The article makes little sense. The site of the DEEP project is more useful. It has the look of an EU publicly funded boondoggle. Those have a long history; see Plan Calcul, the 1966 plan to create a major European computing industry. That didn't do too well.

The trouble with supercomputers is that only governments buy them. When they do, they tend not to use them very effectively. The US has pork programs like the Alabama Supercomputer Center. One of their main activities is providing the censorware for Alabama schools.

There's something to be said for trying to come up with better ways of making sequential computation more parallel. But the track record of failures is discouraging. The game industry beat their head against the wall for five years trying to get the Cell processors in the PS3 to do useful work. Sony has given up; the PS4 is an ordinary shared-memory multiprocessor. So are all the XBox machines.

It's encouraging to see how much useful work people are getting out of GPUs, though.

It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.

As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.

Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.

It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.

That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.

After all, we saw how quickly the iTunes Store withered and died after the DRM got removed from all that music. It'd be crazy for the publishers NOT to double down on DRM!

There were printers in areas with classifed documents which automatically used to do this. They worked with whitespace, fonts and punctuation. Photocopies of the documents could still be tracked. Great work guys you deserve a badge.
Amazon will be able to close the loop by automatically downloading the books that you have on your kindle to "check" that you don't infringe and stomp on those badguys.

We want to transition to an IP company.
Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.

We want to transition to an IP company. Then we only have to employ lawyers and executives, and save ourselves the trouble of all that making stuff.

Nah, that's not why. They're following in the footsteps of Apple and Sega - license out your key strengths to strategic partners, and you're sure to succeed.

Right?!?

If you're wondering about AMD, they also had a project doing graphics for ARM CPUs, but it was outright sold-off to Qualcomm.

Qualcomm's "Adreno" GPU? The name is an anagram of Radeon.

The ONLY company on this planet with an interest in very high-end desktop class GPU technology for their own use is Intel. No-one else has the need (PowerVR fills the gap for most companies that license GPU designs) or the ability to build such a complex design into their own SoC.

Anyone else with an interest in Nvidia GPU capabilities would opt to buy discrete chips from Nvidia, or one of Nvidia's existing ARM SoC parts.

AMD is currently devastating Nvidia in the high end gaming market. Every one of the 3 new consoles uses AMD/ATI tech for the graphics. EA (the massive games developer) has announced their own games engines will be optimised ONLY on AMD CPU and GPUs (on Xbone, PS4 and PC). Nvidia is falling out of the game.

The x86 space is moving to APUs only. Chips that combine the CPU cluster with the GPU system. Intel's integrated GPU is pure garbage. However, Intel spends more on the R+D for its crap GPU than Nvidia and AMD combined. It would be insanely cheaper for Intel to simply license Nvidia's current and future designs. Doing so would give Intel parts that compete with AMD for the first time ever. Of course, it still wouldn't fix the problem that AMD tech is in the only hardware AAA games developers care about.

Next year AMD completes its project to take desktop x86 parts to full HSA and Huma (as seen in the PS4). Next year Intel begins the process to use this tech (and will be two years behind AMD at best). Both companies are moving to PC motherboards that solder memory and CPU on the board itself. Both are moving to a 256-bit memory interface, although again AMD will have a significant lead here.

Intel wants to copy AMD's GDDR5 memory interface (again, as seen in the PS4) but that requires a lot of tech Intel does not have, and cannot develop in-house (god only knows, they've tried). Nvidia also has massive expertise with GDDR5 memory interfaces, and the on-chip systems to exploit the incredible bandwidth this memory offers.

Everyone should know Intel wanted to buy Nvidia, but would not accept Nvidia's demand to have their people run the combined company. The top of Intel is BRAINDEAD, composed of the useless morons who claimed credit for the 'core' CPU design, when all core was in reality was a return to Pentium 3, after Netburst proved to be a horrible dead-end. This political power grab is responsible for all Intel's current problems, including this biggest disaster in semiconductor history- Larrabee. Intel's FinFET project has crashed twice (Ivybridge was much worse than Sandybridge, despite the shrink, and Haswell is worse again). Intel has no new desktop chips for 2014 as a consequence.

Now we can see it is likely Intel is readying Nvidia based parts for 2015 at the earliest. Intel has used licensed GPU tech before, notably the PowerVR architecture. However, Intel's utter inability to write or support drivers meant the PowerVR based chips wee a disaster for Intel. Intel's biggest problem with its current GPU design is NOT that it is a Larrabee scale failure, but that Intel is actually making headway. So why is this an issue?

Well companies like S3 also made successful headway with their own designs, but this didn't matter because they were way behind the competition at the time. It is NEVER a case of being better than you were before, but a question of being good enough to go up against the market leaders. Intel knows its progress means that internally its GPU team is being patted on the back and given more support, and yet this is a road to nowhere. Intel needs to bite the bullet, give up on its failed GPU projects, and buy in the best designs the market has to offer. Nvidia is this.

Unlike PowerVR, which is largely a take it or leave it design (which is why Intel got nowhere with PowerVR), Nvidia comes with software experts (for the Windows drivers) and chip making experts, to help integrate the Nvidia design with Intel's own CPU cores.

Intel isn't going to buy or license nVidia stuff. They already have a license to use all their patents through a cross license deal that excluded a large chunk of Intel patents and IP. Intel is 100% focused on power consumption at this point and nVidia tech would do nothing but hurt them on this front. Haswell includes a GPU that's almost as good at the nVidia 650 and uses less power than Icy Bridge. It's also cheaper for the OEM/ODM's and provides better total power use.

It's trivially easy for Intel to just keep advancing the GPU with each processor generation. As people have been saying for years nVidia's biggest problem is that as Intel keeps raising the low end with integrated processors that don't suck they erode significant revenue from nVidia. The reason prices for top end nVidia parts keep going up is because they are continuing to lose margin on the middle end and have lost the low end. Better than half the computers sold no longer even include a discrete GPU. As Intel continues it's slow advance they will continue to eat more and more of the discrete market place. Considering the newest consoles are going to be only marginally better than the current consoles we're probably looking at another 7 years of gaming stagnation which in the long run will damage nVidia more as fewer games require more resources than integrated GPUs. I seriously doubt nVidia can go much higher than the current $1100 Titan and expect to sell anything at all. I expect over the next two years for nVidia to see consecutive quarterly declines in revenue. They've already eroded margin and they can't push price much higher.

They bet their lunch on HPC, and didn't even come close to their projections on sales. Then they bet the farm on Tegra, they sold none of Tegra1, had just short of no sales on Tegra2, did ok but only with tablets for Tegra3 and have announced not a single win for Tegra4. Project Denver was supposed to be the long term break with Intel that would provide the company the opportunity to move forward as a total service SOC company. Denver is supposed to be a custom designed 64bit ARM processor with integrated nVidia GPU. It was projected for the end of 2012. After missing 2012 they claimed end of 2013, this announcement makes be personally believe project denver has been canceled. Things haven't looked good for nVidia ever since Intel integrated GPU's and blocked them from the chipset market. They won't be selling to Intel because Intel doesn't want them. The other SOC vendors appear to be satisfied with PowerVR products (which focus on power use) except for qualacom which has the old AMD mobile cores to work with. I can't help but believe that this is as other have said, an attempt to go total IP and try to litigate a profit. This is probably the begining of a long slow slide into oblivion. nVidia's CEO has already sold most of his holdings (except for unexecuted options, also a very bad sign).

In general, perhaps.

However, when Oracle took over Sun, it made public statements to the effect that the open version would remain that. If users/consumers took actions [to stay with mysql vs. bolting to Postgres], based on these statements, they may have suffered [actionable] harm.

Reading further down the [wiki] page, under the "reliance-based estoppels" section, Oracle's statements seem to be a "promissory estoppel".

You've been kicking this one back and forth for a decade or more! If you knuckleheads would have used BSD licensed PostgreSQL from the git-go instead of MySQL's crazy now-you-see-me-now-you-don't license you would have freed up so much time and intellectual horsepower that you'd have your fucking flying cars by now.

Slashdot. It's like herding cats, except cats are cleaner.

If they own the copyright, they are free to relicense a piece of data

Sorry to be pedantic, but replace "a piece of data" with "a work of authorship". If there isn't the creative work of a human being involved, it's not copyrightable. And then we get to this:

17 CFR 102(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

And that means that even when the hand of man is involved, a lot of things are still not copyrightable.

They can waste their mod points all they want they can't show me a SINGLE CASE, not one, where the GPL foundation was able to keep a company from changing the license to their own products. And I never said anything about retroactive, which is why I said you can fork the last GPL version and they can't do shit because if you tried to retroactively change a license you would be laughed out of court.

Kinda fucking sad that only the proprietary guy has actually read the fricking GPL, but show me anywhere where the FSF can control FUTURE licenses because its NOT IN THERE. all the GPL does is makes sure that particular release that was done under GPL then STAYS under GPL, they can change the license at any. time.they.want. and it does not matter because the version that is ALREADY GPL STAYS GPL, which was the whole fucking point, that you wouldn't come to depend on a piece of FOSS and have them pull the rug out from under you by pulling a switch.

But that does NOT give you the right to everything a company makes from that moment on, or even every single version of a particular software that they make because it is THEIR PROPERTY and if they want to make it GPL,MPL, if they want to say you have to do a fricking rain dance to get a copy of the latest version? they can do that. what they CAN'T DO is take what was already GPL and wave a magic wand and make it proprietary, it just does not work that way and no case law that I'm aware of lets a company change a license retroactively from whenever they feel like it. If the court allowed that then there wouldn't be any licenses, because you could never know if the deal you made today would be upheld tomorrow.

So its nothing to get your panties in a twist over guys, you can decide to be a dumbass and trust old Monty again (seriously guys look at the MariaDB license again, old Monty has it set up so all the code belongs to him, no reason he can't sell it out from under you again) or you can go to one of the other SQL variants or hell, if you want you and some other devs can take the last GPL version of MySQL and fork it and make something better. Make it belong to the actual community so it can't be sold and get behind that like you did with Libre office, why not do that? But this is a tempest in a teapot, who cares, you have options galore.

Cogent isn't the only ISP out there for Verizon to choose from.

Why open your mouth when you don't know what you are talking about? You did know that you didn't know what you were talking about, right? Right? yeah.. you did...

Verizon is a tier 1 provider.
Cogent acts like a tier 1 provider, but isn't.

Cogent has run into this "problem" more than once, and more than a few times it was before Netflix used them as a provider. The problem is that Cogent dumps data onto other peoples networks as fast as possible, even when its a significantly longer route than if they had moved the data themselves most of the way.

The only reason that any of the tier 1 providers put up with Cogent at all is because Cogent landed quite a few CDN deals that people feel are important, and they landed those deals by offering a lower cost that was only enabled by their bad faith routing practices.

The fair thing is for Cogent to stop existing entirely.

Or they'd simply rather not spend time and money to solve someone else's problem?

Verizon's bandwidth is indeed Verizon's problem.

It's not like rack space is free, or electricity is free...

The backspace and electricity demands of an OpenConnect box are likely negligible in comparison to the overall strain placed on the network by Verizon customers using Netflix en masse.

...or ensuring that someone else's hardware isn't going to harm your network is free. If I were an ISP, Netflix would "get" to install hardware in my network over my dead body - simply because I DO NOT TRUST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE I HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

Good. You sound like a capable admin. Now, what's to say you cannot verify the box?

What about the people who AREN'T Netflix customers and DON'T want to pay for someone else's service? Why should my ISP fees be used to help someone else stream movies I can't access?!

By having an ISP you are splitting the cost of using the network among X number of people. Since the cost of an OpenConnect box is rackspace + electricity + verification / customer base, the cost to you alone is exceedingly low.

There's absolutely no reason I should be footing the bill for a service I have no intention of using.

This mentality is destroying the country.

I work for a telco, and not too long ago I got to chat with one of our VPs about why this happens. I'm a total net neutrality guy, but after talking to him I understood his point of view a bit better.

With most large content providers, like google for example, ISPs can go to them and say "hey, we're getting a lot of traffic from you. It's cheaper for us if we can make arrangements that are beneficial to the both of us." and then the ISP and the content provider enter into an agreement where the ISP pays a bulk rate for trunks to a network, and the content provider remains on that network and gives plenty of warning before switching so the ISP can make sure that they have enough capacity in that direction.

Netflix however, doesn't make these kind of agreements. The switch providers and hosting at will. The ISP will pay for large trunks leading to where the majority of netflix traffic is coming from and then Netflix will suddenly drop that host and switch to another. Suddenly 20% of the ISPs traffic is coming from an entirely new network. But they are still locked into a contract with that other network.

Also, Netflix has no interest in the health of the ISPs network. If Netflix had a financial interest in the health of the network they could do some rather simple things to help the isp, like encourage users to queue up movies ahead of time, have them download at off peak times and then play when they wanted to watch them. This is was cable companies do after all... but netflix has no interest in this sort of thing and as far as the ISP is concerned is doing is best to be as damaging to the network as possible.

I'm still all for net neutrality, but its good to understand the ISPs concerns. They aren't just out to thwart Netflix. But Netflix is digging their own grave on this one.

Yes, it is. The job of the ISP is to provide their paying customers access to 'TheInternet'. That is still the promise they make, and still their obligation. If they can't meet that obligation they should go do something else.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving. So fuck them.

lf l were an ISP, Netflix would "get" to install hardware in my network over my dead body - simply because l DO NOT TRUST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE l HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

lF YOU'RE AN lSP THEN lNSTALLlNG RANDOM SHlT ONTO YOUR NETWORK lS WHAT YOU GET PAlD TO DO. SUCK lT UP AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

I am really looking forward to the Oculus' public release, but I really hope they fix the lag in head tracking that results in motion sickness or dizziness in the users. As a guy who used to get nauseous after a few hours of Duke Nukem or Doom, that'd be a pretty major negative in determining whether I will buy one or not.

Also, I'm glad we've finally hit Johnny Mnemonic levels of tech in real life. Bring on the talking dolphins.

The dev kit version already has latency tackled very well, so it's not really much of an issue. The HD prototype even further reduced it as well as adding the high res and removal of the screen door effect of the dev kit versions (due to low res display) that would exacerbate the issue.

Though understand that a lot of the motion sickness comes from the sudden, jarring and quick motions that are common with games nowadays. Games and demos being developed for the Rift are being designed with slower movement in mind to alleviate strain that the eyes may have. It really comes down not so much to the Rift itself but the developers and how they decide to design their games. Rift would work a whole lot better with Halo than it would Unreal Tournament.

The most successful early adopter of technology has historically been the porn industry.

There you go.

Wrong attitude. One may grow a thick skin naturally due to the harshness of the environment, however it should never be a requirement to grow a thick skin to get on the internet, or join a video game's forums, or to become a free software developer. And why should being a free software develooper be such a difficult job when you don't need to grow a thick skin to be a proprietary software developer? If someone wants to spend their own time and their own money to make a product better why should they have to grow a thick skin first? If someone wants to go to a conference and learn more about some computing technology they shouldn't have to grow a thick skin first.

And why aren't pansies allowed to be free software developers? I'm not saying Martin is, but we shouldn't restrict people from contributing or scaring them away because they're too nice. Everyone body should be joining in here, not just just the rude people and those with swagger.

The very premise of "grow a skin" or "grow a pair" is wrong headed.

This isn't censorship anyway. It's his personal blog. Censorship is something that someone in power does, like governments or corporate bosses, or people who act as gatekeepers of information, such as letters to the editor of a newspaper. The trolling opinions are not being squelched, they can be spoken loudly and clearly on their own blog if they like, or on KDE mailing lists, and so forth.

You are free to express any opinion, but may not do so with "hateful" language. "Fighting words" are forbidden in public forums. In addition, advocating illegal action is not the same as expressing an opinion. Saying something like "The bums in Congress should be removed from office, one and all" is okay, whereas "grab your gun, we march tonight" is not.

That's almost entirely wrong. Hateful speech is perfectly legal, as it should be. "Fighting words" only apply where immediate physical violence is a reasonable result to expect, which is hard to see happening over a web forum (but I guess it's possible). Advocating illegal action is illegal if it becomes conspiracy, but there's not prior restraint there - it's the overt action that makes it illegal, not the speech by itself (IANAL, etc).

Additionally the -1 comments are still there, they are just out of the way and can be read if you want to have a laugh about goatse and frosty piss.

Why is it ok to be extremely rude on the internet, but not ok to react to the extreme rudeness by deleting people's comments?

It takes a certain amount of maturity to express differing opinions on a public and largely anonymous forum in a constructive and polite matter, but I think that maturity should be expected - and people who fail to show it should be censured appropriately. Having your comments removed from someone's personal blog because they are rude and immature is perfectly acceptable.

I noticed at least one person in the linked comments owning up to their rudeness and apologising. That is the short of behaviour that should be encouraged, not the development of a 'thick skin'.

In my experience it was the developers of FOSS software who yell at you and tell you that they are not going to fix the documentation because they do not have to.

Hey gang, we really might be morphing into "Web 3.0" in whichever of many things that means.

We're starting to enter the age of the Law Meta-Game.

Google does their fair share of morally complex things, but they haven't been called "stupid" very often.

So *because it's Google* and not some two-guys-and-a-garage operation, they're not so easy to shove in a corner. Even at the rate that lawyer fees rise, if some "typical" (as the cynics would say) "travesty of justice" occurred, that then becomes a hell of a Meta-Game news article.

"Google: We wanted to report on secret govt data requests. Govt said no."

You/they don't file motions like that "out of boredom on a Tuesday". They have the money to submit the motion and all the bells and whistles. So this might be the first of many kinds of steps it takes to slowly begin to roll back the Big Brother Engine. Not a lot, but they're helping to drag it into the sunlight where such scampery things don't like to be.

He got 10 years for insider trading. Nice try though.

Seriously, what would the government do if Google just went ahead and released the information?

Uh...put people in Jail for breaking the law? There is no legal defense--so unless you want to move to China, you beg for permission to speak.

Let me give you an example of what sorts of things they can do.

I worked for a bank, once. Banks are closely monitored by the Federal Government.

One of our obligations was to feed everyone and everything to a Federal database of terrorists, drug dealers, money launders and other suck ilk. Including, at one point, the entire duly-elected Palestinian government.

The requirements were so all-encompassing that I used to joke that if you so much as walked your dog past the building, both you and your dog were supposed to be checked against it.

Failure to comply in a satisfactory manner could result in:

o Severe fines and penalties
o Revocation of the bank's charter
o Extensive prison sentences for both corporate management and the board of directors
o Ditto for the CIO, my boss and me/co-workers
o Ditto also, I think for the corporate legal department

We once went into a major panic because someone had opened an account and their (fairly common) name didn't come up as a "hit" against a money-laundering Mexican travel agency. Other people with that name have made national news just trying to buy a new car, which is why Federal databases can be so dangerous.

Google may not be a bank, but considering their size, I'm sure that there are more than a few things that come under government scrutiny and/or regulation. So I don't think they're likely to go "lone wolf" here.

That's what THEY want you to believe! Wake up sheeple!

Well the reasons for them doing it are simple: Self Preservation. If you had your E-Mail, Social Contacts/Pictures etc. in a system that was regularly tapped by the NSA and the FBI, then you might think twice about using those services. Google's freely available services that you can use but while you're using them, we'll mine every piece of information out of you that we can. They're a commercial NSA and when the real NSA steps on their toes, possibly driving users away that's not good for business. Facebook and Microsoft have the same problem, hell all free cloud based services have a problem now with this "215" section of the law. Yes, Google is an 800lb Gorilla and so is Microsoft, well 650lb now and Facebook, meh, 400lb. If they start pushing on those idiots like Feinbitch who as chairwomen of the Senate Intelligence Committee (boy there's an oxymoron for you) stating that the NSA has access to your phone conversations, when they want. If they start pushing on DC and getting all the masses lined up, maybe things will change. The EFF and ACLU have some pretty sharp lawyers as well and they haven't had much luck in cracking all of the intrusions into our privacy and the secrecy of why the government needs this information. Feinstein and others with her mentality in DC are the reason we have this mess to begin with, now the feign ignorance and shock or coyishly say "well it has thwarted terrorism." Funding comes from congress, there is no way in hell that She and members of her committee didn't have direct knowledge of what was going on, much less every member of the House and Senate for the past decade. They've written the laws that allow the secrecy and the pulling of information without warrants and because of that and the nature of the legal process in this country, lower courts bar cases from moving forward on "National Security" reasons. This is an affront to the 4th amendment yet alone the 1st amendment as Google is claiming. Like I said, good luck because those Federal Judges have to look at the law as written and do you think that stooge Holder isn't going to appeal his way up to the Supreme Court if an "activist" judge somehow rules against the Government?

Also anybody out here should remember back in 2007 there was an uproar because of the warrantless wiretapping going on. What happened then? Well the cases dragged on and then congress gave the telecomms immunity in a new piece of legislation.

Oh and the only case that is still moving forward since 2007 (it is 2013 now after all) is being held up by the Justice Department and that retard Clapper..

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=190892480

James Clapper, director of national intelligence, personally urged U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White to throw out the remaining lawsuit. Clapper wrote the judge in September that the government risks "exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" if forced to fight the lawsuit.

That case has EFF lawyers behind it, think they'll be successful?

So the constitution and out privacy violated in the names of National Security. Shit, Woz hit it on the mark the other day.
http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/06/apple-inc-aapl-co-founder-steve-wozniak-rethinks-america/

In Wozniak’s view, the Patriot Act started things going downhill, and he said there isn’t even “a free open court anymore.” He compared the U.S. government to a king who rounds up people and kills them or puts them in prison. He said when reading the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he doesn’t see how the things that are happening now are actually allowed to happen.

He also compared the U.S. to Russia. He said that when he was growing up, the Russian government would follow people around, s

I think that a $200 tablet for web browsing, email, and remote desktop would be pretty useful despite the limited app store. Maybe it's time to send my Touchpad to ebay and try one of these out...

Except the $200 price only applies if you are a school buying for your students... An individual can't get that price.

Your argument is like a McDonald's sign: Billions and Billions sold.

        Doesn't say anything about quality.

        Doesn't say anything about value.

An analogy! Let me try: your argument is like a car: it doesn't understand what words mean.

Dud
a : one that is ineffectual; also : failure <a box-office dud>

Love it or hate it, the Apple II was a massive success, becoming one of the best-selling computers of its day thanks in large part to VisiCalc, its affordable price, and the wide availability of apps for it, which allowed it to become an important component of the PC revolution of the '80s. Suggesting that the Apple II was overpriced and outdated (as you did in an earlier comment) is preposterous and factually inaccurate, and suggesting it's a dud on the grounds of quality and value (as you did in your last comment) is irrelevant since those are only indirectly related to whether something is a dud (not to mention that those arguments make no sense in historical contexts). The only thing you got correct was that the volume discount being offered by Apple to educational institutions was, while aggressive, still nowhere comparable to the sort of dumping that we're seeing Microsoft do here.

The big thing Apple had going for it compared to Atari and Commodore was expansion. They had slots that you could put cards in that allowed it to do things:

Serial cards (RS-232 serial interface)
Parallel cards (Centronics/IEEE 1284 parallel interface)
Multifunction I/O cards
Internal modems
80 column (or more) text cards (e.g., Videx)
PAL Color graphics cards (required for color graphics in early European Apples)
RGB cards
Floppy disk controllers
Hard disk controllers
Network adapters
Co-processor cards
Memory expansion cards
Accelerators
Realtime clock cards
Music and sound cards
Miscellaneous cards

WindowsRT reminds me of the PCjr. IBM wanted to sell a cheaper version of the PC and so they made a crippled version so it wouldn't compete with the high priced units. It withered and died. Now MS seems to be repeating the idea. Very Ironic. They took IBM's monopoly away from them and now they repeat IBM's early mistakes with hardware. I love it.

All executables on Windows 8 RT must be signed before they're allowed to run. You won't even get an "are you sure" dialog box. Thus no software is possible without prior permission from Microsoft. Sure you may have some nice byte code emulator but it's useless if you can't get it signed.

And why do we assume that these solar panel charging stations will still be working in the advent of a disaster? Rain and flooding can short out the batteries. Wind and falling branches can destroy the solar panels. I guess the fact that each is independant will mean that hopefully some of them survived the storm. But it seems to me that rather than spending the money on these storm proof kiosks you could strengthen the infrastructure. So you can charge your iPad, but you have no lights or heat at home, great improvement!

Seems to me all the disaster film (real and otherwise) I see shows dark, dark clouds over Manhattan.

Solar powered chargers in the aftermath of a hurricane?
It'll be days after a hurricane before there's a clear day.
Solar panels work poorly on cloudy days ... those on my roof generate about 5 to 30 percent compared to full sunlight.

AT&T - Fastest
Verizon - Reliable
TMobile - Cheapest
Sprint - Service

T-Mobile's LTE roll-out is about to get serious, and they claim they'll have around 200 million people in the U.S. covered by the end of the year (with rumors of my beloved Seattle area getting it by the end of this month). Sprint's LTE roll-out is also chugging along.

The landscape will look very different by year's end.

Sprint is the only cellphone company that has treated me like a person. But -- here in Washington DC -- their service is garbage. It's so bad that I have to constantly ask voice callers to repeat themselves because of dropped frames. At home I have to pick up the phone with "Let me call you back on skype".

There is LTE service randomly in random places, but never consistently or predictably.

I was looking closely at their month-to-month offerings, but their Android devices were all neutered versions of the contract versions. There is a lengthy process of converting an S4 or HTC One into a month-to-month phone but it requires a sacrificial lamb (a month-to-month device) and if Verizon catches wind of your rooting, you'll be dropped like a call on Sprint and be out the cash you spent on both devices.

I'm sticking with T-Mobile and my Nexus 4. HSPA is fast enough for my remote browsing needs and in most places I'm surrounded by WiFi anyway. I admit that they're not the most reliable or the fastest, but they are the most consumer friendly.

One aspect of autonomous vehicles that few people seem to consider is its potential effect on the housing market.

Consider the size of the RV market, and the number of people who prefer the RV lifestyle after they retire. Now consider the fact that one of the more annoying aspects of owning an RV is that you have to drive it everywhere yourself.

Now imagine twenty years from now when you'll be able to buy an autonomous RV. You go to sleep in it, and in the middle of the night it takes you to whatever destination you desire. In the morning, you open the door and you're in a new city. What you really own is not an RV, but a magic house that can take you anywhere you desire, a few hundred miles every night.

With that kind of freedom, how many people would choose to become high-tech nomads, and never live on fixed piece of property again? In fact, I think this will be a major profit center for automakers. Most people won't bother owning cars when they can call for one on a smartphone, but $100K to $200K super-RVs will become the home of choice and the way for GM and Ford to stay in business.

Hitting a pedestrian is pretty easy to detect at any speed. Why would it continue driving?

This is not a corner case this is something that is known from the beginning and planned for.

Humans do not logically deal with unexpected events. Note all the old geezers driving into buildings or people pulling into oncoming traffic to avoid rear ending the car in front of them instead of pulling onto the shoulder. Humans in general are terrible at logical reactions to unexpected conditions.

PS: Slashdot, video "articles" suck.

Drifting off-topic here, but I agree, and I can explain why.

Typical reading speed is 250-300 words per minute with random access. Typical speaking rate is more variable but I'll go with the audiobook reading rate, 160 words per minute with sequential access. So it is a much better use of my time to read an article than to watch or hear a presentation of that article.

That said, _writing_, especially writing well-reasoned and coherent prose such as one can not-infrequently find on Slashdot, takes disproportionately longer than reading the same prose. So the audio and audiovisual formats are appealing to the presenter, because speaking is easier than writing for people with the right skills. An expert, reasonably experienced at public speaking, can give an illuminating presentation with little or no preparation.

My opinion is that video and podcasts can be worthwhile if you know the speaker is good, and are willing to trade off efficient use of your time for efficient use of his.

If you are paying 200-600 a month you do not own a car. That is when the bank owns the car and you are buying it in installments.

That depends on your definition of "own". Once you sign the paperwork car is yours to do what you want with it - in general the financing company is not going to look over your shoulder and keep you from modifying it. You can drill a hole in the roof and add an antenna. You can drill a dozen holes in the trunk and add a spoiler. You can add a lift kit or a lowering kit (or both and let them cancel out).

The bank may hold the title until you pay off the car, but the car is still yours for all intents and purposes.

This is much different than a lease where you'll be expected to return the car back to a sellable condition at the end of the lease. (or pay the leasing company to do it).

anyone care to put a meaning for this into layman's terms?

To my mind the issue is color balance. No, really. Quarks have a property called "color" (not in any way related to visible colors), which needs to be balanced in order to get a stable particle. (It's a consequence of the non-abelian SU(3) gauge group of the strong nuclear force. Aren't you glad you asked?)

The upshot is that to get a stable particle, you need to have a set of blue+anti-blue, or red+anti-red, or green+anti-green, or blue+green+red or anti-blue+anti-green+anti-red quarks. This is the origin of the 2 quark (color+anti-color) or 3 quark (all colors) particle. (Of course, this is a simplification - because of gluons the colors of the particles are constantly swapping around, but in ways that maintain the color balance.)

Having four quarks upsets this notion. You need some way of balancing the color, and the "traditional" ways of doing it won't work. My guess is that this new particle is probably something like a blue+anti-blue+red+anti-red. As the news article mentions, it's apparently still up in the air whether this should really be considered a true four quark particle, or simply two particles (blue+anti-blue & red+anti-red) in very close association.

I don't think anyone likes the Standard Model, it's inelegant and has more "elementary" particles than can be easily memorized, but it keeps making accurate predictions.

Actually that is not really true: just about anyone can do a very simple experiment which is inconsistent with the predictions of the Standard Model. Pick up an object and then let it go. There is nothing in the Standard Model which will predict the behaviour you observe. That's why we physicists don't like it. Parts of it are extremely elegant - e.g. the Higgs mechanism - but since it can't explain gravity we know it is wrong and yet we still cannot find any better model that works for all the other fundamental forces and gravity...not to mention explaining other phenomena like Dark Matter, matter/anti-matter asymmetry of the universe, baryon number violation... etc. The number of particles and free parameters is a minor issue!

Gravitons are not a Standard Model particle, though you can tack them on to the Standard Model to partially explain some gravitational behavior (though not without introducing mathematical problems). The link between Standard Model (and variants) field theories and General Relativity is still missing: one can calculate how particles act within gravitationally bent spacetime, but there is no "microscopic" model for how particles themselves bend the spacetime around them as you approach high enough energies for that to be relevant.

Four quarks? That's a Galuon, isn't it?

Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe! Everything a subscription! Everything an ongoing revenue stream! Lock people in, charge them forever, everything, everywhere, everywhen! Keep them paying! Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.

Seriously, wtf? Maddog knows better than that.

In any really tall building, servers belong in the middle floor - which is probably already a service floor, if it's an intelligently designed high-rise building.

Cable runs decrease in density, thickness, and length when you put the servers in the center of the served area. It's also the safest single place in regards to disasters such as floods, hurricanes, civic unrest, and lightning strikes.

It's cheaper and more reliable to put servers in the middle of the middle floor.

What is wrong with thin clients?

You spend the same amount of money on screen and UI hardware, and then shave a sliver of the total system cost off by skimping on CPU and RAM, then spend much more than what you saved on beefed up network infrastructure to accomodate the larger payload. Thats what.

Thin clients only make sense as a way to salvage older thick clients when you just happen to have next to no money to spend, and already for some reason have an overpowered network and server infrastructure. Or if your user base is so supid that they cannot be trusted not to throw them in the dishwasher.

The only thing that the building has in common is geography. If you're going to take those responsibilities outside of your own device, why not just stick them in a remote data center and be done with it? Why should the building manager want to do anything other than route the bits between you and that center?

If the distance is too great and creates latencies, the solution isn't some server for the building, but some local CDN installation. Perhaps it would be in the building itself, or just in the neighborhood. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have my Google Drive or Netflix Instant cache or some AWS instance. But let the professionals manage that, which is a whole massive headache of its own.

The only hardware a building manager should need is the part that is geographic, the hard wire that leads to the rest of the Internet.

There is so much FUD around HFT it is hard for people to think rationally about it. I had wasted the following study on a troll once already earlier this morning and therefore it would be a shame not to repost it: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/HFT0324.pdf

Maybe someone may be bothered to actually learn something about HFT before they declare it the spawn of Satan. The upshot: "Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated,competing trading venues have substantially improved market liquidity and reduced trading costs for all investors. Share prices are almost surely higher as a result of this reduction in trading costs, benefiting long-term investors. Higher share prices also have favorable implications for firms\ cost of equity capital. " Exactly, and that makes FUD out of the sentiment that HFT is somehow squeezing out mom and pop investors, or siphoning billions out of the market.

In fact, do you know who doesn't like HFT? The investment banking arms of too-big-to-fail banks. Yes, they run HFT operations as well, but they would love to see a return to the days when the roost was ruled by the company with the biggest pile of money instead of the other guy who had better technology. Every time one of these articles shows up I am amazed by the number of supposedly technically minded slashdotters who come out on the side of big banks over the guys who write software for a living, and the trolls who can't be bothered to even understand what HFT is before they attack it.

Things like 1% management fees and high expense ratios on 401(K)s (which can end up costing you 3/4 of your retirement money), combination life insurance/savings plans (almost always a ripoff), and more specific to day-traders, things like how the AP sells early access to hedge funds, insider trading, that type of thing. I would argue that even the ads on CNBC trying to convince people that they can make money day-trading qualify as a scam. Also, see this video:

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/yes-markets-rigged-survive-shark-infested-waters-143233110.html

How are they "siphoning" anything away from a majority of people?

Easy, the value they extract through arbitrage would otherwise be retained by the parties making actual trades.

How are they giving nothing in social value? The money these people make they spend on other business ventures

So do any other sort of theives, what's your point?

The HFTs are paying the stock exchanges a fee to have access to faster trades. The service HFT provides is market making

If that was a valuable service, the stock exchanges would be paying the HFT guys, not the other way around.

Banks borrow money at a lower rate and and lend money at a higher rate creating profit with each transaction. This was seen as immoral at various times in history, but now we know this serves to create liquidity.

It's still immoral, despite creating liquidity. There's absolutely no reason we couldn't create all the liquidity we want with non-profit, publicly owned financial institutions.