Much like how When Windows XP was released it was a hated OS with its FisherPrice Interface
XP was hated because, when it was released, it sucked resources and it crashed. The FisherPrice Interface was collateral damage. It was hated because it ran slow on PC's that ran Windows 98 fine, and it disappointed Windows 2000 users because it ran slow and crashed where 2K ran solid.
XP earned its love after many painful Service Packs, but not before people figured out how to write malware that ripped through XP's (and 2000's) lousy security model. I mean, NT and NTFS offered file permissions, but using them in XP to protect the OS from malware caused applications written for Win16 and Win32 (including Office) to break. So, XP was left wide open so that people's old apps would run, but just as Microsoft got the bugs squashed a malware revolution took over, every free "bubble" game and download site rife with malware to cause ads to pop up endlessly all over your screen. XP didn't turn real until SP3 came out and Firefox became a workable alternative to malware-prone IE, by which time affordable PC's finally had the 1-2 GB of RAM that XP really needed to run well.
Vista suffered from the same "too early" problem that XP had when it was released: it ran shitty on affordable machines at the time, particularly because luckless Microsoft released Vista when tiny, underpowered subnotebooks had become a big thing. Couple that with an upgrade-or-else ad campaign, Vista generated a lot of hate from people satisfied with by-then solid-running XP. Windows 7 was basically Vista version 1.1, but when it was released, the bugs had been squashed and affordable PC's had caught up to its operating requirements. That's why 7 was embraced where Vista was despised. Vista was a victim of its timing and consumer-blind marketing. If Microsoft had waited a year for bug-testing and for hardware to catch up, Vista might have had a better day.
When you start Internet Explorer you're taken to an ad about IE vs Chrome and Firefox.
I assume you mean Edge, not IE, and ALL the browsers out there hit you with pages re: how they're better than every other browser out there. It's been that way for years. Choose a browser as your default and stick with it, and this problem will go away.
but File Explorer and the Start menu is another thing entirely. Live Tiles in particular have been click-bait advert vehicles since their conception. You can manually remove them all, but it's quicker to simply install ClassicShell and you'll never have to see them again. I've long accepted that life with Windows means doing a lot of tweaking before it acts right. It's not worthwhile bitching how the market-drones at Microsoft constantly try to squeeze another dollar out of your desktop, because they always will... if a different OS is not a viable alternative to you, then invest the time to defeat or suppress the marketing stuff and move on.
Like, how does my Google Maps app know to turn the map red when there's traffic up there? The cars ahead of me have Android phones in them, right? Whether or not the app is open and running on the dash, right? How else does Google Maps know to go yellow just after I see a traffic light way ahead of me turn red and cars start to slow down?
I got an iPhone, so I'm assuming Google Maps isn't reporting on me unless I have the app open. But maybe Android is different, feeding Google with this info all the time to provide Maps with such amazing up-to-the-minute info? I mean, this is going on during the afternoon commute, so it's an easy guess the drivers ahead of me aren't actually using their Map app on the familiar ride home, and yet Maps knows when there's traffic. So, we're being watched already.
The trouble comes when these small "rural providers" get bought up by giant conglomerates. These "holding companies" can cheat the system, claiming the benefits of small when they've actually got deep deep pockets that could pay for compliance, but instead ear-mark that money to lobbyists and the "regulation hurts business" crusade.
The original exemption for ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers was applied to the aggregated total of subscribers "across all affiliates," so that small ISPs owned by big holding companies wouldn't be exempt.
The new regulations change that. I think it's bad enough screaming vicious hate toward a known enemy like Comcast, but it's gotta be worse for people relying on some small service-provider that enjoys small-business exemptions but without any folksy small-business courtesy and service we're supposed to associate with small business, 'cause the small businessman sold out to an offer he don't refuse years ago, and now that "small business" is just one of a thousand pages in some nameless guy's portfolio whose only interest is income and territory.
Dice buys Slashdot, and there was not much rejoicing. Even weird 4chan's been bought from its founder, and yet is running out of money in spite of being flooded with ads. This is not a good trend. Has web site hosting just gotten too expensive to keep a good site alive anymore? or is it just a matter of getting too big and popular to keep costs down? DeviantArt is (was) a pretty cool site and community, but experience suggests little hope Wix is going to keep it that way... Wix has to make its ROI. That means the artists probably have to move somewhere else, which is fine I guess, unless it's only a matter of time before the new site gets too expensive to run and either dies or gets sold off.
It's applicable to BOTH sides, however, and its fucking up our elections. For your consideration:
Jeffrey Medford, a small-business owner in South Carolina, voted reluctantly for Donald Trump. As a conservative, he felt the need to choose the Republican. But some things are making him feel uncomfortable — parts of Mr. Trump’s travel ban, for example, and the recurring theme of his apparent affinity for Russia.
Mr. Medford should be a natural ally for liberals trying to convince the country that Mr. Trump was a bad choice. But it is not working out that way. Every time Mr. Medford dips into the political debate — either with strangers on Facebook or friends in New York and Los Angeles — he comes away feeling battered by contempt and an attitude of moral superiority.
“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ”
He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”
The Washington Post has a similar article centering on Milo Yiannopoulos' backfiring at CPAC, but more broadly about how many of today's conservatives consider themselves "reactionaries" to what they see as smug, liberal intellectuals hell-bent on making even the most moderate conservative feel like an asshole, only to find themselves embraced by an "extremely lucrative... conservative-media industrial complex" which encourages bullshit-artists like Anne Coulter and Yiannopoulos because being an asshole grabs air-time and sells books. Whether it's all in their heads is beside the point. The point is enough people think this way to turn an election, either because they voted Trump as above, or they stayed home.
Until the U.S. can get past this finger-pointing you're-an-asshole no-you're-an-asshole bullshit, we can only expect more of the same. Fuck all I hope for is that Trump doesn't start a fucking war on account of his completely dissing the nation's intelligence community: "[Trump] has little need for intelligence professionals who, in speaking truth to power, might challenge the 'America First' orthodoxy that sees Russia as an ally and Australia as a punching bag. That’s why the president’s trusted White House advisers, not career professionals, reportedly have final say over what intelligence reaches his desk." This ain't no shit - the last time a (vice) president ignored intelligence, like there seriously ain't no WMD's in Iraq, we wound up in a war which we are STILL paying for. The only question worth asking is, how in fuck did we get here, and the answer is both sides blaming each other and calling each other assholes, grossing out all the "normal people" until almost HALF feel too disgusted to bother casting a vote.
Yes, we need bullshit-detectors in a world that churns out so much of it, but we also need to learn how to be civil to each other... or we'll just wind up with more blow-hards running things as we just pray that the markets don't collapse or we don't wind up in another war (and Trumps' just crazy enough to re-instate the draft... you 16-to-twenty-something-year-olds put that in your bowl and smoke it).
I guess that means you didn't like "God Emperor" much. It was ok by me, and I liked where Herbert was going in the new series with "Heretics" and "Chapterhouse" (different, but it grew on me), but then death interfered, and now we must rely on Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson to imagine what would have happened next. I haven't read any of those, but it seems reviews are decidedly mixed.
There's a saying in Texas: "All hat and no cattle." And yet, "all hat" keeps winning, even when it's losing. Because the Twitter/Youtube economy is about clicks and views, regardless if you find the content compelling or appalling. Trump got the White House in part because his Tweets got him so much free publicity - news media making his Tweets into front-page stuff while his GOP opponents wasted their time and money trying to go it old-school. Now, people like me who'd never heard or cared about PewDiePie are all reading about him on Wired.com for the first time, amazed at his epic rise and fall as a juvenile asshole, doing on the Internet what would otherwise get him smacked in the face until he learns his lesson and stops... all that really matters is how every click records something about you on a server somewhere, and makes somebody a buck.
This is fucking ridiculous. We are all getting Played, and the Players are studying all this carefully and perfecting the craft... for pay.
Linus' point is there's too much attention spent on hype (the "innovation"), and too little spent on actually getting something built. Having built something himself, and maintained it longer than the lifespans of countless tech companies, he's in an excellent position to say what he's saying. The weak link in the chain is where you start raising money with your idea and your salesmanship, and it becomes time to start hiring engineers, leasing office and factory space, and building prototypes that have a shot at becoming real products. All that costs money, a lot of it, and some "entrepreneurs" and their benefactors simply can't handle seeing all that money they raised just slip away. Easier to keep it, brag about how much you've raised, keep shaking hands with billionaires, and keep on partying on the fund-raising circuit, kicking the whole build-it thing down the road for as long as you can (it's better than bankruptcy in the event your product fails). Human-nature can creep in and fuck-up any good idea with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Seems to me lately only weird guys with personality disorders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg can both raise the money and push the right people just the right way to get a product out the door. Wasn't it Jobs who said "Real artists ship"? That's what Linus was talking about.
So, let's institute a graduated system of licensing where in order to get access to more powerful cars.
I basically agree. But it's gonna be hell to enforce apart from fleets of cops in speed-traps, because you start putting shit-loads of electronic EZ-Pass type shit (breathalyzers?) at the entrances and exits of all twisty roads, we can expect all the "I should be free to do whatever I want, so long as I think it's cool" nut-people foaming about gubmint interference, 'cause if Big Brother is gonna come after my self-built replica of Dominic's car in the Fast the and Furious movies, just because the steering it a little tricky (okay, so I went with a sketchy front-end and some used tires to save a buck), surely they'll start demanding I have a license for my hella collection of guns!
The Tesla already accelerates faster than the Veyron.
Imagine the carnage if they build a ludicrous mode into the "consumer-level" Model 3... damned thing should be hooked to a breathalyzer device - and an IQ test.
In the instant case, if the driver had been in a base Ford Escort or Chevy Cruz, they'd probably be alive today.
I'm all for high-performance cars, and I love the pickup in my street-legal ride, but on the street there's a limit to what's practical and safe. Think real hard how you got your license... not that hard, right? All sorts of people you wonder whether they can tie their own shoes walking out with brand new licenses, thinking "great! now I can legally get alcohol!"
Now consider how tech is going to continue to advance until Tesla and those electric motors puts the power of a Veyron into the hands of anyone who can sign for a car loan but doesn't know that that kind of speed belongs only on the track. A 1979 Toyota Tercel has no business with a modern 5.2 L Flat Plane Crank V8 bolted onto it, particularly because the suspension and steering can't handle the power and the driver of such an abomination is probably a goddam fool, likely to pound down a few six-packs before heading out for Zombie night at Applebees. The only razor-thin silver-lining in the article reported by the OP is they didn't mow down a sidewalk-full of bystanders before the smeared themselves.
If tech advances until torque and horsepower become trivial, we will have to have governors built-in to cars because the road has to be shared and driving like an idiot will become not a matter of a broken leg but something a lot more permanent. On the track or the salt flats, do what you want. On the streets there's a point where basic transportation becomes a suicide machine, and I don't want to share those streets with overpowered idiots.
But developers are not where the money is. Unless you're a Mac or iOS developer, you're probably looking at a PC anyway. Right now, Tim Cook and company want to sell Macs to people who are ogling at iPhones and iWatches, and they think that means smaller and lighter, rather than beefy and powerful.
I don't like this trend. But people getting paid a lot more than I am believe that this is where the money is (read: market-share growth). There's some truth to this, as for a long time the quality of PC laptops have sucked and sucked more, with a few recent notable exceptions like the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Spectre . But there appears to be little profit in desktops like what a developer would want, and if you're a developer or gamer, you're often better-off rolling your own anyway. All that results in the Apple marketing-gods believing that there are lots more casual users open to buying a Macbook than there are developers considering an iMac or Mac Pro. For better or worse, Apple puts their mouths where they think the money is, and so far, compared to HP, Dell, and Lenovo, that strategy has worked, even while power users and their Mac Pros feel screwed, year after year.
Yeah, but no. In short, dependency hell. PC-BSD and MacOS largely avoid this by keeping apps in their own containers. In the Linux world, RPM and dpkg depend too much on particular repositories (and their maintainers) to keep things just right, which often means the mainstream repo doesn't have the latest releases and you find yourself jonezing for the experimental repository or some off-site, you're-on-your-own repo to get what you need, and then shit starts to happen. It's gotten a lot better, for real, but it's not so perfect that your grandmother can find a game of Breakout and not wind up in some sort of trouble.
"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.
Beware of anything in a news article without quotation marks, or is attributed with "according to..." as paraphrasing, which is fair-warning, for good or ill, that the writer is putting his own spin on things.
Wow..these super rich types much be smoking some killer, killer shit.....
I'm guessing it's not all that extraordinary shit. Decent college-dorm shit is quite good enough. There's always that one guy/girl at the party who says some crazy "I wanna machine that taps into my MIND, man!" and everyone paying attention says "Oh yeah! That'd be sooooooo grrrrrreat!" as Santanna's "Black Magic Woman" starts rolling on the sound machine.
The only difference is nobody from mainstream media is picking it up and putting it out as killer clickbait, 'cause some editor thinks it's Musk and what if he's REALLY DONE IT? we HAVE to be FIRST with the SCOOP!!!
This. I immediately thought the CPB officer was on Putin's payroll, instructed specifically to seek out a brown-skinned man who will claim he is with NASA.
Mission accomplished. Well-done, comrade. Pick up your new Camaro at the pre-arranged location, and your family in the motherland will be rewarded with TWO loaves of bread plus a signed poster of Putin shirtless (and a dollar "finder's fee" goes to Trump).
which actually makes sense, if you want to keep selling Macs. The demographics of computer buyers are changing away from power-users to casual users scratching heads over whether a tablet is enough. And with malware slowly but steadily on the rise for MacOS, there is a reason why a lot of people from a high-school kid to your grandmother would be better off with a software depot that is safe and proven and offers automatic updates.
It ain't for me, but more and more even I get twitchy downloading something from softpedia or Sourceforge, wondering if someone's messed with the app I want. Tim Cook is trying to maintain the reputation that Macs "just work", and some sort of safe playroom may be the only way to ensure that for the potential buyers he is seeking to grow the line. I feel this... I spent hundreds, really hundreds, of hours cleaning malware junk off people's PC's back in the XP days ("I just downloaded this new bubble game, so why's my laptop so slow?") so I feel entitled to say I'm completely sick of malware.
I know this is a touchy subject for Slashdotters, and damn I don't want my Mac closed off from "sideloading" any more than on my Windows PC or Linux box. But there are too many stories (google them yourself) about Android apps being fouled, and even one or two evil apps squeak through Apple's app store. It's a hostile world, and Cook would be a fool not to try and do something about it because a malware infested machine, no matter what platform, sucks for everyone. I am confident that Apple needs it's power users enough they will never lock-down macs like in like iOS, but a warning that you're about to run an app from an unknown source, require an admin password, is a price I'm willing to pay. Might lead to a few less infected macs overheating and crashing in weird ways.
Do you also remember that SCOTUS shot down term limits as unconstitutional?
Please cite. And anyway, the Party can mandate term-limits within their own ranks, and SCOTUS has nothing to say. The Party gives you one shot, then if you want re-election, you're on your own as an independent. If there's a will, there's a way. But there was no real will behind term-limits, or else Newt knew all along that the plank for term-limits in his Contract was a sucker-play all along. Not the first time people like him played the electorate for fools, and sadly won't be the last.
You're better off in a swing state. Any state or district where one party has a "lock" is guaranteed to be corrupt... and that goes for Republicans (the Old South) and Democrats (looking at you, Massachusetts). It's just the way it is, no different from the way monopolies in business can't help but screw their customers... there's nothing stopping them, and the temptation is too great.
The fix? Term limits. At least it's a start. But the sad thing is the Republicans actually PROMOTED term limits as part of their Contract with America. The Contract helped the Republicans capture the House back in the Clinton years. My faith in Republicans evaporated when their commitment to term limits did the same pretty much as soon as they took office (thanks, Newt... I haven't forgotten).
But voters can do their own term limits. If Americans were really serious about their low approval of Congress, they would vote out whoever is the incumbent. Keep that up for a couple of terms, and the Parties would get the message, because they keep losing. Would force Congresspeople, particularly members of the House with their 2-year terms, to work a lot harder to keep their jobs or else resign themselves to a single term. But Americans have short memories, and often don't know who their Representative or even Senators are. Worse, the Parties often don't even try in Districts they don't feel safe in (looking at you, Democrats). That's why things don't change.
Slashdot Mirror
Much like how When Windows XP was released it was a hated OS with its FisherPrice Interface
XP was hated because, when it was released, it sucked resources and it crashed. The FisherPrice Interface was collateral damage. It was hated because it ran slow on PC's that ran Windows 98 fine, and it disappointed Windows 2000 users because it ran slow and crashed where 2K ran solid.
XP earned its love after many painful Service Packs, but not before people figured out how to write malware that ripped through XP's (and 2000's) lousy security model. I mean, NT and NTFS offered file permissions, but using them in XP to protect the OS from malware caused applications written for Win16 and Win32 (including Office) to break. So, XP was left wide open so that people's old apps would run, but just as Microsoft got the bugs squashed a malware revolution took over, every free "bubble" game and download site rife with malware to cause ads to pop up endlessly all over your screen. XP didn't turn real until SP3 came out and Firefox became a workable alternative to malware-prone IE, by which time affordable PC's finally had the 1-2 GB of RAM that XP really needed to run well.
Vista suffered from the same "too early" problem that XP had when it was released: it ran shitty on affordable machines at the time, particularly because luckless Microsoft released Vista when tiny, underpowered subnotebooks had become a big thing. Couple that with an upgrade-or-else ad campaign, Vista generated a lot of hate from people satisfied with by-then solid-running XP. Windows 7 was basically Vista version 1.1, but when it was released, the bugs had been squashed and affordable PC's had caught up to its operating requirements. That's why 7 was embraced where Vista was despised. Vista was a victim of its timing and consumer-blind marketing. If Microsoft had waited a year for bug-testing and for hardware to catch up, Vista might have had a better day.
I have it on good authority that this year will FINALLY be the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
Oh do please cite... I've been looking far and wide for some good authority :-P
When you start Internet Explorer you're taken to an ad about IE vs Chrome and Firefox.
I assume you mean Edge, not IE, and ALL the browsers out there hit you with pages re: how they're better than every other browser out there. It's been that way for years. Choose a browser as your default and stick with it, and this problem will go away.
but File Explorer and the Start menu is another thing entirely. Live Tiles in particular have been click-bait advert vehicles since their conception. You can manually remove them all, but it's quicker to simply install ClassicShell and you'll never have to see them again. I've long accepted that life with Windows means doing a lot of tweaking before it acts right. It's not worthwhile bitching how the market-drones at Microsoft constantly try to squeeze another dollar out of your desktop, because they always will... if a different OS is not a viable alternative to you, then invest the time to defeat or suppress the marketing stuff and move on.
Like, how does my Google Maps app know to turn the map red when there's traffic up there? The cars ahead of me have Android phones in them, right? Whether or not the app is open and running on the dash, right? How else does Google Maps know to go yellow just after I see a traffic light way ahead of me turn red and cars start to slow down?
I got an iPhone, so I'm assuming Google Maps isn't reporting on me unless I have the app open. But maybe Android is different, feeding Google with this info all the time to provide Maps with such amazing up-to-the-minute info? I mean, this is going on during the afternoon commute, so it's an easy guess the drivers ahead of me aren't actually using their Map app on the familiar ride home, and yet Maps knows when there's traffic. So, we're being watched already.
The trouble comes when these small "rural providers" get bought up by giant conglomerates. These "holding companies" can cheat the system, claiming the benefits of small when they've actually got deep deep pockets that could pay for compliance, but instead ear-mark that money to lobbyists and the "regulation hurts business" crusade.
The original exemption for ISPs with 100,000 or fewer subscribers was applied to the aggregated total of subscribers "across all affiliates," so that small ISPs owned by big holding companies wouldn't be exempt.
The new regulations change that. I think it's bad enough screaming vicious hate toward a known enemy like Comcast, but it's gotta be worse for people relying on some small service-provider that enjoys small-business exemptions but without any folksy small-business courtesy and service we're supposed to associate with small business, 'cause the small businessman sold out to an offer he don't refuse years ago, and now that "small business" is just one of a thousand pages in some nameless guy's portfolio whose only interest is income and territory.
PAINT, YOU MONKEYS!!!
Thank you. That made me laugh.
Dice buys Slashdot, and there was not much rejoicing.
Even weird 4chan's been bought from its founder, and yet is running out of money in spite of being flooded with ads.
This is not a good trend. Has web site hosting just gotten too expensive to keep a good site alive anymore? or is it just a matter of getting too big and popular to keep costs down? DeviantArt is (was) a pretty cool site and community, but experience suggests little hope Wix is going to keep it that way... Wix has to make its ROI. That means the artists probably have to move somewhere else, which is fine I guess, unless it's only a matter of time before the new site gets too expensive to run and either dies or gets sold off.
It's applicable to BOTH sides, however, and its fucking up our elections. For your consideration:
Jeffrey Medford, a small-business owner in South Carolina, voted reluctantly for Donald Trump. As a conservative, he felt the need to choose the Republican. But some things are making him feel uncomfortable — parts of Mr. Trump’s travel ban, for example, and the recurring theme of his apparent affinity for Russia.
Mr. Medford should be a natural ally for liberals trying to convince the country that Mr. Trump was a bad choice. But it is not working out that way. Every time Mr. Medford dips into the political debate — either with strangers on Facebook or friends in New York and Los Angeles — he comes away feeling battered by contempt and an attitude of moral superiority.
“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ”
He added: “I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”
The Washington Post has a similar article centering on Milo Yiannopoulos' backfiring at CPAC, but more broadly about how many of today's conservatives consider themselves "reactionaries" to what they see as smug, liberal intellectuals hell-bent on making even the most moderate conservative feel like an asshole, only to find themselves embraced by an "extremely lucrative... conservative-media industrial complex" which encourages bullshit-artists like Anne Coulter and Yiannopoulos because being an asshole grabs air-time and sells books. Whether it's all in their heads is beside the point. The point is enough people think this way to turn an election, either because they voted Trump as above, or they stayed home.
Until the U.S. can get past this finger-pointing you're-an-asshole no-you're-an-asshole bullshit, we can only expect more of the same. Fuck all I hope for is that Trump doesn't start a fucking war on account of his completely dissing the nation's intelligence community: "[Trump] has little need for intelligence professionals who, in speaking truth to power, might challenge the 'America First' orthodoxy that sees Russia as an ally and Australia as a punching bag. That’s why the president’s trusted White House advisers, not career professionals, reportedly have final say over what intelligence reaches his desk." This ain't no shit - the last time a (vice) president ignored intelligence, like there seriously ain't no WMD's in Iraq, we wound up in a war which we are STILL paying for. The only question worth asking is, how in fuck did we get here, and the answer is both sides blaming each other and calling each other assholes, grossing out all the "normal people" until almost HALF feel too disgusted to bother casting a vote.
Yes, we need bullshit-detectors in a world that churns out so much of it, but we also need to learn how to be civil to each other... or we'll just wind up with more blow-hards running things as we just pray that the markets don't collapse or we don't wind up in another war (and Trumps' just crazy enough to re-instate the draft... you 16-to-twenty-something-year-olds put that in your bowl and smoke it).
I guess that means you didn't like "God Emperor" much. It was ok by me, and I liked where Herbert was going in the new series with "Heretics" and "Chapterhouse" (different, but it grew on me), but then death interfered, and now we must rely on Herbert's son Brian and Kevin J. Anderson to imagine what would have happened next. I haven't read any of those, but it seems reviews are decidedly mixed.
You date yourself, my friend. Gotta read books to get that reference (or you can cheat and search Wikipedia).
There's a saying in Texas: "All hat and no cattle." And yet, "all hat" keeps winning, even when it's losing. Because the Twitter/Youtube economy is about clicks and views, regardless if you find the content compelling or appalling. Trump got the White House in part because his Tweets got him so much free publicity - news media making his Tweets into front-page stuff while his GOP opponents wasted their time and money trying to go it old-school. Now, people like me who'd never heard or cared about PewDiePie are all reading about him on Wired.com for the first time, amazed at his epic rise and fall as a juvenile asshole, doing on the Internet what would otherwise get him smacked in the face until he learns his lesson and stops... all that really matters is how every click records something about you on a server somewhere, and makes somebody a buck.
This is fucking ridiculous. We are all getting Played, and the Players are studying all this carefully and perfecting the craft... for pay.
Linus' point is there's too much attention spent on hype (the "innovation"), and too little spent on actually getting something built. Having built something himself, and maintained it longer than the lifespans of countless tech companies, he's in an excellent position to say what he's saying. The weak link in the chain is where you start raising money with your idea and your salesmanship, and it becomes time to start hiring engineers, leasing office and factory space, and building prototypes that have a shot at becoming real products. All that costs money, a lot of it, and some "entrepreneurs" and their benefactors simply can't handle seeing all that money they raised just slip away. Easier to keep it, brag about how much you've raised, keep shaking hands with billionaires, and keep on partying on the fund-raising circuit, kicking the whole build-it thing down the road for as long as you can (it's better than bankruptcy in the event your product fails). Human-nature can creep in and fuck-up any good idea with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Seems to me lately only weird guys with personality disorders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg can both raise the money and push the right people just the right way to get a product out the door. Wasn't it Jobs who said "Real artists ship"? That's what Linus was talking about.
So, let's institute a graduated system of licensing where in order to get access to more powerful cars.
I basically agree. But it's gonna be hell to enforce apart from fleets of cops in speed-traps, because you start putting shit-loads of electronic EZ-Pass type shit (breathalyzers?) at the entrances and exits of all twisty roads, we can expect all the "I should be free to do whatever I want, so long as I think it's cool" nut-people foaming about gubmint interference, 'cause if Big Brother is gonna come after my self-built replica of Dominic's car in the Fast the and Furious movies, just because the steering it a little tricky (okay, so I went with a sketchy front-end and some used tires to save a buck), surely they'll start demanding I have a license for my hella collection of guns!
Slippery slope, man. Just sayin'.
The moral of this is to buy a VW... you never have to worry about your vehicle being too powerful.
You know who owns and builds Bugattis? Volkswagen.
The Tesla already accelerates faster than the Veyron.
Imagine the carnage if they build a ludicrous mode into the "consumer-level" Model 3... damned thing should be hooked to a breathalyzer device - and an IQ test.
There's a point where cars become too powerful. When Paul Walker died , it was discussed that the Porsche Carrera GT he was in (as a passenger) has three times the horsepower of the average car [and is] notoriously difficult to handle, even for professional drivers. Porsche was exonerated from blame in the crash, but when you put a car on the road that can blast to 80 at the slip of a shoe, then there's an accident waiting to happen.
In the instant case, if the driver had been in a base Ford Escort or Chevy Cruz, they'd probably be alive today.
I'm all for high-performance cars, and I love the pickup in my street-legal ride, but on the street there's a limit to what's practical and safe. Think real hard how you got your license... not that hard, right? All sorts of people you wonder whether they can tie their own shoes walking out with brand new licenses, thinking "great! now I can legally get alcohol!"
Now consider how tech is going to continue to advance until Tesla and those electric motors puts the power of a Veyron into the hands of anyone who can sign for a car loan but doesn't know that that kind of speed belongs only on the track. A 1979 Toyota Tercel has no business with a modern 5.2 L Flat Plane Crank V8 bolted onto it, particularly because the suspension and steering can't handle the power and the driver of such an abomination is probably a goddam fool, likely to pound down a few six-packs before heading out for Zombie night at Applebees. The only razor-thin silver-lining in the article reported by the OP is they didn't mow down a sidewalk-full of bystanders before the smeared themselves.
If tech advances until torque and horsepower become trivial, we will have to have governors built-in to cars because the road has to be shared and driving like an idiot will become not a matter of a broken leg but something a lot more permanent. On the track or the salt flats, do what you want. On the streets there's a point where basic transportation becomes a suicide machine, and I don't want to share those streets with overpowered idiots.
U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995). Argued November 29, 1994; decided May 22, 1995.
Most excellent cite. Thank you.
Eh? There are more developers than ever.
But developers are not where the money is. Unless you're a Mac or iOS developer, you're probably looking at a PC anyway. Right now, Tim Cook and company want to sell Macs to people who are ogling at iPhones and iWatches, and they think that means smaller and lighter, rather than beefy and powerful.
I don't like this trend. But people getting paid a lot more than I am believe that this is where the money is (read: market-share growth). There's some truth to this, as for a long time the quality of PC laptops have sucked and sucked more, with a few recent notable exceptions like the Dell XPS 13 and the HP Spectre . But there appears to be little profit in desktops like what a developer would want, and if you're a developer or gamer, you're often better-off rolling your own anyway. All that results in the Apple marketing-gods believing that there are lots more casual users open to buying a Macbook than there are developers considering an iMac or Mac Pro. For better or worse, Apple puts their mouths where they think the money is, and so far, compared to HP, Dell, and Lenovo, that strategy has worked, even while power users and their Mac Pros feel screwed, year after year.
You mean like Linux distros have had for decades?
Yeah, but no. In short, dependency hell. PC-BSD and MacOS largely avoid this by keeping apps in their own containers. In the Linux world, RPM and dpkg depend too much on particular repositories (and their maintainers) to keep things just right, which often means the mainstream repo doesn't have the latest releases and you find yourself jonezing for the experimental repository or some off-site, you're-on-your-own repo to get what you need, and then shit starts to happen. It's gotten a lot better, for real, but it's not so perfect that your grandmother can find a game of Breakout and not wind up in some sort of trouble.
The actual quote is
"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.
Beware of anything in a news article without quotation marks, or is attributed with "according to..." as paraphrasing, which is fair-warning, for good or ill, that the writer is putting his own spin on things.
and "high bandwidth interface to the brain"? Many examples already happening in the field of medicine.
Wow..these super rich types much be smoking some killer, killer shit.....
I'm guessing it's not all that extraordinary shit. Decent college-dorm shit is quite good enough. There's always that one guy/girl at the party who says some crazy "I wanna machine that taps into my MIND, man!" and everyone paying attention says "Oh yeah! That'd be sooooooo grrrrrreat!" as Santanna's "Black Magic Woman" starts rolling on the sound machine.
The only difference is nobody from mainstream media is picking it up and putting it out as killer clickbait, 'cause some editor thinks it's Musk and what if he's REALLY DONE IT? we HAVE to be FIRST with the SCOOP!!!
This. I immediately thought the CPB officer was on Putin's payroll, instructed specifically to seek out a brown-skinned man who will claim he is with NASA.
Mission accomplished. Well-done, comrade. Pick up your new Camaro at the pre-arranged location, and your family in the motherland will be rewarded with TWO loaves of bread plus a signed poster of Putin shirtless (and a dollar "finder's fee" goes to Trump).
which actually makes sense, if you want to keep selling Macs. The demographics of computer buyers are changing away from power-users to casual users scratching heads over whether a tablet is enough. And with malware slowly but steadily on the rise for MacOS, there is a reason why a lot of people from a high-school kid to your grandmother would be better off with a software depot that is safe and proven and offers automatic updates.
It ain't for me, but more and more even I get twitchy downloading something from softpedia or Sourceforge, wondering if someone's messed with the app I want. Tim Cook is trying to maintain the reputation that Macs "just work", and some sort of safe playroom may be the only way to ensure that for the potential buyers he is seeking to grow the line. I feel this... I spent hundreds, really hundreds, of hours cleaning malware junk off people's PC's back in the XP days ("I just downloaded this new bubble game, so why's my laptop so slow?") so I feel entitled to say I'm completely sick of malware.
I know this is a touchy subject for Slashdotters, and damn I don't want my Mac closed off from "sideloading" any more than on my Windows PC or Linux box. But there are too many stories (google them yourself) about Android apps being fouled, and even one or two evil apps squeak through Apple's app store. It's a hostile world, and Cook would be a fool not to try and do something about it because a malware infested machine, no matter what platform, sucks for everyone. I am confident that Apple needs it's power users enough they will never lock-down macs like in like iOS, but a warning that you're about to run an app from an unknown source, require an admin password, is a price I'm willing to pay. Might lead to a few less infected macs overheating and crashing in weird ways.
Do you also remember that SCOTUS shot down term limits as unconstitutional?
Please cite. And anyway, the Party can mandate term-limits within their own ranks, and SCOTUS has nothing to say. The Party gives you one shot, then if you want re-election, you're on your own as an independent. If there's a will, there's a way. But there was no real will behind term-limits, or else Newt knew all along that the plank for term-limits in his Contract was a sucker-play all along. Not the first time people like him played the electorate for fools, and sadly won't be the last.
You're better off in a swing state. Any state or district where one party has a "lock" is guaranteed to be corrupt... and that goes for Republicans (the Old South) and Democrats (looking at you, Massachusetts). It's just the way it is, no different from the way monopolies in business can't help but screw their customers... there's nothing stopping them, and the temptation is too great.
The fix? Term limits. At least it's a start. But the sad thing is the Republicans actually PROMOTED term limits as part of their Contract with America. The Contract helped the Republicans capture the House back in the Clinton years. My faith in Republicans evaporated when their commitment to term limits did the same pretty much as soon as they took office (thanks, Newt... I haven't forgotten).
But voters can do their own term limits. If Americans were really serious about their low approval of Congress, they would vote out whoever is the incumbent. Keep that up for a couple of terms, and the Parties would get the message, because they keep losing. Would force Congresspeople, particularly members of the House with their 2-year terms, to work a lot harder to keep their jobs or else resign themselves to a single term. But Americans have short memories, and often don't know who their Representative or even Senators are. Worse, the Parties often don't even try in Districts they don't feel safe in (looking at you, Democrats). That's why things don't change.