static_noise

I, for one, cannot keep track of which version we're currently at. It used to be that a major version was introduced with fanfare and broke things. The holy 1.0 or versions such as Python 3 and or Gnome 3. I will always remember if I'm running 2.x or 3.x.

Some time after the major version hits 3, the madness seems to begin. Am I running Firefox 73 or 85 or was that last years version? I honestly don't know anymore. Are the stable versions even, odd, Fibonacci or prime?

Why not be brave about it and use date-based numberings such as 16.12!

My understanding is that a company which fails to pay the wages is automatically liqudated (after someone triggers the official process and they still fail to pay). For employees it is actually problematic to continue working if they don't get paid in full.

Is the situation with x86 bad to begin with?

Granted, I didn't read the full documentation provided online for my hardware before I powered it on. Honestly, I didn't read any documentation and it just works, kind of.

They continue to add transistors to newer processors. It is a good sign that someone keeps track of them and writes documentation on how to use all these new transistors.

In my experience no plotting software we have today is finished. The sheer infinite range of possiblities of putting data on paper makes it unlikely that this will be the case soon.

I was trying to find out where this suddenly came from and how this related to gnuplot.

A few sentences from the submitter on why this is news and why we should care would be in order.

> This is based on clang --- it's not a new compiler.

This is good. Apparently it improves compile speed by a factor of 2..10 for a wide use range without compromising on the output quality. For many C++ developers it will be like a nitro injection.

The GPU integration as such isn't a problem but they threw together two teams who had a vastly different approach. That is an organizational problem. With AMD I think that the influence of the GPU team grew too big.

Now AMD has better GPUs while intel struggles in that area.

Yes, I almost forgot the resulting Bulldozer fiasco. I believe that was a result of applying GPU thinking to CPUs.

AMD seems to have lost their way back when they merged with ATI and integrated their GPUs into the processors. I remember that in a restructuring they switched from hand-optimizing hotspots in the CPUs to a more abstract approach using design software that worked well in GPUs.

After that decision they fell behind in performance and efficiency. I don't know if that was the root cause but it stayed in my memory as one pivotal point.

It would be interesting to read an insider story on how that decision played out in the meantime.

It will probably beat intel in the performance/price ratio when not considering the cost of electrical power.

That low difference (<10%) between turbo and sustained clock speed is a bit troubling, though. It indicates that these processors are not limited by the TDP but by the transistor speed. Combined with the high TDP, this means that AMD is still much behind intel in their manufacturing process.

My Phenom II X4 940 on the desktop machine is still going strong. I couldn't yet justify replacing it because it just isn't that bad yet. I think I'll put off replacing that rig for another year.

Some desktop AMD processors support ECC memory which would need a Xeon and more expensive mainboards from intel for replacement. This tunes up the price quite a bit when switching. That ECC support was the deciding factor back then.

Supporting multiple platforms also has the benefit that broken code more often results in observable bugs.

Are you now secure?

If you don't like it, don't buy it.

>90% of Apple customers wouldn't replace their SSD anyways and why should they? In a cloud connected world local storage doesn't matter like it used to.

If you don't like it, don't buy it.

Now we need a someone to drop it in an aquarium and collect the bubbles to show just how much air is in that device.

The defendants demand trial before the royal court.

Does this mean, that a single machine potentially amassed 2000 installs per year (1 per hour)?

Still, 558k installs/2k installs p.a./38 licenses are still over 7 years. Something doesn't quit add up here.

Sorry, I can't provide you with any good hypothesis. I'm just looking at what is known assuming that if something is of statistical significance without an obvious cause, that there is probably something going on that we don't see. Yet, correlation is no proof auf causation.

The "best" depends on the context. I don't want to argue what's best for you.

In the university context I've found that there is a lot of free software that works good enough or sometimes even better than commercial products. If you factor in that you still can use that particular program after you leave, it becomes a big plus.

The big market and financial strength is one important factor but I believe that there are quite a few other forces at work which are not so obvious.

This is why I have a strong preference for free software that is available for the dominant three operating systems. Only if free software doesn't satisfy my needs I look for nonfree software and then I first look for commercial software which supports free operating systems. If all that fails, it's time for a Windows 7-VM to run that program.

I'm only one customer but I'm letting Microsoft know that I'm not happy with the way they go with Windows by not using Windows 10.

People want to have their cake and eat it, too. The windows ecosystem is all they know and they are not ready to step outside their comfort zone to use open source alternatives. They rather pirate whatever comes along and try to patch things up as good as possible using antivirus, firewall, VPN and a whole lot of snakeoil software. I don't think we can change a lot on that front in the coming years. I don't know if we should even try.

Somehow the USA manages that almost every key IT corporation has their headquarters in the states sooner or later.

> 3. Is having an upper bound on Bitcoin, to be reached sometime in the next 25 years, a "good idea"? Will this be 2040's equivalent of "640KB should be enough for anyone"?

In my understanding this is a major design flaw which might break the currency in the future. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Having a limited amount of currency improved early adoption akin to a gold rush because you could obtain a large amount of currency (relatively speaking) for a comparatively low amount of work. This worked very well in my opinion.

To my understanding you need active miners to keep the currency alive. (Is this really true?) But the returns for those miners vanish with time. This makes the monetary investment in the miners go down and a single group could take over and manipulate the whole system by majority vote. (Is this also true?)

In my opinion a currencies value should vanish with time because currency is not something that really holds value as physical investments do. Fiat currency as we now have in the "real world" now reflects the monetized value of contracts expressed in that currency. A currency like bitcoin should be used mostly to settle transactions and not to store vast amounts of wealth. Therefore a steady inflation with a rate like e.g. 10% p.a. would be good to thwart money hoarding and ensure a steady supply of new currency.

With an inflation of 10%, each year 10% of the stored value gets taken away and redistributed to the miners. This means that it's wise to not store too much value in that currency but to quickly and efficiently use it for transactions such that the total sum of transactions us much much higher than the stored value.

The current implementation of bitcoin does not reflect this idea at all and I'm very convinced that it cannot play a huge economical role due to its design. In its niche, however, it currently works very well. I see it as a good design study for future cryptocurrencies which can be adopted at a larger scale.

The page should at least display a message like

    "This page requires JavaScript."

and contact details when JavaScript is disabled.

I, too, miss the good old days of splitting bytes into nibbles. Sometimes I program a microcontroller just to feel the walls moving in.

Software today is designed the way it is because developer time matters more than hardware specs. Getting the software to run and onto market is much more important than memory footprint. Very few companies worry about hiring an assembly programmer to quench out 10% performance. They don't even use C/C++ because it's that irrelevant. Before those programmers even finish the market has moved on and the product is obsolete.

People want the RAM because it is cheap and they can put it to good use for their data mining, video editing, virtual machines or whatever.

> 99.9%+ of criticism of the new MBP has been of the form "Without ever interacting with one, I can tell it is unsuitable for me and therefore is unsuitable for anyone, anywhere, in any professional purpose, ever".

While this some truth in it, it is not what I took away from the discussion. Most people complain about the following:

* "I expected more."

* "I expected the price for the same specs to drop or at least stay constant but not to rise."

* "I cannot use this machine to do the work in the way I do it currently. This and that port is missing."

While there is a great deal of hate towards Apple, the comments I've read here are not driven by hate but by disappointment. The old MBP lineup was very good for these people. They like them very much. Some love Apple, some don't care but they all agree that the old hardware is very solid for a reasonable price.

I really do think that the new MBPs are good machines for >90% of the current MBP users. A bit more expensive but not too unreasonable given that most are locked into the Apple ecosystem. Some may need some adapters for things like digital cameras, projectors, monitors, USB sticks, keyboards etc. but that doesn't really matter to a true Apple customer. Most of the time the machine is used without those devices.

What Apple should worry a bit about, though, is, that the top 1-3% users are now looking for other hardware. But who am I to worry about Apples strategy. Probably they don't need those few powerusers anyways in their future business model. I don't even hold Apple stock currently. My old MBP runs fine still and I'm not locked into their ecosystem. I can move onto the greener lawn at any time.

If you still feel the bias, you're not _really_ an Apple customer.

That article is a typical example of "If it suits me, it must suit everybody." and your post is a good example for the no-true-Scotsman-fallacy of "Noone who _really_ used it dislikes it."

All I really know about this is how I feel about it and I must admit that I am going to go back to the PC world when the time comes to replace my current MBP. The offerings in the PC world are not perfect for me but they suit me better. I bought my MBP because at the time it was actually the cheapest machine offering all those features at a high build quality. I didn't get into a dependency on OSX and am pretty confident that I can just migrate fully to Linux. So I guess I'm not _really_ a professional Mac user.