Maybe I should have said 'The entropy of any sufficiently complex computer system will tend to increase with time'.
So embedded systems don't suffer from this effect - in fact most of embedded systems lore - write in C not C++, do all memory allocations at startup and not at run time, minimize or remove file system writes are all aimed at avoiding entropy increase.
So those systems don't get slower with time.
My router and NASs run Linux and they're not embedded systems, but they're also not subject to the kind of churn you get in a desktop PC where the user can install applications and the OS vendor can deploy security fixes and they seem to work perfectly for a few years before succumbing to a dead hard drive or component failure rather than slowing down.
I suspect that sufficiently complex means 'user or OS vendor can install software'. Even there you could imagine a well designed system might be able to keep entropy low over its life. I've worked on embedded systems like that. You need to be very careful who you allow to work on them though.
And of course there are lot of embedded systems these days running things like MicroPython which definitely doesn't follow old school embedded systems lore. So I'd expect them to have the same issues desktop systems do.
Are you going to seriously suggest that changing the penalty from a life sentence (current penalty for top traffickers), or 20-25 to life (major traffickers), to the death penalty, would have *any* effect on drug abuse in the US?
No, I said it worked for Taiwan. The US and Taiwan are very different and executing more people for drug offences in the US probably won't help. On the other hand neither will copying Portugal.
If the British Empire had had the ability to censor memes and political speech that Google/FB etc have, they'd have been able to stop that.
You can see they're very keen to keep people in their walled garden by the way gab.ai got pulled from Google Play for 'promoting hate speech'. Aka 'allowing speech Google can't control'.
Executions are carried out by shooting using a handgun aimed at the heart from the back, or aimed at the brain stem under the ear if the prisoner consents to organ donation. The execution time used to be 5:00 a.m., but was changed to 9:00 p.m. in 1995 to reduce officials' workload. It was changed again to 7:30 p.m. in 2010. Executions are performed in secret: nobody is informed beforehand, including the condemned. The execution chamber is located in the prison complex. The condemned is brought to the chamber by car and pays respect to the statue of Ksitigarbha located outside the chamber before entering. Before the execution, the prisoner is brought to a special court next to the execution chamber to have his or her identity confirmed and any last words recorded. The prisoner is then brought to the execution chamber and served a last meal (which includes a bottle of kaoliang). The condemned prisoner is then injected with strong anaesthetic to render him or her completely senseless, laid flat on the ground, face down, and shot. The executioner then burns votive bank notes for the deceased before carrying away the corpse. It is customary for the condemned to place a NT$500 or 1000 banknote in their leg irons as a tip for the executioners.
... Is not the same as 'anonymity' because in a criminal case you just catch people and offer them immunity if they help you find the identity of the other people they sent or received money from.
tl;dr - if you're doing illegal stuff Bitcoin is much less anonymous than cash transactions.
"Both Hillary and Trump will cause an apocalypse, however Hillary's apocalypse will be cold and gray, like The Road. By contrast Trump's apocalypse will be loud and garish with flamethrowing electric guitars, like Mad Max : Fury Road"
The entropy of any computer system will tend to increase with system and application updates - databases will grow, files will fragment and access to them will slow.
It seems like this happens to Windows, MacOS and Android. With WIndows or MacOS you can fix it by reformatting and reinstalling or imaging onto a new drive. With Android I usually do a firmware reset.
Probably the same thing is happening to iOS too. I.e. Apple might not be deliberately slowing things down but a phone with a bunch of applications and firmware updates applied to it is always going to be more sluggish than one with has a fresh factory install.
Mind you I bet the fresh factory install of any OS had a lot more scrutiny than a security update for performance - each phone with a bunch of updates and apps is basically a unique leaf in the tree of all possible states the system can get into whereas the factory install is the single root of the tree.
Going to alphas to betas to release candidates to releases involved a lot of hurdles the software has to clear. I.e. when you buy the device it's identical to all the other ones with the same hardware and factory firmware. After a couple of years it's almost a unique individual with a unique set of performance and stability problems.
You can make an argument that football players, CEOs and bond traders are underpaid rather than overpaid because their salary seems a lot compared to minimum wage but if you look at at as a percentage of what they make for the people who pay them they're getting screwed.
For a startup with a few people you can make the case for IT people getting paid a tonne of cash, provided they can meet brutally tough performance goals.
Of course it's harder to justify this sort of thing for the average computer janitor when you can get someone in on a H1B to do it for a lot less.
Of course if you're a computer janitor you should support legislation like this
Washington: A legislation has been introduced in the US House of Representatives which among other things calls for more than doubling the minimum salary of H-1B visa holders to $130,000, making it difficult for firms to use the programme to replace American employees with foreign workers, including from India.
The High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017 introduced by California Congressman Zoe Lofgren prioritises market based allocation of visas to those companies willing to pay 200% of a wage calculated by survey, eliminates the category of lowest pay, and raises the salary level at which H1B dependent employer are exempt from non displacement and recruitment attestation requirements to greater than $130,000. This is more than double of the current H1B minimum wage of $60,000 which was established in 1989 and since then has remained unchanged.
It's probably fair to say this is effectively raising the de facto minimum wage for IT work.
More like Microsoft decided to preserve existing OEM code pages for CMD.exe even that meant that unicode characters outside those code pages won't display in a command prompt. It's a design decision.
Note that's it's not like this for GUI applications - they all use UCS-2. Or UTF-16 for Windows 2000 or later.
It's not the filesystem per se. Both NTFS and FAT store long file names as UCS-2/UTF-16. However they also store a short filename in the OEM code page, because that's the way DOS used to do it.
CMD.EXE by default only displays filenames that are representable in the OEM code page. On a US machines the OEM code page will be 437
As the name suggests they use 1-2 bytes to encode a character.
So if you have a Japanese machine then Japanese filenames will show up fine in CMD.exe, in fact they'll display the same as they did if you mounted the volume in a Japanese version of Dos. However in a US machine with code page 437 you'll get ?? or squares when you try to display them in CMD.exe. However in Explorer or a GUI application they'll show up OK.
None of this is XP specific though, as you imply. I've got a US Windows 7 machine here and a directory of Traditional Chinese filenames. They show up fine in the GUI applications but as ??? in CMD.exe.
If I set the locale to Taiwan or somewhere Traditional Chinese is used, it'd work fine though. Or I could just use a shell that is Unicode aware (Cygwin's Bash for example). Or use the GUI.
Interestingly if I set the code page to Unicode with chcp 65001 and then do a DIR I get default glyph characters. Copy paste those into Notepad and I see Chinese. I think the problem is that CMD.exe doesn't let me pick a font where they are present.
By "older versions" you mean "Windows 9x and Millennium". The NT line has supported Unicode from day one. Though it does also support MBCS, i.e. GB2312/Big5/SJIS/EUC-KR. 9x and Millennium only supported MBCS, not unicode.
You have to admire the way legal innovation happens and the free market spreads knowledge of it really. It's a thing of beauty - private and public sector working together in perfect harmony.
What's even funnier is that people think that the solution to large corporations gaming a Byzantine system of rules against the public interest is to introduce more rules.
Exactly. If you officially support a platform it means you need to run your tests on it. Which takes extra time. Presumably they'll go from supporting Windows 10,8,7 instead of 10,8,7,Vista,XP and retire their Vista and XP test systems. XP has about 5.69% market share right now, about the same as Windows 8.1.
On the other it's getting a bit hairy to run XP test systems because there are no security patches and no Microsoft Security Essentials. So you basically need to wall them off from the Internet. In which case how many people are really downloading new browsers for them...
Citation needed. XP no doubt lacks the features of later OSs but saying it's 'completely broken' is overstating things. In fact I remember Chinese/Japanese and Korean support being flawless even in the Windows 2000 days.
Don't allow ram/storage upgradeability. That way people will be forced to pick the highest storage/ram capacity when they buy because the salesperson will point out that they won't be able to upgrade later.
If there's a sweetspot storage level don't offer it. Offer half that at a low price or twice that. People who get the low storage option will run out of space soon and upgrade. People who buy the high storage option buy their extra gigabytes at a hefty premium from the manufacturer at sales time rather than from a third party when they run out of space.
Obsolete old connectors so people need to buy new peripherals
Don't allow user replaceable batteries. Lithium Ion batteries lose 20-40% of their capacity each year depending on temperature and this will force people to upgrade. Or find someone who can do a battery change.
It seems to be spreading across the industry, especially in high end devices. In unrelated news more and more people are moving away from high end devices or just keeping old devices before these trends started.
I.e. it's all designed to make people upgrade high end devices more frequently. However the perverse effect is the exact opposite - people keep old high end devices around longer and when they die they replace them with low end ones. After all if phones and laptops are designed to be disposable, why buy a high end one?
Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand. Consumers actually prefer more of the good as its price rises, and the result is an upward sloping demand curve. For example, in the 1990s when "fashion" jeans became popular, one retailer found that he could sell more when he raised the price. Also functioning as positional goods, they include expensive wines, jewelry, fashion-designer handbags, and luxury cars which are in demand because of, rather than in spite of, the high prices asked for them. This makes them desirable as status symbols in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.
Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).[1] A corollary of the Veblen effect (where goods are desired for being over-priced) is thademand.
The iPhone X is a classic example of a Veblen good - it wouldn't surprise me if Apple announce that it has sold more than the iPhone 8, just like Samsung once announced the Edge versions of their devices were being pre-ordered more than the non Edge versions 'much to their surprise'.
Which was a wonderful piece of marketing spin in of itself - it's no surprise that people keen enough to pre-order buy the Veblen good version of the product because they are True Believers in the brand.
The S6 and S6 Edge weren't regarded as a success once the non pre-sales numbers came out
What Apple are good at is getting people to pony up $1000 for an ultra premium handset. Samsung's marketing people spin each new Galaxy as selling much stronger than expected (or the Veblen good version selling better than expected) but Samsung are not seeing people keep buying a premium handset every year. Or even every two years - I've still got an S5 which does everything I need it to. And unlike the newer Galaxy models has a user replaceable battery. Probably when it dies I'll just get a non flagship Android device with the same sort of performance level and a replaceable battery.
Nobody forced Mozilla to make the stupid decisions that they did. In fact, a lot of Firefox users very vocally said, "No! We don't like that!" time and time again, release after release. But Mozilla didn't want to listen. Mozilla did everything in their power to ruin the Firefox experience. And now the entire web has to suffer.
Opera did the same thing. I still like Opera 12.x. But I prefer Chrome to the newer, Chromium based, versions of Opera. And the problem is that Opera 12.x is doomed in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe you're just being trolled.
Maybe I should have said 'The entropy of any sufficiently complex computer system will tend to increase with time'.
So embedded systems don't suffer from this effect - in fact most of embedded systems lore - write in C not C++, do all memory allocations at startup and not at run time, minimize or remove file system writes are all aimed at avoiding entropy increase.
So those systems don't get slower with time.
My router and NASs run Linux and they're not embedded systems, but they're also not subject to the kind of churn you get in a desktop PC where the user can install applications and the OS vendor can deploy security fixes and they seem to work perfectly for a few years before succumbing to a dead hard drive or component failure rather than slowing down.
I suspect that sufficiently complex means 'user or OS vendor can install software'. Even there you could imagine a well designed system might be able to keep entropy low over its life. I've worked on embedded systems like that. You need to be very careful who you allow to work on them though.
And of course there are lot of embedded systems these days running things like MicroPython which definitely doesn't follow old school embedded systems lore. So I'd expect them to have the same issues desktop systems do.
No, I said it worked for Taiwan. The US and Taiwan are very different and executing more people for drug offences in the US probably won't help. On the other hand neither will copying Portugal.
The American revolution was started by memes like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If the British Empire had had the ability to censor memes and political speech that Google/FB etc have, they'd have been able to stop that.
You can see they're very keen to keep people in their walled garden by the way gab.ai got pulled from Google Play for 'promoting hate speech'. Aka 'allowing speech Google can't control'.
Blasphemy!
C is the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement and Perl is heresy!
Drugs are far less common in Taiwan than they are in the US or UK and Taiwan has the death penalty for drug trafficking.
So it clearly works for them.
https://traveloops.files.wordp...
Taiwan only executes small numbers of people - about half a dozen a year since 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The process is fucking metal too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
... Is not the same as 'anonymity' because in a criminal case you just catch people and offer them immunity if they help you find the identity of the other people they sent or received money from.
tl;dr - if you're doing illegal stuff Bitcoin is much less anonymous than cash transactions.
Back during the election this line made me laugh.
"Both Hillary and Trump will cause an apocalypse, however Hillary's apocalypse will be cold and gray, like The Road. By contrast Trump's apocalypse will be loud and garish with flamethrowing electric guitars, like Mad Max : Fury Road"
The entropy of any computer system will tend to increase with system and application updates - databases will grow, files will fragment and access to them will slow.
It seems like this happens to Windows, MacOS and Android. With WIndows or MacOS you can fix it by reformatting and reinstalling or imaging onto a new drive. With Android I usually do a firmware reset.
Probably the same thing is happening to iOS too. I.e. Apple might not be deliberately slowing things down but a phone with a bunch of applications and firmware updates applied to it is always going to be more sluggish than one with has a fresh factory install.
Mind you I bet the fresh factory install of any OS had a lot more scrutiny than a security update for performance - each phone with a bunch of updates and apps is basically a unique leaf in the tree of all possible states the system can get into whereas the factory install is the single root of the tree.
Going to alphas to betas to release candidates to releases involved a lot of hurdles the software has to clear. I.e. when you buy the device it's identical to all the other ones with the same hardware and factory firmware. After a couple of years it's almost a unique individual with a unique set of performance and stability problems.
The Galaxy S5 had a headphone jack that was waterproof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here's the part on its own
https://www.ifixit.com/Store/P...
You can see here - the jack is encapsulated in plastic which is cunningly designed so the wires pass through but water does not.
You can make an argument that football players, CEOs and bond traders are underpaid rather than overpaid because their salary seems a lot compared to minimum wage but if you look at at as a percentage of what they make for the people who pay them they're getting screwed.
For a startup with a few people you can make the case for IT people getting paid a tonne of cash, provided they can meet brutally tough performance goals.
Of course it's harder to justify this sort of thing for the average computer janitor when you can get someone in on a H1B to do it for a lot less.
Of course if you're a computer janitor you should support legislation like this
http://www.livemint.com/Politi...
Washington: A legislation has been introduced in the US House of Representatives which among other things calls for more than doubling the minimum salary of H-1B visa holders to $130,000, making it difficult for firms to use the programme to replace American employees with foreign workers, including from India.
The High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017 introduced by California Congressman Zoe Lofgren prioritises market based allocation of visas to those companies willing to pay 200% of a wage calculated by survey, eliminates the category of lowest pay, and raises the salary level at which H1B dependent employer are exempt from non displacement and recruitment attestation requirements to greater than $130,000. This is more than double of the current H1B minimum wage of $60,000 which was established in 1989 and since then has remained unchanged.
It's probably fair to say this is effectively raising the de facto minimum wage for IT work.
More like Microsoft decided to preserve existing OEM code pages for CMD.exe even that meant that unicode characters outside those code pages won't display in a command prompt. It's a design decision.
Note that's it's not like this for GUI applications - they all use UCS-2. Or UTF-16 for Windows 2000 or later.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
Which is means, given a suitable font, your steaming pile of poop emoji U+1F4A9 should display fine in a Win32 GUI app on Windows 2000 or later.
It's not the filesystem per se. Both NTFS and FAT store long file names as UCS-2/UTF-16. However they also store a short filename in the OEM code page, because that's the way DOS used to do it.
CMD.EXE by default only displays filenames that are representable in the OEM code page. On a US machines the OEM code page will be 437
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
On a Japanese, Chinese or Korean machine it will be one of the DBCS code pages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As the name suggests they use 1-2 bytes to encode a character.
So if you have a Japanese machine then Japanese filenames will show up fine in CMD.exe, in fact they'll display the same as they did if you mounted the volume in a Japanese version of Dos. However in a US machine with code page 437 you'll get ?? or squares when you try to display them in CMD.exe. However in Explorer or a GUI application they'll show up OK.
None of this is XP specific though, as you imply. I've got a US Windows 7 machine here and a directory of Traditional Chinese filenames. They show up fine in the GUI applications but as ??? in CMD.exe.
If I set the locale to Taiwan or somewhere Traditional Chinese is used, it'd work fine though. Or I could just use a shell that is Unicode aware (Cygwin's Bash for example). Or use the GUI.
Interestingly if I set the code page to Unicode with chcp 65001 and then do a DIR I get default glyph characters. Copy paste those into Notepad and I see Chinese. I think the problem is that CMD.exe doesn't let me pick a font where they are present.
By "older versions" you mean "Windows 9x and Millennium". The NT line has supported Unicode from day one. Though it does also support MBCS, i.e. GB2312/Big5/SJIS/EUC-KR. 9x and Millennium only supported MBCS, not unicode.
You have to admire the way legal innovation happens and the free market spreads knowledge of it really. It's a thing of beauty - private and public sector working together in perfect harmony.
What's even funnier is that people think that the solution to large corporations gaming a Byzantine system of rules against the public interest is to introduce more rules.
Exactly. If you officially support a platform it means you need to run your tests on it. Which takes extra time. Presumably they'll go from supporting Windows 10,8,7 instead of 10,8,7,Vista,XP and retire their Vista and XP test systems. XP has about 5.69% market share right now, about the same as Windows 8.1.
https://www.netmarketshare.com...
On the other it's getting a bit hairy to run XP test systems because there are no security patches and no Microsoft Security Essentials. So you basically need to wall them off from the Internet. In which case how many people are really downloading new browsers for them...
Unicode support is completely broken on XP
Citation needed. XP no doubt lacks the features of later OSs but saying it's 'completely broken' is overstating things. In fact I remember Chinese/Japanese and Korean support being flawless even in the Windows 2000 days.
Don't allow ram/storage upgradeability. That way people will be forced to pick the highest storage/ram capacity when they buy because the salesperson will point out that they won't be able to upgrade later.
If there's a sweetspot storage level don't offer it. Offer half that at a low price or twice that. People who get the low storage option will run out of space soon and upgrade. People who buy the high storage option buy their extra gigabytes at a hefty premium from the manufacturer at sales time rather than from a third party when they run out of space.
Obsolete old connectors so people need to buy new peripherals
Don't allow user replaceable batteries. Lithium Ion batteries lose 20-40% of their capacity each year depending on temperature and this will force people to upgrade. Or find someone who can do a battery change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It seems to be spreading across the industry, especially in high end devices. In unrelated news more and more people are moving away from high end devices or just keeping old devices before these trends started.
I.e. it's all designed to make people upgrade high end devices more frequently. However the perverse effect is the exact opposite - people keep old high end devices around longer and when they die they replace them with low end ones. After all if phones and laptops are designed to be disposable, why buy a high end one?
By what WITCHCRAFT dost thou know the article's contents?
Your time at Verizon is over. Now you must choose between nice clean job at non profit or designated shitting lobby.
I was always buying Reddit Gold for people who were being awesome when most people were being dicks.
So what you're saying, cuntface, is that a high dick:awesome ratio can save a site?
But people still buy them, despite their amazing prices tags.
Marketing people would say people buy them not despite their amazing price tags but because of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The iPhone X is a classic example of a Veblen good - it wouldn't surprise me if Apple announce that it has sold more than the iPhone 8, just like Samsung once announced the Edge versions of their devices were being pre-ordered more than the non Edge versions 'much to their surprise'.
http://www.androidauthority.co...
Which was a wonderful piece of marketing spin in of itself - it's no surprise that people keen enough to pre-order buy the Veblen good version of the product because they are True Believers in the brand.
The S6 and S6 Edge weren't regarded as a success once the non pre-sales numbers came out
http://www.independent.co.uk/l...
What Apple are good at is getting people to pony up $1000 for an ultra premium handset. Samsung's marketing people spin each new Galaxy as selling much stronger than expected (or the Veblen good version selling better than expected) but Samsung are not seeing people keep buying a premium handset every year. Or even every two years - I've still got an S5 which does everything I need it to. And unlike the newer Galaxy models has a user replaceable battery. Probably when it dies I'll just get a non flagship Android device with the same sort of performance level and a replaceable battery.
I'm not an American but I think becoming an American is a bit like becoming a Muslim - there's no way out other than in a body bag.
So if since you are an American I'd keep the true faith ... abhor, detest and abjure, as impious and heretical [traitors like Snowden] if I were you. That buzz in the sky above you could be a Predator drone.
More like "The North Remembers!".
"Direfox! King in the North!"
vs
"Steve Ballmer sends his regards"
Nobody forced Mozilla to make the stupid decisions that they did. In fact, a lot of Firefox users very vocally said, "No! We don't like that!" time and time again, release after release. But Mozilla didn't want to listen. Mozilla did everything in their power to ruin the Firefox experience. And now the entire web has to suffer.
Opera did the same thing. I still like Opera 12.x. But I prefer Chrome to the newer, Chromium based, versions of Opera. And the problem is that Opera 12.x is doomed in the long run.