. The thing is, if there are 500 different contexts in which that value could be evaluated, it's basically useless. Users would have to manually tell it where to do the lookup. An ideal situation would be a patent held by some benign open organization who allows it to be used freely, but basically says, "if you're going to use our protocol and output a recognizable 128-bit value, you have to register an id with us that tells others where to go to fetch the details they'll need to look up the rest of the value". Highly-federated and decentralized, with the bare minimum of dictated control, but enough so that if a phone hears something it thinks is a 128-bit value encoded in this manner, it'll be able to make certain assumptions and deal with it automatically.
Of course, that's how we ended up with the mess we currently have with QR codes and NFC URLs that either contain javascript, or redirect to javascript, and try to crash the browser by redirecting it 257 times and causing a buffer overflow...
Serious question: do kitchens in metric countries have ultra-wide 750mm dishwashers and slightly-narrow 750mm ranges, or do people there have to suffer the indignity of knowing their dishwasher is 609.6mm, that their electric range is precisely 762mm wide, and have built-in cabinets that are sized in multiples of 76.2mm (3 inches) instead of 75 or 100mm? I've heard conflicting stories, most of which seem to suggest that kitchens are almost always built to standard American dimensions, but people pretend that they're built to some multiple of 75mm when talking about them.
In South Florida, the sun in your eyes is annoying, but evening traffic in general becomes several orders of magnitude worse after DST ends. When the sun goes down after 7, people with kids still bolt for the door around 4:30, but most people don't really start to head home until 5:30 or 6, and quite a few don't hit the road until 6:30 or 7. The day after DST ends, everybody goes running for the door at 5pm, and we end up with total gridlock that turns a drive that takes 30-40 minutes during the summer into an hour or more (not to mention the accidents and carnage daily that amplifies it and makes it even worse). The later the sun goes down, the more spread out evening traffic becomes, and the less time it takes to get home (with fewer accidents). Worse, that gridlock persists until 8pm or later during the winter, because everybody's drive home ends up being slower. The traffic surges at 4, stacks up at 5, and is at a complete standstill by 5:30... everywhere... from the beach to the everglades, north to south, from Port St. Lucie all the way south to Homestead, if not Key Largo... just total, complete gridlock everywhere.
I think going to somewhere like Las Vegas is even freakier... one minute, it's twilight and just starting to get dark. Then, all of a sudden, the sun dips behind the mountains, you're in the shadow, and within a matter of seconds, it's pitch black.
Of course, my favorite once-in-a-lifetime experience was the time I was on a jet taking off from Memphis *right* as the sun set... we were on the runway, it got darker and darker, night decisively arrived as we began to taxi... and 30 seconds later, the sun came back up again, and stayed up for another 5-10 minutes until the earth finally outran us and it went back down again. Apparently, back in the Concorde era, there were flights that departed from London & Paris after dark, delighted passengers got to watch the sun rise from the west, then landed in New York an hour or so before sunset.
You're preaching to the choir. I'd *kill* for a totally-open & unlocked best-of-breed awe-inspiring Moto Nexus-M w/4000mAH extended battery. Hell, I don't even care if it's chained to AT&T, as long as the bootloader isn't locked & the kernel modules are either open source or built for the latest kernel's ABI. Moto makes awesome hardware, crippled by management-imposed crippled & locked down firmware.
You're right. Vendor lock-in dispenses with the unpleasant moral messiness of human trafficking, and goes straight to the more profitable involuntary servitude part.
What? You want to demonstrate your freedom and not renew your annual license for ${expensive-relational-database}? OK, fine. We're exercising the right we gave ourselves on page 427, section 18, paragraph 62, to terminate your license immediately and refund 50% of your final 2 months of prorated license costs. Shut the database down and take your website offline immediately, or we'll sue you for statutory damages that start at $300,000. What? You don't want to terminate your license after all? Well then, you'd better pay for next year's license, then... and by the way, the renewal cost just went up by 50% since you allowed it to lapse (even though we're the ones who terminated it 2 months early), and there's a $18,000 license reinstatement fee unless you agree to maintain your license for the next 10 years (with early termination fee equal to 80% of the license fees for any remaining years).
> writes fail, but your data is accessible
Bullshit. Just TRY recovering data from an OCZ Vertex or Agility 2 drive that decided to spontaneously bork itself. If you're LUCKY, the drive won't interpret dd_rescue as a hack attack, and brick itself into "Panic Mode" as a countermeasure, and "all" you'll have to do to "fix" the drive is run "secure format" to wipe the drive clean and start over again.
SMART is almost useless for predicting failure with SSDs, because SSD failures fall into two categories:
* Long-term degradation due to limited write life... maybe 1% of SSD failures. This is the failure mode everyone THINKS is important, but it actually causes almost ZERO real-world failures.
* Spontaneous, often idiopathic, controller failures that instantly render the entire drive inaccessible. Roughly 99% of Sandforce SSD failures fall into this category. Sometimes, it happens because the drive lost power at precisely the worst possible moment. Often, it happens for no obvious reason in particular besides "Sandforce drives suck donkey shit, and commit data-suicide if you so much as have an impure thought or near occasion of computer sin.
> The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.
SSDs might not the only devices to suffer from critical failures, but they're pretty much the only large-scale storage devices that routinely suffer from critical failures almost at random, with zero advanced warning, and metaphorically go up in smoke & instantly trash gigabytes of data for almost no discernible reason.
So many people have gotten burned by SSDs (especially Sandforce drives), an entire generation of elite users have come to regard SSDs as the equivalent of automatic data-suicide, barely safe enough to even use as a write-through cache. If you gave me a 512-gig sandforce drive for free tomorrow, the box would probably still be sitting unopened on my desk 6 months later, because I'm so loath to taint my computer with them anymore. SSDs, especially Sandforce-based drives, are the most toxic computer hardware in history. Few things have caused more concentrated misery to so many users within so little time.
True story: my local CompUSA had a BIN full of (comparatively) cheap 256-gig OCZ SSDs on Black Friday. People saw the price, pounced on a drive or ten, pulled out their phones, did some quick research, and threw the drives BACK into the bin in disgust 10-90 minutes later as if they were radioactive trash. The only sale items in the entire store that got less love than the Sandforce drives were the $39 copies of Windows 8.
Get the fastest computer you can, and set your browser's default homepage to (blank).
I find that my worst temptations to hit Slashdot at work are whenever I go to do something that just... ends... up... being... painfully... slow. It's rare for me to stop mid-thought and go hit Slashdot. It's common for me to go launch something, get stuck waiting 30 seconds for something to time out before the network will let me continue, get frustrated, angrily jump over to Slashdot for a minute, and end up having the next 20 minutes to an hour or more go up in smoke. Anything that breaks your concentration is dangerous.
It's absolutely *sick* how many companies spend thousands recruiting highly-paid employees with relatively rare skills, then turn around and squander their time by skimping on their computer hardware. Seriously. Add up the marginal cost of the most outrageously gamer-grade Intel Extreme Edition i7 Xeon, 16 gigs of ram (vs 4), a large Intel SSD (no Sandforce, unless it's merely acting as a write-through read cache for a real drive), and 3 24" monitors (compared to the hardware you'd give the receptionist or someone in sales), then compare it to the opportunity cost of having just 2-4 10-minute periods of that same employees' productivity get incinerated every day. If you view the computer as at least a 2 year investment, with the monitors being good for 3-4 years, the extra kilobuck or two you'd spend on top-notch hardware will pay for itself within a month or two.
High-end hardware pays for itself in the form of reduced support costs, too. It's a fact -- slow computers running Windows have WAY more problems than fast computers running Windows, because the slower and more resource-constrained the computer is, the more likely it is to get itself into a state where just about anything can kick it past the tipping point and cause problems to start piling up, especially when users get pissed and cycle the power or repeatedly flood the event queue by clicking unresponsive buttons. It's times like those that Bad Things(tm) just start to happen, and happen, and happen.
Likewise, change your browser homepage to (blank), and try to disable anything that throws up things like "article of the day", random breaking news, etc. Get in the habit of searching from Firefox's search bar instead of going to en.wikipedia.org or google.com.
> Eminently sensible. ".com" should have been "us.co." from the start
No, forcing everything into country-level hierarchies makes about as much sense as forcing people to go to some abomination like www.microsoft.co.wa.us.
Country-level domains are useful for identifying sites applicable to residents of a particular country.
> Not really, you are only working with a small subset of imperial units.
Newsflash: NOBODY, not even AMERICANS, uses the "full set" of imperial units in daily life. The main POINT Of imperial units, and why they persist, is because for some specific problem domains, they happen to work with nicer whole units that are more convenient for that purpose. Americans happily buy Diet Mountain Dew in 12oz cans and 2-liter bottles.
Not quite... the Wiimote DOES have a proper 8-way digital gamepad with buttons a-la-NES. They kind of suck, in a middle school finger pain kind of way, but they DO exist.
That said, it's hard to think of ways to make good use of an accelerometer and gyro in a proper digital+analog 360-like gamepad, even though the Sixaxis tries. You can't really hold one confidently with one hand, and if you're holding it with two and using the digital or analog sticks/pads, chances are you DON'T want it reading intentions into the controller's orientation or motion. IMHO, the Gamecube and 360 reached the pinnacle of ergonomic gamepad controller design, and adding motion to them isn't necessarily an improvement. I'd rather just have a gamepad for games where a gamepad is appropriate, and Wii-type wiimote + nunchuck for games where THOSE controls are appropriate. And a nice high-resolution rotary encoder with a bit of mass & inertia, and no Atari 2600-like jitter, so somebody can port a quality versions of Warlords & Arkanoid to the next generation of consoles ;-)
Great. So I can use my phone as a third-rate shitty gamepad that's going to misfire, register phantom touches, ignore deliberate ones, kill me 7 times before I make it to level 2, and lag by at least 50-100ms under the most ideal circumstances possible.
Now, if someone makes a case for the Galaxy S3 that works with an extended battery & gives it a nice slide-out gamepad that's at least as good as the one on a GBA, or a clamp that lets me attach my S3 to a PS3 or 360 controller (with extended battery and case attached) so I can use it as a second display, I might be interested...
A stock touchscreen phone (Android or otherwise) might be good enough for playing something lame like Farmville, or playing card games with people 2,000 miles away, but phones just don't have the controls they need to be real game controllers. Internet latency is just the fatality move that finishes it off once and for all.
The constitution might say that, but I can say with 100% confidence that the Supreme Court would NEVER overrule an American law based upon a treaty unless the Senate itself were the plaintiff.
In other words, if the Senate ratifies a treaty, Congress passes enabling legislation that doesn't quite go far enough, or flat-out contradicts part of that treaty, and a similarly-deficient/contradictory bill ultimately gets ratified by the Senate, reconciled, and signed by the President (or veto-overridden), the Supreme Court would never, ever, in a million years, allow a treaty to be used as a weapon against the Senate (or a law passed by the Senate afterwards). To do otherwise would put the Supreme Court in a role of determining foreign policy... a role it neither has nor wants.
If the Senate ratified a treaty requiring the President to conduct foreign policy in some particular way, and the President ignored the treaty, the SENATE might petition the Supreme Court to hear the case, but that's the farthest I can imagine it going.
In all likelihood, the Supreme Court would just ignore the whole issue and look the other way. Remember, the Supreme Court determines its own agenda, and hears only cases it wants to hear. If the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that could ultimately compel the Senate to do something because of a treaty it ratified, it would be shocking, uncharacteristic, and basically without precedent in US history.
The expected response of the Supreme Court to such a petition (assuming it even acknowledged it) would be, "If the Senate intentionally violated a treaty it signed, or knowingly approved a law that allows a treaty to be violated, that's its own problem to deal with, and within the scope of its authority. If the Senate signed a treaty, and couldn't get Congress to go along with it by passing appropriate enabling legislation, that's a clear sign that it shouldn't have been signed in the first place."
> International Treaties have a force of law higher than FISA
No they don't. They have *zero* legal weight without enabling legislation (passed by the House & Senate, then signed by the President or veto-overridden).
> If people hate Windows 8 so much, why do they even bother commenting on it, as they aren't going to use it anyway,
For the same reason why the British (among others) obsess and whinge about American politics. Indirectly, they're affected by our elected officials too... at least, eventually.
We (Windows 7 users) might bitch about Windows 8 endlessly, but someday, we're going to get stuck with its fallout and be forced to suffer with it. Thus, it's in our best interests to give Microsoft as much grief about it as we possibly can, in the hope that by the time it gets rammed down our throats (if only in the form of a friend or family member's computer), it might hopefully be a bit more tolerable and less awful.
It depends. Plenty of us have had brief love affairs with Linux at one time or another, before discovering that the grass on the other side of the fence had clumps of dogshit strewn around, too. Until fairly recently, Linux sucked at handling laptops that were occasionally connected to second displays (especially if you wanted to use the external display as your primary display in an adhoc manner). Likewise, Windows has historically done a MUCH better job of making sure that even apps that are oblivious to SMP and multithreading benefit to some degree from having multiple cores and CPUs. Windows might be bloated, but KDE & Gnome (not to mention Xfree86) make Windows Explorer look like hand-tuned assembly language at a Scandinavian demoscene conference. On the other hand, Windows' networking (especially pre-7) had so many single-threaded chokepoints, and so many things that ran into them (especially Explorer), that Windows has become practically *unusable* on a true single-CPU single-core system without even hyperthreading to fake it.
Truth be told, I occasionally wonder whether the ultimate pushback to Windows might be a full-blown port of KDE or Gnome to Windows, in a way that allowed it to become Windows' primary desktop shell... kicking Metro to the curb, and acting as the primary window manager for Windows ITSELF. On one hand, Microsoft would still make money from licensing Windows. On the other hand, Microsoft would lose control over their own platform's look and feel. Since KDE & Gnome are free, all it would really take is one or two popular apps that required it, and the ability to run without causing compatibility problems with "normal" win32/64 apps.
This isn't entirely a new idea... Window Blinds kind of started it years ago by being one of the first/only Explorer alternatives/enhancements in history. If someone could leverage the 70% or so of KDE or Gnome that would be relevant to Windows, Microsoft would be *hating* life. Remember, Explorer/Metro might be firmly enmeshed within Windows, but so was Internet Explorer... and Firefox eventually motivated roughly half of Windows users to kick IE to the curb anyway. The key is to enhance and extend Windows, without forcing users to burn bridges behind them. Firefox duplicated functionality from IE, but did it in a way that left IE itself unharmed (just ignored and unloved). If KDE or Gnome could pull off the same feat, it would be a HUGE blow against Microsoft's "Platform Power"
Think about it for a moment... how many kernel-level things about Windows 8 are truly intolerable? Or driver architecture? Windows 8's suckiness is almost entirely due to its UI and window manager. Dump them for open-source alternatives, and we can have our cake & eat it too. Now, we just have to get Miguel de Icaza on board with our little scheme to corrosively topple Microsoft's power by "embracing and extending" Windows in ways beyond Microsoft's own control ;-)
> Windows 95 and 98 both got a lot of negative press at the time,
Are you kidding? When Windows 95 came out, it was like god himself opened up the skies while everyone yelled, "it is good". Stores had launch parties at midnight, and there were lines out the door of people buying it like twinkies & toilet paper after a nuclear attack, along with pretty much ANYTHING that had the number "95" printed on the box.
People bitched about 98 because ActiveDesktop made your shiny new 60-100MHz Pentium crawl like a 33MHz 486SX. For years, Win95 OSR2 was the gold standard against which everything was judged, especially if your USB needs began and ended with "mouse" (95OSR2 could deal with USB mice, though I don't remember whether it was 'out of the box', or 'by hand-copying a few DLLs ripped from a 98 system').
Win2k Pro was either the best or worst OS Microsoft has ever made, and your opinion depends almost entirely upon whether you cared about using software and hardware that was supported by NT Workstation 4. If you (like me) came from NT4W, it was a gift from ${deity}. If you cared about running "Pooh's Alphabet Adventure" from 1993 on your old PC, it sucked.
People's opinions of XP were pretty much their opposite opinion of Win2k. People who loved Win2k's compromise-free perfection hated XP's compromises made in the name of legacy compatibility (especially its endless reboots for everything). People who loved Win95OSR2 and hated Win2k loved XP's compatibility and prettyness. Most of the Win2k camp grudgingly ended up with XP 2-3 years later, when XP's superior SMP won them over, and Win2kSP3 or SP4 made Win2k need reboots as often as XP, anyway.
Everyone hated Vista, or at least had a grudging love-hate relationship that left them feeling like a battered spouse. I loved the real symlinks, but hated its video driver dysfunction. It was my All in Wonder 128 Pro's deathblow.
Then came Windows 7. Ahhh. Flawless perfection, especially once I discovered that Win7/64 requires signed drivers, but I can sign OTHER people's binary drivers MYSELF with my own self-signed certificate & Windows will quit nagging and leave me alone to install them as I please (this is a big, huge deal for anyone who does embedded development, especially anything that involves a legacy parallel port).
Windows 8? Endless suck. I suspect that, like 98(SE) with 98Lite to make it tolerable (98Lite removed Active Desktop & basically let you have 98's guts with 95OSR2's much faster Explorer), I'll probably end up with 8 eventually... but I have zero desire to put myself through Win8's misery just to make it tolerable. Plus, I'm still hoping that Microsoft will see the light, and quickly release Windows 9... giving us back Aero Glass, and allowing us to apply the translucent-titlebar effect to the ENTIRE WINDOW when it's being dragged. Assuming, of course, that Microsoft is willing to compromise and let us HAVE multiple windows again, instead of turning "Windows 8" into "Window 9" (no "s").
Truth be told, Vista briefly pushed me over the edge to Ubuntu. Ubuntu's then-dysfunctional handling of dynamic multiple monitor configurations on a laptop killed it for me, but apparently Linux/Xfree86 *finally* fixed that problem sometime around 2009 or 2010. Early in the Vista era, I used Ubuntu 6... right around the time Compiz became official, and booting a laptop configured to use monitor #2 as the primary desktop meant having to boot into single-user mode and hand-edit xinetd.conf (I think... it was a few years ago) to put it back to single-monitor with laptop = main display. Oh, and circa 2007 or so, Linux's handling of multiple cores with non-SMP-aware apps basically sucked. The prevailing attitude was, "If the application's author wanted to make use of multiple cores, he should have made it properly multithreaded", as opposed to "application authors are lazy, so make the OS itself as aggressively multithreaded as possible so that even single-threaded apps kind of benefit from multiple cores by virtue of their implicit library calls". From what I've read, it was kind of a kernel-level holy war between the purists and pragmatists, but the pragmatists won, and Linux is now about as good at faking SMP support in single-threaded apps as Windows is.
If your salary is $1,250/week, payable in Bitcoins at the Mtgox exchange rate in effect at noon eastern on payday, or 95% of the highest rate between 9am & 5pm, whichever is higher, but you end up exchanging half of them for US Dollars 9 months later for 50% more, your reported income would be $1,250, and it's up to you to report the currency-speculation windfall to the IRS the way you would with any other currency. The fact that your employer did the speculation for you, with your permission, is irrelevant. What matters is that your salary is *defined* in Dollars, regardless of the currency in which payment is made.
If your salary were INVOLUNTARILY paid in bitcoins, your employer would be breaking federal law (legally, you'd have the right to demand payment in dollars if you're employed in the US... and you can't wave that right in a contract. You can choose to not exercise it, but the right is always there. They can offer you a bonus for payment in bitcoins, but ultimately your salary or wages must be Dollar-defined and equal or greater than minimum wage.)
Isn't there a FAT-ish filesystem for Linux developed sometime around 1998 for running Linux under FAT that works kind of like RockRidge extensions, and allows files larger than 2gb to be chained together as two or more smaller files? From what I remember, there is, and it's even readable by Windows (using a utility to reassemble 2gb+ files), and view the long filenames. "FAT64", maybe?
From what I recall, the main problem with it is the ease with which a nontechnical user can corrupt large files (by opening the first under an OS that thinks it's just a normal FAT16 filesystem, not realizing it's just part one of several, and appending something to it).
The main reason companies like Nikon pay Microsoft is because the royalties max out at some amount they hit per-unit by mid-February in a typical year, so it's not worth dealing with the tech support costs of telling Aunt Mabel that she has to download and use a thirdparty utility to copy her "FAT64" files to NTFS to view them under Windows.
Couldn't Nikon skirt the whole patent (the enforceable and legally-tested claims, anyway) by just shipping the camera with unformatted flash, making users format them on a PC, and ignoring long VFAT filenames by only looking at the 8.3 part? AFAIK, Microsoft's chief patent narrowly covers the act of formatting a blank card as ExFAT (but not its use), long VFAT filenames (expiration imminent, if it hasn't happened already), and NTFS.
Nikon could easily save $10 by making their cameras only use FAT16 (or FAT32 filesystems created by Windows) and ext2/3/4.
> Microsoft hasn't innovated anything in 20 years
Scroll wheels on mice aren't 20 years old, and to the best of my knowledge, they came straight from Microsoft. Once in a great while, Microsoft *does* get *something* right.
>How should this be taxed?
Easy. If salaries are pegged to the Bitcoin equivalent of some US Dollar value, their taxable salary is that dollar value. If they literally have a stable salary denominated in Bitcoins that doesn't change when Bitcoin's value does, handle it the same way you'd handle the salary of someone who lives in the US and works remotely for a European company & gets paid in Euros.