It's hard to say with this one. I agree that at least this appointment has some enthusiasm about the overall subject. I'm not sure of the "business" side of it though. Trump still has the mindset of running government like a private business, when it is far from it. Hopefully this appointment recognizes the difference. Heck, I think it will slam him right in the face day one when he realizes that they don't have a budgetary plan that can survive more than 1 year, which makes dealing with things that take multiple years pretty hard to do....

My parents needed me to explain what I was laughing my @$$ off.

Account for inflation and a $600 or $700 console today is not much different than earlier consoles. For instance, Nintendo, the 1985 NES was $150 (inflation adjusted to today it is $440), the SNES in 1990 was $200 (inflation adjusted to today of $480). The Nintendo Switch OLED today is $350.
Sony Playstation release in 1994 was $299, which is $633 in today's dollars...

I can go on and on, but consoles themselves have not really increased in price, the value of the currency has simply changed over time. And now that you see the difference in the consoles, just realize the difference in the game prices over that time. In 1985 it was $39 or $49 for the latest games, which equates to $114 or $143 in today's dollars, but our games are still in the $59 - $69 range for most latest titles, which is a huge savings (and partly due to the costs of physical cartridge with PCB's, EEPROMs, RAM, and other chips, vs DVD/Blu-ray/digital download of today).

To an extent, I agree with you. But lets not for the moment believe that a 3D printer might be a means to produce this item. 3D printers can easily be used to quickly make roughed out metal components by creating castings for use in "investment casting" or "lost-wax casting". This is very often used in jeweler and other small/intricate metal casting work, where a 3d printed polymer is created used in a sand mold, where the printed part holds the shape in the sand mold and is melted by the molten metal that is poured into the mold, leaving the molten metal to take the shape of the 3d printed part. This can very quickly create a complex metal part to a fairly high degree of completion, needing just a few minutes of work to polish up and remove any spurs/sprews from the part.

But, yes, I agree, the part was probably not actually 3d printed. That doesn't mean a 3d printer can not be used to create it.

Go look online for an old and/or refurbished Supermicro CS846 system/case. It can be typically found for anywhere from $200-2000 (or more). Try and find an old barebones system, something like a dual Intel E5-2620v2 with 128GB RAM can usually be found for like $500-550. It has storage for 24 hot swap SAS hard drives (you will need to check your version, but you should be able to get SAS 3 speeds, with at most swapping out the backplane, but the most common backplane will support SAS 3). Just need to go grab yourself some 14-24TB hard drives (I suggest starting with a set of 6), and install TrueNAS (or as most people suggest, put a hypervisor as the barebones OS such as Proxmox or XCP-NG and run TrueNAS as a VM with passthrough of the SAS controller(s) to the VM).

You can easily mod the chassis, and get replacement parts fairly easily as Supermicro is still making some variants of it and has made tens of thousands of them in the past with plenty of supply of replacement fans, controller boards, cable harnesses, power supplies, etc...

Two modifications I would highly suggest are ensuring you have power supplies that end in SQ (which meant quiet). And I suggest pulling the internal fans and fan wall from behind the disk drive backplane and instead zip tie 3x 120mm fans together like the Nocta NF-F12 iPPC-3000 and stuff a little closed cell foam on the bottom and top of them, three across, which will fill the space of the fan wall and let cables pass below (as the closed cell foam strip at the bottom will simply conform around the cables). You can then zip tie it in place to hold securely and will not only have fans that are capable of moving 2x the CFM, but will do it 12db quieter than the original fans.

With the 6 data disks, place them all in a single column in the front, and make a RAIDZ2 vdev/disk pool. You are now protected from a double disk failure, and can either expand the disk pool with three more sets of 6 disks, or create new disk pools with the new disks. If you still need more space after that, I recommend just getting an expansion chassis such as a 846JBOD (essentially a 846 chassis stripped of everything but the disk drives, power supplies for the drives and fans) or if you really need lots of disks a 946JBOD which will fit 60 disks loaded from the top. Hard to beat these from the consumer "NAS" space with some of the largest setups only getting you 6-9 disks and will cost as much or more than one of these.

Cloud pricing was based on the idea that things only ran during the 8 hour working day/40 hour work week. If you needed to run something longer than that, it was always cheaper to do it in house on purchased hardware.

The problem was that the marketing campaigns made it such that all the management and upper management bought hook-line-and-sinker that it would save them money. Anyone with a brain could run the math and show that it didn't in a 24hr production shop for anything other than a short term need. The few use cases where it makes sense also tended to be the last places cloud was implemented (i.e. new projects/programs that were in experimental stages, and services that were only needed temporarily). I really don't know why this was always the case, but I can guess, because new products don't yet have a revenue stream, and thus draining money by putting them on the cloud was something that a manager immediately notice, so they would put it on old or shared resources, often times to the detriment of the project as they would not see the performance/benefit of it due to the limited resources, and it might be shutdown.

Without a very strict usage policy and meticulous accounting and monitoring, cloud can and does very quickly go over budget to the point that purchasing the hardware would have been the better solution.

I think you are missing the point of the "RIght to Repair". In almost all the cases of some broken electronics (especially LCD/OLED screens for phones, and other devices), the parts are a LOT cheaper than you think. You are being quoted exorbitantly marked up prices from Samsung, to which you then in your mind simply say, "for that price I might as well buy a new one", and that is the entire point. Samsung and these other businesses want you to simply buy another one since it drives up sales, and sales are what drives up stock prices.

Go watch some of the youtube videos of various electronics repair techs, and some of the right to repair advocates. Louis Rossmann comes to mind as he even tells you what that new replacement apple iphone screen actually costs in a few of his videos and testimonials. He would order replacement screens from the OEM that Apple uses and would get them for like $40 or less in many cases, but it didn't matter because Apple started adding identity certificates embedded into the phones such that the phone would not recognize the replacement screen since it didn't match the identity cert for the screen originally installed on the phone....

I was just thinking the same exact thing. Heck it would be cheaper for someone to have a twitch channel or youtube stream that accepts "donations"....

ADA probably the programming language named after Ada Lovelace or more officially, Augusta Ada King nee Byron, Countess of Lovelace (yes, that Byron as in Lord Byron the famous poet was her father). Her mother hated her father because he left them just a few months after Ada was born and channeled Ada into learning mathematics so that she didn't follow in her father's footsteps in the humanities...

The difference for the copyrightable photo is that a human took the photo after determining the subject matter, lighting, time, temperature, conditions and composition created a work of art.

Also, ask the Dave Slater, a wildlife photographer who's camera was briefly taken by a bonobo which then snapped a selfie of itself grinning into the camera and was denied copyright protection of the work. Or ask the elephant owners who tried to copyright the artwork that the elephants painted.... The copyright bills are all clearly worded, that it needs to be created by a human. You can contend that especially in the case of the elephant where it paints a picture at the request of the human handlers is no different than an AI algorithm doing the same thing at the request of the human. If the human made it him/herself, it would be copyrightable, but if they didn't, it isn't.

Sure you can go on and on about using tools and technology to help develop new art or generate a better result (such as the differences that something like an airbrush allowed vs traditional paint or using photo editors to remove red eye, or make people look "more fit", etc...). The blurry line seems to be crossed when the human isn't the one directly creating the work but instead letting an algorithm do it for them. This is the same issue as has been discussed in book authorship and what is and isn't copyrightable (i.e. fact data is not copyrightable, numbers are not copyrightable, math is not copyrightable). As a result a mathematical algorithm creating an output, that output is not copyrightable.

Or probably more likely it still was a management screwup because they didn't approve the purchase of a fully redundant storage platform with proper excess capacity. Very likely had a conversation similar to the following:

IT employee: "We need to expand our storage system."
Manager: "We just did that last year."
IT employee: "Yes, I know, but we have been using it at a rate faster than originally projected."
Manager: "We don't have the budget, make due with what you have, we bought twice as much as originally planned because you wanted redundancy, use that redundancy and spare capacity to make due."

No actually, derivative works do not fall under fair use. You need the right from the original copyright owner to make a derivative work (this is why you don't see people other than Disney making a Star Wars movie).

Also, let me make this with a very easy example. Movies from books and comics. We see movies made all the time that used original source material that was from a book or comic (in fact over the last few decades, the vast majority of money earned by movies across the industry were by movies that came from a book or comic, with 6 of the 10 highest grossing movies of all time being a movie either from a book or comic book). All those movies required to obtain the copyright permissions from the original authors of the books and/or comics before they could make a movie about them (with Disney having acquired the movie rights to most of the Marvel Comics, and Warner Bro's having acquired the movie rights to most of D.C. Comics, and the Harry Potter series).

Tell that to the courts that have ruled otherwise. Someone painting a copy of a painting or photograph is creating a derivative work, which is covered by copyright law and is considered infringement.

I'm not so certain of that. As we are quickly moving down the rabbit hole of human-computer interactions, asking a computer algorithm to "create a photorealistic copy of which afterwards it produces a copy of artwork, would not that copy violate copyright of the original (under the hypothetical that the original is still copyrighted)? Even though an algorithm then generated that "new copy", it only exists because the original did in the first place, and thus it is in violation of that original work.

In this particular case above, I would stress that the AI algorithm isn't necessary at fault, but the person who commanded it to violate the copyright (in the same way that a tool is not at fault if it was used to break a crime, but the person using the tool).


The real questions become, if the works generated by AI can not be copyrighted, then a vast use of AI can not be monetized, and thus research and development for AI will then be stymied due to no foreseeable return on the investment, but really we should not be worried about that issue. The tools will still have a purpose in helping to speed up some tasks, just not be able to be used for others such as creative works (involving copyrights, patents, etc).