Windows is... unsuitable for hardcore development.
Honestly, this entire thread has mostly devolved into holy war rhetoric. Any three of the major desktop OSes work just fine for development work. Some are better at specific development tasks than others, largely depending on what type of software you're writing.
Deploying software to Linux-based servers or prefer using traditional OSS tools? Yeah, naturally Linux is probably the way to go, with OS X as a reasonable alternative. iOS development - OS X is nearly a requirement unless you're doing Xamarin or another x-platfrom system - although Windows is now rolling out pretty decent alternative-OS dev support for iOS and Android now too. Native client-side development, or perhaps a C# project? Yeah, you might want to use Visual Studio and Windows. Web development - yeah, probably doesn't matter quite as much... just depends on where your preferred tools are. Game developer? There's not even a question: you're going to be using Windows as your primary development platform.
When people try to tell me that a particular OS isn't a suitable development platform, I have to roll my eyes a bit (sorry), because obviously they mean "for the specific type of work I do", and they may not even realize it.
We really are rapidly moving to the point where 5% of the earth's population can provide *all* the needed goods and services for the world.
5%? The numbers don't back up your claim, unless by "rapidly" you mean "still a few centuries away, if ever." We need a lot more than just agricultural workers to survive as a society, if that's what you're thinking. You're forgetting about the vast network of industries that support that and the other primary critical industries required for basic survival (food, water, shelter) and support society in general, like mining, transportation, construction, manufacturing, finance, education, health care, government, utilities...
I'm not upset that MS is playing the patent game as best they can. I would, however, like to see the rules of the game changed for everyone. Software patents need to go.
I don't hate Microsoft. To me, that makes as much sense as hating a tiger for chasing down and tearing apart its hapless prey. It's pointless to get upset at corporations for just doing what they do, which is to figure out how to make as much money as possible within the current rules of law and society. If they're doing something which is legal but which we don't like, then we only have two options: we can either create societal pressure (bad publicity, boycotts, etc) to alter their behavior, or we can change the laws under which they operate.
I'd suggest that, as far as software patents go, it would be far more effective to go the second route (changing laws), because there's just too much money involved involved, not to mention a lack of public awareness, to make any serious traction with the first method. Of course, given that there's so much money involved, changing laws isn't going to be easy either, but at least it has a chance.
I really doubt there's a way to build enough bus routes to take people from arbitrary point to arbitrary point in an efficient manner. Public transportation works pretty well at major transportation hubs, when you can move huge concentrations of people to and from specific, highly popular destinations (like to extremely dense city centers). But it doesn't work nearly as well when you're trying to move between two arbitrary points in, say, a large semi-densely suburban region dotted with small to medium-sized cities in which the journey an individual is likely to take is not nearly so predictable.
The problem is that without hub and spokes, you're trying to solve a N x N hard problem (with N being the number of possible destinations in a given region) in the worst case scenario. Each additional hub you add drastically reduces the number of routes needed, but at the cost of increased travel time and inconvenience.
We give everyone... It isn't like they're taking anything away from anyone else.
Oh really? I'd love to hear how you think it works then.
If they're receiving "free" money or services from the government, then they most certainly ARE taking money from those that are actually working hard and paying into the system. And you can't just solve this by taxing corporations, because ultimately, you're still taxing people, whether its employees that either aren't hired or are paid less, or fewer dividends to investors, or simply increased prices by customers due to higher overhead, it's ultimately paid for by individuals.
I'd love to live in your hypothetical world where the majority of people can just loaf around because they don't have to really work, yet our economy still won't collapse into the shitter. I just don't believe it's realistic.
Don't get me wrong... I absolutely understand *why* they want people on Windows 10, but I think they'd catch more flies with honey. For the people who want to stay on older versions for whatever reason, all they've done now is alienate a good portion of them with their annoying and aggressive tactics. They're burning long-term loyalty for short term gain, which seems a foolish thing to do. It has the air of desperation about it, which seems strange, as MS is not hurting financially at the moment, nor do their prospects look terrible with their focus on "software and services".
BTW, I'd argue they save no money on Windows support with this tactic, because they're already guaranteeing how long exactly each version of the OS remains supported. No matter what they do, a percentage of users will remain on those operating systems, and so they must be supported.
It's absolutely social engineering at its worst. Take a look at this article by Mary Jo Foley (well known Microsoft-focused writer) and check out the dialog box in the middle of the article. Notice how insanely difficult it is to figure out how to even cancel this operation. There's no standard "cancel" button, you click a tiny hyperlink to "cancel or delay" the update. I think (although not 100% certain) that just hitting the "close" button isn't the same as cancelling.
What appears to be happening is that this update is being scheduled without user consent in some cases, so unless the user actively cancels (they'll have two chances, one three days before, and one 60 minutes before), Windows 10 will be installed. It's hard to say whether this is intentional or not, but really, Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 so aggressively that even if it *were* an honest mistake, they've really lost most of their credibility on this issue.
What's really sad is that at its core, Windows 10 is actually a decent OS, but MS has made so many questionable decisions that this really can't make up for all the negatives for many people. They could have made a few simple changes in strategy and I think a lot more people would have been fine with it:
* Offer the free Upgrade, and let the user dismiss it. Pop up once again before the free offer expires, but otherwise, shut the hell up. * Allow a simple, one-click option to avoid all cloud-based options and telemetry (maximum privacy) both at install time or in the control panel. * Kill advertisement in the OS itself - a seriously, seriously terrible idea. * Allow pro and corporate users to opt out of mandatory updates ("pro" implies you know what the fuck you're doing, after all). Automatic updates is fine as the default setting. * Anyone should be able to explicitly exclude specific updates for safety reasons.
I think these are the big issues people have. Most people probably would have been fine with the defaults, so they could have let privacy-conscious people stay happy without really even affecting how many people use those new services anyhow. If you make those services (like cloud integration or Cortana) compelling enough, people will want to use them anyhow.
Yep, exactly. Specifically, the fact that it's extremely difficult to determine the factors of large prime numbers is the basis for a lot of cryptography - part of the "hard problem" required for any algorithm, where it's simple to compute in one direction, but extremely difficult to determine the components that led to that result. If someone tomorrow discovered a way to do this, it would immediately destroy a lot of our current crypto tech overnight. It wouldn't be an over-exaggeration to call that particular property of primes one of the linchpins of modern crypto.
Note that that elliptic curve crypto, a more recent approach, doesn't rely on prime factorization. As it's name suggests, it relies on properties of elliptic curves for its one way "hard problem" rather than factorization - it turns out that this is a more efficient approach for smaller key lengths. Not that anyone expecting someone to discover a simple prime factorization algorithm in the near future, but it's certainly nice to have alternative approaches.
Thanks for the link. I actually read through that, and while some of the arguments were certainly valid, some of them sounded an awful lot like simple justification for how Linux chooses to do things. For example, rapidly changing internal API interfaces is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when you assume you can just change the interface of any drivers for which you have the source. He acknowledges that it would be more work to maintain older, depreciated interfaces, and claims that they couldn't impose such a burden on volunteer programmers. It may be true in some cases, but that argument seems a little weak with the knowledge that these days most contributors today are actually paid by a corporation for their work on the kernel.
This sentence is of particular note: "...get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we are talking about GPL released drivers here, if your code doesn't fall under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, you leech)..."
This attitude is both the strength and weakness of Linux. It works FOR Linux as an open platform, but certainly AGAINST it as a commercial one, if a manufacturer doesn't wish to open-source their drivers - and that unfortunately includes video card manufacturers, which is also a major issue for Linux. If a commercial vendor feels unable to release open source drivers for their proprietary hardware for whatever reason, then Linux is simply *never* going to work reliably on their hardware.
More importantly, because client machines tend to be much more reliant on the subtle interfaces and behaviors of many complex drivers (headless servers don't have to worry about nearly as much), I believe that this philosophy is a large part of why Linux remains something of a second-class citizen on the desktop. I'm not saying this philosophy is necessarily wrong, but I think it's important to understand that it definitely comes with some tradeoffs.
Sure, modern higher-end laptops are ridiculously overpowered for about 95% of what people generally need to do with a PC. Hell, top-end smartphones are overpowered for what most people need to do with a PC, which is why (among other reasons), the overall PC market share is stagnating or declining. They're just not necessary for run of the mill, daily computing needs for most people. Non-gaming applications which actually require a desktop's power are the exception among the already rare, but they're most certain out there. And of course, games historically require a lot of GPU horsepower, which most laptops don't have in large quantities.
There are also small form-factor desktop PCs which are useful for lightweight office or home tasks, but for which the portability of a laptop is either completely unnecessary or even a liability.
So yeah, I totally agree - I was just pointing out the ignorance of mocking desktop PCs as 'last century'. Probably the same sort of hipsteritis that causes people to snicker at someone with (gasp) a three-year-old smartphone. It gets tiresome to have to repeatedly explain to people that the modern desktop PC is sort of like a full-sized work truck. It's completely overkill for most people's driving needs, but it's invaluable to professionals with specific requirements.
Desktops? Try an antique store, or a government office.
Or a development shop, or a music studio, or a digital artist's workshop, or a gamer's den, or anyone else that needs a machine with some significant horsepower that also doesn't need to be mobile. Try hooking up a VR headset to a laptop, and the hardware will openly mock you. Yes, desktops are still a thing, believe it or not, even if you personally can't imagine how you'd use one.
It wasn't a "golden age", it was just a gold rush. And did people seriously think the "gold rush" would last forever? It's like any other gold rush, literal or figurative - a few in the first wave get lucky and strike it rich. Most of the people who actually made a profit were selling equipment or services to the prospectors. And after the individual prospectors skimming off the surface were gone, it took a large-scale mining effort to exploit the resources at a deeper level.
The strength of indie developers are that they're able to move quickly with new ideas and on new platforms, but the new platforms don't come along all that often, and marketable new ideas are surprisingly hard to come by.
Microsoft is taking Linux seriously as a server platform, in which it has a significant presence and market share. Game developers target client machines, in which Linux has a very tiny market share (under 1% according to Steam). It's the same reason fewer developers bother making apps for Windows Phone, yet Microsoft itself is targeting iOS and Android with its own apps. Developers go where the market is.
Yep, nothing novel at all, even in conception. The real trick with deep learning software is figuring out how to integrate them into knowledge bases and provide useful training and feedback mechanisms. Honestly, creating the neural network software is the easy part, because there's a ton of academic research that tells you *exactly* how to do it. I actually downloaded and examined the code, and while it looks reasonably clean and functional, we're not exactly talking about a huge amount of work to replicate it - it's just a few hundred lines in total.
Moreover, when any software package starts with a section on "The Ethical Motivations" for its existence, it strikes me as the wrong sort of motivation altogether. The real motivation should be "I want to solve some interesting problems", and THAT will drive the design. This sounds like a pretty typical academic exercise, and as such, probably is not going to amount to much, other than as a starting point for some student projects here or there. But even that is dicey, as naturally, there's no documentation at all - just a readme file telling you to look at the source code to figure out how it works. Odds are pretty good that documentation is never actually written for it, because that's a hell of a lot less fun than writing the code.
Sorry, I really do love this sort of stuff, but it's a little hard to get excited about the project when its exactly the same sort of code I was tinkering with as an undergrad student decades ago. That anyone is actually comparing a few hundred lines of relatively simplistic C code to IBM or Google's machine learning projects is disingenuous at best, borderline insulting at worst.
I doubt that WWII subs would hold up to modern scrutiny, even at relatively slow speeds. Our detection capabilities have probably improved a thousand-fold or more in the last half century, and that might even be an underestimation.
A staggering amount of R&D has gone into optimizing hull surfaces / shapes and prop designs to minimize cavitation and other emissions, so it's not just the noise of the powerplants that are factors. I'm not sure if they do this any more, but at one time US submarine prop designs were highly guarded secrets, and kept covered when out of the water.
True, but another inherent property of Diesel-Electric submarines is they can operate submerged in extreme silence... nuclear subs make a very small but detectible amount of noise at all times underwater...
When you talk about noisy nuke subs, you can talk about China's or India's, but the US has had many decades to eliminate those sorts of emanation and are extremely proficient at doing so. Eventually that will change as other nations reach parity with the US or Russia, but at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if US nukes like the Virginia class are actually even quieter than a NK diesel, at least when it's moving.
Enlighten me, what should one be using to chat securely these days?
I'd probably use Threema, as it has a trust-no-one model in which the most secure level (of the three available) requires personally exchanging keys with the target recipient. The company is also based in Switzerland, which, sadly, makes it a hell of a lot more secure by default than any US-based company, as we're quickly finding out with this pending Apple / FBI case.
That being said, I *don't* actually need secure chat, so I just use SMS or e-mail, which should be considered about as secure as a postcard.
...zero. There is absolutely no possibility of such an attack, on US soil or anywhere else.
There's this little thing called "statistics" you're completely ignoring. The probability is extremely low, but calling it "zero" is simply wrong. When I buy a lottery ticket, do you also call the chances of me winning "zero"? My house burning down is also probably pretty low-probability, but any sane person has insurance just the same. When you simply dismiss any chance outright, you destroy your own credibility. And if you're wrong, it's not like you will be held responsible. It's pretty easy to be dismissive when it's not your problem in the first place.
Also, I'm not sure where your faith in our impenetrable borders comes from. For fuck's sake, we have illegals from Central America pouring into the US all the time across our southern border. You seriously believe we'd actually detect a suitcase nuke coming across? Highly improbably, of course. Impossible, not at all.
If those people believe firmly enough that they will die, then - as is well known from studies in shamanism - those people will will themselves to die. There needn't be a single thing wrong with any of them, aside from their own credulity.
It makes me wonder a bit that you got modded +5 interesting with this little gem in there. WTF? Since when did Slashdot collectively believe in "booga-booga" witchcraft? And you're talking about rationality?
True, but keep in mind the boogeymen change over time. Remember, it used to be "communists". So long as the government has a fear-inducing target, they can acquire more power.
Sometimes it's even done for the right reasons (a desire to catch criminals), but all too often it seems at heart a desire to build bureaucratic fiefdoms just for the sake of acquiring more power and wealth. Look at how many local police forces now have armed-to-the-teeth (meaning well-funded) paramilitary-like squads? Are people aware of how much they profit from the war on drugs due to asset forfeiture and increased funding? No one complains, because they're unlawfully stealing from rich drug dealers, not normal folks... right? And how many top-heavy regulatory agencies in the government are unnecessarily siphoning off vast quantities of wealth from private industry, while only providing the illusion of safety for consumers?
Half the problem here is that so many people are perfectly fine with ceding unbelievable amounts of power to the federal government when it's for a cause they think is good and just, but then somehow expect the government to leave them alone on the issue of privacy or personal liberty. Unfortunately, it just doesn't seem to work that way in practice. When you allow the creation of powerful federal bureaucracies, you take the bad with the good, and this is definitely some of the bad.
Redundancy is better than reliability, and low cost-per GB means redundancy is easily affordable. Because no matter how much you spend on a drive, you're never going to hit 100% reliability, which means that you still have to do everything you're going right now in order to protect your data, with multiple levels of backup plus RAID if you need high availability. Cheap per-GB costs means you can build in all the reliability you want into a system yourself, and it's probably going to ultimately be cheaper than if manufacturers tried to build that reliability into the HD itself.
What's really great is that this flexibility allows you to choose the level of redundancy that's right for your data. I've got a local media server NAS with a bunch of my ripped DVDs and Blu-rays. These only have the protection of RAID, since while I'd be sad if I lost them, I could theoretically always re-rip from the original discs. However, my more critical documents are automatically backed up in several locations, including offsite, since I absolutely can't afford to lose that data.
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Windows is... unsuitable for hardcore development.
Honestly, this entire thread has mostly devolved into holy war rhetoric. Any three of the major desktop OSes work just fine for development work. Some are better at specific development tasks than others, largely depending on what type of software you're writing.
Deploying software to Linux-based servers or prefer using traditional OSS tools? Yeah, naturally Linux is probably the way to go, with OS X as a reasonable alternative. iOS development - OS X is nearly a requirement unless you're doing Xamarin or another x-platfrom system - although Windows is now rolling out pretty decent alternative-OS dev support for iOS and Android now too. Native client-side development, or perhaps a C# project? Yeah, you might want to use Visual Studio and Windows. Web development - yeah, probably doesn't matter quite as much... just depends on where your preferred tools are. Game developer? There's not even a question: you're going to be using Windows as your primary development platform.
When people try to tell me that a particular OS isn't a suitable development platform, I have to roll my eyes a bit (sorry), because obviously they mean "for the specific type of work I do", and they may not even realize it.
We really are rapidly moving to the point where 5% of the earth's population can provide *all* the needed goods and services for the world.
5%? The numbers don't back up your claim, unless by "rapidly" you mean "still a few centuries away, if ever." We need a lot more than just agricultural workers to survive as a society, if that's what you're thinking. You're forgetting about the vast network of industries that support that and the other primary critical industries required for basic survival (food, water, shelter) and support society in general, like mining, transportation, construction, manufacturing, finance, education, health care, government, utilities...
I'm not upset that MS is playing the patent game as best they can. I would, however, like to see the rules of the game changed for everyone. Software patents need to go.
I don't hate Microsoft. To me, that makes as much sense as hating a tiger for chasing down and tearing apart its hapless prey. It's pointless to get upset at corporations for just doing what they do, which is to figure out how to make as much money as possible within the current rules of law and society. If they're doing something which is legal but which we don't like, then we only have two options: we can either create societal pressure (bad publicity, boycotts, etc) to alter their behavior, or we can change the laws under which they operate.
I'd suggest that, as far as software patents go, it would be far more effective to go the second route (changing laws), because there's just too much money involved involved, not to mention a lack of public awareness, to make any serious traction with the first method. Of course, given that there's so much money involved, changing laws isn't going to be easy either, but at least it has a chance.
I really doubt there's a way to build enough bus routes to take people from arbitrary point to arbitrary point in an efficient manner. Public transportation works pretty well at major transportation hubs, when you can move huge concentrations of people to and from specific, highly popular destinations (like to extremely dense city centers). But it doesn't work nearly as well when you're trying to move between two arbitrary points in, say, a large semi-densely suburban region dotted with small to medium-sized cities in which the journey an individual is likely to take is not nearly so predictable.
The problem is that without hub and spokes, you're trying to solve a N x N hard problem (with N being the number of possible destinations in a given region) in the worst case scenario. Each additional hub you add drastically reduces the number of routes needed, but at the cost of increased travel time and inconvenience.
We give everyone... It isn't like they're taking anything away from anyone else.
Oh really? I'd love to hear how you think it works then.
If they're receiving "free" money or services from the government, then they most certainly ARE taking money from those that are actually working hard and paying into the system. And you can't just solve this by taxing corporations, because ultimately, you're still taxing people, whether its employees that either aren't hired or are paid less, or fewer dividends to investors, or simply increased prices by customers due to higher overhead, it's ultimately paid for by individuals.
I'd love to live in your hypothetical world where the majority of people can just loaf around because they don't have to really work, yet our economy still won't collapse into the shitter. I just don't believe it's realistic.
Don't get me wrong... I absolutely understand *why* they want people on Windows 10, but I think they'd catch more flies with honey. For the people who want to stay on older versions for whatever reason, all they've done now is alienate a good portion of them with their annoying and aggressive tactics. They're burning long-term loyalty for short term gain, which seems a foolish thing to do. It has the air of desperation about it, which seems strange, as MS is not hurting financially at the moment, nor do their prospects look terrible with their focus on "software and services".
BTW, I'd argue they save no money on Windows support with this tactic, because they're already guaranteeing how long exactly each version of the OS remains supported. No matter what they do, a percentage of users will remain on those operating systems, and so they must be supported.
It's absolutely social engineering at its worst. Take a look at this article by Mary Jo Foley (well known Microsoft-focused writer) and check out the dialog box in the middle of the article. Notice how insanely difficult it is to figure out how to even cancel this operation. There's no standard "cancel" button, you click a tiny hyperlink to "cancel or delay" the update. I think (although not 100% certain) that just hitting the "close" button isn't the same as cancelling.
What appears to be happening is that this update is being scheduled without user consent in some cases, so unless the user actively cancels (they'll have two chances, one three days before, and one 60 minutes before), Windows 10 will be installed. It's hard to say whether this is intentional or not, but really, Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 so aggressively that even if it *were* an honest mistake, they've really lost most of their credibility on this issue.
What's really sad is that at its core, Windows 10 is actually a decent OS, but MS has made so many questionable decisions that this really can't make up for all the negatives for many people. They could have made a few simple changes in strategy and I think a lot more people would have been fine with it:
* Offer the free Upgrade, and let the user dismiss it. Pop up once again before the free offer expires, but otherwise, shut the hell up.
* Allow a simple, one-click option to avoid all cloud-based options and telemetry (maximum privacy) both at install time or in the control panel.
* Kill advertisement in the OS itself - a seriously, seriously terrible idea.
* Allow pro and corporate users to opt out of mandatory updates ("pro" implies you know what the fuck you're doing, after all). Automatic updates is fine as the default setting.
* Anyone should be able to explicitly exclude specific updates for safety reasons.
I think these are the big issues people have. Most people probably would have been fine with the defaults, so they could have let privacy-conscious people stay happy without really even affecting how many people use those new services anyhow. If you make those services (like cloud integration or Cortana) compelling enough, people will want to use them anyhow.
Whoops, of course that's what I meant, darn it - thanks for the correction.
Fine, you worrywart. We'll make sure it's ray-shielded and and tucked away in a protective trench somewhere.
Yep, exactly. Specifically, the fact that it's extremely difficult to determine the factors of large prime numbers is the basis for a lot of cryptography - part of the "hard problem" required for any algorithm, where it's simple to compute in one direction, but extremely difficult to determine the components that led to that result. If someone tomorrow discovered a way to do this, it would immediately destroy a lot of our current crypto tech overnight. It wouldn't be an over-exaggeration to call that particular property of primes one of the linchpins of modern crypto.
Note that that elliptic curve crypto, a more recent approach, doesn't rely on prime factorization. As it's name suggests, it relies on properties of elliptic curves for its one way "hard problem" rather than factorization - it turns out that this is a more efficient approach for smaller key lengths. Not that anyone expecting someone to discover a simple prime factorization algorithm in the near future, but it's certainly nice to have alternative approaches.
Thanks for the link. I actually read through that, and while some of the arguments were certainly valid, some of them sounded an awful lot like simple justification for how Linux chooses to do things. For example, rapidly changing internal API interfaces is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when you assume you can just change the interface of any drivers for which you have the source. He acknowledges that it would be more work to maintain older, depreciated interfaces, and claims that they couldn't impose such a burden on volunteer programmers. It may be true in some cases, but that argument seems a little weak with the knowledge that these days most contributors today are actually paid by a corporation for their work on the kernel.
This sentence is of particular note: "...get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we are talking about GPL released drivers here, if your code doesn't fall under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, you leech)..."
This attitude is both the strength and weakness of Linux. It works FOR Linux as an open platform, but certainly AGAINST it as a commercial one, if a manufacturer doesn't wish to open-source their drivers - and that unfortunately includes video card manufacturers, which is also a major issue for Linux. If a commercial vendor feels unable to release open source drivers for their proprietary hardware for whatever reason, then Linux is simply *never* going to work reliably on their hardware.
More importantly, because client machines tend to be much more reliant on the subtle interfaces and behaviors of many complex drivers (headless servers don't have to worry about nearly as much), I believe that this philosophy is a large part of why Linux remains something of a second-class citizen on the desktop. I'm not saying this philosophy is necessarily wrong, but I think it's important to understand that it definitely comes with some tradeoffs.
There is no rush or time limit on who can make a successful application, on any platform.
Three words: Duke Nukem Forever.
Sure, modern higher-end laptops are ridiculously overpowered for about 95% of what people generally need to do with a PC. Hell, top-end smartphones are overpowered for what most people need to do with a PC, which is why (among other reasons), the overall PC market share is stagnating or declining. They're just not necessary for run of the mill, daily computing needs for most people. Non-gaming applications which actually require a desktop's power are the exception among the already rare, but they're most certain out there. And of course, games historically require a lot of GPU horsepower, which most laptops don't have in large quantities.
There are also small form-factor desktop PCs which are useful for lightweight office or home tasks, but for which the portability of a laptop is either completely unnecessary or even a liability.
So yeah, I totally agree - I was just pointing out the ignorance of mocking desktop PCs as 'last century'. Probably the same sort of hipsteritis that causes people to snicker at someone with (gasp) a three-year-old smartphone. It gets tiresome to have to repeatedly explain to people that the modern desktop PC is sort of like a full-sized work truck. It's completely overkill for most people's driving needs, but it's invaluable to professionals with specific requirements.
Desktops? Try an antique store, or a government office.
Or a development shop, or a music studio, or a digital artist's workshop, or a gamer's den, or anyone else that needs a machine with some significant horsepower that also doesn't need to be mobile. Try hooking up a VR headset to a laptop, and the hardware will openly mock you. Yes, desktops are still a thing, believe it or not, even if you personally can't imagine how you'd use one.
It wasn't a "golden age", it was just a gold rush. And did people seriously think the "gold rush" would last forever? It's like any other gold rush, literal or figurative - a few in the first wave get lucky and strike it rich. Most of the people who actually made a profit were selling equipment or services to the prospectors. And after the individual prospectors skimming off the surface were gone, it took a large-scale mining effort to exploit the resources at a deeper level.
The strength of indie developers are that they're able to move quickly with new ideas and on new platforms, but the new platforms don't come along all that often, and marketable new ideas are surprisingly hard to come by.
Microsoft is taking Linux seriously as a server platform, in which it has a significant presence and market share. Game developers target client machines, in which Linux has a very tiny market share (under 1% according to Steam). It's the same reason fewer developers bother making apps for Windows Phone, yet Microsoft itself is targeting iOS and Android with its own apps. Developers go where the market is.
Let's just say that the ethics preamble (at five lines) is longer than the library's current documentation.
Yep, nothing novel at all, even in conception. The real trick with deep learning software is figuring out how to integrate them into knowledge bases and provide useful training and feedback mechanisms. Honestly, creating the neural network software is the easy part, because there's a ton of academic research that tells you *exactly* how to do it. I actually downloaded and examined the code, and while it looks reasonably clean and functional, we're not exactly talking about a huge amount of work to replicate it - it's just a few hundred lines in total.
Moreover, when any software package starts with a section on "The Ethical Motivations" for its existence, it strikes me as the wrong sort of motivation altogether. The real motivation should be "I want to solve some interesting problems", and THAT will drive the design. This sounds like a pretty typical academic exercise, and as such, probably is not going to amount to much, other than as a starting point for some student projects here or there. But even that is dicey, as naturally, there's no documentation at all - just a readme file telling you to look at the source code to figure out how it works. Odds are pretty good that documentation is never actually written for it, because that's a hell of a lot less fun than writing the code.
Sorry, I really do love this sort of stuff, but it's a little hard to get excited about the project when its exactly the same sort of code I was tinkering with as an undergrad student decades ago. That anyone is actually comparing a few hundred lines of relatively simplistic C code to IBM or Google's machine learning projects is disingenuous at best, borderline insulting at worst.
I doubt that WWII subs would hold up to modern scrutiny, even at relatively slow speeds. Our detection capabilities have probably improved a thousand-fold or more in the last half century, and that might even be an underestimation.
A staggering amount of R&D has gone into optimizing hull surfaces / shapes and prop designs to minimize cavitation and other emissions, so it's not just the noise of the powerplants that are factors. I'm not sure if they do this any more, but at one time US submarine prop designs were highly guarded secrets, and kept covered when out of the water.
Breaking news... teenage kids are embarrassed by oblivious parents!
In other stunning news, people, including many parents, post waaay too much personal crap on Facebook.
True, but another inherent property of Diesel-Electric submarines is they can operate submerged in extreme silence ... nuclear subs make a very small but detectible amount of noise at all times underwater ...
When you talk about noisy nuke subs, you can talk about China's or India's, but the US has had many decades to eliminate those sorts of emanation and are extremely proficient at doing so. Eventually that will change as other nations reach parity with the US or Russia, but at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if US nukes like the Virginia class are actually even quieter than a NK diesel, at least when it's moving.
Enlighten me, what should one be using to chat securely these days?
I'd probably use Threema, as it has a trust-no-one model in which the most secure level (of the three available) requires personally exchanging keys with the target recipient. The company is also based in Switzerland, which, sadly, makes it a hell of a lot more secure by default than any US-based company, as we're quickly finding out with this pending Apple / FBI case.
That being said, I *don't* actually need secure chat, so I just use SMS or e-mail, which should be considered about as secure as a postcard.
...zero. There is absolutely no possibility of such an attack, on US soil or anywhere else.
There's this little thing called "statistics" you're completely ignoring. The probability is extremely low, but calling it "zero" is simply wrong. When I buy a lottery ticket, do you also call the chances of me winning "zero"? My house burning down is also probably pretty low-probability, but any sane person has insurance just the same. When you simply dismiss any chance outright, you destroy your own credibility. And if you're wrong, it's not like you will be held responsible. It's pretty easy to be dismissive when it's not your problem in the first place.
Also, I'm not sure where your faith in our impenetrable borders comes from. For fuck's sake, we have illegals from Central America pouring into the US all the time across our southern border. You seriously believe we'd actually detect a suitcase nuke coming across? Highly improbably, of course. Impossible, not at all.
If those people believe firmly enough that they will die, then - as is well known from studies in shamanism - those people will will themselves to die. There needn't be a single thing wrong with any of them, aside from their own credulity.
It makes me wonder a bit that you got modded +5 interesting with this little gem in there. WTF? Since when did Slashdot collectively believe in "booga-booga" witchcraft? And you're talking about rationality?
True, but keep in mind the boogeymen change over time. Remember, it used to be "communists". So long as the government has a fear-inducing target, they can acquire more power.
Sometimes it's even done for the right reasons (a desire to catch criminals), but all too often it seems at heart a desire to build bureaucratic fiefdoms just for the sake of acquiring more power and wealth. Look at how many local police forces now have armed-to-the-teeth (meaning well-funded) paramilitary-like squads? Are people aware of how much they profit from the war on drugs due to asset forfeiture and increased funding? No one complains, because they're unlawfully stealing from rich drug dealers, not normal folks... right? And how many top-heavy regulatory agencies in the government are unnecessarily siphoning off vast quantities of wealth from private industry, while only providing the illusion of safety for consumers?
Half the problem here is that so many people are perfectly fine with ceding unbelievable amounts of power to the federal government when it's for a cause they think is good and just, but then somehow expect the government to leave them alone on the issue of privacy or personal liberty. Unfortunately, it just doesn't seem to work that way in practice. When you allow the creation of powerful federal bureaucracies, you take the bad with the good, and this is definitely some of the bad.
Redundancy is better than reliability, and low cost-per GB means redundancy is easily affordable. Because no matter how much you spend on a drive, you're never going to hit 100% reliability, which means that you still have to do everything you're going right now in order to protect your data, with multiple levels of backup plus RAID if you need high availability. Cheap per-GB costs means you can build in all the reliability you want into a system yourself, and it's probably going to ultimately be cheaper than if manufacturers tried to build that reliability into the HD itself.
What's really great is that this flexibility allows you to choose the level of redundancy that's right for your data. I've got a local media server NAS with a bunch of my ripped DVDs and Blu-rays. These only have the protection of RAID, since while I'd be sad if I lost them, I could theoretically always re-rip from the original discs. However, my more critical documents are automatically backed up in several locations, including offsite, since I absolutely can't afford to lose that data.