Comment Worst car analogy ever (Score 2) 211
Since when did the car owner's manual teach the owner how to drive?
I work for an airline. We train pilots on our aircraft and our procedures. We certainly do not teach them how to fly.
Since when did the car owner's manual teach the owner how to drive?
I work for an airline. We train pilots on our aircraft and our procedures. We certainly do not teach them how to fly.
All good ideas. I think a lot of people are actually open to change as long as they feel their skill and experience is being valued. Suggest that it would be good to simplify and modernise the process and find out what ideas Bob has and the challenges he sees in implementing any changes.
This is definitely true but I would also add "offer to help with the changes" (or find someone who is capable of helping). Outsiders may have good ideas about how to fix things, but anyone can be a critic. That can be annoying to the original maintainer who has to do the work, regardless of how much it improves the system.
GPUs only tend to allow you to offload the strait-shot parallelized stuff - graphic blits, audio, textures & lighting - but the core of the game logic is still tied to the CPU. Even if you aren't straining the limits of the CPU in the final implementation, programmers are still limited by the capacity of them.
Your theory is basically valid, but the practical reality and the empirical evidence of the last, I dunno, 20 years or so, is that the graphics processing takes a significant amount of computing power. There's a reason that virtually every computer and every game console has a dedicated GPU. For that matter, a dedicated sound processing chip. It's all offloaded and the APIs have improved to the point that it doesn't seem like much work, but those specialized chips are burning an awful lot of power.
For a wide variety of games, the game logic just isn't that complicated, or rather, it doesn't require as much computing horsepower as the rendering. Sports games and FPS are the most obvious but I'm sure there's others. The most CPU intensive game I can think of is Civilization 4. I'm sure it's been surpassed, and yeah the AI still sucks, but late in games you can really tell that the CPU is chugging away.
The truth, of course, is that something will ALWAYS be a bottleneck. The argument seems to be: is it the CPU or GPU?
I never worked in the same industry but I guess it is a bit obvious this is an issue. Basically what PayPal is saying is this distributor is at a higher risk because of their already documented history of charge backs. OK that I can deal with. Charge a higher premium to the distributor to compensate.
Credit card merchant banks already do this. Merchants pay more for "card not present" transactions (anything online) and certain types of businesses pay different discount rates. Hotels generally pay more than "regular" storefront merchants, for example. Restaurants and gas stations pay different rates. I think government agencies generally get the best rates but I'm not sure.
However, the rates for adult content merchants are already sky high (12-15% vs around 3% for non-adult merchants) because, surprise, there's a lot of fraud. Many banks have decided that they simply don't want to deal with it for ANY price. Paypal served adult merchants at one time but they stopped long ago, maybe 2004.
I never understood the reasoning behind the time based password change. No one expects people to get a new key every six months for their home lock. No one expects someone to get a new ATM card every 6 months.
Physical tokens like keys don't require such frequent replacement because (in general) they are difficult to compromise without alerting the holder. Someone has to actually steal your key and take it to the hardware store without you noticing. Passwords, on the other hand, can be shoulder surfed, socially engineered, stolen with malware, stored in plain text in the database, shared with someone else, etc., and the user may have no clue his password is compromised. Also, if someone steals your key and robs your house, and there was no sign of forced entry, you probably would change the locks. But someone with your password could log in as you without you noticing for... well, maybe forever, depending on the system. I agree it can be overdone, but it is a good security practice and there is some logic behind it.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth