Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Historical example. I am old enough to have seen and used a CRT display. In some ways, the CRT display is still superior to LCD/LED displays. However, it is hard to find a CRT display now, even a refurbished one in satisfactory working condition. The manufacturing has stopped, the world has moved on."
I grew up with CRTs, too, but after seeing the transition to LCDs, I can see why CRT's disadvantages outweighed the advantages. They're bulky (takes up precious desk space), heavy (transport and labor costs, potential desk issues), and not as precise (an analog device by nature). Once LCDs overcame problems of contrast, size, and weight, they could outpoint CRTs 4 times out of 5.
For me, it was Zip drives. It was the best option for me at the time because I was working with a 486SLC laptop with no CD-ROM capacity. Thankfully, at that point, technology was pretty fluid and by the time Zip's writing was on the wall, I had access to other techs to offload things before I lost too much.
Well, for me, I'm not that paranoid, but I DO take precautions for data I'd prefer not to lose. My drives are paired up and rotated periodically (mirroring as I do so) to guard against a controller failure. Bit rot I cover by using parity archives.
I'm not talking the stuff built into the drives. ZFS, as you noted, includes advanced error codes so can pick up on silent corruption, and that's one way to do it. I'm taking including things like Parity Archives for distinct finalized data sets that are being archived or (say media collections) won't be changing around. That way, even if bit rot hits during a transfer, you can usually correct for them and get back in business. You use up a little capacity to cover your butt over bit rot. This as well as pairing drives are perhaps the best way to keep consomer-level data (as in nice to keep intact but not life-and-death) protected against wear and tear.
There are hints that rust is approaching the point of diminishing returns. Technologies such as HAMR and shingled recording are pretty complicated beasts compared to the technologies of the past. Additional points of failure loom, so one has to wonder how much time the state of rust art has actually bought.
The thing is, people have found that cycling backups on occasion has benefits as well. As you move the backups from one tape generation to the next every few years, you also help to maintain its integrity by verifying the backups and resetting the cold storage clock. Plus tape technology (particularly LTO) evolved to produce additional advantages: such as high data transfer rates that can surpass most rust drives and cramming more data in the same physical size than most other formats. Plus it still has its advantages regarding cold storage (rust drives apart from RDX can't be guaranteed to keep their data intact long-term).
My thought is that flash is gaining ground on rust, but rust won't go away until flash hits a price:capacity tipping point (say twice rust's price for the same amount of storage). Until then, rust's raw capacity advantage is still useful, and although so much storage in rust has issues, there are already ways around them (most notably transfer bit rot; but that's why we have error codes).
"I remember hearing that curves are put into motorways to ensure that drivers remain alert rather than just driving up a monotonous straight road."
True story. The problem cropped up when the Interstate a highway System was first going up. We have a term for the problem: Highway Hypnosis.
"There is a plethora of -400 series jet available given that Cathay and Air France have recently retired their last -400 bodies, and British Airways still has over 30 of them in daily use."
I think Delta retired a few -400s several years ago when they closed certain transoceanic flights (like Detroit to and from Manila via Nagoya Centrair).
As I recall, Activision suffered the same fate as Atari in their descent into mediocrity. The Activision of today is also much different: it's now one half of Activision Blizzard. And until recently, the whole shebang was a subsidiary of Vivendi (but give them credit: they took themselves independent with a successful buyback).
"Actually no, the mothers tend to have much more developed immune systems and their bodies naturally filter out most of the bad stuff."
Not if they're undernourished, which mothers will tend to be when having babies in impoverished areas where even clean water isn't a given. Compromised bodies result in compromised immune systems.
Nope, they're not hardwires. Like on laptops, the OS can track BOTH inputs and simply turns the built-in one off by software when a TRRS device is installed (and it has to be a real one--they detect it by impedance and will flag you if something is amiss, claiming it's a malfunctioning mic). That means something with system-level permissions can override.
The trick is that ARM isn't responsible for a lot of the peripheral hardware: only the CPU architecture and usually the GPU that's paired with it if it's a Mali. All the rest has historically been handled by custom memory maps that ARE in control of the SoC manufacturers, and they ARE motivated to make things unique to each SoC to keep poaching down. With things like SBSA, however, the mapping can be standardized so that you don't have to compile a custom system for each iteration.
But as noted, Google can take a different approach with the hardware. First, they can take the Apple approach and only sanction certain classes of hardware for which knowledge is mature and abundant. Second, we know they're also taking the Microsoft approach with an abstraction layer that can help smooth out differences in hardware by giving the hardware driver writers a common set of targets. This may well have basis in the Server Base System Architecture: an ACPI-like system being developed as ARM progresses into the server market.
These approaches together with contract terms concerning carrying Google Play Services and Google could well coerce manufacturers to comply with new standards that force them to relinquish update control.
No, I mean TTS: Text to Speech: the computer saying things out loud. When you say STT, I tend to call it "Speech Recognition," which I will admit is improving considerably. It just so happens that, with Google, TTS and Speech Recognition are rolled into the combined Speech API.
Like I said, it's very each to hear the difference. Simply test Google's text to speech system first with an online connection, then without. I can assure you the offline version will sound a lot worse: more like what I heard out of computer TTS systems in the 1990's than state of the art.
PS. As for CereProc, I believe SVOX produced a better result, and I'm strongly of the opinion Google's cloud speech trumps SVOX.
Then humanity is doomed as WMDs are designed to be capable of overwhelming anything that can be conceived as a defense.
If a value judgment cannot be made as to who lives and who dies, then no optimal answer is possible. Anyone on the losing side will attempt revenge or retribution. Indeed, if there is someone out there willing to accept MAD as a scenario, then the least optimal answer becomes a distinct possibility.
That's the scariest proposition of all (because it's existential): that, through our own hands or through agents, we wipe ourselves completely out with no change to save ourselves.
Problem is, in many cases, one side and/or the other DON'T WANT the process to be simple.
In your case, as is the case of a mutual contract between parties of equal standing, the buyers want to close the deal and move in and the sellers usually want to do something with the proceeds tout suite (such as buy another house, so domino effect), so both legal teams are pressed to hurry up lest the deal get abandoned out of impatience. Mutual contracts thus have motivation to get it over with.
But most T&Cs that we think about are one-sided, "deal or no deal" propositions. Basically, the provider is in full control because if you don't bite, someone else will.
I guess it does down to a case of "Your Mileage May Vary". If your destination is pretty easy to spot, out in the open on well-established streets that haven't been changed recently, then outside mapping data should be current enough that services like Uber can handle it.
HOWEVER, if the destination is off the beaten path, not that obvious, or in a location that changed its layout recently, then your only option is something with local knowledge, and that means the taxi service.
"Civil court. Proof only needs to be more likely than not. And a git changelog for the website showing no changes were made means you're going to lose that argument."
Correct, in civil court, the standard is simply "Preponderance of Evidence" to determine which side is more convincing since the litigants are considered to be peers (in the sense both stand as equals) so have equal standing in the court.
BUT if the complaint is about violation of a CRIMINAL act and the People (specific term varies by jurisdiction) agree there's a case, then it goes into the Criminal Court system where guilt can be established and the "Reasonable Doubt" test applies.
Or if the terms and conditions cross the line and violate a standing Act. No contract can overrule actual law no matter what it says. If a contract carries an illegal term, it can be taken directly to court on that ground alone (unenforceable contract) because matters of law can ONLY be handled by the courts; that is their purpose for existing.
"The firms can't do without us anymore than we can do without them. It's a question of numbers and the OP was suggesting that all customers should take this approach. That's very unlikely, but it would be immediately effective since otherwise the company's revenue simply dries up, forever."
Point is, you'll never get that far. As P. T. Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute," and there are seven billion plus of us. As long as they can convince enough suckers to sign on, the rest of us can go chase unicorns as they can then just reply, "Next!" The kind of unity you'd need to convince most of the population to rally behind you would need to be supported by some life-and-limb whiter-than-white issue, and this simply doesn't tick all the boxes.
The TL;DR version: How do you win when you're surrounded by idiots?
If they're willing to do that, they're also probably willing to hire a forger to initial fake pages for them as well, probably even create a forgery of an entirely new contract and then sociopathically lie that your copy is the fake and that you bribed a civil clerk to falsely certify the copy (and used insiders in City Hall to plant the evidence).
IOW, if someone REALLY wants you, if they have more connections than you do, consider yourself screwed. Much as civilization likes to say it isn't so, in the end might makes right.
And people wonder why I insist my batteries be REMOVABLE. I have a Note 4 (T-Mobile model, not affected here), so I know it's ONLY because the battery is removable that the solution is so simple.
Given the fire risks associated with Lithium-based batteries, ALL of them should be required by law to be removable to control that fire risk.
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