Bah, if the engineers at NASA are so smart, why are they not billionaires? Moving money around online is more profitable thus it must require a higher intelligence and drive then engineering.
Actually, the air force had some interesting prototypes a few decades back for rockets that could launch, do work, and land themselves again. The basic idea has been proven, but they could not find a way to make it cost effective given something like 98% of a rocket's mass is fuel, thus the equipment and power to pull the trick off made it much worse at actually getting a payload up.
The idea that NASA has been poo-pooing SpaceX is mostly a myth. NASA has been urging caution and realism, but NASA has been on SpaceX's side from the early days. However people really get into the narrative of hip young capitalists taking on the stogy old government and shoe horn an adversarial narrative in.
Which is why the final result will probably be somewhere in between. The reusability issues were not expected, engineers believed they would get a lot more out of the parts then they did, thus experience showed them that the operational reality was not as rosy as the calculations. SpaceX will probably encounter something similar, right now they, like others before them, are overestimating how reusable things will be. With any luck technology and materials have improved enough that they will do better then the older designs, but until they actually start using the units and getting real world behaviors under their belt, they need to temper their confidence with the experiences of past attempts by others.
SpaceX has become a darling in part because people have a lot of confidence in plucky young companies and want to believe their projections, but for the moment they just do not have the track record to back up their estimates.
On the other hand, people who have been doing things for decades tend to have a better idea of the problems one encounters then people who have never actually done something.
That would be terribly amusing. I can just imagine what a 'dark day' would do to those ISPs, though I suspect Level 3 has contracts that prevent it, which is sad.
Virtual war would only work if you had some way to have each side agree to abide by the outcome. However, countries are far more likely to go 'no, I do not agree to loose, now I will hurt you in the real world' and start bombing something.
There is a difference between scammers shilling impossible technology and big companies that are too cheap, short sighted, or lazy to install additional equipment for rare situations. One is a lier, the other is playing the odds and just happened to loose this time.
Having gotten involved in arguments about it on multiple mainstream news sites, yeah, people really bought into them. Some because they were establishment, some because they described themselves as pro-science, many because they pointed to the company already making money with their technology, etc. The voices saying 'this is bullshit' were mostly drowned out or shouted down.
There are no poor parts of down. Everyone has a smartphone, modern laptop, high speed internet connection, cash to burn, and is only interested in the latest hot list of content. No one I socialize with uses DVDs, therefor such people do not exist, they must be a myth like those people without ID cards.
Or the looming problem that the 'under 25' crowd will start running into soon, what do you do when something you want to watch is not available? If one is watching only new series and latest movies this is not a big deal, but sooner or later people often want to go back and watch something they saw years before, and even the best streaming services right now generally only have a small (and rotating) fraction of content available. Their feeling will also probably change the first time they are part way through a series and it is pulled from the streaming catalog.
For either rental or purchase, once a disk is out there, it is out there. You generally do not get all available copies of it (including ones in your playlist) vanishing overnight.
Ahm.. that "boring publisher" was paying him to research and prototype VR headsets. This is actually a good example of why older companies are often nervous about researching new technologies, the pattern of paying people to do research and then they leave to do a startup is an old and frustrating issue in tech. Companies start to feel like they are bankrolling the research phase of startups but not getting a return on it.
One of the things that is not clear is if he took code with him or not. Oculus has stated that any code he might have taken with him would have been long since replaced by now, which indicates that he probably did, in which case they might have a case.
From my reading, this might be a situation where a non-compete clause might make a bit of sense. Zenimax paid him to do research and prototyping for a VR headset, and then he turned around and took what he learned doing that to another company. Even if there is no legal backing to stop him, it is still pretty bad form.
That is what concerns me about people shilling these 'password locker' sites or applications. Does that not simply create a single point of failure, complete with a list of all the sites the person can now access?
Two factor solutions only work until you want to log in from someone else's device. The general problem with such systems is that they make assumptions about what kind of technology the person is going to have with them at all times. This is less of a problem for people who live out of their smart phone, but can quickly become problematic for others who need to be able to connect remotely when something is going wrong or they need a piece of data.
The better question is, are his supporters stupid? Generally one does not get to be that powerful by being stupid, while we mock them politicians are usually quite intelligent, but that tends to be hidden behind closed doors. What the public generally sees is a carefully crafted image designed to appeal to certain voter blocks, a persona if you like. Ran Paul's stupidity is just a role he plays based off analysis of people who vote for him.
This is only the case for certain values of 'libertarian'. Like any large group, the ideals are rather fluid and tend to be more flavor then specification.
Depends on how you are doing the backups. Say you only have 1TB of data, you could back it up once per day appending and only need to swap out tapes every 9 months or so.
Though were I see this really being useful (at least to me) is recording scientific data. Experiments can put out obscene amounts of information and I could easily see hooking one of these up to a detector and being happy that you only need to change tapes once a week or so.
Which is why tape will probably be around for a long time. It is great that HDDs have become more economical for things they are good at, but there will probably never be one solution across the entire range of use cases. Tape has its place.
And a rather important part of that inconsistency is people having different weights and concerns. As geeks stuff like this often seems really important, but a lot of consumers do not care nearly as much and thus these plans exist not because people are stupid, but because they are ok with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, if the engineers at NASA are so smart, why are they not billionaires? Moving money around online is more profitable thus it must require a higher intelligence and drive then engineering.
Or if it doesn't, I am sure it must have been the fault of lobbyists or other conspirators out to make sure they do not succeed.
Actually, the air force had some interesting prototypes a few decades back for rockets that could launch, do work, and land themselves again. The basic idea has been proven, but they could not find a way to make it cost effective given something like 98% of a rocket's mass is fuel, thus the equipment and power to pull the trick off made it much worse at actually getting a payload up.
The idea that NASA has been poo-pooing SpaceX is mostly a myth. NASA has been urging caution and realism, but NASA has been on SpaceX's side from the early days. However people really get into the narrative of hip young capitalists taking on the stogy old government and shoe horn an adversarial narrative in.
Which is why the final result will probably be somewhere in between. The reusability issues were not expected, engineers believed they would get a lot more out of the parts then they did, thus experience showed them that the operational reality was not as rosy as the calculations. SpaceX will probably encounter something similar, right now they, like others before them, are overestimating how reusable things will be. With any luck technology and materials have improved enough that they will do better then the older designs, but until they actually start using the units and getting real world behaviors under their belt, they need to temper their confidence with the experiences of past attempts by others.
SpaceX has become a darling in part because people have a lot of confidence in plucky young companies and want to believe their projections, but for the moment they just do not have the track record to back up their estimates.
On the other hand, people who have been doing things for decades tend to have a better idea of the problems one encounters then people who have never actually done something.
Well, one example would be this gem of a piece: http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/29/...
That would be terribly amusing. I can just imagine what a 'dark day' would do to those ISPs, though I suspect Level 3 has contracts that prevent it, which is sad.
Not that much different then usual. A couple of paint bombs can cover up view ports just as easily.
Virtual war would only work if you had some way to have each side agree to abide by the outcome. However, countries are far more likely to go 'no, I do not agree to loose, now I will hurt you in the real world' and start bombing something.
Yeah, apparently people were outraged when I brought up that example since I "obviously did not understand their technology".
There is a difference between scammers shilling impossible technology and big companies that are too cheap, short sighted, or lazy to install additional equipment for rare situations. One is a lier, the other is playing the odds and just happened to loose this time.
Having gotten involved in arguments about it on multiple mainstream news sites, yeah, people really bought into them. Some because they were establishment, some because they described themselves as pro-science, many because they pointed to the company already making money with their technology, etc. The voices saying 'this is bullshit' were mostly drowned out or shouted down.
There are no poor parts of down. Everyone has a smartphone, modern laptop, high speed internet connection, cash to burn, and is only interested in the latest hot list of content. No one I socialize with uses DVDs, therefor such people do not exist, they must be a myth like those people without ID cards.
Or the looming problem that the 'under 25' crowd will start running into soon, what do you do when something you want to watch is not available? If one is watching only new series and latest movies this is not a big deal, but sooner or later people often want to go back and watch something they saw years before, and even the best streaming services right now generally only have a small (and rotating) fraction of content available. Their feeling will also probably change the first time they are part way through a series and it is pulled from the streaming catalog.
For either rental or purchase, once a disk is out there, it is out there. You generally do not get all available copies of it (including ones in your playlist) vanishing overnight.
Ahm.. that "boring publisher" was paying him to research and prototype VR headsets. This is actually a good example of why older companies are often nervous about researching new technologies, the pattern of paying people to do research and then they leave to do a startup is an old and frustrating issue in tech. Companies start to feel like they are bankrolling the research phase of startups but not getting a return on it.
One of the things that is not clear is if he took code with him or not. Oculus has stated that any code he might have taken with him would have been long since replaced by now, which indicates that he probably did, in which case they might have a case.
From my reading, this might be a situation where a non-compete clause might make a bit of sense. Zenimax paid him to do research and prototyping for a VR headset, and then he turned around and took what he learned doing that to another company. Even if there is no legal backing to stop him, it is still pretty bad form.
That is what concerns me about people shilling these 'password locker' sites or applications. Does that not simply create a single point of failure, complete with a list of all the sites the person can now access?
Two factor solutions only work until you want to log in from someone else's device. The general problem with such systems is that they make assumptions about what kind of technology the person is going to have with them at all times. This is less of a problem for people who live out of their smart phone, but can quickly become problematic for others who need to be able to connect remotely when something is going wrong or they need a piece of data.
The better question is, are his supporters stupid? Generally one does not get to be that powerful by being stupid, while we mock them politicians are usually quite intelligent, but that tends to be hidden behind closed doors. What the public generally sees is a carefully crafted image designed to appeal to certain voter blocks, a persona if you like. Ran Paul's stupidity is just a role he plays based off analysis of people who vote for him.
This is only the case for certain values of 'libertarian'. Like any large group, the ideals are rather fluid and tend to be more flavor then specification.
Depends on how you are doing the backups. Say you only have 1TB of data, you could back it up once per day appending and only need to swap out tapes every 9 months or so.
Though were I see this really being useful (at least to me) is recording scientific data. Experiments can put out obscene amounts of information and I could easily see hooking one of these up to a detector and being happy that you only need to change tapes once a week or so.
Which is why tape will probably be around for a long time. It is great that HDDs have become more economical for things they are good at, but there will probably never be one solution across the entire range of use cases. Tape has its place.
And a rather important part of that inconsistency is people having different weights and concerns. As geeks stuff like this often seems really important, but a lot of consumers do not care nearly as much and thus these plans exist not because people are stupid, but because they are ok with it.
Generally they do not even need to go that far, selling your debt to a collection agency tends to be pretty effective.