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I really hate the stupid "start screen". My PC isn't a mobile phone.
I don't care about "app stores", I want to choose which PROGRAMS I want to install on my PC. Apps are for phones.
Also, where the HELL is the "show desktop" button?? It's the single most amazing feature of windows 7, or any other version before it.
Overall, it looks to me like Microsoft wants to make all computers work just like cell phones, where you can only buy "authorized" software from an app store. Windows 8 seems to be the first step in that direction. |
First, cloud services should use asymmetric PKI encryption.
There's a ton of functionality that gets lost once you do that though. To oversimplify, those services only need to store one copy of every song, movie, tv show, and application that gets sync'd to the cloud. Customers don't even have to upload files that already exist on the server.
As soon as you start using client side encryption each user has to upload every song, movie, tv show, and application they want to store in the cloud. That's not practical for a lot of users. Add the need to store one copy of every song, movie, tv show, and application per user on the cloud service and all of a sudden you've made the service significantly crappier and more expensive for your users.
In terms of security, asymmetric encryption is a good idea for important data (ex: your taxes, business docs, etc.), but, since the majority of the data getting pushed to iCloud isn't confidential, I don't see anything wrong with the way they're doing things.
Use iCloud for your media since forgoing asymmetric encryption makes it more convenient and less expensive. Use a proper backup service that supports asymmetric encryption (ex: SpiderOak, JungleDisk) for you're important data. |
Isn't that what |
It looks like an iPhone.
Sort of.
But then again a Sonata looks like a Lexus es, sorta.
Who cares?
I love Apple, and I love their stuff.
But they can't patent their look and feel.
Their stuff looks like other smartphones too.
They shouldn't focus on making money from weak patents like these, but from production.
When I first saw this article I was in Apple fanboy mode.
I don't want anyone to outcompete Apple.
I don't want apple to die.
But they should die if they stop innovating.
I'm not worried about apple. Samsung will never overtake apple's niche, which is high end premium electronics. |
Something you must know about Apple. This is a company willing to invest huge sums of money, purchase top-shelf components from market leaders, and pay ridiculous prices for support and service the likes of which other companies can only dream of. The result is an illusion of innovation which hides the real innovators behind a veil of sparkly cases and high res displays.
Now they can do this because they have a rabid fan base that will allow them to make up all of these investments, and it puts them in a very beneficial position. When other companies were waiting for prices to come down enough to allow for mass production of affordable units, Apple is throwing a ton of resources, and not even questioning costs. The result is that they go to market with these ideas first.
That said, all of these products start development years before customers even catch a hint of them in store. In development all of these so called "original" ideas are evaluated, re-evaluated, implemented, removed and evaluated again based on the equipment being targeted. This is where Apple's strategy pays off. Because of their guaranteed return, the the hardware capabilities are going to be a lot better than the competition; all this simply because the competition does not have a guaranteed million people that will buy their phones.
So really, it wasn't that Apple invented something totally new and original 5 years ago; several organizations had been working on very similar products at the same time. Instead it's just the fact that Apple could afford to get these shiny features out earlier than anyone else. In other words, phones weren't stuck in the dark ages until 2007. They were constantly improving each year, and 2007 was the earliest possible time our technology would allow for iPhone like products.
Also, Android was remade in the image of iOS? What? The first Android phone was released in 2008 after 5 years in development, and it had most of the features iPhones had. Either you are suggesting that Google re-did their UI in 1 year to rip off Apple (Something that would take a lot longer than a year), or you understand that Google was simply not willing to rush to market, and the last year was likely spent testing. |
Not that I agree with this but if you're in Apple's shoes how could you do anything but this? I mean you percieve that Windows did nothing but rip off Apple's innovations at a lower price and that lost you a huge amount of the PC marketplace.
The truth of that is neither here nor there it is how people inside Apple perceive it. Then along comes Google. You bring them in house and partner with them and then Android comes along and looks and feels very very similar to Apple's machines and Samsung is probably the chief perpetrator of that with their home row of icons and very similar look and feel. |
It doesn't seem like Jobs was pissed because of parts. He was pissed over the design of the whole product and UI being such an obvious copy of the iPhone which Apple had been working on for years. Little things like a sensor that tells when a phone is close to your face so it deactivates the touch ability of the phone while on a call was new, and a whole slew of other things they had designed and refined before releasing a product. Apple did do R&D, and bought other companies that had already done the R&D at great expense to put into the product. When it came out, the bugs and niggles for the most part where all but gone, as they had done so much work troubleshooting and evolving the product until it was complete. This takes time and money,prototyping, lining up suppliers and assemblers, software, etc. They have indeed spent money on R&D and acquisition with the goal of releasing an amazing product, which they did., and protect the 'little' things like an OS entirely based on a free-form UI (buttons are where you draw them) and the capactive multi-touch surface. People like to say "Oh but they just bought a company that made a multi touch surface", yet they where forward enough thinking to understand that their phone design needs or, or just as likely the company gave a presentation to Apple about the tech they had made. Either way, Apple delivered this 'unique' product that was usable and refined from day 1. I have quoted 'unique' because at the time of release there was nothing close, and the fact you could buy it right away was quite an accomplishment, representing years of work by a crapload of people. Not only that it also represents the pinnacle of Jobs comeback success with the company that almost turned into a memory like Commodore.
To me, and maybe I am wrong, Samsung's early Galaxy phones and Tabs and so many aspects of them where so similar to the iOS equivalents that they looked they were copied near verbatim, with just enough changes to not be sued while being developed on a different trajectory. When I look at it like that, and that Jobs was pissed that his 'creation' was just absorbed and spit out slightly different with an OS on it that came in part from the mind of an ex-Apple employeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee sorry keyboard got stuck, and we are now seeing 'thermonuclear war' in the courts.
To see what it is liked to be ripped off, see how the Winklevoss twins felt.
As for the fees, Apple and Samsung have lawyers on retainer, always working for them full time, so it costs the same all the time. |
This. The title of both this link and the article itself are unbelievably misleading.
1) Apple has applied for a patent on this device. They have not been awarded anything as of yet. Something like 90% of initial patent applications are rejected [(Source)](
2) The device described in the application is NOT a game controller that looks exactly like a PS3 controller. In fact, it doesn't sound like a game controller at all. The patent application ([Full text here]( describes something more akin to a universal remote with a touchscreen that interacts with devices via a wireless network.
3) Figure 6 (the image of the "PS3 controller" shown in the article) has this as its description:
> FIG. 6 is a schematic of a video game controller for the standalone media player of FIG. 4 or a video game system;
and here's FIG. 4's description:
>FIG. 4 is a schematic of a standalone media player representing an embodiment of a controllable electronic device of FIG. 1;
and FIG. 1:
>FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating an electronic device configured to control or be controlled by another electronic device;
The basic idea is that this might be a device that can interact with many different kinds of devices (including, but not limited to, a video game system) via a wireless network. They're demonstrating the kinds of devices their device might interact with. |
Google is demoting pages that Google receives take down requests for on its search links, not sites that have seen DMCA requests issues directly to the website. This title is very misleading. Again the issue here is that google needs to play ball with the content companies because it is bleeding money fighting their lawsuits and is selling their stuff through Google Play store. If you want google to offer a truly uncensored view of the internet, then tell your politicians to put forth legislation that removes liability for linking to copyrighted or other illegal content. Also get them to suggest legislation that imposes fines for any illegitimate copyright claim content companies put forth so that companies stop abusing Google's contentID system as well as DMCA requests. |
The hard hitting stuff like cancer medications certainly is. Decongestants...not as much.
That's not at all how the medical R&D industry works. You can't predict in advance what kinds of drugs you'll end up discovering, and costs certainly aren't correlated to how severe the conditions being treated are. The real thing that dictates the price of drug research is whether you pursue research on truly novel drugs, or just take an existing drug and try to find tiny chemical tweaks that result in a nearly identical drug that can be patented all over again for another few years of exclusivity. In the latter case, you have a good idea what you'll end up getting, but in the vast majority of cases you end up with a drug that has nearly identical effects and drawbacks as the original drug you were tweaking, and you're far more likely to end up with new side effects than with new therapeutic ones. In the former case, you have no idea what you'll end up finding, but that's the only way to find truly novel treatments and cures for the previously incurable. |
ideas aren't a means of production
Knowledge and the transfer of knowledge is heavily studied in economics right now. Why? Economics is the study of the allocation of scare resources which are usually the traditional resources: land, capital and labor. However, we've now observed that knowledge is a resource which helps increase productivity. Not only is it transferable, but it is not scarce meaning that we can create new knowledge. What does that mean? With the traditional resources, we only have a finite amount. We can't create more which means we can't grow beyond a certain point. The only way we can continue to grow now is to create new technology which increases the efficiency of the use of the resources. However, now we've realized knowledge is a resource that enables economic growth and it is "infinite." Once we can figure out exactly what knowledge entails, how it is created and transferred across space, we can harness it as a tangible resource and the fear that we'll 'run out' will be less. |
But let's say society expects these businesses to behave in a more human manner. We demand that, while patents no longer pose a barrier, the only one able to claim "I had the OC" would be the OC content creator. Like Minecraft, with mods. We know most of it is Notch's, but some of the best stuff is modded. Nobody play vanilla Minecraft unless they have no idea how to mod. And few people playing Castle Miner are ignorant of Minecraft, either. With an informed consumer base, the innovator (Notch, in this case) always has the lions share unless his idea is improved, in which case he can embrace progress or not.
If we like the cosmetics of the ipad, and prefer to link our OS to our Google account, we should be able to install Android with no more fuss than ticking a check box. If this policy is broken or ignored, the consumer would hear about the two conflicting stories, and be able to respond by withdrawing capital from the offending party (and consumers are fickle), which may end up worse for everyone. This is why it would be bad for business to challenge the OC creator.
Software is nothing but lines of code with no foolproof way to trace it back to it's creator. This is why 'hackers' usually have a free, open source view on all software, as well as a high regard for reputation and honesty in claiming a kill. The first point I made illustrates this. |
No it doesn't.
According to Apple's most recent 10-Q, the "revenue from sales from the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore in addition to sales of iPod services and Apple-branded and third-party iPod accessories." was $2.1 billion last quarter. Apples entire operating expenses last quarter was $2.6 billion. That includes the cost of running the brick & mortar stores, employee payroll, etc. |
Except you already know what the response is going to be about. DDoSing someone is effectively denying THEIR freedom of speech, not exerting your own. That would be the |
OK I'll try to be clear as possible then.
A DDos attack sends so much data to the targeted server that it shuts down and crashes (provided that you succeed). That is what I mean when I said "by force".
A protest can at most stop people from entering due to the sense of peer/hivemind pressure. Your 800 protesters aren't blocking the way. Walmart is still open and you can still buy things. With a DDos you won't find the door into Walmart because someone took it down (or boarded it up, if you want to be realistic).
The average daily reach of a DDoSed site drops because no one could enter the site. That's like locking up Walmart, recording that zero customers shopped today, and concluding that it wasn't much of a hassle. Wrong. Plenty of regular customers could not purchase their goods, but since no one entered no records of their presence was made. The place is closed and non-functional .
There are plenty of Walmarts out there, but only 1 site. You take down the one and only website (as most sites do), and it is equivalent of every Walmart being shut down at once. "By force".
You really want to know about DDoS, try experiencing one. Try co-hosting a minecraft or any private server, then find that you cannot access one day, even as moderator/admin, because it's been DDoSed. There aren't people protesting outside the server or leaving comments/posts about how this site is bad. The site is simply dead.
I've tried my best to explain the difference between a DDoS and "average/legal" protest. I hope you can understand. |
I posted this response over at /r/mw3 on how DDoSing works after someone kept claiming it was impossible. Replace Xbox with PC and you have the same deal.
Your Xbox is connected to your home network. Your computer is also conencted to your home network. When you connect to other through XBL - via a pregame lobby or a XBL party - you're creating what I guess you could call a supernetwork between your respective networks with the host as a "hub" between all the other networks. That's why if your NAT type doesn't match up you can't connect to certain people: because without compatible NAT types, you can't make this supernetwork. Now, each network has it's own unique "name," or IP. This is how each network differentiates itself from the others.
Now if you're in game or just sitting in party, each network is sending data to the other networks. Every network sends data to all the other ones. The host of the lobby sends the most packets and has the most traffic for obvious reasons.
Now what the freeware does (I'm avoiding naming it on purpose,) is dip into the cache of data that the super network holds with all the IPs of each network. Someone mentioned it above. ARP cache poisoning. It can do this because it is connected to your home network, which is connected to the supernetwork, which by association means that your computer is also connected to the supernetwork. It then returns a list of all the IPs in the supernetwork along with the amount of traffic going through each one. All of the IPs, including yours, your teammates, and the other team's. The program also returns the physical location of each IP (Down to the city). You get each of your teammates to go to a website like IPchicken.com to figure out their respective IPs and to tell them to you. Now you have your IP and your teammates IPs.
By process of elimination, EVERY OTHER IP IS SOMEONE FROM THE OTHER TEAM. You now have all the IPs you need. Now enter any of their IPs into whatever booter you have, be it a putty, loic, jays, or your own goddamn botnet, and let the booter flood that IP with packets. Once you flood one of the home networks, by extension every piece of hardware connected to that home network gets knocked offline due to an inability to send or receive packets because all the bandwidth is taken up by junk. THIS MEANS YOUR XBOX IS SUDDENLY NOT ABLE TO SEND OR RECEIVE ANY DATA OVER THE INTERNET SO IT ACHIEVES THE SAME EFFECT AS DISCONNECTING. If you flood the host, the entire supernetwork drops, just like if you suddenly made a tree trunk disappear, all the branches would be disconnected from each other. |
I'm starting to have problem with the amount of power that Anonymous is gaining. They have been doing very public things, such as bringing criminals to justice and actively supporting a free and open Internet, which are all good things, but they do it behind a mask. Their power is almost to the point of rivaling a government.
Most first world governments have some sort of Democratically elected leaders or politician who are put in very public roles. The good politicians make decisions not for their own self gain but for the people. Politicians can be taken down by making bad decisions. It can be something as trivial as a sex scandal, or something as major as driving his/her region's economy to the ground. But the point is that the leaders who make poor decisions get fired or forced to resign and leaders who make good decisions stay in office.
Most of Anonymous's decisions have been for the greater good. But things like making DDoS attacks as a form of protest shouldn't just be ok and allowed. Especially those of you who have a small website for your business or just for yourselves, you could be the victims of this.
It's almost like there is a growing generational gap as technology is improving. Many major politicians are over 50 and have spent the majority of their lives getting to the position they are in, through spending years in Law School and being elected up the ladder. I would rather put my trust in those people than in a group of people, mostly under 30, trying to make decisions without knowing the consequences behind them.
Don't get me wrong though sometimes politicians make poor decisions, such as being against guns in video games, and wanting the Internet to have restrictions. But they did not grow up having video games or the Internet so they simply do not understand the consequences of putting those actions in effect.
There needs to be a solution for this growing generational gap. |
I don't know if anyone cares, but I posted and sourced an answer as to why other countries have faster internet. I will cross post it here.
It is because South Korea is a much better metropolitan area. Think of it like this, if it was a railroad it would be much easier to enter the game in South Korea. They are much smaller geographically. Now another company could certainly set up in the city of New York, for instance. New York is just one city though. Comcast or TW could easily slash their prices there and take a loss on them. The rest of the country will fund their losses in New York. After the company goes bankrupt, they can raise prices and not worry about more competition.
There have been towns that have tried to promote faster internet and cable. They recognize this is a problem. Yet the bigger companies can slash and burn all the surrounding areas preventing them from ever taking the United States. Look at Verizon Fios. Verizon is a HUGE company. They are worth 120 billion dollars. source:
Verizon took years to lay their FIOS lines and they excluded huge parts of the country. Furthermore, FIOS has been hemorrhaging money since inception. It has not met expectation. Verizon wanted to provide fast Internet to the country. They had enough funding to do it and still couldn't.
A reply:
I can not speculate on whether or not the customers would be more or less willing to fund Verizon over Comcast. I just know that Verizon thought more people would feel the same and they didn't. I can only look at their SEC filings. The numbers don't look good. Any one else looking to build another network is going to see those numbers before building too.
As to why it is that way, I don't have the answer. I don't pretend to either. I am just relating to you why it would be likely someone else doesn't want touch this industry with a ten foot pole. I'm sure your dad does like it. What's not to like? That doesn't always equate to success though. |
NYT article written highly criticizing Tesla's new electric car. The person who wrote the article after testing the car turned out to have been out for blood, so to speak. He intentionally did not fully charge the car and even drove it in circles in a parking lot at 0 miles remaining to get it to die. Turns out, Tesla installed a black box that logs every sort of data imaginable from battery charge to cabin temperature settings. The linked article is basically, step by step disproving most of his criticisms. |
Oh good, HALF of them are under 60.
These are the people who have a lifetime of bribes and dirty dealings that other people know about and pretty much just get the |
I'm sorry I'm busy at work... on a fucking saturday. But can somebody give me the |
Yes you will. As someone who's actually 4k tv's running standard def content it looks like something that's been filmed on a potato.
Upscaling is never perfect, even from SD to 1080p it still looks shocking on most TV's and you can certainly tell the difference between HD and SD unless you're blind.
How upscaling works on a 1080p panel is the engine inside the TV has to populate all the pixels otherwise you'd be left with an image about a quater the size of your screen sitting somewhere in the middle [this]( image should help. Because the TV wants all the pixels in use it essentially duplicates what the pixels are displaying until it reaches the desired resolution. It's like rolling dough, if you havn't got enough dough it's going to roll way to thin and you'll end up with a crappy pizza or bread bun. This is why when you watch a 1080p source on a 1080p panel you can pull out much more detail that's why it's "pin sharp" but SD content looks like a lot softer or even blurred.
This is further compounded by motion tracking technology. My company calls their's CMR (Clear motion rate) but while other companies call it other things it's essentially the same thing. Let's say you have a 200hz TV. A provider (in the UK) sends 50 images a second to your TV (50hz) on a 200hz set for every 1 image from your provider the TV will computer generate another three so fast movement looks smooth and clear. On top of this there are also black screens added in to sort of refresh your brain which also helps reduce judder. Only Panasonic count these black screens (ever wonder where they get 2400hz from?)
Anywho... So you've got a shitty SD source coming through and you're watching the football (or literally anything fast paced) on your brand new 1080p tv and you wonder why it looks shit this is because the TV is drawing extra panels from, in it's mind, an incomplete source.
On a 4K TV all of these problems are compounded by 4x. You actually have to see for yourself how bad they actually handle SD, HD and 1080. 1080p will look like SD on a 4K panel despite what marketing says. It is as simple as that
Granted 4K content looks really nice, but I certainly won't be buying one in the foreseeable future. |
Don't know why you're getting downvotes ( were getting as of now), but this isn't so far off. An important factor to include would be that the gov't is a huge source of information/news for the media and so it is generally in the best interest of the media to not anger it (and hence they often spin things in a positive light).
For this particular issue, Snowden is a larger potential news story than most of what the government can offer, but they're remaining very tight-lipped about it. However, news today is an international industry by virtue of the internet, so the coverage by non-US media companies has put US domestic media in a very interesting position.
Non-US media does not necessarily rely on the same allegiance to the US gov't for its tidbits and is therefore more flexible in its reports on US policy. As a result, US media has to compete for audience with the international reports (accessible globally online) while at the same time toeing the line with the US gov't. It may only require one dissenting domestic company to break the dam, allowing everyone to report without fear of being put at an information disadvantage by the gov't, but only time will tell. |
It's a little release valve to take the edge of people's anger. |
Accused the hypothetical DEA agents of cherry-picking, not you
*Presented a hypothetical scenario as an example of 4th amendment protections being eroded by wide-net surveillance warrants granted by FISA courts.
This is not precedented by pre-9/11 wiretap orders which required probable cause on a case-by-case basis, a clear stipulation of the 4th amendment.
*It's hardly fear-mongering. There are no legal or logistical obstacles that would prevent the DEA from doing exactly what I described. It's clearly not a priority under this administration, but the legal avenues that would allow this type of investigation will be open long after Barack Obama is out of office, and the priorities of future administrations cannot be predicted, so there is perfectly valid cause for concern.
*I could think of much, much worse scenarios than a bunch of pot-growers being busted for violating federal drug laws. Marijuana busts are not an unreasonable or far-fetched application of the current system. |
So with that in mind, you could still pickup a module with the latest CPU/GPU/RAM, and still have your camera be upgradable, upgrade your wifi to support the latest band, improve your screen. I don't know, as someone who used a Droidx for 3 years, and only recently upgraded, I would have loved to give my Droidx the ability to connect to Verizon's LTE network. The idea of spending hundreds of dollars every year or 2 to keep up with these things bothers me, so I've found other ways around it. I'd love to know how the telecom companies feel about customers upgrading their phones without having to ruin their contracts.
BTW thanks for the informative supply, I was thinking that the CPU's and the gfx chips were generally separate on phones. |
I know the hypocrisy will be easy to find if you look for it, but in general the reddit community frowns upon comments that add nothing to the discussion; anyone reading such comments can't possibly gain anything of even the most remote value, entertainment, or insight out of them. Most kinds of positive or negative rating comments are right out, though things like thanks are usually not downvoted.
so |
That's correct. Something many people who aren't engineers seem to forget when they compare the Japanese infrastructure with America is the sheer size difference. The country of Japan is tiny, very tiny, as well as very compact because of it. The cost to build an equally efficient infrastructure system here in the United States is orders of magnitude higher. It may be viable in some very specific areas of the country, namely the Eastern seaboard, but that is only hypothetical because it would mean completely abandoning the billions of dollars and decades of infrastructure already in place. |
This isn't 1999 though. Just look at the downfall of the Concorde, fast simply isn't as commercially significant as it was. Ticket price scale currently better rewards a higher quantity of passengers than a higher travel quality. I would argue this is only so because domestic travel time is relatively short. 12 hours versus 18 hours in an aggressive marketplace would be hard to fight a superior product without temporary measures like a new name (looking at you, Delta/Spirit).
Having said that trains are a whole lot slower than air travel, so it's entirely possible to have different economic significance. If they whole trip was at peak speed of 315mph, NY to LA would still take over 8 hours. LA to Vegas would take nearly an hour. Even NY to Chicago would take nearly 3 hours. That being said, it could be overnight travel. |
The DB is also the absolute reference for the timetables in Europe. Once travelling from Hungary to Romania there was apparently some disturbance on the Romanian side, and in Hungary they printed us the timetables of the Romanian trains from the DB website. Once in Romania, some stations didn't even have any information on the new time tables because they had no internet. |
There are a number of obstacles in the way of it, but one that I haven't seen mentioned is the extreme NIMBY-ism inherent in massive infrastructure projects like these. There are a number of people who oppose the government doing essentially anything , because of ideological beliefs about the nature of government or what have you.
But there are also plenty of people who say, "A high-speed rail network? Fantastic! I would, totally support tha--oh wait...you wanna build the track near my house? Eh, sorry, I'm not interested anymore."
The government can't easily build upon some of the mose logical, direct routes because the country is so developed and heavily populated now, so their options are to either make the routes zig-zag around property they can't acquire (dramatically increasing projected costs and the efficiency of the rail line), or to bust out eminent domain in order to seize the land that would be best suited for the project, and that's a governmental and public relations nightmare all its own. |
LA to SF is not a "small distance". LA to Las Vegas is certainly not a "small distance".
LA to SF is ~383 miles (616 km). The longest length of track of the entire Japan "Bullet Train" line is the Tohaku line (spanning almost half of the entire country) which is ~675km, [according to wikipedia]( and it cost Trillions of Yen, which is 10's of Billions USD, and took a very long time and a boat load of effort to build.
You have to understand that Japan is very, very small and very densely populated, those unique factors are the only reason that their train system is even viable. To do the equivalent type of system in the United States would literally cost 100's of billions if not trillions of dollars just to even put it into place, that doesn't include the upkeep/maintenance/workforce to run it and that is just for the "small distance" lines.
Using LA and SF as an example: To make the line viable you would need to run the tracks into the heart of each city, and connect it through hundreds of miles of very precious farmland. That would mean rerouting entire existing infrastructure that is already developed and in place (eg., highways, electric lines, sewage, etc.). From an engineering perspective this project would be such a large undertaking that it is almost unfathomable. This says nothing of the politic aspects that are just to numerous to list off. |
I'm no scientist but I know some shit about things man. So here's more words than you wanted.
> Wouldn't that other trains speed, relative to you be 200k miles per second?
Yes, but nothing is moving faster than c (c being the scientificalised term for the 'speed of light').
Fascinating rabbit hole to go down: my understanding is the train will appear brighter (more probably, a different colour) due to the doppler effect. For a moment let's break the universe into nanosecond steps (during each step we advance everything according to its speed). The light rays coming from the train are coming towards you like dit-dit-dit-dit one for each tiny step we make, and each dit moves toward us by a small amount each step.
If we are static, and the train is static, we hear dit-dit-dit-dit with the same gap between each as there was when the light originally reflected from the train. If the distance is decreasing (the train is coming towards us), each dit leaves from a point closer to us than the one before it. So, initially, no dits. Step 1, one dit leaves the train, and the train comes a tiny bit closer to us. Step 2, first dit moves by an amount, second dit is created, train gets closer (rinse and repeat). With each step, the distance between each dit is smaller so when the dits eventually arrive, we receive it as ditditditdit with tiny gaps.
If the train was moving at the speed of light, then the train advances so far in a single step that it keeps pace with the first dit, so the second dit is in the same place. The dits never get ahead of the train, and instead pile up on one another, so that when they eventually reach us, it comes in one huge instantaneous crash of holy sh-dit .
Even though they're not moving any quicker, they are arriving more frequently because they start closer and closer to us.
In terms of sound, this is why ambulance sirens appear to rise in pitch as they get closer. If you were in the ambulance (God forbid unless that's your job), it doesn't change tone at all. With light, the wavelength (colour) is affected and the colours shift. At 'normal' speeds this isn't a problem. Once your speedometer has half a dozen zeros on the end? Problem. As it turns out, if you drive at a sufficient speed, a red traffic light will appear green due to this doppler effect. (source: [xkcd]( Fortunately , if you're driving at 31,000mph the cop probably won't have enough time to read your plates. Unfortunately if you're driving at 31,000mph you will surely die.
SEE ALSO: [Relativistic Baseball]( from XKCD.
Now what was I answering... oh right. |
Roughly $780 at amazon's cost for ABS spools. It stays stable/durable between -4f and 170f, so you don't need to worry about storage in most climates. ABS is commonly used in household pipes, and is usually considered to have about a 50 year lifespan.
for more info
The tensile strength is actually a bit low there, but [this source]( has it listed as 6,500PSI of tensile strength. For reference, a [sturdy oak desk]( has a perpendicular-tensile strength of ~1000. It has a much higher tensile strength when going with the grain, because smashing a plank of wood cross-ways is easier than trying to compress it to smash it.
So that kayak is as sturdy as if you had grown an oak tree in a mold to "exactly" form the shape of the hull, and then you made it 6 times more durable. For reference, Lego blocks are made of ABS. |
I used to work at a Dish Network call center. And to say that they didn't give a flying fuck about customers would be an understatement.
They had HUGE digital clocks on the walls (I think it was 2 or 3 per wall) around the floor. These clocks did not tell the time (the regular clocks were analog wall clocks); those huge clocks showed the average time per call. If it was over 9 minutes, we were told to hurry up and make sure to end the call as quickly as possible.
I was given a warning once because my average time per call was 15-20 minutes. They told me to make sure I tell customers to call back when a Dish box needed to be reset or rebooted, since it took about 5 minutes to reconfigure. This was around the time when they had a known faulty box that was prone to fail (and they keep selling it and telling us not to tell customers about a new box coming in the near future). So when trying to fix these boxes, I knew most of the time it was going to be an RMA, but you have to follow certain steps. In all of these steps, there were about 3-5 times were you would have to reconfigure the box, so it would either take one long call for me, the rep, or many short calls, including going through all the holds again, for the customer. So when they customer tells me he/she had to wait 30 minutes to talk to a rep, I was not going to let them go through that again.
I know I hate being placed on hold and waiting in the call queue, so I tried to treat them better than I was trained to.
I quit after 4 months. |
it just confuses the matter.
Literally the opposite, for anyone who confuses bites with bytes.
It puts it in a perspective that the layperson is used to reading it. There is literally no downside to listing both speeds, and there are upsides. So, |
Hey, just wanted to share a video I watched in an IT policies class that I am currently enrolled in. The video is a bit long but talks about how Enron used to do the same thing with energy. They would clog the transmission lines and then charge the company to unclog it so there wouldn't be a blackout. I felt the comparison was so similar and hope to share the video with more people!
The 3 min mark talks about the utility lines being clogged. |
The difference between wireless and wired communication is wired communication should always have enough capacity to handle all communications even during peak hours. You know how much bandwidth you sold. Wireless communication makes that impractical because all your subscribers could go to one point. You can't have enough capacity for everyone at every point in your network. Hence you need throttling.
Some data probably should get priority. (911 calls.) But mostly it doesn't matter what type of data people are using, but only how much . And then only on the leg of the trip between the phone and the tower. But bar exceptions (911), there is zero reason for the website to matter when it comes to throttling. Netflix, Google and Facebook should all have access to the same amount of bandwidth for any given user. So Net Neutrality would still apply. |
Did anyone else catch the "wireless broadband Internet access provider" part?
Wireless providers like Verizon are already exempt from rules that include throttling Wireline internet access providers, like Comcast, are not. |
Out of curiosity I calculated the required space the plant would need to satisfy California's demands.
At 6080 acres the solar farm produces 1096 GWh/yr.
And California's demand roughly 280,000 GWh/yr
The solar plant would have to take up 2,427 sq. miles to be the sole provider of California's power demand.
For perspective, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant would need to take up just 7.6 sq. miles to do the same. Thats 60,030 GWh/yr. At 1038 acres |
They take the risk, build out the infrastructure, and maintain it.
They didn't, for example the 850mhz wireless spectrum that Verizon and ATT use to provide nationwide coverage were attained through acquisitions (FCC handed them out to regional providers who were later bought). Those acquisitions gave them more customers and existing infrastructure that created the appropriate scale to build a nationwide network. You can't build a nationwide network with 30M, 40M or even 50M customers when there are 300M that need coverage. Until recently neither T-Mobile nor Sprint had access to low-band spectrum (700 and 800mhz respectively). Low band spectrum allows you to deploy a network at 1/3 the cost it does on 1700, 1900mhz, and 2.5Ghz. Basically T-Mobile and Sprint run a network that costs 3x to operate but covers 3x fewer people because they don't have 100M customer to justify a bigger network
ATT and Verizon are largely the result of dozens of mergers and acquisitions of regional providers that gave them a treasure trove of 700, 850, 1700, and 1900. The FCC created the "duopoly" and allowing these two to own nearly all of the most valuable spectrum. The only reason T-Mobile is putting up a fight is because ATT was forced to give up spectrum and money in the failed merger attempt.
> How much that would affect their actual building, we can't know- but it is a negative incentive.
Quite the opposite. It would create MORE regional carriers and more spectrum bidders. ATT and Verizon do not want this. They don't want companies buying up spectrum and launching their own networks because THEY would have to start paying for roaming too! Right now, there aren't many regional providers left, so there is no competition in roaming rates (like the past). The biggest player can afford to build the biggest networks. ATT/VZW would like to keep it that way because Sprint and TMO would end up losing money every-time a subscribers leaves the network. The other reason is that there isn't any spectrum left to buy (after the 600mhz auction). |
Everyone responding to your comment seems to ignore that T-Mobile caught Verizon charging less in roaming areas where they were not in direct competition. Aka Verizon increased rates in order to harm smaller carriers and impede their ability to provide ample coverage at a "reasonable" rate for roaming on ATT and Verizons network. Specifically, TMobile alleged that Verizon is charging a much lower rate (sometimes lower than 1/10th of T-Mobile's quoted rate for data) to international carriers which ATT and Verizon share no direct competition.
Now since the FCC began regulating roaming rates, this is an obvious abuse of ATT and Verizon's current network standing to price gouge TMobile and Sprint. |
i am no fan of verizon. I am tmobile user and pretty happy with their pricing . But having said this, what kind of precedence will this kind of ruling set? I am all happy about paying less but how can a court order a private company to charge less for their own network? Shoudn't it be based on their demand/suppy? I am pretty sure t mobile is not the only network that is using verizon networks for roaming. |
I think the real problem is not informing drivers what lane to be in before each turn.
Ex. "Left turn in 500 yards, please move to 2nd to far left lane" (sorry I can only think of a very technical way to say that).
Also telling drivers about quick follow up maneuvers ahead of time.
Ex. Turn left onto "Learn to Navigate" Dr and prepare to veer right onto "It's not that fucking hard" Blvd 200ft later. |
I can smash an Android on the ground too and it can't perform. |
Well you get to places like that when you do anti-competitive things
EDIT: So things don't get buried and comments here is justification for this response.
In 2005 there were 2 "choices" of processors: Intel's Prescott series processor against AMD's Athlon 64 processor. The Athlon 64 series processors outperformed the Prescott series processors by leaps and bounds.
In order to counteract this Intel chose to violate anti-trust laws by paying OEMs such as Lenovo, Dell, HP, etc. to delay, handicap, or release their AMD based products and order exclusively from Intel, even if they were getting inferior processors.
AMD sued Intel because of this however they won the lawsuit years after the damage was done and have since never recovered. In fact, AMD doesn't have their own fabrication facilities, they were sold years ago because of Intel's douchebaggery.
AMD even tried giving HP a MILLION free processors at one point just to get the name out only to be told that HP was so dependent on Intel rebates that they couldn't afford to take them. |
The lower end iMacs have just integrated gfx, which is good enough to play some stuff on low. The higher end iMacs have Nvidia's 700M series, which actually isn't [terrible]( if you're content playing on med/low 1080p settings. Enough for 30fps for most stuff.
Now, the top tier 27" 5k res iMac has an AMD M290x which is actually [pretty great]( at 1080p...if you feel like dropping $2.5k on an iMac. It's on par with an older Radeon 6970 desktop card. |
I don't disagree with you that Apple will eventually falter -- as nearly every worldwide brand tends to do. But perception of quality, ecosystem, and loyalty goes a very long way in ensuring the success of a company.
Yes, there are more powerful and technically able technologies and products out there. I think most intelligent Apple fanboys would concede that. But not everyone knows, wants, or cares to utilize those products.
I've always thought millenials would adapt to troubleshooting and researching technology more easily, but the trend has stayed consistent throughout the generations. The majority of people just don't care to put the research into less accessible albeit more powerful technologies.
Apple products (and the consumer tech market at large) is extremely savvy at producing very adequate, powerful products that are easy to use and have an intuitive, low learning curve. No other competitor has come close, and Apple's done well enough to remain the undisputed number one in this regard. If it were so easy, everyone would do it, no? |
That's simply not true. Motorola made chips for Apple right up until Intel transition announcement, and even for a bit beyond it. For high-end desktop chips, Apple switched to the third partner in the PowerPC AIM alliance, IBM, but the G4 was made by [Motorola (later Freescale)]( — meaning that all iMacs and Mac laptops still used Motorola chips. Apple never got a G5 that could fit in a MacBook Pro, so it used Motorola tech until the Intel transition.
Timeline:
2003 June — [First IBM CPU in PowerMac]( [Motorola in iMac, MacBooks](
2004 August — IBM in PowerMac, [iMac]( Motorola in MacBooks
2004 November — [Tech journals rumor Apple/Motorola phone news](
2004 December — [Motorola completes chip spin-out as Freescale](
2005 June — [Intel transition announced](
2005 September — [Motorola phone collaboration announced](
2006 January — first Intel Macs ship
Apple never forgave Motorola for their inability to live up to their promises. In late 1999, when Intel had +700 MHz CPUs, Apple announced a 500 MHz PowerMac which Motorola failed to deliver. Apple was publicly embarrassed, and you can bet that Steve Jobs didn't care that one corporate entity had become two by the end of 2004. Before the Freescale spin-out, Apple and Motorola had already done enough work on their phone collaboration by then that tech journals were reporting the rumors. Given how slowly tech companies move, the collaboration was probably in the works before the Freescale spin-out announcement in July 2004.
Ultimately, there was no dodging the ire of Steve Jobs with, "What, those chip people? In a couple of months, that'll totally have nothing to do with me anymore! Please help me make a cool phone." |
I'm an electronics engineer for a utility. I work With batteries daily. I don't see it working for peak times. It would only work with the proper training of the homeowner. You'd need a massive battery to power a home first off, which would be very expensive. You'd need AC/DC converters as well as a charger to regulate your charge on your batteries. A new breaker feed from your battery from the charge as well as a breaker from your battery to your distribution in your house. As well as proper storage, temperature regulation, and ventilation. This would be over $10,000 for the homeowner, no way the power company subsidizes it because batteries require Maintainence that the homeowner would also need to do either theirselves or a contractor. The utility has enough Maintainence so they wouldn't want any part of it. Secondly, managing the load during peak would become difficult, work planning would become difficult, because it would vary depending on when the homeowner switched from grid load to battery load. This switching would have to be done by the homeowner, it couldn't be done remotely unless an entire residential feeder gets turned off, in turn dropping 400-600 houses from load and some of them might not want this new battery idea. I don't think It would benefit peak load unless a few conditions were in place, but based on the way it is now I can't see it happening for that.
I do however think it would be a great backup for your home, although costing three or four times what a 5kw generator will cost you, it would be quite safe and reliable as long as proper Maintainence is done throughout the lifespan of the batteries to ensure all the cells are going to last. |
We have something like this for the UK already - but it is only used by major industry.
It's called "Triad" here - it's based on the 3 half hours in a day where demand is highest and only during the 4 coldest months of the year. So it's a fairly limited scope. The large industries have the option of switching to their own power generation (batteries or diesel generators usually) or pay a punitive peak-usage rate. They only find out on the day if Triad will be active so it's a pain to manage, there are talks to automate it or put the switchover into the hands of the national grid in the future.
If the scope of this could be widened to include domestic residences, more times during the day and for more months it could represent the beginning of a huge reduction in the overall power requirements for this country. They would, of course, need to replace the "stick" incentive with a "carrot". It would also address one of the major drawbacks of wind and solar generation - what to do with all of the excess power during periods when it's not needed? We feed it into batteries in people's attics/basements/garages then use all of that saved up juice when the sun goes down, the wind drops and Eastenders starts. |
Capitalism is often mischaracterized and misunderstood, so people end up supporting systems to "reign it in".
I'd argue that we don't have nearly enough capitalism, because a small elite calls the shots for hundreds of millions of people. The Fed sets interest rates, governments create complex and unpredictable (or unfairly enforced) regulations, some industries are subsidized, while others are heavily taxed, etc.
Basically the western democratic world suffers from elite power. The problem is most people view this complexity and centralized control as being a good thing. They think it somehow helps the poor, or prevents exploitation of workers.
Until interest rates freely float, money isn't based on government issued debt, and private property isn't considered "up for grabs" by the majorities in democracies, the economy will continue to stagnate and become even more sclerotic. |
TheVerge article misses the point: this battery is about how industrialized nations produce electricity, not having a backup generator in your house or using your electric car to ferry "free" power from a charging station to be used at home.
If this battery can be produced at an affordable cost and Tesla can get power utilities to integrate the batteries into the grid, this has the potential to revolutionize how electricity is produced worldwide. As "The Economist" points out (and many other analyses have argued as well): "The biggest problem with renewables has always been storing the electricity they produce... If intermittent energy [like wind and solar] can be stored, its economics are dramatically improved."
It's often not windiest or sunniest during the hours of peak demand for electricity when most people want to use it: when they are in their homes in the evening. As a result, installing additional solar panels and wind turbines is ineffective if the regional power generation market does not have enough on-demand generation capacity (like coal or gas plants) to meet peak demand. Market dynamics haven't encouraged power companies to install energy storage capacity at scale because battery technology to date has been (a) expensive and (b) inefficient. Tesla's in-home battery is a consumer focused workaround that cuts out power utilities and gets all of us to provide energy storage; if enough of us buy Tesla home batteries, the combined storage capacity of our homes gives the power grid the flexibility to absorb renewable energy generated during off-peak hours and use it later during peak demand. |
My biggest problem with Mr. Musk is his idiotic anti-AI bullshit. It's so clearly an attempt to get people to invest in his technologies rather than other technological advancements that could potentially do just as much, if not considerably more for the human species as Mr. Musk's technological advancements. |
Not really, almost every website uses google analytics, or if you email anyone with a gmail address, or someone with an android phone stores your phone/address info, etc. |
Considering many aspects of current 20th century living would require more effort than I currently have. Young nihilists aside, there are more efforts being made to fundamentally alter the way governance is applied without regard for the basic moral precepts of fundamental liberty politics than for it. |
Here's how I see it:
I will never pay for a mod.
Current free mods, like SkyUI, have been implemented in a TON of other free mods.
SkyUI became paid, breaking those free mods.
I feel gaming has declined a TON recently because of all the add-ons and skins and microtransactions and pay us for in game money, etc.
Adding MORE ways to spend money on gaming when we already loathe the current ways to spend money on gaming is just plain annoying.
They tested the water to see if they could give the first inch in their mile of monetization, the fish in the waters grew legs and chased them far, far away. |
The self generated hype in the community around HL3 is greater than Duke Nukem. You are fooling yourself to assume it won't be the same or worse situation.
Fair enough on the IP rights but what happens when this out sourced company generates a turd with their name on it? Also imagine the backlash when they simply announce that Half Life 3 will not be made directly by Valve...
It is simply not worth making. Yes it would make a nice fortune if they did, even if it was a turd (pre-orders and the curious would add up quickly). However, and just like they say, they can make more money by keeping those resources focused elsewhere.
Heck, there is simply less risk by not making it right now. As for the life long hounding, by this stage it's brought them more attention than negative results. |
People in the 'Google is the next Big Brother' camp can say all they want, but the fact is that Google just acted with goddamn ethics . Any attempt to rationalize this as Google acting in their own financial interest fails here. They just unilaterally shut themselves off from a market with 400 million internet users .
Even if you insist on attributing a cold-heated financial motive to this move, that would still involve Google making a bet that it operates more profitably in an environment where information is free. Think about that. An enormous multi-national corporation whose senior executives believe that their corporation's capacity for profit is directly tied to freedom of expression and are willing to risk billions of dollars towards that end.
Counter-argument: "This just an extremely well-orchestrated public relations coup. Give up the biggest pie in order to get bigger chunks of all the other pies. That, or they're doing it because they actually think they can get China to back down."
So what? Either of these motives still requires them to do an extremely good thing in order to carry out their nefarious schemes. In other words, they'd have to earn their praise in order to get it.
Again, personally I think the best explanation is that this was a group of senior executives that decided to place more value on an ethical stance than the financial interests of the company's shareholders.
But, regardless of what motive you ascribe to Google here, at the end of the day you have a company that, at least this very instant, has put its gargantuan heft behind a cause that many of us can profoundly support.
Frankly, the idea of a large multi-national company making a billion-dollar ethical stand is absurd to me - but , I can't find any other reasonable explanation for what's going on here. More than anything, it blows my mind that I can honestly regard a public corporation as a champion in the fight for human freedom. Not forever, not always; but certainly in this one moment. |
It's the first time I've ever done it, too! Probably will not do it again (I have yet to enter a pun thread, though), but I'll never understand why anyone would take the time to post a comment in any forum about how they decided not to RTFA. In this case, the |
Tell me, if I were to drop you in the middle of an unfamiliar place with a map, would you be able to figure out where you are?
The wifi-only iPad can use wifi networks for a pretty inaccurate idea (I have no idea how that actually works...GeoIP of some kind?) of where it is, but it would be supremely useless to give you a pinpoint location or to provide turn-by-turn directions. |
Phone makers and carriers alike just need to let go of the cheek-clenching.
First, there needs to be a really affordable Android phone with at least a 320x480 screen (think iPhone 1-3), an at least 3MP camera, BT, WiFi, capacitive touchscreen, sturdy body (not plastic; I hate Nokia) and expandable memory in the price range of 80 EUR ($105 or so) without a contract (for use with prepaid; where I live prepaid is usually even the better choice). It should cost nothing with a contract.
Then there need to be unlimited data plans for mobile. OK maybe not "unlimited" unlimited, but, please, put your 2GB or 5GB plans for $30 back from where they came from. What we need is 100GB for $30 a month, something most people won't even use up. Carriers can throttle the speed on HSDPA/HSUPA(+)-networks to 1MBit/s, it's plenty enough for most people and will allow for better planning of scaling of their network.
Secondly, as a "soft" problem, carriers and phone makers need to change their advertising from not only stating what the phones have, but also what you can do with it (i.e. not only advertise the hardware, but also the software).
This is already happening, again, where I live; but I've seen it happen in the US too, although e.g. the original Droid ads fell short, because they just compared themselves to the iPhone instead of simply saying what the Droid can. "Droid can" is just another dumb marketing catchphrase that spreads more FUD among potential buyers than helping them decide. Those people you are selling to aren't the people you were selling your first cellphones in the mid/late 90ies.
People today in the 20-30 year old demographic know what a particular tech spec means, and telling them what the software can do will assure them that they can do with the device what they want to do. People older than 30 or so will, so I think, research long enough so that they can be sure that the phone they buy will have what it needs.
So yes basically, people 20-30 are impulsive buyers, but these days even they want more than just a "cool" device ("Droid can"), they want to know what it has and what it can, otherwise you're just turning them off.
FWIW, I still have only a Sony W890i, and its "smart" features are plenty enough for me to do daily management of stuff (think contacts, calendar, camera, etc.; internet on it is pretty shitty but I simply don't use that). I really don't have a lot of cash at the moment and am waiting for a really affordable but sturdy Android phone. |
Simply watching some of the few interviews on Ive's philosphy on design are quite inspiring. I think his products have influenced the design of just about all consumer electronics since the first iMac.
You can thank Steve for finding Ive but Jonathan Ive and his crew are definitely a huge reason for Apple's success of late.
People that read Reddit and contribute on here do so because of a certain liking for technology, one that is more active and involved than the average person's appreciation for technology and even its impact on society. Apple, not exclusively, is a company that really doesn't care for people like us. They're a company that wants to make great products for the largest audience; the average person. And it is this philosophy, targeting the layman, that I personally think has gotten them so much success. A nerd like me will never understand why design is so deeply important in a product, both in software and hardware. Apple believes it is so important that it wishes to control its products so that the experience received is predictable and stable for the average user. Me, being a nerd, am always asking for more, more openness, more extensibility, more customization. It even gets to the point where I sometimes start associating political notions to the terms "open" and "closed", which is taking things a little bit too far.
However, i've never stopped to think that the average person doesn't want all this for fear of confusion. I feel that Apple has struck the right balance between these two paradigms, simplicity and flexibility, for the most part.
And as for Job's health. I wish him all the best.
He is a human being.
And for all I can see, it seems his only goal in life is to make great products for the most people possible. He may have made some bad decisions, stepped on many toes, and stabbed some people in the back but such is expected and normal for any person forced to make tough decisions. Following Apple for many years has revealed to me that here is a company that is only in business to serve a demand for technology that makes our lives richer, money, fame, etc are simply the side effects.
I personally think Jobs is in this business for life, he's simply too passionate about the socio-political-technological aspects of our future to simply retire and leave Apple. If anything, he is a great leader with a strong vision of the future who can inspire people to get things done.
Without him I fear Apple's corporate culture just will not be as strong. |
Yup.
Idea = publish.
Good idea = visit the Office of Technology Licensing, get 1/3 of the take, 1/3 to dept, 1/3 to university, but if it's big $$$ university takes dept share too.
Awesome Idea = Keep your mouth shut.
It's like that at most universities. The result of that is you will NEVER see a research publication with a good or awesome idea in it. It's not because researchers are all idiots, it's because great ideas do not get sent to conferences or journals, they go to the patent office. And even with normal ideas, you won't see it presented well, because you don't want anyone else figuring out your next step. |
There's a difference between claiming ownership and what's called "shop rights". The general gist of is that you get to "own" what you create, but they can take a portion based on the fact that you created it using their resources. The same exists for companies, where even if you invent something on your own time they can say you were using their resources or even ideas you received from work.
The thing is, schools are sitting at this really strange place compared to corporations. For instance, you lose some of your rights when you submit your exams or papers. It varies from school to school, but look hard enough and you'll usually see some form of it. This is even more so for schools that use TurnItIn or other services. |
HE SHOULD PAY THE F*CK UP .
He's on the UNIVERSITY'S campus.
OBVIOUSLY, The university is entitled to 25% of the funds.
MATTER OF FACT, LETS TAKE THIS B*TCH FURTHER.
The state should be entitled to 25% of the funds, and then OBAMA PERSONALLY, should get 25% of the app for being the president of USA.
THEN- GOD, personally should have 25% of the funds because he created Earth and everything and provided you with limbs to create such an amazing app.
THEN I, should be provided with 25% of THAT because I helped everyone get there their deserved share.
HOW DOES THAT SOUND? GREAT . Lawyers, get the paper work ready. |
I'd say anything that ignores human emotion is a shitty argument. I use to be like that, fuck emotions they shouldn't count towards anything...and then I realized something. To ignore emotions is to ignore ourselves. We aren't machines that adhere to a set of rules and when we break one of those rules, we're suddenly broken. We're humans with laws (which aren't really laws since we can break them) that were created by beings which have emotions...us. |
Something that Herrohkitteh didn't hit on, but it probably what DublinBen wanted to emphasize is how parallelism actually affects how you go about doing things.
A GPU can crank through computationally expensive tasks if there is parallelism to exploit – One such parallelism that is exemplified by the term Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). The idea being that if you have 1million numbers in a row that all need to get multiplied by 5, you can set up hundreds of workers to do the same thing fairly easily. That's what a GPU does. In the video, the data is the mona lisa, the instruction is "put the paint straight ahead", and each barrel is a worker/core.
What GPUs don't do well with is the type of computation that requires a little bit of work, then depending on the result of that work, deciding what work to do next . GPUs are also generally bad at having their various cores (and there's often dozens of simple cores in a gpu) do different things from each-other (meaning that GPUs are good at problems with parallelism of task). GPUs also often work better on tasks where they're operating on a fixed amount of data, and not having to bring new data on board all the time– so when a GPU works on a big list of numbers to produce a new big list of numbers, then goes on to work with that new list... that works well.
Another way to think of this whole thing is that a cake factory takes just as long to produce a cake as a skilled baker. If you're interested in a thousand highly similar cakes, then you'll want the factory, otherwise it's overkill. Now, if you want 1 chocolate cake, 1 lemon cake, and a dozen cupcakes, the factory will actually be at a disadvantage because of different tooling (instructions) and raw materials (data) needed for each of these tasks. |
That's incorrect. The server requests password from the user. The client sends password to the server. Server ferries it. If the password is correct the server sends out a token to the client. Only with this token with that timestamp can access the necessary data. This is how LDAP works. Always. |
Quote from at&t rep:
> "That means increased output, higher quality service, fewer dropped calls, and lower prices to consumers than without the merger."
He was on a roll there with "higher quality service, fewer dropped calls". Should have quit while he was ahead.
From a technological standpoint, the merger would definitely be beneficial. Rather than having two sets of towers working in parallel and not serving any common consumers, you'd have the same towers serving all customers. This would be a huge gain for at&t subscribers, as their primary problem is not enough towers and not enough bandwidth.
...and any benefit to the consumers stops there.
This will definitely allow them to provide better service at a lower cost, but...
Logistically, I don't see any reason, with one less competitor, that they would choose to lower prices for consumers rather than just pocket the savings.
So why wouldn't they just jack up prices with one less competitor? I don't see any reason why they wouldn't... Anyone remember when they bought BellSouth back? They promised they'd offer cheap $10 dsl, but [kind of didn't]( If you knew about it and asked them, you could get it, but your average consumer didn't see these low prices they were talking about.
Obviously, increased output would be wiped out by the above: consumers wouldn't " get " more bandwidth and capacity, only because they'd crunch it out of a reasonable price range.
From a financial standpoint, I think 'acquiring' more towers through a merger would drain the amount of dollars they'd otherwise be using to actually build more. After (a) draining cash reserves from the buyout, and (b) having more tower already, why would they bother putting up more?
So that "increased output" from the supply-side would be reduced further from less actual tower-building |
you could never delete them anyway, fb store everything you do on their network, from posts and photos to interactions and eyetracking. Nothing ever gets deleted, you just opt to hide it or leave it viewable but rest assured you're precise movements throughout the site and the wider fb:connected web are monitored at all times with data collated and analysed. It's worth a fortune because it's one of the most valuable marketing metrics systems available with close to a billion users, being monitored. Data isn't freely exchanged of course, but leveraged internally in the form of target advertising charged to 3rd parties but it's all stored in scaleable sql configurations for the foreseeable future.
The fact that US LEA can access this data without judicial review is something else entirely different but the |
Some actual stats. Most of which can be found [here]( the US over the last 10 years there are on average about 9k homicides committed with firearms per year.
There are also studies done on specific cities that seem to indicate that a criminal record was highly correlated with being a murder victim. For example in 1996 93% of murder victims had a criminal record, and Richmond a male is 22x more likely to suffer a gunshot wound if they have a criminal record than if they don't.
On a side note about 5k deaths from distracted driving every year (texting, talking with a passenger, fiddling with the radio etc). |
Sorry that linux was too hard for you.
It's not too hard. It's not worth the hassle. That's the whole point. It's not worth the trouble.
>Sorry that you dislike helping people.
I help people for a living. All day long. You don't know what you're talking about.
>Sorry that you think that the software is the end state of things.
This doesn't even make any sense. This is not a philosophical discussion.
>Linux hassles me far less than windows EVER did/does.
That's because you wanted to take the time to figure it out. On your own. What you seem to be missing is I have things I need to do for a job. If Linux wants to replace windows, those things have to be at least as easy as they are on windows. They are not. And people like you don't think they need to be. So Linux. Will never. Replace windows.
>That's even WITHOUT having the ENTIRE industry backing it up.
So, what you're saying is your anecdotal evidence is better than everyone elses anecdotal evidence? I'll take that to heart.
>Windows would probably have died long ago if it wasn't for vendor lock in.
Really? Then how do you explain Apple? You have no earthly idea what drives a business to use a certain technology. You can't get past your bias.
> |
There's got to be some sort of godwin for people that resort to calling their opponents in a discussion "fanboy".
RTFM. (holy shit, this applies in windows as well OMGWTFBBQ)
Also, I dual boot. At no point did I say it was irredeemable. Sorry that linux was too hard for you. Sorry that you dislike helping people. Sorry that you think that the software is the end state of things. Linux hassles me far less than windows EVER did/does.
That's even WITHOUT having the ENTIRE industry backing it up.
Windows would probably have died long ago if it wasn't for vendor lock in. |
This Proview lawsuit is one of the most hilarious corporate lawsuits I've seen in a long time.
> The irony is that Proview is trying to get a U.S. court to nullify an agreement that it claims in Chinese courts never existed -- namely the one that Apple says sold them the rights to the iPad trademark in mainland China.
> Proview's press release has answer for that:
> *"The legal questions and remedies in the China and U.S. lawsuits are separate and distinct and have no bearing on one another." - [Link](
So for those who aren't familiar with the case, here's what happened:
Proview built a computer that was just a cheap old iMac knockoff .
Years later, Apple was interested in releasing a device called an iPad, which not only had a different name from Proview's device (ie. it wasn't an acronym and the capitalization was different), but it was also an entirely different product, meaning there may not even have been a trademark issue to begin with. Even though it might have been in the clear, Apple still decided to purchase the name from Proview, just to cover all its bases.
Apple sets up a Special Purpose Entity (SPE) to purchase the name from Proview so that Proview doesn't know it's Apple. This act may be manipulative but it's perfectly legal. Apple names this fake company IP Application Development Limited (aka. IPAD Ltd) as a means to convince Proview of the reason why it wants the "IPAD" name.
Proview sells the "IPAD" name to IPAD Ltd (aka Apple) for $55,000.
Year later, Proview goes bankrupt, and in an attempt to make some money, it realizes that it could have made a lot more money off the sale to Apple, given how popular the iPad is. Proview then sues Apple, and argues in Chinese court that it never legally sold Apple the name, meaning Apple is violating Proview's trademark.
While simultaneously arguing in Chinese court that it never sold Apple that name, Proview argues in American court that it DID sell Apple the name but that Apple committed a fraudulent act by using the SPE to buy the trademark. In other words, Proview's lawsuit against Apple in the U.S. refutes its own lawsuit against Apple in China. When called out on this fact, Proview's response was "The legal questions and remedies in the China and U.S. lawsuits are separate and distinct and have no bearing on one another." |
Someone killed my friend in a car crash he was unknowingly taking cocaine. The fine for taking cocaine and driving in my country (UK) is £5,000 so yes. $675.000 for pirating 'now thats what i call music 78' losing the artist maybe a second car a year when a man is dead and his killer is serving 3 years maximum in prison and paying out £5,000. |
CD's costs so little to produce, that they might as well be free. It is not the object as such you pay for, but the development-costs previously. |
Do you understand that very few bands make much of anything off of album sales due to the tyranny of record companies? Aside from shows, these guys make very little from album sales regardless of the work that goes into it, and it has been like that since long before internet piracy was on anyones radar. Bands get money from shows, shows get promoted by word of mouth, word of mouth gets spread by more people listening. Some of my favorite bands have actually boycotted themselves in regards to buying albums, encouraging fans to go to shows instead. |
There are many reasons that your logic is valid, but there is at least one more big piece.
'Potential Profits': The problem with this term is that it assumes that those who download illegally would pay for the copy given there was no other way to get it. If I tell you that I could potentially make $30 billion dollars in my lifetime, that does not guarantee that I will. We used to just say "counting your chickens before they hatch".
The nature of virtual products: The copies of this product are unlimited. Where you say stealing an apple will cause undue monetary damage you are correct. That is because an apple takes time to grow, harvest, ship, shelve, and sell - per apple. Once the musician's music is recorded, infinite digital copies of that music can be made for no additional cost. The price you pay is 100% recording industry profit for a virtual product (unless you buy a cd). Since this is the case, the digital copy has no inherent value, only an assigned value.
This is where the RIAA falls off. They believe that each copy of the album retains the original value of the recording.
One example to clarify, then I'm done. RIAA buys an apple tree for $250, and spends another $250 on labor and expenses to raise that apple tree. They sell each apple for $1, then use 3 cents from each sale to upkeep the apple tree. If an apple is taken from the tree, the loss of profit would be 97 cents. You do not pay $500 for an apple because that would be ludicrous.
RIAA finds a way to infinitely reproduce apples for no additional cost. They still want to sell them to you for $1 (100% profit). If you take an apple from the tree, RIAA will find it most advantageous to perceive the value of the apple as $500 (what they spent on the tree) because you can now infinitely make your own apples.
At this point the apple has only subjective value as you can infinitely produce and distribute your own. Since there is no inherent value, there is no loss for free apples distributed. |
Correct. As much as I hate riaa they do try to settle. Sometimes they get the occasional dick thinking that he can fight it. |
do you know what |
You have him using an expensive, technically poor registrar , with a proven track record against rights. then you say someone else would cost $20 more!?
$8 namecheap domain. AWS host $.50/month. extra instance for your own DNS +$.50/mo.
You're ripping the poor guy off sending him to godaddy in the first place.
try $20 total for the year, a clear conscience, and 99.9% uptime |
As someone who works in technical support for a web hosting company (not GoDaddy) please don't call in and yell at tech support. Yelling at that person over the phone will NOT bring your site up faster. And I can assure you that it wasn't that person's fault. |
Because every time hot women get payed for selling things by using their good looks, the internet gets pissed as fuck, however if the shoe is on the other foot (male gender) internet doesn't care. |
She's pretty terrible. It really seems like a publicity stunt. The worst part is that you have to sit through the announcers drive on and on about how 'good' she is racing today when she is currently placed somewhere in the 20s or worse. And even more embarrassing is that she has an amazing team with plenty of money.
But... I think the worst part of the whole "Danica Patrick can race in NASCAR.. GRL PWR!!!" is that she can't, but a driver named Johanna Long actually appears to be capable of being a true contender (it's her rookie season) and the ugly-ass bright green/yellow car overshadows her. |
3D printing is nothing but a pretentious toy for people who've read too many sci-fi novels and not enough engineering tables.
For exactly the same cost as a RepRap you can get a decent metalwork lathe or milling machine. Which can machine in plastic, but also metal, wood, even glass and ceramics. Lathes can be used to wind coils for pick ups or motors, and polish objects. Even friction welding can be performed on a lathe or mill.
For the same cost you can get a rep rap that can only produce parts of relatively low quality plastic, with poor dimensional accuracy, and no meaningful rotational symmetry, that are a million miles away from the "self replicating" label on the packet.
Why should anyone want a RepRap over a lathe then? Because of some non-existent connection between a poor quality CNC plastic extruder and a fantasy "make anything" machine?
If half the effort thats been spent on 3D printing had been spent on making more affordable and accessible lathes/mills, there'd be significantly more productive capacity in the world and far fewer useless plastic widgets.
Lathes have been capable of self replication for centuries (although its practical to make some parts by casting/milling if you want a lathe larger than the one you started with).
The idea of a one tool fits all solution is poison to the worlds crafting traditions. No one tool is enough (although if one is its most definitely the lathe). 3D printing sells a lazy promise of creation with no effort. It's a lie. |
Hah, thanks, I got a bit carried away because I find the subject of 3D printing really interesting.
I don't see posts that long on reddit too often, that's why I felt the need for a " |
In an open eco system anyone can change the software. There is no pre-approval system (such as Apples app store) that can be used to accept or deny a piece of software on a device. The end choice is the end users's and only the end user's.
The reason being is, google's play store is only one method of obtaining, and installing applications (apps) on the android device in question. Android itself is a modified linux distribution (modified in the sense it has different kernel modules running by default to accommodate certain tasks, I wouldnt be overly surprised if you could boot strap a fully functioning desktop distro onto an android device with a little bit of work). |
Since I ended up with a Chromebox (thanks Google IO 2011,) here's how it works for different tasks:
Productivity:
PDFs: Fine for reading, but you'll need import stuff in Google Docs for editing, and that'll be a bit limited.
Word Processing/Spreadsheets/Powerpoint: I hope you like Google Docs/Drive or MyOffice/SkyDrive. Power users are probably out of luck, but I've aced classes involving paper writing using nothing but Google Docs.
Remote Desktop: TeamViewer works great in browser, but true RDP is off the table.
Internet:
Web: Any website you browse already works the exact same on ChromeOS.
Chat: Depends on your tastes. If you have a web client for the particular protocol you use, you're fine, otherwise, you're out of luck.
BitTorrent: There is an extension, OneClick, that'll give you BitTorrent right in ChromeOS, but it doesn't seem to work.
Multimedia Consumption:
Video: Flash and HTML5 stuff runs great, and it can play a pretty good number of video formats. Oddly, FLV throws it from a loop. Justin.tv and Youtube are staples.
Music: Again, anything online and streaming is a given, and it seems to handle mp3s just fine. I use TuneIn.com a lot with it.
Images: Not even a problem.
Multimedia Creation:
Music Production: There are some very cool sites like AudioSauna.com that let you do a surprising amount of composition, but you're not going to get anything even as fully featured as FLStudio or GarageBand.
Video Editing: Again, there are okay online options, but many of the better ones seem have closed up shop, and you're not getting anything as powerful as iMovie.
Image Editing: Pixlr.com manages to hold it's own against stuff like the GIMP and Paint.NET, but it's not a photoshop replacement for power users.
Games:
If you can play it in a browser already, you're set. Otherwise, you're outta luck. |
I back-ordered a Chromebook on a lark a few months back and forgot about it until Amazon sent me the shipping notice. Since it was too late to cancel and I was getting ready to go into the hospital for surgery, I decided to keep it figuring if I ended up in the hospital for a while, I'd have the Chromebook and be out very little if it was stolen.
Well, it has been two weeks and my Macbook Air has been gathering dust. I'm using it for email, web research, remote systems work (Oracle dba), writing blog articles work documentation. I'm also moving one of my websites from Wordpress to Squarespace which involves moving a lot of files and working with my S3 buckets and some minor coding.
In two weeks, I've gone back to the Macbook Air once because I needed to get into my work's Cisco VPN and couldn't get a connection on the Chromebook. I also needed to run some ruby code and couldn't find an online interpreter which had the right libraries.
The best part of the Chromebook experience? For someone like me who lives in Google's world, everything syncs between my Chromebook, Nexus 4, and Nexus 7.
Aside from the limitations that I mentioned above, the hardware isn't be best. Nice screen, keyboard, and trackpad (way better than my CR48), but the palm rests creek and the whole computer feels a bit flimsy. And, if you load up too many tabs, especially tabs where there is a lot of javascript running, ChromeOS starts to swap stuff out, so when you switch back to gmail or another tab, there is a wait while it reloads. That is a bit annoying. |
Honestly, the first time I heard someone I knew IRL say that they couldn't read any captchas it really surprised me. I guess I've gotten so used to it over time that it just comes easily. |
They might not be able to do it now, but in the future possibly.
People are cable cutting left and right, because they know they are getting ripped off and over-advertised too, and because the cable networks provide huge piles of shit programming.
Eventually they'll have to adopt on demand or channel subscription models that offer affordable rates, because that's what consumers want.
It's way better for the content producers, because they get paid for how popular there show is, and people who don't like ad's can always pay more to avoid ad's. |
The truth is there really is no profit to be had in coupling crap with non-crap. If people are willing to pay a price for non-crap with crap, they will likely pay slightly less or the same for just the non-crap. If you factor in the cost to produce the crap, companies make a higher profit without the crap.
Someone might argue that advertising revenue for the crap means a loss if it's separated from the non-crap. However, if nobody actually watches the crap, the advertisers arguably don't pay money to advertise with it anyway. And, if people do watch the crap, then people will pay money to ensure that they do get the crap etc...
Still, I do suspect this problem won't resolve itself until people outright cancel their entire cable subscriptions. As long as people keep rolling over and letting their cable companies sodomize them with 95% crap nobody watches along with 5% people actually watch (which is 50% or more ads, some even during the actual show) for utterly ridiculous prices, it's probably going to continue. |
I think the cost-balance argument is a bunch of fear mongering, actually. No company will offer a product out of the price range of the consumer, because it won't sell, and they won't generate profit. I can foresee a marginal increase in per-channel prices, but it wouldn't be substantial. Cable companies would be forced to come up with creative ways to reduce costs, instead.
Perhaps they could have a hybrid system (a-la-carte + bundles), and try to entice consumers by offering significant discounts with bundled channels. |
I actually think $0.99 is still too expensive. Before you call me cheap, let me explain. Many U.S. shows are well over 20 episodes. Personally, I watch around five sitcoms a year, and about five dramas (Game of Thrones, Dexter, and similar shows). Now, the dramas are rarely more than 16 episodes a season, most are 12-13. But still, assuming I'm watching roughly ten shows a year, at an average of 18 episodes a season between sitcoms and dramas, that's over $200/yr just for TV. For me, at least, that isn't worth it. In my opinion, a great price would be $10 for a season pass. You can watch each episode as many times as you want within a week of it's air date (or a month, or whatever). At ten bucks, I can justify watching every show I want. At upwards of $25 for some sitcoms, I would have to seriously reconsider my desire to watch them.
Okay, now you can call me cheap. |
At first this will be a god spaghetti monster send but soon enough a $1.50 channel will cost $15 because is is rated most subscribed then a pricing war will induce, then an agreement that all shit channels will only cost us $0.99 and "premium" channels will cost us $6.99, then due to inflation, and again pricing wars the $6.99 channels will go up to only $9.99 and the shit channels (convienently bundled with one or two worthwhile channels) will go to a price of "All for only $15.99" then eventually in 30 years when everyone forgets how telivision used to work some lone provider will unleash their "package deal" in which basically you are paying for 150 channels for a low price of $80 a month, without the hassle of choosing which channels you want to subscribe to and you have free rein to watch whatever channel you want to, whenever you want to, for one low price. |
I watch MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show online for free every night that there is a show. I just have to wait 1.5-2 hours after original airing ends, and then I get to watch the whole thing with about 5 commercials total. MSNBC shows all of their other shows this way too, just not as well organized/easy to find as Maddow's show (and I don't like the other programs as much as hers). So in my case, I do get cable news online for free, I just have to wait a little longer. |
Everyone I know who has moved out in their own are subscribing to internet and mobile phones only.
You're falling victim to the "everyone I know" fallacy. Yes, there are many young, tech-savvy people who live this way, and they tend to hang out together and read the same blogs/reddit, but that is not a representative sample of most people.
Here's a good article breaking down the reality of the issue : |
I don't think your cheap, you sound spot on to me.
Let's use a typical 'average' sitcom as an example.
According to Wikipedia, 'How I Met Your Mother' (CBS sitcom) ' a typical first-run episode of HIMYM has about 8-9 million viewers. (neilson rating numbers, ignoring all online streaming, reruns, ect) An average sitcom costs about 1million USD per episode.
Rounding down, if everyone who tuned in, paid 13 cents USD per episode, they could watch and own it ad free, and CBS would break even. If each person paid a single quarter (25 cents USD) then folks could own the episode, no advertisements needed, and CBS would take in $960,000 dollars of pure profit every episode.
Note that these numbers don't count any money from reruns, syndication, DVD sales, or Netflix / Hulu streaming income, or merchandising. (this would all be pure profit) This assumes worst case scenario that just the first run live tv folks watch and pay for an episode. |
Thanks to the low weight of the bullet only a fraction of the kinetic energy will be transfered to a heavy object like the helmet. Low mass, high speed projectiles have a low energy/impulse relation, and the impulse is what gets transferred to the helmet
Imagine you got a 10g projectile that hits a 1990g helmet (don't know how heavy they are) with 500m/s left and is stopped:
the bullet has a kinetic energy of .01kg*.5*(500m/s)² = 1250J
bullet impulse is .01kg * 500m/s = 5 kgm/s
idealized the impulse will be transferred completely to the resulting mass of helmet and projectile: 5/2kg = 2.5m/s
kinetic energy of the helmet (without a head inside): 2kg*.5*(2.5 m/s)² = 6.25J |
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