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Comment Re:And how long does it take... (Score 1) 190

Replace all the cars on the long-distance highway with EVs and you'll need a service station about an order of magnitude larger in size (i.e. your typical 12-pump gas station becomes a parking lot with over 100 chargers). Hydrocarbon fuels have their advantages and high energy density is one of them.

Assuming you know you're going on a long trip and start out with full battery you should have a 250 mile range starting out. Top it off with 150 extra and you can go 400 miles with half an hour of downtime, I don't know about you but I wouldn't drive that far in one stretch anyway, so it would be taking up a parking spot while I eat anyway. Sure, technically it's more tanking and less parking but the car takes up the same space anyway.

Also most of the time most people (who consider getting an EV anyway) will have a gas station in their garage/parking spot, which happens to be where it was going to stand anyway so it consumes zero extra space. Despite the efficiency difference there'd probably be less space spent on gas stations in inner cities. It'd probably become an add-on service for malls and parking garage top off your car while you're shopping.

Comment Re:Pick a different job. (Score 1) 548

One of the most difficult things I've had to come to accept as a developer is: If you see a 'clever' way to solve something, STOP. The sad fact is most programmers work on programming teams and you need to absolutely view yourself as expendable. Embrace mediocrity and find another outlet for your creativity. This could be personal projects outside of the workplace, or other hobbies altogether.

I don't write mediocre code, I write smart code which is something else entirely than being "clever". With a certain amount of hubris I'll say that I don't think I've ever written really bad code at the micro-level. However, I used to write a lot more code which disregarded encapsulation, separation of concerns, side effects, poor function and variable naming, anti-patterns and so on. And if I wrote enough of it then it resembled spaghetti code, it lacked the structure, abstractions and layers to make it clean and easy to maintain. I still suck at writing high level documentation but at least when people jump into my code they usually praise it for being easy to follow. That's much harder than it looks.

Comment Re:That's it? (Score 1) 611

Let's for the sake of argument assume that every site has subscription/micro-payment options and that they don't care where the money comes from so the ad free cost equals their ad revenue. And that it's so convenient and secure it's basically transparent, you pay $230/year and all your ads go away. And let's forget that we'd essentially be competing with the ad industry, probably causing a price spike. The underlying issue at least according to this survey is that no matter what, people don't want to pay that much.

I'm not surprised, a lot of people become extremely stingy online. I remember all the bitching that iTunes charged you 99c for a hit track, when the other legal alternatives were much, much worse. A lot of people swore to downloading MP3s to save money. I think a lot of it is that on the Internet, nobody can see that you're poor or a cheapskate. Nobody knows that your water cooler talk came from something you downloaded from TPB rather than premium cable. I just checked /. subscription options and I could pay $5 for 1000 ad free pages, do I? Nope. If I extrapolate then $230 should be 46000 web pages, no doubt I could pay my way to an ad free web.

Comment Re:Why focus on the desktop? (Score 3, Insightful) 727

Well first of all Linus has never been overly concerned with market share, just building a technically damn good kernel so I doubt this will have much practical influence on his work. It's got to be frustrating though, Linux works on massively huge and complex servers. It works on the smallest mobile and embedded devices. But a regular desktop that from the kernel's side is rather simple, one CPU and usually one GPU and pretty much no exotic devices (from the kernel side all USB devices look the same, for example) and no absurd limits being pushed in any direction.

I think the last real significant desktop feature was when they increased interactivity by changing the default time slice from 100 Hz to 1000 Hz and that was in 2004 or so. Heck, I would say it was at least as ready as the BSD kernel was when Apple created OS X in 2001. It's quite telling that the one thing Google did not want to rewrite when they made Android was the kernel. All else they ripped out and replaced with Apache licensed code, but not that. Well that and a bunch of Google proprietary APIs, but that's another flame war. I think I'd feel just the same in his shoes.

Comment Re:or they could just NOT do it (Score 1) 155

Sure, but they're not hosting anything. Links to infringing content are pretty solidly in the realm of the legal. It's actually kind of weird that they rolled over on that one.

They're solidly in the realm of the legal in the US because of USC 17 512(d):

(d) Information Location Tools.- A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider referring or linking users to an online location containing infringing material or infringing activity, by using information location tools, including a directory, index, reference, pointer, or hypertext link, if the service provider:
(...)
(C) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;

If they don't respond to DMCA notices they fail condition (C) and become liable. This has been established legal history since way back when web pages used to link to illegal MP3 files, perhaps longer. It's not true in the general case, just because you point them to other website that might contain something illegal won't get you into trouble. But pointing directly to infringing content and claiming you aren't liable because you're not the one hosting it doesn't fly.

Comment Re:What about OSS license that respects other righ (Score 1) 117

If that is so, then I find it abhorrent that the OSS movement prioritizes the freedoms of killing, censorship and persecution above the right to life and live.

What drugs are you on really? You make as much sense as saying that because this knife didn't come with an EULA not to behead unbelievers the manufacturer supports what the Islamic State is doing in Iraq/Syria. I've never to my knowledge bought or owned anything that has a political agenda as condition for use and newer will. I do care how they were produced (no child labor, animal testing, destroying the rain forest, social dumping or so on) but I'd never buy a car that had the gall to tell me where I could and couldn't drive in the EULA. So are you nuts, a troll or just trying to kill OSS? Because you make RMS look pragmatic.

Comment Re:Play hardball (Score 1) 181

Overage fees are nothing but pure evil. They did use to offer capped DSL and my cell phone data usage is still capped, I ran into it this summer as I was watching videos at the cabin but it doesn't have overage. What happens is at 80% I got a text that I'm getting close on my cap. At 100% I got a new text saying my quota is now up, I'll now either get very, very slow internet connection the rest of the month like enough to check email and barely browse the web, or I can pay up for additional quotas. Back when they offered capped DSL it was the same there.

The biggest benefit to a flat rate connection is that it's flat rate. And particularly today when you got phones and tablets and laptops and consoles and smart TVs and whatnot that all like to go online keeping track of your aggregate data usage is not easy. Overage fees are like the credit card model offering you 30 days free credit. How to do they make money off giving people free money? Because people slip up, get unplanned or unwanted expenses and then they nail the suckers. It's just begging to exploit the people who think they can save a few bucks a month.

Comment Re:Left or Right? (Score 1) 475

Why not just bump the signage by that much, and make the signs themselves the hard limit?

To avoid arguments. If the cops say 11 km/h over an artificially 10 km/h low limit then you weren't speeding just a little, if they said 1 km/h over the limit people go all "waaaaaaa it was only 1 km/h" and "waaaaaaaa your equipment must be off I went 1km/h under". "I wasn't speeding that much" holds a lot less sway than "I wasn't speeding".

Comment Re:Marginally better (Score 1) 64

Like OCZ which bumped theirs up to 5 years before they imploded? Here's the thing, 2014 was a big year for consoles, both the PS4 and XBone sold many millions of consoles all with AMD semi-custom chips. Yet despite this AMD is barely floating with a small operating income and a tiny loss overall. In 2018, what consoles will be selling? Still the PS4 and XBone but a whole lot less of them.

Two vital quotes from their last earnings call "In the desktop space, demand for our desktop APUs was strong from our OEMs. However, the desktop component channel was softer than we expected." "Inventory was $960 million, up $91 million, primarily driven by increased level of our latest 28-nanometer microprocessor products and lower shipments to channel distributors." Read: APUs go unsold. Either they need to lower production or prices or both.

To be fair, they're hanging on better than I expected but their traditional business still points downwards and breaking new ground is hard. And unless they can turn the trend, it needs to grow a lot and fast to make up for the business that we can see slipping. I wouldn't exactly be sure that AMD will be around to honor that warranty in four years.

Comment Re:Surprise? (Score 1) 579

At my company (125 users) a while ago we moved to OpenOffice to save money. Users were not happy and started to call it "BrokenOffice".

Which is the real issue in doing an office migration. That and replicating Outlook, I don't know about the whole kitchen sink but at least the whole mail/calendar/meeting bit. Somehow I'm amazed that in the last decade open source hasn't managed to pull it off, what the average office worker does is not rocket science. I guess it's just nobody's itch.

Comment Re:Misleading title & summary (Score 4, Informative) 579

Well when the First Mayor is making statements like "Linux is limping after Microsoft" and the Second Mayor says the "employees are suffering [under Linux]" then I have a fairly good bet on how the "independent" committee to review their OS policy is going to turn out. And maybe finally we can stop flogging this dead horse, because I'm tired of hearing about Munich as the beacon of light that will usher in a new era of Linux on the desktop. It's been rather obvious to all but zealots that they weren't convincing anyone else to make the switch.

Comment Re:The Average Cat (Score 1) 66

Somehow, I still fail to see the point... I can search for "cat" in Google Images, then if I'm not happy then "siamese cat" and finally "siamese cat jumping" because I'm probably looking for one useful picture, not a blurred mess as I'd expect trying to average what a "jump" looks like. And if you ask what an average face looks like, they mean the average feature size and location not a mathematical average. I'm trying to think of one single purpose where the results of this "average browser" is what I'm looking for and I'm coming up blank.

Comment Re:Mental Masturbation (Score 1) 239

Mental Masturbation

Someone is, yes. Building overpasses or tunnels for pedestrians on every street is not nearly realistic. If you sprint out a doorway you'll cross the sidewalk and hit traffic in less than 0.5 seconds, even with zero reaction time physics won't let a car stop that fast or they'd have to drive a lot slower than cars today. And while their might be auto-only cars, for most the autopilot will be the new cruise control. It will have an off switch. So yes, somebody here is detached from reality.

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