Posts by cirby 132 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2008
You can certainly find politicians and fanatics who say they don't, but in reality they all know they trust the US more than China, by a huge margin.
(Takes vacation to Disney World)
"We can't trust the US!"
(Flies to Boston for advanced medical procedure)
"Who knows what they'd do?"
(Checks NYSE on iPhone to see how their investments are doing)
Back in January, when I started to hear about the virus, I bought some extra parts, just in case.
That paid off, since I needed to replace one of the pieces I bought as a spare, and right now I'd either have to wait over a month, or pay $50 extra for one (that would still not show up for weeks).
It's amazing how "91 valid violations we can pin down to individuals and 497 valid violations we can't pin down to individuals" gets translated to "there were no violations."
The report says there was no evidence that the introduction of classified material to unclassified systems was deliberate. That means is that there was no proof that they did it on purpose - but that also means that almost 600 violations were done unintentionally. Which means that they did so stupidly and accidentally.
That's why you run secured systems to begin with: in case you stupidly include material that should be classified in your daily operations.
As a footnote: No, material does NOT have to be marked CLASSIFIED to be considered such. Some information is considered "born classified," like casual conversations between US diplomats and foreign officials. Again, that's why Clinton and her flunkies should have been using a secured email server.
Not exactly.
True, CFC production is much lower than it was 30 years ago, but it's common knowledge that there are "bootleg" CFC factories in places like China and India - and they're producing enough CFCs to counterbalance the tiny amount of CFC that degrades each year. We weren't supposed to see an appreciable reduction in stratospheric CFCs until the middle of the 21st century, even with complete phase-out of CFCs.
Basically, the amount of CFCs in the upper atmosphere shouldn't be going down at all, much less dropping enough to allow ozone regeneration. That suggests that the theory was drastically wrong about the mechanism for ozone depletion, at least in magnitude.
I've run into a number of people who keep all of their files on their laptop's desktop, "where I can see them." ALL of their files.
There have been a couple with so many files on the desktop that you couldn't see the wallpaper or read the actual file titles.
Each time they wanted to open a file, they opened the appropriate program and skimmed the names...
Yes, this was horribly inconvenient and slow, but they never seem to want to change to something rational.
I've spent a lot of money on Blizzard games over the years - with WoW subscriptions, it's well over the thousand dollar mark. I recently resubbed to play Wow Classic.
Today, I cancelled my subscription to WoW and deleted all of their games from my computer, and I've seen other people doing the same today.
Let's see how well that China decision works out for Blizzard...
Supposedly, the original plan for DeepNudes was for a male version too, they just got shut down too soon.
Meanwhile, if someone creates a nude portrait of a female or male celebrity with Photoshop (or even paper and pencil), that's apparently acceptable, and has been for years. Because it's art.
The first thing they need to do is drop prices at least 10%, probably 20%.
The RTX line of cards is pretty neat, but the price differential over the 10x0 series is too much.
Until they get enough games and other software to support the RTX features, they're just higher-priced versions of similar cards.
A number of years ago, a rich and showy wine connoisseur customer bought us wine for a stupidly-expensive dinner, for some reason or other.
He started with a "cheap" $100 bottle, then moved to a "good" $500 bottle, and finished off with "his favorite" $1100 bottle.
The "cheap" one was my favorite, and even he admitted that the expensive one wasn't immensely better, and that most $30 bottles are pretty good nowadays.
...they might have included these contrarians to keep the "ethics experts" from addressing silly, unrealistic scenarios, to keep them focused on what the industry is actually doing.
"Yeah, we know that making a T-1000 or an ED-209 would be a bad move, but let's address the issues involved in dealing with the things we can ACTUALLY build in the near future. It also might be nice to look at what other countries are working on right now, instead of going on and on about the US military-industrial-academic complex and how awful it is."
First, they extrapolate that a degree or so of extra warmth is going to kill most of the species of WILD coffee plants. They add in species that haven't been seen for a while to get that "most."
Then, they casually suggest that the ones being cultivated and harvested are going to die off because of possible diseases that aren't actually known to exist, and could only be saved because of wild plants (which probably won't be immune to those diseases anyway).
Coffee production, by the way, is at an all-time high, almost 50% higher than in 2003/2004. So the global warming we've had so far seems to be having either no effect, or a positive one.
Back in the 90s, I lived in an apartment, and ever day at 6 PM, my TV and cable reception went to hell. Couldn't figure out why, until I also noticed that the guy downstairs came home each day at that time. He had one of the cheaper PC clones (with almost no shielding on the case) that he'd overclocked a lot, and it was emitting enough RF at just the right frequencies that it would hose every TV in the vicinity.
The problem went away when he lined the case with aluminum foil.
The Vive sold about a half-million headsets in 2016 alone. I think your numbers are a bit old.
Oculus Go is supposedly over the million mark already.
Add up the PSVR, Oculus, Oculus Go, and Vive, and you're well over the five million mark, almost certainly much higher.
From the introduction of the Apple II in 1977, it took about five years before "home computers" hit the five million sales mark (Apple II, Atari, TRS-80, etc).
The Oculus Rift (the first mainstream headset to release) has been out for about 2.5 years.
VR sales are building at well over twice the rate home computers did when they were released.
Once, I had a consulting call - a friend of mine sold Macs, and one of his customers had decided their print server needed to be replaced.
I took the new machine to their office, looked around, and asked where the old print server was.
"What print server?"
I went onto the office net, found there definitely _was_ one, and started a physical search. Found the offending beast in a closet that was hidden behind a tall cubicle partition. Moved the wall out of the way, went into the room, and found an original Mac II, monitor turned off, covered in dust, attached to an ancient lead-acid UPS. Turned the monitor on and checked the uptime.
Twelve years.
It had been a running, non-rebooted print server for twelve years. I felt bad for replacing the poor old thing. Luckily, it was running bone-stock software, so that side of the process was easy enough, but it took three days to train them all on how to use the new process.
It's probably more the case that the restaurant assumed the group was part of the main convention, and didn't find out about it until the day of the show.
I've seen worse things at shows. Like a major company shipping their entire $500,000 booth to the wrong continent, and finding out the day AFTER setup was supposed to start.
The "restrictive rules" are mostly just "pay for a booth, and if you want to host a larger event off-site, pay us some cash to advertise the event."
IGEL did a lot of things wrong, starting with "we're going to host a competing event at one of the contracted hotels for the show without reading the hotel contracts thoroughly."
Oddly enough, "outboarding" usually IS a basis for action.
When you look at the contracts big hotels make you sign when you do shows, one of those nice little clauses usually mentions outboarding, with "we can shut you down" language buried in there.
...and when you have an "independent" restaurant in a hotel, using hotel resources (like in-house AV), they're controlled by the same sort of language.
It's going to be really interesting when the lawyers for IGEL get to deal with all of the contracts they signed when they set this event up. It'll be friggin' HILARIOUS when they find out how many IGEL people had badges for the VMWare show, and if they were promoting the outboarding event at the show, IGEL could be hosed in even more ways.
A lot of shows have a problem with vendors trying to take advantage of their shows by hosting events in the hotels the show books (or right next door). For example, instead of paying the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to book a large booth at the show, someone might host an event at a nearby restaurant.
This is often called "outboarding," and is frowned on by basically the entire trade show industry. Lots of companies have been shut down in very similar situations. Most big convention hotels have policies against outboarding.
Yeah, you might be a "partner" of the exhibiting company, but in this case you're acting more like a competitor - and a somewhat disreputable one, at that.
They probably saved a couple of hundred thousand by hosting this at the restaurant, but now they've pissed off their "partner."
There's a similar practice called "suitcasing," where someone attends a show, doesn't pay for a booth, but runs around selling their products to attendees (spend $2000 for a badge an a hotel room, instead of $30,000 for a booth). Generally, if you get caught you immediately lose your badge, and are usually banned from ever attending that show again...
The Oculus Go is pretty nicely set for Christmas. Pricey enough to not be a too-casual purchase, but cheap enough that a bunch of middle-class parents will grab it as their kids' first VR headset. It's probably going to be the Commodore 64 of VR. Not the best, not the fastest, but certainly good enough to get started.
I have a Vive, a Rift, a WMR, and a Go - they each fill a certain segment of the market. The Vive is my favorite, but the Go is surprisingly good for the price. They're all pretty good, though.
...and the true second-generation headsets are no more than a year out. That's when it kicks into high gear.
Not likely, pal.
Almost all online games minimize bandwidth. When all you're doing is sending game location and input data, it's a tiny fraction of the size of, say, a decent-quality YouTube stream.
Games companies try to use the least bandwidth because if you do big chunks of data, it nukes the servers that are carrying all of those online games and makes it nearly impossible to get good latency.
...except this is for video.
For even a ten-second clip, it would take a ridiculous amount of time to do well - and the results would probably be pretty bad.
For comparison, someone took one of the Carrie Fisher "added" shots from the last Star Wars movie and did their own version with this software, which arguably looks better than the professional version.
You need to remember some things when you read those "US companies don't pay taxes" stories."
First, the vast majority of "companies" in the US are small businesses, and a lot of those companies are basically just one or two people and some incorporation paperwork. A majority of those companies don't pay taxes because they're basically placeholders - companies that either never did business or that are getting ready to start up.
Second, a lot of the rest of the corporations don't make a profit in a given year. A bunch of those are ones that are getting ready to go out of business, and a number of others are ones that don't make a profit in a given year (due to acquisitions or other financial reasons), but make a profit and pay taxes in other years. Quite a few of them also don't pay corporate taxes because they report their taxes under the individual tax codes (quite a few contractors do this).
Third, foreign and US-owned companies often shield their income by keeping their profits overseas, or counter their US taxes by losses in other markets. This is "encouraged" by US tax codes that double-tax US companies that bring their overseas profits back home. The current tax reform bill is supposed to address this.
You also have the situation where a reporter writes "X company didn't pay taxes" when the real story is "X company didn't pay taxes in the second quarter of the year," which is pretty normal.
Current VR headsets (Vive, Rift) are barely able to run wireless - it's "edge" hardware at the moment, the the few people who use the TPCAST wireless kit are mostly having to deal with a lot of bugs and other issues. I know this because I'm one of them.
The next generation of headsets - 4K per eye monsters like the Pimax, for example - are going to be using DisplayPort, because current HDMI just can't handle the bandwidth on a single cable. They talk about an RF wireless add-on, but that's vaporware at the moment.
HDMI 2.1 will allow 4K per eye, plus be able to push HDR content, which will make more difference than any planned upgrades in resolution.
Wireless for that bandwidth just isn't in the cards right now. I'm betting on optical wireless for the next step, because getting that much 100% reliable radio bandwidth is getting harder and harder.
"professional entymologists will have accounted for any natural cycles"
You don't know many actual scientists, right?
While that seems to be the sort of thing they'd do if they were all interested in getting to the truth about the subject, there's no guarantee of it. A few minutes of skimming Retraction Watch will disabuse you of most of your romantic ideas about modern science.
That "Trump was working with the Russians" idea was primarily based off of those nonexistent wiretaps.
If there weren't any wiretaps, the whole thing goes down the drain.
(The "Trump Russian Dossier" story also relied on the fictional wiretaps, so it goes away too.)
We're about a year away from the "business usefulness point" of virtual reality systems - the headsets will be crossing the resolution line, and enough good software will be available. Prices on systems are already starting to drop, and the showstopper bugs are all pretty much worked out.
...and yes, that will mean desktop-level systems, not tablets and phones. Yeah, you can shoehorn enough hardware into a laptop, but at twice the price of an equivalent desktop machine, and you still need at least a small stationary work area.
"Your Honor, I'm not certain this is the same Terms and Conditions I saw on their website. The one I saw didn't have an arbitration clause, for example. I'd like to see the signed and notarized copy, please."
"All we have is the electronic version!"
"Well you seem to have AN electronic version, but unless you have some sort of physical proof that it was the one I agreed to, then I don't see how it can be valid."
There isn't much (if any) VR content that relies on direct video streaming like that.
Generally the "40 ms" issue in internal to the VR system, and doesn't touch the network. Interactions between players by pass that, for the most part, and don't impact play any more than any other online game.
If you have a long delay (40ms+) between the time you move your head and the time the display updates, that's a problem, and people start to get "VR sickness."
If you have a long (300 ms+) delay in person-t-person game interactions, it just makes play seem clunky.
A 1070 is currently $525 to $600+ - the one in my VR machine cost me $399 last year, but is going for $649 now...
A new 970 (up to $450) is more expensive than a 1070 was in January.
(I had a lightning strike kill this computer last week, and I was panicking at the thought of replacing the graphics card - luckily, it survived.)
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