With all the extra mass of the ship, is this really more efficient than just strapping on some flippers?

At this stage it just looks like a special-interest art project, or a sculpture you can sit in. Video of it being used in more than 1 metre of water would make this more interesting.

Wet subs aren't new, and they can be far more efficient because the shape can be much more hydrodynamic than the human body, thus eliminating excess energy expenditure. They can also be used to haul more tanks around, or rearrange your tank to be more streamlined.

Wet subs ain't new, even human powered ones. They've come in all configurations as well - from ones where the diver is just sitting out to ones with canopies. Usually they're for really small torpedo subs, but there are wet subs used by the military that are meant to carry 3-4 SEALs.

I'd rather go with stable than EXTREME, so I go with Intel. It might not be the fastest around, but we rarely hear about Intel SSD problems.

For SATA SSDs, there's no more extreme. All modern SSDs saturate a SATA-3 bus. If you wonder why they all benchmark at 540MB/sec reads and writes, that's why - SATA is the bottleneck, not the SSD.

PCIe SSDs are where the "extreme" ones go, and even the most conservative ones are pretty damn fast - the old MacBook Air's SSD clocks in at 750MB/sec read and write. I think the newer ones can hit 1GB/'sec now easy.

As for what to buy, well, Samsung, Intel and Toshiba are the general safe bets. Even with this bug, Samsung is still stable, just slow.

Intel's got a history of failure as well, but they seem to have gotten beyond it, and while they're not stunners, they generally are solid.

Toshiba's on the slower end of the scale, but Apple uses them, so they can't be TOO bad.

And yes, I say Apple, but you can see what Dell uses as well. The big OEMs that ship lots of units will generally pick ones that give the least warranty and support issues and thus are more conservative. Plus, recalls are expensive.

If you want to follow someone - pick Apple. Given the way news coverage is, if there's a problem with someone somewhere and their SSD in their Apple product, the whole world would know in a nanosecond. Someone as heavily scrutitinized as Apple (where even one failure in millions of computers sold would probably bring about SSD-gate) means if there is a real problem, you'd already know.

Instead, I spend plenty of time in meetings, coordinating with fellow programmers, working through issues like their code sucks (and for some reason I can't figure out, they think my code sucks), strange emotional attachments they feel towards Visual Studio (even though it costs over $10000 for the full version). And that's only fellow programmers......figuring out what customers, management, vendors all want is another issue (and it's important).

You obviously are in a "software engineering" position, when you really want a "code monkey" position where you're just handed the task, you code it up and submit it.

Just get yourself demoted, you'll have to take a pay cut, but them's the breaks - once you start rising in rank, your need to interact with others increases. Why? So those below you don't!

And if you're in such a fortunate position, you have to realize that coding is one seriously annoying part of the job. Yes, I do all the meetings and all that, and I give most of the coding jobs to others underneath me. It's called delegating.

Hell, try it sometime - once you learn to delegate and trust people, you can do what I like - assign the crummy tasks you don't want to do to someone else :).

And yes, it's also meant I've had to give up many interesting tasks as well - all in the name of efficiency. I don't want to be the bottleneck, so I have to know to give up those tasks too.

Yes, I said coding was getting annoying - because the more fun part of the job ends up being the problem solving part. Seeing the problem, devising a solution that's not only implementable, but also minimizing risk, and then decomposing the solution into tasks that can be mapped to the appropriate programmer with the appropriate skill.

Heck, I even try to minimize the amount of code I have to write.

I don't mind analytics in general, but don't assume that they will help rescue your favorite show by proving that there is a big following. Managers will just slice and dice the analytics until it "proves" that the show doesn't have a big enough viewership to continue.

Even worse, it doesn't matter if 10,000,000 watch a show.

The Neilson numbers come in several forms. The ones you see daily are called "Live and Same Day" (L+SD), which counts views that watched the show live and within 24 hours of airing. Other numbers you can easily find are Live+3 days (L+3) and Live+7 (L+7).

But none of those numbers are actually used by anyone. That's why Neilson gives them out for free. No one's paying for that information, nor will they ever. And that's not where they make their money.

The real money is in the C3 number, or if you're CBS, you convinced advertisers to take C7 numbers. What are these? They're commercial ratings (for programming watched live to 3 days later). Basically you take the L3/L7 numbers, strip out the numbers while the program is showing, and you're left with just the numbers related to the advertising. And that's the number that makes Neilson money and the number stations pay money for. And yes, you skip ads on your DVR, which pull down those C3 numbers because it lowers the viewers for the advertising.

And that's because the largest source of income is advertising. Sure they get some through cable fees and Hulu and iTunes/Amazon/DVD etc. sales, but that's a tiny fraction of advertising.

CBS managed this season to convince advertisers to pay the C7 rate rather than C3, because well, it more accurately reflects today's lifestyle of people who record a show and watch it later in the week.

And that's all that matters. It doesn't matter if you can find 100,000,000 people to watch a show - if it's not reflected in those 100,000,000 people watching the ads.

It also brings up cord cutters who prefer to download their TV programming from torrents and such - as far as the industry is concerned, they don't care because those people don't add to advertising ratings.

Even under the new system - the new system just means that Neilson can more accurately measure their ratings, but if you're not watching the ads, it means jack squat to the producers.

So that super popular show people pirate? Guess what, the TV industry really doesn't care - you never were a "customer" and it doesn't matter if only 1M people watched it on TV while 100M people watched it off torrents - if those 1M people can't justify the ad rates and production costs, it's getting canned. The 100M other people? Too f'in bad - if it was that good, they should've watched it with ads.

If you ever wondered why worrying over TV piracy has subsided, that's one reason (who cares about pirates - they obviously don't care about their TV show), the other is they've found legal streaming to be even better. Because if they put a stream online to watch programming, they can make it such that you can't skip ads, and that's actually worth something - enough to pay for the effort of putting an online stream up. So you beat both DVR owners and appear as a hero for making a legal source available.

Bonus material - 2014-2015 TV season ad rates (30 second spot). This is what brings in the money.
http://variety.com/2014/tv/new...

How about building your tech stack so that it can be scaled up/down on-demand? I'm using Rackspace and we have dedicated servers along with cloud servers. I can add or remove cloud servers as needed and also have the load balancers updated.

If you're just doing reads against a database, it's straightforward to add additional replicas (we use MongoDB with replica sets, don't have enough data for sharding yet). If you need to do any processing, then you should build a grid compute system where you can just add additional compute nodes. We're using RabbitMQ along with Celery. Granted, this strategy ignores issues like a saturated network, but our provider is responsible for dealing with that.

So they need to spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a situation that crops up ... virtually never? And you want to talk about "government waste"?

I mean, vehicle recalls are rare. Other than GM recalling a new line of cars every day this year it seems,

I mean yeah, they COULD spend their time and effort making a system that scales from a majority of 0 people looking for their car recall information to 5M people looking in a single day, wasting millions of dollars in service fees and development costs for something that "might happen".

Perhaps the government isn't wasting as much money as we thought if we use it so its infrastructure can scale up in the rare-to-never case that it needs to, right?

(Yes, the government wastes a bunch of money. But to then suggest it waste more?)

Google (like Apple), wants your credit card info for the play store

You can have an account without a credit card on both.

It's just a bit tricky, and it relies on the fact that if you try to make an account through "the front door" then yes, you need a credit card or other payment option.

But if you go through the "back door" it works just fine.

For iOS, what you do is you try to buy a FREE app. This will ask you to create an account, and will not ask for payment details (because the app is free). And now you have an account without an attached credit card.

Android is the same - just buy a free app.

Not really. You cannot launch an app that's not signed in iOS to run on that specifically device, thereby all this process just wouldn't work in iOS for instance.

It also wouldn't work in OSX unless you deactivated the permissions to run only Mac Store apps (which many of the people do though).

OS X's default permission for GateKeeper is Mac App Store and Developer Signed Apps. It has never been Mac App Store only. The other option is well, "off" (any source).

And it'll always remain that way because people do buy apps elsewhere (there are categories of apps the MAS will not have, such as demos, drivers, utilities (that cannot be sandboxed), etc.)

So if your payload was signed, then yes, it'll run on OS X just fine. Though if it's particularly virulent, Apple will probably revoke the signing certificate, thus making the payload non-executable by default.

Though there is also another nuance to it - GateKeeper only works from untrusted sources - if you compile an application from source code, even though it's unsigned, it actually will NOT pop up a warning because it came from a trusted source (the compiler). Ditto apps installed from optical media. The untrusted source here would be the Internet.

So yeah, the trick will work on OS X. Though to be honest, it seems like a rather roundabout way to do things when the user will just double-click the file anyways.

The trick appears more like those videos and crap that try to get you to install "codec packs" which don't do anything other than install malware on your machine.

For example, if a gaijin resident is caught with light marijuana -> Jail time or deportation.

That's relatively minor compared to other countries in Asia, where importation of drugs is smuggling, and smugglers get the death penalty. No if, ands or buts. They find drugs on you, you're dead within the week. If you're lucky, the newspaper articles will read "Drug smuggler arrested and sentenced to death".

Oh yeah, and some of those countries neighbour unofficial drug producing countries as well.

Others are well, if you use a gun in commission of a crime, even if it wasn't fired, increases the penalties to 5 years in jail, if someone was killed, death penalty.

Oh yeah, it wasn't some Podunk backwoods country either - it was a modern metropolis.

It took two decades for the personal computer to reach a point where the average rig performance was "good enough" for everyone but gamers, it took 7 years for the same thing to happen to smartphones. Which is good for the users, not so much for the big companies.

The big companies are probably going to jump to the next bandwagon soon, what remains to be seen is what that will be. VR headsets, AR headsets, smartwatches or something completely different.

You do realize the war on "retina" has gotten to the silly point of basically needing a powerful processor just to present a decent UI. Because pushing 500dpi's worth of pixels (that unless you're an eagle eye or hold the phone to your nose, you won't notice. And no, those people are the exception) consumes a whole lot of power for the display and processors behind it.

They've chased spec sheets the whole time. First with was CPU+RAM. Then it was screen size. Then it was DPI and screen resolution.

Hell, iOS's reachability is a hack (it works like one too, but it DOES work). Perhaps that's something Google should concentrate on - implementing something similar so single-handed use of a big screen is possible.

Heck, it's probably going to be peripherals and all sorts of other crap. I expect the RAM wars to re-start the moment 64-bit SoCs become propular. 4GB, 8GB, 16GB of RAM (the same as internal storage!).(The main reason to go AArch64? Speed. ARMv8 in AArch64 mode is MUCH faster than ARMv8 in AArch32 mode).

Because pressure can give information on what altitude you are at which enables GPS to find your position faster and more accurately.

Provided it's calibrated to the proper atmospheric pressure where you are. Simple weather changes can easily shift your altitude 100 feet either way making it no more reliable than a GPS fix. Granted, if you can obtain the local sea level pressure where you are, you can beat GPS quite handily. But if you can't, you're pretty much guessing your altitude.

This isn't a software division, it's not even like their server hardware division, it's chipmaking. It's kind of a go-big-or-go-home game where your competitors -- well-funded types like, say, Intel -- can easily pour many billions of dollars into next-generation fabrication processes and equipment which will readily put any half-assed investment to shame. I don't think IBM's chip business has the customer base to make "go big" profitable, or any reasonable plan to acquire new customers, so "go home" makes a lot of sense here.

No, the big reason why is that their big customers are leaving.

IBM supplied chips for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox360. With those consoles being last-gen nowadays, IBM's chipmaking fab is dead.

Apple dumped IBM when IBM couldn't produce enough chips that Apple wanted (it's why AMD will remain a non-starter - Apple's been screwed twice by chipmakers who just could not make what they said they could make - Motorola (twice - 68K and PowerPC) and IBM. Intel's pretty much the only one that has spare capacity. Even Samsung had to build a new fab just for Apple (for their SoCs - who knows about stuff like flash chips and such which Apple buys a ton of).

IBM would've had to spinoff the fabs then, but right around the transition, well, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all stormed in IBM's door. Both the PPUs and Xenon cores are stripped down G5s and initial availability was limited because IBM couldn't make the chips fast enough. It's why there are 3 cores on the Xenon.

But now that everyone's gone AMD, well...

Funny, Apple has this thing called iAd where you pay Apple to place targeted ads

And given the limited reach of iAds over say, Google's AdMob, there is no justifiable business case to use it. AdMob is cheaper, Google is far more accommodating, and you can reach Android, iOS and every other device with AdMob.

iAds is a serious joke - they had to reduce the minimum buy from $1M to $100K. It's probably only there to satisfy "competition" guidelines so Google can have AdMob. (As in, Google is probably by far the largest revenue source for iAds purely meant to keep up the appearance of competition).

No sane person uses iAds. Which explains why the ads are all either for apps (developers get a special deal), or about iAds itself.

Being a Commonwealth country, we still have lots and lots of WW1 issue rifles, making their use very cost effective. The only reason the Canadian Forces wants to replace it is because nobody has made parts for them in decades, so things like firing pins and trigger springs are becoming scarce.

Canada actually has a pile of them brand-new-in-box as new-old-stock. They bought a pile of them and every new ranger gets a brand new one even though they've not been made in years.

The real problem is well, that stock is diminishing and it's probably a good idea to have a replacement ready before the last one is issued.

I imagine Beats/Apple isn't too happy with Bose's shenanigans regarding telling NFL players they can't wear their Beats headphones until 90 minutes after the end of the game.

Of course the players do it anyway, and Beats apparently pays the fines for them... but still.

Incidentally, the NFL isn't doing very well with regards to their endorsement deals - first Microsoft, and now Bose.

The problem is you have a conflict of endorsements.

The NFL is being paid directly by Microsoft and Bose to promote their stuff - Microsoft and Bose can put "Official NFL Product" on those things.

The problem is, the teams and players don't really see much of that money because it goes straight into the league. Sure, they may get a few bucks in the way of stadium improvements and such, but you can bet most of that money isn't going into their paycheques.

So the players and teams often have their OWN endorsement deals. This money goes directly to the team and the players themselves. Sure some goes back to the NFL in terms of league fees and whatnot, but it's extra income for the team and player.

So what's a player to do? Be forced to wear Bose which nets them ZERO dollars in the end? Or wear their Beats which nets them millions in extra dollars in their pocket?

It's obvious why the players are defying the rule. And in fact, you have to admit, it's getting a LOT of marketing for Beats as well - I mean, they're being fined, in public, for wearing Beats. With photos. In the news. Now what is better marketing - the player wearing it on the field or a news conference, or having it plastered all over the news with closeups of the offense with news they're being fined for wearing Beats headphones (and barely a Bose mention!).

It's actually kind of brilliant marketing - Bose gets made out to be the bad guy, and Beats gets plastered all over the news section, so much so that the $10,000 fine is well worth it - marketing expense.

List of NFL Finable Offenses, with fines.

Heck, one wonders if they're going to get a bunch of stickers to stick over their Bose headphones with the iconic "b". I mean, it doesn't get more interesting than that - they wear Bose headphones, but they're sporting the "b" that clearly indicates Beats.

Do you hear nothing? No, you hear a background roar of muffly rumblings.

Actually, a small (but not insignificant" amount of sound comes from around the ear as well - bone conduction can transfer the lower bass notes to the ear directly (it's why you can't have perfect silence except by being in an anechoic chamber). Of course, your ears when wearing ear defenders does crank up its gain - people in anechoic chambers do report hearing blood rushing through their veins in the ears, their heartbeats, etc. All noise conducted through the body.

It can get pretty freaky.