Posts by PghMike 130 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Feb 2011
I'm still pretty happy with Chromecast. It works fine for Netflix, Hulu and Youtube (of course), along with Vudu. There are a few things on Amazon I like to watch on the big screen, and tab casting work better than ever these days, so that's just what I do.
It isn't that hard to buy a Chromecast from a Best Buy (in the US). So, I doubt Amazon's behavior will have any effect, except to make people wonder how crappy the FireStick must be if Amazon feels this will materially help it.
I'm guessing that the recall will significantly hurt some aspect of the cars' performance -- otherwise why do the hack in the first place. So, I'm guessing that there'll be a bunch of civil lawsuits against VW for this.
Conceivably, even the US DoJ might file criminal charges, but I'd be surprised if they do -- Obama's DoJ seems to think that crimes committed as an executive of a large corporation don't merit prosecution.
It isn't surprising that current 7 mode customers aren't migrating to C mode -- it requires a full data copy of any volume switching modes, last time I checked. That's way too much upheaval to put a working storage infrastructure through.
C mode sales are pretty much all new sales, and NetApp directs the same customers who would have been buying 7 mode systems to buy C mode systems for their new filers. The real question is how the sum of 7 mode + C mode sales are growing, or shrinking. That tells you how NetApp's traditional business is doing.
Pretending it is good news on its own that C mode sales are growing is silly: of course C mode sales are growing; the sales are starting from a relatively small installed base.
My old way of using iTunes involves having a bunch of music local to my iPhone and Mac, and streaming anything not present from iCloud. All that still comes for free -- you can stream the music you've purchased on any iDevice.
When Apple Music was released, the streaming option disappeared until I signed up for Apple Music. But even today, a lot of my ripped CD music in my iTunes library now shows up as "Apple Music" even though I don't have iTunes Match. Fortunately, it appears that this "Apple Music" isn't DRM'd (at least, VLC can play them); some are even MP3 files!
The iTunes store app on the iPhone is a nightmare. My youngest (sharing the same Apple ID) bought Taylor Swift's 1989, and iTunes shows the songs as downloadable on my Macbook, but on my phone, the iTunes store app doesn't seem to know that I own it. The phone's Music app offers me an option to "make available offline" but I don't know if that means downloading a DRM'd version that'll go bad when I drop Apple Music, or if it is downloading the iCloud version. I guess I won't find out until the subscription runs out, at which point I suspect Apple's support phones will be ringing off the hook.
Finally, what's the deal with the "Beats 1" radio station? Does Apple really not know that there are literally hundreds of thousands of free Internet radio stations, many of which are more interesting?
I'm not sure that being a billionaire is sufficient compensation for having that picture distributed around the world. And while I realize that I'm over 50 and so can no longer judge the ages of youngins, he doesn't look like a dorky 22 year old, he looks like a dorky 12 year old.
How did Oculus marketing ever let something like that happen?
The US has *political* union, which the EU does not have. The Germans hate sending their money to others; that's why they're refusing any debt reduction to Greece.
In the US, OTOH, the bluest states have citizens who, for example, are fighting politically to expand Obamacare, which will pump more money from the richer blue states to the poorer red states.
So, much as we make jokes about Alabama and Mississippi, we're trying to give, not loan, them money. Call me when your typical German *wants* to do that for Greece, Spain and Italy.
Well, as Jerry Garcia once said, "Well, you can't please everyone."
I think Apple saw a pile of bad press about how a company with $200 billion in the bank decided it had to screw some musicians out of 3 months of revenue.
Kudos to Ms Swift -- her statement pretty much guaranteed lots of bad press for Apple if they continued their plan to rip off musicians.
You wrote: "Simply on the basis that this is the first time anyone really tried that unconventional monetary policy, that QE, and it does seem to have worked."
I suspect that fiscal stimulus would have helped a great deal more than QE. QE, after all, makes loans cheap, but when demand is missing, offering to loan companies money on the cheap isn't particularly compelling -- I think the expression is "pushing on a string."
Creating demand, i.e. fiscal stimulus, by having the government either spend directly, or give money (in the US) to states to spend, is a much more direct path towards getting money circulating in the economy, and increasing V.
And it would "obviously" have helped (well, as much as anything in economics is obvious). We have in the US still too high unemployment, and we also have piles of infrastructure tasks that need to be done, from expanding high speed internet into the hinterlands, to repairing bridges and roads, to hiring teachers to teach overcrowded classes. I suspect it would have been relatively uninflationary to take people who were out of a job anyway, and hire them to do jobs that needed to be done, and that they could have done.
Instead, those people sat on their hands, and the corresponding investments never got made, all due to lack of fiscal (not financial) stimulus.
The last line of the article was "But it is possible to have a vague feeling that this isn't quite how red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism is supposed to work."
It was that statement, and the overall tone of the article that somehow these subsidies were remarkable in size, that I found either naïve or disingenous. We have nothing remotely like "red in tooth and claw capitalism" in this country, and solar and EV subsidies aren't close to the largest subsidies you find.
The author seems remarkably clueless about the role of government in capitalism, even in the supposed wild west of the United States.
Virtually every business exists in the context of laws, rules, regulations and subsidies, and these are at least as valuable as the solar and EV subsidies that Musk's companies are collecting
I'm sure you've heard how corn subsidies effectively lower the price of corn products in the US, resulting in much better candy in the UK than the US.
I'm personally pretty familiar with the US DMCA. It grants compulsory music licenses to internet radio stations, effectively raining free money to radio stations in exchange for their following certain rules. It also defines what types of material are subject to copyright. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, but it certainly isn't a libertarian paradise. And the DMCA actually defines copyright, which isn't a naturally occurring property right, anyway.
Boeing got started by selling planes to the military and then turning around those same designs for commercial aircraft, quite an effective subsidy. You may have heard of Airbus -- I remember reading vaguely that they too may have received some subsidies.
Here in the US, the nuclear power industry gets liability limitations that make it much more economical to run nuclear power plants. The fracking industry has exemptions written into the clean water act allowing them to dump poisons into the water supply of people surrounding their drilling operations.
Some of the above are reasonable, some are criminal. But only a fool would truly believe that only Elon Musk benefits from governmental subsidies.
I agree that the GPL is a much less useful license than the Sun / FreeBSD style licenses, when simply looking for code to incorporate into your own projects.
But for tools like g++, gdb, &c, GPL is fine, and the GPL license for tools like these really don't hurt things.
No, you're underestimating Stallman's contributions here. Independent of the legal stuff, Stallman basically rebuilt an immense amount of infrastructure, without which Linux would have just been a toy. Gcc, gdb, more Unix utilities than you can shake a stick at, and Emacs are just the tip of the iceberg. And leading by example, he motivated lots of others to contribute their work as either GPL or really free (Sun-style) licensed tech, such as Samba, Apache, and lots more.
And the stuff is very good quality. I don't remember the last gcc bug I encountered, nor the last Emacs bug.
He basically started off in the late 70s or early 80s saying that he was going to rewrite everything AT&T did, just to show them. At the time, it seemed stone cold bonkers, but amazingly, he succeeded, well beyond any sane expectations. All the legal rulings in the world would have meant nothing if there was no actual useful free software. And we owe RMS a big debt of gratitude for providing that big initial burst.
And it might be nice if he listened more graciously to other opinions (and I know, I had argued with him lots years ago), at this point, I think it is fair to say that Stallman is Stallman. He's not going to start listening to others *now* :-)
I couldn't believe that there's only one port on this box. Is Apple going to reserve one announcement date per year for joke products that are pretty, but useless, like the people who are expected to buy them? Why would you go through all the effort to build a product like this, and then piss it away by making it impossible to charge!?
I figure either they have some serious network routing problems affecting their private inter-city links, or they've designed something idiotically. Or both.
It is surprising, however. After all, large intercity routers must misbehave all the time, and the currently deployed routing protocols must have some way of avoiding bad routers (even Byzantinely bad routers that claim to be working). So, it is somewhat of a mystery how MSFT manages to get these gigantic failures.
One thing that always amazed me is how poor Apple's service is for businesses. They'll be happy to pay a little more to be able to bring in a laptop to the Apple store and get someone to fix it right then and there, or swap its drive into a new chassis.
Teaming up with IBM, which understands business service much better than Apple, is a good idea.
It *doesn't* mean that Apple is losing its cool. To me, it means that Apple noticed that it is leaving a *ton* of money on the table by being obtuse to the needs of businesses.
I'm still much happier with my family iPhones, which never get viruses, than I would be with an Android phone whose store is littered with malware. And there's no way I'm buying a Windows phone -- ever. Microsoft has achieved that rare combination of banality, incompetence and arrogance that would prove instantly fatal to a company that didn't have a constant income stream from desktop Windows. I'm certainly not going to inflict their system on anyone I care about.
I don't know why they bother to say stuff like "[T]he agency only slurped the communications of targeted individuals." It's clear that's untrue -- it's clear they record everything, and then (theoretically) only listen to stuff that they're interested in.
The real information that Snowden exposed is that those things that you knew were theoretically possible to do, but didn't seem worth doing, they *are* doing. Whether it's recording everything, or putting in sufficient backdoors to break any standard encryption algorithm, they're doing it.
One thing I learned from this paper was "It is almost universally accepted that by itself the equilibrium warming effect of a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration is slightly more than 1◦C," even though the models are predicting 3 degrees C.
For years, I've been assuming that the global warming estimates were due simply to computing how much more energy the atmosphere would absorb given the additional CO2. I didn't realize that the majority of the predicted warming is due to feedback effects, where the models are somewhat more (or if this article is to be believed, significantly more) uncertain.
In other words, probably still time to design and deploy some safer nuclear technology.
Apple's had two things going for it all of these years. First, a much cleaner user interface, which makes using their systems much more fun (and the systems are cleaner internally, which makes it harder to write viruses).
More importantly, they've had various unique services that are increasingly less unique. Their iTunes music store was pretty cool when it was the only legal way to buy music downloads. And it no doubt is still going strong, even now that DRM is gone, since it is much simpler to keep buying music from one place.
But they've been unable to do anything really innovative with music or video downloads or streaming, thanks to the copyright holders. And of course, there are lots of video and music streaming services today, and Apple controls relatively few.
The author has it pretty much right--they're just one more purveyor of glass rectangles through which to view the Cloud.
Ethernet no doubt contributed to IBM's loss of standards setting abilities, but I always thought that the real hit was when IBM couldn't come out with a 386-based system fast enough, and Compaq took over defining what an IBM PC-compatible system was.
That being said, IBM's token ring, and associated SNA technology, certainly deserves the scorn heaped upon it. My first full-time job was writing a driver so that a Sun 2's serial chip could operate in SDLC mode so we could send LU6.2 verbs to an IBM printer, and thus print on an IBM SNA-based printer from a Sun 2 workstation.
Why? Because our University got free IBM printers at the time.
I read the referenced paper, and didn't see any correction for serious illnesses, such as cancer. Since having cancer (for example) tends to cause both increased mortality and decreased weight, I'm not sure that there's any content in this paper at all.
As a matter of fact, the authors say that they purposely excluded people with BMI between 18.5 and 20.0 from normal, since people in that category are more likely to have "concurrent illnesses" that increase mortality, and they didn't want those ill people making normal weight people appear more ill and thus hide potential relative negative health effects of obesity.
The study was careful to exclude sick people from the normal weight group, but it did so by moving them into the underweight group. So, I don't think the study says anything meaningful about being underweight, only about being overweight.
Gee whiz, didn't the Federal government develop something called the Arpanet, which I recall some folks in the Valley managed to exploit commercially in some way or another. Face it -- the US Federal government has always contributed to the success of the Valley, and to pretend otherwise shows a great deal of ignorance.
People weren't even allowed to use the ArpaNet --> Internet for commercial purposes until the 1990s, when the Clinton administration (guided here by Al Gore, I believe) changed the rules. Before that you had to have some connection to a DoD contract to get a computer connected to the Internet at all.
The author's real argument is that capital gains taxes should be reduced so that pre-IPO share profits are taxed less. That's pretty much a self-serving argument, and one that's unsupported by any serious policy evidence. Back when the peak tax rates were 49%, a 28% capital gains rate looked pretty good, and today, with a peak rate of 36%, even a 20% capital gains rate would still likely provide plenty of motivation for starting companies.
In short, this article is as moronic and ignorant as those people who tell the Federal government to stay out of Medicare. Frankly, I expect better from The Register.
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