The e-Ink tech would be useful for a lot of things. I have always wanted it on Wi-Fi APs, so if someone does a hard reset of a consumer router, the default WPA2 password would change, but be displayed on the bottom, with the option of turning that off in the config later on. For other appliances/IoT devices, just a means of displaying a default password for first access would be useful, or displaying a code for Bluetooth pairing. There is a big market and use for e-Ink... I just wish it were used more often, as I have not seen it used past e-Readers, and the shipping label on the Amazon Snowball.
AFIAK, we have passed peak coal, where anthracite (the highest quality coal) is almost impossible to find, so a lot of coal plants burn lignite (one step up from peat.) Peak oil is long since behind us, especially with the pushback from fracking. Then, you get reports of solar actually being cheaper than fossil fuels, especially for maintenance.
There are three things which would kill fossil fuels dead that are still out there:
1: Nuclear power becoming accepted, or re-accepted. 2: Battery density getting near current fossil fuels. 3: A usable, efficient way to put energy in, suck out CO2 from the air, and make an easy to store fuel like synthetic diesel, fuel, ethanol, or even propane. Hydrogen is mentioned, but that is not a real soliution as making it requires a lot of energy, and storing it for the long term is difficult due to how it embrittles tanks and has a tendency to escape.
There is the fact that hydrogen sucks to store compared to other fuels like propane, diesel fuel, or gasoline.
What would excel is a fuel that is pulled from the air that can use existing infrastructure, without needing exotic tanks, heavy expense in upkeep (a H2 tank needs inspected quite often, while a propane tank can sit in the back of a garage for decades and still be fine), and can be pumped by Joe Sixpack who might know enough to not smoke near the gas pump, but not much else.
I'd say the best solution would be a synthetic diesel fuel. If not that, an alcohol or propane (since propane isn't toxic to the environment.) Diesel is the most safe to transport because it doesn't have explosive vapor.
In my experience, a lot of places say they provide backups.
Usable restores, on the other hand... different story.
My recommendation is to dump the MySQL/MariaDB database (I use mysqldump and do a logical backup, as well as popping a snapshot), as well as snapshotting the core and other files needed for the Drupal site, shove all of that into a deduplicating backup program like Borg Backup, as well as every so often, take a tar archive and save that off in a separate location, just in case the backup program glitches. When it comes to backups, pack your own parachute. Don't expect someone to do it for you.
It would be nice if providers giving shell access would use NetApp or another filesystem to allow backups to be pulled out using the.snapshot directory. This, combined with periodic dumps of the MySQL database to a directory would do well for short-term, "oh shit" recoveries.
It makes sense to have a pool of money and some allocation for domestic culture on the airwaves, otherwise a country's culture will just be overwhelmed by what is cheap and easy to produce or import, such as "reality" shows or $COUNTRY Idol, which take little to no thought to produce, and require very little F/X work, outside of a basic set design and some "stars" with snide commentary, decent looks under airbrush makeup, and little else.
I respect France and Germany for this. Music-wise, this is what the US desperately needs. Not another boy band or "band" put together from individuls by a MBA and promoed to death, but an actual shot at being able to do something with a band.
This is how IoT should be done across the board. I have pleaded with several IoT startups to go hub and spoke, just so they reduce their attack surface, but because it is cheap to just open up to cellular or Wi-Fi, they just open the device to the Internet, since it is so easy to go that route with commodity hardware, and yet again, I get told that "security has no ROI".
The only thing I wish there were a wireless protocol for, would be for block access. Something like a wireless iSCSI. This sounds stupid, but with Apple and other companies moving to just one port, having an external HDD that can pair with a computer, and read/write without requiring a Wi-Fi SSID or Wi-Fi Direct would be very useful.
I use code for "bridge building", mainly spending time on looking at the map, and finding the best two places to span the bridge. Even then, there are times when I may have a number of lines of code, and wind up tossing the entire shebang out because I can do the same thing with an algorithm change, or using another function.
Coding is one thing, but I've seen dev houses measure quality by doing over 10,000 lines a day, regardless of bugs. That is akin to building a house and measuring the quality of the structure by the tonnage of concrete that was poured, or the amount of lumber used.
I have seen this argument since the dawn of Linux: Drop what you are doing, join the rest of the world and run Novell/MS-DOS/Windows, because that is what the "cool kids" are using, and where the applications are.
How about no? Desktop Linux is getting to a point where it is viable for day to day work tasks, and gaming is becoming not just a wish, but actually something coming around (slowly but surely). Going back to having to use Windows or a closed source OS will set Linux back by years. The fact that Linux is a decent desktop OS is why MS is deciding to fold and play in the Linux ecosystem. If people and companies go back to "closed source, good, F/OSS bad", I can see MS pivoting again, swinging deals to eradicate Linux in the server rooms in return for cost breaks come true-up time.
As of now, the only two MS products that are a must have in a company are AD and Exchange (and even those are debatable). I'd rather see F/OSS alternatives which might take some work, but can be used, as opposed to having to "surrender" and be forced to vendor lock-in.
It could be done. The embedded boards are not expensive, and one can get a Raspberry Pi Zero or an Arduino for pretty cheap, and build from there. Someone who wants to spin their own boards and even make their own ASIC is doable. If one wants as small a physical size as possible, it may take about $500,000 to fab an ARM SoC ASIC with a decent CPU, but it isn't impossible. We had X10 offering some form of home automation for decades now, and it never needed a cloud.
The trick is to use a hub and spoke arrangement, with 1-2 redundant, hardened hubs, then devices that communicate with those. This reduces the attack surface to needing to be physically near the LAN, or compromising the hardened hub, and with VMs or containers, one can separate functionality like firewalling from device management and software updating to ensure better defense in depth.
Security of IoT devices is a solved problem. Consoles come to mind as something that has had years of attacks from all sides, without a single breach, and a console is pretty much a computer. It is just getting device makers to actually bake security in, as opposed to strapping in on later on.
I just wonder how long it will be before the bar goes from "terrorist content" to "possibly infringing content", and everything stored/uploaded gets passed through a filter. I'm sure if this continues local scans will happen, (with anyone who opposes it being called "sympathetic to terrorists"), and the local scans will silently be updated to go after signatures from BitTorrents.
There is also the fact that modern stuff last longer, but with most IC engines more complex than a weed-whacker being common rail EFI or otherwise computer controlled, one has to depend on the manufacturer for the ECU timing... and they are not ever going to allow an open source ECU for love, nor money. When that component fails, the whole engine is scrap metal.
It would be nice to have a balance... modern ECUs... but with parts/chips/modules very easy to obtain and reprogram, so that if something breaks, it can be repaired by a machine shop without too much effort.
This, in a nutshell. Who knows who has a copy of the samples, and destroying all of them can lead to blackmail. All it takes is a rogue lab that may or may not have gotten a sample, and then tells everyone to pay up, or they will start selling it to $EVIL_ORGANIZATION, and with no samples to make vaccines from, it would leave everyone SOL.
Plus, there are other versions of smallpox out there. Cowpox comes to mind. Might as well work on some vaccines anyway, because one never knows if cowpox might mutate to smallpox's danger levels.
I have been asking the same thing. The LTO drives have already dealt with shoe-shining, so they can work on a sub-optimal interface, and even then, there is always having the drive with an I/O buffer similar to CDs before "burn-proofing" made buffer underruns a thing of the past.
I do know LTO-3 drives can run from Thunderbolt 1, which is about on par with USB 3, so it can be done. It is just a matter of making consumer level software to handle LTFS, and some basic documentation, like not to run a defragmenter on a tape volume.
Get tape drives to a $1000 price point, easily used with USB 3.1, and this definitely would be a storage niche, especially with ransomware. A WORM tape or optical media is as good as it gets, no matter what gets compromised. If tape companies do this, they definitely will have an expanded market, especially if their product is combined with a NAS of some sort, so a backup of the NAS can be as simple as putting tape in and hitting a button.
Yes, it is a waste of time, but McAfee and Symantec both have ICSA certified AV solutions which run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. This is crucial in a lot of environments to make the legal eagles happy, and check that box off that "all computers run a certified AV solution", even if the machines are LPARs or LDOMs.
Sounds idiotic, but PCI-DSS and other specs can require this, even though the AV software, at best, will be deadweight.
I am not sure what tier this storage goes in, as for price/capacity, where CPU registers are the most precious and tape, cloud, or big, slow DASDs are on the other scale of speed/price.
Does it go under flash, but "above" spinning rust? The BD example made it seem that IBM is wanting to make another CD-PD, which was a storage format that lasted a few years until CD-R and CD-RW became mainstream, where a drive could read CDs, as well as use a specific optical cartridge.
Personally, I would love a high density, cheap optical storage medium. Optical disks are easier to manipulate than tapes (wasn't that long ago when everyone had 400 CD autochangers), and because of the size, can be stored with more units in a given space than tapes. If the optical medium is cheap and WORM, that would provide excellent protection against ransomware, as well as the ability to store media offline.
If it goes between flash and spinning disks, that isn't really a useful market niche, as flash is getting cheaper all the time.
Just the fact that a SDC can drive much closer means that at least 2-3 times as many vehicles can fit in the same stretch of road as before. Combine that with the ability to replace traffic signals, stop signs, and it means faster driving overall. Highway intersections that require multi-level construction can be replaced by a simple four-way, with vehicle computers adjusting speed so they can go through safely and at highway speeds.
Of course, there is one reason why SDCs will be overall better than HDCs: Wrecks. Lower the chance of those happening, it it will help immensely. There is also the fact that SDCs don't get drunk, tripping, high, or in a state that renders them unusable for driving. This is arguably the chief cause of wrecks, so by that factor being further mitigates, it will help traffic flow and overall commute times significantly.
It would be interesting for the ability to add more drives dynamically, perhaps with a new RAID type that can work with dynamic adding and removing of drives, minimizing the time the array is in a degraded state.
My "ideal" of a filesystem that sits on BSD is EMC Isilon's OneFS or NetApp's WAFL filesystem. This not just offers what ZFS has, but the ability to link other nodes via Infiniband and use their filesystems, presenting a filesystem which is redundant across drives, and redundant across nodes. If a drive fails on an Isilon cluster, it can be configured to rebuild itself, except with less disk space, so redundancy is preserved. I've even encountered severely neglected Isilon clusters that have had over half their drives dead, and the only reason the users noticed was that they ran out of disk space.
It can be argued that testing the OS as a gestalt is a good thing. One good idea is how AIX does releases. You have your OS revisions and your APARs as patches, but you have technology level updates as well, which are not truly OS updates per se... but a snapshot in time where all packages and updates have been thoroughly regression tested. It would be interesting to have something similar on a quarterly basis. This is sort of handled by OS updates like RHEL 6.8 which was recently released, but would be something that would be more guaranteed to happen at a time of the year, so every so often, there is a solid base to start at for OS imaging.
Amazon has a bunch of Dash buttons, but I wonder if they would do better making the buttons with an e-Ink display so only one model is needed, and depending on the function or product it is paired/activated with, would display the logo of that.
I do have a 13" MBP, and about every two weeks, it will be unresponsive when I SSH or RDP into it, and a screen lock pops the pinwheel of death...forcing a hard shutdown.
Even more quirky, if FileVault is in use, upon reboot, it will block the keyboard input for a random duration (30-60 seconds), allow keyboard/mouse movement for 100-500 milliseconds, then block it again. To get around this, if I don't do a "fdeutil authrestart" as a way of rebooting, I have to clear the NVRAM, and after doing that, it boots without issue... until it is time to restart again. Initally, with 10.10, I didn't have that issue until the update last August. 10.11 seemed to clear that up until about 2-3 months ago when it came back.
I know Apple can do better than this. They control the vertical and horizontal with their hardware. My 2008 MB (first unibody aluminum model) is still going strong, after a battery, SSD, and RAM update. The 15" MBP I use has zero issues with it. My iToys work flawlessly.
Even though Macs are not Apple's cash cow, it would be nice if Apple could either pay more attention to them, or if that isn't the company's focus, spin Macs off into a separate company that can focus on making the absolute best x86 hardware out there.
The good news is that fast food joints are facing a population and customer base that is going elsewhere. IIRC, McDonald's has been hurting because of this.
There are a lot of people who don't have time/money to go to other places, but there are people who will either just go home and nuke a frozen meal or actually cook if they get fed up with what fast food joints are doing. Or, they just go to another fast food joint. Instead of Wendy's, there is a Dairy Queen. Or in north Austin, there is a Sonic, Wally's or other place. If downtown in Austin, there is Hut's.
I think adding automation just for the purpose of lashing back at higher minimum wages is self-defeating. Had Wendy's just added kiosks to help with order accuracy... completely different thing (because we all have had that issue of wrong orders.)
I wonder if this actually helps things. Does the churn of employees every year actually beat dealing with someone who might be unlucky to not make the cut? It might not be their fault. I've seen sales managers get handed dud employees, just so the manager gets booted come the next mass firing. If someone is already underperforming, shouldn't it be caught by the normal performance review process which is part of HR's job?
I know it is cool to pretend to be the head honcho on the Apprentice and yell, "you're fired" to people, but does this make actual business sense, with regards to morale and such? That ill will can last a long time. I have personally seen contracts lost when someone from company "A" gets fired, starts at company "B" who is company "A"'s main customer, and then changes from company "A" to company "C" just out of spite... and those contracts mean a lot more money than just a salary or two.
I would throw the concept of Mazlow's Pyramid into this. If basic food and security are not present, you will not get much from people in the way of advances. By a guarenteed basic income, which would let people focus on other things than trying to eke enough for food, it would allow people to spend time doing research, making stuff, designing cooler items, and advancing the arts and sciences in general. The Renaissance is an object lesson to this, when people had time to do something other than toil in the fields.
It sounds "cool" to tell people to just go eat cake, but that philosophy has its blowback. Look at how the US has stagnated, while countries that guarantee some means of knowing where one's next meal is coming from are advancing. A population that is barely existing is not a population that is inventing and advancing science.
I am not impressed with Bluetooth speakers. If I try one during a conference call, it either has 0 volume or KISS concert, deaf-in-5-seconds volume as the next step up. Even then, people say that one can't be heard.
Now, add IoT stuff to the mix, which would allow any blackhat who manages to find the device now has a dedicated microphone to record what is going on 24/7? Not worth the cash or the bother. Especially with the state of IoT where security updates are talked about, but rarely done, just because to IoT firms, "security has no ROI", and they want people to buy their new stuff, not expect upgrades to their existing items.
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The e-Ink tech would be useful for a lot of things. I have always wanted it on Wi-Fi APs, so if someone does a hard reset of a consumer router, the default WPA2 password would change, but be displayed on the bottom, with the option of turning that off in the config later on. For other appliances/IoT devices, just a means of displaying a default password for first access would be useful, or displaying a code for Bluetooth pairing. There is a big market and use for e-Ink... I just wish it were used more often, as I have not seen it used past e-Readers, and the shipping label on the Amazon Snowball.
AFIAK, we have passed peak coal, where anthracite (the highest quality coal) is almost impossible to find, so a lot of coal plants burn lignite (one step up from peat.) Peak oil is long since behind us, especially with the pushback from fracking. Then, you get reports of solar actually being cheaper than fossil fuels, especially for maintenance.
There are three things which would kill fossil fuels dead that are still out there:
1: Nuclear power becoming accepted, or re-accepted.
2: Battery density getting near current fossil fuels.
3: A usable, efficient way to put energy in, suck out CO2 from the air, and make an easy to store fuel like synthetic diesel, fuel, ethanol, or even propane. Hydrogen is mentioned, but that is not a real soliution as making it requires a lot of energy, and storing it for the long term is difficult due to how it embrittles tanks and has a tendency to escape.
There is the fact that hydrogen sucks to store compared to other fuels like propane, diesel fuel, or gasoline.
What would excel is a fuel that is pulled from the air that can use existing infrastructure, without needing exotic tanks, heavy expense in upkeep (a H2 tank needs inspected quite often, while a propane tank can sit in the back of a garage for decades and still be fine), and can be pumped by Joe Sixpack who might know enough to not smoke near the gas pump, but not much else.
I'd say the best solution would be a synthetic diesel fuel. If not that, an alcohol or propane (since propane isn't toxic to the environment.) Diesel is the most safe to transport because it doesn't have explosive vapor.
In my experience, a lot of places say they provide backups.
Usable restores, on the other hand... different story.
My recommendation is to dump the MySQL/MariaDB database (I use mysqldump and do a logical backup, as well as popping a snapshot), as well as snapshotting the core and other files needed for the Drupal site, shove all of that into a deduplicating backup program like Borg Backup, as well as every so often, take a tar archive and save that off in a separate location, just in case the backup program glitches. When it comes to backups, pack your own parachute. Don't expect someone to do it for you.
It would be nice if providers giving shell access would use NetApp or another filesystem to allow backups to be pulled out using the .snapshot directory. This, combined with periodic dumps of the MySQL database to a directory would do well for short-term, "oh shit" recoveries.
It makes sense to have a pool of money and some allocation for domestic culture on the airwaves, otherwise a country's culture will just be overwhelmed by what is cheap and easy to produce or import, such as "reality" shows or $COUNTRY Idol, which take little to no thought to produce, and require very little F/X work, outside of a basic set design and some "stars" with snide commentary, decent looks under airbrush makeup, and little else.
I respect France and Germany for this. Music-wise, this is what the US desperately needs. Not another boy band or "band" put together from individuls by a MBA and promoed to death, but an actual shot at being able to do something with a band.
This is how IoT should be done across the board. I have pleaded with several IoT startups to go hub and spoke, just so they reduce their attack surface, but because it is cheap to just open up to cellular or Wi-Fi, they just open the device to the Internet, since it is so easy to go that route with commodity hardware, and yet again, I get told that "security has no ROI".
The only thing I wish there were a wireless protocol for, would be for block access. Something like a wireless iSCSI. This sounds stupid, but with Apple and other companies moving to just one port, having an external HDD that can pair with a computer, and read/write without requiring a Wi-Fi SSID or Wi-Fi Direct would be very useful.
I use code for "bridge building", mainly spending time on looking at the map, and finding the best two places to span the bridge. Even then, there are times when I may have a number of lines of code, and wind up tossing the entire shebang out because I can do the same thing with an algorithm change, or using another function.
Coding is one thing, but I've seen dev houses measure quality by doing over 10,000 lines a day, regardless of bugs. That is akin to building a house and measuring the quality of the structure by the tonnage of concrete that was poured, or the amount of lumber used.
I have seen this argument since the dawn of Linux: Drop what you are doing, join the rest of the world and run Novell/MS-DOS/Windows, because that is what the "cool kids" are using, and where the applications are.
How about no? Desktop Linux is getting to a point where it is viable for day to day work tasks, and gaming is becoming not just a wish, but actually something coming around (slowly but surely). Going back to having to use Windows or a closed source OS will set Linux back by years. The fact that Linux is a decent desktop OS is why MS is deciding to fold and play in the Linux ecosystem. If people and companies go back to "closed source, good, F/OSS bad", I can see MS pivoting again, swinging deals to eradicate Linux in the server rooms in return for cost breaks come true-up time.
As of now, the only two MS products that are a must have in a company are AD and Exchange (and even those are debatable). I'd rather see F/OSS alternatives which might take some work, but can be used, as opposed to having to "surrender" and be forced to vendor lock-in.
It could be done. The embedded boards are not expensive, and one can get a Raspberry Pi Zero or an Arduino for pretty cheap, and build from there. Someone who wants to spin their own boards and even make their own ASIC is doable. If one wants as small a physical size as possible, it may take about $500,000 to fab an ARM SoC ASIC with a decent CPU, but it isn't impossible. We had X10 offering some form of home automation for decades now, and it never needed a cloud.
The trick is to use a hub and spoke arrangement, with 1-2 redundant, hardened hubs, then devices that communicate with those. This reduces the attack surface to needing to be physically near the LAN, or compromising the hardened hub, and with VMs or containers, one can separate functionality like firewalling from device management and software updating to ensure better defense in depth.
Security of IoT devices is a solved problem. Consoles come to mind as something that has had years of attacks from all sides, without a single breach, and a console is pretty much a computer. It is just getting device makers to actually bake security in, as opposed to strapping in on later on.
I just wonder how long it will be before the bar goes from "terrorist content" to "possibly infringing content", and everything stored/uploaded gets passed through a filter. I'm sure if this continues local scans will happen, (with anyone who opposes it being called "sympathetic to terrorists"), and the local scans will silently be updated to go after signatures from BitTorrents.
There is also the fact that modern stuff last longer, but with most IC engines more complex than a weed-whacker being common rail EFI or otherwise computer controlled, one has to depend on the manufacturer for the ECU timing... and they are not ever going to allow an open source ECU for love, nor money. When that component fails, the whole engine is scrap metal.
It would be nice to have a balance... modern ECUs... but with parts/chips/modules very easy to obtain and reprogram, so that if something breaks, it can be repaired by a machine shop without too much effort.
This, in a nutshell. Who knows who has a copy of the samples, and destroying all of them can lead to blackmail. All it takes is a rogue lab that may or may not have gotten a sample, and then tells everyone to pay up, or they will start selling it to $EVIL_ORGANIZATION, and with no samples to make vaccines from, it would leave everyone SOL.
Plus, there are other versions of smallpox out there. Cowpox comes to mind. Might as well work on some vaccines anyway, because one never knows if cowpox might mutate to smallpox's danger levels.
I have been asking the same thing. The LTO drives have already dealt with shoe-shining, so they can work on a sub-optimal interface, and even then, there is always having the drive with an I/O buffer similar to CDs before "burn-proofing" made buffer underruns a thing of the past.
I do know LTO-3 drives can run from Thunderbolt 1, which is about on par with USB 3, so it can be done. It is just a matter of making consumer level software to handle LTFS, and some basic documentation, like not to run a defragmenter on a tape volume.
Get tape drives to a $1000 price point, easily used with USB 3.1, and this definitely would be a storage niche, especially with ransomware. A WORM tape or optical media is as good as it gets, no matter what gets compromised. If tape companies do this, they definitely will have an expanded market, especially if their product is combined with a NAS of some sort, so a backup of the NAS can be as simple as putting tape in and hitting a button.
Yes, it is a waste of time, but McAfee and Symantec both have ICSA certified AV solutions which run on Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. This is crucial in a lot of environments to make the legal eagles happy, and check that box off that "all computers run a certified AV solution", even if the machines are LPARs or LDOMs.
Sounds idiotic, but PCI-DSS and other specs can require this, even though the AV software, at best, will be deadweight.
I am not sure what tier this storage goes in, as for price/capacity, where CPU registers are the most precious and tape, cloud, or big, slow DASDs are on the other scale of speed/price.
Does it go under flash, but "above" spinning rust? The BD example made it seem that IBM is wanting to make another CD-PD, which was a storage format that lasted a few years until CD-R and CD-RW became mainstream, where a drive could read CDs, as well as use a specific optical cartridge.
Personally, I would love a high density, cheap optical storage medium. Optical disks are easier to manipulate than tapes (wasn't that long ago when everyone had 400 CD autochangers), and because of the size, can be stored with more units in a given space than tapes. If the optical medium is cheap and WORM, that would provide excellent protection against ransomware, as well as the ability to store media offline.
If it goes between flash and spinning disks, that isn't really a useful market niche, as flash is getting cheaper all the time.
Just the fact that a SDC can drive much closer means that at least 2-3 times as many vehicles can fit in the same stretch of road as before. Combine that with the ability to replace traffic signals, stop signs, and it means faster driving overall. Highway intersections that require multi-level construction can be replaced by a simple four-way, with vehicle computers adjusting speed so they can go through safely and at highway speeds.
Of course, there is one reason why SDCs will be overall better than HDCs: Wrecks. Lower the chance of those happening, it it will help immensely. There is also the fact that SDCs don't get drunk, tripping, high, or in a state that renders them unusable for driving. This is arguably the chief cause of wrecks, so by that factor being further mitigates, it will help traffic flow and overall commute times significantly.
It would be interesting for the ability to add more drives dynamically, perhaps with a new RAID type that can work with dynamic adding and removing of drives, minimizing the time the array is in a degraded state.
My "ideal" of a filesystem that sits on BSD is EMC Isilon's OneFS or NetApp's WAFL filesystem. This not just offers what ZFS has, but the ability to link other nodes via Infiniband and use their filesystems, presenting a filesystem which is redundant across drives, and redundant across nodes. If a drive fails on an Isilon cluster, it can be configured to rebuild itself, except with less disk space, so redundancy is preserved. I've even encountered severely neglected Isilon clusters that have had over half their drives dead, and the only reason the users noticed was that they ran out of disk space.
It can be argued that testing the OS as a gestalt is a good thing. One good idea is how AIX does releases. You have your OS revisions and your APARs as patches, but you have technology level updates as well, which are not truly OS updates per se... but a snapshot in time where all packages and updates have been thoroughly regression tested. It would be interesting to have something similar on a quarterly basis. This is sort of handled by OS updates like RHEL 6.8 which was recently released, but would be something that would be more guaranteed to happen at a time of the year, so every so often, there is a solid base to start at for OS imaging.
Amazon has a bunch of Dash buttons, but I wonder if they would do better making the buttons with an e-Ink display so only one model is needed, and depending on the function or product it is paired/activated with, would display the logo of that.
This would definitely be useful for IoT.
I do have a 13" MBP, and about every two weeks, it will be unresponsive when I SSH or RDP into it, and a screen lock pops the pinwheel of death...forcing a hard shutdown.
Even more quirky, if FileVault is in use, upon reboot, it will block the keyboard input for a random duration (30-60 seconds), allow keyboard/mouse movement for 100-500 milliseconds, then block it again. To get around this, if I don't do a "fdeutil authrestart" as a way of rebooting, I have to clear the NVRAM, and after doing that, it boots without issue... until it is time to restart again. Initally, with 10.10, I didn't have that issue until the update last August. 10.11 seemed to clear that up until about 2-3 months ago when it came back.
I know Apple can do better than this. They control the vertical and horizontal with their hardware. My 2008 MB (first unibody aluminum model) is still going strong, after a battery, SSD, and RAM update. The 15" MBP I use has zero issues with it. My iToys work flawlessly.
Even though Macs are not Apple's cash cow, it would be nice if Apple could either pay more attention to them, or if that isn't the company's focus, spin Macs off into a separate company that can focus on making the absolute best x86 hardware out there.
The good news is that fast food joints are facing a population and customer base that is going elsewhere. IIRC, McDonald's has been hurting because of this.
There are a lot of people who don't have time/money to go to other places, but there are people who will either just go home and nuke a frozen meal or actually cook if they get fed up with what fast food joints are doing. Or, they just go to another fast food joint. Instead of Wendy's, there is a Dairy Queen. Or in north Austin, there is a Sonic, Wally's or other place. If downtown in Austin, there is Hut's.
I think adding automation just for the purpose of lashing back at higher minimum wages is self-defeating. Had Wendy's just added kiosks to help with order accuracy... completely different thing (because we all have had that issue of wrong orders.)
I wonder if this actually helps things. Does the churn of employees every year actually beat dealing with someone who might be unlucky to not make the cut? It might not be their fault. I've seen sales managers get handed dud employees, just so the manager gets booted come the next mass firing. If someone is already underperforming, shouldn't it be caught by the normal performance review process which is part of HR's job?
I know it is cool to pretend to be the head honcho on the Apprentice and yell, "you're fired" to people, but does this make actual business sense, with regards to morale and such? That ill will can last a long time. I have personally seen contracts lost when someone from company "A" gets fired, starts at company "B" who is company "A"'s main customer, and then changes from company "A" to company "C" just out of spite... and those contracts mean a lot more money than just a salary or two.
I would throw the concept of Mazlow's Pyramid into this. If basic food and security are not present, you will not get much from people in the way of advances. By a guarenteed basic income, which would let people focus on other things than trying to eke enough for food, it would allow people to spend time doing research, making stuff, designing cooler items, and advancing the arts and sciences in general. The Renaissance is an object lesson to this, when people had time to do something other than toil in the fields.
It sounds "cool" to tell people to just go eat cake, but that philosophy has its blowback. Look at how the US has stagnated, while countries that guarantee some means of knowing where one's next meal is coming from are advancing. A population that is barely existing is not a population that is inventing and advancing science.
I am not impressed with Bluetooth speakers. If I try one during a conference call, it either has 0 volume or KISS concert, deaf-in-5-seconds volume as the next step up. Even then, people say that one can't be heard.
Now, add IoT stuff to the mix, which would allow any blackhat who manages to find the device now has a dedicated microphone to record what is going on 24/7? Not worth the cash or the bother. Especially with the state of IoT where security updates are talked about, but rarely done, just because to IoT firms, "security has no ROI", and they want people to buy their new stuff, not expect upgrades to their existing items.
I came across an article where even MS recommends moving to git from TFS, and IIRC, TFS also functions as a git server.
If MS double-downs on an OSS technology, that definitely means something.