Google exists primarily as a playground for two (actually much, much more, now) geeks. They want to do things like build driverless cars and have robot cats and sharks with frickin' laser beams.

Unfortunately, Google accidentally became too successful, and would have needed to start filing SEC disclosures even if they hadn't gone public. So hey, free money.

Now, Google has a problem, not unlike that of John Rigas or Dennis Kozlowski (minus the criminal aspect of it, of course) - Brin and Page both see Google as their private playground, but have to pretend they give the least damn about their shareholders... Thus, the whole reason they brought on Eric Schmidt early on, to do all that boring BS business-stuff while they play with online weather balloons.

But make no mistake, evil or no, Google exists as a high-tech playground, not a serious business. The fact that they make oodles of money should serve as a role-model to other companies who haven't come to grips with the fact that "knowledge" workers do their best when not forced to sit in a 6x6 box for exactly eight hours a day using only "approved" apps and hardware.

How does the performance measure up to GPUs for TFLOPS/$$$?

If you need double precision FP, you don't have a lot of alternatives.

If you only need single or half precision, the Radeon 7990 rates at 7x the TFlops for about 15% of the price.

In addition, we'll see new Xeons based on this technology later this year, in the 22nm E5-2600 V2 family, with up to 12 cores.

...And yet, because of corporate policies on running the shittiest AV on the planet (Symantec) cranked to the max, my desktop PC will still have the responsiveness of a sloth on 'luudes.

Seriously, I already have 8 cores worth of Xeon (2x4) and the load meter never even twitches, enough RAM to load my entire system drive into, and an SSD system drive. More cores won't help at this point.

The 4th amendment doesn't apply (as the 5th in this case doesn't)... because said right was waved through the actions of the person involved

Inalienable (Adj): - Unable to be taken away from or given away by the possessor: "inalienable human rights".

If you convince someone to sell themselves into slavery to you, you can't enforce the contract because they can't "waive" their 13th amendment rights.

The topic of open source relates to the version control manager, not the software OP wants to create.

Aka, "I understand - and value! - the concept of FOSS. And only plan to exploit it in the as in beer sense".

That may still make the GP a moron, but it makes the FP a hypocrite.

If Snowden lied, then he didn't commit a crime by leaking classified information.

So, Mr. Rogers (hehehe), why do we currently have a worldwide manhunt - Including calling in favors from our 51st-state lapdogs - For someone who didn't commit a crime?

You'll forgive me, of course, for presuming you as completely full of shit and trying to salvage your precious unconstitutional spying campaign.

Except, of course, that the request wasn't pointless

Those do not describe "real" problems.

The first describes why "unofficial" repositories exist in the first place - So we can install non-stock versions of packages. That breaks dependencies? Hey, the user has to choose to add those to his apt sources, so keep your nose out of it, DPL.

And the second amounts to nothing more than weaselly lawyering up. Quick poll, everyone who loves FOSS at least in part to avoid that pro-corporate "protect our IP at all costs" bullshit, raise your hand? Yeah, thought so.

From Redhat to Ubuntu and now to games like this from Debian, has the entire Linux community sold out?

/ Glad I've always preferred Slackware. No games, no GNU/purism, no corporate BS. Just a rock-solid distro that stays true to its roots.

I'm pretty sure you couldn't, certainly not without about ten years of practice and $100K worth of equipment.

An actual clone of a Bushmaster .223, you have a fair point. Not going to just pop out a frame and barrel, file down a working action, and call it good.

A crude-but-functional high(er than .380)-caliber magazine fed semiautomatic pistol, though? Lookin' at machinery that costs less than current low-end 3d printers (an entry metal lathe will set you back around $600, and the rest you can rough out with a Dremel and finish by hand with a sub-$100 set of metal files).

That said, yes, you would still need to invest a good amount of time to learn how to do it right. A few months to a year, perhaps (talking about the basics to produce something functional, not designing your own new-and-improved custom actions)? Sure. Ten years, though? By then you've already mastered the art, gotten bored, and started looking into changing careers.


Also, FWIW, you can buy all the "hard" parts to make on a gun without it counting as a gun. Only the part stamped with the serial number (the frame or lower receiver in most cases) has any controls around the purchase, and that part amounts to nothing more than a passive hunk of metal with holes in the right places (YouTube has a video of a guy making a fully functional lower receiver for an AR-15 out of... A shovel. A few folds and a few holes, and bam, it goes "blam").

If I hadn't already posted here, you'd get my mod points. +5 "completely gets it".

Welcome to the 1980s. The world no longer needs people to stand in front of a group of 20 year olds and read a book to them.

That said, plenty of classes do benefit greatly from a live instructor. But virtually any "core curriculum" class really only requires a professor as the equivalent of a janitor - Count the filled chairs, sweep in the homework every week, polish the doorknobs and desktops, refill the quiz dispenser, and do a quarterly inspection of the knowledge sieves.

So the real question here needs rephrasing - Instead of figuring out how to pay professors for "producing" the same course material year after year when we have the ability to completely automate that, how about:
1) Find the "best" professor for each class in the world, buy the rights to his materials and make that "The" foo-101 course,
2) Refocus the in-person college experience around classes that actually involve thought rather than rote, and
3) Use the savings to cut tuitions back to a level that doesn't leave people in debt for the first 40 years of their professional careers.

I know, I know... Crazy talk.

/ Player Piano.

I think it's for the people of New York City to decide how New York City wastes its tax dollars.

In general, sure. When it comes to doing things explicitly banned by the US constitution, not so much, because it means you and I, in other states, will have to pay to process this BS through the federal court system.

I can legally manufacture my own firearms in the US. So can most of you. I can make them, own them, and use them.

The only thing I can't legally do? Sell them.

So I could legally manufacture a more-or-less perfect replica of the gun used in Newtown. But New York gets its knickers in a knot over someone printing out a single-shot low-pressure piece of crap?

Dear politicians - We all know you couldn't think your way out of a paper bag. But can you at least prioritize the crap on which you waste our tax dollars?

Thank you. This anti-XBox-One rant from just last week might have put the nail in that particular coffin, if most people had bothered to look. ;)

If your tax software won't run in Wine then it's probably time to get some better software.

My tax software company didn't target Wine, so although I might fault them for failing to have a Linux version, I sure as hell won't complain that it has bugs when run in an emulator they might never even have heard of.

Excel...the Windows killer-app. You Sir^H^H^H"Power-User", made my day.

Sorry that it hurts so much, but so, so true in the business world.

I love Linux. I use it for servers, I've rolled my own kernels, even my own embedded distros (and I mean back before Knoppix remastering made that trivially easy). But for day to day desktop use?

Quite simply, Linux sucks ass as a desktop OS. Some of that doesn't count as its own fault, but rather, that of a Windows-centric world. Others (like getting something as basic as sound to work reliably), I consider a major shortcoming. Either way, sorry, but I just can't call myself a desktop Linux user. And I say that as someone who would switch in a frickin' heartbeat if it really counted as a serious option.

For home use, I could probably get away with it. But at the office, no way in hell.