0
stringlengths 9
22.1k
|
|---|
It will take some time for manufacturers, the NEC and local codes to get up to speed before you see this widespread.
Many home safety devices would have to come to market. Currently, GFCI outlets are required in bathrooms. AFCI is required in some jurisdiction in bedrooms.
Low voltage DC (<30V) would be more practical and safer for home distribution for most electronics, but you would need a dc/dc converter likely because your DC/AC inverter for your AC appliances which would be running at higher voltages. (Most household inverters take a 120V-240VDC input.) |
My biggest problem with this process is that companies will fiddle with the nature composition of meat to make it "healthier" (more profitable for themselves).
I've already heard people developing this technology talk about modifying meat to have less saturated fat and cholesterol, but the problem is we now have new emerging evidence that saturated fat and cholesterol don't cause the health problems they were once blamed for. If they substitute the saturated fat and cholesterol for something else, they might be make the product even worse. Example: substituting Hydrogenated Oil for Frying instead of Lard, and Tallow.
Also I feel many of those developing this technology to produce meat and dairy will completely ignore many of the micro-nutrients and semi-essential nutrients in meat and dairy that aren't necessarily on the nutrition label. So they will create a product that looks good on paper (nutrition label) but will be missing nutrients that aren't normally labeled or aren't fully understood yet. The study of nutrition is still in development, and I think it's naive to think we know everything about it. The person developing soylent is a perfect example, he thinks he's created a perfect product, but most of the nutrients in it are synthetic versions that aren't always as bio-available as naturally occurring nutrients.
Example: synthetic folic acid, which a portion of the population can't convert to usable form, vs folate naturally found in food, with all people can use. And Synthetic beta-carotene found in supplements (which some studies show a link to cancer) and natural beta-carotene found in vegetables and dairy (not linked with cancer). |
The problem with Google's solution is that their settlement prevents ANYONE ELSE from doing the same.
Timeline: There are (were) many such projects scanning out-of-print works. Google continued, others stopped after legal threats. Google negotiated (or, used it's legal migth to force) a settlement that permits goog -- and Goog alone -- to continue or enact such a program.
The situation is this: Goog is trying to lockup, for their own exclusive use, all out of print works.
This is a massive problem if google succeeds. Their goal isnt more access, but more access if you consent to whatever access requirements google creates. That may be advertising - it may be something else.
This is by far the final nail in the "do no evil" coffin.
(ad that to the censorship of Pirate Bay and their refusal to advertise for legal women's medical services).
edit;
> [The original settlement proposal creates de facto exclusivity of a comprehensive digital book solution for Google in the digital books market](
> [The original settlement would create horizontal price agreements by publishers and authors that closely resemble those forbidden by the Sherman Act.](
> [The class notification process for the original settlement may not have been broad enough given the scope of the agreement.]( |
This is cool and all, but I'm reminded of a few companies that came up with this idea as well and went belly-up during the crash. The main one I think of is [SiCortex]( These guys could cram 5,832 cores into a 20kW power window when the system was fully-loaded. Also, they had a crazy low-latency interconnect that helped with it's scaling.
They also had a few smaller systems and were about to release a new chipset that allowed them to cram even more cores into a box. Unfortunately they had some financial troubles and couldn't recover, even though they had sold a few systems. |
It's sensible, but not for all server applications. Performance per watt depends on the computer and the workload. It's not apparent from the SPECint benchmarks they mention in the article, but chips like Atom are better than beefy server chips for some server workloads, and worse for others, when measuring performance per watt. Here's a paper from Berkeley's RAD lab which tries two Atom processors and a Xeon on several different server workloads, and compares their performance per watt:
The |
WARNGING: WALL OF TEXT EXPLAINING WHAT HAPPENED
Well one day I checked my bank account online and notice there was a $700($700.00 exactly) charge from paypal on my debit card. I called my bank to cancel my debit card and they told me to try to contact Paypal and see if they can reverse the charge. I tried to call Paypal, but you need a Paypal account to do anything with their automated phone system, so I couldn't do anything since I don't have an account.
I've never used paypal so I have no idea if the description was like a transaction code or something, but I couldn't figure out what to do with it, and I had no idea who did this at all. So I called my bank and they told me to fill out these papers saying I didn't make the charge. I did and got my money back, and they said they had up to 6 months to investigate it and take the money back if they think I'm lying.
In the mean time, I get 2 giant used DJ kits shipped to my house. I call the number on the shipping label for the person who shipped it, and apparently they were in CA or some other state, I'm in MI, and someone in GA was the person who bought it and was supposed to get it.
So I call the cops and have them come pick it up, and the cop ends up shipping it back to the person who sold it. So I think everything is all good, my money is back and the stolen shit is out of my hands.
About two months later my bank sends me a letter saying they think I bought the used DJ kits because they were delivered to my house(UPS just left it on my porch with no one signing for it or anything). They said I had a week to send them another letter fighting it or else they'll take the money back. So I sent them a letter, but apparently they didn't get it and they took the money back.
So then I called them up and they said to fax it to them asap, so I did and they gave me the money back when they got it. Now I'm waiting to see if they investigate it further and decide to take the money back again. |
No, he said apple's primary FUNCTION is marketing. They don't build the devices, they barely design anything of it and if you look at their numbers then they do indeed spend most of their money, by far, on marketing. |
OK, full Blue-Ray is 50 GB per disk, so you'd be limited to 20 full length features per month at 1TB, assuming no further compression. That's still a lot.
But the key question is not 'can I fill all my waking hours with Blue-Ray HD given my bandwidth?' but is 'will cable TV be able to offer anything better than broadband with a 500GB or 1TB monthly cap'? It's not as though cable tv were offering 100 blue ray movies a month. |
Seems a bit guff to me. Actually, a lot of guff.
>1. Integration with Google Services
So what? It's not like my Mum, or the majority of non-IT-aware FB users, are going to jump ship for stuff they don't use. If it had been around when FB first got going, then maybe - how 'silly' it may seem jumping out to go to FB is irrelevant - if you want to stay connected to everyone else, it's game over. And people already message each other in FB, meaning that offering them email will leave most asking 'so what?' (as FB have discovered upon offering email services).
>2. Better Friend Management
Again, so what? FB isn't generally used to segregate friends from family. In fact, I'm not sure I know anyone that does this - if you have 'private' stuff to share between friends, you use FB messaging or email.
>3. Better Mobile App
What, now we all have smartphones with proper browsers in anyway, you're going to make the app more android friendly? It's a bit late for that.
>4. Easier to Find Stuff to Share
Oh wow, you mean searching for stuff is really that hard? Oh crikey, I have to 'leave the site'? However did I cope before?
>5. You Can Get Your Data Back
Err....right, because I delete all the pics of mine that I upload to FB on a daily basis. Apparently.
>6. Better Photo Tagging
You mean it notifies the people being tagged? Wow, can't wait for FB to do that. Oh....with bonus points for FB supposedly not notifying you when you're tagged (which it does).
>7. Strong Group Chat Features
Again, there are already apps for this. Building the options my friends and I already use is not going to create any sort of mass exodus.
>8. Safer Content Sharing
Again, stuff that's shared that might be sensitive is easily sent over email. But even so, this is something that FB will no doubt implement themselves if they see Google+ as a threat. This is the first 'feature' that actually made me think 'that would be cool'.
>9. Google Is a Better Steward of Your Personal Data
For the vast, vast majority, this has not (and never will be) an issue.
Now for the crunch - will it inter-operate with FB? It's too late to offer a replacement; otherwise we're back to 1985, with Apple pretending that Windows doesn't exist and will never have to be acknowledged; twenty years later, they've reached one-in-ten. |
Doesn't surprise me that much.
SSD and SAS drives are both several times the cost-per-gig. But you can't just nip down to your local branch of PC World to fill it up with drives; you need to use officially certified drives or that fancy maintenance contract your paying for isn't worth the paper it's written on. So you can take the typical cost of an SSD or a SAS disk and probably double it.
You then have to double or even treble that when you set up redundancy.
Obviously you've got disaster recovery to cope with - how long could your organisation operate if the data centre were to burn to the ground? If the answer to that is "not very long", you buy another identical unit and replicate to another site. That doubles your cost again, without touching your overall capacity.
Note that so far I've only discussed disks. I haven't discussed the enclosures those disks sit in or the hardware and software that manages them. |
Hey no sweat, and I have thick skin :) For sure we have our issues - and our sales tactics have historically been pretty Iron Fisted (and somewhat duplicitous). We are really making steps in the right direction, however.
Your Centera story doesn't make sense though... Centera can't even be used for tier one storage - there is no way to configure it to be such. It's purely an application level target for archiving applications, of which DiskXtender can be one. DiskXtender is largley reviled within EMC, being known as a piece of crap. I'm not sure how they had this relationship set up, but there are a lot of ways to design a slow crappy system with these tools involved. A project involving DX and Centera is close to the sixth level of Hell for me... would stay far away :)
RecoverPoint IS cool, and is doing some amazing things. It's taking replication and snapshotting to another level, and I'd encourage you to learn about how it works. It is quite simply the best distance replication solution that I have seen, with exceptional data rates over the WAN. And from a local protection perspective, the journaling concept IS new for most people, and takes some effort to understand. Usually my customers have an "A-Ha" moment once they get it.
The downside of it is that it takes a good amount of understanding to properly configure it into your SAN. You have to know how to set up the journal space properly, and calculate the performance effects, since every write happens THREE times in a local protection scenario. 1) the main write, 2) the target write, 3) the journal write. It has an impact on performance, but then again, ALL such capabilities do. Snaps, replication have similar penalties - often made worse when the storage processor bears the burden of the processing. In RP's case - the appliance-based approach offloads the processing overhead to the RP cluster, so you have a very predictable I/O penalty. |
As a Senior storage admin, I think you are given some false information. First, 100TB of SAN doesn't cost 1m unless you have all SSDs or cache. With a SAN like that you don't need to upgrade on a yearly bassis. If your existing SAN already had 2ms latency than there was no reason to upgrade.
Your pinky comment doesnt make sense because nothing travels faster than light. The way the FC protocol works, you will have at least 2ms latency because it make four round trips for a single write. |
On your lawn for a mo, just to say that I'm not confident we'll see the same explosion through to terabyte storage that we did through KB>MB>GB.
There are a number of reasons why I believe this is so, but it boils down to there being an equilibrium between how much volatile/nonvolatile storage is required to achieve certain tasks, how efficient our software is becoming in comparison to its functionality, how much data is required to represent the information we want to respresent and how much processing power is available to process larger quantities of data.
Looking at all of it, it seems odd that we would find ways to fill 100TB on a flash card (the average home user, that is).
I suppose it's the exact parallel of what people said all those times before, but our largest media hogs - the data we create and consume - are not really growing. Text documents are bloated compared to days of old, but insignificantly tiny compared to current-day storage. Music files have not grown more complicated either. Video swelled a bit with the advent of HD in the home, and a bit more with 3D, but not enormously so.
Probably depends on timescale, but as our eyes have a practical limit for video quality, and our ears a practical limit for sound quality, and documents are tiny, and so on, it only really leaves bloat in the software we use, our operating systems and such, which can fill the void.
However, even those seem to be stagnating in their hungriness, with the latest versions of major OSes like Windows/OS X not really taking up more space than their predecessors, and maybe in fact require less space and memory. |
I think we all agree that the industry needs to change, the MPAA and RIAA are clinging to an outdated model, the movies are too highly priced, etc. Now, along with (seemingly) most other people, I don't think this is morally right for me to do, and maybe in a sense it is stealing, but I have a personal example that might clear up for some why I do it.
I love movies/tv shows/music and the like. Great for conversation starters and often a little bit of mindless fun. I do not, however, have an unlimited source of income with which to buy them. So I have Netflix, and that's great for some shows, but it doesn't have them all. So I started downloading a lot of stuff, until eventually my hard drive was full. So what did I do? I went out and bought a rather large external hard drive to store the stuff I downloaded and it works great. Still do it, actually just bought another hard drive for the same purpose (I download a lot of stuff).
I may watch the stuff I download once or twice, maybe continually if I love it, but that's rare. Still, it's still a pain to find and then wait for the files to download. A cloud system like Netflix but with current episodes and instant viewing would be perfect, even if you have to pay by the show. It seems most of us would be willing to pay for some kind of service, but the outrageous fees just aren't compatible with most people. |
If you write a book, yes that book is your property. If you print 10,000 copies those copies are your property. Those are physical objects, the books themselves. If somebody were to want a book it's fair to charge $10.
But ideas arent property anymore than corporations are people. It's a legal fiction that is a real-world-lie we pretend is true to make the law work. That's it. As an author you retain eternal rights to be credited as the author.
Any restrictions upon others, prohibiting their free expression of learning and language, is an infringement upon natural rights. An author is granted a legal monopoly via copyright, that infringes upon those rights. It's not REALLY your property because ideas are never property.
Part of the idea behind copyright protection is that you get a limited time during which you can send armed government agent to violently attack, imprison and possible murder any whom you deem infringe upon your copyright. Your hit squad doesn't come without a price, YOU have to give something in return to the society in which demand legal enforcement through violence (the only tool of the law that counts) That means after a limited and reasonable amount of time it enters into the public domain.
I have a right to read what's before my eyes. Period. If you have a limited copyright for a reasonable length of time, I, and most others, will accept the copyrights limited and temporary infringement upon my own rights to think, learn and innovate.
If you have an unreasonable length of time, like forever, this is a direct attack on humanity as a whole. Never again can a creative young author write a story about X where X is the story you wrote. You also offer me absolutely nothing yet demand my tax dollars be used to attack others for the rest of time eternal? Yeah fuck that. You feel entitled to copyright but you don't, can't and never will own your "story" as property. You must fulfill the other half of the social contract of copyright or I'm not going to play pretend and pretend the legal fiction of copyright is legit.
Anything more than a generation isn't legit IMO. If you make $50 billion over 50 years and still whine that your stupid cartoon mouse hasn't made you enough money to justify the effort? Then you're crazy.
The rest of society isn't demanding our own professions be compensated forever for a single work product. Nothing I, or 99% of people do or make gets that protection. It's immoral from the outset. You want copyright, make a deal with society. |
More like the |
Yes, I am really hoping to bring these to my enterprise. I've had so many users clamoring for tablets but trying to get an iPad to work in a corporate network is just a nightmare. 802.1x wifi is hit and miss, Apple had it working, then it stopped working in iOS 4.4 and didn't get completely fixed until 5.1.1! That was like 3 version releases with the same bug. Forget about getting it to work with a proxy server that requires authentication.
With Surface I should be able to push all these settings via Group Policy, just like I do with my Windows 7 laptops, and something tells me it's going to work right out of the box.
If surface tablets can really reach the < $250 price point I think they'll fly off the shelves, however I was expecting them to be around $500. I also think that Microsoft should really push marketing these tablets specifically at the Enterprise customers. MS could make a nice niche and completely own the market of Enterprise Tablets if they do this right.
Lastly, redditor for 2 days and 2 posts one about surface one about windows phone 8. I'm guessing you are a corporate shill trying to gauge the marketplace. |
DON'T CLICK IT. You won't be able to hit the back button. I hate when sites operate like this. |
Throughput capabilities on a per port basis.
When running 1 Gbps full duplex on an ethernet port, you are pushing 2 Gbps of data (max) between the client and the switch. The switch has a controller that integrates one, some, or all of the ethernet ports. This controller has a maximum amount of data it can simultaneously move at one time.
The short of it is, a consumer "gigabit switch" has a 1 Gbps controller (usually). So all aggregate traffic is limited to 1 Gbps. 2 Clients at full duplex can effectively send only 250 Mbps simultaneously. Add a third client, its closer to 150 Mbps.
On business and enterprise networking gear (Cisco/Juniper and higher end Netgear 'Business'), they use higher throughput controllers and a larger quantity of them. An 8 port Netgear Business switch may have a 4 Gbps controller, or 4 1Gbps controllers with 2 ports on each controller.
This concept is known as 'over-subscription' and these controllers are sometimes referred to as 'ASIC'
For a switch with 64 Gbps aggergate through put with 48 ports, is at an over-subscritpion of 3:2. |
What a troll article. You'd be singing a different tune if it was your company they attacked or if you were the sysadmin team responsible for cleaning it up. I'm sick of the idea that nothing on the internet matters and this "nerd stuff" is meaningless bits and bytes. No its affects real people and victimizes people.
>There's no sign he ever made any attempt to profit from any of this.
Your house has a non-enterprise lock that I can pick. I go in, take a shit, watch your TV, pet your dog, charge my phone, take a nap on your bed, and leave. I'm still very guilty of breaking and entering and tresspassing even if I didn't "profit." And me saying "sorry you should have bought a stronger lock" isn't a defense. Its an asshole statement.
Also many governments are constantly fighting botnets and other profitable hacker enterprises. [For example the SpyEye guy was just extradited to the US.]( The guy who tried to shutdown spamhause to guarantee more profitable spam in your inbox [was just arrested.]( etc etc. Equally applying the law should be seen as just, not unjust. |
I guess it's for the sake of fashion, appealing to the current trend.
Internet crimes are new, interesting, and a majority of people are reading up on them, discussing them etc- if the police crack down on that, it would deter the public from getting involved. Because it's so trendy, the media will pick up and discuss the topic.
Gang crime isn't as talked about anymore, but people are still working strongly to prevent it from happening. |
Lots of negativity in this thread. Let me tell my story.
I live in a Comcast monopoly area. The only other cable provider is licencing use from Comcast and they have a ridiculous data cap. DSL exists but it's a fraction of the speed of Comcast for roughly the same price after I'm paying for a phone line, and it also has data caps. Comcast is the only option for unlimited broadband. I recently moved and tried to get Comcast to come connect service. The rep I got ahold of couldn't speak english and couldn't tell me what the deposit they wanted was for (I was using my own equipment. According to Comcast ToS deposits are only for equipment renters). I got pissed, hung up the phone and decided I wasn't going to deal with Comcast ever again.
I had recently switched mobile providers from Sprint to T-Mobile. I was sad that I was going to lose my unlimited data in the switch but Sprint's data speeds had degraded to literally unusable levels (web servers would time out). When I signed up for T-Mobile the guy informed me they'd recently come out with unlimited data plans, they just hadn't gotten updated promotional material yet. I went with that.
So when I moved in to the new place and lost my cable internet I started tethering. I planned on doing this for a while before meeting my neighbors and seeing if one of them would like to split the cost of a cable connection and let me get in on their wifi. Turns out my tethering connection over T-Mobile is so good I never got around to doing that.
[This is a speed test I just took over my tethered connection.]( Note that this is through my VPN, so the speed and latency are actually inflated a little bit. When I take a test without the VPN in the way I get about 1-2 more Mb/s and around 20ms ping.
But benchmarks mean dick, right? Some real world analyses:
I play Planetside 2. It's a twitch-based MMO FPS. Ping is a serious factor. I have zero issues. I can't say lag spikes or general latency is any worse than it was on Comcast.
I watch Netflix. Initial buffering takes slightly longer. No big deal.
I stream music over Google Music with my All Access subscription. (previously a Pandora user with no issues either)
I communicate using VOIP services.
I torrent the television shows I can't get via streaming services. It takes about 15-20 minutes to download a 30 minute show.
So we have real-world tests of applications sensitive to latency (multiplayer FPS), download speed (streaming video), and upstream (VOIP) without any issues worth mentioning.
The only downside is that when I unplug my phone from the PC to take with me the PC is no longer connected to the net. But oh, hey, when that's an issue I just turn on wifi tethering, the router I set up as a repeater automatically connected and rebroadcasts the wifi signal where the client-bridge my PC is connected to feeds the connection to my desktop. Obviously that's more advanced than just plugging in the phone and streaming video but it's indeed completely possible.
So the people saying this is "not viable" haven't really looked into it. Just because it's not viable for you doesn't mean it isn't a viable alternative in the grand scheme. Cordcutting itself isn't a viable alternative for everyone on the planet but here we are, right?
I'm paying ~$90/mo for mobile phone AND home internet with unlimited bandwidth on both. Considering I'd be paying at the very least $140 after Comcast promos expired for this otherwise, I'm finding it difficult to complain about my relatively lackluster speeds when they work just fine for every application I've been able to put them through. |
Google did this really shitty thing where they paired GMail with G+. If you sign up for a new gmail account right now, it auto-creates a g+ account for you that is defaulted to somewhat public access. It lets people search for you by default, for one.
People may not realize this if they're not paying attention to it.
In my case, one of my employers had me set up a mail account since I was temporary part-time and thus couldn't get an official business email. I signed up using my real name and all and only realized after the fact that I've gone ahead and created a g+ profile. Of course I didn't populate it with any relevant information, but I'm NOT OKAY with signing up for one account and having it sign me up for any other account at once. It's one thing when your gmail account gets you access to other parts of google's network - like YouTube - if you so please. It's another when your private email creates a public profile. |
Facebook is valued at $67.8billion]( At its low when the stock tumbled it was around $40 billion. The $100 Billion number is just something to build hype for its going public. [It was EXPECTED by some firms to rise to being valued at $100 billion when it went public]( but obviously it didn't do that. The stock fell, and lost a lot of its value.
Facebook never reached $100 billion
On the subject of "is facebook worth 100bil"
>One way to frame the question is to consider a single fraction.
>The number on top of the fraction is the total value of the company. The number on the bottom is the company's profits over the past year. This fraction is called the price-to-earnings ratio. It's widely used by investors in stocks.
>Over the past century, the average price-to-earnings ratio for big U.S. companies has been 15, according to Anant Sundaram with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. The ratio for Apple is about 15. The ratio for Google is a bit higher.
>One way to think about that: At current levels, it would take the average company 15 years to generate enough profit to pay for itself.
>The picture for Facebook is very different. Facebook's price-to-earnings ratio is 100. At current levels, it would take Facebook 100 years to generate enough profits to pay for itself.
>"Its price-to-earnings earnings ratio is astronomical," Sundaram says. "Off the charts."
>That number is so high is because investors are betting Facebook's profits are going to explode.
If its profits never "exploded" like the investors thought, then the company would not be justified in being valued as high as $100billion. Its price to earning ratio would still be "astronomical". Unless investors are willing to wait ~100 years for the price to buy Facebook to be less than the profits gained from owning facebook
It was supposed to grow a ton when it went public. It has continued to increase revenue, but [they don't reach the expected levels]( Facebook went public in May of 2012. As you can see quarterly revenue growth levels took a sharp turn downwards in 2011, and 2012. Growth of the site has slowed. It didn't "explode" like it was supposed to. Problem is [that younger users are turning away from Facebook]( That's a large demo on their site. The privacy problems, and invasive stuff isn't helping it either. People see their changes as obvious money grabs. I can understand some ads, how else are they going to make most of their money, but Facebook went overboard IMO. In contrast Reddit's ad model is perfectly fine. Much less in your face, and invasive. This site is much smaller than facebook though. It's only valued at $3.2billion, but its growth is much better. I'm not saying it would be in Facebook's best interest to adopt the Reddit advertising model, but users are getting annoyed with the direction FB is going. |
How does changing your OS or browser somehow help with internet snooping?
Edit: actually, that site is mainly bullshit. Bitcoin can really barely be used for anything but drugs, and to say you can replace paypal with bitcoin is BS. The same goes for many things on that list. It tells you to stop using ios altogether for ios behavior that was taken out of ios in 2011. Then all android usage is somehow covered by cyanogenmod. What about the android devices that can't get cyanogenmod (many) and then what about cyanogenmod is so much more secure?? It doesn't have security enabled, and any method to make cyanogenmod more secure could also apply to android in general. How does the actual email client matter? The email traffic gets intercepted in transmission. In chat clients it tells you to use pidgin, but pidgin isn't a protocol, it is a messaging client. If you used google chat first, then change to pidgin, you would still be using the same google chat account. The same goes for any other protocol. Then there is facetime, which is evil despite using end to end encryption which the government can't crack.
That list is just a big list of open source software alternatives of which some aren't any more secure than the program they are replacing. Some nerd with a free software boner just made a big list of cool software, some of which is secure, some of which isn't secure, and some of which isn't any better than the software it is replacing. |
I will do my best to explain it, I am by no means an expert so take my explanation as a lay man's understanding.
The title of this post "Facebook blocks log in by tor, leaving thousands of activists at risk" is best explained in two parts, first with an explanation of what tor is, and secondly, how it relates to activists.
TOR is a program used to make your online activity more anonymous. In normal internet behavior, the person hosting a website can see directly what ip address is accessing his website. Imagine normal internet behavior as a straight hallway: if Bob is at an internet cafe and visits a website (for example Facebook), Bob is on one side of the hallway and Facebook is on the other end. In this way Bob gets to see everything on his Facebook page, but Facebook can also see Bob. Additionally, whoever owns the hallway (Verizon) or has access to the hallway (the government) can also see both ends of the hallway, so they know Bob is on Facebook.
With Tor, imagine the hallway now to be a huge house of mirrors such that the pathway between Bob and Facebook is bounced around amongst millions of other people. In this case, Bob can see Facebook, but Facebook only knows that someone is on their website, it looks like some random person besides Bob. For this reason tor is useful to anyone who wants their online activity to be anonymous. (Activists, criminals, undercover police/military agencies, and most commonly, hipster Linux users who use tor to BitTorrent music and think they are badass hackers important enough for the government to care about them.)
Now, on to the second part, how does this put activists in danger? In a nutshell, by Facebook blocking Tor, anytime an activist logs into Facebook without Tor, his location and identity is no longer anonymous. The identity part is kinda silly because if an anonymous internet user logs into a personal facebook profile, their identity is no longer anonymous. The location part is still an issue because without Tor, the government can find out what house/internet cafe you are posting Facebook updates from. This could be a problem for someone posting anti-government stuff in a country like Iran or Syria where you are afraid the government will track you down and hurt you (cue "DEA agree U.S.A = Iran hurp derp...." circlejerk)
In reality, this is probably not that big of a deal, because it appears that Facebook isn't blocking Tor on purpose and is working to fix it.
Additionally, using facebook is a very very bad idea in the first place if you are concerned with anonymity. Any "activist" that this would actual endanger would have other options besides facebook or they would be long dead already. |
Let me teach you something, little grasshopper. The tactics neckbeards use to criticize Microsoft are very predictable once you learn them.
What we see here is a classic "standards attack":
In the case where MS ignores or doesn't adopt some technology that is increasingly important (such as 3D printing), then Microsoft will be labeled as slow and out of date. Neckbeards will also claim that by not supporting this new technology, MS is actively trying to stifle innovation in that area.
In the case where MS DOES adopt some new technology and the standards that come with that technology, neckbeards claim that Microsoft will use an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy to destroy the standard and co-opt this new technology so that users are required to use Windows in order to use the technology effectively.
In the case where MS DOES adopt a new technology but they create a proprietary standard, then neckbeards claim that MS is once again flouting standards and are trying to tie users to Windows. |
The big battery use on my laptop is the screen, just like my phone. I have an i7 3517U which is Ivy Bridge so already a generation old. I can switch the screen off and leave music playing and the battery consumption is tiny. The only way I can see Broadwell increasing battery life by 30% is if you are gaming on battery. |
You do understand the reason for this right?
It's not that they want to steal your work, but they need to protect themselves from abuse from customers.
If I create a nice little game with the web designer, and publish it through the platform (which I have to, because back-end technology is not open) I can claim Google is illegally publishing my copyrighted content (and making profit out of it through ads!). So they need me to give them copyright to publish my work, otherwise there is no sense in using a publishing platform.
Now say that Google wishes to update the platform, some nice optimizations and also some tweaking so that apps look more native in the new Android OS (which has evolved). This makes my work look different (it becomes altered), again I can sue since they do not have the right to alter the way my work looks. As a matter of fact just injecting Ads into the app is altering the work (they add text that was not created by me for their benefit). If we want the free cake, we have to cede the right for the to alter our creative content published through their platform as well.
Finally issues may happen when the service is canceled. Maybe someone uses resources I created (custom plugins and templates), maybe it takes some time for the system to clear the website fully, maybe it's just cache'd in some places and still served when people access the platform. Again Google needs to protect themselves.
Now is it really stealing your work? I wouldn't think that publishers are considered to steal an author's work, there is a contract and the rights given and taken are there for a reason. For that matter you don't loose creative content over your creations, you are in full right of making a perfect copy elsewhere, and then if you make an altered version, Google would not have accessed to that.
So Google isn't stealing your work. It's only requiring you to share it with them so they can show it to the world. You don't loose the right to make copies, alter them, or do whatever you want with them. Sure the contract was made by Google lawyers to sway on keeping things safe on their side, but is it any more abusive than an Open Source License (it doesn't even require you to allow others the right to copy)?
In exchange Google allows you to use their platform, free of charge, to create whatever you can with it (with some limitations, again defined in the EULA).
I wouldn't recommend it for commercial/profesional applications. If there's money involved you should want more control over the product to ensure quality. If you want a website done quickly for your club, or group of friends, or just your personal resume, you might be happier using quick templates. |
You didn't read the article, did you? It's for shooting down mortars and drones. Damn thing's too big to cart around on convoys. As is, it looks to be used for base defense - although if they could shrink it a bit, I could see it being useful in clearing minefields, IEDs, and other unexploded ordinance. |
Business class gets you no better support. I had Comcast business (at my business) for over two years. During that time there were several week+ long issues (10 kilobit downstream, 30% packet loss, etc) where support was no help at all.
The only thing I ever got out of support was scheduling a technician visit, even if one had been out the day before, and said the issue was upstream rather that on my end. There's no system in place for transferring a call to tier 2. They can only escalate the ticket to tier 2, and they're supposed to call back within 4 hours (they never do). Technicians themselves have no system in place for calling anyone but tier 1. I've stood and listened to techs just as frustrated as I was trying to explain things to tier 1. |
I am well aware at the problems with my internet connection. I pay Comcast 75 dollars a month for internet only. The nature of the contract is that I have to give them money and they can provide me with whatever speeds they like. Any speed mentioned is never promised.
There is no way to reach anyone who is able to help solve the problem. If I call, I am speaking to someone who is either in a different country or a different state. Their job is to answer angry calls from customers all day, and they have no recourse even if they can identify a problem.
I could choose to write letters to my congressman. I do not know who my congressman is, and that is my fault. If I was a betting man, I would say that my congressman understands a lot less about how the internet works than I do, and my own knowledge is severely limited though I am a professional web developer, so I at least understand the basics of how servers, protocols, and so on work. Above the server level I am less knowledgeable. I know it's a system of tubes, but it ends there.
If I choose to suspend my service, there is no other competitive provider in my area. It's Comcast or nothing. And I live within 100 miles of Google Headquarters just up the road from Silicon Valley.
If someone with my experience and understanding of the problem can't do anything but accept the situation as is, then what is the average consumer supposed to do? Barring violent rebellion (which would definitely cause an initial slow down in broadband speeds) I do not have it within my power to change the situation without devoting large swaths of time I don't have to it.
Look - there's a fundamental problem that extends past Broadband and it is complex and tied in with a lot of broken systems. Firstly, I am not represented by my representative in a meaningful way on this issue and others. But as I admitted above - I have not personally tested this to the full extent of my ability, so maybe there's some inertia there. We all have it and I'm representing that I am a semi-savvy consumer at best. Second, corporations above a certain size are not beholden to their customers anymore - they work on a large enough scale and employ enough bureaucracy and marketing that the numbers dictate that there is more money in under serving a large number of people than properly serving a smaller number of people. That's still devoid of any judgment over whether it is appropriate for telcoms to hold a functional monopoly over their services. I don't feel I need to point that out, as this thread is rife with it.
Fundamentally we allow profit to be the exclusive motive of companies. That is widely accepted as okay. And it's very easy to see where that is a mistake in situations like healthcare where life is on the line. But that value insidiously affects every facet of our day to day life. Most of us participate in it on some level or another because it is very hard not to. I do not personally hold this value at all in my own life, but at my job I must - it is the driving principle behind most corporations, and it multiplies exponentially as the size of the employee and customer base grows. The strength of the value also grows as you move toward the top of a company, to where it is anathema to suggest that treating people fairly without marketing whatever action you took is taken seriously. |
So, I've been working for a small ISP for 5 years, and I can tell you about a lot of fun things.
Some of time, it IS the ISP that does the screwing over with absurd taxes and fees that DON'T have to be there, but are there to try to inflate profits (Evenlink, Strato.net, PAOnline, Safe-t.net).
A lot of the other ones try to charge as little as possible, but still have high prices because of the telco or cable company in the area.
For example, a 3mb/640k connection from us costs $46.95. expensive for what it is? yes. however, we make $3 off of that, and thats it. the rest of the fee is what Century Link charges us for the line and port. hell, we even use our own bandwidth and they charge us that much! It's out of our control sadly.
The worst part is, the max speed we can offer is 5mb/768k for $59.95 because that is the max that Century Link will allow us to do even though they are capable of doing 25mb. So not only do they let us do sub par speed, but they charge us way to much for it.
Verizon isn't any better. they let us do a whopping 7mb/768 for 59.95, but worst of all, they (to my knowledge) don't let 3rd party companies offer FiOS anymore. As the FiOS network expands, the availability of DSL declines since the copper wiring needed for DSL is removed from the phone lines, slowly becoming a monopoly.
Cable companies pretty much don't wholesale their internet to anyone. Very rarely, in very specific service areas, will they do that. It is the same with DSL and phone companies, where they charge outlandish prices for the port and line, so therefore those companies are left HAVING to overcharge to ever make a profit.
Other times, Telco's just completely refuse to work with 3rd party providers. Frontier is the biggest offender of this. If you live in West Virgina, I'm sorry, cuz your internet is fucked up. Verizon was the Telco through most of WV as late as last year, and when that was the case, other ISP's were able to offer service, and we were able to do standalone as well. When they sold their territory to Frontier, Frontier basically told everyone else to fuck off. The worst part of that, they didn't USE the already existing Verizon network, they insisted on using their own, therefore, people who WERE able to get internet, were no longer able to. Those who had service with us through Vz were grandfathered in, but we could literally do nothing for them. could never upgrade their speed, could never put in a trouble ticket. couldn't set up any kind of repair dispatch or even run a simple line test. |
HAH! I currently have satellite internet, living out in the middle of nowhere. It is some of the worst internet I have ever had.
I got Hughesnet back when it was just starting out. I paid $500+ for installation and equipment (which is now offered for free) and $70+ a month. At first it was... okay . It was the only option where I live. I had it for 3+ years. And then they introduced a bandwidth cap. You could only use 200MB per day. If you wanted to watch some youtube videos, you could get through a few before your internet got throttled so slow that it would barely even load Google. You could, of course, pay extra money if you wanted to get your daily allotment reset for the day. Also, their customer service was laughable, and they would charge you for calling.
Now, I have a local satellite internet. There's no bandwidth cap, and it's about $40 per month, but my download speed averages about 20 kb/s during the day and about 40-60 kb/s at night, occasionally jumping up to 100+ kb/s and quickly shooting back down. |
This is how our society is already structured, you just require a bunch of loopholes to receive welfare. It would actually be cheaper to institute mincome, because you wouldn't need any bureaucracy to maintain the same level of welfare. Most people wouldn't be satisfied with mincomes, so they would get a real job. The difference is you wouldn't have to do an empty meaningless job just to afford to eat. These types of jobs would be automated, and humans would have more time to do what they do best, be creative. |
You wrote lots of words yet didn't actually respond to any of the points I made, misrepresented my position, and don't even seem to understand several important concepts.
> Why did you respond at all? It's not as if the few points you made are very good, either. You have either failed to understand most of the things I said or are deliberately ignorant. What is it? |
In all actuality, if homosexuality is not a choice, as we better understand its genetic and epigenetic basis, someday we will probably have the ability to choose if someone is homosexual or not. When such a day comes, the people siring offspring will probably choose to have children like themselves. In this eventuality homosexuals will be almost completely wiped out merely by people choosing to have heterosexual children like themselves.
There might be enough homosexuals who choose to have offspring outside of "normal" reproductive systems or go through artificial insemination to support a gay culture, similar to the deaf culture, but I expect it will be a much smaller group than currently exists. |
Disclaimer: I am an atheist who supports gay marriage, and has never donated to any cause which might come back to bite me. To the extent I have a dog in this fight, it's not on Eich's side. With that out of the way...
I think this is just begging the question. If not for political correctness, why would Eich's views have handicapped Mozilla's ability to compete for the best employees?
Let's recap the situation: Eich is the creator of Javascript and a co-founder of Mozilla. His technical chops place him right at the top of the Valley hierarchy. However in 2008, he donated $1,000 to support a politician who was against gay marriage (he said he believed marriage was only between "a man and a woman"); as a result he is deemed to be unqualified to be CEO of a major Valley corporation.
Oops! My mistake; that actually describes pretty much every other CEO in the valley except Eich! After all, anyone who supported that Obama re-election campaign (which in the Valley is practically everyone, especially at the top tiers of Google, Apple, etc.) supported a politician who was against gay marriage. What Eich actually did was donate $1,000 to a ballot initiative campaign that had the same view. It won a majority of the vote in California, and polls show that even today (when gay marriage is much more popular) something like 40%+ of American's still support a restrictive view of gay marriage.
So, a few questions:
Why is donating to (and voting for) a politician who says "marriage should be between a man and a woman", and who has publicly pronounced that he is actively against gay marriage fine , but donating to a campaign to make that policy law via a ballot initiative is not?
How long is it going to remain fine? In 2008, nobody thought that a donation to Prop 8 would mean you could never lead a major Valley company. But those donation records stick around. Will a day come when public support for a politician who does not support gay marriage will similarly disqualify you? (And remember, in the US, this describes almost every politician of both parties; if you have EVER donated to a D nominee for president, you have donated to a politician who was against gay marriage. How sure are you that this will not become a millstone around your neck in another couple of years? Indeed, by the logic of the anti-Eich campaign, why on earth shouldn't it?)
Why is Eich's donation in 2008 even meaningful? The man has had a long career. If he was prejudiced against LGBT employees, wouldn't that be clear by now? One of the reasons why we gave Obama a pass in 2004 and 2008 (and his voters and supporters a pass), is because we thought that even though he was vocal in his opposition to gay marriage, that he was not personally prejudiced, and that he might well evolve on the issue. As far as is known, Eich is not personally prejudiced, and he may well evolve (or have evolved) on the issue. Why the focus on a single donation from last decade? Is there really nothing else to uncover if we dig?
The same records which outed Eich show the top tiers of other Valley companies are full of supporters of Prop 8 (and again, the majority of California voters were supporters of Prop 8). Statistically (drawing on surveys and exit polls); it's quite likely that at least a few of other major Valley CEOs hold similar views to Eich's, but have just done a slightly better job of hiding it. How can Eich's removal be justified in a way that does not justify a massive witchhunt/purge of executives throughout the Valley?
I welcome other possibilities for this, but my view is that the linked article is half right: Eich's views did endanger Mozilla's ability to compete for talent, and the reason it did so is because of what we might well call political correctness run amok; an attempt at merging the personal and the political, and enforcing ideological purity in both spheres. Yes, the role of CEO is important; yes, he or she serves as the spokesperson for a company. But a CEO is also human. Nothing good is going to come of forgetting that.
(Again, I support gay marriage, I disagreed with Prop 8, and I would have voted against it were I a resident of California.)
Edit: I also support the actions of Mozilla's board, and Eich's resignation. The linked article is, as I say, correct: He did need to leave. My interest is in why he needed to leave, when we have so little reason to think Eich is actually any different than any other top Valley CEO.
Edit 2: Also, it doesn't work to say that Eich deserved criticism because of his role as a spokesperson, but Obama does not because he was only a spokesperson. If anti-gay speech is bad, then it's hard to calculate the damage Obama's opposition to gay rights has done. If Obama gets a pass because it was just speech, and he didn't take any action, then it's hard to see what action Eich has taken; his donation to the Prop 8 campaign was used strictly for speech advocating the same position Obama had at that time. Morally and legally, all Eich has done is speak, but he has spoken less (and less effectively) than Obama has. How does this make him worse?
Edit 3: I guess my |
Decentralizing the storage of cloud data has a number of advantages and disadvantages.
In order for continual access, it requires a greater degree of duplication of data. The purpose of this of course is for access - if any system goes offline with all or a portion of a piece of data, you require duplicate sources in order to maintain access.
The other consideration is the encryption scheme used. Any system given a sufficient length of time can be broken, either do to increases to in computational resources or in a flaw in the encryption scheme, meaning the encryption scheme should be independent from the storage system for easily changed encryption of the stored data.
But the above has an issue - if your goal is to protect the data and anonymize the data, then one needs to also take a step in putting it through an anonymity network, else back-tracing data to an owner is trivial, and you may as well store the data on a central server that is controlled by an entity that has reason to ensure your data is secure and protected from loss do to hardware failure.
The other consideration is: What happens when someone inevitably losses the encryption keys and knowledge of the data storage location? How do we collect the garbage so to speak and reclaim the space without risking the loss of stored data?
Another consideration is network capacity and the cost, until ISP's are willing to grant un capped broadband, and give full duplex connections (equivalent simultaneous up down rates), there isn't really a point in discussing this as using it will be horrendously irritating at best. |
Best we have at the moment for decentralizing everything is CJDNS project. Until Google Fiber (Gigabit internet without cap) is everywhere, it is going to be difficult to make decentralization widespread, but the tool is already there to use publicly.
CJDNS should be a go-to tool for this, because it is like a VPN, but more for recreating an entire internet without accessing the public internet (you have to set up a proxy to do so) with strong encryption (it has a moderate amount of anonymity.) Honestly, best case scanerio is when everyone goes on Google Fiber and use CJDNS for regular internet usage which basically thwart every attempt on MITM attacks when encryption can go on multiple layers via CJDNS/SSL/Application Level Encryption for little to no cost on performance.
Important thing is that with Google Fiber, the CJDNS network itself will multiply the speed thousand folds making it fast enough for general use compresating the internet load from other people when you are routing their packets. CJDNS works on the basis of network packet system and that you can host your own website through those network without any concern for restrictions from the ISP (you can't host public website on residential internet even from Google Fiber as per policy, but CJDNS can avoid that completely) as well as gaining the capability of sharing that connection with your neighbor with impunity (You could privately share the encryption key with your partners to improve your network security and throttle the connection speed.)
As of now, in Seattle Meshnet, there is already a cloud service, a reddit clone called Uppit.us, email system, and so forth. |
We'll see how fast this disappears when the cpc gets the boot. I'm guessing not very, you know why? Because politicians are greedy fuckers that do exactly what they're told to do. Yes there are exceptions but it's becoming more difficult to find them through all of the shit standing in their way.
Until we change our electoral system and take money out of campaigns we're going to be stuck singing the same song over and over. Trudeau is a rich kid following in his fathers foot steps, Mulcair is another goddamn lawyer and Harper ... well he's just Harper. Suckling at the teet of the Oil companies while reading whatever script is handed to him that day. For christ sake his announcement about Flaherty's passing was fucking scripted. There's not a word that comes out of his mouth that not pre-approved. |
What the article fails to point out is that it does not say that an organization can request your personal data if the organization has reasonable suspicion that you are breaking a law or about to break a law. What it does say is that the ISP can willingly give up data if the ISP has reasonable suspicion you have broken or are about to break a law. The implications of this are still bad though. If the organization like RIAA is in cooperation with the ISP they can give out your information to the organization with impunity. Now if the ISP respects your privacy and denys any request for private information the organization would still need a court order to access that info. In reality this just extends the immunity provision that they currently have when voluntarily disclosing information to law enforcement agencies to include other organizations performing legal investigations. The changes are more than likely being asked for by ISPs that already disclose information freely that want to avoid costly legal battles due to warrantless disclosures. |
This type of proposed legislation is atypical for Canada. We are a bastion for privacy, and the courts consistently reinforce that point.
The article itself recognises that.
Harper and his cabinet have pushed a lot of sketchy laws through. In the past year, he has been shut down by the Supreme Court on game-changing issues no less than 5 times. Even his appointment of a Supreme Court judge was denied!
If you think for a second this will actually pass into law in Canada, you're crazy. You totally have a right to be outraged, but you have to view it contextually. This is an anomaly, and it won't fly. |
Wow. You speak "editorially" and I'm suppose to not take you literally, yet you tagged on my edited out "majority" and ran with it like a puppy hell bent on destroying something.
No, I'm not upset with you or anyone. I'm just calling out your bullshit about the expectation of implicit privacy once you set foot outside your door. |
Renderman, as a stand-alone rendering software, doesn't offer much in terms of support for newcomers who aren't willing to spend the time and effort to learn it.
It's integration in 3d softwares (3dmax, maya, cinema 4d, softimage... etc. ) usually lacks intuitive usability and requires above average software scripting to be remotely useable.
Think of it this way.
It is a tool with no specific "how to" guide but with many "well you could do it this way".
Out of the box you could produce mid quality advertising work with some knowledge about 3d rendering, but if you compare it to v-ray, mental ray, and other integrated renderers, you'll find it extremely hard to get something nice out of it compared to well known 3d packages.
Now that its free though, if you want to get in the action of producing amazing visual fx for film/video game, well... prman is really the shit. It is amazingly flexible and pretty much a standard in the industry.
Sauce you asked? I just finished working on x-men. |
It would have to know from where the waves or originating from though. Imagine points A, B, C in order. If a quake happens in the middle of A and B, A and B wouldn't be able to warn each other, although C would be warned.
Or if it happend just to "the right of B. B would feel it a few seconds later, but it wouldn't know if it came from the left or right of B, which would change the predictions for A and C quite a lot. |
Just a quick list for any other californian's that want to know exactly which of our reps voted for this nice bill. I looked over the results of the vote just out of curiosity and was actually somewhat surprised.
Sorry for the wall of text in advanced |
Try not to target the reps. It's most likely not their fault. I previously worked in sales, as well as retention, for TWC (yes, it's a horrible company) like 2 years ago.
I can tell you that there's a very high chance the issue was technical. The software we used for TWC was terrible. It looked like it came straight out of 1999, was convoluted and confusing as hell and on top of that laggy and prone to errors. We had to enter a list of codes (stuff like: AR1064, DT3010, etc.) by keyboard for each element of the service (internet, promo, modem, cable box, etc.) and HOPE it doesn't create an error somewhere that wouldn't let us process the changes.
Mix that with non-tech savvy middle aged supervisors that can get just as stumped by the old ass software's errors. Factor in the fact that the call queue can be so high that everyone is busy and you're on your own (and possibly quite new, since there's a lot of turnover) trying your best with the shitty software to make it work.
So, I doubt those first 2 reps lied to you. Calls are also recorded from the reps side and a supervisor can review said call. Reps are not allowed to just make up numbers. They are given a list with available promos they can offer (along with the promo's shitty code for the shitty software). They probably entered the necessary changes in the system correctly but it wouldn't surprise me if there was an error with the software that didn't apply the changes. Same with the confirmation email.
Now, about there not being any notes for the first calls. That can happen if there was a high queue. Back-to-back calls means that as soon as you hang up, the rep will have a few seconds to make the notes on file before the next call comes in. If he's new, maybe he has not gotten used to the fact that he won't have the time (it's better to do them while still on the call) and BAM another call came in. He still has not typed the notes in your account and has to greet another customer. Now he has to juggle between the current call and typing the notes for the previous call.
I know some of this only applies to TWC but the general gist of it should be similar with Comcast. |
Which rarely happens. What you free marketers don't understand is that non-competition is profitable for all companies. Only the little guys can compete, but they usually don't because it's too expensive for them because of fiscal problems within the US taxation scheme etc etc. Giant companies who are already top 5 aren't gonna compete, because it hurts them in the long run. AT&T and Verizon offer deals maybe each half year to bag may be a bit more customers, ie the iPhone and promotional shit like that but they're not competing on a massive scale because it would hurt and not be profitable. |
I develop websites, and am very competent with the standards and technologies used to do so.
Indeed. However, you have a very short-term, parochial, non-socially-conscious attitude to the technology, and little feeling for the long-term consequences of such a technological decision.
Even from the point of view of what's best for you or your clients, if we standardise on a patent-laden codec like H.264 then you (and/or your clients) will have to pay for licence fees in order to produce videos, and open-source browsers like Firefox will effectively be unable to compete.
It's a giant step back towards a proprietary, closed-standards, pay-to-play web as we almost had when IE5 ruled the roost... and if you don't know why that was bad, I really don't know where to begin. <:-/ |
Well I didn't mention that they set up a startup script to automatically update my work's internet proxy address in IE only . So I could use chrome if I wanted to manually type this shit in everytime I booted up... |
So why don't you just leave? If you never come back to reddit won't it be the same thing? As a bonus, all these people you don't seem to like will stay behind instead of following you to whatever trendy new site you decide to join so you can still feel superior. |
I was thinking they could target users based on upvote history.
Nice, but probably much harder than it looks. A given user may upvote stories and comments with the word ‘Mac’ in. Or ‘Conan.’ Or ‘Ron Paul.‘ Has that told you whether they’re pro- or anti? Looks like an awful lot of conditioning and analysis. Still, somewhere in the dusty logs must be some kind of a Beyesian goldmine. No idea what it is, though, much less how you might mine it without being several shades of evil.
The big problem for advertising is that the community, the thing that everybody likes, the secret sauce, just isn’t a very ad-friendly terrain. Too much NSFW, too much contentious flying fur, and too many sides to the arguments presented way too freely.
Advertisers get twitchy when they see their logos next to things calling Leno, Jobs, Cheney or Fox douchebags. And Israel?? Woah, thats scary on a pant-changing level. Amazon, some movies and TV shows, maybe would advertise. Mercedes, Nike? Good luck. Remember a guy called Tiger Woods? A sports icon who had some sex. Well, quite a bit of sex maybe but, hey, he’s a kachillion-dollar sport star. Advertisers vanished underground faster than any little balls he ever hit. Reddit probably won’t be brought to you by Tag-Huer anytime soon.
No, the long-term revenue is pretty certainly going to be somewhere in the tech. The real problem is keeping it on the road through the short-term. |
What I don't get is that people are happy to fling money at Reddit and talk about how they're supporting this thing that they like, etc., without realizing that they have NO assurances from anyone at Reddit that this money will stay with Reddit, that a certain amount of $$ means Reddit stays open, or that Conde won't just take the money and put it in a personal bank in Aruba. And you know why there are none of these assurances? Because they can't give them. The programmers don't own it anymore. What happens if Redditors donate $10 million and Conde says "sweet, good work, you can keep $250,000" and uses the rest to pay off bills for fucking Bon Appetit magazine?
If they really wanted to keep Reddit open, they would make some sort of guarantees that your money would go to Reddit and Reddit related expenses. Why on Earth would Conde, having already decided what Reddit's budget is (remember, "businesses aren't run like charities", except for this one...) just let them keep extra money they got out of Conde's customers? How would you ever know if Reddit got to keep 90%, 50%, or 25% of the money? Why don't they have a running tally of the money they've received and what, specifically, they are going to do with it? Oh, right, because those are for shareholders, which is not what you are. |
They changed the way you receive content to be focused on who it came from instead of what it was about. You're pretty much forced to subscribe to individual submitters feeds now for most of the sites features to be of any use. Many of the submitters are the content producers themselves and the system is built such that submissions can be made automatically. A big content producer like HuffPo can now blast out thousands of submissions a day which the users can either see all or none of.
There's still the whole generic front page but without going through the whole subscribing process, the front page is the same for every one. There's no way to tailor the content to what you want to see short of finding a submitter that just so happens to only produce the content you're interested in. |
an example to reddit of what I - a digger - do for reddit
Seriously? No one gives a shit that you came from digg. You sound like a douche when you look down your nose and say "here are all the great things I do, and I'm not even one of you! "
There is no rivalry anymore, and there hardly was even when digg was a lot bigger than reddit. Digg shot itself in the face with a 12 gauge and reddit received some of the estate, good and bad. Done. |
The question is what are we trying to prevent? Are we trying to prevent people who have access to our physical wallet who also possess the knowledge and incentive to subsequently use a educated brute force attack our passwords out site by site, or are we trying to prevent someone across the ether from using educated brute force attacks on our passwords. The card prevents the later.
I can tell you how many times someone has tried to compromise my security by obtaining physical records related to my passwords; 0. How many times has someone tried hacking my account from across the ether? > 0. |
In a typical union contract, management will be required to give employees a chance to correct issues, and may be required to provide training if the position changes or if the employee otherwise is found lacking the necessary skills. If the employee then fails to meet the set-upon goals, he or she can then be terminated, although management may have to attend binding arbitration with the employee (and his or her union representatives). |
I had it once on my old computer, I waited half a year before doing anything about it, the computer was slow as hell anyway and having the virus stop all the processes that were normally going on gave me the illusion that it was actually making my PC faster, so I let it be. It blocked Internet Explorer but not Firefox, but it did crash frequently. After I stopped being able to access the internet, I decided to do something about it, little did I know that I was too late. I remember getting tips to use Malwarebytes but I was afraid it was a virus This was back when I downloaded everything regarding porn and visited random porn sites like it was an addiction, disregarding the possibilities of viruses, I even got a few notifications from McAfee saying it found a trojan, but I continued to browse and so I didn't download it. After I got my new PC, I took care of it as if it was my own baby. After a while, I started studying up on Malware and how to prevent it. Norton Anti-Virus came with my ISP, but it sure as hell was a resource hog. Anyway, I got rid of Norton for Avast and now I've got Avast Free registered until 2038, Malwarebytes Pro, Advanced System Care 4, Firefox Aurora with NoScript, RequestPolicy, Web of Trust, HTTPS Everywhere, AdBlock Pro, and I've been the most security-conscious since. Basically, |
I really like my Grado SR225's, crystal clear, can focus in on any part of a good recording. They are even better when hooked up to my portable headphone amp. That said, I actually prefer to listen to lower quality songs on my speakers, the clarity in the grado's lets me really hear everything in the song... including the imperfections I might not have wanted to hear.
There's more to it than the bit rate, the original recording has to be good too. If the original is muddy or has peaks/cutoffs then it doesn't matter what the bit rate is, those flaws will remain.
Also, once a song has been converted into a lossy format like a low bit rate mp3, it cannot regain what has been lost simply by converting it back or upping the bit rate. I have about 90GB of music, but I would guess that less than 5% of it is truly a high quality copy of the original recording.
I hope this helps you. |
He's definitely a good guy. My fiancée and I have been big fans since he was doing Lucky Louie , and we saw he was doing a small show in Newport RI a couple years ago. It was on the 4th of July so the place was maybe half full, really weird considering he was already taking off by this point. The venue was a small yacht club that put up tents for the stage and beer selling; After the show he went backstage for like 5 minutes, came out to the beer tent and just hung out at a picnic bench for like 45 minutes, talking to people and taking pictures.
Then the weirdest thing happened; people stopped coming up to him. I guess everyone who wanted to say something (including us) got their fill, and he just kinda wandered around the beer area for a bit. (By this point it dawned on me how odd it was that the club hadn't chased people out, as we'd been there drinking beers and even got a refill.) He just got a beer and chilled at this picnic table and then eventually wandered off. It's not what you'd expect out of a performer/celebrity on the rise, acting as if he really had nothing else to do (but he did allude to that in his show, saying he had nothing going on afterwards). |
The patent system was meant to spur innovation, and for a while it did that job very well. It's not working anymore. All the patent system does now is spur legal fees, and I'm tired of it.
When Apple and Samsung sue each other into oblivion, the only people who will be hurt are the folks who love their new kickass phones. I love my brand new (notice how I left that blank,) but 's phone is pretty kickass too.
One's got a better screen. The other one has a slightly longer battery life. One violated our patent against pulling magical signals from the air. Yeah, well the other one violated our patent against projecting wonderful images onto your eyeballs. ...whatever.
If you had never owned a smartphone before, and somebody told you "I've got a Galaxy S III and an iPhone 5, one under each box. Give me $200, and I'll let you choose one at random," you'd be getting a device that would make you happy one way or the other. At this point, the differences between both phones are so small, and the phones are so beyond fantastic that it really just comes down to which system you've already invested money in for apps and accessories.
My message to both companies: Leave these fights to the fanboys on the message boards, and funnel all those unspent legal fees into R&D instead. Let's see what happens if you let the consumers decide who's phone is worth buying, instead of letting the courts decide what phone the consumers will be allowed to buy?
Also, a joke: Apple should counter-sue Samsung for copying their legal tactics now. |
I had this image as the final slide on my senior presentation for my finance degree. Nobody got it and nobody was amused.
It's pretty much was business/finance is, really. You learn some of the things corporations/people do with our tax code and this image is the definitive representation of it.
That and my computer pretty much does all my work for me (although I'm no finance hotshot yet.) You know what's scary? Pretty much none of the "money" we throw around in billions each day is really backed or worth anything that could ever be reclaimed. It's mostly frivolous "values" stored on a computer somewhere. The entire world is just a Monopoly game. Someday we'll probably live in a society where there is no physical money. That's a truly frightening thought. |
Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed from that video. They're acting like for the first time in human history that our interests are being controlled by our search results.
I hate to break it to you, but from the clothes we where, to the music we hear, to the movies we watch, are all being controlled. Now that sounds a bit tin-foil-hat-ish, but bear with me.
We don't know if we like a certain type of music unless we hear it. We don't if we like a certain style of clothes unless we wear them. And we don't like certain movies unless we watch them.
The limiting factor in all of this is that it literally impossible to listen to every song, try on every piece of clothing, or watch every single movie. So what do we do? We group songs/clothes/movies into specific styles or genres. Thus now we can use a much smaller sample size and are able to scan through each category selecting a genre or multiple genres that we like/enjoy.
I hope you see where I am going with this. This is why when you go to Target and visit the men's section it is arranged in a particular way with a particularly selected set of clothing. It makes life simpler, rather than just throwing all the clothing together in one giant box saying 'have at it.' Further more, Target is less likely to include clothing that won't sell.
Search engines doing this automatically is nothing new. And I'm thankful for it. I don't have to waste time filtering throughout all of the shit that I don't care about it. We have technology to do it, so let's do it.
Does the media/manufacturing industry control what we listen to/wear/watch/search? No of course not. It's a two way street. They're not going to sell things that people do not want to buy. |
Disagreement is not the issue. The bias, however is.
>But it didn’t take me a week and a half to decide whether the Surface is better than the iPad. At most it took a couple days, and that’s being generous.
The author, Farhad, has made up their mind in a couple of days on a new product by comparing it to a product that he has been using for years. The familiarity alone could account for some of the issues he was having.
He went on to talk about how the product was slow, and buggy. He never quantified with any accuracy the speed difference. Who's to say he can accurately measure "half seconds?"
Sure maybe it feels a little slower, but no where did he mention why that my be. It's a full featured OS for FFS.
>
it’s a circumscribed version that will not run any of the software from your PC
Really, did he even try? I doubt it because from the sound of what he's talking about he thinks the installer is the button in the app store. sorry, I sunk, forgive me.
>when I picked it up, my first thought was, Boy, that’s heavy! When I looked up the specs, I discovered that the Surface is only about 20 grams heavier than the iPad 3, but somehow those grams make a difference.
Really.... he's going to mention 20 grams feeling "heavy." Really, because I would trade 100 grams for something useful, like I don't know, a standard fucking USB port. Does he even know what can be done with one of those? Probably not, because he talked about the keyboard like it was the end of the world. Guess what with one of those bad boys you can plug in a real keyboard if you want to do some serious typing.
It makes no mention of where the surface excels, and only nit picks trade offs the surface made for functionality... something the Ipad severely lacks. That is of course, if you want to spend $500 on something that can do more than browse Facebook, shop online, and play angry birds. |
Someone already made this point. But he was just saying, the Media would have been up in arms over Romney for doing this. As someone that was VERY active politically during the Bush years, it was pretty much Armageddon against Bush, anytime he did something awful. Media would go crazy over it. Left leaning people would scream their heads off (as well as they should).
I've been nothing but disgusted by the left voters, who have turned a blind eye to Obama's failures in the past 4 years. Look, I'm not saying Obama had to be perfect. Of course, there is such thing as reality, and compromise. The reality of the system itself (and him even having to work within his own party). But Obama has done countless things, that would have had these same people get up in arms had Bush done it.
And that, ultimately, is what is so disappointing with Obama. Not Obama. But his voters. During the 2008 election, I really thought the fervor and movement to get Bush's successor out of office, also meant a more active and participating generation of Americans. But they have all pretty much been in a coma, since Mr. Obama took office. Giving him a pass on almost everything. Blindly accepting this premise that, the right is evil, and the left can't do no wrong.
It really upsets me, because again - the "change" Obama promised, I never expected it to come from him. I expected it to come from my fellow Americans. And if anything was proven by Obama's election in 2008, is that all you need is a good looking guy,who can speak extremely well, and who is easy to listen to - to get a bunch of people worked up to say they are going to participate.
But when the dust settles, everyone ends up going back to being in their dream state. Funny how, this same group was awakened again during the 2012 election, against the "it's the end of the world if he wins" Romney.
The other thing that really annoys me, is when I see my fellow Americans say: well, Obama isn't as bad as the other guy. So they basically say, well I don't agree with what Obama is doing. BUT he's not as bad as it could be. Whether this is true or not, it's total shit to accept this as a standard. |
I had a great VAR; Canada Computers. I spent around $15,000 at their store over the last 2-3 years.
Then I bought a new Asus X58 motherboard to replace one that died after a couple years, but the RAM slots were DOA when I installed it! It happens...not a big deal, I'll return it next week when I've got some time...meanwhile, tomorrow I'll get a sexy Rampage X58 board from them that I know will kick ass; that way I have a computer working still while I pack up the defective board.
Bring it back to them, somehow the serial on the board doesn't match the box. Must be just an inventory error on their part...except the entire time they treat me (a $15,000 golden goose customer) like I'm a scumbag thief trying to scam them out of some already dated X58 board.
Finally they agree to RMA it for me and then do the return afterwards.
Flash forwards a couple months. I get a call that my board is back from Asus, the RMA was denied due to mismatched serials, and it's ready to be picked up! Wait. I don't want this board, I already bought a more expensive one to replace it from you guys in fact. You sold me a defective fucking thing after you fucked up your inventory or returns, and I'd like to finally return this one, get my money back, and that's all.
Nope. They will not do it. I called head office, pleaded my case, informed them of my customer history with their company...wouldn't budge. I said "Listen to me. If I walk out of your store with that board, it will be the last time I set foot in there." They were fine with that.
I tried the manager of the store one last time when I went in to pick it up. Was still being treated like I was probably still a scammer. I even EXPLAINED to them all the holes in my "scam" and that if I WERE indeed looking to pull something...I'd certainly look for a better opportunity than a $200 motherboard.
Anyway, I used to be all about supporting local businesses, but after being treated like that after all the love I gave them over the years...fuck that.
I now buy all my shit on Newegg. Since my falling out with Canada Computers, I've bought around another $15,000 worth of computing gear (I do heavy VFX work at home and need several high end machines). |
I understand what you're saying, but I work for a consulting system integrator. A retailer is not a VAR. A VAR adds value to computer hardware by integrating it with their system or customizing it for an industry. Take a cash register, for example. The same cash register might be used in a grocery store, a clothing store, and Best Buy. However, the first two examples may never sell an item which requires serial number tracking. Likewise, the clothing store may carry only 10% of the SKUs a grocer or BB carries, but that 10% of items may need to be tracked by color, size and style. The VAR in those cases is the company which takes that cash register and makes software to make it work for each of those businesses. Further, that VAR has invested in testing various other cash register models to ensure compatibility. They also have to validate their software and hardware against security standards, and adhere to local laws (some places may require the customer to "view" pricing at the sale even if they are blind, as an example). All of that overhead is what I'm talking about, not a consumer who is looking for the best price on an accessory. If you're still reading this, you know I"m not talking about a desktop or laptop but specialized components. |
can we the whooshing curious get some |
However once the ball was rolling it probably couldn't be stopped all that easily.
A speech along the following lines would easily clean it up:
I, believe this lawsuit to be ill advised. It neglects how Apple came about. It ignores the reality that no idea or concept is created in a vacuum. The Samsung devices clearly have minor aesthetic points that define them as different from Apple's simple and clean design. Pursuing the Lawsuit would only do to discredit the way that new devices evolve. Very rarely does the opportunity to create something completely new - such as the iPod or iPhone - come along. Just as apple copied the Clam Shell design of Laptop systems, Samsung has copied a successful basic concept for the production of touch enabled, small form factor devices.
The Design, though similar has clear distinctions. There is no reason to believe that the copying of design was done melaciously - defined by the clear differences. Unlike other companies in other countries that have blatently ripped off the design, Samsung has gone to length to make their device distinct - following standards that have been set. Certain ideas such as "Slide to Unlock" and "Pinch to Zoom" are too broad - thinking about a thing so simple as a sliding lock on a bathroom stall or the limited methods or gestures that are sensible for zooming in and out using touch alone. It would be akin to patenting a scroll wheel for a mouse - an absurd idea - or the layout of a QWERT keyboard.
I believe that some of Apple's patents are an example of the failure of the Patent Office to correctly evaluate patents, and for the government to properly fund the Patent office as to ensure the proper review of patents before they are able to pass.
Seriously A speech along these lines would have halted the ball rolling and allowed for a real debate about the patent system to be brought up. It would clearly point out patents that may be too broad, while accepting that Samsung did take away certain stylistic concepts from the iPhone, while recognizing that they in fact did make alterations to it. Holding a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, vs an iPhone - you can tell immediately that they are not the same device. |
The spec is the spec. The laser simply will not pull data off the disk at faster that 46 (not 48, due to slop)Mbps. The tool he's using is giving him a estimate, not an actual, and it apparently has 2 or more points of inaccuracy.
>You CAN encode video at a higher bitrate to Blu-Ray, but it won't play (in a standard player) because it's off-spec.
The laser may not be able to exceed ~46Mbps, but apparently there are various encoder & buffer use tricks that can allow one to very briefly exceed this from both an encoding & playback standpoint, all while technically staying within spec and maintaining compatibility with standard hardware players.
Here's a past comment with more detail:
>Here's a thread with a professional blu-ray compressionist discussing it among other things. (page 6-7)
>
>How they manage it from a hardware standpoint I have no idea, I can't seem to find any mention of what the minimum RAM for a blu-ray player is, every mention is of the newer profiles persistent memory.
>
>the |
He's speaking the truth. The most Internet 99% of users will need is enough to stream HD video and play video games. 30 Mbps is much more than enough to do this. Only 1% of users, of which a large number are represented here, routinely download large amounts of data and would pay extra for extremely fast Internet speeds. Hell, I consider myself a medium to advanced computer user, I am an avid gamer, and am generally doing things a lot online. I have 30 MBps and never feel hindered by my Internet speed with the possible exception of the few times per year I need to download a large game file. Although, I'm pretty sure I would be hindered by the company's server upload speed long before my download speed. That being said, I would welcome google fiber in my town to provide some competition to the monopoly in my area. |
I have Comcast in Minneapolis. After it was set-up, I haven't had any problems and find it to be quite fast. I would like a lower price ($80 for basic channels and internet), but I think everyone always wants that.
However, getting it set-up was a living nightmare. My roommate and I had to go wait for 2 hours to pick up our set-up kit. We were assured multiple times that we could do set-up on our own. Get home, I follow the instructions verbatim (even sacrificing my printer power cord for a cord they forgot to include) and nothing works. My roommate spends 4 hours on the phone with them the next day and is finally informed that there is no such thing as "self-installation" and we will definitely need a tech to come out. Which they will send out the following week. He doesn't show. Spend a few more hours on the phone, apparently we "cancelled our installation." The guy came the next week, did the exact same thing I did except also typed in a code, and made everything work in under 5 minutes. The only nice thing was he waived the fee. |
I have a supposed 20 Mbps download from TWC, but my roommates and I notice the throttle very often. Any YouTube videos are throttled, as well as every so often at some peak internet times. Any speed test with a TWC server comes up much higher than with any other server (at my old place we were getting about 0.2 MB down one day across multiple speedtest.net servers, but when tested on TWC servers it showed about 15 MB down).
Don't even get me started with their HD cable service. We basically missed the first two weeks of NHL hockey this year due to spotty service and dropped coverage. I absolutely cannot wait until a FiOS or Google Fiber service is available in my area. Even if they are slower than TWC, as long as someone is putting fiber in the ground, it will eventually be better. |
Oddly enough, I have AT&T for television and Charter for internet. Never had a problem with Charter. Well, except for the one time they sent my dad a letter because he wasn't being careful enough with his torrenting. |
It's hard for me to get my head around how ISPs are allowed to hold back such an important market in one of the worlds most developed countries.
I pay 900 roubles (about 30 usd) per month for my optic fiber connection in Russia, and have a varying speed cap. 50 Mb down/up daytime, while from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. the cap is removed and I get 250 Mb. And nightime speeds grow every few months :/
Although I did have to initially pay 35.000 roubles to connect my home to the network.
Meanwhile, my relatives get "10 Mb" service (it never passes 5 from my experience) for 40 usd in Florida. |
I'm going to take this time to tell a story, and forgive any mistakes, this is from my phone.
So I live in a small town in Pennsylvania that at one point had steam heat that ran to all the downtown buildings from a steam plant. Eventually this goes out of business and the building sits empty (1960's).
Years later (1990's?), the property is up in a sheriffs sale and my uncle notices that even though the plant itself is gone (it's now a parking lot), all the steam pipes are included with the property. He wants to run fiber lines to all the downtown businesses through the existing and unused steam pipes. The city however, wants the property for the same purpose.
Long story short, the city screwed up and my uncle got the property for 1/10 what the city was willing to pay for it. He then refused to sell it to the city because he knew it could be a gold mine.
So what does the city do? The mayor goes out one night with a fleet of city owned cement trucks, takes the covers off the access tunnels (basically man hole covers) and proceeds to fill every tunnel with cement. After the fact they stated that it was to "reinforce" the roads the tunnels ran under.
Now comes google fiber and the city was tripping over itself in an attempt to get google to bring fiber to the area. Can't help but admire the irony. |
No, they just wanna keep telling people this so that there's no demand for them to spend money to allow for this kind of connection. I sure as hell demand it! The initial service costs will be expensive, but as they regain the money spent on supplying the equipment the price will lower. Just gotta convince them to undertake the risk of a long-term profit over their current short-term profits they're making now. Investors hate long-term over short-term.
That's why S. Korea has it, because their government assisted in the funding for such things, and also, because their country is more densely populated. |
It's funny because in Florida, the car accident state, the rear driver in a car accident is presumed negligent. Not only that, but slamming on your brakes for a yellow light, just to avoid a red light ticket (like people always do), still places the fault on the rear driver. So now approaching a traffic light becomes a death trap, a money trap, and a cluster fuck. |
Lol you've made it abundantly clear that you have no idea what "margin of error" means.
Almost no one can tell the difference on their speedometer between 55mph and 56mph unless they have a digital one, and even if they could/did, the car may not even be accurately reporting it with that kind of accuracy. |
It is a scam the motorist cannot win."
They could win by going the speed limit...
Edit: I admit I'm probably a little biased, since a friend of mine was killed by a speeding driver (going just 40 in a 30 zone), and as a result I am vehemently against speeding in any form but, while I agree that private companies should not be profiting from speeding fines, and setting up speed 'traps' is deplorable, the original idea behind speed cameras, i.e. to stop people going over the speed limit, is wise. It's about safety and, when the speed limit is clearly signposted, you have no excuse for breaking it. No one has the right to risk killing someone just to get where they're going a few minutes sooner. Those that do should be punished. The speed limit is there for a reason. If you don't agree with the speed limit on a particular road, then that's nothing to do with the speed camera. |
You fail to realize that media companies don't exist to entertain you and tell you want you want to hear. That's just what they want you to believe. They exist to tell you what they want you to hear. Don't ever forget that.
How the media portrays these events has little to no bearing on the story itself and the story here is that yes, indeed, the internet is done for. The sooner you come to terms with that fact the better you'll be able to handle it. There's going to be a lot of fuss over this because make no mistake the people are pissed.
You'll be singing a different tune when the rest of the world pries control of the world's DNS servers out of the Department of Commerce's hands which this is easily justification for. If they don't hand it over willingly I am assuming that yes, the internet as we know it today will be scrapped and replaced by a system controlled by the UN, possibly even creating state-level internets that have to be independently interfaced with one another because no one can agree on how they should be managed.
What happens next is anybody's guess but regardless I already have my plans laid out: I'm shuttering my companies, pulling everything out of the cloud, disconnecting my phone and internet services and working on a plan to emigrate from this country to somewhere that either doesn't treat the whole world's populace as terror suspects or at the very least to a country that doesn't have the power to ...
In the mean time there's a movement afoot headed by those who saw this coming years ago to establish darknets to circumvent the internet's infrastructure. Their efforts are now more important than ever. |
Prescient president / general: "We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty can prosper together." Eisenhower's final message as president, 1961. |
Where's the |
So let me get this straight:
1) Your purchase decision for one of the most expensive tablets on the market was a YouTube app. You never considered buying a Nexus tablet instead...you know, a Google product like YouTube? Or any other cheap Android tablet since you had such a small tablet need?
2) AppleCare+ is one of the best mobile warranties on the market, and you didn't think to protect your major electronics purchase with it...we all have to learn our proper warranty purchasing lessons in life. This was apparently yours.
3) Yes, MacBooks are expensive, but you aren't paying for just hardware. If you were only cared about the hardware, why did you buy a MacBook Pro?
4) Store your cables properly, your cables won't fray. While I'll admit that there are some batches that could be weaker than others, the fact that you have had three strip themselves is clearly user error.
5) Replacement feet for Macs cost $10 and they will replace them for you at the Apple Store regardless of warranty. Are you telling me you're willing to shell out $3000 on two devices but won't pay $10 to fix a major annoyance on one of them?
6) What year is your laptop? Hinges will wear over time with any laptop, and even faster if you open and close it 500 times a day. |
Absolutely, I was thinking more in the line of project-based work. As for IT, I can provide first-hand experience that it's not really all that necessary to always be there, so many things can be automated or done remotely. It naturally helps and is useful when things come tumbling down, but in general, many jobs could be done from home or in half the time it takes.
I'm not saying this applies to everyone and naturally there are jobs where they pay you for your time, but the ones that don't keep forgetting that.
For example, a few years ago there was a guy that wanted a small log cabin installed, the log cabins are produced by one of my relatives' company, so he called me and asked whether I'd like to make a decent amount of money in just a day, so of course I went.
We had 7 people and finished assembling the cabin in 8 hours and the assembly ran the guy 1/3 of the cost of the cabin. He was disappointed in how much was charged and even pointed out the hourly rates which he was paying everyone and said they're ludicrous and he could have gotten other people to do it much cheaper. He was counting everything by the hour. What might have taken 5 random guys from god-knows-where 3 or 4 days to assemble, it got done in a day by the very people who produce the cabins and know everything about them. We could easily have done this slower and spread the work out over 2 days which would decrease the hourly rate, but there was literally no point in doing that.
Cost-efficiency is something most people can't psychologically swallow when it appears as if they're getting less for their money when in reality, everything has just been done more efficiently.
Of course I digressed now and started talking about customers rather than employers, but cost-efficiency affects employers as well. Personally, I don't care whether the guys that work for me shoot pool and party 5 days a week as long as they have everything delivered on time and properly, which is also why I don't even rent an office since I'd just be bringing morale down by telling everyone they have to be at a certain place Monday to Friday 9-to-5 when there is no actual need. They get to plan their own schedules, the only thing I expect of them is for them to pick up the phone during business hours when I need to get in touch with them and show up once a week for a weekly recap and briefing for the next one.
I've had almost no trouble with this approach with a few exceptions, but I'm quite sure those exceptions won't last long in an office, either. |
Windows XP was the current version of Windows for 5 years. Snow Leopard was current for less than 2. I'm sure MS would have preferred to end LTS for XP a lot sooner, but since they waited so long to put Vista on the market, XP became so entrenched in so many areas that Redmond has essentially been forced to continue supporting XP because far more people relied on it than OS X Snow Leopard.
I actually just worked on a project where a customer had a SCADA system that could only run on Windows 2000 or NT 4. Fifteen years ago, it was current. But industrial controls have a standard life cycle of 20 years. So because the world of PCs moves so much faster than the world of industrial automation, lots of very big companies are finding out that their standard industrial life cycle of 20 years is being shortened because Microsoft has to put out a new Operating System every 3 years and break everything in the process.
The industrial life cycle is so long because replacing software and hardware at that level is massively expensive. The cost of the PC is a drop in the bucket compared to the new version of the industrial automation software (easily $10,000+), hardware (again in $10,000s usually for any decently-sized system), and the labor for engineers to re-design/re-write for the newer Operating System.
If you think it's annoying having to buy a new $1,200 laptop, try being the one to explain to the board that they have to drop $50K on a new automation system to replace the one that is only 10 years old because the Operating System on the PCs is obsolete, and if one more mission critical PC dies there are literally NO replacements to be found anywhere and the line will not run, it will not collect the critical data for QA, the service techs no longer can run the legacy software required to connect to controllers on the floor for troubleshooting, etc.
Industrial automation software is only just now beginning to standardize on Windows 7 64-bit, a full two versions behind the current Windows release. We will be needing Windows XP for at least the next 5 years minimum . |
Even if it is free, you still have to devote time doing it and there are always going to be issues.
You have to back all of your files up, delete everything, install the new OS, and then spend hours with tech support because the program that you want to use won't work unless you manually tweak your computer options. There are 3 programs that I know I will have to do this for. |
what op and everyone here fails to see is that apple is in it for the quick cash grab. they dont give a shit about their customers aka fanboys who made them rich.
yeah that's right you apple fanboys will literally swallow anything apple dishes out so until you stop being such imbecile hipster fanboys shit like this will continue. |
Not sure the downvotes. Is this just emotional brand attachment?
I'm in graphic design and am like an atheist in the bible belt in terms of colleagues and Macs. I've abandoned the platform and have been fine with Windows 7. I like Macs but the cost and lack of upgradeability led me to move on. There's a few OSX things I miss but many I've replicated in Windows and others were actually third party add ons (like Default Folder X).
But I'm a rare one in the field without a Mac (or iPhone). |
It should also be noted that for long periods of time, the follow up OS's to XP were horrendous. People consistently downgraded back to XP or refused to update past it because of the problems that came with it until they finally made a decent OS with Windows 7. Which, is basically Windows Vista with UI tweaks and a laundry list of bug fixes. It was renamed because of how tarnished the Vista name was. Microsoft had no choice but to continue support for XP. The enterprise sector took quite a while to warm up to adopting Windows 7. Currently, a similar pattern is happening with Windows 8. So, this isn't just a case of Good Guy Microsoft extending support for such a long period of time. They HAD to. |
Things are getting to smell pretty fishy around here.
Have you heard of [Antique Jetpack](
Antique Jetpack is a marketing firm that we only know about because of the Stratfor leaks. It's run by Alexis Ohanian and Erik Martin. Ohanian is a co-founder of reddit, and Martin is reddit's General Manager. Until about two days ago, Ohanian was the #3 mod on /r/technology, the #2 mod on /r/gadgets, the #2 mod on /r/apple, and the #3 mod on /r/business.
In the Daily Dot article, they reference what Alexis said yesterday on Twitter: "i haven't been an active mod on any subreddits in years, when I realized I was still a mod, I deactivated."
The thing about that is, I messaged him about a month ago (and he replied), referencing the fact that he was the #3 mod of /r/technology and pointing out the conflict of interests that creates re: Antique Jetpack.
In other words that tweet, which implies that he very recently realized he was still a mod on /r/technology and removed himself when he remembered, [is a lie](
I'd be very interested in hearing from Alexis what the ["Antique Jetpack line of business"]( entails--not that I'd necessarily take what he'd have to say at face value, given his history of evasiveness and deflection. Still, it would be nice to have his explanation of what Antique Jetpack does on the record.
When I mentioned his meeting with Stratfor on behalf of his marketing firm, Antique Jetpack, he indicated that at the time he only knew of Stratfor as a news wire, and not as a global intelligence firm.
This belies the fact that if you use the wayback machine to grab a [screenshot of Stratfor's website from around the time of the meeting]( you'll see that the first tab after "Home" is "Intelligence."
Pick any date around the time of the meeting, and "Intelligence" is featured prominently. What other "news wire" has an "Intelligence" section--especially one featured so prominently? |
Sorry but your reasoning here is super thin, and I do not like how you intentionally use langugage to make him (one of the most important people when it came to stopping SOPA) sound bad. Your post is classical conspiracy theory without any evidence and I am appaled that it got voted so high.
>he runs a PR firm we were never supposed to have heard of
What is this even supposed to mean? Where do you get that "we" (who is we?) were never "supposed" to hear of it? Because they do not post all the meetings they have on their website? Almost no company does this. Because they are not super famous? That is true for the vast majority of businesses on this planet. The fact that you learned about its existence in the Stratfor leak, and that they do not do mass business does not mean its a super secret Majestic-12 like organization you are not "supposed" to know about. It simply means you did not know about it before. There are plenty of businesses out there who conduct their business by approaching specific companies, instead of having companies approach them. Its not suspicious in the least. On top of that, I can use a sentence like yours for almost every company.
You ever hear of Herrenknecht? They have meetings with tons of government agencies, maybe even ties to the oil industry. We are not supposed to know about them. (They make tunnel boring machines)
So that part of your reasoning is entirely empty.
Your only thing about Antique Jetpack is that:
>He also met with Stratfor on behalf of that PR firm
First of all, why would Stratfor want to ban 'Tesla' on /r/technology ? Its not exactly their line of business. What you are doing here is plain, disgusting manipulation: you are building on the hope that people kind of remember that Stratfor=bad. Hence doing business with Stratfor=bad. This is a logical fallacy, however. Its like saying: "This guy spoke with a terrorist, he must be a terrorist himself!" If company A does business with shady company B, it does not follow A is shady.
So they tried to do business with Stratfor. You just assert that because its Stratfor, it must be dubious, as if every business deal they ever did is dubious, just because they did some shitty stuff. You have no proof that there is anything shady going on. Instead, you are just using public opinion on Stratfor to intentionally paint Ancient Jetpack in a negative light.
One of the stratfor mails even says that its just plain advertising:
>[...] We'd probably get better mileage
out of StumbleUpon or Digg, if it's something we're thinking about
pursuing. We did a test with StumbleUpon last spring (got a free coupon
at SXSW) and it performed adequately for Free Weekly distribution, if
memory serves.
>Kinda going off on a tangent here, but the way Stumble works is that
when you advertise with them , you pay for a certain number of spots in
their queue. ... Using some metrics, we
can take the cost of the 'impressions' and compare it to the number of
impressions Stumble provides, multiply that by its FLJ conversion and
worth of that FLJ ($3.25), we could easily determine a secure ROI for an
ad program with Stumble.
>Alexis is duplicitous
Why? Because of this?
>The thing about that is, I messaged him about a month ago (and he replied), referencing the fact that he was the #3 mod of /r/technology and pointing out the conflict of interests that creates re: Antique Jetpack.
Reading your [super conspiracy-nutjob-sounding, insulting PNs]( here is what I would do if I were a multimillionaire with a bazillion things on my to-do list and a dozen companies to manage or oversee: forget about it ASAP. Especially because I would probably get dozens a day.
>When I mentioned his meeting with Stratfor on behalf of his marketing firm, Antique Jetpack, he indicated that at the time he only knew of Stratfor as a news wire, and not as a global intelligence firm.
>This belies the fact that if you use the wayback machine to grab a screenshot of Stratfor's website from around the time of the meeting[10] , you'll see that the first tab after "Home" is "Intelligence."
First of all, Stratfor was considered one of the good guys before the leaks. They DO have lots of interesting articles. That they call their news 'Intelligence' does not mean its not also a news site, or that calling it a news site is lying. |
A Co-Founder of the largest social interaction website founding a marketing PR firm is VERY SUSPECT
first of all let me correct the above statement a bit
>>A Co-Founder of the largest social interaction website which he sold years ago founding a marketing PR firm
Someone who is a sought-after public speaker and made a website that makes money with abvertising starting a marketing consulting company is not what I would call suspect. It fits his abilities. You also dismiss the stratfor email saying its about plain advertising.
Also his point was a different one, he said "we" werent "supposed" to know about the company, but thats BS. Just because you learned about the company through an email leak does not mean your werent supposed to know it exists. It means you learned about it in an email leak. There are so many companies you never hear about until you go to a tradeshow, that doesnt mean you "werent supposed to know they exist". The wording is intentionally trying to make an every day event sound suspicious.
> Wonder who is behind the censorship on /r/technology, hmmmmmmmmmmm, not the auto/oil industry?
Ah yes, all the positive fracking propaganda here, and oh all the posts about other car companies. If you search around the tesla reddit a bit you find a PN from agentlame basically saying they delete all car posts. You find posts beeing deleted and automatically assume its censorship, but you have zero evidence to back you up.
>You're lucky you have a brigade backing you up
> |
I wonder what the efficiency of internal combustion engines was when they were barely a prototype...
Though I do know, that with a century of common use we've gotten some of them up to 60%. |
I worked for a third-party callcenter that did outbound promotional calling on behalf of directv to current customers. one of the promotions we were pushing while I worked there was just to people on "expired" grandfathered packages that directv didn't want to offer anymore. The promotion included 'free' NFL Sunday Ticket for some minor monthly increase to your programming package. The catch was that because this changed the programming package, and the people's current package was no longer offered, they would NOT be able to go back to what they had prior to accepting the promotion once it was done, and would either be stuck on the more expensive package, or risk losing channels they cared about to go to a lower current package. Many agents would lie about this in order to get more sales, and when I brought it up with management because I was not comfortable having my performance evaluated against people acting unethically, they basically told me they didn't care. (not those exact words, but it was years ago at this point and that was the gist of it). |
huh, tbh I didnt expect an answer that actually made real sense. My original post WAS an extreme oversimplification just to give some background, but your points still stand.
And to answer your question earlier about the monopoly status, they were initially granted by the government. In many areas that needed broadband when the infrastructure was being developed, because upfront costs were so high the companies demanded a period of exclusivity in order to be sure that they could recoup their initial (admittedly huge) investment. Many of these locally granted monopolies were simply WAY too long, because the cities/counties were desperate for an ISP and didnt think about the future. Now, because the upfront costs are so large, it is nearly impossible for an ISP to enter. Comcast et al can use all the tricks in the book to keep them out through legal loopholes, or they can simply threaten the new ISP that they will lower the price if they build a competing network, making it impossible for the newcomer to ever break even on the huge fixed cost of building infrastructure. A huge mega-company like Google can stomach these costs, or municipal internet funded by the local tax payers, but the municipal internet has been especially troublesome from a legal standpoint. |
States have spoken and said we should be careful and deliberate in how we allow public entry into our vibrant communications marketplace, a sector of our economy that invests tens of billions of dollars each year, accounts for tens off thousands of jobs, and serves millions of consumers.”
Excuse me? We're already there. We are the Internet. We are the economy. |
Someone has to put all the wires in. Back when there weren't any, the government funded it at vast expense, keeping their economy competitive. The ISPs in 'murrica did the barest minimum they could and pocketed the rest of the money, carving up the country into cartel-like regions so they didn't have too much overlap.
Now if anyone else wants to play, they have the crushing cost of digging up the pavements themselves. Plus the landmass of America is just huge, so there's a lot of hurdles getting between states. Google can just about afford to, but anyone else would have to use wireless technologies, which involve tricky licensing of chunks of the wireless spectrum.
The UK has almost none of the issues of America, network-wise. Small country, decidedly socialist rules. BT had to instigate Local Loop Unbundling to allow Sky and Plusnet and whomever to put their own gear inside each phone exchange. Virgin cable are investing heavily due to their legacy NTL infrastructure giving them pre-allowed access to loads of sites. BT Wholesale have to sell their services to third party 'virtual' ISPs who can jiggle the pricing and customer service to their smaller userbases' liking.
In my case I work for a little rural community ISP that use line-of-sight wireless to get around with little or no impediment so long as we stay within straightforward rules. |
Im going to piggy back off your analogy because I think it's pretty good. First of all, Comcast doesn't reduce the quality to VHS, they just refuse to increase connectivity when needed...
It's like buy.com is running three trucks an hout to UPS and all is well and good. Well, buy.com gets big and now three trucks aren't enough to ship everything they need shipped.
Buy.com offers to put a distribution center in the UPS facility free of charge, but UPS doesn't want that, they say they don't want to manage the facility even though they already have distribution centers for Amazon and a few others. Buy.com then offers to throw a few more lanes in the road so more trucks can move between the two buildings. This only costs UPS the cost of adding another truck delivery port, it does this all the time for smaller companies. They are basically forcing buy.com into paying for the right to deliver their trucks so that one of their customers can get something delivered that they already bought and paid UPS to deliver.
This is going to set a dangerous precedence if things like this are allowed to happen because we all become a bargaining chip. Want access to our customers, pay us. Who cares that the customers already paid for the access to both services, everyone is already getting their cut. The provider is in a position where it can basically hold us hostage because we have no where else to go. We can't take our money anywhere else in a lot of cases so Netflix is in a position where they have no choice. If they don't pay it then it's not a service with having, people will cancel Netflix because it doesn't work. Everyone will keep their Comcast because they need Internet and have nowhere else to turn. Comcast can't lose in this situation, yes some customer perception is lowered, but what can we do.
Our only option is to lean on the government to step in for us. Are they going to serve the people that need them now, or are they going to follow the company lining their pockets. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.