So, you agree it's a "worst case" projection, at least in the context of the study, right? Not sure where the disagreement is then. Is my contention that "worst-case" projections are typically not the most likely?
RCP8.5 is, I believe, a somewhat improbable model used to generate these scenarios. For instance, it assumes population growth at the very high end of current projections, rather than the more current and reasonable productions of 8.7 billion peak at the middle of this century. It assumes massive growth in coal-fired power generation, when we're now seeing trends away from that. It assumes a few other negative trends skirting the edge of reasonable probability in order to arrive at that scenario. You need to look a bit deeper than a simple trend line to determine the probability of that trend continuing on its current arc - just as what happened with population curves (which look very alarming several decades ago). The labeling of RCP8.5 of "business as usual" seems a bit off to me, as "business as usual" would have to mean literally reversing trends of pursuing cleaner energy and our clearly slowing population growth.
That's why I call it a "worst-case", because while it's well within what is possible, I don't believe it to be probable. Thus, my contention with the headlines promoting what I feel to be an unlikely future, given current trends and policies. It think it's very valuable to have these sort of reasonably realistic outer edge probability markers, but I think it's a mistake to misrepresent them as often happens in headlines.
The study, published in the journal Science, modelled what would happen to vegetation in the Mediterranean basin under four different paths of future carbon emissions, from a business-as-usual scenario at the worst end to keeping temperature rises below the Paris climate deal target of 1.5C at the other.
Temperatures would rise nearly 5C globally under the worst case scenario by 2100, causing deserts to expand northwards across southern Spain and Sicily, and Mediterranean vegetation to replace deciduous forests.
They ran four different projections, with the worst-case of these projections representing the 5C temperature increase and southern Spain ending up a desert. Unfortunately, the paper is paywalled, so we just have to rely on the summaries.
I'd imagine many of those same people also still believe the world overpopulation doomsday predictions of the 70's, even though population is demonstrably trending toward peaking at around a very manageable 8.7 billion by 2055, according to recent analysis and predictions. I still encounter people (some here on slashdot) who are seriously worried about the world's population "problem", and pointing them at current trends and predictions seems to do nothing to dissuade them that it's really a non-issue.
It's important to note that this is a worst-case scenario, which typically means its somewhat improbable. Of course, the worst-case scenario also just so happens to make the best headlines.
I'm not arguing that the climate isn't changing, or that's it's not worthwhile to curb pollutants and emissions. But I fear this constant fear-mongering is damaging climate science credibility as much as it's helping to push forward good environmental policies. This is highly reminiscent of the now laughable doomsday predictions around the time of our first Earth Day in 1970. Among these:
* Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years * 100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years * Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make * Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World Will Be In Famine * In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution * Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License * By The Year 2000 There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil
There's an interesting article on why most of these dire predictions didn't come to pass, noting some positive outcomes of the increased environmental awareness, like the Clean Water, Clean Air, Endangered Species acts, and other environmental protection laws.
When the experts have been consistently wrong with these constant doomsday predictions for 45 years, is it any wonder that people start to become skeptical of ALL climate and environmental sciences? That's not a good thing.
It sounds like it's software configurable, and that there will be an API to control this, from how it's described. That would be the ideal solution, so if someone just wanted to put the old function keys back, they can do that, rather than having to hold the Fn key down, which sounds awkward - maybe even allowing it to be toggled. It sort of depends on how much control Apple allows, of course.
It's hard to say without using it, but this could turn into a neat feature. Function keys are nothing more than arbitrary application-specific shortcut keys. Why not just turn those into a visual context-sensitive set of buttons related to the particular application you're using? After all, that's what the function keys are for, only you have to memorize them. Plus, function keys aren't typically involved in touch-typing, so in this case, the loss of physical buttons doesn't seem that much of a drawback.
Microsoft has sort of tried this before on one of their keyboards, where they tried replacing the function keys with a common set of command keys. In one particularly stupid version of the keyboard, these new function keys were made default instead of the older function keys (annoying me every time I cycle the power on that computer). But a fixed set of commands has a limited appeal to a broad range of applications (for instance, F7 is 'reply', which is obviously only helpful to an e-mail or chat client). I think this approach has more possibilities.
Why not? Let's see... Internet of Thing botnets are already in the hands of script-kiddies / hackers... we don't really know who, and they've already demonstrated that they have the ability to negatively impact large portions of the internet. And that was the low hanging fruit. It really feels like we need to slow down a bit and figure out how to harden and secure our infrastructure from bad actors before we start inventing new ways for our devices to be used to attack a very important global resource.
Well, I still have to disagree, at least to some extent. And not with a -1 mod (I hate that too, btw).
I think the biggest difference is in whether you buy bottom of the barrel priced and quality stuff or not, even with computers. For example:
I purchase my computers from a custom PC boutique dealer and probably pay half again as much as a comparable brand from a box store, maybe even more. But these guys analyze each component for failure rates out in the field, and only sell the highest-rated parts in terms of reliability. They also do more extensive burn in tests, thermal and airflow analysis, etc. Yes, they're the same components everyone else uses, but there are many differences in quality among those common components, and even in how carefully a PC is built, and how stable a system is without a bunch of crapware installed. So, generally speaking, the computers I buy tend to last a long time, and that includes the PC I purchased earlier this year as well (a Linux dev machine).
By contrast, do you remember Packard Bell computers, popular a few decades ago? Those were absolute pieces of crap, and I'll bet few of them managed to last five years. Relatives that bought those computers seemed to have nothing but problems with them.
As far as early failures go, yes, you're going to have some failures at the relatively low prices we pay for electronics these days, but I'm not sure it's any grand conspiracy to deliberately make things more fragile. I just think that failures are more likely to occur as our devices push technological boundaries and get more complex, meaning they simply have more potential points of failure, while at the same time dropping dramatically in price from what we used to pay for these items. And yes, occasionally, you find a brand that is just badly designed - junk from the outset. A bit of research helps to avoid most of those issues.
Smartphones are a different matter - I agree there's some planned obsolescence forced on us, simply because the carriers and manufacturers stop supporting perfectly good hardware with updates. But that's not really a technological matter, but a policy issue. My three year old phone was top of the line when I bought it, but now is apparently "obsolete", which is ridiculous. It still can run nearly any app or OS version just fine, only it's no longer being updated.
I think you're suffering from a bit of rose-colored nostalgia.
I remember cars not starting on winter mornings because they were temperamental as hell, and breaking down much more often, requiring costly servicing or repairs. By contrast, today's cars run far more reliably than they used to. I've heard people complain about all the electronics packed into them, but it's all those electronics, among other factors, that keeps the car running in good condition and warns you when anything goes wrong. Many modern cars can last 250K miles if you take good care of them, which used to be almost unheard of several decades ago, when 100K miles was often pushing things.
I'm not quite as certain modern electronic hardware fails quite as frequently as you think either. Many of my current electronics (like my current computers) are five or six years old and running just fine - I'm betting they'll both last quite a few more years, easy. My last TV lasted a dozen years, and my microwave lasted over twenty years. I guess we'll have to see if my new ones do as well, but they're doing fine so far after several years.
You can greatly improve your chances finding quality hardware by doing a bit of due diligence beforehand to find which devices are the most reliable (and avoiding the temptation to rush out and buy the latest, greatest whatever). Of course, sometimes you're bound to get a lemon. For instance, I've had somewhat spotty luck with routers/wireless hubs until my current one. But overall, I'm not sure I buy the argument that everything of yesteryear was somehow better made - at least at equivalent prices.
They can distinguish one thing...they can't fucking work. Who gives a shit whether it's a crash or freeze.
Just to clarify, I'm not blaming the coaches or players for that. I agree that from their perspective, if it doesn't work it doesn't work, and that's all that matters to them.
Dumbshit.
Feel better after lashing out at a random stranger on the internet? Happy to help you out with that.
I'm not sure I like putting all the blame on the users. Don't we have a reasonable expectation that we're not going to be sold faulty products? And I can't characterize such brain-dead non-security as anything but "broken".
Maybe we also should force companies to shoulder the cost of a product recall if their device is found to have security issues that can't be automatically patched and fixed. That would add a nice financial incentive for companies to release more secure products.
If a company continues to release broken product after broken product, then the FCC or other regulatory body steps in and forbids them to sell any internet-connected device, since they've demonstrated themselves to be a public menace.
I'm going to guess that those who complain about them don't (or even can't) distinguish crashes or freezes from connectivity issues. This isn't really a new story, as these sorts of glitches have been happening on occasion since being introduced. Given that these things obviously rely on wireless info feeds, and (as you indicated) that such wireless or communication systems fail in stadiums on occasion, I'm not sure I'd be so quick to blame the hardware or software.
I've seen that, as an MMO developer, whenever an ISP has a problem, people immediately blame the developer for whatever lag or disconnectivity they're experiencing. I think it's human nature to blame the software or hardware sitting in front of them rather than some invisible infrastructure sitting in-between.
I'd agree though, that this is something that Microsoft should have considered. It was risky to push something like this when there was a chance for very public and visible failures like that, even if it's not necessarily Microsoft's fault. Moreover, I really dislike the NFL pushing tools like this on the teams. They should have an opportunity to use their choice of technology when it comes to tools used in course of the game (within reasonable limits, of course). This is nothing like "official coffee of the NFL". This is a tool that can actually make an impact on the game if it succeeds or fails.
Yep, I agree, although I think "microservices" is better described as "any sort of specialized language domain", and is a little less buzzword-bingo-ready.
I recently finished work on a small embedded language that I'm using in my own projects. I published it on GitHub. Interest? Zero. Quite literally, no one else is using it, as far as I can tell. No worries, it's got one satisfied customer, and it's available for others to use if they want. It was hugely satisfying to design the language and work through a bunch of problems in the design and implementation phase. I spent quite a bit of time on API documentation and even a comprehensive tutorial, so if anyone ever stumbles across it, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up.
I think it's a great thing to keep designing new languages, even if very few of them gain traction. At the very worst, it's likely that they'll inspire interesting changes and trends among the bigger languages in their next revision. At best, a few of them may catch hold and grow into something cool. I think every programmer at some point thinks "what would I do differently if I designed a language from scratch?", and a few of them even go try it out.
So the best modeling offered can predict next years climate with 62% accuracy. That says a lot about climate modeling over the next century.
Keep in mind that while short term predictions can be chaotic, it's sometimes easier to see long-term patterns emerge, and to extrapolate data from those trends, like trending lines through a scatter plot. I agree that anything looking a century out is guesswork at best, but I'm not sure I'd say the same looking a decade out.
Historically, many climate-related doomsday predictions have been laughably innacurate. It's for this reason that I continue to be somewhat skeptical about current doomsday or long term projections, because so far *no one* has had much success with those sorts of predictions. Even so, as we have better instrumentation and more historical data with which to create models, it's all but inevitable that our climate prediction models become more accurate as well, certainly for shorter to medium length predictions, and maybe someday, even longer term.
It's important to make the distinction between platform-specific optimization and "hardware-level" optimization. The former undoubtedly occurs (e.g. managing video memory buffers, which is one area the two platforms have some significant differences), but doesn't necessarily imply hardware-level access, like what used to happen on the PS2 (since those didn't even have an OS to speak of). All that stuff is typically managed through OS-level APIs these days, not by poking around in raw memory.
So, when I say "bare-metal isn't a thing", I meant that direct to-the-metal programming is probably not even an option for console developers these days. I hesitate to say that for certain, because as I said, I'm no longer a console programmer, but that's the gist I get from other friends in the industry. I guess we'll see pretty soon, but again, my prediction is that you're not going to see too many problems with compatibility. I'm not sure why you think this is such a hard problem when the PC industry has been doing backwards compatibility and hardware abstraction for many years now.
No one (sane) questions whether solar works or not. It's a pretty straightforward technology, and it's intuitively ideal for reducing demand during peak hours, typically the middle of the work day. There are, however, questions about whether the economics make sense without government subsidies, which is where we'd like to eventually end up, I think.
For businesses, obviously an economic incentive is the most straightforward driver, and if it's good for the environment too, that's a happy bonus. I'm hopeful that over the next few years we'll start seeing some actual results with real numbers for installations on a mass scale over time - not projections, but real, historical data. I guess it also depends whether these corporations are willing to release those numbers over the next decade or so. You'd think that would be a requirement of getting these generous government subsidies (anyone know if it is?).
"Bare-metal" coding / optimization on modern consoles isn't really a thing anymore, according to colleagues working on current gen console games (I worked on consoles two generations ago, but have been mostly on PC since then). Modern console game code, as far as I know, doesn't have access to raw hardware - it's all done through API libraries provided by the OS.
This means that minor changes to hardware specs don't matter as much, since the console OS provides a hardware abstraction layer just like the PC platform does, making backwards compatibility much easier. As a result, I don't foresee either console having many issues with backwards compatibility.
I'd be a lot happier with Hulu if they didn't plaster the local station logo in the corner of the screen, which is somewhat distracting for me.
Other than that, I feel that TV has already been rebooted just fine. I have a massive on-demand selection that I can watch at any time for a reasonable price. And no commercials at all, as I value my own time. I cut the cable a decade or so ago, and don't miss it at all. You can sign up for half a dozen streaming services and still you're probably paying equal to or less than basic cable. Of course, you do have to factor in internet connection costs, but most people want that service anyhow.
If Apple wants to create a compelling streaming service, they'll have to compete with existing services out there. I'm happy to take a look and see if it's worth a subscription. But since I have consoles that run any streaming app just fine, I can't imagine myself wanting any hardware they could possibly offer.
You haven't worked with normal users much, have you? It can be a shock how little most people understand their computers and how they work. They simply memorize the actions needed to accomplish specific tasks, and that's good enough for them. The big blue E icon on their desktop means "the internet", until it drives someone they know who's a bit more knowledgeable insane, and they replace it with a Fox or round primary icon, and then THAT becomes "the internet" for them.
I'll put it bluntly. No, normal users should stay away from the terminal, nor should they *need* to use it for daily operations. If they're interested in learning how to work at a command prompt, that just means they're probably on the verge of becoming a power user. That's not a bad thing, of course, but it's not what most people want to spend their time doing.
Figuring out how to use a terminal requires a non-trivial learning curve. That's because there's no intuitive method of command / feature discovery, unlike with a menu, toolbars with tooltips, and dialog boxes that show you all the options in a visual, hierarchical format. There's a reason GUIs are ubiquitous in nearly all computing platforms today, with the possible exception of headless servers, embedded systems, and other specialized systems.
I'm a programmer, so yes, I'm comfortable with various shells, but I think some people seem to overly fetishize it, like it's a badge of their geekdom or a symbol of their arcane power over a computer. The command line is just power and flexibility at the expense of user friendliness. Once learned, it's a very handy tool in your arsenal, and can be more efficient for some type of operations. Don't pretend it's anything but that, or you're just fooling yourself.
It almost seems to me that some peoples' ideal free society is where certain people can literally say anything they want, and no one is ever allowed to call what they say into question. Again and again, what I see from the Trump camp and the Alt-right isn't the notion of freedom of speech, but rather freedom from consequences.
In another article on Slashdot, we have people boycotting a Silicon Valley business associated with a CEO who has dared to donate to Trump. And we have a GOP office being firebombed just the other day. But hey, it's all good because those are evil Republicans, right?
Don't you dare pin this all on the right. I've seen more than plenty from the left as well. Fascist assholes who simply want to silence their opposition are all over the spectrum, sadly.
I would be OK writing desktop application and games in Go instead of Java or C++.
In the context of videogames (my line of work), "needs some libraries" means "would need to rewrite the entire videogame ecosystem from scratch." In other words, not a chance in hell, no matter what the virtues of the alternate language happens to be. The videogame industry isn't moving away from C++ as it's primary language anytime soon, mostly due to sheer inertia. Every major game engine and 3rd party or platform library is written in or has interfaces available in C/C++.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you agree it's a "worst case" projection, at least in the context of the study, right? Not sure where the disagreement is then. Is my contention that "worst-case" projections are typically not the most likely?
RCP8.5 is, I believe, a somewhat improbable model used to generate these scenarios. For instance, it assumes population growth at the very high end of current projections, rather than the more current and reasonable productions of 8.7 billion peak at the middle of this century. It assumes massive growth in coal-fired power generation, when we're now seeing trends away from that. It assumes a few other negative trends skirting the edge of reasonable probability in order to arrive at that scenario. You need to look a bit deeper than a simple trend line to determine the probability of that trend continuing on its current arc - just as what happened with population curves (which look very alarming several decades ago). The labeling of RCP8.5 of "business as usual" seems a bit off to me, as "business as usual" would have to mean literally reversing trends of pursuing cleaner energy and our clearly slowing population growth.
That's why I call it a "worst-case", because while it's well within what is possible, I don't believe it to be probable. Thus, my contention with the headlines promoting what I feel to be an unlikely future, given current trends and policies. It think it's very valuable to have these sort of reasonably realistic outer edge probability markers, but I think it's a mistake to misrepresent them as often happens in headlines.
In The Guardian link:
The study, published in the journal Science, modelled what would happen to vegetation in the Mediterranean basin under four different paths of future carbon emissions, from a business-as-usual scenario at the worst end to keeping temperature rises below the Paris climate deal target of 1.5C at the other.
Temperatures would rise nearly 5C globally under the worst case scenario by 2100, causing deserts to expand northwards across southern Spain and Sicily, and Mediterranean vegetation to replace deciduous forests.
They ran four different projections, with the worst-case of these projections representing the 5C temperature increase and southern Spain ending up a desert. Unfortunately, the paper is paywalled, so we just have to rely on the summaries.
I'd imagine many of those same people also still believe the world overpopulation doomsday predictions of the 70's, even though population is demonstrably trending toward peaking at around a very manageable 8.7 billion by 2055, according to recent analysis and predictions. I still encounter people (some here on slashdot) who are seriously worried about the world's population "problem", and pointing them at current trends and predictions seems to do nothing to dissuade them that it's really a non-issue.
Because that's what it said in the summary?
It's important to note that this is a worst-case scenario, which typically means its somewhat improbable. Of course, the worst-case scenario also just so happens to make the best headlines.
I'm not arguing that the climate isn't changing, or that's it's not worthwhile to curb pollutants and emissions. But I fear this constant fear-mongering is damaging climate science credibility as much as it's helping to push forward good environmental policies. This is highly reminiscent of the now laughable doomsday predictions around the time of our first Earth Day in 1970. Among these:
* Civilization Will End Within 15 Or 30 Years
* 100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving To Death During The Next Ten Years
* Population Will Inevitably And Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases In Food Supplies We Make
* Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously Thirty Years From Now, The Entire World Will Be In Famine
* In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have To Wear Gas Masks To Survive Air Pollution
* Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless The Parents Hold A Government License
* By The Year 2000 There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil
There's an interesting article on why most of these dire predictions didn't come to pass, noting some positive outcomes of the increased environmental awareness, like the Clean Water, Clean Air, Endangered Species acts, and other environmental protection laws.
When the experts have been consistently wrong with these constant doomsday predictions for 45 years, is it any wonder that people start to become skeptical of ALL climate and environmental sciences? That's not a good thing.
Must admit I'm baffled by the uproar on Twitter.
Twitter is pretty good at brewing tempests in teapots. Surely it's not all that surprising.
It sounds like it's software configurable, and that there will be an API to control this, from how it's described. That would be the ideal solution, so if someone just wanted to put the old function keys back, they can do that, rather than having to hold the Fn key down, which sounds awkward - maybe even allowing it to be toggled. It sort of depends on how much control Apple allows, of course.
It's hard to say without using it, but this could turn into a neat feature. Function keys are nothing more than arbitrary application-specific shortcut keys. Why not just turn those into a visual context-sensitive set of buttons related to the particular application you're using? After all, that's what the function keys are for, only you have to memorize them. Plus, function keys aren't typically involved in touch-typing, so in this case, the loss of physical buttons doesn't seem that much of a drawback.
Microsoft has sort of tried this before on one of their keyboards, where they tried replacing the function keys with a common set of command keys. In one particularly stupid version of the keyboard, these new function keys were made default instead of the older function keys (annoying me every time I cycle the power on that computer). But a fixed set of commands has a limited appeal to a broad range of applications (for instance, F7 is 'reply', which is obviously only helpful to an e-mail or chat client). I think this approach has more possibilities.
Why not? Let's see... Internet of Thing botnets are already in the hands of script-kiddies / hackers... we don't really know who, and they've already demonstrated that they have the ability to negatively impact large portions of the internet. And that was the low hanging fruit. It really feels like we need to slow down a bit and figure out how to harden and secure our infrastructure from bad actors before we start inventing new ways for our devices to be used to attack a very important global resource.
It may be a while, but I have faith we'll get there someday.
Well, I still have to disagree, at least to some extent. And not with a -1 mod (I hate that too, btw).
I think the biggest difference is in whether you buy bottom of the barrel priced and quality stuff or not, even with computers. For example:
I purchase my computers from a custom PC boutique dealer and probably pay half again as much as a comparable brand from a box store, maybe even more. But these guys analyze each component for failure rates out in the field, and only sell the highest-rated parts in terms of reliability. They also do more extensive burn in tests, thermal and airflow analysis, etc. Yes, they're the same components everyone else uses, but there are many differences in quality among those common components, and even in how carefully a PC is built, and how stable a system is without a bunch of crapware installed. So, generally speaking, the computers I buy tend to last a long time, and that includes the PC I purchased earlier this year as well (a Linux dev machine).
By contrast, do you remember Packard Bell computers, popular a few decades ago? Those were absolute pieces of crap, and I'll bet few of them managed to last five years. Relatives that bought those computers seemed to have nothing but problems with them.
As far as early failures go, yes, you're going to have some failures at the relatively low prices we pay for electronics these days, but I'm not sure it's any grand conspiracy to deliberately make things more fragile. I just think that failures are more likely to occur as our devices push technological boundaries and get more complex, meaning they simply have more potential points of failure, while at the same time dropping dramatically in price from what we used to pay for these items. And yes, occasionally, you find a brand that is just badly designed - junk from the outset. A bit of research helps to avoid most of those issues.
Smartphones are a different matter - I agree there's some planned obsolescence forced on us, simply because the carriers and manufacturers stop supporting perfectly good hardware with updates. But that's not really a technological matter, but a policy issue. My three year old phone was top of the line when I bought it, but now is apparently "obsolete", which is ridiculous. It still can run nearly any app or OS version just fine, only it's no longer being updated.
I think you're suffering from a bit of rose-colored nostalgia.
I remember cars not starting on winter mornings because they were temperamental as hell, and breaking down much more often, requiring costly servicing or repairs. By contrast, today's cars run far more reliably than they used to. I've heard people complain about all the electronics packed into them, but it's all those electronics, among other factors, that keeps the car running in good condition and warns you when anything goes wrong. Many modern cars can last 250K miles if you take good care of them, which used to be almost unheard of several decades ago, when 100K miles was often pushing things.
I'm not quite as certain modern electronic hardware fails quite as frequently as you think either. Many of my current electronics (like my current computers) are five or six years old and running just fine - I'm betting they'll both last quite a few more years, easy. My last TV lasted a dozen years, and my microwave lasted over twenty years. I guess we'll have to see if my new ones do as well, but they're doing fine so far after several years.
You can greatly improve your chances finding quality hardware by doing a bit of due diligence beforehand to find which devices are the most reliable (and avoiding the temptation to rush out and buy the latest, greatest whatever). Of course, sometimes you're bound to get a lemon. For instance, I've had somewhat spotty luck with routers/wireless hubs until my current one. But overall, I'm not sure I buy the argument that everything of yesteryear was somehow better made - at least at equivalent prices.
They can distinguish one thing...they can't fucking work. Who gives a shit whether it's a crash or freeze.
Just to clarify, I'm not blaming the coaches or players for that. I agree that from their perspective, if it doesn't work it doesn't work, and that's all that matters to them.
Dumbshit.
Feel better after lashing out at a random stranger on the internet? Happy to help you out with that.
I'm not sure I like putting all the blame on the users. Don't we have a reasonable expectation that we're not going to be sold faulty products? And I can't characterize such brain-dead non-security as anything but "broken".
Maybe we also should force companies to shoulder the cost of a product recall if their device is found to have security issues that can't be automatically patched and fixed. That would add a nice financial incentive for companies to release more secure products.
If a company continues to release broken product after broken product, then the FCC or other regulatory body steps in and forbids them to sell any internet-connected device, since they've demonstrated themselves to be a public menace.
I'm going to guess that those who complain about them don't (or even can't) distinguish crashes or freezes from connectivity issues. This isn't really a new story, as these sorts of glitches have been happening on occasion since being introduced. Given that these things obviously rely on wireless info feeds, and (as you indicated) that such wireless or communication systems fail in stadiums on occasion, I'm not sure I'd be so quick to blame the hardware or software.
I've seen that, as an MMO developer, whenever an ISP has a problem, people immediately blame the developer for whatever lag or disconnectivity they're experiencing. I think it's human nature to blame the software or hardware sitting in front of them rather than some invisible infrastructure sitting in-between.
I'd agree though, that this is something that Microsoft should have considered. It was risky to push something like this when there was a chance for very public and visible failures like that, even if it's not necessarily Microsoft's fault. Moreover, I really dislike the NFL pushing tools like this on the teams. They should have an opportunity to use their choice of technology when it comes to tools used in course of the game (within reasonable limits, of course). This is nothing like "official coffee of the NFL". This is a tool that can actually make an impact on the game if it succeeds or fails.
Yep, I agree, although I think "microservices" is better described as "any sort of specialized language domain", and is a little less buzzword-bingo-ready.
I recently finished work on a small embedded language that I'm using in my own projects. I published it on GitHub. Interest? Zero. Quite literally, no one else is using it, as far as I can tell. No worries, it's got one satisfied customer, and it's available for others to use if they want. It was hugely satisfying to design the language and work through a bunch of problems in the design and implementation phase. I spent quite a bit of time on API documentation and even a comprehensive tutorial, so if anyone ever stumbles across it, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up.
I think it's a great thing to keep designing new languages, even if very few of them gain traction. At the very worst, it's likely that they'll inspire interesting changes and trends among the bigger languages in their next revision. At best, a few of them may catch hold and grow into something cool. I think every programmer at some point thinks "what would I do differently if I designed a language from scratch?", and a few of them even go try it out.
So the best modeling offered can predict next years climate with 62% accuracy. That says a lot about climate modeling over the next century.
Keep in mind that while short term predictions can be chaotic, it's sometimes easier to see long-term patterns emerge, and to extrapolate data from those trends, like trending lines through a scatter plot. I agree that anything looking a century out is guesswork at best, but I'm not sure I'd say the same looking a decade out.
Historically, many climate-related doomsday predictions have been laughably innacurate. It's for this reason that I continue to be somewhat skeptical about current doomsday or long term projections, because so far *no one* has had much success with those sorts of predictions. Even so, as we have better instrumentation and more historical data with which to create models, it's all but inevitable that our climate prediction models become more accurate as well, certainly for shorter to medium length predictions, and maybe someday, even longer term.
Yep, possibly local groceries as well. Amazon Fresh is available in limited markets, but may eventually grow as well.
How many different ways can you say the same thing?
A) Several ways
B) A lot of ways
C) Nearly infinite ways
D) About four, it seems
It's important to make the distinction between platform-specific optimization and "hardware-level" optimization. The former undoubtedly occurs (e.g. managing video memory buffers, which is one area the two platforms have some significant differences), but doesn't necessarily imply hardware-level access, like what used to happen on the PS2 (since those didn't even have an OS to speak of). All that stuff is typically managed through OS-level APIs these days, not by poking around in raw memory.
So, when I say "bare-metal isn't a thing", I meant that direct to-the-metal programming is probably not even an option for console developers these days. I hesitate to say that for certain, because as I said, I'm no longer a console programmer, but that's the gist I get from other friends in the industry. I guess we'll see pretty soon, but again, my prediction is that you're not going to see too many problems with compatibility. I'm not sure why you think this is such a hard problem when the PC industry has been doing backwards compatibility and hardware abstraction for many years now.
No one (sane) questions whether solar works or not. It's a pretty straightforward technology, and it's intuitively ideal for reducing demand during peak hours, typically the middle of the work day. There are, however, questions about whether the economics make sense without government subsidies, which is where we'd like to eventually end up, I think.
For businesses, obviously an economic incentive is the most straightforward driver, and if it's good for the environment too, that's a happy bonus. I'm hopeful that over the next few years we'll start seeing some actual results with real numbers for installations on a mass scale over time - not projections, but real, historical data. I guess it also depends whether these corporations are willing to release those numbers over the next decade or so. You'd think that would be a requirement of getting these generous government subsidies (anyone know if it is?).
"Bare-metal" coding / optimization on modern consoles isn't really a thing anymore, according to colleagues working on current gen console games (I worked on consoles two generations ago, but have been mostly on PC since then). Modern console game code, as far as I know, doesn't have access to raw hardware - it's all done through API libraries provided by the OS.
This means that minor changes to hardware specs don't matter as much, since the console OS provides a hardware abstraction layer just like the PC platform does, making backwards compatibility much easier. As a result, I don't foresee either console having many issues with backwards compatibility.
I'd be a lot happier with Hulu if they didn't plaster the local station logo in the corner of the screen, which is somewhat distracting for me.
Other than that, I feel that TV has already been rebooted just fine. I have a massive on-demand selection that I can watch at any time for a reasonable price. And no commercials at all, as I value my own time. I cut the cable a decade or so ago, and don't miss it at all. You can sign up for half a dozen streaming services and still you're probably paying equal to or less than basic cable. Of course, you do have to factor in internet connection costs, but most people want that service anyhow.
If Apple wants to create a compelling streaming service, they'll have to compete with existing services out there. I'm happy to take a look and see if it's worth a subscription. But since I have consoles that run any streaming app just fine, I can't imagine myself wanting any hardware they could possibly offer.
You haven't worked with normal users much, have you? It can be a shock how little most people understand their computers and how they work. They simply memorize the actions needed to accomplish specific tasks, and that's good enough for them. The big blue E icon on their desktop means "the internet", until it drives someone they know who's a bit more knowledgeable insane, and they replace it with a Fox or round primary icon, and then THAT becomes "the internet" for them.
I'll put it bluntly. No, normal users should stay away from the terminal, nor should they *need* to use it for daily operations. If they're interested in learning how to work at a command prompt, that just means they're probably on the verge of becoming a power user. That's not a bad thing, of course, but it's not what most people want to spend their time doing.
Figuring out how to use a terminal requires a non-trivial learning curve. That's because there's no intuitive method of command / feature discovery, unlike with a menu, toolbars with tooltips, and dialog boxes that show you all the options in a visual, hierarchical format. There's a reason GUIs are ubiquitous in nearly all computing platforms today, with the possible exception of headless servers, embedded systems, and other specialized systems.
I'm a programmer, so yes, I'm comfortable with various shells, but I think some people seem to overly fetishize it, like it's a badge of their geekdom or a symbol of their arcane power over a computer. The command line is just power and flexibility at the expense of user friendliness. Once learned, it's a very handy tool in your arsenal, and can be more efficient for some type of operations. Don't pretend it's anything but that, or you're just fooling yourself.
It almost seems to me that some peoples' ideal free society is where certain people can literally say anything they want, and no one is ever allowed to call what they say into question. Again and again, what I see from the Trump camp and the Alt-right isn't the notion of freedom of speech, but rather freedom from consequences.
In another article on Slashdot, we have people boycotting a Silicon Valley business associated with a CEO who has dared to donate to Trump. And we have a GOP office being firebombed just the other day. But hey, it's all good because those are evil Republicans, right?
Don't you dare pin this all on the right. I've seen more than plenty from the left as well. Fascist assholes who simply want to silence their opposition are all over the spectrum, sadly.
I would be OK writing desktop application and games in Go instead of Java or C++.
In the context of videogames (my line of work), "needs some libraries" means "would need to rewrite the entire videogame ecosystem from scratch." In other words, not a chance in hell, no matter what the virtues of the alternate language happens to be. The videogame industry isn't moving away from C++ as it's primary language anytime soon, mostly due to sheer inertia. Every major game engine and 3rd party or platform library is written in or has interfaces available in C/C++.