Yep. I run it and love it on my Linux systems at home. At work, though, I have to deal with systemd all day, so I run Debian unstable.
The Devuan folks have an uphill battle ahead of them, though. More and more software is getting sucked into the systemd ecosystem because of its heavy-handed policy and vast market share. They might find themselves having to support forks of fairly complex tools just to keep that dependency away.
By the same token, systemd just might make a whole lot of Linux software Unix-incompatible.
Yet I can't help wondering how much of it is really just people who resist change because they don't want to learn something new.
Probably a good chunk.
That said, init and upstart solved problems in a fairly small domain: starting daemons in dependency order. SMF, launchd, and a few others did the same thing. They sucked to learn, but they gave us parallel startup, services that could start in response to events (logins, socket connects, etc.) and that was worth some relearning.
Things that systemd has embraced into its scope that SMD and launchd did not include:
System logs
Control groups
Resource accounting
User session management
Power management (suspend/resume)
Time synchronization
Temp file cleanup
Name resolution
Hostname setting
Privilege escalation
Disk, Volume, and Metadevice discovery
Thanks to RedHat's backing, the systemd developers have a bully pulpit to force policy on Linux users everywhere. Like when nohup stopped working by default. The usual rationale from Poettering and company are that things are "broken" or "nobody needs that."
Right now, on my Debian box, in ~root/ is a script called thanks-systemd.sh. It mostly boils down to:
cd/dev ; for i in dm-? ; do ln -s../$i mapper/$(cat/sys/devices/virtual/block/${i}/dm/name); done
Because for about two weeks my system stopped autobooting due to some churn between LVM2 and systemd. LVM2's worked nigh-flawlessly for 20 years, and its semantics haven't changed.
It's one thing to change a clunky misfeature (init scripts) in some jarring way to make them better. It's quite another to take over most aspects of systems management, do them differently "just because," and break random things because of scope creep.
Perhaps not, per se. However, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides a "safe harbor" against people who run web sites from being treated as the "publisher or speaker of any information provided by another."
This sort of provision is directly at odds with the notion of editorial control. Being able to say "we didn't say that" is effectively a lie when spoken by someone who gets to control exactly what got said.
There's lots of grey area and middle ground, but there needs to be some sort of litmus test for whether or not these platforms' "Community Standards" are valid in the context of Section 230. On one hand, no one wants to put in all the work in hosting a platform just to have users fill it with filth. On the other, the standards need consistent application so that, for example, a post of "Kill all x" is equally offending for all demographic values of x; or, that those Community Standards aren't a mere rephrasing of some group's political platform.
I'm all for site owners to say whatever they want and face whatever consequences come their way. I'm all for platform providers not being held liable for the things that other people say using those platforms. I'm not for platform providers getting that (additional) legal protection while effectively acting as a publisher/gatekeeper in an increasingly-consolidating Web.
Make a "fat macbook" with USB-A, 17 inch screen and optical drive and long battery life and it will sell like hot cakes.
Yep, that's the Mac I wanted--and the Mac I upgraded to every two-to-three years starting with the first 17" PowerBook G4.
I'm told we're a niche market. We're too picky and too expensive to cater-to relative to the masses of people who just want a shiny Facebook/YouTube machine. I was told that a 15-inch screen is big enough, that I really would never want to upgrade memory or storage, and then I was told to be patient while iOS got all the attention from Apple's OS engineers.
So I waited. My most recent Mac is 8 years old. The new OS X won't run on it, and I can't even get a 15 "Pro" MacBook with an "escape" key. I didn't really want to run Vim, anyway, I guess.
I've stopped waiting, and now I carry a ThinkPad. It's big, it's ugly, it's fast, the battery lasts all day, and I can swap out parts as I need. Shame about losing my investment in software for OS X, but Apple have firmly and repeatedly told our type that we're not welcome at their party anymore.
If 22% of TV purchasers defaulted, leaving Wells Fargo to pay the bill, you bet your ass Wells Fargo would stop paying for TVs.
If that were what the article said, it'd imply that Wells Fargo should stop issuing lines of credit in excess of what people can repay. Whether the money was spent on Dogecoin or Home Shopping Network kitch, it's spent. The limit is there precisely so that the consumer doesn't spend more than he can repay (even if it is a long way down the road to paying it off).
So, roughly the same number of people are being irresponsible with money as usual, but because they're being irresponsible in a new and different way, it's time to sound the alarm!
Lenders have said they’re worried they’d be left on the hook if a borrower lost money on a digital currency bet and couldn’t repay.
As opposed to plastic crap from big-box stores, ever-shifting expensive fashions, electronics designed to be obsolete by next CES, and all the other pointless crap we're bombarded with in advertising. When you can't pay the credit card bill, you can just flog all that stuff for beaucoup bucks on Craigslist or eBay.
Ever had the nagging suspicion that your car's manufacturer was charging outrageous prices for parts simply because it could? Software might be to blame.
Damn those silly algorithms and expressions organizing themselves in a way to make extra money for a completely uninvolved party who happened to deploy them. The nerve of them!
The practice may be automated now, but it's been going on for literally decades. Even as far back as the 1980s and 1970s, you could swap parts between Corvettes and other cars. The part numbers would be different, but the equipment itself would be functionally identical. Funny how the part for the Corvette always cost several times as much; I'm sure it's purely because there were fewer Corvettes on the road (than, say, Citations or Skylarks), so the manufacturing costs were higher, right? Riiiiiiight
The price of a thing is always cost plus, where "plus" is defined by what the market will endure. If you can keep the cost hidden (see also: US healthcare) or obscure the availability of a thing (nearly-identical parts with different labels, with only one label approved for your application), the market will endure a hell of a shafting until the house of cards comes down.
Moore's Law is an economic one, not a strictly a technological one. Although, keeping it going depends on semiconductor processes getting finer.
The costs per nanoacre more-or-less follow a predictable curve relative to how bleeding-edge a process is required to fabricate a chip. If you need a really old process, availability will be low, so demand will push the costs up. If you're using the latest, availability is low and yields will initially be low, so the costs are way up. Everything in-between is pretty cheap because demand tends to go towards newer stuff, and the fabrication plant for those middle-aged processes has already started depreciating-out.
If you're trying to be an industry leader, you're targeting the newest processes, so you have the highest expenses. As a result, you want to keep your chip small because costs scale with semiconductor area (N chips per wafer, X dollars per wafer, etc.).
However, there's a lower bound on that. If you've got a chip with over a thousand pins, like a high-end microprocessor, the chip has to be physically large enough to have that many bumps to wire out to pins. Also, there's the case of heat dissipation to consider. A teeny-tiny part that draws a lot of current may shatter or desolder itself if there's not enough surface area to mate with the thermal solution.
So, you want to be small, but there's a lower bound to that. That implies wasted space on the die, which you're going to pay for, anyway. What to do with it?
Add a core! Make the pipelines deeper! More cache! Add some multimedia accelerators. Add an FPGA! Add some other dedicated-function unit! Then present it as a bullet-point for selling more of your part versus your competitor.
Geez they are really doing their absolute best to piss off and alienate their core fanbase.
They learned from Apple that it's a totally safe an profitable thing to do if you have a "golden parachute" in another market.
Apple did it to the educational customers in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Apple did it to the publishing/print customers in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Apple did it to the audio/video content creators in the late 2000 and early 2010s.
Apple did it to the nerds shortly thereafter.
Now, with their not trying to sell to nerds and professionals (apart from iOS developer systems), Apple's more profitable than ever. They learned how to milk a market for what it's worth so that you can get into a market where the money's better, the effort less, and the users still desperate. When the old market is sick of you, you don't need them anymore.
Apple will do just fine until they lose touch with what consumers feel is shiny and exciting; then they'll be as relevant as Westinghouse and Sears.
Fear not, fellow nerd. There will be plenty of other companies who will make shiny things for us for the limited time before our usefulness wears out.
This smells very "motte and bailey" to me, if being played in reverse.
Vanishingly few people will be okay with adults grooming adolescents for sex on Facebook, so I would presume that overwhelming answer will be that this sort of behavior should be disallowed on the platform.
Facebook implements additional controls on behavior in other areas, as well, like they always do.
When there's public backlash, they'll fire back with "the users asked for it," citing this poll and tying whatever additional restrictions they make into "protecting the children."
Remember in 2012 when Facebook put out a huge policy change but would allow the users to veto it if 30% of the accounts voted against it? Of course it was fair because people aren't allowed to have multiple accounts; therefore, "no one" has one. Sure it included people who abandoned the platform and many others who had died, but it was only 30%, right? Getting the equivalent of the whole population of the US to care about something enough to log in during a week-long window and find the "vote" button is no big deal, yeah?
It's their platform to do as they please, and that's fine. I just wish they wouldn't be so duplicitous about it. Do your thing, Facebook, but don't act like your users asked for it.
All students should have computer skills, but not all need computer science.
True. It's like the difference among home economics (computer skills), shop class (programming), and geometry/precalculus (computer science).
Misguided as the College Board's proposal is, there's a little bit of wisdom in teaching some of these things to everyone, but maybe not in the context of computing.
The biggest win from CS is not the potential paycheck of being a programmer, but in things that other math/science courses should already teach students, but apparently don't: problem-solving by decomposition. That skill alone (and maybe the encompassing skill of algorithmic thinking) will get a typical person a lot further in life than knowing some soon-to-be-antiquated programming language (Pascal, anyone?).
I've been writing code for over 30 years, and I went through a phase when I believed that literally everyone should learn code. I later realized that part of that came from dealing with people who couldn't do anything unless it was broken into explicit steps, and the rest of it came from wanting to share my joy of programming with others. The unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate for us professionals) is that most people hate programming. Associating the valuable life skills of critical/algorithmic thinking with something that most people hate would be a disaster.
Absolutely everyone should take home economics, though. The basic life skills of planning a personal budget and keeping oneself fed and clothed are far more important than learning a programming language or even basic computer skills.
Once again I've had big updates like that on my machines. At home I run Windows Pro and at work Windows Education and neither have ever done this.
I'm not disputing this. I'm saying that it does happen, just not as overtly as Steve described. I run Windows Pro at home and on my laptop and have seen it happen to older software I'd installed.
It can both not-happen to you, and happen to other people who have different software installed.
Steve may have been simplifying for brevity's sake, but that is exactly what the experience feels like when the update happens overnight while no one is there to stare at the PC.
When Windows 10 does an upgrade to a later version, it effectively does a clean OS install and re-installs applications. This is what's going on behind that creepy "These updates are for your protection / Your computer will be just fine / All your data is exactly where you left it" screen. If it hits a known conflict (Microsoft keeps a database of these), an application won't be reinstalled. It wasn't the intent, but it sure looks like Microsoft decided to uninstall another company's product just to be a dick and show you who really owns your PC.
You can tell when you got one of those big updates because all the stupid in-built advertising gets reactivated and Candy Crush Saga III: Wrath of the Tyrannical Twizzlers or WTFever shows up prominently on the Start menu.
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. Texas has dumb things about "data processing" versus "programming," where 20% of one is exempt and the other is (AFAIK) non-taxable unless it was part of the task of generating a report (web sites are included in this definition of "report," so front-end programming is always taxable), so writing a program for a client and getting them to run it for you can actually save them some tax if you're playing to the letter of the law.
And then there's nonsense about whether or not a thing is taxable based on why you did it. If you're an architect and produce a drawing in AutoCAD as part of the production of a design for a client, that's non-taxable. If you're an architect and produce a drawing in AutoCAD because your client handed you a sketch (or a drawing in some other program's format), the labor involved in creating the AutoCAD document is taxable. There are analogues in bookkeeping, where doing tax-prep things as part of bookkeeping are nontaxable, but doing tax-prep things in order to produce payroll (and, AFAIK, only payroll) tax documents is taxable.
Coordinating this BS on a national level would either require some sort of uniformity of the sales tax systems first (yay!) or would be too onerous for small firms to handle. Maybe for strictly retail/resale a small company could do it, but consulting or any sort of value-add would be nearly impossible across state lines.
Texas, for instance, has state, county, and local sales taxes (usually just the city). The state rate is constant (with exceptions for differing types of goods, some of which are totally exempt and some of which have a portion of the price exempt). The county and local tax rates are usually—but not required by statute to be—constant within those counties and localities, but cities sometimes stretch across county lines, and then there are addresses with a city associated (because of the nearest post office) but that are actually outside the boundaries of the local taxing jurisdiction. Very little of this can be determined by ZIP code because those are allocated to the servicing Post Office rather than political subdivisions.
The other states with sales taxes probably aren't much saner.
No, if taxes must be collected based on destination, this is going to be another rent-seeking cottage-industry that exists entirely because some government goons disconnected from reality decided that something that was easy-to-write-down couldn't possibly be a complete pain in the ass to comply with. Square or PayPal or whatever will collect the taxes plus some compliance overhead fee and distribute it on your behalf. Compliance would be a completely unreasonable burden for small businesses to undertake themselves.
The app comprises multiple Electron processes, a player server process (for being remotely controlled), and the MPD player process, while managing to present a semblance of a whole.
Thankfully, no one had to endure the savage ordeal of writing in a low-level language to assemble this pile of media-playing middleware. Phew!
It doesn't have to be that way. If you're running a node, you could run software that packs transactions into a block by any criteria you choose. However, since the aggregate fees for the block are part of the reward for winning the mining operation, it's in the miners' best interests to pack the largest fees first. Also, since the likelihood of any particular node winning the block is very low, we can talk about the most common strategy as if it were universal.
One of the parts of what makes me really nervous is that fees and trading price feed-back into each other in a damaging sort of way. The way that transactions are expressed is that their components must be spent in totality. So, if you're trying to pay 0.01 BTC, and your smallest previous inbound transaction was 0.1 BTC, you have to refund 0.09 BTC (less fees) back to yourself. Over time, this means your wallet gets fragmented with a bunch of spare change which may make some later transaction expensive because of the number of previous-spends needed to be referenced to get up to that amount. The smaller the pieces of change, the less they can contribute because of the fee overhead in referencing them.
Looking even a little in to the future, this is going to ramp up pressure to rely on off-chain transactions, using the blockchain itself more like inter-bank settling than like personal accounts. That's the exact opposite of the initial sales pitch.
It doesn't seem accurate, I mean, how can an exchage demand real currency when dealing with the fake currency they are promoting.
Bitcoin fees are expressed as an average amount in BTC per kilobyte. A given transaction takes a particular amount of space in the block (owing to how many previous transactions are needed to express the exact amount to send plus the address to send the "change" to), and that transaction has a fee attached. The fee is a "bid" to place the transaction on the network.
Likely the rate is really high because the exchanges are expecting a major crash in bitcoin but don't want to admit it and instead charging for bitcoin exchanges at a rate that reflects a much lower bitcoin for real money exchange.
A given node will take the transactions it knows about, and pack the ones with the highest fees into the current block until that block is full. Then the block is mined. If that node wins the mining operation, those transactions become part of the chain. If some other node wins, the transactions it knows about become part of the chain (which will likely have a lot of commonality with the transactions in the first node's block). A higher fee attached to the transaction increases the chances that it'll be processed quickly. Below the average amount, you've got queueing working against you, and your transaction will likely expire before it becomes part of the chain.
If a transaction is totally within one exchange, the fee may be nominal or zero because it's done entirely off the blockchain, but that's not the rising fees the article discusses. This is purely a congestion effect.
..you can't have companies starting a war. That's an inherently governmental responsibility, and plus the chances of a company getting it wrong are fairly high
Ages ago, before torrents and automated enforcement of the DMCA, one could find direct-download "warez," "keygens," and "cracks" easily through major search engines.
One day, I was searching for a particular software crack so that I could try it without borrowing a key dongle, and I got a notice from Google directing me to a drug rehabilitation hotline. I'd never even considered that people might use Google to look for crack cocaine, but, thanks to the naiveté of keyword-matching, there was the opportunity to get help for an addiction I thankfully did not have.
I'm sure all sorts of hateful organizations paid Google for the opportunity to sell swag to bigots. I'm sure Google spent their money just as easily as they spent money from people buying access to nicer keywords.
Want to burn a bigot in the ass? Let it come out that every dime spent on buying access to "Jewish Parasite" and "Black People Ruin Everything" went to the ADL and NAACP. Give organizations like the ADL and NAACP access to those keywords gratis. Offer alternatives to hate as easily as alternatives to drugs.
Google missed an opportunity to, relatively cheaply, buy a huge PR win and help overcome hate.
The Digital Library is an add-on to a normal ACM Membership that gives access to journals and publications going back decades, as well as access to a selection of modern textbooks and technical books.
It doubles the cost of the annual ACM membership, but I can think of a few times where a few hours spent reading old journals has saved me a week of hacking around because someone had previously proved a solution to a problem I was trying to solve.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. I run it and love it on my Linux systems at home. At work, though, I have to deal with systemd all day, so I run Debian unstable.
The Devuan folks have an uphill battle ahead of them, though. More and more software is getting sucked into the systemd ecosystem because of its heavy-handed policy and vast market share. They might find themselves having to support forks of fairly complex tools just to keep that dependency away.
By the same token, systemd just might make a whole lot of Linux software Unix-incompatible.
Probably a good chunk.
That said, init and upstart solved problems in a fairly small domain: starting daemons in dependency order. SMF, launchd, and a few others did the same thing. They sucked to learn, but they gave us parallel startup, services that could start in response to events (logins, socket connects, etc.) and that was worth some relearning.
Things that systemd has embraced into its scope that SMD and launchd did not include:
Thanks to RedHat's backing, the systemd developers have a bully pulpit to force policy on Linux users everywhere. Like when nohup stopped working by default. The usual rationale from Poettering and company are that things are "broken" or "nobody needs that."
Right now, on my Debian box, in ~root/ is a script called thanks-systemd.sh. It mostly boils down to: cd /dev ; for i in dm-? ; do ln -s ../$i mapper/$(cat /sys/devices/virtual/block/${i}/dm/name); done
Because for about two weeks my system stopped autobooting due to some churn between LVM2 and systemd. LVM2's worked nigh-flawlessly for 20 years, and its semantics haven't changed.
It's one thing to change a clunky misfeature (init scripts) in some jarring way to make them better. It's quite another to take over most aspects of systems management, do them differently "just because," and break random things because of scope creep.
Perhaps not, per se. However, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides a "safe harbor" against people who run web sites from being treated as the "publisher or speaker of any information provided by another."
This sort of provision is directly at odds with the notion of editorial control. Being able to say "we didn't say that" is effectively a lie when spoken by someone who gets to control exactly what got said.
There's lots of grey area and middle ground, but there needs to be some sort of litmus test for whether or not these platforms' "Community Standards" are valid in the context of Section 230. On one hand, no one wants to put in all the work in hosting a platform just to have users fill it with filth. On the other, the standards need consistent application so that, for example, a post of "Kill all x" is equally offending for all demographic values of x; or, that those Community Standards aren't a mere rephrasing of some group's political platform.
I'm all for site owners to say whatever they want and face whatever consequences come their way. I'm all for platform providers not being held liable for the things that other people say using those platforms. I'm not for platform providers getting that (additional) legal protection while effectively acting as a publisher/gatekeeper in an increasingly-consolidating Web.
Was that the gut-wrenching sound of a paradigm shifting without a clutch?
Yep, that's the Mac I wanted--and the Mac I upgraded to every two-to-three years starting with the first 17" PowerBook G4.
I'm told we're a niche market. We're too picky and too expensive to cater-to relative to the masses of people who just want a shiny Facebook/YouTube machine. I was told that a 15-inch screen is big enough, that I really would never want to upgrade memory or storage, and then I was told to be patient while iOS got all the attention from Apple's OS engineers.
So I waited. My most recent Mac is 8 years old. The new OS X won't run on it, and I can't even get a 15 "Pro" MacBook with an "escape" key. I didn't really want to run Vim, anyway, I guess.
I've stopped waiting, and now I carry a ThinkPad. It's big, it's ugly, it's fast, the battery lasts all day, and I can swap out parts as I need. Shame about losing my investment in software for OS X, but Apple have firmly and repeatedly told our type that we're not welcome at their party anymore.
If that were what the article said, it'd imply that Wells Fargo should stop issuing lines of credit in excess of what people can repay. Whether the money was spent on Dogecoin or Home Shopping Network kitch, it's spent. The limit is there precisely so that the consumer doesn't spend more than he can repay (even if it is a long way down the road to paying it off).
Instead, what the study referenced in the article actually said was that 22% of those who purchased cryptocurrency on credit are still carrying a balance. Only 11% of those people carrying a balance said they wouldn't even sell their stake in crypto to pay the balance, which is greater (by 50%) than the average rate of default, but that's only considering this self-selected group of people willing to take extraordinary financial risk (and, we can presume, are not a typical cross-section of cardholders).
So, roughly the same number of people are being irresponsible with money as usual, but because they're being irresponsible in a new and different way, it's time to sound the alarm!
As opposed to plastic crap from big-box stores, ever-shifting expensive fashions, electronics designed to be obsolete by next CES, and all the other pointless crap we're bombarded with in advertising. When you can't pay the credit card bill, you can just flog all that stuff for beaucoup bucks on Craigslist or eBay.
Damn those silly algorithms and expressions organizing themselves in a way to make extra money for a completely uninvolved party who happened to deploy them. The nerve of them!
The practice may be automated now, but it's been going on for literally decades. Even as far back as the 1980s and 1970s, you could swap parts between Corvettes and other cars. The part numbers would be different, but the equipment itself would be functionally identical. Funny how the part for the Corvette always cost several times as much; I'm sure it's purely because there were fewer Corvettes on the road (than, say, Citations or Skylarks), so the manufacturing costs were higher, right? Riiiiiiight
The price of a thing is always cost plus, where "plus" is defined by what the market will endure. If you can keep the cost hidden (see also: US healthcare) or obscure the availability of a thing (nearly-identical parts with different labels, with only one label approved for your application), the market will endure a hell of a shafting until the house of cards comes down.
Moore's Law is an economic one, not a strictly a technological one. Although, keeping it going depends on semiconductor processes getting finer.
The costs per nanoacre more-or-less follow a predictable curve relative to how bleeding-edge a process is required to fabricate a chip. If you need a really old process, availability will be low, so demand will push the costs up. If you're using the latest, availability is low and yields will initially be low, so the costs are way up. Everything in-between is pretty cheap because demand tends to go towards newer stuff, and the fabrication plant for those middle-aged processes has already started depreciating-out.
If you're trying to be an industry leader, you're targeting the newest processes, so you have the highest expenses. As a result, you want to keep your chip small because costs scale with semiconductor area (N chips per wafer, X dollars per wafer, etc.).
However, there's a lower bound on that. If you've got a chip with over a thousand pins, like a high-end microprocessor, the chip has to be physically large enough to have that many bumps to wire out to pins. Also, there's the case of heat dissipation to consider. A teeny-tiny part that draws a lot of current may shatter or desolder itself if there's not enough surface area to mate with the thermal solution.
So, you want to be small, but there's a lower bound to that. That implies wasted space on the die, which you're going to pay for, anyway. What to do with it?
Add a core! Make the pipelines deeper! More cache! Add some multimedia accelerators. Add an FPGA! Add some other dedicated-function unit! Then present it as a bullet-point for selling more of your part versus your competitor.
Ergo, Moore's Law.
s/Apple will do/Google will do/
They learned from Apple that it's a totally safe an profitable thing to do if you have a "golden parachute" in another market.
Now, with their not trying to sell to nerds and professionals (apart from iOS developer systems), Apple's more profitable than ever. They learned how to milk a market for what it's worth so that you can get into a market where the money's better, the effort less, and the users still desperate. When the old market is sick of you, you don't need them anymore.
Apple will do just fine until they lose touch with what consumers feel is shiny and exciting; then they'll be as relevant as Westinghouse and Sears.
Fear not, fellow nerd. There will be plenty of other companies who will make shiny things for us for the limited time before our usefulness wears out.
This smells very "motte and bailey" to me, if being played in reverse.
Remember in 2012 when Facebook put out a huge policy change but would allow the users to veto it if 30% of the accounts voted against it? Of course it was fair because people aren't allowed to have multiple accounts; therefore, "no one" has one. Sure it included people who abandoned the platform and many others who had died, but it was only 30%, right? Getting the equivalent of the whole population of the US to care about something enough to log in during a week-long window and find the "vote" button is no big deal, yeah?
It's their platform to do as they please, and that's fine. I just wish they wouldn't be so duplicitous about it. Do your thing, Facebook, but don't act like your users asked for it.
All students should have computer skills, but not all need computer science.
True. It's like the difference among home economics (computer skills), shop class (programming), and geometry/precalculus (computer science).
Misguided as the College Board's proposal is, there's a little bit of wisdom in teaching some of these things to everyone, but maybe not in the context of computing.
The biggest win from CS is not the potential paycheck of being a programmer, but in things that other math/science courses should already teach students, but apparently don't: problem-solving by decomposition. That skill alone (and maybe the encompassing skill of algorithmic thinking) will get a typical person a lot further in life than knowing some soon-to-be-antiquated programming language (Pascal, anyone?).
I've been writing code for over 30 years, and I went through a phase when I believed that literally everyone should learn code. I later realized that part of that came from dealing with people who couldn't do anything unless it was broken into explicit steps, and the rest of it came from wanting to share my joy of programming with others. The unfortunate (or perhaps fortunate for us professionals) is that most people hate programming. Associating the valuable life skills of critical/algorithmic thinking with something that most people hate would be a disaster.
Absolutely everyone should take home economics, though. The basic life skills of planning a personal budget and keeping oneself fed and clothed are far more important than learning a programming language or even basic computer skills.
I'm not disputing this. I'm saying that it does happen, just not as overtly as Steve described. I run Windows Pro at home and on my laptop and have seen it happen to older software I'd installed.
It can both not-happen to you, and happen to other people who have different software installed.
Steve may have been simplifying for brevity's sake, but that is exactly what the experience feels like when the update happens overnight while no one is there to stare at the PC.
When Windows 10 does an upgrade to a later version, it effectively does a clean OS install and re-installs applications. This is what's going on behind that creepy "These updates are for your protection / Your computer will be just fine / All your data is exactly where you left it" screen. If it hits a known conflict (Microsoft keeps a database of these), an application won't be reinstalled. It wasn't the intent, but it sure looks like Microsoft decided to uninstall another company's product just to be a dick and show you who really owns your PC.
You can tell when you got one of those big updates because all the stupid in-built advertising gets reactivated and Candy Crush Saga III: Wrath of the Tyrannical Twizzlers or WTFever shows up prominently on the Start menu.
Subjective, arbitrary, and opaque. Even if all you do is post about old games and computer hardware, you're not immune.
YouTube are acting as though they're so big and attractive that the talent can't leave. That sort of thinking is only true for a limited time.
People are going to be really hacked off when they find out the rest of the industry has been testing their fumes on great apes worldwide!
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that. Texas has dumb things about "data processing" versus "programming," where 20% of one is exempt and the other is (AFAIK) non-taxable unless it was part of the task of generating a report (web sites are included in this definition of "report," so front-end programming is always taxable), so writing a program for a client and getting them to run it for you can actually save them some tax if you're playing to the letter of the law.
And then there's nonsense about whether or not a thing is taxable based on why you did it. If you're an architect and produce a drawing in AutoCAD as part of the production of a design for a client, that's non-taxable. If you're an architect and produce a drawing in AutoCAD because your client handed you a sketch (or a drawing in some other program's format), the labor involved in creating the AutoCAD document is taxable. There are analogues in bookkeeping, where doing tax-prep things as part of bookkeeping are nontaxable, but doing tax-prep things in order to produce payroll (and, AFAIK, only payroll) tax documents is taxable.
Coordinating this BS on a national level would either require some sort of uniformity of the sales tax systems first (yay!) or would be too onerous for small firms to handle. Maybe for strictly retail/resale a small company could do it, but consulting or any sort of value-add would be nearly impossible across state lines.
It's worse than that.
Texas, for instance, has state, county, and local sales taxes (usually just the city). The state rate is constant (with exceptions for differing types of goods, some of which are totally exempt and some of which have a portion of the price exempt). The county and local tax rates are usually—but not required by statute to be—constant within those counties and localities, but cities sometimes stretch across county lines, and then there are addresses with a city associated (because of the nearest post office) but that are actually outside the boundaries of the local taxing jurisdiction. Very little of this can be determined by ZIP code because those are allocated to the servicing Post Office rather than political subdivisions.
The other states with sales taxes probably aren't much saner.
No, if taxes must be collected based on destination, this is going to be another rent-seeking cottage-industry that exists entirely because some government goons disconnected from reality decided that something that was easy-to-write-down couldn't possibly be a complete pain in the ass to comply with. Square or PayPal or whatever will collect the taxes plus some compliance overhead fee and distribute it on your behalf. Compliance would be a completely unreasonable burden for small businesses to undertake themselves.
Thankfully, no one had to endure the savage ordeal of writing in a low-level language to assemble this pile of media-playing middleware. Phew!
That's it.
It doesn't have to be that way. If you're running a node, you could run software that packs transactions into a block by any criteria you choose. However, since the aggregate fees for the block are part of the reward for winning the mining operation, it's in the miners' best interests to pack the largest fees first. Also, since the likelihood of any particular node winning the block is very low, we can talk about the most common strategy as if it were universal.
One of the parts of what makes me really nervous is that fees and trading price feed-back into each other in a damaging sort of way. The way that transactions are expressed is that their components must be spent in totality. So, if you're trying to pay 0.01 BTC, and your smallest previous inbound transaction was 0.1 BTC, you have to refund 0.09 BTC (less fees) back to yourself. Over time, this means your wallet gets fragmented with a bunch of spare change which may make some later transaction expensive because of the number of previous-spends needed to be referenced to get up to that amount. The smaller the pieces of change, the less they can contribute because of the fee overhead in referencing them.
Looking even a little in to the future, this is going to ramp up pressure to rely on off-chain transactions, using the blockchain itself more like inter-bank settling than like personal accounts. That's the exact opposite of the initial sales pitch.
Bitcoin fees are expressed as an average amount in BTC per kilobyte. A given transaction takes a particular amount of space in the block (owing to how many previous transactions are needed to express the exact amount to send plus the address to send the "change" to), and that transaction has a fee attached. The fee is a "bid" to place the transaction on the network.
A given node will take the transactions it knows about, and pack the ones with the highest fees into the current block until that block is full. Then the block is mined. If that node wins the mining operation, those transactions become part of the chain. If some other node wins, the transactions it knows about become part of the chain (which will likely have a lot of commonality with the transactions in the first node's block). A higher fee attached to the transaction increases the chances that it'll be processed quickly. Below the average amount, you've got queueing working against you, and your transaction will likely expire before it becomes part of the chain.
If a transaction is totally within one exchange, the fee may be nominal or zero because it's done entirely off the blockchain, but that's not the rising fees the article discusses. This is purely a congestion effect.
s/responsibility/profit center/
Ages ago, before torrents and automated enforcement of the DMCA, one could find direct-download "warez," "keygens," and "cracks" easily through major search engines.
One day, I was searching for a particular software crack so that I could try it without borrowing a key dongle, and I got a notice from Google directing me to a drug rehabilitation hotline. I'd never even considered that people might use Google to look for crack cocaine, but, thanks to the naiveté of keyword-matching, there was the opportunity to get help for an addiction I thankfully did not have.
I'm sure all sorts of hateful organizations paid Google for the opportunity to sell swag to bigots. I'm sure Google spent their money just as easily as they spent money from people buying access to nicer keywords.
Want to burn a bigot in the ass? Let it come out that every dime spent on buying access to "Jewish Parasite" and "Black People Ruin Everything" went to the ADL and NAACP. Give organizations like the ADL and NAACP access to those keywords gratis. Offer alternatives to hate as easily as alternatives to drugs.
Google missed an opportunity to, relatively cheaply, buy a huge PR win and help overcome hate.
The Digital Library is an add-on to a normal ACM Membership that gives access to journals and publications going back decades, as well as access to a selection of modern textbooks and technical books.
It doubles the cost of the annual ACM membership, but I can think of a few times where a few hours spent reading old journals has saved me a week of hacking around because someone had previously proved a solution to a problem I was trying to solve.