Protection against the 'killer' USB devices is a matter of cost.
Anyone shipping computers that can't handle the 'pretty much any pin could get shorted to any other pin(s)' cases commonly caused by dodgy peripherals or connector and wiring damage is, indeed, doing shamefully shoddy work and deserves all the warranty returns they get(potentially more if the warranty is stingy). Some basic ESD endurance is also pretty much expected in consumer devices: requiring ESD protection measures on stuff that isn't bare components prior to assembly or oddball specialty hardware aimed at trained operators is pretty tacky
However, the 'killer' widgets deliberately produce output much more hostile than any standard mishap(usually some sort of charge pump to obtain a voltage well above what's usually available and then hammer one or more of the lines with it until the port stops supplying it with enough power to recharge). If you want to resist that it will substantially increase cost and board space, especially for USB 3 that has more data lines to protect and needs to use protective methods that won't interfere with much higher speed signals. 'Industrial' USB isolation boxes can easily run you north of $100/port depending on how picky you are.
Given that USB is typically integrated with the chipset, except on boards that have use for especially large numbers of ports, probably $30 nominal probably isn't far off(that's roughly what Intel says the tray price for a middling platform controller hub is, presumably lower in real volume); but with the significant downside of being a zillion-ball BGA that's nontrivial to rework without appropriate tools and expertise(and those aren't just a soldering iron) and which leaves the computer completely nonfunctional unless replaced since it also handles most of the critical system functions that haven't been moved onto the CPU itself.
A torched trace or fuse, or a little discrete USB chip, is less of a catastrophy(though most IT operations try to avoid that sort of labor intensive and unpredictable nonstandardization if they can, it has a nasty habit of proving a false economy); but having the PCH zapped makes the motherboard a write-off unless you have suitable replacement parts and BGA rework gear; it doesn't just force you to not use a couple of USB ports.
This is a bit surprising not so much because Intel has been having such a good time in phone silicon(since they haven't); but because I would have assumed that Intel would have considered an at least adequate cell modem to be essential for purposes of selling their CPUs and chipsets for 'IoT' and embedded stuff; as well as 'Centrino' style chipset bundling.
You can certainly slap a 3rd party cell modem card into an x86(it's a standard option on a fair percentage of laptop lines); but that is considerably less compact than the ARM SoC option; which is a minus for space constrained applications. It's also likely to be more expensive and power hungry, since peripheral integration usually ends up being helpful on those counts.
Given that, it seems like Intel is either really pessimistic about their situation, enough so that they don't think they can even justify a pet cell modem aggressively sold along with their chips and wifi/bt silicon(either just because the R&D isn't going so well or because they suspect the patent litigation will be hideous); or they are fairly optimistic about Qualcom being more cooperative in the future and being willing to license modems for integration at rates reasonable enough that it's simply not worth reinventing the wheel.
I'm just not sure which. It doesn't help that Apple's main possible motives point in the same two directions: either a belief that the patent situation is bad enough that they'll get hammered in court/import bans/etc. even if they cultivate a secondary supplier; or a belief that Qualcom's position is weakening and they are likely to be cooperative enough on pricing and not shaking people down on patents that there's no reason to turn down their parts unless something genuinely superior shows up(which, so far, it hasn't).
I, for one, am utterly shocked that a Getty associated company would be up to something rampantly sleazy. The fact that a Chinese outfit has started to move away from just ignoring copyright in favor of attempting to abuse it is incrementally more novel, though also not terribly surprising.
It's funny how the people who attempt to outright seize control of the creative works of others are always so enthusiastic about insisting that the ones who make clandestine copies but don't even try to dispute ownership are the 'pirates'.
I'm unclear on why you would use the blacklist option(except because of a quirk of notation; if memory serves just setting a whitelist doesn't automatically block everything not on it; but setting a blacklist of '*' blocks everything except extensions where being on the whitelist takes precedence); but they offer both. (Documentation page is for the Windows GPO options; but Chrome's actual settings are mostly the same across platforms, just wrapped in the platform-native setting delivery mechanism. Only real exception are the ones aimed at Chromebooks, which control things that aren't within scope of Chrome on a full OS.)
I'm not so surprised by the failure to take on Xeons(possibly barring the 'it's an i3 we didn't rip ECC out of' ones, which aren't too punchy); Intel can be obnoxious about their pricing and blatant market segmentation; but they know a few things about high performance cores; and people who don't need x86 but do need performance also have options like Power.
What surprises me more is that the niche that the existence of Avoton (C2000 series) and Denverton C3000 series) parts suggests exists doesn't have more plausible contenders. Those things are Atom cores; but with ECC not lasered off, so not exactly compute monsters; but boards based on them remain surprisingly expensive($450+ for an unexceptional SuperMicro specimen). Such boards, having things like DIMM slots and PCIe expansion, are way more serious than the everything-soldered-and-caps-out-at-4GB single board computer stuff; but if they even slightly live up to the hype I'd think that an ARM SoC given a 25 watt TDP to play with could at least trade shots with an Atom, if not outperform it.
I suppose it is possible that the problem is the niche not being very attractive: Mature hypervisors have certainly cut demand for weak computers by making it easy and flexible to use a small slice of a powerful computer instead; and x86 compatibility presumably still counts for a lot of the remaining applications.
There are some hypervisors that use Trustzone for various things; mostly commercial and relatively low profile(Sierraware has one, as does Mentor Graphics, and there are a number of other projects and research papers; no personal experience with them).
What's less common is a hypervisor used as we are accustomed to(just carving a big system up into a bunch of smaller VMs for resource efficiency and abstraction purposes); and the prevailing use seems to be adding features that stock trustzone doesn't have, without expanding the size of the code base that has to be explicitly trusted too much; by going from the basic 'untrusted general purpose OS'/'minimal trusted world that does hard real time or DRM stuff you don't want the general purpose OS messing with' to moving the hypervisor into the trusted world and running the big feature rich and buggy OS as one guest and one or more special-purpose reasonably highly trusted VMs that are protected from the untrusted VM but don't have to be brought fully into the trusted world.
I'm not sure if this is because these products have a history in being sold for embedded systems, set top boxes with DRM/conditional access requirements, and the like; or whether it's because ARM systems large enough to be worth chopping up into multiple general-purpose VMs are still pretty uncommon; or some of both.
In principle the trustzone features are applicable to the protection of general purpose hypervisors or sensitive credential handling and such; but aside from immaturity of software aimed at those uses cases there is also the issue that it is not typically the case that the device administrator is intended to modify the behavior of what goes on within the trusted side; again, likely a legacy of use in cases where it's being used to keep the user from messing with it. If you are ordering enough units the vendor will presumably do whatever you tell them to; but as-is expecting to modify trustzone behavior is not unlike expecting to edit an x86 board's UEFI to change SMM behavior. Not always impossible if the assorted checks are buggy; but deeply not encouraged.
A lot of the RAID controllers as well(I think that's the purpose that Intel held onto their last bit of ARM for when they sold the rest to Marvell, not sure if they've fully divested at this point or if it remains the case).
That's what makes the report of these SoftIron storage nodes (and the fact that the storage nodes are accompanied by management nodes whose architecture the article doesn't specify and 'router' nodes that expose iSCSI, NFS, and SMB; architecture also unspecified) unsurprising (if you want to do relatively computationally cheap 'expose disk to network' stuff, an AMD A1100 with 2x 10GbE and 14x SATA integrated into a relatively low power SoC is just what the doctor ordered); but also not terribly novel or relevant to the viability for more general purpose stuff: ARM cores have been wildly successful doing specific things, tailored to their strengths by the vendor, for ages now; so much so that we don't even notice most of them. What they haven't been is terribly viable as substitutes for general purpose computers.
The degree to which that hasn't panned out is honestly a trifle surprising: It's not a surprise that they can't go head-to-head with Xeons or AMD's current gen actually good parts; but what is a bit curious is how quickly the lower power/lower performance options start suffering from one or more serious deficiencies: there are the ones that seem promising, and are often astoundingly cheap, but are cripplingly awful on the software side(the usual fate of rPi-alikes derived from Chinese tablet SoCs); there are the ones that have reasonably sane software, either OSS or at least competently vendor supported, but cap out at very low performance(the rPi and various router/networking oriented parts tend to fall here; lacking things like RAM expansion options and usually with I/O options that are sharply limited in one or more areas); and there are the ones that actually seem really cool, but are either only show up in expensive appliances and a a pricey dev board or two, or do show up for sale in at least a few boards/systems but are just really expensive for what they do compared to a basic x86 that won't require any special attention(The AMD ARM Opterons seem to have done this a bit; the SoftIron storage appliances seem interesting as storage appliances; but if you want just an ATX board or a barebones server based on one good luck even matching, much less beating, the price of a boring x86 box that's at least as fast and much better supported).
I, apparently naively, would have expected a few more products of the "We licensed whatever ARM's current 64-bit core is, support a bunch of DIMMs and a PCIe root; and the firmware is designed to get you into mainline Linux with minimum fuss" persuasion to be available.
What they are used for varies by implementation, since ARM is all kinds of things to various people; but 'Trustzone' extensions are specifically designed to provide analogous capabilities(at lower cost, the invisible super-privilege enclave is logically separated but runs on the same CPU rather than being a separate processor); and tends to be used for similar purposes in cases where conditional access enforcement or 'platform integrity' are design goals. ARM SoCs commonly also implement all the features one requires for a full crypto bootloader lockdown.
If you are working at some scale this matters less because you get to dictate if some of those features are enabled, whose keys are burned in as trusted, etc.(unlike Intel, where your leverage is likely to be substantially lower: there is at least one exception, the High Assurance Platform ME firmware variant, but for the most part they aren't terribly open to suggestions in that area); but if you are buying consumer or small business quantities of off-the-shelf ARM there's no particular reason to be more optimistic about how much control you have over the low level behavior.
It doesn't seem like a huge surprise to combine pessimism with patent accumulation: the cost of having a few relevant staff working on the project and some patent filings is fairly modest; and should blockchains exceed expectations having some strategically placed patents will be very valuable.
It's speculative behavior, not startup-that-believes-it-is-changing-the-world stuff; but making a modest investment because it has a low probability of a huge payoff is hardly irrational or unusual among people who can afford to lose the investment if the most probable outcome occurs; which likely covers BoA.
For the Chinese market do you really need anything being AOSP, a skin that tries to look like iOS; and WeChat support?
Maybe an in-app payment system for pay to win mobile games?
It is surely only common sense that having the crash-prone 737s weeded out of the fleet makes the remainder not just safe, but safer, on average. Science.
Games are certainly a less helpful case(tighter latency demands, heavier GPU requirements on the server side, no corporate-IT-likes-the-centralization bonus); but much of the trouble seems to be the same sort of licensing/pricing issues that have dogged Terminal Services stuff since forever.
Given what mobile games just don't cost (with the limited exception of mostly iPad ports of PC games, which still tend to be cheaper than the PC version but not 99cents+microtransactions) and how little back catalog PC and used console titles go for the amount someone would be willing to pay for any streaming service that doesn't have new releases more or less at release isn't very high. If you want the new stuff, though, you need to find a way to get companies expecting to sell Call of FIFA 20XX++ for $60($100+ for deluxe pre-order premium edition) on board with accepting a slice of what you have left out of the monthly subscription fee, after paying for infrastructure and keeping your own lights on.
That's where the 'Netflix' example is fairly optimistic: nobody expected Netflix to get them access to still-in-theatres big budget movies as well as back catalog DVD rentals on nicer terms than Blockbuster, so setting up a DVD rental by mail service that gradually morphed into a streaming entity was viable(it also helps that, while a video rental outfit and a studio can come to a special licensing agreement if they wish, if nothing else the rental outfit can always just buy retail copies and rent those, so license fights can't scuttle selection; software licenses are less helpful, especially if you need technical assistance to reduce cost(ie. reasonably efficient multi-user streaming setups vs. just slapping capture cards and custom input devices on unmodified consoles.)
Some of the services we've seen trialed(or offered for a bit before their deaths) actually work surprisingly well, better than I would have expected; but it's never clear how they are supposed to square the circle on prices: the netlfix-style "OMG unlimited back catalog!" offering is something that's generally pretty cheap just to buy one game at a time as it suits you(and if a game is unobtanium in Steam or GoG that probably means that it's in rights clearance hell that will keep you from streaming it legally), so willingness to pay for that is tepid; while a "all the newest games!" offering is what people would probably actually want; but also what publishers would want to be paid relatively well for and what would cost the most to run, so the service would probably start looking more like your cable bill than like Netflix.
Doesn't help, for something like a Rovio/Sprint alliance, that there are already entities much more logically placed already nibbling at the idea(Microsoft has their 'games with gold' subscription bundle thing, Sony has a similar one; both already have substantial publisher relationships, large hardware install bases; and, if streaming games on phones is such a thing, could fairly easily kick out a phone client and a "stream any game you've bought for Xbox/PlayStation when you are on the go!" tied to existing accounts and such. Not seeing Rovio's relevance here.
This seems like it's hard to argue with for what you pay(nothing if you already have the relevant console); but of slightly baffling utility:
The PS4 is still limited to running one game at a time, so this isn't some multi-user terminal services thing(nor is such a thing likely given that consoles generally try to devote all the resources they can to that one game they are running; not ship with half the system idle in case someone wants to remote in); it's for use over local wifi(so 'use your home console when out and about' will be an unsupported hack at best; quite possibly too high latency to be useful) and you are stuck on a small screen with the glories of touchscreen emulation of hardware buttons.
Where's the situation where it isn't preferable to just walk over to the couch and use the TV and controller?
I'm assuming that this story appearing immediately above "Self-Driving Cars May Hit People With Darker Skin More Often, Study Finds" definitely is purely coincidence.
I suspect that the interesting thing to watch is whether Apple gets into obvious ancillary financial services(as they are already doing to an extent, something like "AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss" is basically an insurance product backed by Apple's competitive advantage in performing repairs where those are more cost effective, something competing insurers are less able to do); consumer credit for purchases of their products being the big one(and proven by the car manufacturers to be quite a profitable sideline); whether they get into those and some financial services that wouldn't be possible without integration with their products(also a largely foregone conclusion at this point, offering billing services through ITMS and Apple pay are both exactly that; and probably have some further logical expansions); and whether they sprout a division that has nothing whatsoever to do with their traditional core products and services except to put their giant pile of cash to work.
Given what Apple has already done; 'predicting' the first and second of these is really just knowing your recent history and making a couple of highly plausible extrapolations at this point. The third option also isn't wildly unlikely; but it will be interesting to see to what degree it occurs(Apple obviously isn't storing its spare cash under a mattress somewhere at HQ; so it's obviously doing some amount of investing; but there's "I have money and want to put it into a diversified range of investments" and there's "I'm starting a hedge fund"); and whether Apple's financial activities remain fairly closely tied to their products(selling the credit you use to buy them and the payment processing built into them; while investing the profits) or whether the financial side takes on a life of its own that gradually eclipses the other activity.
It would not be at all surprising if the tape loop is quite deliberate:
Starbucks(along with most other retail establishments) has clearly gone to a lot of trouble to establish a particular 'feel'/'branding' in their interior and exterior design, staff uniforms, product graphic design, even what's printed on their paper cups and napkins and stuff.
If they sweat those sorts of details, rather than just ordering generic FoodCo napkins, odds are that some branding consultancy has laid out the soundtrack with some care(presumably with both seasonal and regional variations where applicable) and mandated it from HQ to ensure brand consistency. As you note, if it were just a technical problem it would have been solved years ago(and generally is at the local indie coffee shop where what's playing depends on whose shift it is); but I suspect that the technical problem solved was ensuring consistency and uniformity in soundtrack, not local autonomy and variety.
Apparently not in this case; the moderation in TFA is handled by subcontractors earning a princely $28k/year(ok, almost $29k). With is probably a lot more than some of the offshored content moderators get; but is really scraping the bottom of 'well paid' by most definitions.
Facebook HQ doesn't soil its hands with that sort of thing; much less C-suit Facebook HQ.
So what sort of 'actions' would we expect people to be taking here? In an environment where a huge chunk of vendors are dirty, the details are complex enough that you have to be a paranoid nerd practically full time to know them; and EULAs apparently make just about anything legal where are we expecting the moderately privacy-concerned to be going?
Going with the 'consumer choices reveal minimal interest in privacy' angle would be one thing if we could compare between known good and known bad actors with slightly different prices; or if, say, voluntarily engaging with Facebook were the only way to end up interacting with them; but as it is we are in the (somewhere between uninformative and downright deceptive) position of basically saying that everyone not bugging out to go live in a unibomber cabin off the grid somewhere clearly just doesn't care about privacy.
Also, unless you want a wall to be effective you have to exercise control of both sides of it.
Put the wall right on the border and you have to have your own people violate the other nation's border any time they want to respond to what someone on the far side is doing. That makes it pretty trivial to dig tunnels, stockpile ladders, encourage anyone dumping trash and construction debris to do so against the wall to form a handy ramp(slow, but has the advantage of being really cheap to do over large areas and being carried out by the mostly-innocent activity of locals committing minor improper waste disposal; which makes shooting them a PR nightmare), etc. unless you are actually willing to commit a more or less unlimited number of provocative and illegal cross-border activities.
Once you've set the wall back far enough that your jurisdiction actually covers the area where people might stage crossings or work to compromise it you end up with a nontrivial slice of your own territory on the far side of the wall.
I can easily imagine that a heavily-stage-managed and custom documentation process would be way faster than the lowest-common-denominator legacy paper arrangement; but I find it much harder to understand why the 'blockchain' based updated electronic records process would be faster or more efficient than a similarly updated electronic records process that's based on some boring database instead.
It's easy to compare updated processes against legacy ones and get good results(especially given that there are probably way more techs watching this order and making sure nothing bad happens than any normal one enjoys); but if you want 'blockchain' data what matters is how it stacks up to a similarly updated process that uses a different backing mechanism.
I'd also be curious about how this beats the 'garbage in/garbage out' problem: Blockchain storage makes it very tricky to munge records after the fact without being noticed; but have absolutely no effect on any of the steps where someone needs to accurately and honestly observe the state of the world at a given step and write that into the record. The fun cryptographic integrity doesn't kick in until you have the electronic record; the process by which that record is produced is unaffected; and where a variety of opportunities for adding lies present themselves.
This question seems to hinge on the (almost certainly false) notion that design, and the perception of design, evolves in some trajectory that's independent of its context.
Things that look old do so in no small part because we can compare them with things that are new. Things that look cutting edge do so in part by rejecting design elements that look familiar.
Even if we assumed a scary good, probably better than human level, bot put to the task of inferring what "2020 thinks 2040 will look like" its output would, immediately, be part of 2020-era design, albeit probably a visually distinct flavor; and what 2040 actually look like would include reactions to, away from, against, with nostalgia for, etc. that "2040" design from 20 years ago.
When humans try this we get zeerust. It's not clear why a bot would do better; or that even an arbitrarily talented bot could beat the fact that the future it predicts will automatically become part of the past that the actual future evolves from(recursion is fun and unproblematic, right?).
There's also the problem, outside of some purely decorative objects or ones that aggressively try to defy the constraints of material culture(either trying to look more futuristic than the tech really is, like sci-fi TV props; or are deliberately throwbacks, like SCA longbows and stuff), that things look the way they do in no small part because of the constraints of technology that no amount of industrial designer resistance can get around.
Luckily, the other 75% can be kept in fear of losing their jobs to members of the unemployed 25% who will work for not-starvation; so we needn't let this disappointment interfere with reducing the cost of human resources. Progress!
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Protection against the 'killer' USB devices is a matter of cost.
Anyone shipping computers that can't handle the 'pretty much any pin could get shorted to any other pin(s)' cases commonly caused by dodgy peripherals or connector and wiring damage is, indeed, doing shamefully shoddy work and deserves all the warranty returns they get(potentially more if the warranty is stingy). Some basic ESD endurance is also pretty much expected in consumer devices: requiring ESD protection measures on stuff that isn't bare components prior to assembly or oddball specialty hardware aimed at trained operators is pretty tacky
However, the 'killer' widgets deliberately produce output much more hostile than any standard mishap(usually some sort of charge pump to obtain a voltage well above what's usually available and then hammer one or more of the lines with it until the port stops supplying it with enough power to recharge). If you want to resist that it will substantially increase cost and board space, especially for USB 3 that has more data lines to protect and needs to use protective methods that won't interfere with much higher speed signals. 'Industrial' USB isolation boxes can easily run you north of $100/port depending on how picky you are.
Given that USB is typically integrated with the chipset, except on boards that have use for especially large numbers of ports, probably $30 nominal probably isn't far off(that's roughly what Intel says the tray price for a middling platform controller hub is, presumably lower in real volume); but with the significant downside of being a zillion-ball BGA that's nontrivial to rework without appropriate tools and expertise(and those aren't just a soldering iron) and which leaves the computer completely nonfunctional unless replaced since it also handles most of the critical system functions that haven't been moved onto the CPU itself.
A torched trace or fuse, or a little discrete USB chip, is less of a catastrophy(though most IT operations try to avoid that sort of labor intensive and unpredictable nonstandardization if they can, it has a nasty habit of proving a false economy); but having the PCH zapped makes the motherboard a write-off unless you have suitable replacement parts and BGA rework gear; it doesn't just force you to not use a couple of USB ports.
This is a bit surprising not so much because Intel has been having such a good time in phone silicon(since they haven't); but because I would have assumed that Intel would have considered an at least adequate cell modem to be essential for purposes of selling their CPUs and chipsets for 'IoT' and embedded stuff; as well as 'Centrino' style chipset bundling.
You can certainly slap a 3rd party cell modem card into an x86(it's a standard option on a fair percentage of laptop lines); but that is considerably less compact than the ARM SoC option; which is a minus for space constrained applications. It's also likely to be more expensive and power hungry, since peripheral integration usually ends up being helpful on those counts.
Given that, it seems like Intel is either really pessimistic about their situation, enough so that they don't think they can even justify a pet cell modem aggressively sold along with their chips and wifi/bt silicon(either just because the R&D isn't going so well or because they suspect the patent litigation will be hideous); or they are fairly optimistic about Qualcom being more cooperative in the future and being willing to license modems for integration at rates reasonable enough that it's simply not worth reinventing the wheel.
I'm just not sure which. It doesn't help that Apple's main possible motives point in the same two directions: either a belief that the patent situation is bad enough that they'll get hammered in court/import bans/etc. even if they cultivate a secondary supplier; or a belief that Qualcom's position is weakening and they are likely to be cooperative enough on pricing and not shaking people down on patents that there's no reason to turn down their parts unless something genuinely superior shows up(which, so far, it hasn't).
Any guesses?
I, for one, am utterly shocked that a Getty associated company would be up to something rampantly sleazy. The fact that a Chinese outfit has started to move away from just ignoring copyright in favor of attempting to abuse it is incrementally more novel, though also not terribly surprising.
It's funny how the people who attempt to outright seize control of the creative works of others are always so enthusiastic about insisting that the ones who make clandestine copies but don't even try to dispute ownership are the 'pirates'.
I'm unclear on why you would use the blacklist option(except because of a quirk of notation; if memory serves just setting a whitelist doesn't automatically block everything not on it; but setting a blacklist of '*' blocks everything except extensions where being on the whitelist takes precedence); but they offer both. (Documentation page is for the Windows GPO options; but Chrome's actual settings are mostly the same across platforms, just wrapped in the platform-native setting delivery mechanism. Only real exception are the ones aimed at Chromebooks, which control things that aren't within scope of Chrome on a full OS.)
I'm not so surprised by the failure to take on Xeons(possibly barring the 'it's an i3 we didn't rip ECC out of' ones, which aren't too punchy); Intel can be obnoxious about their pricing and blatant market segmentation; but they know a few things about high performance cores; and people who don't need x86 but do need performance also have options like Power.
What surprises me more is that the niche that the existence of Avoton (C2000 series) and Denverton C3000 series) parts suggests exists doesn't have more plausible contenders. Those things are Atom cores; but with ECC not lasered off, so not exactly compute monsters; but boards based on them remain surprisingly expensive($450+ for an unexceptional SuperMicro specimen). Such boards, having things like DIMM slots and PCIe expansion, are way more serious than the everything-soldered-and-caps-out-at-4GB single board computer stuff; but if they even slightly live up to the hype I'd think that an ARM SoC given a 25 watt TDP to play with could at least trade shots with an Atom, if not outperform it.
I suppose it is possible that the problem is the niche not being very attractive: Mature hypervisors have certainly cut demand for weak computers by making it easy and flexible to use a small slice of a powerful computer instead; and x86 compatibility presumably still counts for a lot of the remaining applications.
There are some hypervisors that use Trustzone for various things; mostly commercial and relatively low profile(Sierraware has one, as does Mentor Graphics, and there are a number of other projects and research papers; no personal experience with them). What's less common is a hypervisor used as we are accustomed to(just carving a big system up into a bunch of smaller VMs for resource efficiency and abstraction purposes); and the prevailing use seems to be adding features that stock trustzone doesn't have, without expanding the size of the code base that has to be explicitly trusted too much; by going from the basic 'untrusted general purpose OS'/'minimal trusted world that does hard real time or DRM stuff you don't want the general purpose OS messing with' to moving the hypervisor into the trusted world and running the big feature rich and buggy OS as one guest and one or more special-purpose reasonably highly trusted VMs that are protected from the untrusted VM but don't have to be brought fully into the trusted world.
I'm not sure if this is because these products have a history in being sold for embedded systems, set top boxes with DRM/conditional access requirements, and the like; or whether it's because ARM systems large enough to be worth chopping up into multiple general-purpose VMs are still pretty uncommon; or some of both.
In principle the trustzone features are applicable to the protection of general purpose hypervisors or sensitive credential handling and such; but aside from immaturity of software aimed at those uses cases there is also the issue that it is not typically the case that the device administrator is intended to modify the behavior of what goes on within the trusted side; again, likely a legacy of use in cases where it's being used to keep the user from messing with it. If you are ordering enough units the vendor will presumably do whatever you tell them to; but as-is expecting to modify trustzone behavior is not unlike expecting to edit an x86 board's UEFI to change SMM behavior. Not always impossible if the assorted checks are buggy; but deeply not encouraged.
A lot of the RAID controllers as well(I think that's the purpose that Intel held onto their last bit of ARM for when they sold the rest to Marvell, not sure if they've fully divested at this point or if it remains the case).
That's what makes the report of these SoftIron storage nodes (and the fact that the storage nodes are accompanied by management nodes whose architecture the article doesn't specify and 'router' nodes that expose iSCSI, NFS, and SMB; architecture also unspecified) unsurprising (if you want to do relatively computationally cheap 'expose disk to network' stuff, an AMD A1100 with 2x 10GbE and 14x SATA integrated into a relatively low power SoC is just what the doctor ordered); but also not terribly novel or relevant to the viability for more general purpose stuff: ARM cores have been wildly successful doing specific things, tailored to their strengths by the vendor, for ages now; so much so that we don't even notice most of them. What they haven't been is terribly viable as substitutes for general purpose computers.
The degree to which that hasn't panned out is honestly a trifle surprising: It's not a surprise that they can't go head-to-head with Xeons or AMD's current gen actually good parts; but what is a bit curious is how quickly the lower power/lower performance options start suffering from one or more serious deficiencies: there are the ones that seem promising, and are often astoundingly cheap, but are cripplingly awful on the software side(the usual fate of rPi-alikes derived from Chinese tablet SoCs); there are the ones that have reasonably sane software, either OSS or at least competently vendor supported, but cap out at very low performance(the rPi and various router/networking oriented parts tend to fall here; lacking things like RAM expansion options and usually with I/O options that are sharply limited in one or more areas); and there are the ones that actually seem really cool, but are either only show up in expensive appliances and a a pricey dev board or two, or do show up for sale in at least a few boards/systems but are just really expensive for what they do compared to a basic x86 that won't require any special attention(The AMD ARM Opterons seem to have done this a bit; the SoftIron storage appliances seem interesting as storage appliances; but if you want just an ATX board or a barebones server based on one good luck even matching, much less beating, the price of a boring x86 box that's at least as fast and much better supported).
I, apparently naively, would have expected a few more products of the "We licensed whatever ARM's current 64-bit core is, support a bunch of DIMMs and a PCIe root; and the firmware is designed to get you into mainline Linux with minimum fuss" persuasion to be available.
What they are used for varies by implementation, since ARM is all kinds of things to various people; but 'Trustzone' extensions are specifically designed to provide analogous capabilities(at lower cost, the invisible super-privilege enclave is logically separated but runs on the same CPU rather than being a separate processor); and tends to be used for similar purposes in cases where conditional access enforcement or 'platform integrity' are design goals. ARM SoCs commonly also implement all the features one requires for a full crypto bootloader lockdown.
If you are working at some scale this matters less because you get to dictate if some of those features are enabled, whose keys are burned in as trusted, etc.(unlike Intel, where your leverage is likely to be substantially lower: there is at least one exception, the High Assurance Platform ME firmware variant, but for the most part they aren't terribly open to suggestions in that area); but if you are buying consumer or small business quantities of off-the-shelf ARM there's no particular reason to be more optimistic about how much control you have over the low level behavior.
It doesn't seem like a huge surprise to combine pessimism with patent accumulation: the cost of having a few relevant staff working on the project and some patent filings is fairly modest; and should blockchains exceed expectations having some strategically placed patents will be very valuable.
It's speculative behavior, not startup-that-believes-it-is-changing-the-world stuff; but making a modest investment because it has a low probability of a huge payoff is hardly irrational or unusual among people who can afford to lose the investment if the most probable outcome occurs; which likely covers BoA.
For the Chinese market do you really need anything being AOSP, a skin that tries to look like iOS; and WeChat support? Maybe an in-app payment system for pay to win mobile games?
It is surely only common sense that having the crash-prone 737s weeded out of the fleet makes the remainder not just safe, but safer, on average. Science.
Games are certainly a less helpful case(tighter latency demands, heavier GPU requirements on the server side, no corporate-IT-likes-the-centralization bonus); but much of the trouble seems to be the same sort of licensing/pricing issues that have dogged Terminal Services stuff since forever.
Given what mobile games just don't cost (with the limited exception of mostly iPad ports of PC games, which still tend to be cheaper than the PC version but not 99cents+microtransactions) and how little back catalog PC and used console titles go for the amount someone would be willing to pay for any streaming service that doesn't have new releases more or less at release isn't very high. If you want the new stuff, though, you need to find a way to get companies expecting to sell Call of FIFA 20XX++ for $60($100+ for deluxe pre-order premium edition) on board with accepting a slice of what you have left out of the monthly subscription fee, after paying for infrastructure and keeping your own lights on.
That's where the 'Netflix' example is fairly optimistic: nobody expected Netflix to get them access to still-in-theatres big budget movies as well as back catalog DVD rentals on nicer terms than Blockbuster, so setting up a DVD rental by mail service that gradually morphed into a streaming entity was viable(it also helps that, while a video rental outfit and a studio can come to a special licensing agreement if they wish, if nothing else the rental outfit can always just buy retail copies and rent those, so license fights can't scuttle selection; software licenses are less helpful, especially if you need technical assistance to reduce cost(ie. reasonably efficient multi-user streaming setups vs. just slapping capture cards and custom input devices on unmodified consoles.)
Some of the services we've seen trialed(or offered for a bit before their deaths) actually work surprisingly well, better than I would have expected; but it's never clear how they are supposed to square the circle on prices: the netlfix-style "OMG unlimited back catalog!" offering is something that's generally pretty cheap just to buy one game at a time as it suits you(and if a game is unobtanium in Steam or GoG that probably means that it's in rights clearance hell that will keep you from streaming it legally), so willingness to pay for that is tepid; while a "all the newest games!" offering is what people would probably actually want; but also what publishers would want to be paid relatively well for and what would cost the most to run, so the service would probably start looking more like your cable bill than like Netflix.
Doesn't help, for something like a Rovio/Sprint alliance, that there are already entities much more logically placed already nibbling at the idea(Microsoft has their 'games with gold' subscription bundle thing, Sony has a similar one; both already have substantial publisher relationships, large hardware install bases; and, if streaming games on phones is such a thing, could fairly easily kick out a phone client and a "stream any game you've bought for Xbox/PlayStation when you are on the go!" tied to existing accounts and such. Not seeing Rovio's relevance here.
This seems like it's hard to argue with for what you pay(nothing if you already have the relevant console); but of slightly baffling utility:
The PS4 is still limited to running one game at a time, so this isn't some multi-user terminal services thing(nor is such a thing likely given that consoles generally try to devote all the resources they can to that one game they are running; not ship with half the system idle in case someone wants to remote in); it's for use over local wifi(so 'use your home console when out and about' will be an unsupported hack at best; quite possibly too high latency to be useful) and you are stuck on a small screen with the glories of touchscreen emulation of hardware buttons.
Where's the situation where it isn't preferable to just walk over to the couch and use the TV and controller?
Specifically I think 'haven' is the name of the place where the people who never come out of the euthenic pods supposedly go to live happily.
I'm assuming that this story appearing immediately above "Self-Driving Cars May Hit People With Darker Skin More Often, Study Finds" definitely is purely coincidence.
I suspect that the interesting thing to watch is whether Apple gets into obvious ancillary financial services(as they are already doing to an extent, something like "AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss" is basically an insurance product backed by Apple's competitive advantage in performing repairs where those are more cost effective, something competing insurers are less able to do); consumer credit for purchases of their products being the big one(and proven by the car manufacturers to be quite a profitable sideline); whether they get into those and some financial services that wouldn't be possible without integration with their products(also a largely foregone conclusion at this point, offering billing services through ITMS and Apple pay are both exactly that; and probably have some further logical expansions); and whether they sprout a division that has nothing whatsoever to do with their traditional core products and services except to put their giant pile of cash to work.
Given what Apple has already done; 'predicting' the first and second of these is really just knowing your recent history and making a couple of highly plausible extrapolations at this point. The third option also isn't wildly unlikely; but it will be interesting to see to what degree it occurs(Apple obviously isn't storing its spare cash under a mattress somewhere at HQ; so it's obviously doing some amount of investing; but there's "I have money and want to put it into a diversified range of investments" and there's "I'm starting a hedge fund"); and whether Apple's financial activities remain fairly closely tied to their products(selling the credit you use to buy them and the payment processing built into them; while investing the profits) or whether the financial side takes on a life of its own that gradually eclipses the other activity.
It would not be at all surprising if the tape loop is quite deliberate:
Starbucks(along with most other retail establishments) has clearly gone to a lot of trouble to establish a particular 'feel'/'branding' in their interior and exterior design, staff uniforms, product graphic design, even what's printed on their paper cups and napkins and stuff.
If they sweat those sorts of details, rather than just ordering generic FoodCo napkins, odds are that some branding consultancy has laid out the soundtrack with some care(presumably with both seasonal and regional variations where applicable) and mandated it from HQ to ensure brand consistency. As you note, if it were just a technical problem it would have been solved years ago(and generally is at the local indie coffee shop where what's playing depends on whose shift it is); but I suspect that the technical problem solved was ensuring consistency and uniformity in soundtrack, not local autonomy and variety.
Apparently not in this case; the moderation in TFA is handled by subcontractors earning a princely $28k/year(ok, almost $29k). With is probably a lot more than some of the offshored content moderators get; but is really scraping the bottom of 'well paid' by most definitions.
Facebook HQ doesn't soil its hands with that sort of thing; much less C-suit Facebook HQ.
Did Microsoft just refer to the Department of Defense as an "institution we elected"?
Because I'm pretty sure that's not quite how it works.
So what sort of 'actions' would we expect people to be taking here? In an environment where a huge chunk of vendors are dirty, the details are complex enough that you have to be a paranoid nerd practically full time to know them; and EULAs apparently make just about anything legal where are we expecting the moderately privacy-concerned to be going?
Going with the 'consumer choices reveal minimal interest in privacy' angle would be one thing if we could compare between known good and known bad actors with slightly different prices; or if, say, voluntarily engaging with Facebook were the only way to end up interacting with them; but as it is we are in the (somewhere between uninformative and downright deceptive) position of basically saying that everyone not bugging out to go live in a unibomber cabin off the grid somewhere clearly just doesn't care about privacy.
Also, unless you want a wall to be effective you have to exercise control of both sides of it.
Put the wall right on the border and you have to have your own people violate the other nation's border any time they want to respond to what someone on the far side is doing. That makes it pretty trivial to dig tunnels, stockpile ladders, encourage anyone dumping trash and construction debris to do so against the wall to form a handy ramp(slow, but has the advantage of being really cheap to do over large areas and being carried out by the mostly-innocent activity of locals committing minor improper waste disposal; which makes shooting them a PR nightmare), etc. unless you are actually willing to commit a more or less unlimited number of provocative and illegal cross-border activities.
Once you've set the wall back far enough that your jurisdiction actually covers the area where people might stage crossings or work to compromise it you end up with a nontrivial slice of your own territory on the far side of the wall.
I can easily imagine that a heavily-stage-managed and custom documentation process would be way faster than the lowest-common-denominator legacy paper arrangement; but I find it much harder to understand why the 'blockchain' based updated electronic records process would be faster or more efficient than a similarly updated electronic records process that's based on some boring database instead.
It's easy to compare updated processes against legacy ones and get good results(especially given that there are probably way more techs watching this order and making sure nothing bad happens than any normal one enjoys); but if you want 'blockchain' data what matters is how it stacks up to a similarly updated process that uses a different backing mechanism.
I'd also be curious about how this beats the 'garbage in/garbage out' problem: Blockchain storage makes it very tricky to munge records after the fact without being noticed; but have absolutely no effect on any of the steps where someone needs to accurately and honestly observe the state of the world at a given step and write that into the record. The fun cryptographic integrity doesn't kick in until you have the electronic record; the process by which that record is produced is unaffected; and where a variety of opportunities for adding lies present themselves.
This question seems to hinge on the (almost certainly false) notion that design, and the perception of design, evolves in some trajectory that's independent of its context.
Things that look old do so in no small part because we can compare them with things that are new. Things that look cutting edge do so in part by rejecting design elements that look familiar.
Even if we assumed a scary good, probably better than human level, bot put to the task of inferring what "2020 thinks 2040 will look like" its output would, immediately, be part of 2020-era design, albeit probably a visually distinct flavor; and what 2040 actually look like would include reactions to, away from, against, with nostalgia for, etc. that "2040" design from 20 years ago.
When humans try this we get zeerust. It's not clear why a bot would do better; or that even an arbitrarily talented bot could beat the fact that the future it predicts will automatically become part of the past that the actual future evolves from(recursion is fun and unproblematic, right?).
There's also the problem, outside of some purely decorative objects or ones that aggressively try to defy the constraints of material culture(either trying to look more futuristic than the tech really is, like sci-fi TV props; or are deliberately throwbacks, like SCA longbows and stuff), that things look the way they do in no small part because of the constraints of technology that no amount of industrial designer resistance can get around.
Luckily, the other 75% can be kept in fear of losing their jobs to members of the unemployed 25% who will work for not-starvation; so we needn't let this disappointment interfere with reducing the cost of human resources. Progress!