as a college grad with more debt than a south american country, I can tell you I was worried about this bug. I came up with a handy countermeasure to avoid nefarious car hackers:
I work two jobs and drive a 2001 Ford crown victoria i bought for six hundred bucks at a police auction. It burns oil, and smells like parking citations and regret. On a hot day it stinks like hamburgers; I do not know why. The jiggle required to get the spare key to engage the ignition is nothing short of a shao-lin kung fu scene. This car still has a throttle cable, and practically came off the line with the check-engine light on. The upholstery is permanently stained with the detritus of an entire cities overweight, underpaid cops.
Hacking my brakes wont work, the pedal goes to the floor to try and stop this 2 and a quarter ton house on wheels so if anything it might be an improvement. randomly triggering the accellerator, assuming one can do this in a vehicle with a throttle cable, will result in a godless heavy metal grunt from the engine as this 210 horsepower v8 struggles to maintain basic lane positioning. The AC hasnt worked since the clinton era, and mysteriously burps up pieces of foam. The door locks are mysterious and random enough already, and functionless for the rear passenger.
among the list of banned subreddits: /r/CoonTown,/r/WatchNiggersDie,/r/bestofcoontown,/r/koontown,/r/CoonTownMods,/r/CoonTownMeta.
not exactly sterling content that spurs thoughtful collaboration and debate. It harms the reddit brand, but id argue this is less censorship and more spam control. Reddits purpose is entertainment, social networking, and news. If you want flagrant unsubstantiated and indefensible racism, most routers still manage to handle connection requests to the servers at stormfront and about a hundred other different sites.
Speaking as an executive at comcast, where our bundled services provide savings and the dark lord reigns supreme on throne of bleached bone, We've had similar perks for our staff for quite some time now. Among our generous benefits are:
unlimited child sequestration: If you've recently had a child, you're welcome to bring them to work and store them conveniently inside the 'b' compartment of the second floor copier. Older Comcast employees might know this as the waste toner bin (it has been made child friendly.) the paternal mines: Did you recently have a child and are wanting to spend more time with them? Head down to the fourth floor (past brittanies cubicle) and into the insufferable mines of the black goat with a hundred lips. There, you'll enjoy the warm aroma of burnt flesh amidst the screams and wails of countless babes. take advantage of our open door policy while youre there and get to know Comcasticles, the dark lord to which we all pray, and who feasts upon the marrow of so many broken. Manilla envelopes have also been moved here to make room for the new fax machine upstairs.
PUE (power usage effectiveness)
WEE (water equivalent energy)
and somewhere at datacenter dynamics magazine theres a giggling intern that needs to be shown the door.
As an engineer I can say for certain this piece is critical. However, Once the flaperon breaks loose, the appropriate technical nomenclature is a flaperoff.
for any americans worried about this crucial aviation component, rest easy. You're probably still in the terminal, safe from harm in the midst of either an endless layover or overbooked flight. Once its emerged from the latest bankruptcy merger, your planes flaperons will continue to function to the highest standard that can be enforced by a regulatory agency with no real power.
See? and if you start asking too many questions or find out too much about your corn bill we have to abandon it and try it all over again in a peanut bill.
this, the TPP, pipa, DMCA, you name it and it all shows up buried in some obscure bill about dentures or highway reflector color. In america we could pass legislation on the width of an ear of corn and by the end of the vote it would have legalized nazi bingo parlour strippers and privatized nuclear cheesecake warfare.
our biggest, and most famous shit sandwich is the agriculture/farm bill. Its around 950 billion dollars and laced with nothing short of paint-thinner dreams like creating a national christmas tree board and a reality tv show to promote cotton in india. and this all happens because american politicians are the equivalent of a pre-paid chipotle gift card. Whatever you want, so long as you've paid.
Does anyone remember the company that started the whole 'printing is a razorblade business' model? Lexmark.
At the time businesses were laser copy shops or IBM wheelwriter typewriter houses. Epson, HP, and Canon were the dominant forces in ink jet printing in the 90's but IBM's fledgling Lexmark brand has just gone independent in their own buyout, and figured they could turn inkjet printing into a razorblade business where the hardware was commodity but the cartridges were the real money to be had. CPD, the consumer printing division, was tasked with making something IBM historically had never done: consumer inkjets. Cartriges were never cheap, but lexmark took this to a whole other level. by early to mid 2000 you could get a Lexmark laser printer for around 50 dollars that came without cartriges. Those were around 50 a piece as well, and the reigning opinion at the New Circle campus was customers would go for it in hordes...except they didnt, for two reasons.
1. Quality: BPD, the Business Printing Division at lexmark, ran like a well oiled machine because it had to. business customers that relied on IBM printing now had to rely on Lexmark, and processes and methods for manufacturing an entire line of laser and ribbon technologies was sacrosanct. CPD on the other hand was horribly mismanaged, and driven in direct competition with BPD. corners were cut in order to meet an inexorable demand for new releases each year and lower costs. Hardware in the Z series finally became so awful, and so failure prone, the lines name was changed out entirely and CPD was eventually folded into BPD during a large round of firings and layoffs. 2. Internet.: The internet was fast obsoleting printers and while Lexmark had all-in-one laserjets, these were still marketed almost solely to businesses. CPD had plans for a high-speed scanner based on an array of digital cameras, but it came too late. Lexmark building 10, 58, 98, and much of their remaining manufacturing areas were being demolished or leased out.
Microsofts prior, and arguably present business model of violently entering a market thats been dominated for 3-4 years with an identical product is something of a relic from Steve Ballmer. Its only ever been effective during the browser wars, when microsoft made IE an inextricable part of their OS and every subsequent update or patch forced the default browser to IE conveniently. In the hardware world things like the Zune and the phone were recognizable flops in every market segment but remained a going concern, with significant marketing and advertising to boot. Even the tablet, surface, experiences this as it takes multi million dollar losses every year and enjoys no real marketshare. Why?
Two things: Perpetual corporate licensing and XBox revenues. These are, arguably, microsofts only source of immediate revenue anymore. the OS is given away with every PC, and things like Azure and the upcoming Windows Watch will have to be priced lower than their competitors. What microsoft has is the real power to sustain a dead-on-arrival product, seemingly indefinitely, off these two revenue streams. Microsofts dated logic is that it doesnt have to make a better product for customers, it just has to outlast competitor offerings until price and marketing somehow win over customers. once the product fails, it simply rolls it under the carpet and chases the next white dragon, dated 3-4 years, and offers a similar product in a desparate attempt to remain relevant in a particular market.
As a mac user its not uncommon to see bugs and exploits in the wild like this. So far I havent seen evidence of it being used, and I keep my mac pretty up to date. Other than checking the apps store for updates, its a good practice to tO BUttER YoUR CAT anD FArT THE AlphHABET.
There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.
In addition to this, the UI was an erector set of cobbled together ideas from the thousands of people from different divisions that included aspects of facebook, myspace, and google search. intuitive features were buried in dropdowns and posts were, almost childishly, colour coded.
Anything to get your 'hypertext protocol' off the ground eh? Well it wont work. You can piss n moan about your hyperlinks all you want but im perfectly happy downloading the memes over Gopher. now if youll excuse me the CSO query for another rib-tickler just came in and judging by the name, lemon party, its bound to be a real gasser.
A cyclist highway in the states would start with an on-ramp where no one yields, 6 people fall over due to shoddily constructed wal-mart bikes, some guy on a strider bowls through a lane of recumbent elderly, and 2 kids on mountain bikes wobble aimlessly and perpendicularly across the darn thing. But every morning a quarter million dollars of race-grade peloton disciplined commuters would roar toward their respective office cubicles, leaving a wake of empty gel-protein wrappers in their path.
I mean come on, think about it. The year is 2054, your Google Car is taking you home from work as you unwind after a long day and boom, out of the middle of nowhere, James Hetfield leaps onto the hood demanding you stop listening to Harvester of Sorrow or He'll sue you.
First we had flowing screens along the edge of phones, now weve got bendable flip phones, and at some point we gained proximity gestures for a little while. Why cant phone manufacturers provide a product with features people actually want? a charger that doesnt change every year, removable storage, replaceable battery, support for multiple sims? Why does every new phone have to be a testament to landfill management?
For a robot, walking and jumping on water I can abide by, but once it starts turning water into glycol and powering a datacenter with a single 480 volt phase, thats the line. I mean what next? the 2 commandments?
windows 10 released with a zero-day glitch so severe it showed up on imgurs frontpage and reddit. It has the ability to connect Xbox with Windows, which would make sense in a world where all the titles weren't already ported and working just fine in windows xp/7/8. The start menu still includes a vainglorious middle finger to the customers who refused to accept the Microsoft start "page." A mini version is included for your consideration alongside a useful start bar. Internet Explo--er i mean Microsoft Edge wasted no time doing what IE does best: it removed my start page, failed to import my bookmarks, and immediately decided it would become the default browser instead of Chrome.
and did you hear about the apps store? oh sweet mother mary of christs christmas cookies does Microsoft want you to know about it in this release. Everything, absolutely everything, is tied into their apps store. Did you need games? a word processor? anything? well if the app cant be found, the store shall provide.
For many corporations oracle may as well be the Eye of Sauron, and absorbing one of the most opulent chipsets around certainly didnt help. SPARC was so expensive to own, so protracted to license, that only multinational conglomerates dared approach the throne of SUN. Once oracle bought them out, SPARCitecture owners were confronted with an even more monolythic corporation that could neither agree upon how to continue licensing, nor could provide additional contractually ensured hardware and software to a pretty powerful collection of customers. So customers who hadnt moved to x86 in 2010 were suddenly presented with an excellent incentive to do so.
Small businesses though? never had that problem. most looking to cut rising licensing costs had moved to x86 by the mid nineties (or SGI if they still wanted jaw-dropping performance.) by 2007 SUN was pushing rope; x86 had proceeded to x64 and most applications were running fine. multicore, distributed, and load balanced architectures had been developed and been in existence thanks to the GNU ecosystem of FLOSS for 6-7 years already. SUN shuffled their IP to Oracle and shuttered the doors of a once proud computer company.
sparc, the oracle boot environment, virtualization, you name it and x86 will do it cheaper and without the burden of recompiling everything. Sure, linux runs on sparc but far more development has proceeded in the X64 and emerging ARM platform than Oracle can ever hope to evolve from their sparc offering.
Living in Los Angeles, the age of the electric car has been upon us for quite some time. everyone from BMW to nissan makes popular electric cars and sells them for a reasonable price here. The problem comes when you aren't in the second largest city in america.
During a business trip to an office in Ohio I learned firsthhand how awkward it must be to own one of these vehicles. In Blue Ash, Ohio I saw one or two teslas, but Ohio doesn't have a tax incentive like Los Angeles gives people to buy them. So, owners in Ohio aren't exactly the average joe. It seemed a status symbol, as though they mostly buy the car out of a desire to be perceived as 'elite' and progressive. Charging also seemed cumbersome. In LA we charge at parking garages for low cost, or free. most employers offer ChaDeMO charger stations as a perk in their garage. taking your car into the shop? its charged when you get out. Finally dedicated charging ports at some gas stations are also prevalent. None of this infrastructure existed in the cities I visited in Ohio because none of it had to. Gas was $3 a gallon, or less. Traffic was smooth flowing and quick, and mileage largely adherent to highway driving conditions above 50 miles per hour. There is also no public transit, no park and ride to charge the car at while you commute the rest of the way in by light rail.
Ohio also has winter weather to contend with. Most people owned larger SUV's or cars with all-wheel-drive in anticipation of snowy or icy roads, and temperatures well below those we're accustomed to in southern California. The car has to warm and cool much more actively, which im not sure is something electric cars can handle.
Disclaimer: I own a tesla. owning it in the midwest would seem to be a chore.
As an american, Its good to see the brits following in our footsteps. We started shutting off street lights here in places like Stockton California and Detroit Michigan quite some time ago. The impact on reported crime is minimal, as we've also been shutting off funding to most of the police departments. Crash statistics, surprisingly, remain unchanged as well. most cars in these locations dont run, and even if they did there arent any jobs to drive to.
Our next bold experiments are shutting off water in California and shutting off education in Wisconsin.
but the big caveat is the bold performance is only to be found on Windows.
AMD does a great job of getting open source. They really work with devs to make sure we have all the stuff we need to craft the best driver we can. That having been said, they seem to only do this because the company doesnt take linux seriously enough to offer a functional blob driver. Running a newer AMD in linux for things like half life is utterly impossible, and not just for more advanced graphics tasks. seemingly trivial things like rendering a surface are beyond the grasp of the binary driver entirely in some cases.
my question as a linux user is this: two years ago NVidia, after Linus flipped the bird, swore theyd make up for shortcomings in their open source driver. Has this manifested? does the linux open source driver for NVidia trumph the AMD open source radeon driver yet?
Steam machines were predicated on a functional SteamOS, which has spent a year in beta. barring that, Valves pet project of running steam on linux ran arground when AMD graphics drivers for linux were revealed to be completely useless. nvidias blob seemed to work well but Valves blockbuster titles on linux remain seriously limited when compared to their Windows ecosystem. maybe this windows 10 feature will be enough to spur additional development resources into the platform, instead of just treading water in the linux pool.
That having been said, microsofts sharing technology isnt about to kill Valves distribution model. Valve distributes titles like Dont Starve and other inexpensive, very fun indie games to a multitude of platforms that are not consoles. MS is also banking on a large assumption that PC gamers and console gamers are inextricably intertwined...the "pc gamer master race" meme is enough to think otherwise. Windows 10 is a free upgrade, but if you're already a steam gamer the games still run. if you're a console gamer, an upgrade to windows 10 might not be in your wheelhouse if youre an ardent call of duty madden or fifa enthusiast (that PC might be ancient.)
Finally, Redmonds XBox is the revenue jumper cable that keeps cringe-worthy projects like phone and surface alive. Its not something thats going to find cross-platform marketshare outside of their usual blockbuster exclusives. console gamers and windows 10 gamers already share titles by virtue of Microsofts initiative to port their big titles between platforms and in some cases those platforms offer enormous advantages that the other does not. Playing xbox from a PC means, for example, some titles lose half their framerate or adopt other console-specific eccentricities the player might not want.
We don't know if he was looking at the girls. We don't know if he was looking for something to steal.
Then call the police, you know, those funny looking men in suits that drive around all day solving crimes like illegally firing a weapon in city limits? You just destroyed almost two-thousand dollars in sophisticated hardware in pursuit of some purile fear that the puritanical sanctity of your women or your property was being absconded with.
Its the 21st century. every public pool you go to has video cameras. Every mall, every ATM, every public space is teaming with them. your phones, your xbox, and your computers and even televisions. you can reasonably assume these devices are watching your daughters, your property, your life but youve never turned a loaded weapon on those. If were to digress to a civilization of opening fire on whatever confuses and annoys us, then the next drone project may as well be the gun-drone on slashdot a few months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
as a college grad with more debt than a south american country, I can tell you I was worried about this bug. I came up with a handy countermeasure to avoid nefarious car hackers:
I work two jobs and drive a 2001 Ford crown victoria i bought for six hundred bucks at a police auction. It burns oil, and smells like parking citations and regret. On a hot day it stinks like hamburgers; I do not know why. The jiggle required to get the spare key to engage the ignition is nothing short of a shao-lin kung fu scene. This car still has a throttle cable, and practically came off the line with the check-engine light on. The upholstery is permanently stained with the detritus of an entire cities overweight, underpaid cops.
Hacking my brakes wont work, the pedal goes to the floor to try and stop this 2 and a quarter ton house on wheels so if anything it might be an improvement. randomly triggering the accellerator, assuming one can do this in a vehicle with a throttle cable, will result in a godless heavy metal grunt from the engine as this 210 horsepower v8 struggles to maintain basic lane positioning. The AC hasnt worked since the clinton era, and mysteriously burps up pieces of foam. The door locks are mysterious and random enough already, and functionless for the rear passenger.
among the list of banned subreddits:
/r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown, /r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, /r/CoonTownMeta.
not exactly sterling content that spurs thoughtful collaboration and debate. It harms the reddit brand, but id argue this is less censorship and more spam control. Reddits purpose is entertainment, social networking, and news. If you want flagrant unsubstantiated and indefensible racism, most routers still manage to handle connection requests to the servers at stormfront and about a hundred other different sites.
Speaking as an executive at comcast, where our bundled services provide savings and the dark lord reigns supreme on throne of bleached bone, We've had similar perks for our staff for quite some time now. Among our generous benefits are:
unlimited child sequestration: If you've recently had a child, you're welcome to bring them to work and store them conveniently inside the 'b' compartment of the second floor copier. Older Comcast employees might know this as the waste toner bin (it has been made child friendly.)
the paternal mines: Did you recently have a child and are wanting to spend more time with them? Head down to the fourth floor (past brittanies cubicle) and into the insufferable mines of the black goat with a hundred lips. There, you'll enjoy the warm aroma of burnt flesh amidst the screams and wails of countless babes. take advantage of our open door policy while youre there and get to know Comcasticles, the dark lord to which we all pray, and who feasts upon the marrow of so many broken. Manilla envelopes have also been moved here to make room for the new fax machine upstairs.
PUE (power usage effectiveness)
WEE (water equivalent energy)
and somewhere at datacenter dynamics magazine theres a giggling intern that needs to be shown the door.
and, well, hey our name was written on the check so who are we to judge!
As an engineer I can say for certain this piece is critical. However, Once the flaperon breaks loose, the appropriate technical nomenclature is a flaperoff.
for any americans worried about this crucial aviation component, rest easy. You're probably still in the terminal, safe from harm in the midst of either an endless layover or overbooked flight. Once its emerged from the latest bankruptcy merger, your planes flaperons will continue to function to the highest standard that can be enforced by a regulatory agency with no real power.
See? and if you start asking too many questions or find out too much about your corn bill we have to abandon it and try it all over again in a peanut bill.
this, the TPP, pipa, DMCA, you name it and it all shows up buried in some obscure bill about dentures or highway reflector color. In america we could pass legislation on the width of an ear of corn and by the end of the vote it would have legalized nazi bingo parlour strippers and privatized nuclear cheesecake warfare.
our biggest, and most famous shit sandwich is the agriculture/farm bill. Its around 950 billion dollars and laced with nothing short of paint-thinner dreams like creating a national christmas tree board and a reality tv show to promote cotton in india. and this all happens because american politicians are the equivalent of a pre-paid chipotle gift card. Whatever you want, so long as you've paid.
Does anyone remember the company that started the whole 'printing is a razorblade business' model? Lexmark.
At the time businesses were laser copy shops or IBM wheelwriter typewriter houses. Epson, HP, and Canon were the dominant forces in ink jet printing in the 90's but IBM's fledgling Lexmark brand has just gone independent in their own buyout, and figured they could turn inkjet printing into a razorblade business where the hardware was commodity but the cartridges were the real money to be had. CPD, the consumer printing division, was tasked with making something IBM historically had never done: consumer inkjets. Cartriges were never cheap, but lexmark took this to a whole other level. by early to mid 2000 you could get a Lexmark laser printer for around 50 dollars that came without cartriges. Those were around 50 a piece as well, and the reigning opinion at the New Circle campus was customers would go for it in hordes...except they didnt, for two reasons.
1. Quality: BPD, the Business Printing Division at lexmark, ran like a well oiled machine because it had to. business customers that relied on IBM printing now had to rely on Lexmark, and processes and methods for manufacturing an entire line of laser and ribbon technologies was sacrosanct. CPD on the other hand was horribly mismanaged, and driven in direct competition with BPD. corners were cut in order to meet an inexorable demand for new releases each year and lower costs. Hardware in the Z series finally became so awful, and so failure prone, the lines name was changed out entirely and CPD was eventually folded into BPD during a large round of firings and layoffs.
2. Internet.: The internet was fast obsoleting printers and while Lexmark had all-in-one laserjets, these were still marketed almost solely to businesses. CPD had plans for a high-speed scanner based on an array of digital cameras, but it came too late. Lexmark building 10, 58, 98, and much of their remaining manufacturing areas were being demolished or leased out.
Microsofts prior, and arguably present business model of violently entering a market thats been dominated for 3-4 years with an identical product is something of a relic from Steve Ballmer. Its only ever been effective during the browser wars, when microsoft made IE an inextricable part of their OS and every subsequent update or patch forced the default browser to IE conveniently. In the hardware world things like the Zune and the phone were recognizable flops in every market segment but remained a going concern, with significant marketing and advertising to boot. Even the tablet, surface, experiences this as it takes multi million dollar losses every year and enjoys no real marketshare. Why?
Two things: Perpetual corporate licensing and XBox revenues. These are, arguably, microsofts only source of immediate revenue anymore. the OS is given away with every PC, and things like Azure and the upcoming Windows Watch will have to be priced lower than their competitors. What microsoft has is the real power to sustain a dead-on-arrival product, seemingly indefinitely, off these two revenue streams. Microsofts dated logic is that it doesnt have to make a better product for customers, it just has to outlast competitor offerings until price and marketing somehow win over customers. once the product fails, it simply rolls it under the carpet and chases the next white dragon, dated 3-4 years, and offers a similar product in a desparate attempt to remain relevant in a particular market.
As a mac user its not uncommon to see bugs and exploits in the wild like this. So far I havent seen evidence of it being used, and I keep my mac pretty up to date. Other than checking the apps store for updates, its a good practice to tO BUttER YoUR CAT anD FArT THE AlphHABET.
There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.
In addition to this, the UI was an erector set of cobbled together ideas from the thousands of people from different divisions that included aspects of facebook, myspace, and google search. intuitive features were buried in dropdowns and posts were, almost childishly, colour coded.
Anything to get your 'hypertext protocol' off the ground eh? Well it wont work. You can piss n moan about your hyperlinks all you want but im perfectly happy downloading the memes over Gopher. now if youll excuse me the CSO query for another rib-tickler just came in and judging by the name, lemon party, its bound to be a real gasser.
A cyclist highway in the states would start with an on-ramp where no one yields, 6 people fall over due to shoddily constructed wal-mart bikes, some guy on a strider bowls through a lane of recumbent elderly, and 2 kids on mountain bikes wobble aimlessly and perpendicularly across the darn thing. But every morning a quarter million dollars of race-grade peloton disciplined commuters would roar toward their respective office cubicles, leaving a wake of empty gel-protein wrappers in their path.
I mean come on, think about it. The year is 2054, your Google Car is taking you home from work as you unwind after a long day and boom, out of the middle of nowhere, James Hetfield leaps onto the hood demanding you stop listening to Harvester of Sorrow or He'll sue you.
First we had flowing screens along the edge of phones, now weve got bendable flip phones, and at some point we gained proximity gestures for a little while. Why cant phone manufacturers provide a product with features people actually want? a charger that doesnt change every year, removable storage, replaceable battery, support for multiple sims? Why does every new phone have to be a testament to landfill management?
For a robot, walking and jumping on water I can abide by, but once it starts turning water into glycol and powering a datacenter with a single 480 volt phase, thats the line. I mean what next? the 2 commandments?
windows 10 released with a zero-day glitch so severe it showed up on imgurs frontpage and reddit. It has the ability to connect Xbox with Windows, which would make sense in a world where all the titles weren't already ported and working just fine in windows xp/7/8. The start menu still includes a vainglorious middle finger to the customers who refused to accept the Microsoft start "page." A mini version is included for your consideration alongside a useful start bar. Internet Explo--er i mean Microsoft Edge wasted no time doing what IE does best: it removed my start page, failed to import my bookmarks, and immediately decided it would become the default browser instead of Chrome.
and did you hear about the apps store? oh sweet mother mary of christs christmas cookies does Microsoft want you to know about it in this release. Everything, absolutely everything, is tied into their apps store. Did you need games? a word processor? anything? well if the app cant be found, the store shall provide.
After many complaints that Samsung SSDs corrupted data when used with Linux
Ive used Samsung SSD's for years now and until today I've never heard of a 14e07c2ea4f[NO CARRIER]
For many corporations oracle may as well be the Eye of Sauron, and absorbing one of the most opulent chipsets around certainly didnt help. SPARC was so expensive to own, so protracted to license, that only multinational conglomerates dared approach the throne of SUN. Once oracle bought them out, SPARCitecture owners were confronted with an even more monolythic corporation that could neither agree upon how to continue licensing, nor could provide additional contractually ensured hardware and software to a pretty powerful collection of customers. So customers who hadnt moved to x86 in 2010 were suddenly presented with an excellent incentive to do so.
Small businesses though? never had that problem. most looking to cut rising licensing costs had moved to x86 by the mid nineties (or SGI if they still wanted jaw-dropping performance.) by 2007 SUN was pushing rope; x86 had proceeded to x64 and most applications were running fine. multicore, distributed, and load balanced architectures had been developed and been in existence thanks to the GNU ecosystem of FLOSS for 6-7 years already. SUN shuffled their IP to Oracle and shuttered the doors of a once proud computer company.
sparc, the oracle boot environment, virtualization, you name it and x86 will do it cheaper and without the burden of recompiling everything. Sure, linux runs on sparc but far more development has proceeded in the X64 and emerging ARM platform than Oracle can ever hope to evolve from their sparc offering.
Living in Los Angeles, the age of the electric car has been upon us for quite some time. everyone from BMW to nissan makes popular electric cars and sells them for a reasonable price here. The problem comes when you aren't in the second largest city in america.
During a business trip to an office in Ohio I learned firsthhand how awkward it must be to own one of these vehicles. In Blue Ash, Ohio I saw one or two teslas, but Ohio doesn't have a tax incentive like Los Angeles gives people to buy them. So, owners in Ohio aren't exactly the average joe. It seemed a status symbol, as though they mostly buy the car out of a desire to be perceived as 'elite' and progressive. Charging also seemed cumbersome. In LA we charge at parking garages for low cost, or free. most employers offer ChaDeMO charger stations as a perk in their garage. taking your car into the shop? its charged when you get out. Finally dedicated charging ports at some gas stations are also prevalent. None of this infrastructure existed in the cities I visited in Ohio because none of it had to. Gas was $3 a gallon, or less. Traffic was smooth flowing and quick, and mileage largely adherent to highway driving conditions above 50 miles per hour. There is also no public transit, no park and ride to charge the car at while you commute the rest of the way in by light rail.
Ohio also has winter weather to contend with. Most people owned larger SUV's or cars with all-wheel-drive in anticipation of snowy or icy roads, and temperatures well below those we're accustomed to in southern California. The car has to warm and cool much more actively, which im not sure is something electric cars can handle.
Disclaimer: I own a tesla. owning it in the midwest would seem to be a chore.
As an american, Its good to see the brits following in our footsteps. We started shutting off street lights here in places like Stockton California and Detroit Michigan quite some time ago. The impact on reported crime is minimal, as we've also been shutting off funding to most of the police departments. Crash statistics, surprisingly, remain unchanged as well. most cars in these locations dont run, and even if they did there arent any jobs to drive to.
Our next bold experiments are shutting off water in California and shutting off education in Wisconsin.
but the big caveat is the bold performance is only to be found on Windows.
AMD does a great job of getting open source. They really work with devs to make sure we have all the stuff we need to craft the best driver we can. That having been said, they seem to only do this because the company doesnt take linux seriously enough to offer a functional blob driver. Running a newer AMD in linux for things like half life is utterly impossible, and not just for more advanced graphics tasks. seemingly trivial things like rendering a surface are beyond the grasp of the binary driver entirely in some cases.
my question as a linux user is this: two years ago NVidia, after Linus flipped the bird, swore theyd make up for shortcomings in their open source driver. Has this manifested? does the linux open source driver for NVidia trumph the AMD open source radeon driver yet?
Steam machines were predicated on a functional SteamOS, which has spent a year in beta. barring that, Valves pet project of running steam on linux ran arground when AMD graphics drivers for linux were revealed to be completely useless. nvidias blob seemed to work well but Valves blockbuster titles on linux remain seriously limited when compared to their Windows ecosystem. maybe this windows 10 feature will be enough to spur additional development resources into the platform, instead of just treading water in the linux pool.
That having been said, microsofts sharing technology isnt about to kill Valves distribution model. Valve distributes titles like Dont Starve and other inexpensive, very fun indie games to a multitude of platforms that are not consoles. MS is also banking on a large assumption that PC gamers and console gamers are inextricably intertwined...the "pc gamer master race" meme is enough to think otherwise. Windows 10 is a free upgrade, but if you're already a steam gamer the games still run. if you're a console gamer, an upgrade to windows 10 might not be in your wheelhouse if youre an ardent call of duty madden or fifa enthusiast (that PC might be ancient.)
Finally, Redmonds XBox is the revenue jumper cable that keeps cringe-worthy projects like phone and surface alive. Its not something thats going to find cross-platform marketshare outside of their usual blockbuster exclusives. console gamers and windows 10 gamers already share titles by virtue of Microsofts initiative to port their big titles between platforms and in some cases those platforms offer enormous advantages that the other does not. Playing xbox from a PC means, for example, some titles lose half their framerate or adopt other console-specific eccentricities the player might not want.
We don't know if he was looking at the girls. We don't know if he was looking for something to steal.
Then call the police, you know, those funny looking men in suits that drive around all day solving crimes like illegally firing a weapon in city limits? You just destroyed almost two-thousand dollars in sophisticated hardware in pursuit of some purile fear that the puritanical sanctity of your women or your property was being absconded with.
Its the 21st century. every public pool you go to has video cameras. Every mall, every ATM, every public space is teaming with them. your phones, your xbox, and your computers and even televisions. you can reasonably assume these devices are watching your daughters, your property, your life but youve never turned a loaded weapon on those. If were to digress to a civilization of opening fire on whatever confuses and annoys us, then the next drone project may as well be the gun-drone on slashdot a few months ago.