This is arguably a very useful solution. It reminds me of the PowerBook Duo or the IBM Thinkpad dock, which allowed for an entire added PCI bus, way back when.
The portable portion would be something fairly light and easy to tote around, with a decent amount of RAM, CPU, and SSD space.
The docking station would use Thunderbolt 3, a decent GPU renderer, drive bays, and the other trimmings, such as a PCIe card slot, 10gigE ports, and so on. Add water cooling, it it wouldn't be so bad for noise.
I am guessing those new 10 terabyte helium SMR drives have to be filled up somehow, and cat pics are not really work relevant.
Makes me wonder about making a stego application which hides a message in a buzzword filled product announcement, similar to the one that uses spam for hiding a message.
You're right... In some ways, it would make life easier Displaying produce would be not as tough, but it would probably require its own set of buzzwords more edgy and with more pop than "organic".
I have done proposals to VCs with the produce displayed in simple, terse sentences. The original draft got snubbed, because the would-be funders wanted to see words like "cloud based", "hyperconvergence", "deperimeterization", and other puffery. It almost is a different language, where just stating that "this is something that does 'x'" has to be obfuscated into paragraphs of fluff.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple went with Skylake. They have stepped back before. The Mac Minis which were quad cores, but are duo cores is one good example of that.
This reminds me of the Clevo laptops from a decade ago. They were not thin and light... but they could go into a backpack, and had the ability to have three hard drives, a pop-out remote for video, a separate DVD player, and use a desktop CPU.
I wouldn't mind something like that today. Something with two M.2 slots and hardware RAID, eSATA, TB-3, 32+ GB of RAM, a bay for a 2.5" SATA HDD (for backups), and a decent i7 or even a Xeon processor. With closed-loop water cooling, this could be doable. It wouldn't be a laptop per se, but would be good for slinging onto a hotel desk to get some heavy work and QA done.
I worked for one place that called them portables, regardless if they were a notebook, netbook, or laptop. This got rid of any confusion when comparing items.
With some bloatware I've come across, I would doubt the NSA would want their name sullied by being associated with it. Every time I see an "accelerator" program, I'm already smelling some type of BS. Either one trades privacy by having a third party MITM web pages to "accelerate" them, or a program tries reinventing the wheel, trying to redo some established crypto standard, and falling flat.
As for program updates, there is a very simple way to do it:
1: Have a set of gpg keys that go with the program. 2: Come time to check for updates, do a curl, fetch a manifest via https. 3: Check the manifest against the proper GPG key. If the manifest doesn't validate, cough up an error. 4: If the manifest is properly signed, go and fetch files and their.sig files via https. 5: Check the.sig files against the downloaded files. 6: If all jives, apply and patch.
SSL handles transport, gpg handles the authenticity if there is an update, and what the updated files are. If a CA is compromised and someone injects bogus files, they will be stopped at step #3 or #5, with the only practical attacks being linking the files to/dev/zero (so the curl command keeps going), or trying to find where the private key is located and compromise that.
I would say it is worse than that. I remember back in the 1990s, a college grad getting $36,000 starting salary, regardless of major. A good sports car (Toyota Supra, twin turbo) would run you in the 30k range. A house where I live, around $150k.
Fast forward to today. A college grad that doesn't make contacts via internships will wind up with the same starting salary, if not less. A decent car? $50k. A house in the neighborhood? $400k.
Couple this with what it takes to find a job. In the 1980s, you had to have a high school diploma. 1990s, a B. S. in -any- major. Post 2008, the major has to be in the field, and even then, it is just a baseline with additional experience or certs a must.
The ironic thing is that the new, super expensive refrigerators are worse for service life than the ones with a mechanical thermostat. If I had to pay $3000 for a fridge, I'd sooner buy one of the fridges that runs from natural gas and only uses 120VAC to power the electric light, as opposed to a "smart" model which likely will demand people watch a 30 second ad before it unlatches the door after a ninja firmware update.
This reminds me of vehicle audio heads on some cars. I have seen a 2006 vehicle that has its audio head have native support for WMA, PlaysForSure DRM, and a hard disk for storing those files. However, it wouldn't play AC3 files. Fast forward to today. The audio head, unless one transcodes to MP3, is pretty much worthless with that feature.
Similar with the audio head of my vehicle. It supports satellite radio... but the company is no longer around, so at best activating it would be dicey at best, an exercise in futility at worst.
Or the audio head on my travail [sic] trailer. It supports audio on SD cards... but finding a SD card that is under four gigs is difficult, and so pointless, I just use the AUX jack for incoming music.
TVs are not smartphones. They are not intended to be dynamic and chucked every year. Instead, they are made to last an indefinite amount of time. If a TV maker doesn't understand this, they should sell their business and focus on toymaking.
If TV makers want something new and cool, then they should define some type of standard, similar to a VESA standard where a device can be mounted on or behind the TV in a standardized way, with certain dimensions and weights. This way, one can mount a set top box on the TV, and with a set of electrical contacts, the act of mounting it provides power and a HDMI/VGA/DisplayPort/whatever connection that is HDCP compliant and all that jazz. This way, if the TV maker wanted to branch out into making "application" boxes, they can freely, and consumers will buy and chuck those at their leisure, leaving the main display.
Unless he has some way of deploying a space elevator or otherwise dealing with the issue of gravity wells, not to mention escape velocity going up and reentry going down, it is a nice fantasy, but it will take a lot of government focus and resources, and with the disinterest of Western governments to do any projects bigger than a building or two, the only country I can even see being able to do this would be China, perhaps Russia.
Of course, this is assuming that Kessler Syndrome doesn't go into full swing, where anything launched into orbit gets perforated.
I might fiddle with Duo security, or just fire up a VM whose sole purpose in life is to handle VPN duty. That way, it is isolated, and can be hardened well. Nice thing about OS X and Linux is that they play well together.
I have fallen into the same hole as the grandparent. I'm not happy with the desktops on the major Linux distros, I could hack my own or use an off-brand distro, but then there is the issue of updates, and just spending time fiddling with it, when I have many other things to do. So, I went the OS X route because it is usable out of the box. Plus, I'm not liking the route MS is going with Windows, where they can do an update/forced restart anytime. That and the telemetry privacy concerns.
All and all, I get about 95% of what I like with Linux on OS X. Ansible, borg, xz, and other utilities install with little issue with brew, and with proper ACL setting,/usr/local can be kept owned as root, while letting an admin user do updates. XCode isn't bad, as I've had to write Objective C code to watch the thermal and memory pressure of a machine, and have it throttle an app before either got out of hand. OS X Server's git server is decent, and eventually I may just buy a Mac Mini for running a LDAP server and VPN server, although I have no clue if it can support 2FA, which is a must. Plus, since Mac Minis support ESXi, I can use it for another compute node if I need.
This has been a best practice for decades. It doesn't matter what the platform is, be it a Dell that was on special from Amazon, a Mac, an Oracle box, or a POWER8 that will be used for LPARs... it gets completely flattened and installed from scratch. Even my smartphones and tablets get erased and reflashed from scratch.
The Dell cheapie I bought, I just bought OEM Windows install media, stuffed a SSD in there, and it works fine. With most drivers being from Windows or OEM stuff, there is no Dell specific upgrade utility on the system. I don't see why I should bother installing a vendor application, unless there is some specific functionality. For example, there was a year or two where HP had motherboard NICs from nVidia with hardware firewalling built in, which came in handy to block bad sites in hardware before they could even touch the OS, as well as protect the Web browser.
I don't know anyone offhand who wants a "smart TV", other than it might save them the need for another box and wall wart. Especially with the fact that it will be a pretty much foregone conclusion that the apps on the TV will never be upgraded... actually, nothing upgraded on the TV, other than an "enhanced advertising experience", which no consumer wants.
I just like displays that display accurately whatever signal I feed them, be it VGA, DVI, HDMI, DP, MiniDP, or whatever. If I want additional features, I'll just plug in a box that does what I want it to.
Plus, how can a TV maker know what people are going to stay using? An app that may be in vogue today may be completely dead a few years from now. For example, a Napster or Rdio app. A TV needs to remain relatively timeless, and app neutral. In fact, it shouldn't be connected to the Internet at all, for security reasons. Firmware updates? This is what hardware QA is for. A TV has far fewer states than a computer does, so if done right, it shouldn't need any firmware upgrades through its service life.
I used to respect Samsung, but if they keep doing that, I will just buy my next TV from their Chinese competitors, which won't have that issue.
I'm content with TVs being TVs... no WAN connection needed. Plus, there are many devices which do the job better than "smart" TVs. A Roku model, Chromecast, AppleTV, or a HTPC is a lot more useful.
One advantage about mainframes is how few people are needed to maintain them once they are set up. Of course, one pays dearly to have CPUs execute in lockstep, Parallel Sysplex, and other things, but if you want something to want for five-9s, mainframes may not be stylish, but they will do the job.
PGP is needed, because it does something few applications do -- it works regardless of the transport layer. I can PGP encrypt a document, E-mail it, or I can send it via SMS, MMS, copy it to a SD card and put it in a dead drop, post to alt.anonymous.messages, or any number of ways. In any case, the document will be encrypted, and signed, so the receiver is assured of its security, no matter how public the transportation is.
Of course, PGP isn't perfect... it is a standard made in 1993. It needs forward secrecy, and a better binary to ASCII encoding scheme, preferably with the option of adding ECC. But it does work, and it is secure. It also will work with whatever the latest trendy messaging app will be come next year, just as well as it will work with ones from the past.
Polyethylene glycol or propylene glycol? The first is a very powerful laxative (it is what they give when going to get an endoscopy), the second is something used in applications like RV antifreeze and other items.
If Google does an occasional text ad here and there, fine. If they are pop-up/slide up, full screen ads which wiggle when you try to close them, then take you to the web page or app store for downloading something, I'll find another map provider. MapQuest and Bing Maps are suitable alternatives, and Apple Maps has gotten past navigating people through wormholes and tessaracts.
I wonder about using something like AES or a standard encryption algorithm on the stream of numbers coming from the RNG/PRNG, with the encryption key coming from a different RNG pool. This might help with the unpredictability aspect.
With a post-scarcity society, we can go one of two routes: A basic income, or spend money on prisons, police, military, training, dealing with crime/terrorism when a disaffected populace becomes an insurgent populace. I personally think a basic income is cheaper in the long run, and can allow a nation to focus on something other than existing or basic security in its borders.
This is common across the ad industry now. Either a fake "X", that takes you to some shitty app or website, or the "close" button brings up AdChoices's "is this ad bad?" menu. This started back in the days of Bonzi Buddy, and is a common trick. Ad blocking extensions have stopped that problem on the desktop, but it is a chronic thing on iOS.
I personally have had good luck with HP/HPE stuff over the years. The Moonshot has yet to be duplicated by anyone, and for places that can't expand or add rack capacity, the only way to add more (other than machine upgrades) is to go with denser racks/blades. iLO holds its own, on the par with iDRAC.
I do wish HPe would make some G9 MicroServers. For an entry level box in an environment where rackmounting isn't that feasible, they are nice little machines and are definitely worth it for price/performance.
I definitely wouldn't say HP is dead, but HPe needs to toss something out there, enterprise-wise to get a nose ahead of the competitors. Moonshot and extremely dense rack/blades may be the best thing going for them, especially if they can perfect liquid cooling so that the blades can be far denser without worry about airflow.
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This is arguably a very useful solution. It reminds me of the PowerBook Duo or the IBM Thinkpad dock, which allowed for an entire added PCI bus, way back when.
The portable portion would be something fairly light and easy to tote around, with a decent amount of RAM, CPU, and SSD space.
The docking station would use Thunderbolt 3, a decent GPU renderer, drive bays, and the other trimmings, such as a PCIe card slot, 10gigE ports, and so on. Add water cooling, it it wouldn't be so bad for noise.
I am guessing those new 10 terabyte helium SMR drives have to be filled up somehow, and cat pics are not really work relevant.
Makes me wonder about making a stego application which hides a message in a buzzword filled product announcement, similar to the one that uses spam for hiding a message.
You're right... In some ways, it would make life easier Displaying produce would be not as tough, but it would probably require its own set of buzzwords more edgy and with more pop than "organic".
I have done proposals to VCs with the produce displayed in simple, terse sentences. The original draft got snubbed, because the would-be funders wanted to see words like "cloud based", "hyperconvergence", "deperimeterization", and other puffery. It almost is a different language, where just stating that "this is something that does 'x'" has to be obfuscated into paragraphs of fluff.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple went with Skylake. They have stepped back before. The Mac Minis which were quad cores, but are duo cores is one good example of that.
This reminds me of the Clevo laptops from a decade ago. They were not thin and light... but they could go into a backpack, and had the ability to have three hard drives, a pop-out remote for video, a separate DVD player, and use a desktop CPU.
I wouldn't mind something like that today. Something with two M.2 slots and hardware RAID, eSATA, TB-3, 32+ GB of RAM, a bay for a 2.5" SATA HDD (for backups), and a decent i7 or even a Xeon processor. With closed-loop water cooling, this could be doable. It wouldn't be a laptop per se, but would be good for slinging onto a hotel desk to get some heavy work and QA done.
I worked for one place that called them portables, regardless if they were a notebook, netbook, or laptop. This got rid of any confusion when comparing items.
With some bloatware I've come across, I would doubt the NSA would want their name sullied by being associated with it. Every time I see an "accelerator" program, I'm already smelling some type of BS. Either one trades privacy by having a third party MITM web pages to "accelerate" them, or a program tries reinventing the wheel, trying to redo some established crypto standard, and falling flat.
As for program updates, there is a very simple way to do it:
1: Have a set of gpg keys that go with the program. .sig files via https. .sig files against the downloaded files.
2: Come time to check for updates, do a curl, fetch a manifest via https.
3: Check the manifest against the proper GPG key. If the manifest doesn't validate, cough up an error.
4: If the manifest is properly signed, go and fetch files and their
5: Check the
6: If all jives, apply and patch.
SSL handles transport, gpg handles the authenticity if there is an update, and what the updated files are. If a CA is compromised and someone injects bogus files, they will be stopped at step #3 or #5, with the only practical attacks being linking the files to /dev/zero (so the curl command keeps going), or trying to find where the private key is located and compromise that.
I would say it is worse than that. I remember back in the 1990s, a college grad getting $36,000 starting salary, regardless of major. A good sports car (Toyota Supra, twin turbo) would run you in the 30k range. A house where I live, around $150k.
Fast forward to today. A college grad that doesn't make contacts via internships will wind up with the same starting salary, if not less. A decent car? $50k. A house in the neighborhood? $400k.
Couple this with what it takes to find a job. In the 1980s, you had to have a high school diploma. 1990s, a B. S. in -any- major. Post 2008, the major has to be in the field, and even then, it is just a baseline with additional experience or certs a must.
The ironic thing is that the new, super expensive refrigerators are worse for service life than the ones with a mechanical thermostat. If I had to pay $3000 for a fridge, I'd sooner buy one of the fridges that runs from natural gas and only uses 120VAC to power the electric light, as opposed to a "smart" model which likely will demand people watch a 30 second ad before it unlatches the door after a ninja firmware update.
This reminds me of vehicle audio heads on some cars. I have seen a 2006 vehicle that has its audio head have native support for WMA, PlaysForSure DRM, and a hard disk for storing those files. However, it wouldn't play AC3 files. Fast forward to today. The audio head, unless one transcodes to MP3, is pretty much worthless with that feature.
Similar with the audio head of my vehicle. It supports satellite radio... but the company is no longer around, so at best activating it would be dicey at best, an exercise in futility at worst.
Or the audio head on my travail [sic] trailer. It supports audio on SD cards... but finding a SD card that is under four gigs is difficult, and so pointless, I just use the AUX jack for incoming music.
TVs are not smartphones. They are not intended to be dynamic and chucked every year. Instead, they are made to last an indefinite amount of time. If a TV maker doesn't understand this, they should sell their business and focus on toymaking.
If TV makers want something new and cool, then they should define some type of standard, similar to a VESA standard where a device can be mounted on or behind the TV in a standardized way, with certain dimensions and weights. This way, one can mount a set top box on the TV, and with a set of electrical contacts, the act of mounting it provides power and a HDMI/VGA/DisplayPort/whatever connection that is HDCP compliant and all that jazz. This way, if the TV maker wanted to branch out into making "application" boxes, they can freely, and consumers will buy and chuck those at their leisure, leaving the main display.
Unless he has some way of deploying a space elevator or otherwise dealing with the issue of gravity wells, not to mention escape velocity going up and reentry going down, it is a nice fantasy, but it will take a lot of government focus and resources, and with the disinterest of Western governments to do any projects bigger than a building or two, the only country I can even see being able to do this would be China, perhaps Russia.
Of course, this is assuming that Kessler Syndrome doesn't go into full swing, where anything launched into orbit gets perforated.
I might fiddle with Duo security, or just fire up a VM whose sole purpose in life is to handle VPN duty. That way, it is isolated, and can be hardened well. Nice thing about OS X and Linux is that they play well together.
Even worse... no safeword possible...
I have fallen into the same hole as the grandparent. I'm not happy with the desktops on the major Linux distros, I could hack my own or use an off-brand distro, but then there is the issue of updates, and just spending time fiddling with it, when I have many other things to do. So, I went the OS X route because it is usable out of the box. Plus, I'm not liking the route MS is going with Windows, where they can do an update/forced restart anytime. That and the telemetry privacy concerns.
All and all, I get about 95% of what I like with Linux on OS X. Ansible, borg, xz, and other utilities install with little issue with brew, and with proper ACL setting, /usr/local can be kept owned as root, while letting an admin user do updates. XCode isn't bad, as I've had to write Objective C code to watch the thermal and memory pressure of a machine, and have it throttle an app before either got out of hand. OS X Server's git server is decent, and eventually I may just buy a Mac Mini for running a LDAP server and VPN server, although I have no clue if it can support 2FA, which is a must. Plus, since Mac Minis support ESXi, I can use it for another compute node if I need.
This has been a best practice for decades. It doesn't matter what the platform is, be it a Dell that was on special from Amazon, a Mac, an Oracle box, or a POWER8 that will be used for LPARs... it gets completely flattened and installed from scratch. Even my smartphones and tablets get erased and reflashed from scratch.
The Dell cheapie I bought, I just bought OEM Windows install media, stuffed a SSD in there, and it works fine. With most drivers being from Windows or OEM stuff, there is no Dell specific upgrade utility on the system. I don't see why I should bother installing a vendor application, unless there is some specific functionality. For example, there was a year or two where HP had motherboard NICs from nVidia with hardware firewalling built in, which came in handy to block bad sites in hardware before they could even touch the OS, as well as protect the Web browser.
I don't know anyone offhand who wants a "smart TV", other than it might save them the need for another box and wall wart. Especially with the fact that it will be a pretty much foregone conclusion that the apps on the TV will never be upgraded... actually, nothing upgraded on the TV, other than an "enhanced advertising experience", which no consumer wants.
I just like displays that display accurately whatever signal I feed them, be it VGA, DVI, HDMI, DP, MiniDP, or whatever. If I want additional features, I'll just plug in a box that does what I want it to.
Plus, how can a TV maker know what people are going to stay using? An app that may be in vogue today may be completely dead a few years from now. For example, a Napster or Rdio app. A TV needs to remain relatively timeless, and app neutral. In fact, it shouldn't be connected to the Internet at all, for security reasons. Firmware updates? This is what hardware QA is for. A TV has far fewer states than a computer does, so if done right, it shouldn't need any firmware upgrades through its service life.
I used to respect Samsung, but if they keep doing that, I will just buy my next TV from their Chinese competitors, which won't have that issue.
I'm content with TVs being TVs... no WAN connection needed. Plus, there are many devices which do the job better than "smart" TVs. A Roku model, Chromecast, AppleTV, or a HTPC is a lot more useful.
One advantage about mainframes is how few people are needed to maintain them once they are set up. Of course, one pays dearly to have CPUs execute in lockstep, Parallel Sysplex, and other things, but if you want something to want for five-9s, mainframes may not be stylish, but they will do the job.
PGP is needed, because it does something few applications do -- it works regardless of the transport layer. I can PGP encrypt a document, E-mail it, or I can send it via SMS, MMS, copy it to a SD card and put it in a dead drop, post to alt.anonymous.messages, or any number of ways. In any case, the document will be encrypted, and signed, so the receiver is assured of its security, no matter how public the transportation is.
Of course, PGP isn't perfect... it is a standard made in 1993. It needs forward secrecy, and a better binary to ASCII encoding scheme, preferably with the option of adding ECC. But it does work, and it is secure. It also will work with whatever the latest trendy messaging app will be come next year, just as well as it will work with ones from the past.
Polyethylene glycol or propylene glycol? The first is a very powerful laxative (it is what they give when going to get an endoscopy), the second is something used in applications like RV antifreeze and other items.
If Google does an occasional text ad here and there, fine. If they are pop-up/slide up, full screen ads which wiggle when you try to close them, then take you to the web page or app store for downloading something, I'll find another map provider. MapQuest and Bing Maps are suitable alternatives, and Apple Maps has gotten past navigating people through wormholes and tessaracts.
I wonder about using something like AES or a standard encryption algorithm on the stream of numbers coming from the RNG/PRNG, with the encryption key coming from a different RNG pool. This might help with the unpredictability aspect.
With a post-scarcity society, we can go one of two routes: A basic income, or spend money on prisons, police, military, training, dealing with crime/terrorism when a disaffected populace becomes an insurgent populace. I personally think a basic income is cheaper in the long run, and can allow a nation to focus on something other than existing or basic security in its borders.
Even in 1984, the proles got -something-.
This is common across the ad industry now. Either a fake "X", that takes you to some shitty app or website, or the "close" button brings up AdChoices's "is this ad bad?" menu. This started back in the days of Bonzi Buddy, and is a common trick. Ad blocking extensions have stopped that problem on the desktop, but it is a chronic thing on iOS.
I personally have had good luck with HP/HPE stuff over the years. The Moonshot has yet to be duplicated by anyone, and for places that can't expand or add rack capacity, the only way to add more (other than machine upgrades) is to go with denser racks/blades. iLO holds its own, on the par with iDRAC.
I do wish HPe would make some G9 MicroServers. For an entry level box in an environment where rackmounting isn't that feasible, they are nice little machines and are definitely worth it for price/performance.
I definitely wouldn't say HP is dead, but HPe needs to toss something out there, enterprise-wise to get a nose ahead of the competitors. Moonshot and extremely dense rack/blades may be the best thing going for them, especially if they can perfect liquid cooling so that the blades can be far denser without worry about airflow.