That's weird. Last time I bought a car with a bank loan. Walked into the dealership with the loan papers, said "I want that one," they knocked out the paperwork and I walked out in twenty minutes. This was a Chevy dealership.
That was my main tablet for three years until it failed for some unknown reason. The closest thing I could get to replace it was an Asus ZenPad 8, and it's nowhere near as good. Support sucks and it's flaky, and it's jammed with crapware. At least their launcher is OK. I hear the Amazon Fire pads are OK, but still aren't up to snuff with the Nexus 7. Plus I have a few apps I don't want to repurchase on the Amazon store.
Remember the giant laser bay in Tron? The one where Flynn gets zapped into the computer? That was filmed at the SHIVA laser facility at Lawrence Livermore, a machine built to attempt to reproduce the conditions on the sun to get fusion going. It didn't work. The government built a larger laser at the National Ignition Facility. It went way over-budget and took forever to build. It also didn't work.
Rent seeking is a code-word for a coercive business transaction. I don't think it fits Apple's situation. The smart phone market is pretty well saturated. The only new revenue you can get is through related devices (watches? headphones?) or services.
There are plenty of competitors. If one of them can come up with something substantially better then they could easily crush everyone else in the smartphone market.
There used to be a great Mac programmer's conference called MacHack. It was a weekend hackathon where people would churn out interesting code. Lots of them were pranks. One would cause the OK and Cancel buttons to run away from the pointer in dialog boxes. One turned all system text into Pig Latin. It was easy to pull these off in classic MacOS as it didn't have protected memory, so you could patch basically anything in the system with an application.
My personal favorite was the person who coded Breakout (in Forth!) to run on OpenFirmware, the original PPC Mac's firmware. So you turn the machine on and immediately after POST, breakout comes up.
Of course, it's entirely likely you're not affected by the compromised chips.
So you can take the reassuring route of "Clearly, that vulnerability clearly affects folks other than me, so I'm righteously Dunning-Kruger in my examination of the evidence that might suggest I'm super, duper, special.
The corollary to that is: "zOMG ZERO DAY IN YOUR ROUTERS!!! IT COULD BE YOU!!! CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFOS!!!!"
Meanwhile it's a vulnerability in some brain-dead feature nobody uses and you have to be standing next to the router to exploit it. My personal favorites are the exploits that require physical access to the machine to plug something in.
Are 16 lanes per GPU that important? There was an old benchmark from a few years ago that compared SLI using 2x16 to 1x16/1x8, and there was hardly any difference. Granted this was on relatively old hardware (I think 8xx series GeForce) but from what I remember the important part was bandwidth loading textures into the GPU. Since modern GPUs have gobs of RAM, and the faster SLI bridges let them pool memory better, it's less of an issue.
The GPU integration has me scratching my head. AMD's integrated slaughters Intels in any fair (equal $) comparison. I dont see how the deal with Intel benefits AMD.
Because Intel still sells a lot more desktop chips than AMD. AMD probably won't be making any serious moves in the low to mid-range desktop CPU market any time soon. Intel has that locked up. So you may as well make money selling AMD graphics on those low end chips.
There is something to be said for making strategic decisions on not partnering with potential competition. There is also something to be said for selling as much product as you can to make money.
My company just hired a bunch of CS graduates right out of college. We also let go of a few project managers (who worked in a defunct product group) who got new jobs within a month.
No, but they are long term issues that affect customer loyalty. There are rumblings amongst Tesla owners about service issues. In-warranty service is slow. Out-of-warranty is slow AND super expensive. Like $900 to fix a door handle. Dealerships are known for stiff markups, but $900 to fix a door latch is usury.
Other explanations are either restatements of the problem ("people suddenly began eating more", "people suddenly became more sedentary") or are unsupported by evidence, such as blaming it on HFCS, which is an "American thing" yet the obesity epidemic is a worldwide phenomena.
People began eating more and were more sedentary are not restatements of the problem. They are direct causes. You then would need to figure out why people are eating more or are more sedentary. Also, though it's a worldwide problem, the rate varies greatly from country to country, and even within areas of each country.
That's the understatement of the century. It's beyond difficult. It's herculean. It's somewhat easier when you are building a luxury product and the market for your product is, maybe, a few hundred thousand. It's a whole 'nother ball of wax when you are churning out millions of cars a year. For instance, when you are at that volume at a low price, you need to hedge on raw materials so commodity price spikes don't eliminate your profit margin. Large car companies have entire divisions that just figure out how much steel and rubber are going to cost. Ditto labor. And shipping costs. And energy costs. And that's just scratching the surface.
Probably, but there's no incentive for China to do so, if we are going to eat the cost of postage. The underlying problem is the pricing structure is broken. The Post Office is, essentially, subsidizing shipping stuff from other countries. When you have a massive trade deficit with most other countries, it's a problem.
You can sort-of fix it by making a bunch of deals on where cargo needs to be shipped, or you can fix it by charging what it actually costs to ship something. The latter is what Trump is (hopefully) trying to do, and really what makes the most sense.
Problem is, maybe a fraction of the stuff on the giant container ship is going to go to Miami, or all of Florida for that matter. So you'd have to load a ship with *just* stuff going to Florida, which kind of defeats the purpose of the giant container ship.
Also, due to laws protecting US shipping companies, you can't pull into a port from a foreign country, unload some of your cargo, then sail to another US port. All your cargo has to be transferred to a US-owned ship, at which point you might as well throw it on a train or truck and send it on it's way to it's final destination.
TL;DR version - Yes there is a postal "illuminati." The treaty states that, when sending things via international mail, the sending country handles the cost to get the package to the country being delivered to, and the country being delivered to covers the cost of delivery from the point of entry to the final destination. As you can imagine, sending something from China on an enormous container ship to a port in Los Angeles is relatively cheap, especially when most of the manufacturing and shipping is done near sea ports. Shipping that thing from Los Angeles to Miami is pretty expensive. The cost of the last part is covered by the US post office.
This stuff cost a ton of money and energy to refine. Don't throw it away. Seal it up in ceramic caskets and bury it in the middle of an army base somewhere. There might be a use for it in 50 years.
The two issues I see holding machines back, that are inherent in the human mind, are:
1. In the brain the "memory" and "logic" hardware are mixed together. There are no separate areas of the brain, they are spread out and combined all over the place, except for some specialized structures for handling visual processing and autonomic systems.
2. The brain can create arbitrary connections between different parts of itself, making it, essentially, *massively* parallel with no set routes between areas. Computers *suck* at this right now. Parallel processing only works well with very linear algorithms. Message passing bogs things down. They tried alleviating this with all kinds of weird architectures back in the 90's when these things were in vogue - hypercube arrangements, torus nodes, ultra-high-speed switching fabric buses. None of them scaled out particularly well.
...for the last 30 years. Nobody has cracked it yet. This "common sense" bit is what prevents "true" AI from becoming a reality. What we have now are glorified expert systems and pattern matching algorithms.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but we aren't talking about machining ingots, we're talking about moving individual particles around, I'd assume in a vacuum.
That's weird. Last time I bought a car with a bank loan. Walked into the dealership with the loan papers, said "I want that one," they knocked out the paperwork and I walked out in twenty minutes. This was a Chevy dealership.
That was my main tablet for three years until it failed for some unknown reason. The closest thing I could get to replace it was an Asus ZenPad 8, and it's nowhere near as good. Support sucks and it's flaky, and it's jammed with crapware. At least their launcher is OK. I hear the Amazon Fire pads are OK, but still aren't up to snuff with the Nexus 7. Plus I have a few apps I don't want to repurchase on the Amazon store.
It was part of the ICF program, that tried to duplicate the conditions for fusion on the sun.
Remember the giant laser bay in Tron? The one where Flynn gets zapped into the computer? That was filmed at the SHIVA laser facility at Lawrence Livermore, a machine built to attempt to reproduce the conditions on the sun to get fusion going. It didn't work. The government built a larger laser at the National Ignition Facility. It went way over-budget and took forever to build. It also didn't work.
Good thing those are all chemical free. Don't want chemicals in your food do you?
Rent seeking is a code-word for a coercive business transaction. I don't think it fits Apple's situation. The smart phone market is pretty well saturated. The only new revenue you can get is through related devices (watches? headphones?) or services.
There are plenty of competitors. If one of them can come up with something substantially better then they could easily crush everyone else in the smartphone market.
There used to be a great Mac programmer's conference called MacHack. It was a weekend hackathon where people would churn out interesting code. Lots of them were pranks. One would cause the OK and Cancel buttons to run away from the pointer in dialog boxes. One turned all system text into Pig Latin. It was easy to pull these off in classic MacOS as it didn't have protected memory, so you could patch basically anything in the system with an application.
My personal favorite was the person who coded Breakout (in Forth!) to run on OpenFirmware, the original PPC Mac's firmware. So you turn the machine on and immediately after POST, breakout comes up.
Of course, it's entirely likely you're not affected by the compromised chips.
So you can take the reassuring route of "Clearly, that vulnerability clearly affects folks other than me, so I'm righteously Dunning-Kruger in my examination of the evidence that might suggest I'm super, duper, special.
The corollary to that is: "zOMG ZERO DAY IN YOUR ROUTERS!!! IT COULD BE YOU!!! CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFOS!!!!"
Meanwhile it's a vulnerability in some brain-dead feature nobody uses and you have to be standing next to the router to exploit it. My personal favorites are the exploits that require physical access to the machine to plug something in.
Are 16 lanes per GPU that important? There was an old benchmark from a few years ago that compared SLI using 2x16 to 1x16/1x8, and there was hardly any difference. Granted this was on relatively old hardware (I think 8xx series GeForce) but from what I remember the important part was bandwidth loading textures into the GPU. Since modern GPUs have gobs of RAM, and the faster SLI bridges let them pool memory better, it's less of an issue.
The GPU integration has me scratching my head. AMD's integrated slaughters Intels in any fair (equal $) comparison. I dont see how the deal with Intel benefits AMD.
Because Intel still sells a lot more desktop chips than AMD. AMD probably won't be making any serious moves in the low to mid-range desktop CPU market any time soon. Intel has that locked up. So you may as well make money selling AMD graphics on those low end chips.
There is something to be said for making strategic decisions on not partnering with potential competition. There is also something to be said for selling as much product as you can to make money.
My company just hired a bunch of CS graduates right out of college. We also let go of a few project managers (who worked in a defunct product group) who got new jobs within a month.
Cost to fix a Cadillac Escalade door handle (and latch mechanism) $430:
https://www.cadillacforums.com...
No, but they are long term issues that affect customer loyalty. There are rumblings amongst Tesla owners about service issues. In-warranty service is slow. Out-of-warranty is slow AND super expensive. Like $900 to fix a door handle. Dealerships are known for stiff markups, but $900 to fix a door latch is usury.
https://forums.tesla.com/forum...
Other explanations are either restatements of the problem ("people suddenly began eating more", "people suddenly became more sedentary") or are unsupported by evidence, such as blaming it on HFCS, which is an "American thing" yet the obesity epidemic is a worldwide phenomena.
People began eating more and were more sedentary are not restatements of the problem. They are direct causes. You then would need to figure out why people are eating more or are more sedentary. Also, though it's a worldwide problem, the rate varies greatly from country to country, and even within areas of each country.
Seriously, apart from Batterizer I don't think Jones has ever once been right in one of his debunking rants.
What else has he been wrong about?
Building a whole new car may be difficult...
That's the understatement of the century. It's beyond difficult. It's herculean. It's somewhat easier when you are building a luxury product and the market for your product is, maybe, a few hundred thousand. It's a whole 'nother ball of wax when you are churning out millions of cars a year. For instance, when you are at that volume at a low price, you need to hedge on raw materials so commodity price spikes don't eliminate your profit margin. Large car companies have entire divisions that just figure out how much steel and rubber are going to cost. Ditto labor. And shipping costs. And energy costs. And that's just scratching the surface.
I think the treaty only covers shipments to the continental US. Shipping stuff to Hawaii costs a *ton* no matter where it comes from.
Probably, but there's no incentive for China to do so, if we are going to eat the cost of postage. The underlying problem is the pricing structure is broken. The Post Office is, essentially, subsidizing shipping stuff from other countries. When you have a massive trade deficit with most other countries, it's a problem.
You can sort-of fix it by making a bunch of deals on where cargo needs to be shipped, or you can fix it by charging what it actually costs to ship something. The latter is what Trump is (hopefully) trying to do, and really what makes the most sense.
Problem is, maybe a fraction of the stuff on the giant container ship is going to go to Miami, or all of Florida for that matter. So you'd have to load a ship with *just* stuff going to Florida, which kind of defeats the purpose of the giant container ship.
Also, due to laws protecting US shipping companies, you can't pull into a port from a foreign country, unload some of your cargo, then sail to another US port. All your cargo has to be transferred to a US-owned ship, at which point you might as well throw it on a train or truck and send it on it's way to it's final destination.
Came here to post this :) Here's the link:
https://www.npr.org/sections/m...
TL;DR version - Yes there is a postal "illuminati." The treaty states that, when sending things via international mail, the sending country handles the cost to get the package to the country being delivered to, and the country being delivered to covers the cost of delivery from the point of entry to the final destination. As you can imagine, sending something from China on an enormous container ship to a port in Los Angeles is relatively cheap, especially when most of the manufacturing and shipping is done near sea ports. Shipping that thing from Los Angeles to Miami is pretty expensive. The cost of the last part is covered by the US post office.
Multitrack high-res audio editing. Video editing and compositing. Medium format 48-bit image editing.
Anything needing a few gigabytes of RAM just to load a project will just get faster the more you can buffer stuff into memory.
This stuff cost a ton of money and energy to refine. Don't throw it away. Seal it up in ceramic caskets and bury it in the middle of an army base somewhere. There might be a use for it in 50 years.
The two issues I see holding machines back, that are inherent in the human mind, are:
1. In the brain the "memory" and "logic" hardware are mixed together. There are no separate areas of the brain, they are spread out and combined all over the place, except for some specialized structures for handling visual processing and autonomic systems.
2. The brain can create arbitrary connections between different parts of itself, making it, essentially, *massively* parallel with no set routes between areas. Computers *suck* at this right now. Parallel processing only works well with very linear algorithms. Message passing bogs things down. They tried alleviating this with all kinds of weird architectures back in the 90's when these things were in vogue - hypercube arrangements, torus nodes, ultra-high-speed switching fabric buses. None of them scaled out particularly well.
...for the last 30 years. Nobody has cracked it yet. This "common sense" bit is what prevents "true" AI from becoming a reality. What we have now are glorified expert systems and pattern matching algorithms.