Kodak is, indeed, a good example. Folks often forget that Kodak wasn't just a camera company. Kodak was a paper company and, more importantly, a film company and chemical company. Instead of employing lots of people to manufacture film in the United States, we now have flash cards that are assembled almost entirely by machine, usually in China. Instead of Kodak selling developer chemicals to tens of thousands of small film processing facilities around the country, these days, we have people just uploading their photos to Flickr. And so on. Of course, it isn't just Kodak; they're just the top of the pyramid of companies that depended on Kodak.
On the flip side, those people were mostly not in the middle class. I doubt that working in a 1-hour film lab was ever a high-paying job, for example. Instead, what we have are a lot more people at the bottom of the class hierarchy who are going on to college because there are too many workers and not enough low-skill jobs. This, in turn, results in too many people at the next pay grade, and so on. The result is positive in some ways, in that people are better educated, but negative in others, in that having a glut of possible candidates tends to make employers less willing to pay good salaries with good benefits, because the employers don't have to compete as hard with other companies to find good talent..
So yeah, this article is probably at least to some degree true (judging solely by the summary).
The current generation of "smart" TV's with every brand having their own interface is getting a bit tedious. Give me Android, give me Firefox OS, even give me iOS if you have to.
The problem is, even if they are based on Android, they still will probably each have their own interface. For some reason, every company seems to think they understand UI design better than whoever designs the standard Android interface, and unfortunately, more often than not, they're wrong.:-)
And if you're really unlucky, you end up with a smart TV that won't play Netflix reliably and a smart Blu-Ray player that won't play video from Amazon reliably....
Wow. Having only used Apple and D-Link Wi-Fi hardware (both of which support Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridging out of the box), I would have assumed that bridging was considered basic functionality. I'm kind of surprised any hardware can't do that out of the box....
yup.. affordability and openness were what made wrt54gl so popular and gave it unsurpassed longevity in a market filled with 'disposable' products.
Disposability is exactly what concerns me about Linksys being acquired by Belkin. Over the years, I've used two products by Belkin: a USB to serial adapter (1999), which apparently had a dead short and caused my whole computer to shut off instantly as soon as I plugged it in for the first time, and a Wi-Fi router (2007-ish), which crashed under any actual traffic load.
Maybe they've improved their product quality since then—I have no idea, as I won't touch anything with the Belkin name on it at this point. Either way, only time will tell whether this is built with the same quality control and high quality component selection that went into the previous models, or whether it got Belkin'ed....
BTW, just out of curiosity, as somebody who has never had the need to install OpenWRT, DD-WRT, or Tomato on a router, what features do folks use that necessitate doing so?
To use GP's simplistic terminology, their cellular reproduction mechanism is built to wear down slower, but that doesn't mean it doesn't wear at all.
The existence of two-thousand-year-old redwood trees and five-hundred-year-old clams at least suggests that this might not be universally true. Either way, though, it isn't (usually) the tumor that's the main problem; it's the metastasis. The lack thereof is the primary reason that even though plants do occasionally get tumors (usually as a result of bacterial infections, fungal infections, or other damage), they typically don't die from them.
Assuming that it doesn't lead to autoimmune problems down the road, I strongly suspect that immunotherapy (programming the immune system to identify the damaged cells and attack them) will become a much more commonplace treatment for cancer, precisely because it cuts off that metastasis process.
The reason why networks have been fighting against streaming is because they didn't see a business case.
The reason they don't see a business case is that they're too stupid to qualify as sentient. You want a business case, here's one in only nine words: When people miss an episode, they don't stop watching.
The main reason that people stop watching a TV show is that they miss watching a show for some reason and/or miss TiVo-ing an episode and don't discover it until after the rerun (which is only a couple of hours later). Then, they can't find a way to watch the show that they missed without paying for it, decide that it isn't worth paying for, and say that they'll start watching again when the network reruns the entire season over the summer. Then, they forget, and never watch the show again. Network shows probably lose more viewers because of the inability to get caught up than from all other causes put together.
If a network doesn't make its shows available until a week after the shows air, that's too late to be useful. By the time someone can watch a week-delayed show online, they've already missed the next show. Rinse and repeat. The single most common reason for watching shows online breaks down completely when there is a significant delay between when the show airs and when it becomes available online, because you'll never be able to switch over and start watching it on TV again, which means you can't talk about this week's episode, etc., which means word-of-mouth advertising for the show breaks down, etc. At that point, you might as well stop watching the show on OTA/cable television entirely, and start watching it on Amazon Prime streaming when it comes out a year later. That way, you avoid all the commercials, the waiting between episodes, etc.
Because destroying what looks like decorative bamboo to an untrained eye is not anywhere close to what you described.
JFK customs inspectors removed and smashed eleven handmade flutes (or thirteen, according to some stories). That's not the level of destruction that should ever be allowed without multiple sign-offs by supervisors and speaking to the owner of those items to determine whether the items fall into one of the many, many exceptions to U.S. import laws (which they did). Anything less than that level of care clearly crosses the line into gross criminal negligence territory.
Do you really think a clarinet or violin would be seized and destroyed based on one story of decorative bamboo?
The bigger concern is that nearly all non-digital musical instruments (and some digital instruments) contain agricultural products by such a loose definition. Almost every oboe, clarinet, stringed instrument, etc. worth more than a hundred bucks is made out of wood. Even brass instruments and metal woodwinds (e.g. saxes and flutes) use cork for pads, for stops on keys, for tunable joints, for the ring at the top of trumpet valves, for water key/spit valve corks, and so on (though in some cases, it may be a synthetic cork). Even the felt used in various parts of the instrument may be made from agricultural products.
What this effectively means is that the United States government has declared all musical instruments to be illegal contraband that may not be transported into the United States. Musicians around the world would be advised to avoid travel to the United States and its territories for any reason, or if you cannot avoid travel to this country, arrange to rent an instrument after you get here. It simply is no longer safe to carry your own instruments across the borders of this country until Congress passes a law explicitly forbidding these acts of grand theft.
We could demand real privacy, but its a dream we lost that right once we became meshed in social media and the need to share.
That's a fallacy. I choose what I share on social media. Granted, I can't control what other people share about me, but that was just as true before social media; we just used to call it gossiping. That's why you have to be careful who you trust with things that you consider secret—keep your secrets secret and all that.
Here's why PCIe flash storage doesn't matter: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of computers sold in 2013 were desktops, and that number is quite literally plummeting. If you include tablets in your figures, desktops are barely above the single digits. Therefore, any flash drive standard that hopes to survive for more than the next couple of years must be external. Internal PCIe storage cards simply aren't a viable market for storage vendors long-term, which means they're going to become more and more rare as competing (external) standards take hold.
GPUs are another question, but then again, most folks never upgrade them, with the exception of Slashdot users.:-)
It's certainly possible that SATA Express will end up being the dominant standard for hard drives, or we might end up with some new miniature PCIe connector, or we might even see flash drives that speak NVMe over Thunderbolt PCIe directly. Either way, the nice thing about Thunderbolt is that by being trivially bridgeable to PCIe, it dodges the issue by making it relatively straightforward to add SATA Express devices (at full speed) if that standard ends up becoming the market leader.
Of course, NVMe over Thunderbolt directly would be about 25% faster than the current incarnation of SATA Express, so that's certainly the direction I hope things take.
I'll grant you limited choice in video cards, but otherwise, personally, I think you're putting too much emphasis on legacy hardware whose importance is waning.
Standard-sized PCIe as a physical card architecture (as opposed to an internal bus architecture) is basically dead and buried already. With the exception of flash storage, almost nothing uses PCIe cards anymore, even in the pro audio and video space. Everything is external, because external peripherals are easier to deal with—easier to install, easier to replace when they fail, etc. Of course, for the few people who do still need PCIe, you can use a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe chassis, so long as you don't need anything faster than x4 PCIe 2.0 speeds. That pretty much covers 99.999% of non-graphics-card use of PCIe.
And SATA is dog slow compared with Thunderbolt. A single Thunderbolt 2 port is fast enough to hang three of the fastest 6 Gbps SATA drives off of it and still have enough spare bandwidth to handle a half-speed (S200) FireWire device on top of that, all without performance degradation. As a result, there are already Thunderbolt to SATA adapters that run at full SATA speeds, and lots of manufacturers also make RAID enclosures that let you stick several SATA drives on a Thunderbolt bus, with big performance wins over USB-, FireWire-, or SATA-based RAID enclosures.
Of course, in the long run, it seems likely that storage will move towards direct PCIe flash storage (like the internal storage in the Mac Pro) because it is much faster than SATA is currently capable of supporting, because flash is much faster than hard drives, and because in a Thunderbolt world, SATA is an unnecessary bit of protocol bloat that can only reduce performance, not improve it. When flash becomes cheap enough, SATA will likely fade into obsolescence, though for folks who need lots and lots of storage in the short term, that isn't the case yet, hence the RAID enclosures.
It is not even theoretically possible for the freedom-loving individual to win against us statists.
On the contrary, historically, it has happened about once every couple of centuries, and usually begins and ends with a bunch of particularly egregious statists' severed heads stuck on the fence outside the palace. Then, inevitably, a new batch of statists claws their way to power, until eventually it gets so bad that the public does it all over again.
Linux's end-user experience is way behind because their driver model doesn't play well with binary drivers over the long term. It isn't a question of whether the apps require drivers, but rather how many years behind the Linux graphics drivers are, how many devices don't work with it out of the box, and so on. Sure, the major GPU vendors are starting to open source usable drivers recently, but getting there has been an uphill battle for the roughly 17 years that I've been using Linux on the side. And when it comes to having a usable desktop experience, that's important.
And CFLs are also very slow to get up to full brightness at or below freezing. They would be nearly unusable as a refrigerator light.:) Fortunately, refrigerator-sized and oven-sized bulbs are not banned.
With that said, my new fridge uses LED-based lighting, which works quite well. Eventually, all the older refrigerators will die, which will just leave ovens, lava lamps, and outdoor lighting north of the freeze line.:-D
Replace it or not, you're still likely to end up with an enclosed fixture in most of those places. You don't typically want a lot of light, so multi-bulb fixtures are out, and one-bulb ceiling fixtures are almost invariably fully enclosed.
On the flip side, there are some situations where rough service bulbs are probably the only good alternative to incandescent bulbs—for example, the fully enclosed fixtures that most folks use in their hallways and porches. CFL ballast electronics and LED step-down electronics are typically designed under the assumption that they can breathe, and have a tendency to fail much sooner when they can't. And I'd be afraid to use halogen bulbs in those fixtures because of the higher temperatures involved.
Lava lamps use a small, specialty lamp size that is unaffected by this ban, just like refrigerator and stove bulbs. The ban is only on standard-sized, non-long-life incandescent bulbs at specific wattages.
Fully interchangeable, no, but they are somewhat so. It's more like saying that the transmission and engine are interchangeable. In a literal sense, it isn't true—neither can do the other's job—but you can make up for a weak engine by adding more gears.
Slashdot Mirror
Kodak is, indeed, a good example. Folks often forget that Kodak wasn't just a camera company. Kodak was a paper company and, more importantly, a film company and chemical company. Instead of employing lots of people to manufacture film in the United States, we now have flash cards that are assembled almost entirely by machine, usually in China. Instead of Kodak selling developer chemicals to tens of thousands of small film processing facilities around the country, these days, we have people just uploading their photos to Flickr. And so on. Of course, it isn't just Kodak; they're just the top of the pyramid of companies that depended on Kodak.
On the flip side, those people were mostly not in the middle class. I doubt that working in a 1-hour film lab was ever a high-paying job, for example. Instead, what we have are a lot more people at the bottom of the class hierarchy who are going on to college because there are too many workers and not enough low-skill jobs. This, in turn, results in too many people at the next pay grade, and so on. The result is positive in some ways, in that people are better educated, but negative in others, in that having a glut of possible candidates tends to make employers less willing to pay good salaries with good benefits, because the employers don't have to compete as hard with other companies to find good talent..
So yeah, this article is probably at least to some degree true (judging solely by the summary).
The problem is, even if they are based on Android, they still will probably each have their own interface. For some reason, every company seems to think they understand UI design better than whoever designs the standard Android interface, and unfortunately, more often than not, they're wrong. :-)
And if you're really unlucky, you end up with a smart TV that won't play Netflix reliably and a smart Blu-Ray player that won't play video from Amazon reliably....
Wow. Having only used Apple and D-Link Wi-Fi hardware (both of which support Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridging out of the box), I would have assumed that bridging was considered basic functionality. I'm kind of surprised any hardware can't do that out of the box....
Disposability is exactly what concerns me about Linksys being acquired by Belkin. Over the years, I've used two products by Belkin: a USB to serial adapter (1999), which apparently had a dead short and caused my whole computer to shut off instantly as soon as I plugged it in for the first time, and a Wi-Fi router (2007-ish), which crashed under any actual traffic load.
Maybe they've improved their product quality since then—I have no idea, as I won't touch anything with the Belkin name on it at this point. Either way, only time will tell whether this is built with the same quality control and high quality component selection that went into the previous models, or whether it got Belkin'ed....
BTW, just out of curiosity, as somebody who has never had the need to install OpenWRT, DD-WRT, or Tomato on a router, what features do folks use that necessitate doing so?
The existence of two-thousand-year-old redwood trees and five-hundred-year-old clams at least suggests that this might not be universally true. Either way, though, it isn't (usually) the tumor that's the main problem; it's the metastasis. The lack thereof is the primary reason that even though plants do occasionally get tumors (usually as a result of bacterial infections, fungal infections, or other damage), they typically don't die from them.
Assuming that it doesn't lead to autoimmune problems down the road, I strongly suspect that immunotherapy (programming the immune system to identify the damaged cells and attack them) will become a much more commonplace treatment for cancer, precisely because it cuts off that metastasis process.
The problem is, the price increases with the number of channels, but the quality doesn't.
The reason they don't see a business case is that they're too stupid to qualify as sentient. You want a business case, here's one in only nine words: When people miss an episode, they don't stop watching.
The main reason that people stop watching a TV show is that they miss watching a show for some reason and/or miss TiVo-ing an episode and don't discover it until after the rerun (which is only a couple of hours later). Then, they can't find a way to watch the show that they missed without paying for it, decide that it isn't worth paying for, and say that they'll start watching again when the network reruns the entire season over the summer. Then, they forget, and never watch the show again. Network shows probably lose more viewers because of the inability to get caught up than from all other causes put together.
If a network doesn't make its shows available until a week after the shows air, that's too late to be useful. By the time someone can watch a week-delayed show online, they've already missed the next show. Rinse and repeat. The single most common reason for watching shows online breaks down completely when there is a significant delay between when the show airs and when it becomes available online, because you'll never be able to switch over and start watching it on TV again, which means you can't talk about this week's episode, etc., which means word-of-mouth advertising for the show breaks down, etc. At that point, you might as well stop watching the show on OTA/cable television entirely, and start watching it on Amazon Prime streaming when it comes out a year later. That way, you avoid all the commercials, the waiting between episodes, etc.
JFK customs inspectors removed and smashed eleven handmade flutes (or thirteen, according to some stories). That's not the level of destruction that should ever be allowed without multiple sign-offs by supervisors and speaking to the owner of those items to determine whether the items fall into one of the many, many exceptions to U.S. import laws (which they did). Anything less than that level of care clearly crosses the line into gross criminal negligence territory.
This same airport, back in 2006, seized and destroyed a grand piano valued at over two hundred thousand dollars and severely damaged a second one. This is not just a single story. U.S. Customs has a long history of destroying things.
The bigger concern is that nearly all non-digital musical instruments (and some digital instruments) contain agricultural products by such a loose definition. Almost every oboe, clarinet, stringed instrument, etc. worth more than a hundred bucks is made out of wood. Even brass instruments and metal woodwinds (e.g. saxes and flutes) use cork for pads, for stops on keys, for tunable joints, for the ring at the top of trumpet valves, for water key/spit valve corks, and so on (though in some cases, it may be a synthetic cork). Even the felt used in various parts of the instrument may be made from agricultural products.
What this effectively means is that the United States government has declared all musical instruments to be illegal contraband that may not be transported into the United States. Musicians around the world would be advised to avoid travel to the United States and its territories for any reason, or if you cannot avoid travel to this country, arrange to rent an instrument after you get here. It simply is no longer safe to carry your own instruments across the borders of this country until Congress passes a law explicitly forbidding these acts of grand theft.
That's a fallacy. I choose what I share on social media. Granted, I can't control what other people share about me, but that was just as true before social media; we just used to call it gossiping. That's why you have to be careful who you trust with things that you consider secret—keep your secrets secret and all that.
The problem with Internet quotes is that you can't always depend on their accuracy.
—Abraham Lincoln
Here's why PCIe flash storage doesn't matter: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of computers sold in 2013 were desktops, and that number is quite literally plummeting. If you include tablets in your figures, desktops are barely above the single digits. Therefore, any flash drive standard that hopes to survive for more than the next couple of years must be external. Internal PCIe storage cards simply aren't a viable market for storage vendors long-term, which means they're going to become more and more rare as competing (external) standards take hold.
GPUs are another question, but then again, most folks never upgrade them, with the exception of Slashdot users. :-)
And if you happen to be using OS X, also check out sips(1). It does much of what ImageMagick + DCRaw does, but a lot faster.
It's certainly possible that SATA Express will end up being the dominant standard for hard drives, or we might end up with some new miniature PCIe connector, or we might even see flash drives that speak NVMe over Thunderbolt PCIe directly. Either way, the nice thing about Thunderbolt is that by being trivially bridgeable to PCIe, it dodges the issue by making it relatively straightforward to add SATA Express devices (at full speed) if that standard ends up becoming the market leader.
Of course, NVMe over Thunderbolt directly would be about 25% faster than the current incarnation of SATA Express, so that's certainly the direction I hope things take.
I'll grant you limited choice in video cards, but otherwise, personally, I think you're putting too much emphasis on legacy hardware whose importance is waning.
Standard-sized PCIe as a physical card architecture (as opposed to an internal bus architecture) is basically dead and buried already. With the exception of flash storage, almost nothing uses PCIe cards anymore, even in the pro audio and video space. Everything is external, because external peripherals are easier to deal with—easier to install, easier to replace when they fail, etc. Of course, for the few people who do still need PCIe, you can use a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe chassis, so long as you don't need anything faster than x4 PCIe 2.0 speeds. That pretty much covers 99.999% of non-graphics-card use of PCIe.
And SATA is dog slow compared with Thunderbolt. A single Thunderbolt 2 port is fast enough to hang three of the fastest 6 Gbps SATA drives off of it and still have enough spare bandwidth to handle a half-speed (S200) FireWire device on top of that, all without performance degradation. As a result, there are already Thunderbolt to SATA adapters that run at full SATA speeds, and lots of manufacturers also make RAID enclosures that let you stick several SATA drives on a Thunderbolt bus, with big performance wins over USB-, FireWire-, or SATA-based RAID enclosures.
Of course, in the long run, it seems likely that storage will move towards direct PCIe flash storage (like the internal storage in the Mac Pro) because it is much faster than SATA is currently capable of supporting, because flash is much faster than hard drives, and because in a Thunderbolt world, SATA is an unnecessary bit of protocol bloat that can only reduce performance, not improve it. When flash becomes cheap enough, SATA will likely fade into obsolescence, though for folks who need lots and lots of storage in the short term, that isn't the case yet, hence the RAID enclosures.
On the contrary, historically, it has happened about once every couple of centuries, and usually begins and ends with a bunch of particularly egregious statists' severed heads stuck on the fence outside the palace. Then, inevitably, a new batch of statists claws their way to power, until eventually it gets so bad that the public does it all over again.
Simpler and safer: Control-click -> Open. That way, it allows only that one app, not every app.
Not for desktops. Apple provides on-site servicing for their desktop machines. All you have to do is know to request it. :-)
Linux's end-user experience is way behind because their driver model doesn't play well with binary drivers over the long term. It isn't a question of whether the apps require drivers, but rather how many years behind the Linux graphics drivers are, how many devices don't work with it out of the box, and so on. Sure, the major GPU vendors are starting to open source usable drivers recently, but getting there has been an uphill battle for the roughly 17 years that I've been using Linux on the side. And when it comes to having a usable desktop experience, that's important.
And CFLs are also very slow to get up to full brightness at or below freezing. They would be nearly unusable as a refrigerator light. :) Fortunately, refrigerator-sized and oven-sized bulbs are not banned.
With that said, my new fridge uses LED-based lighting, which works quite well. Eventually, all the older refrigerators will die, which will just leave ovens, lava lamps, and outdoor lighting north of the freeze line. :-D
Halogens may be more efficient, but they are significantly hotter than incandescents, in part because the bulbs have a smaller surface area.
Replace it or not, you're still likely to end up with an enclosed fixture in most of those places. You don't typically want a lot of light, so multi-bulb fixtures are out, and one-bulb ceiling fixtures are almost invariably fully enclosed.
On the flip side, there are some situations where rough service bulbs are probably the only good alternative to incandescent bulbs—for example, the fully enclosed fixtures that most folks use in their hallways and porches. CFL ballast electronics and LED step-down electronics are typically designed under the assumption that they can breathe, and have a tendency to fail much sooner when they can't. And I'd be afraid to use halogen bulbs in those fixtures because of the higher temperatures involved.
Lava lamps use a small, specialty lamp size that is unaffected by this ban, just like refrigerator and stove bulbs. The ban is only on standard-sized, non-long-life incandescent bulbs at specific wattages.
Fully interchangeable, no, but they are somewhat so. It's more like saying that the transmission and engine are interchangeable. In a literal sense, it isn't true—neither can do the other's job—but you can make up for a weak engine by adding more gears.