At $25, I'd be in for at least one, just to have a look at this 'firefox OS' in its native habitat (as well as it likely being at least better than most dumbphones in terms of usability, probably not enough screen, for $25, to take on the $100+ 'smartphone' scene. Any chance of these showing up stateside?
A mobile OS that isn't Apple's Garden of Pure Ideology, or linked directly to the mothership in Redmond if you actually want to do much of anything would also be nice to see.
The easiest way to eliminate this threat is to lock down hardware sampling rates such that ultrasonic frequencies cannot be reliably reproduced (e.g. in the BIOS), and allow the user to flip the switch for higher rate support. At least, that's the first idea that came to mind. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's better than "kill all audio!"
Obviously anything that is vulnerable to software tampering is less secure than some elegant hardware based solution; but surely one could apply ACLs to the audio device, to at least ensure that only suitably blessed applications can interact with it?
Doesn't stop a root/kernel level exploit, or a blessed application being subverted; but right now, the default is that any program that can run can make noises, which is certainly easier to slip malice through.
Arguably, it's a bit of a hybrid phenomenon: neither pure misinformation nor pure purchase:
A large number of these assorted 'community' interest groups; are both relatively impecunious and relatively minimally informed, or interested, in the details of issues outside their mission area. It would be relatively trivial to, say, tell the group representing rural hospitals in Texas (one of the ones mentioned in TFA) that what's good for Comcast is good for rural internet access (this might even be true, since a time-honored technique for bargaining with the FCC is to promise to provide coverage to some totally uneconomic rural areas in exchange for the right to squeeze the much more numerous customers in some more profitable and denser markets. Going all the way back to the Communications Act of 1934, telling the FCC that you'll wire Podunkistan is approximately the equivalent of telling them that you love them for who they are, and generally about as honest.)
It is also the case that telcos and cable outfits, as with most large corporations, have 'philanthropic' arms, and here the 'bought and paid for' aspect takes on a greater role than the 'duped'. Some outfit that does gang-prevention for at-risk youth or some similar more-or-less-unrelated-to-broadband mission really has no business signing up pro or con; but if their operating budget is peanuts, and Comcast is kicking in part of it, it would be only polite to return the favor, no?
The one other aspect to keep in mind, specifically with telcos and cable companies, is the role of their employee structure: If you want to build infrastructure, nationwide, you need a lot of workers, including a lot of blue collar, tradesmen, and the like. Even if, in the long run, those workers might be better off in a more competitive climate(more laying cable and new service rollouts, which benefit the linesmen and splicers and bucket trucks, less buying fancy appliances from Cisco and Sandvine to wring more revenue out of legacy infrastructure), those workers can still answer "What has Comcast done for me?" a lot more easily than "What has Netflix done for me?", or any of the other internet-using companies, who tend to have relatively small, largely high-skill white collar, employee bases concentrated in a few specific locations.
This 'roots in the community' aspect is a nontrivial advantage: Somebody like Google or Netflix has customers in the community; but customers tend to be disorganized, and to perceive only small benefits, per company(though public backlash on net neutrality has been fairly strong, by the standards of policy wonkery, so they aren't totally ignorant of the value of the internet); but they only have employees, presence, relationships with local charities and Little League teams and such, in a few specific areas, if at all. A cable company or telco, though, has (although the name on the HQ may have changed a few times) been employing linesmen, trenchers, and service, maintenance, and field-tech people of all levels from 'guy with shovel' up through 'skilled tradesman' and 'local guru on freak issues with cable head-ends' for decades, and a fair few of them: Cable started rolling out ~1950, POTS predates 1900. Unless you are an utter failure at PR, or just a real, real, asshole, turning that into relatively broad-based influence over local 'good causes' should be an easy and natural process, however counterproductive you are to the long term interests of your customers.
I think that bringing broadband to America would be pretty cool. I've heard good things about it...very slowly... from parts of the world that do have it, and it seems like we really ought to as well.
I'm just confused about why Comcast, of all people, would be in charge of operating such an initiative, given their apparent opposition to good internet connections...
Apple, as it happens, does. Their iDevices and recent trackpads mostly use BCM5976 controllers. Always a good sign, for a company whose core business is capacitive touch interface sensors, that Apple would go with a part from Broadcom, the 'Well, at least they aren't Realtek...' of the world, rather than touch their stuff.
I'm a trifle surprised that nobody has used the gaze-tracking technology that is quite widely available and not-too-wildly expensive, commonly used for UI and website optimization work, to determine how the user's focus moves through the design, to help address the too many monitors for one field of view problem...
If you know where somebody's gaze is resting, and you know how their head is oriented, you can determine how close to the edge of their comfortable field of view they are. If the giant-wall-of-monitors were semicircular, with the user at the center, and the user's chair had motorized rotation(and possibly tilt) the system could automatically re-orient the user whenever their gaze drifts into the region where further travel would require either strain or head movement.
It'd take some tweaking, and practice, to keep the effect from being wildly disconcerting and a bit nauseous; but I suspect that acclimatization would be entirely doable...
Probably crash into something and die, just as if some delicate blood vessel in the driver's brain gave out (and/or he was texting).
As for the tank thing, it only looks like a major vulnerability if you consider the alternative: If you want to see out, you'll need a hole or a window. Even fancy exotic glazing materials are inferior to armor that doesn't have to be transparent, and holes are obviously not terribly protective. Cameras, especially with assorted lenses and clever image processing tricks, can offer the level of situational awareness that you'd practically have to swiss-cheese the armor to get from an unaided operator.
Can they be shot out or coated? Sure. Is the same true of windows? Yup. Is it even worth coating exposed crew when you could just put a bullet through their fleshy bodies?
The point is hardly that machines are infallible (oh they so very, very, aren't...); but that humans leave much to be desired for certain tasks.
Finally! I'm so glad there's something to feel intrigued about in technology. I miss all the corporate labs doing amazing things.
Unfortunately, while three quarters of the lab are working on that project, the other 25% are working on a way to make it rely on proprietary consumables and require 'FPU head cleaning' with tedious frequency.
I'd imagine that if you are building something that breaks binary compatibility and likely incorporates a fairly minimal set of hardware for which borrowing a BSD driver or something would be convenient(new system architecture, and aimed at big iron, so compatibility with mom and dad's scanner isn't an issue), you are in about as good a position as you could possibly be to discard some of the accumulated sins of the past.
It's also quite possible that the 'new OS' bit will be something more akin to a hypervisor and abstraction layer(whether the level of abstraction is closest to your basic VM, more like an LPAR, or follows some of the more service-level stuff to provide 'SQL database', 'Object storage', etc. is anyone's guess at present), and it simply wouldn't gain much from trying to cut and adapt an existing OS to size. What runs on top, may well include "yeah, here's the POSIX environment from HP-UX" or "Here's a Linux kernel modified to interact efficiently with the abstractions our OS supplies", since legacy code has massive inertia; but that won't be the 'new OS' itself.
I assume that economies of scale aren't helping; but some of the parts aren't inexpensive: that FPGA is ~$50, even in quantity, and the application processor isn't far behind.
In absence of details about the locations where the protest are occurring, I don't venture an opinion one way or the other about the validity of the rules. Just the position that having them apply to taxi operators but not to Uber is hardly 'competitive'. Apparently, given their protests, the taxi operators would prefer the 'apply to both' option, while Uber would presumably prefer the 'apply to neither' option(at least if the alternative was a crackdown that actually forced them to comply or leave, I'm sure they don't mind at all the current situation of skirting the laws that their competitors are subject to.)
Competition sucks. Gotta keep that privileged access to the market.
I am hardly wholly sympathetic to the taxis; but there is one important aspect that is often elided in the hagiographic "Hail Uber, destroyer of corrupt taxi monopolist cartels!" pieces: In regulated markets, taxi operators are subject to a variety of rules, some of them costly (insurance, metering accuracy consumer protection stuff, getting the much-coveted and supply limited taxi medallion in the first place), that Uber is just too hip and 'disruptive' to bother with.
If you wish to adopt the 'bring on the competition and let the cards fall as they may" view, it is an imperative that the existing taxi providers be released from the assorted regulatory burdens that Uber just ignores. Failure to do so is, in effect, a substantial subsidy to Uber under the guise of 'competition'.
If you take the position that taxi regulations exist for good historical reasons, founded on what happened before there were such regulations, it is similarly imperative to keep them from being flouted by assorted twee distinctions-without-difference "Oh, this isn't a taxi, it's an independent entrepreneur(who just happens to be hardwired directly into our business' software systems; but never you mind that, having 'employees' might expose us to obligations) offering social ridesharing!".
Regardless of whether you prefer the status quo, or would prefer to set the status quo on fire, anyone who does abide by taxi-related regulation and has to compete with people who don't has a very legitimate grievance. Whether that ought to be resolved by eliminating that regulation or extending it is a different matter; but either position still leaves the existing taxi guys getting the short end of the regulatory situation as it is now.
Oh, I'm not at all sure that they can do it, and I'm no fan of controllers myself; I've merely gotten the impression that their plan depends on doing it.
Given that consoles get the brutally efficient cost-optimization, as well as tending to score the occasional exclusive or exclusivity window on Sequel Shooter: Franchise of Halo: Warfighter 20XX, it's hard to make a terribly compelling case for building a PC to do the same job for more money, unless console graphical limitations really bug you.
So, while couch-usability demands something more or less like the 'controller' as we know it, if it isn't substantially more usable for games that aren't built with controllers as first-class citizens, it no longer much matters how much of the PC back catalog is ever coming to Linux; because much of it will be a masochistic exercise in utter sorrow.
I'm assuming that this attempt, along with Valve's usual tendency to lackadaisical deadline adherence, is part of why their design process is taking so long, and why they haven't adopted the (markedly faster, and very likely legal if it isn't wildly blatant) 'do something that looks like the offspring of what Microsoft and Sony are doing' strategy.
I'm assuming that it will resemble medieval Europe's complex webs of hierarchical feudal obligation, generally dismal infrastructure, and incredibly intricate patchwork of borders and fiefdoms.
Except with more lawyers, omnipresent surveillance, ubiquitous targeted advertising, and probably some sort of XML-based "Shakedown description language" for efficient automated squeezing of individuals and dependent companies by expert systems that continuously adjust the network's throttling behavior to maximize the expected willingness to pay of the target...
Obviously Valve would have preferred to have everything ready for launch earlier rather than later; but does anybody expect for a moment that "Well, the proposal is just to build a PC that's good enough for gaming and looks OK in the living room, we commit essentially nothing to the OS until the HDDs actually get imaged and installed" was a part of the calculation for OEMs from the beginning?
Getting the controller right is, for Valve, a big deal; because just cloning the xbox controller won't do much for PC oriented titles; but keyboard/mouse combos are not exactly good couch company (also some bad history there...), so they need something clever.
For the OEMs, the bet is markedly smaller. It's not as though you can easily buy linux-only hardware, and 'quiet', 'small and unobtrusive', and 'reasonably powerful' are virtues you can sell under any OS.
Architecturally, Cisco's point has merit (aside from being purely an excuse to sell higher-margin fancy-shaping hardware, rather than brutally commodified really-fast-switching hardware). Some applications are more latency sensitive than others.
However, there's a serious complication that Cisco is either ignoring or doesn't have any reason to care about: the mechanisms for doling out 'priority access to the network' and 'slight delays' are more or less target agnostic. There is nothing magic about hypothetical VOIP-911, Granny Accelerometer, or whatnot that makes it easy to identify them as "justified" prioritization and leave everything else alone.
If you have the system set up to promote and demote traffic based on type, origin, destination, (or any similar set of parameters sufficient to plausibly identify 'important' traffic, rather than just basic TCP congestion behavior), you can promote and demote whatever you feel like writing rulesets for. Given that the last-mile is pretty much buttoned up by a cozy oligopoly of incumbent telco and cable outfits, does anybody seriously expect the shaping to stop at making sure those 'public safety apps' get the message out in time, rather than paying lip service to ensuring that 911 calls go through and then moving on to the actually profitable business of chopping the internet up and attempting to reach optimum price discrimination and suppress competition?
So, barring major changes in the competitive landscape, or some sort of regulation-indistinguishable-from-magic, agreeing with Cisco on architectural grounds;but still rejecting the idea on the balance, is a perfectly cogent position(you can argue that it isn't correct; but it's not contradictory): Yes, traffic prioritization will allow better performance of latency sensitive applications (if they are in fact prioritized) all else being equal. However, once you have the architecture in place for that, the economic incentives to go nuts with it are absurdly compelling. By comparison, 'just grow your way out of it' isn't architecturally elegant; but it provides a nice, aligned, incentive for ISPs to build out and people who want more performance to buy fatter pipes, rather than for ISPs to let the infrastructure rot and focus on squeezing every penny out of every user.
It doesn't help that Amazon (while their margins are pitiful) has a pretty good reputation(and, since they sell stuff that everybody and your grandparents buy, rather than semi-specialized tech services, good reputation probably helps every purchase a bit) and an excellent reputation for efficiency.
It would be interesting to see what happens if they did try to turn the screws a bit and generate some real profit; but it's hard to argue that they are anything but good at what they do. GoDaddy? Cheap; but also pretty shit, and tolerated more or less only because they are cheap.
An IPO that, even if successful, would cover only 6 months of their burn rate?
It's not enough; but they don't really bring much to the table. Their products and services are all in heavily commodified areas (ooh, a domain registrar!) and they...don't exactly trade on a premium reputation...
Honestly, 100 million seems like a pretty generous valuation for a commodity dealer, with comparatively minimal differentiation or brand loyalty, probably not many assets to sell off, and a more or less drop-in replacement by any of their numerous competitors.
We don't even talk about bugs. Those little bastards make the entire human history of BDSM and BME practices look like tentative missionary position, in the dark, for procreative purposes only, by comparison.
Generally, I've found this to be true. Their business model does not depend on a lack of customer privacy like Google.
I would be more optimistic if it weren't for the fact that Apple went and deliberately developed "iBeacon", more or less deliberately designed for every sort of horrid 'location based service' and 'relevant offer' crap in the book.
Architecturally, hunting for wifi networks with a spoofed MAC is a good idea; but it sure does look like Apple is cutting an attempt to track their phones the non-blessed way off at the knees, even as they actively provide a blessed way of doing it.
In the same way, they cracked down on apps that used phone serial numbers, IMEIs and similar; but then built an "advertising identifier" right into their OS.
They want to be sure that you find the experience of being sold tasteful and unobtrusive; but they aren't actually your friends, nor do they consider your hardware purchase to be sufficient to exempt you from being the product.
As best I can tell, body-building is sort of like opera singing for your muscles. It's not clear why you would want to, or why people would be interested in the result; but it is undeniably impressive what you can make a human body do if you put your mind to it.
Plenty of species without hands get their rape on to a degree that makes A Clockwork Orange look like Saturday morning cartoons. Ducks, just by way of example, are so nasty that the evolution of their genital morphology is basically an arms race, with female reproductive tracts getting ever longer and more convoluted, and males developing ever more grotesque Cthulhoid horror-phalluses in an attempt to not let that stop them. ("Explosive eversion and functional
morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia" is always a good read if you suspected nature of harboring any traces of benevolence...)
You want to avoid delving into 'just so stories', or flattering a particular cultural quirk with the status of 'universality' ("Y'know why pink is a girl color, and chicks naturally like it? Because they, like, evolved to judge the ripeness of fruits that they were gathering! Oh, wait, you mean that the association between young girls and pink and young boys and blue is actually a century or two old? Umm, never mind...); but you can infer things about lifestyle and social interaction from archeological evidence.
Undamaged bone, bone that has experienced substantial unhealed trauma (ie. that trauma was part of whatever killed the bone's owner before any healing occurred), and bone that was damaged; but subsequently healed, all look quite different if they are in reasonably well-preserved shape.
If a fossil record is adequately detailed across time, changes in skeletal structure are also quite discernable, and isotopic analysis can help determine whether those changes were driven by dietary demands, or whether they occurred for unrelated reasons.
There is no certainty to be had, and there are pitfalls to avoid; but it's hardly a morass of nescience.
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Android 2.x? You would do that to yourself?
At $25, I'd be in for at least one, just to have a look at this 'firefox OS' in its native habitat (as well as it likely being at least better than most dumbphones in terms of usability, probably not enough screen, for $25, to take on the $100+ 'smartphone' scene. Any chance of these showing up stateside?
A mobile OS that isn't Apple's Garden of Pure Ideology, or linked directly to the mothership in Redmond if you actually want to do much of anything would also be nice to see.
The easiest way to eliminate this threat is to lock down hardware sampling rates such that ultrasonic frequencies cannot be reliably reproduced (e.g. in the BIOS), and allow the user to flip the switch for higher rate support. At least, that's the first idea that came to mind. I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's better than "kill all audio!"
Obviously anything that is vulnerable to software tampering is less secure than some elegant hardware based solution; but surely one could apply ACLs to the audio device, to at least ensure that only suitably blessed applications can interact with it? Doesn't stop a root/kernel level exploit, or a blessed application being subverted; but right now, the default is that any program that can run can make noises, which is certainly easier to slip malice through.
Arguably, it's a bit of a hybrid phenomenon: neither pure misinformation nor pure purchase:
A large number of these assorted 'community' interest groups; are both relatively impecunious and relatively minimally informed, or interested, in the details of issues outside their mission area. It would be relatively trivial to, say, tell the group representing rural hospitals in Texas (one of the ones mentioned in TFA) that what's good for Comcast is good for rural internet access (this might even be true, since a time-honored technique for bargaining with the FCC is to promise to provide coverage to some totally uneconomic rural areas in exchange for the right to squeeze the much more numerous customers in some more profitable and denser markets. Going all the way back to the Communications Act of 1934, telling the FCC that you'll wire Podunkistan is approximately the equivalent of telling them that you love them for who they are, and generally about as honest.)
It is also the case that telcos and cable outfits, as with most large corporations, have 'philanthropic' arms, and here the 'bought and paid for' aspect takes on a greater role than the 'duped'. Some outfit that does gang-prevention for at-risk youth or some similar more-or-less-unrelated-to-broadband mission really has no business signing up pro or con; but if their operating budget is peanuts, and Comcast is kicking in part of it, it would be only polite to return the favor, no?
The one other aspect to keep in mind, specifically with telcos and cable companies, is the role of their employee structure: If you want to build infrastructure, nationwide, you need a lot of workers, including a lot of blue collar, tradesmen, and the like. Even if, in the long run, those workers might be better off in a more competitive climate(more laying cable and new service rollouts, which benefit the linesmen and splicers and bucket trucks, less buying fancy appliances from Cisco and Sandvine to wring more revenue out of legacy infrastructure), those workers can still answer "What has Comcast done for me?" a lot more easily than "What has Netflix done for me?", or any of the other internet-using companies, who tend to have relatively small, largely high-skill white collar, employee bases concentrated in a few specific locations.
This 'roots in the community' aspect is a nontrivial advantage: Somebody like Google or Netflix has customers in the community; but customers tend to be disorganized, and to perceive only small benefits, per company(though public backlash on net neutrality has been fairly strong, by the standards of policy wonkery, so they aren't totally ignorant of the value of the internet); but they only have employees, presence, relationships with local charities and Little League teams and such, in a few specific areas, if at all. A cable company or telco, though, has (although the name on the HQ may have changed a few times) been employing linesmen, trenchers, and service, maintenance, and field-tech people of all levels from 'guy with shovel' up through 'skilled tradesman' and 'local guru on freak issues with cable head-ends' for decades, and a fair few of them: Cable started rolling out ~1950, POTS predates 1900. Unless you are an utter failure at PR, or just a real, real, asshole, turning that into relatively broad-based influence over local 'good causes' should be an easy and natural process, however counterproductive you are to the long term interests of your customers.
I think that bringing broadband to America would be pretty cool. I've heard good things about it...very slowly... from parts of the world that do have it, and it seems like we really ought to as well.
I'm just confused about why Comcast, of all people, would be in charge of operating such an initiative, given their apparent opposition to good internet connections...
Apple, as it happens, does. Their iDevices and recent trackpads mostly use BCM5976 controllers. Always a good sign, for a company whose core business is capacitive touch interface sensors, that Apple would go with a part from Broadcom, the 'Well, at least they aren't Realtek...' of the world, rather than touch their stuff.
I'm a trifle surprised that nobody has used the gaze-tracking technology that is quite widely available and not-too-wildly expensive, commonly used for UI and website optimization work, to determine how the user's focus moves through the design, to help address the too many monitors for one field of view problem...
If you know where somebody's gaze is resting, and you know how their head is oriented, you can determine how close to the edge of their comfortable field of view they are. If the giant-wall-of-monitors were semicircular, with the user at the center, and the user's chair had motorized rotation(and possibly tilt) the system could automatically re-orient the user whenever their gaze drifts into the region where further travel would require either strain or head movement.
It'd take some tweaking, and practice, to keep the effect from being wildly disconcerting and a bit nauseous; but I suspect that acclimatization would be entirely doable...
Probably crash into something and die, just as if some delicate blood vessel in the driver's brain gave out (and/or he was texting).
As for the tank thing, it only looks like a major vulnerability if you consider the alternative: If you want to see out, you'll need a hole or a window. Even fancy exotic glazing materials are inferior to armor that doesn't have to be transparent, and holes are obviously not terribly protective. Cameras, especially with assorted lenses and clever image processing tricks, can offer the level of situational awareness that you'd practically have to swiss-cheese the armor to get from an unaided operator.
Can they be shot out or coated? Sure. Is the same true of windows? Yup. Is it even worth coating exposed crew when you could just put a bullet through their fleshy bodies?
The point is hardly that machines are infallible (oh they so very, very, aren't...); but that humans leave much to be desired for certain tasks.
Is it really a 'productivity' application if it's just used for shoveling financial instruments around in exotic ways?
Finally! I'm so glad there's something to feel intrigued about in technology. I miss all the corporate labs doing amazing things.
Unfortunately, while three quarters of the lab are working on that project, the other 25% are working on a way to make it rely on proprietary consumables and require 'FPU head cleaning' with tedious frequency.
I'd imagine that if you are building something that breaks binary compatibility and likely incorporates a fairly minimal set of hardware for which borrowing a BSD driver or something would be convenient(new system architecture, and aimed at big iron, so compatibility with mom and dad's scanner isn't an issue), you are in about as good a position as you could possibly be to discard some of the accumulated sins of the past.
It's also quite possible that the 'new OS' bit will be something more akin to a hypervisor and abstraction layer(whether the level of abstraction is closest to your basic VM, more like an LPAR, or follows some of the more service-level stuff to provide 'SQL database', 'Object storage', etc. is anyone's guess at present), and it simply wouldn't gain much from trying to cut and adapt an existing OS to size. What runs on top, may well include "yeah, here's the POSIX environment from HP-UX" or "Here's a Linux kernel modified to interact efficiently with the abstractions our OS supplies", since legacy code has massive inertia; but that won't be the 'new OS' itself.
I assume that economies of scale aren't helping; but some of the parts aren't inexpensive: that FPGA is ~$50, even in quantity, and the application processor isn't far behind.
In absence of details about the locations where the protest are occurring, I don't venture an opinion one way or the other about the validity of the rules. Just the position that having them apply to taxi operators but not to Uber is hardly 'competitive'. Apparently, given their protests, the taxi operators would prefer the 'apply to both' option, while Uber would presumably prefer the 'apply to neither' option(at least if the alternative was a crackdown that actually forced them to comply or leave, I'm sure they don't mind at all the current situation of skirting the laws that their competitors are subject to.)
Competition sucks. Gotta keep that privileged access to the market.
I am hardly wholly sympathetic to the taxis; but there is one important aspect that is often elided in the hagiographic "Hail Uber, destroyer of corrupt taxi monopolist cartels!" pieces: In regulated markets, taxi operators are subject to a variety of rules, some of them costly (insurance, metering accuracy consumer protection stuff, getting the much-coveted and supply limited taxi medallion in the first place), that Uber is just too hip and 'disruptive' to bother with.
If you wish to adopt the 'bring on the competition and let the cards fall as they may" view, it is an imperative that the existing taxi providers be released from the assorted regulatory burdens that Uber just ignores. Failure to do so is, in effect, a substantial subsidy to Uber under the guise of 'competition'.
If you take the position that taxi regulations exist for good historical reasons, founded on what happened before there were such regulations, it is similarly imperative to keep them from being flouted by assorted twee distinctions-without-difference "Oh, this isn't a taxi, it's an independent entrepreneur(who just happens to be hardwired directly into our business' software systems; but never you mind that, having 'employees' might expose us to obligations) offering social ridesharing!".
Regardless of whether you prefer the status quo, or would prefer to set the status quo on fire, anyone who does abide by taxi-related regulation and has to compete with people who don't has a very legitimate grievance. Whether that ought to be resolved by eliminating that regulation or extending it is a different matter; but either position still leaves the existing taxi guys getting the short end of the regulatory situation as it is now.
Oh, I'm not at all sure that they can do it, and I'm no fan of controllers myself; I've merely gotten the impression that their plan depends on doing it.
Given that consoles get the brutally efficient cost-optimization, as well as tending to score the occasional exclusive or exclusivity window on Sequel Shooter: Franchise of Halo: Warfighter 20XX, it's hard to make a terribly compelling case for building a PC to do the same job for more money, unless console graphical limitations really bug you.
So, while couch-usability demands something more or less like the 'controller' as we know it, if it isn't substantially more usable for games that aren't built with controllers as first-class citizens, it no longer much matters how much of the PC back catalog is ever coming to Linux; because much of it will be a masochistic exercise in utter sorrow.
I'm assuming that this attempt, along with Valve's usual tendency to lackadaisical deadline adherence, is part of why their design process is taking so long, and why they haven't adopted the (markedly faster, and very likely legal if it isn't wildly blatant) 'do something that looks like the offspring of what Microsoft and Sony are doing' strategy.
I'm assuming that it will resemble medieval Europe's complex webs of hierarchical feudal obligation, generally dismal infrastructure, and incredibly intricate patchwork of borders and fiefdoms.
Except with more lawyers, omnipresent surveillance, ubiquitous targeted advertising, and probably some sort of XML-based "Shakedown description language" for efficient automated squeezing of individuals and dependent companies by expert systems that continuously adjust the network's throttling behavior to maximize the expected willingness to pay of the target...
Have a nice day.
Obviously Valve would have preferred to have everything ready for launch earlier rather than later; but does anybody expect for a moment that "Well, the proposal is just to build a PC that's good enough for gaming and looks OK in the living room, we commit essentially nothing to the OS until the HDDs actually get imaged and installed" was a part of the calculation for OEMs from the beginning?
Getting the controller right is, for Valve, a big deal; because just cloning the xbox controller won't do much for PC oriented titles; but keyboard/mouse combos are not exactly good couch company (also some bad history there...), so they need something clever.
For the OEMs, the bet is markedly smaller. It's not as though you can easily buy linux-only hardware, and 'quiet', 'small and unobtrusive', and 'reasonably powerful' are virtues you can sell under any OS.
Architecturally, Cisco's point has merit (aside from being purely an excuse to sell higher-margin fancy-shaping hardware, rather than brutally commodified really-fast-switching hardware). Some applications are more latency sensitive than others.
However, there's a serious complication that Cisco is either ignoring or doesn't have any reason to care about: the mechanisms for doling out 'priority access to the network' and 'slight delays' are more or less target agnostic. There is nothing magic about hypothetical VOIP-911, Granny Accelerometer, or whatnot that makes it easy to identify them as "justified" prioritization and leave everything else alone.
If you have the system set up to promote and demote traffic based on type, origin, destination, (or any similar set of parameters sufficient to plausibly identify 'important' traffic, rather than just basic TCP congestion behavior), you can promote and demote whatever you feel like writing rulesets for. Given that the last-mile is pretty much buttoned up by a cozy oligopoly of incumbent telco and cable outfits, does anybody seriously expect the shaping to stop at making sure those 'public safety apps' get the message out in time, rather than paying lip service to ensuring that 911 calls go through and then moving on to the actually profitable business of chopping the internet up and attempting to reach optimum price discrimination and suppress competition?
So, barring major changes in the competitive landscape, or some sort of regulation-indistinguishable-from-magic, agreeing with Cisco on architectural grounds;but still rejecting the idea on the balance, is a perfectly cogent position(you can argue that it isn't correct; but it's not contradictory): Yes, traffic prioritization will allow better performance of latency sensitive applications (if they are in fact prioritized) all else being equal. However, once you have the architecture in place for that, the economic incentives to go nuts with it are absurdly compelling. By comparison, 'just grow your way out of it' isn't architecturally elegant; but it provides a nice, aligned, incentive for ISPs to build out and people who want more performance to buy fatter pipes, rather than for ISPs to let the infrastructure rot and focus on squeezing every penny out of every user.
It doesn't help that Amazon (while their margins are pitiful) has a pretty good reputation(and, since they sell stuff that everybody and your grandparents buy, rather than semi-specialized tech services, good reputation probably helps every purchase a bit) and an excellent reputation for efficiency.
It would be interesting to see what happens if they did try to turn the screws a bit and generate some real profit; but it's hard to argue that they are anything but good at what they do. GoDaddy? Cheap; but also pretty shit, and tolerated more or less only because they are cheap.
An IPO that, even if successful, would cover only 6 months of their burn rate?
It's not enough; but they don't really bring much to the table. Their products and services are all in heavily commodified areas (ooh, a domain registrar!) and they...don't exactly trade on a premium reputation...
Honestly, 100 million seems like a pretty generous valuation for a commodity dealer, with comparatively minimal differentiation or brand loyalty, probably not many assets to sell off, and a more or less drop-in replacement by any of their numerous competitors.
We don't even talk about bugs. Those little bastards make the entire human history of BDSM and BME practices look like tentative missionary position, in the dark, for procreative purposes only, by comparison.
Generally, I've found this to be true. Their business model does not depend on a lack of customer privacy like Google.
I would be more optimistic if it weren't for the fact that Apple went and deliberately developed "iBeacon", more or less deliberately designed for every sort of horrid 'location based service' and 'relevant offer' crap in the book.
Architecturally, hunting for wifi networks with a spoofed MAC is a good idea; but it sure does look like Apple is cutting an attempt to track their phones the non-blessed way off at the knees, even as they actively provide a blessed way of doing it.
In the same way, they cracked down on apps that used phone serial numbers, IMEIs and similar; but then built an "advertising identifier" right into their OS.
They want to be sure that you find the experience of being sold tasteful and unobtrusive; but they aren't actually your friends, nor do they consider your hardware purchase to be sufficient to exempt you from being the product.
As best I can tell, body-building is sort of like opera singing for your muscles. It's not clear why you would want to, or why people would be interested in the result; but it is undeniably impressive what you can make a human body do if you put your mind to it.
Why do you need thumbs for raping?
Plenty of species without hands get their rape on to a degree that makes A Clockwork Orange look like Saturday morning cartoons. Ducks, just by way of example, are so nasty that the evolution of their genital morphology is basically an arms race, with female reproductive tracts getting ever longer and more convoluted, and males developing ever more grotesque Cthulhoid horror-phalluses in an attempt to not let that stop them. ("Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia" is always a good read if you suspected nature of harboring any traces of benevolence...)
You want to avoid delving into 'just so stories', or flattering a particular cultural quirk with the status of 'universality' ("Y'know why pink is a girl color, and chicks naturally like it? Because they, like, evolved to judge the ripeness of fruits that they were gathering! Oh, wait, you mean that the association between young girls and pink and young boys and blue is actually a century or two old? Umm, never mind...); but you can infer things about lifestyle and social interaction from archeological evidence.
Undamaged bone, bone that has experienced substantial unhealed trauma (ie. that trauma was part of whatever killed the bone's owner before any healing occurred), and bone that was damaged; but subsequently healed, all look quite different if they are in reasonably well-preserved shape.
If a fossil record is adequately detailed across time, changes in skeletal structure are also quite discernable, and isotopic analysis can help determine whether those changes were driven by dietary demands, or whether they occurred for unrelated reasons.
There is no certainty to be had, and there are pitfalls to avoid; but it's hardly a morass of nescience.