JustSomeGuy1

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  • Tim Cook tells Tulane University grads that 'my generation has failed you'

    If Lefties like Tim really believed in climate change, they'd be shilling non-stop for nuclear energy in their daily affairs. This is proven technology we have today that can wipe out our carbon footprint within a generation. Without having to revamp our entire economy in the process.
    I used to support massive investment in fission plants. Then someone dropped a couple of airplanes on the WTC. And also, we learned that nuclear operators keep failing at safety 101, because money. I now support fission a whole lot less, though I still think we should be trying to build new-gen tech like molten salt reactors.
    Thats why climate change is a scam meant to take away your freedom and your money. Don't fall for it. I'm glad Tim thinks his generation has failed these students. Its good when doomsday prophets fail, because their predictions are always bunk anyway. Doesn't matter whether its a wild-eyed street preacher or the head priest of the technorati class.
    Like the other liars and fools, you fail at logic 101:
    - Imperfection in the messenger does not make the message less true
    - There are rational reasons to consider nuclear a bad solution (though it's a complex balance of evils)
    - "Freedom" and "money" are hot-button words typically used to obfuscate facts. If you live in any modern society, you are already making tradeoffs using both those commodities. You pay taxes, and you give up the ability to kill anyone or take anything you please. The important question is how much are you giving up, and what are you getting in return? The sky-is-falling wailing about how climate change legislation will take all this away is patently nonsense (for example, there are a lot more jobs in green energy than in coal; if you had to kill one of those industries, which one would it be? - not that that's really the choice we face).
    - Even if the costs are significant (unproven, and likely to be false for most people), they're not going to be as high as the cost of climate change ALREADY IS. Open your eyes! If you're not old enough to remember what the weather in this country was like 40-50 years ago, go read some statistics. Which you should anyway.
    - The predictions aren't failing. Except in that they haven't been dire enough.

    If you don't like "lefties", fine, fight with them all you like. But stop making this a political issue. It's not. It's a matter of survival. And while I'm not sure that suicidal ostriches deserve to survive, I'd really prefer that you not take my children with you.
    bilweelerMisterKit
  • Tim Cook tells Tulane University grads that 'my generation has failed you'

    seankill said:
    In my mind, this is exactly it, you are 100% correct. I hope we continue to invest heavily in fusion, who knows what we will find. 

    But the the sad truth is, until we can plateau and maybe even decline our world population, we are chasing a moving target we will never meet. Same is true for world hunger. Technology and advanced methods are the only reasons we’ve made it this far. 
    Unlike some of the willfully blind posters here, you seem reasonable. So... I suggest you look into the actual numbers for solar and wind. (I was a wind skeptic until I did so, myself.) In fact, we could easily support 100% of the world's energy demand with solar and wind, far into the future. The difficulties are primarily in distribution and energy storage density. Neither of those are easily solved problems, but we're making incremental gains all the time. If, as when I was a child, we were primarily concerned with running out of nonrenewables, we'd be in very good shape. The tech curve for renewables (and, yes, fusion) is good.

    The problem is that that's no longer our biggest concern, and we can't afford to take all that carbon out of the ground. The curves there don't look so good, which is why we need major investment in renewables and storage technology. Population decline could solve this problem, maybe, but if you think people don't like it when you take away their gas-guzzling cars, wait until you try to take away their right to have babies. So that's a non-starter.

    There are real solutions. And they're not business-killers or life-quality-destroyers, whatever nonsense some reactionaries may spread. They might kill *some* businesses, but that happens all the time anyways. New ones replace them. And really, I wouldn't shed a tear for Exxon, though realistically, it's not going to suffer in the long run. When they can no longer drag their heels, they'll invest in whatever is replacing carbon.
    jeffharrisbaconstangmac_dogmuthuk_vanalingamdysamoriabilweeler
  • Tim Cook tells Tulane University grads that 'my generation has failed you'

    JWSC said:
    Oh boy.

    Loons to the left. Loons to the right.  Moderator switching off comments in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ...
    You are worse than any of them.

    "A plague on both their houses, shrug". The lazy center is the doom of our world. You can't be bothered to spend the time to figure out that they are not equal, and the lack of your weight added to the debate is another big nail in our collective coffin.

    There are no "loons to the left" here. If you consider a recognition of anthropogenic climate change to be a left issue (why is it? It wasn't twenty years ago), then two posters here are "left". Neither was by any conceivable stretch of the imagination a loon. You don't have to have my point of view (that anyone on the other side of the issue is a loon, a liar, or willfully ignorant) to recognize that both StrangeDays and Normm posted fact-based statements. Even if you contest the validity of their facts, nothing was "loony".

    Come to think of it, I don't think the deniers are loons either- at least the ones who posted. They may just be liars or ignorant.

    The longer your expected lifespan, the more your willful blindness/laziness/whatever is going to cost *you* as well as the rest of us.

    baconstangmontrosemacsn2itivguymuthuk_vanalingamdysamoriabilweelercrowleylolliverfastasleepchemengin
  • The truth about what's actually good and bad about Apple News+

    The real problem is that the News app is beyond an embarrassment - it's a disgrace to Apple. It has high utility but utterly miserable usability. For example:

    - It can't get scrolling right. Seriously? 10+ years after the iphone came out, and it can't tell between horizontal and vertical scrolling? Unlike every other app that exists? (Specifically, it'll confuse my vertical swipe to scroll the article with a horizontal one to switch articles, often enough to be a constant irritation.)

    - It violates the principle of least surprise, multiple times over, by capriciously moving in the article list (back to the top, at random times, when it loads new articles), rearranging articles (so you can't even go back to where you were in the list), and not returning to an article you're reading when you return to the news app from somewhere else.

    - Finding your history and saved articles, once easy, has become a hidden feature most people will never discover.

    Beyond that, there are other issues. For example, the "smarts" are intensely stupid. No, I do NOT want to see astrology articles in the astronomy section. Yes, I know why that happened. But this is 2019, not 2009, and it should do better.

    In a competitive market, this app would sink like a stone. Instead it has survived because it's Apple's. And now, some geniues has decided to use it for their magazine subscriptions, and it's being overloaded with more features and more bugs.

    All this could be fixed. Most of it wouldn't even be that hard. But it's been years, and they haven't bothered, so I'm not hopeful.
    chemengin
  • Editorial: Intel CPU constraints are sign on the road to ARM chips in the Mac

    A few points people (and AI) have missed:

    1) Intel isn't the only foundry that's supply-constrained. TSMC has issues too, though not as bad as Intel's at the moment. Of course, 7mn uptake is growing, and possibly faster than TSMC can improve yield and otherwise add capacity, so thy may get more constrained as 2019 goes by. Long-term, Apple may have to pay for its own plant (even if it's owned/operated by TSMC). And TSMC will likely have the whip hand on any such negotiations. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

    2) Apple's ARM design is *already* able to compete with Intel's best consumer chip (the 8-core i9-9900k - I'm not talking about the ridiculous X-series Xeons-in-disguise). I wrote about this once before, but in short, the iPad Pro shows that Apple's uncore and interconnect capabilities are superior to Intel's, at least for up to 8 cores. So they could easily put eight of their high-performance cores into an "A12XX" and have something competitive with the i9. This wouldn't even be a major job. Now, there are still questions to be asked: How much headroom do they have for clocks at higher power? Pipeline length may be too short to enable 4GHz, or even 3.5, and there are other less obvious issues as well. Can the memory interface and caches grow organically without a major redesign? Could they scale to even more cores (probably not)? Etc. So, we don't know if Apple can beat the current i9 with their existing design, but we do know it's in the right ballpark.

    3) For the guy worried about driver support - a good emulator will make that irrelevant. There are virtually no devices out there for which emulation overhead is a problem. I can imagine a latency issue for sound devices but it's highly unlikely. Of course time will tell. Note that Apple did this successfully twice already.

    4) I used to think the notion of ARM replacing Intel in Macs was ridiculous. But Apple's execution over the last few years - and especially the ridiculous multicore performance and efficiency they pulled off in the A12X - has shown that that's inevitable. As long as their team keeps executing, that'll be a good thing.

    There's actually an interesting historical parallel here. In the old days, "server" CPUs (actually mini/mainframe, servers were just big PCs and not relevant) defined the state of the art and provided the most performance (all the once-great RISC families: Sparc, MIPS, Alpha, etc., and various mainframe/supercomputers). But as volume in the PC business grew, Intel kept pushing its CPUs forward, and then applying those lessons learned to its server chips. Even though server ship development lagged consumer processors by 1-2 years, those advances eventually pulled Intel Xeons ahead of all the other architectures (excepting POWER, because IBM is stubborn and has lots of talent).

    And now, we're seeing the same thing: Mobile chip development has the advantage in volume, and so the lessons being learned there will have repercussions on the desktop processor market. Only now the volume winner (at least in high-performance mobile) is Apple (and to some extent TSMC), and the loser is likely to be Intel.

    The big question is, will Apple's designs ever migrate up to the server level? I don't see a natural path for that right now, but they may be leaving a LOT of money on the table. Well, a lot for any company that's not Apple. For Apple, it may be more distraction than money. But it's at least plausible that at some point, if their big-core designs continue to dominate the field (and they *really* dominate right now), some server-play ARM vendor (like Cavium/Marvell, Ampere, etc.) might license the core design (if nothing else) to build 64+ core chips.

    dewmeroundaboutnowtmayJWSC