This will all go to the suits. Fuck them. Fuck microsoft. Everyone else will still work overtime without pay, hard crunch deadlines, low pay, and no health care on a project basis.

The only one feeling the change will be the gamer buying games and the suits pocketing all the profit of those artists.

$ ping facebook.com
PING facebook.com (173.252.110.27): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 173.252.110.27: icmp_seq=0 ttl=87 time=59.217 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.110.27: icmp_seq=1 ttl=87 time=58.550 ms
64 bytes from 173.252.110.27: icmp_seq=2 ttl=87 time=58.887 ms
--- facebook.com ping statistics ---

Try harder.

He's the real deal, I've seen him post before.

Honestly, it depends what he's trying to do. If he's moving files around, or doing word processing, sure, maintain a history and allow reversibility, wiki-style. If he's running a nuclear power plant, it might be a tad more difficult to recover from a bad operation. The question isn't detailed enough to allow for a decent answer.

[ off_topic ] Welcome back to Slashdot! Good to see you here again, and a little surprising. Have you ever considered running a simulated US Federal Government? I have been toying with the idea for a few years, and it seems there would be quite a few overlaps with wiki technology and processes (document version management, online elections, that sort of thing). I'd be curious to see what the internet would do with the federal government if given the ability to write and vote on (theoretical) bills, in addition perhaps to real bills in process through Congress. Allow users to offer themselves up for election, and vote on users to form an "Internet US Government", as an experiment. I think at least in this country, the Federal Government is the most broken part... and I think crowdsourcing part of it, at least as an experiment, would be a good way to start fixing it (it seems the real thing is too entrenched to get any real change done). If nothing else, it would be an interesting educational piece. Let me know what you think if you get time. Thanks! [ /off_topic ]

I'm not sure I would consider forcing the used game buyers to buy new instead a "failure" from Microsoft's perspective.

I think you can find instances of every carrier sneaking rate hikes onto customers with contracts. The contract only helps the carrier, never ever the consumer.

Thankfully, my contract is up next month. I'll be off to T-mobile no-contract plan.

Github did this recently too which was annoying, because it was useful. They're not entirely clear why ... "confusing" doesn't seem nearly as likely as "abuse", though I am not aware of any abuse in particular. Since Google is providing Drive as an alternative, and not even immediately removing the service for those using it, it's not even as bad as Github's move, which removed it for everyone. I suppose it's an opportunity to cut another Google dependency though if you really want.

How will we be able in the future to distinguish between "fake" media and "real" media. As media is being used in legal battles, eventually there will have to be a requirement to determine an 'authentic' footage, which means we will need some form of protocol, file format and/or tools which can create media which can be proven as 100% original and unaltered in any way.

Signed image/video .. private key stored on a chip in a camera, frames and video gets signed before writing. Produce an unaltered/unhacked device and the signed video. Anything else should be considered altered.

While you could arguably hack apart a device and get at its key, doing so while leaving no trace brings us back into physical forensics, and almost certainly significantly harder to do. Add a few different measures like light-sensitive markers, exposed EPROM, etc. It's not about preventing hacking (or even difficult), it's about simply making alteration evident.

Anecdotally, we switched to Maria from MySQL during a move to a cloud architecture, and haven't had any major problems with it.

It's pretty obvious who is and who is not reading the article here:

In short, there seems to be no evidence, at present, that the D-Wave machine is going to overtake simulated annealing for any instance size.

The author concedes that it is possible that this may happen, but:

Well, I concede that almost anything is possible in the future—but “these experiments, while not supporting D-Wave’s claims about the usefulness of its devices, also don’t conclusively disprove those claims” is a very different message than what’s currently making it into the press.

Additionally the author wants this to succeed because of possible results of its failure:

Academic QC programs will be decimated, despite the slow but genuine progress that they’d been making the entire time in a “parallel universe” from D-Wave. People’s contempt for academia is such that, while a D-Wave success would be trumpeted as its alone, a D-Wave failure would be blamed on the entire QC community.

Seriously, read the whole damn article.

The problem is that it's not faster, and while there's a study that concludes it is, the blog post specifically invalidates this:

Namely, the same USC paper that reported the quantum annealing behavior of the D-Wave One, also showed no speed advantage whatsoever for quantum annealing over classical simulated annealing. In more detail, Matthias Troyer’s group spent a few months carefully studying the D-Wave problem—after which, they were able to write optimized simulated annealing code that solves the D-Wave problem on a normal, off-the-shelf classical computer, about 15 times faster than the D-Wave machine itself solves the D-Wave problem! Of course, if you wanted even more classical speedup than that, then you could simply add more processors to your classical computer, for only a tiny fraction of the ~$10 million that a D-Wave One would set you back.

About the paper claiming it's faster:

As I said above, at the time McGeoch and Wang’s paper was released to the media (though maybe not at the time it was written?), the “highly tuned implementation” of simulated annealing that they ask for had already been written and tested, and the result was that it outperformed the D-Wave machine on all instance sizes tested. In other words, their comparison to CPLEX had already been superseded by a much more informative comparison—one that gave the “opposite” result—before it ever became public. For obvious reasons, most press reports have simply ignored this fact.

Sounds like you're screwed.

Look, if you're not willing to pay for talent, and consider that a cost of doing good business, then you have no right doing what you're doing. Speed, cost, quality: pick two.

Same thing that happened with hotmail. They switch to Windows servers, it crashes and burns horribly, so they switch back. There's no quality control, no development, it goes to hell, and everyone switches to the far superior service Google offers (since they decided to grow their own and not acquire youtube).

Then they switch everyone over to zune.com or something to try capitalizing on their name .. or perhaps trying to gain a name, it's hard to tell really .. complete with commercials about people deleting hundreds of hours of video in a single click in the middle of other unrelated activities, because you know that's the feature we've all really been missing.