The ironic thing is when a market hits a stable point and competitors are stagnant, that's when you toss money into R&D and start reworking a market segment. Before Apple came in, the cell phone market was stagnant (RAZR v3 anyone?)
The desktop market is ripe for this, and all it takes is a significant step by one company with a must-have feature, and everyone (including the big enterprises) will be either knocking on their door, or trying to build something similar at a feverish pace.
I do have high hopes for this guy. MS, though not as flashy as other computer companies, has a lot of directions it can go for growth/innovation. They sit on a lot of technologies, and pretty much own the enterprise. MS had some bumps last year, but the main reason they emerged profitable was the price hike on their server products.
To make content publishers happy, Adobe has to update its DRM scheme once in a while. This could be as simple as obfuscating a stored key a slightly different way on disk. However, it keeps the content people happy, as it makes it look like that their works are kept well protected and the pirates are at bay.
The PC market isn't going down the tubes. It just has reached a point where it isn't growing, because there are so many players for that market. However, even now, the desktop isn't going away. It is a content creation device while tablets and smartphones are intended to be content consumption items. Yes, in theory one can use a BlueTooth keyboard with a tablet, but that tends to be a cautious exception.
It wouldn't be hard for Dell or PC companies to revive the desktop market. It could be little things like putting a copy of the OS install media into a read-only flash drive on the motherboard (not a new concept -- some Tandy AT compatibles had MS-DOS in ROM.), having a read-only recovery ROM that boots Linux or Windows PE with the ability to have updated AV definitions on a USB flash drive.
There can perhaps be bigger jumps. A lot of people use their desktops/laptops as "servers" where the machine holds their synced music, eBooks, Quicken documents, Office items, etc. Why not add server functionality, such as a hypervisor so one can have different VMs for tasks, a smarter drive controller which can actively deduplicate present logical drives, snapshot, perhaps even autotier. Backups could be handled by the controller by attaching a USB drive, and saving the snapshots off similar to how it is done in ZFS. Plus, this gives a layer of abstraction so a hardware upgrade would just mean moving the VMs to the new machine rather than having to reinstall and reload apps.
Yes, desktops/laptops are stagnant, but definitely not dead. There is plenty of room for innovation.
If the Steambox One is open enough where I can run Linux stuff in the background, this might be useful for a general home server. If it is locked down just like every other console, meh, I'll pass.
I'd take a gander at various RV forums, and this happens fairly often. The 30A, 120VAC receptacle has a U-shaped ground. The older 30A, 240VAC receptacle has an L-shaped neutral. Modern dryer outlets in the are four-pronged (a ground was added) which makes this a moot issue in any install made in the past decade), but sometimes people still confuse or miswire the two in an older place.
I've wondered similar, except a space for an Onan generator. Since Onan gensets can be gasoline, LP gas, or diesel, one can pick what fuel supply they want to use, have that genset installed and be good to go.
Of course, the gensets are made for AC voltage, but that is what the charger is made to handle. It probably would not take much work to make DC generators so only DC-DC conversion would be necessary to keep the car's batteries going while on a long trip.
Nail, head hit. It would be nice to have multiple standards for charging stations, and it work across all cars. If we can do this with phones (MicroUSB), we can do this with cars, except with some caveats:
1: Circuits may vary. One place may have a 15 amp, 120VAC circuit at best. Another place might have an 80 amp circuit to support higher chargers, with a 50 amp subpanel coming from it to handle current charging needs.
2: The charger would need some safety features, If someone stuck a fork in a charging cord and got even a tingle, the lawsuits would be flying. Most current chargers are goof-resistant, but this is definitely an issue, especially in the US where I've seen workers stick two straightened clothes hangers into an outlet, then use alligator clips between those and the prongs on a plug.
3: Patent neutral. This needs to be a benefit for everyone, as vendor-neutral chargers will help every player in the market.
4: Low voltage failsafes. US power can be dirty [1], so it should either downshift or stop trying to charge altogether if it gets under 90 volts.
5: High voltage failsafes... Same reason. Just in case someone hooked up 120VAC to 240 or vice versa. This isn't an issue in Europe and the rest of the world, but there are a lot of RVs killed each year by plugging into a 240VAC dryer outlet which is almost the same shape as a 30 amp, 120VAC receptacle.
[1]: As a RV-er, a hard-wired EMS is a must if one doesn't want to fry their A/C due to voltage sags.
That is good info to know. A SAS card is a couple C-notes, so it wouldn't be too expensive to build a server around that pretty easily.
With motherboards starting to come out with Thunderbolt already present, coupled with LTO-6 drives that use that interface, even a SAS card might not be a must. I even wonder if a Mac Mini might be able to drive an external Thunderbolt tape drive.
Not to say that optical has its place -- it is cheap, but if one can pay for a LTO-6 drive, one ends up getting a lot more bang per media, more compression, and hardware level AES encryption via SPIN/SPOUT.
If HVD actually made it into mass production, it would be a game-changer. However, it would have to be a different diameter than CDs/DVDs/BD media... that or else be able to read the previous media types.
I remember when Tamarak out of Austin was promising a similar product, and they died with not even a whimper in the early 1990s.
Wonder what keeps holographic tech from hitting the market.
EFOY fuel cells have been in the field for a while now. In fact, if you are willing to pony up the $8000 or so, you can get one for your RV. You have to use their methanol cartridges which are 150 bones per 10 liters, but they give out constant, relatively quiet power to keep RV batteries charged even at night, without needing to fire up a generator or start the vehicle's engine.
I've been in Houston under extreme rain/heavy electrical storm conditions. No wrecks leaving there. Come into Austin, and I had to take a number of detours due to people smashing up everywhere.
So, Houston drivers might not be great, but they are definitely a notch above Austin. If Austin gets a sprinkle of rain, the main interstate will be shut down due to wrecks.
TFA was murky, but generating bogus data? If one is brute forcing a data blob, how can it make stuff up? Authentication is another story.
Are they meaning to make a system similar to Phonebookfs? This is an interesting filesystem used with FUSE. You have different layers over the same directory, so one encryption key may allow you to grab one set of files, another key, a different set. Then there is chaff present that cannot be decrypted under any circumstances and provides plausible deniability.
Is something like phonebookfs what they are intending?
Even Windows had working HSM until 2008 R2 killed it. It was useful when disk was expensive -- just have a drive that you tossed your junk onto, and the OS moved it to tape.
With the next rev of USB, I wonder if it would be possible to have a LTO-6 drive usable on most machines without a Thunderbolt connection or a SAS card.
For the big boys, HSM + LTO6 + a decent tape library + some method of backing/duplicating stored tapes is the idea solution. It would be nice if this technology could wind up in the SMB world, where optical (or just external HDDs) is king now.
I'm going into tinfoil hat territory, but I wonder if there is some advance in BD storage that FB is assuming, but the average person does not know about. If BDXL disks drop from $45.00 per disk to $1 a disk or even $2 a disk, that would change the game. Similarly, Sony/Panasonic's Blu-Ray successor that stores 300GB per disk would also be a big thing, should each disk be priced at a reasonable amount.
For a drive + 50 BD-R disks per TB, I'm looking at a C-note for the drive and $25 for each terabyte after that.
For a modern tape drive, I'm looking at $3500 for the drive and $65 per 2.5 TB, native capacity.
This also doesn't include hardware and software. For the LTO-6 drive, I need a dedicated server with a SAS card and a high end backup program. For Blu-Ray... it can be used, albeit slowly, with a USB 2.0 connection, but works decently with eSATA or USB 3.0.
For the big stuff, the relatively cheap price per TB of the LTO-6 drive is useful. However, not everyone can spend about $6000 for the drive, I/O card, and a decent server that can run it.
I've yet to find a single media solution that has stood the test of time. Yes, I might be able to pull data from a tape from the 1990s, or a burned CD from 1998... but I wouldn't want to bet my data on it. Long term, the only way to do things is archive data in a format that detects (and corrects) errors (I use WinRAR, but.PAR archives work as well) and keep moving them forward in media.
Even cloud storage is unreliable. I have had sync errors completely flatten my TC volumes stored on DropBox, and restoring from Amazon Glacier is doable... but is something I have as an absolute last resort.
I've been using the Optical Quantums that dugancent mentioned for a year now, and have had very good luck with them. They are about 50 cents per.
They are slow blanks, burning at 4X, but you get what you pay for, and for large backups running in the background, they are good enough. I've saved off terabytes of data using WinRAR split volumes (with recovery archives just in case) and Nero SecureDisk burning, which makes it easy to check integrity of disks before starting a restore.
Some technologies come full circle. I'm reminded of Kodak's optical storage technologies that stored 3-6 gigs on large (8 inch?) MO platters in a jukebox that had its built in "clean room". The advantage of this technology was the fact that once burned, the data was there forever, which was useful for long term archiving.
Rewritable MO disks came out in drive arrays after that, arrays that had the ability to flip disks, so it could read/write the both sides (300 megs per side.)
Optical tech ended up on the sidelines because tape got cheap, especially when DLT started having decent capacities and tapes with WORM capabilities hit the data centers.
Now, tape drives are very expensive, and require a LOT of I/O on the attached computer, or else they will shoe-shine themselves into oblivion.
In the past, optical burners had issues, buffer underrun was one of those. Now, with modern ones that just turn off the laser once the buffer empties and resume very close to where it left off once data starts arriving again.
With tape out of the price range, I have not understood why someone hasn't made a Blu-Ray autochanger. Sony has one, but it is a carousel unit made for playing. However, couple that with a BDXL drive, "flippy" disks that have two sides for twice the writability, and that would provide more than adequate storage on an archival basis for large volumes of data. Two autochangers will allow one to have the ability to move data offsite, and almost every backup program out there has some form of encryption on it.
I just don't see why this isn't done. Even a 5-10 Blu-Ray autochanger that used five disk caddies (so one could just load the pack, and then not have to touch the media after that) would be immensely useful for critical backups.
Because they are electric cars that look good, and not the hideous little bubbles that a number of previous electric vehicles looked like.
Plus, Tesla vehicles are interesting. They have a pickup truck in the works, and being to put together something like that is something no company has even attempted yet. GM has tried to make a hybrid Silverado for a few years, but gave up the effort. If Tesla can pull this off, it would provide a lot of utility, from not having to have a generator on site (just a heavy duty PSW inverter to handle power tools) to max torque at 0 RPM, there are a lot of advantages to an electric pickup.
You can make Android pretty decent by starting off with a device with an unlockable bootloader and using CM or another decent ROM. I've always added a firewall (root needed) so if an app doesn't need to communicate out, it won't get out, no matter if it has that permission or not.
I'd recommend reading the EULA of any "free" E-mail provider. All of them reserve the right (in some wording or another) to go looking through the mailbox as they see fit to sell to advertisers.
Want E-mail privacy? One has to do like they did before the advent of Hotmail, and either pay for a custom domain +hosting or pay for a private ISP for mail hosting. I personally use SaaSHost.net [1], but there are many others that are good.
I prefer a provider that only does paid subscriptions, no ad revenue. That way, no matter what, you are the customer, not the product.
What I'd like to see is something similar to the old LBE Privacy Guard (which doesn't have a version in English for recent Android releases.) That way, even though an app might ask for everything under the sun, one can turn on functionality that prompts if an app can do something, similar to how iOS and BlackberryOS do things.
For non-technical users, they can leave that off and either allow/deny apps on install. For more technical users, they can turn off a permission either explicitly (with an exception or error returned), or false data (so a GPS request ends up winding up in the same place such as USENET Central Administration's address.)
I like having functionality similar to the Cydia app, PMP (Protect My Privacy). That way, if something asks for everything under the sun and won't work without it, the app can data-mine all day... all it will get is random garbage for contacts, random meme pictures, and randomly generated death metal band names.
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The ironic thing is when a market hits a stable point and competitors are stagnant, that's when you toss money into R&D and start reworking a market segment. Before Apple came in, the cell phone market was stagnant (RAZR v3 anyone?)
The desktop market is ripe for this, and all it takes is a significant step by one company with a must-have feature, and everyone (including the big enterprises) will be either knocking on their door, or trying to build something similar at a feverish pace.
He isn't tossing chairs just yet.
I do have high hopes for this guy. MS, though not as flashy as other computer companies, has a lot of directions it can go for growth/innovation. They sit on a lot of technologies, and pretty much own the enterprise. MS had some bumps last year, but the main reason they emerged profitable was the price hike on their server products.
To make content publishers happy, Adobe has to update its DRM scheme once in a while. This could be as simple as obfuscating a stored key a slightly different way on disk. However, it keeps the content people happy, as it makes it look like that their works are kept well protected and the pirates are at bay.
The PC market isn't going down the tubes. It just has reached a point where it isn't growing, because there are so many players for that market. However, even now, the desktop isn't going away. It is a content creation device while tablets and smartphones are intended to be content consumption items. Yes, in theory one can use a BlueTooth keyboard with a tablet, but that tends to be a cautious exception.
It wouldn't be hard for Dell or PC companies to revive the desktop market. It could be little things like putting a copy of the OS install media into a read-only flash drive on the motherboard (not a new concept -- some Tandy AT compatibles had MS-DOS in ROM.), having a read-only recovery ROM that boots Linux or Windows PE with the ability to have updated AV definitions on a USB flash drive.
There can perhaps be bigger jumps. A lot of people use their desktops/laptops as "servers" where the machine holds their synced music, eBooks, Quicken documents, Office items, etc. Why not add server functionality, such as a hypervisor so one can have different VMs for tasks, a smarter drive controller which can actively deduplicate present logical drives, snapshot, perhaps even autotier. Backups could be handled by the controller by attaching a USB drive, and saving the snapshots off similar to how it is done in ZFS. Plus, this gives a layer of abstraction so a hardware upgrade would just mean moving the VMs to the new machine rather than having to reinstall and reload apps.
Yes, desktops/laptops are stagnant, but definitely not dead. There is plenty of room for innovation.
If the Steambox One is open enough where I can run Linux stuff in the background, this might be useful for a general home server. If it is locked down just like every other console, meh, I'll pass.
I'd take a gander at various RV forums, and this happens fairly often. The 30A, 120VAC receptacle has a U-shaped ground. The older 30A, 240VAC receptacle has an L-shaped neutral. Modern dryer outlets in the are four-pronged (a ground was added) which makes this a moot issue in any install made in the past decade), but sometimes people still confuse or miswire the two in an older place.
I've wondered similar, except a space for an Onan generator. Since Onan gensets can be gasoline, LP gas, or diesel, one can pick what fuel supply they want to use, have that genset installed and be good to go.
Of course, the gensets are made for AC voltage, but that is what the charger is made to handle. It probably would not take much work to make DC generators so only DC-DC conversion would be necessary to keep the car's batteries going while on a long trip.
Nail, head hit. It would be nice to have multiple standards for charging stations, and it work across all cars. If we can do this with phones (MicroUSB), we can do this with cars, except with some caveats:
1: Circuits may vary. One place may have a 15 amp, 120VAC circuit at best. Another place might have an 80 amp circuit to support higher chargers, with a 50 amp subpanel coming from it to handle current charging needs.
2: The charger would need some safety features, If someone stuck a fork in a charging cord and got even a tingle, the lawsuits would be flying. Most current chargers are goof-resistant, but this is definitely an issue, especially in the US where I've seen workers stick two straightened clothes hangers into an outlet, then use alligator clips between those and the prongs on a plug.
3: Patent neutral. This needs to be a benefit for everyone, as vendor-neutral chargers will help every player in the market.
4: Low voltage failsafes. US power can be dirty [1], so it should either downshift or stop trying to charge altogether if it gets under 90 volts.
5: High voltage failsafes... Same reason. Just in case someone hooked up 120VAC to 240 or vice versa. This isn't an issue in Europe and the rest of the world, but there are a lot of RVs killed each year by plugging into a 240VAC dryer outlet which is almost the same shape as a 30 amp, 120VAC receptacle.
[1]: As a RV-er, a hard-wired EMS is a must if one doesn't want to fry their A/C due to voltage sags.
I assume the fart scent means quittin' time, or would be that the mid-afternoon scent after lunch?
That is good info to know. A SAS card is a couple C-notes, so it wouldn't be too expensive to build a server around that pretty easily.
With motherboards starting to come out with Thunderbolt already present, coupled with LTO-6 drives that use that interface, even a SAS card might not be a must. I even wonder if a Mac Mini might be able to drive an external Thunderbolt tape drive.
Not to say that optical has its place -- it is cheap, but if one can pay for a LTO-6 drive, one ends up getting a lot more bang per media, more compression, and hardware level AES encryption via SPIN/SPOUT.
If HVD actually made it into mass production, it would be a game-changer. However, it would have to be a different diameter than CDs/DVDs/BD media... that or else be able to read the previous media types.
I remember when Tamarak out of Austin was promising a similar product, and they died with not even a whimper in the early 1990s.
Wonder what keeps holographic tech from hitting the market.
EFOY fuel cells have been in the field for a while now. In fact, if you are willing to pony up the $8000 or so, you can get one for your RV. You have to use their methanol cartridges which are 150 bones per 10 liters, but they give out constant, relatively quiet power to keep RV batteries charged even at night, without needing to fire up a generator or start the vehicle's engine.
I've been in Houston under extreme rain/heavy electrical storm conditions. No wrecks leaving there. Come into Austin, and I had to take a number of detours due to people smashing up everywhere.
So, Houston drivers might not be great, but they are definitely a notch above Austin. If Austin gets a sprinkle of rain, the main interstate will be shut down due to wrecks.
TFA was murky, but generating bogus data? If one is brute forcing a data blob, how can it make stuff up? Authentication is another story.
Are they meaning to make a system similar to Phonebookfs? This is an interesting filesystem used with FUSE. You have different layers over the same directory, so one encryption key may allow you to grab one set of files, another key, a different set. Then there is chaff present that cannot be decrypted under any circumstances and provides plausible deniability.
Is something like phonebookfs what they are intending?
Even Windows had working HSM until 2008 R2 killed it. It was useful when disk was expensive -- just have a drive that you tossed your junk onto, and the OS moved it to tape.
With the next rev of USB, I wonder if it would be possible to have a LTO-6 drive usable on most machines without a Thunderbolt connection or a SAS card.
For the big boys, HSM + LTO6 + a decent tape library + some method of backing/duplicating stored tapes is the idea solution. It would be nice if this technology could wind up in the SMB world, where optical (or just external HDDs) is king now.
I'm going into tinfoil hat territory, but I wonder if there is some advance in BD storage that FB is assuming, but the average person does not know about. If BDXL disks drop from $45.00 per disk to $1 a disk or even $2 a disk, that would change the game. Similarly, Sony/Panasonic's Blu-Ray successor that stores 300GB per disk would also be a big thing, should each disk be priced at a reasonable amount.
For a drive + 50 BD-R disks per TB, I'm looking at a C-note for the drive and $25 for each terabyte after that.
For a modern tape drive, I'm looking at $3500 for the drive and $65 per 2.5 TB, native capacity.
This also doesn't include hardware and software. For the LTO-6 drive, I need a dedicated server with a SAS card and a high end backup program. For Blu-Ray... it can be used, albeit slowly, with a USB 2.0 connection, but works decently with eSATA or USB 3.0.
For the big stuff, the relatively cheap price per TB of the LTO-6 drive is useful. However, not everyone can spend about $6000 for the drive, I/O card, and a decent server that can run it.
I've yet to find a single media solution that has stood the test of time. Yes, I might be able to pull data from a tape from the 1990s, or a burned CD from 1998... but I wouldn't want to bet my data on it. Long term, the only way to do things is archive data in a format that detects (and corrects) errors (I use WinRAR, but .PAR archives work as well) and keep moving them forward in media.
Even cloud storage is unreliable. I have had sync errors completely flatten my TC volumes stored on DropBox, and restoring from Amazon Glacier is doable... but is something I have as an absolute last resort.
I've been using the Optical Quantums that dugancent mentioned for a year now, and have had very good luck with them. They are about 50 cents per.
They are slow blanks, burning at 4X, but you get what you pay for, and for large backups running in the background, they are good enough. I've saved off terabytes of data using WinRAR split volumes (with recovery archives just in case) and Nero SecureDisk burning, which makes it easy to check integrity of disks before starting a restore.
Some technologies come full circle. I'm reminded of Kodak's optical storage technologies that stored 3-6 gigs on large (8 inch?) MO platters in a jukebox that had its built in "clean room". The advantage of this technology was the fact that once burned, the data was there forever, which was useful for long term archiving.
Rewritable MO disks came out in drive arrays after that, arrays that had the ability to flip disks, so it could read/write the both sides (300 megs per side.)
Optical tech ended up on the sidelines because tape got cheap, especially when DLT started having decent capacities and tapes with WORM capabilities hit the data centers.
Now, tape drives are very expensive, and require a LOT of I/O on the attached computer, or else they will shoe-shine themselves into oblivion.
In the past, optical burners had issues, buffer underrun was one of those. Now, with modern ones that just turn off the laser once the buffer empties and resume very close to where it left off once data starts arriving again.
With tape out of the price range, I have not understood why someone hasn't made a Blu-Ray autochanger. Sony has one, but it is a carousel unit made for playing. However, couple that with a BDXL drive, "flippy" disks that have two sides for twice the writability, and that would provide more than adequate storage on an archival basis for large volumes of data. Two autochangers will allow one to have the ability to move data offsite, and almost every backup program out there has some form of encryption on it.
I just don't see why this isn't done. Even a 5-10 Blu-Ray autochanger that used five disk caddies (so one could just load the pack, and then not have to touch the media after that) would be immensely useful for critical backups.
Sewage is one thing, but if we can mine storm drains where the golf course runoff goes, that is where this device would be extremely useful.
Because they are electric cars that look good, and not the hideous little bubbles that a number of previous electric vehicles looked like.
Plus, Tesla vehicles are interesting. They have a pickup truck in the works, and being to put together something like that is something no company has even attempted yet. GM has tried to make a hybrid Silverado for a few years, but gave up the effort. If Tesla can pull this off, it would provide a lot of utility, from not having to have a generator on site (just a heavy duty PSW inverter to handle power tools) to max torque at 0 RPM, there are a lot of advantages to an electric pickup.
You can make Android pretty decent by starting off with a device with an unlockable bootloader and using CM or another decent ROM. I've always added a firewall (root needed) so if an app doesn't need to communicate out, it won't get out, no matter if it has that permission or not.
I'd recommend reading the EULA of any "free" E-mail provider. All of them reserve the right (in some wording or another) to go looking through the mailbox as they see fit to sell to advertisers.
Want E-mail privacy? One has to do like they did before the advent of Hotmail, and either pay for a custom domain +hosting or pay for a private ISP for mail hosting. I personally use SaaSHost.net [1], but there are many others that are good.
I prefer a provider that only does paid subscriptions, no ad revenue. That way, no matter what, you are the customer, not the product.
What I'd like to see is something similar to the old LBE Privacy Guard (which doesn't have a version in English for recent Android releases.) That way, even though an app might ask for everything under the sun, one can turn on functionality that prompts if an app can do something, similar to how iOS and BlackberryOS do things.
For non-technical users, they can leave that off and either allow/deny apps on install. For more technical users, they can turn off a permission either explicitly (with an exception or error returned), or false data (so a GPS request ends up winding up in the same place such as USENET Central Administration's address.)
I like having functionality similar to the Cydia app, PMP (Protect My Privacy). That way, if something asks for everything under the sun and won't work without it, the app can data-mine all day... all it will get is random garbage for contacts, random meme pictures, and randomly generated death metal band names.