Agreed. The only thing missing is the ability to voluntarily step into the cheater's pool, load up some hacks and let off some steam. Then return to the normal game
Thanks for the clarification, 100k was all I found on Google. With 3K I suppose it could get a bit tight when using it as a scratch disk for video editing (for example). "A few weeks of maximum use" really says it all.
[....]unmitigated jerks. You can be the bigger man. Even if you get the short end of the stick, [....] I met some of their staff.[....] there to twig [...] I got hung [...]
This thing is indeed pretty harmless, but it scares me that vendors can set different prices based on arbitrary criteria. It shifts the balance of knowledge (power) from the consumer to the vendor. Companies do secret discounts all the time, but usually just for B2B relationships and one-off sales. Suppose Amazon shows me a book, and the price is $ 20, but if a better customer looks at the book, they see $ 10 (Amazon got a patent for this some years ago IIRC). We'd be in for all kinds of confusion, as comparison sites and review sites could no longer be objective.
There have to be some decent alternatives out there.. right?
(Popularity aside, of course.)
I'll second that request...
Wouldn't it be possible to have a reasonably stable P2P network without any central servers? This would eliminate the need to rely on an advertisement company for free callse. It could be hard to store the address book for access from multiple computers, one would need encryption and a DHT.
Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. "
US is one of the countries with most permissive weapons laws in the democratic world. If someone invents a new weapon (perhaps safer for the operator and more accurate), then it's a legal chicken-and-egg problem to make owning that weapon legal.
Wearout isn't a concern for almost any normal use. If you copy big video files to it many times every day for editing, and run transformations on them, youd only run up about 100 GB every day, i.e. 1 write cycle on average (nicely distributed because of wear-levelling). An SSD can handle 100,000 write cycles, so you're good for 273 years or so.
Space is a bigger concern, as many "pro" tasks require lots of storage (though many don't, but for professional writers etc, there's little point in even getting the higher-spec pro laptops). The fact that it's a laptop indicates that it's meant to be portable, so the data must also be portable. Apple make a super-thin laptop, but they require you to carry a hard-drive and an ethernet dongle.. That's not elegant design! At least they have a HDMI port now, so you can get by without a display dongle.
Cell phone batteries were about the only thing user replaceable until companies realized that people were just chucking their phones after two years anyway.
It's nice to be able to pop the battery if you spill some liquid on the phone/laptop or to reset a phone that's locked up. Sure, neither happens frequently, but I'd easily trade 5mm of extra thickness for a removable battery in a laptop.
If someone gets bitcoins because they don't trust the banks, they will not keep their bitcoins at an exchange like the one that was hacked. They will keep them on their computer, with off-site backups. Those hacking incidents will cause the value of everyone's bitcoins to fluctuate, and that's part of the equation.
Koss PortaPro is quite cheap, and something you can use when travelling. The fidelity is not great, though. I have some Sennheisers at 5x the price, and the difference is obvious -- anyone can hear that (and I couldn't even hear the difference when I re-encoded a WAV file with 4 bits per sample). There is no obvious distrortion in the PortaPro though, and I sill keep mine around and prefer them to a Koss headset and a Plantronics headset (+all cheap earbuds that I use for running).
This makes the requirement to be online to play D3 much worse. Blizzard better be 100 % sure there are no false positives. They probably have all kinds of CYA stuff in their EULA, but now that there's real money involved, some victims of wrongful banning may actually try to sue.
Really, glitchy drivers? Way to RTFA:
"On the third day of use a loud coil squeal/chirp became apparent, becoming louder when it was running on battery power. Within hours the wireless chipset failed and refused to connect, the display began glitching with horizontal lines appearing through it, and it became unresponsive. I tested it with a Windows live USB thumb drive"
Some versions of the NVidia driver used a non-standard method for dimming the display, by turning on/off the backlight rapidly. This bug even mentions audible noise: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/562005 . Booting windows from an USB drive is guaranteed to eliminate such issues though, so this bug wasn't the case in TFA.
Good tip. Another problem is that browsing is slow. Mobile devices have a single full-screen app, so it's not possible to load the add in a separate window or in a background tab. To make things worse, browsing is slower than on a desktop. Even if the connection is fast, the CPU has to load up the browser and render the ad page, this easily takes 20 seconds. If the page is particularly complex or flash-heavy, the original app will be terminated, and has to be reloaded when switching back. So you lose about a minute on looking at the ad, 30 seconds of which is spent waiting, unable to do anything (you can look at the birds if you're outside, maybe). If mobile devices became 20 times faster (well, 20 times compared to my Nexus S, maybe 10 times compared to more modern stuff), I reckon more people would click ads in mobile apps.
I'm running KDE too. It has a useful file manager, and it is very configurable. Don't like the alt-tab switcher? There are 4 to choose from:D The defaults are generally OK too, so only a few things need changing. It's not perfect, there could be something better in terms of window management, but I haven't seen it yet. KDE doesn't become useless when you have about 8 windows per workspace, and that's more than you can say about most DEs...
You're describing a software problem though. A desktop is just an overpowered tablet without a touchscreen. Maybe the Gnome3 and Unity people are on to something after all....
What's the point, and what benefit does this give over a laptop?
For the record, I re-installed an app yesterday on my Nexus S, and I just wanted to throw it at the wall because of how slow it was. If phones get as fast as laptops (or better software), then this is a net zero...?
2. You can be a hypocrite and criticize it while using it. This is what most do that attack the modern world. Evil when they don't need it and suddenly acceptable when they do.
That kind of hypocricy is quite useful actually, when living in a modern society. It is not illogical, because you can believe that there is another way to stop the thing you're criticising than to stop enoying all its benefits. For example, lots of people are vocal about climate change, yet they drive petrol-powered vehicles. Or enjoy some benefit from the government, yet criticise it. One could argue that it's not even hypocricy, because one is not arguing that "everyone but myself should stop taking medicine", one is arguing that "we should find a better solution for this".
I shoud concede that it's a cross platform API, while Advanced Linux Sound Architecture doesn't work on things like BSD. Still, BSD people look at you strangely if you try to get Pulse working, and tell you to use OSS or OSS4.
I think the reason people don't like it is that it introduces a fair number of problems, and it only has benefits in some rare, specific circumstances
Pulse seems to have been introduced at the wrong level, for what it is. Because it works on top of ALSA, it relies heavily on some little used functions, such as getting the true decibel level of the volume controls. (This causes the PA volume controls to fail for some hardware, such as muting the audio at 25 %). On the other hand, it doesn't make use of all ALSA functions, so it does resampling and mixing in software, instead of relying on (possibly superior) hardware. It also doesn't expose all functionality of the underlying devices, and I think it was difficult to get passthrough of digital audio to work about 6 months ago. So it's a rich API built on top of another rich API, offering little benefit, and introducing some bugs.
1. Reliability: Consequences of failure are the same as OS. If the driver fails, the computer usually fails. Complexity is high for many drivers, at the same level as the OS itself. The relevant metric is the probability of bugs in the bits you use, not the total probability of bugs. OS: 8/10 , Toaster: 1/10, Drivers 8/10
2. Unhackability: Lower than OS, as the driver has a fixed purpose. More important than a toaster, as you may want special HW functions, like switching resolutions on a graphics card. The bit about "you don't get fixes from other people" in the article seems a bit out of place, but if that's really unhackability, then it bumps the score for drivers up 2 points. OS: 8/10. Toaster: 1/10. Drivers: 6/10
3. Agency: HW makers can make rules in the drivers to only work with their accessories/supplies. Quite harmful when it happens, it's not a problem with graphics and NIC drivers though. They can make it impossible to use other brand's HW together with their own (e.g. Nvidia + ATI graphics in one system). They can drop support for old models, forcing you to upgrade your HW if you want to upgrade the driver. This has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but most driver makers aren't doing anything like that. OS: 10/10. Toaster: 0/10. Drivers: various, let's call it 0/10 for Linux graphics drivers.
4. Lock-in. You possibly lose your configuration settings when changing do a different hardware maker. OS: 10/10 (according to the article, anyway), Toaster: 0/10. Drivers: 1/10
5. Amnesia: Linux changes its ABI all the time, so binary drivers quickly become obsolete. Open-source drivers are not free of this constant churn either, Xorg recently dropped support for some legacy open-source drivers. It's much easier to reverse-engineer an old open-source driver than a closed driver, though, if you really wanted to. Dropping support may be better to put here than in (3), depending on the motivation of the HW maker. If a vendor goes out of business, for example, we can call it "amnesia". So the reason this is somewhat high is that drivers must stay in sync with other SW, so they need update. OS: 10/10, Toaster: 0/10. Drivers: 5/10
One could argue that harm is multiplicative, that an increase in one category makes all the other categories worse as well. I'll take it as additive, however, as that seems more intuitive. OS sum: 46. Toaster sum: 2. Drivers sum: 20. I just realised this isn't helpful to me at all. I'm not using any closed drivers. Maybe it will inform someone else.
One thing he barely touches on, if at all, is that you can't assing harm to categories of devices. There is a big difference between my main home workstation, which I develop software on, use to record TV, store data, and hundred other things, vs. my laptop which I use to check my email and IM. There is a big difference between the elevator at the physics department, with only 7 floors and a good set of stairs right next to it, vs. the elevator that goes 100 m under ground to the LHC experiments, and is the only way up/down in case of an emergency.
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Agreed. The only thing missing is the ability to voluntarily step into the cheater's pool, load up some hacks and let off some steam. Then return to the normal game
Thanks for the clarification, 100k was all I found on Google. With 3K I suppose it could get a bit tight when using it as a scratch disk for video editing (for example). "A few weeks of maximum use" really says it all.
OMG there's a 750 GB version, that's crazy. Strike my comment about drive space. (I thought SSDs were still at 128 and 256)
[....]unmitigated jerks. You can be the bigger man. Even if you get the short end of the stick, [....] I met some of their staff.[....] there to twig [...] I got hung [...]
Did I get them all? ;)
This thing is indeed pretty harmless, but it scares me that vendors can set different prices based on arbitrary criteria. It shifts the balance of knowledge (power) from the consumer to the vendor. Companies do secret discounts all the time, but usually just for B2B relationships and one-off sales. Suppose Amazon shows me a book, and the price is $ 20, but if a better customer looks at the book, they see $ 10 (Amazon got a patent for this some years ago IIRC). We'd be in for all kinds of confusion, as comparison sites and review sites could no longer be objective.
There have to be some decent alternatives out there.. right? (Popularity aside, of course.)
I'll second that request...
Wouldn't it be possible to have a reasonably stable P2P network without any central servers? This would eliminate the need to rely on an advertisement company for free callse. It could be hard to store the address book for access from multiple computers, one would need encryption and a DHT.
Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. "
US is one of the countries with most permissive weapons laws in the democratic world. If someone invents a new weapon (perhaps safer for the operator and more accurate), then it's a legal chicken-and-egg problem to make owning that weapon legal.
Wearout isn't a concern for almost any normal use. If you copy big video files to it many times every day for editing, and run transformations on them, youd only run up about 100 GB every day, i.e. 1 write cycle on average (nicely distributed because of wear-levelling). An SSD can handle 100,000 write cycles, so you're good for 273 years or so.
Space is a bigger concern, as many "pro" tasks require lots of storage (though many don't, but for professional writers etc, there's little point in even getting the higher-spec pro laptops). The fact that it's a laptop indicates that it's meant to be portable, so the data must also be portable. Apple make a super-thin laptop, but they require you to carry a hard-drive and an ethernet dongle.. That's not elegant design! At least they have a HDMI port now, so you can get by without a display dongle.
Cell phone batteries were about the only thing user replaceable until companies realized that people were just chucking their phones after two years anyway.
It's nice to be able to pop the battery if you spill some liquid on the phone/laptop or to reset a phone that's locked up. Sure, neither happens frequently, but I'd easily trade 5mm of extra thickness for a removable battery in a laptop.
If someone gets bitcoins because they don't trust the banks, they will not keep their bitcoins at an exchange like the one that was hacked. They will keep them on their computer, with off-site backups. Those hacking incidents will cause the value of everyone's bitcoins to fluctuate, and that's part of the equation.
btw, the PortaPro is very popular in some countries (Norway) for some weird reason. Or it was like that 4 years ago, anyway.
Koss PortaPro is quite cheap, and something you can use when travelling. The fidelity is not great, though. I have some Sennheisers at 5x the price, and the difference is obvious -- anyone can hear that (and I couldn't even hear the difference when I re-encoded a WAV file with 4 bits per sample). There is no obvious distrortion in the PortaPro though, and I sill keep mine around and prefer them to a Koss headset and a Plantronics headset (+all cheap earbuds that I use for running).
This makes the requirement to be online to play D3 much worse. Blizzard better be 100 % sure there are no false positives. They probably have all kinds of CYA stuff in their EULA, but now that there's real money involved, some victims of wrongful banning may actually try to sue.
Really, glitchy drivers? Way to RTFA: "On the third day of use a loud coil squeal/chirp became apparent, becoming louder when it was running on battery power. Within hours the wireless chipset failed and refused to connect, the display began glitching with horizontal lines appearing through it, and it became unresponsive. I tested it with a Windows live USB thumb drive"
Some versions of the NVidia driver used a non-standard method for dimming the display, by turning on/off the backlight rapidly. This bug even mentions audible noise: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/562005 . Booting windows from an USB drive is guaranteed to eliminate such issues though, so this bug wasn't the case in TFA.
That laptop has more pixels than my dual monitor setup!
Even if the connection is fast, the CPU has to load up the browser and render the ad page, this easily takes 20 seconds.
Sorry, I exaggerated. It takes 10-15 sec to load a couple of ads I tried. Still too long, though.
Good tip. Another problem is that browsing is slow. Mobile devices have a single full-screen app, so it's not possible to load the add in a separate window or in a background tab. To make things worse, browsing is slower than on a desktop. Even if the connection is fast, the CPU has to load up the browser and render the ad page, this easily takes 20 seconds. If the page is particularly complex or flash-heavy, the original app will be terminated, and has to be reloaded when switching back. So you lose about a minute on looking at the ad, 30 seconds of which is spent waiting, unable to do anything (you can look at the birds if you're outside, maybe). If mobile devices became 20 times faster (well, 20 times compared to my Nexus S, maybe 10 times compared to more modern stuff), I reckon more people would click ads in mobile apps.
I'm running KDE too. It has a useful file manager, and it is very configurable. Don't like the alt-tab switcher? There are 4 to choose from :D The defaults are generally OK too, so only a few things need changing. It's not perfect, there could be something better in terms of window management, but I haven't seen it yet. KDE doesn't become useless when you have about 8 windows per workspace, and that's more than you can say about most DEs...
You're describing a software problem though. A desktop is just an overpowered tablet without a touchscreen. Maybe the Gnome3 and Unity people are on to something after all....
What's the point, and what benefit does this give over a laptop?
For the record, I re-installed an app yesterday on my Nexus S, and I just wanted to throw it at the wall because of how slow it was. If phones get as fast as laptops (or better software), then this is a net zero...?
2. You can be a hypocrite and criticize it while using it. This is what most do that attack the modern world. Evil when they don't need it and suddenly acceptable when they do.
That kind of hypocricy is quite useful actually, when living in a modern society. It is not illogical, because you can believe that there is another way to stop the thing you're criticising than to stop enoying all its benefits. For example, lots of people are vocal about climate change, yet they drive petrol-powered vehicles. Or enjoy some benefit from the government, yet criticise it. One could argue that it's not even hypocricy, because one is not arguing that "everyone but myself should stop taking medicine", one is arguing that "we should find a better solution for this".
WTF!!:)
I shoud concede that it's a cross platform API, while Advanced Linux Sound Architecture doesn't work on things like BSD. Still, BSD people look at you strangely if you try to get Pulse working, and tell you to use OSS or OSS4.
I think the reason people don't like it is that it introduces a fair number of problems, and it only has benefits in some rare, specific circumstances
Pulse seems to have been introduced at the wrong level, for what it is. Because it works on top of ALSA, it relies heavily on some little used functions, such as getting the true decibel level of the volume controls. (This causes the PA volume controls to fail for some hardware, such as muting the audio at 25 %). On the other hand, it doesn't make use of all ALSA functions, so it does resampling and mixing in software, instead of relying on (possibly superior) hardware. It also doesn't expose all functionality of the underlying devices, and I think it was difficult to get passthrough of digital audio to work about 6 months ago. So it's a rich API built on top of another rich API, offering little benefit, and introducing some bugs.
One could argue that harm is multiplicative, that an increase in one category makes all the other categories worse as well. I'll take it as additive, however, as that seems more intuitive. OS sum: 46. Toaster sum: 2. Drivers sum: 20. I just realised this isn't helpful to me at all. I'm not using any closed drivers. Maybe it will inform someone else.
One thing he barely touches on, if at all, is that you can't assing harm to categories of devices. There is a big difference between my main home workstation, which I develop software on, use to record TV, store data, and hundred other things, vs. my laptop which I use to check my email and IM. There is a big difference between the elevator at the physics department, with only 7 floors and a good set of stairs right next to it, vs. the elevator that goes 100 m under ground to the LHC experiments, and is the only way up/down in case of an emergency.