In an ideal world, antibiotics, a good working knowledge of haemostasis, aseptic technique, and sanitary practices to prevent contamination of food and water and infestation of people and clothing by disease carrying parasites.
In a less ideal world, you can get away with less at the cost of higher mortality rates.
The archeological record is never as good as we'd want it to be; but it is there and it can definitely tell you a fair bit about what people were growing, how long they were living and what sorts of things they were dying of; what sort of structures they were building, and so on. Aside from written records being one of the specific technologies that tends to show up when agricultural surpluses allow a bureaucracy/priesthood/whatever to dedicate themselves to pushing paper(obviously, logistics on a small scale can be done by the wholly illiterate; but the more you are doing the more likely it is that you'll at least have some sort of accounting system and some pictographs of common commodities).
You don't need a written record to know approximately how densely populated an area was, what sorts of things they died of, and whether they constructed granaries and similar storage structures.
The 'bloody scrum of europeans killing each other over something cryptic' bit isn't exactly news; but TFA describes a relatively massive number of combatants, with isotopic signatures suggesting they came a considerable distance to reach the site and with equipment and healed wounds suggesting that they were comparatively experienced rather than just the local peasant militia(which, given the low population density of the place at the time, wouldn't have amounted to much).
I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
Users with unacceptably deviant names will be assigned GUIDs for standardized interaction with all systems. Thank you for your compliance with this exciting and mandatory efficiency initiative.
The FTC is pitifully hopeless for a job like this. If we have to put up with the downsides of living in a militant surveillance state, why can't we at least enjoy the benefits of putting the NSA on the job? With the world's largest telecommunications surveillance system, they certainly know much more about spammers and telemarketers than the FTC does; and are probably more comfortable than the FTC is with forwarding information to whoever is handling the executions and extraordinary renditions today.
Man, Now I have to dig out my Visor Edge and see if the battery is still any good... Palm's sync software was absolutely atrocious(the 'conduits' concept was elegant; but the software itself was utter garbage); but it's amazing how good the experience was on practically no computing power at all.
I suspect that this would have to be balanced against the energy costs of higher bluetooth data rates; but you might actually be able to get fairly impressive lifespan/longevity out of a 'smartwatch' by making it dumber.
Consider the humble serial terminal: your odds of finding genuine RS-232 voltages have fallen dramatically; but with the appropriate level converter all sorts of even new gear can talk to basically anything that postdates the old 60ma and 20ma loop interfaces. You want to dial in to the serial debug port on some modern widget with a ~35 year old Smartmodem 300? Not a problem. Similarly, 'pretend to be a VT-100' will probably still be a widely available lowest-common-denominator pseudostandard when I'm succumbing to senility in a retirement facility.
If the 'smartwatch' tries to get clever, and have onboard apps and vendor-specific SDKs and APIs and so on, yeah, it'll be finicky legacy gear or wholly unsupported relatively quickly. If the 'smartwatch' offers(either exclusively, or in addition to the fancy-and-ephemeral stuff) some way for the master device to just treat it as a dumb terminal over the bluetooth link, that could easily be viable decades from now. There will probably be better options; but supporting legacy BTLE will likely be vanishingly cheap and unless the command set for scribbling on the smartwatch's screen is horrifically baroque or deliberately broken, it will take only a fairly thin translation layer to format whatever you want on whatever device of the future you are using and paint it on the screen.
This isn't exactly a feel-good story; but it's hard to say that it's a bad plan. If you've already got a serious 'brownfield' site, using it to deal with other unpleasant industrial matters rather than letting it sit idle or attempting some wildly uneconomic remediation seems sensible. Hopefully the new facilities will not inherit the legacy of...competent and safety oriented...nuclear engineering that caused the trouble originally.
One thing I'd be curious about, though: I assume that the exclusion zone is because of a combination of nasty isotopes in the soil that make subsistence activities, kids eating dirt, and various other aspects of human habitation problematic, along with the generally low tolerance of radiation risks for civilians not working in nuclear energy/related industries; but are there any areas(outside of the interior and immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus) where the radiation exposure you would receive just by standing around is still intense enough to be an occupational safety issue?
Isotope contamination can mostly be dealt with as though it were a mere chemical hazard, since you won't take much exposure unless you ingest/inhale/whatever the stuff and end up with it in your body somewhere; but your options are a lot more limited if you are being bathed in ionizing radiation just standing there. Chemical protective gear isn't a pleasure to wear; but it's doable. Radiation shielding tends to be mass prohibitive unless you are going full power armor or something.
I'm sure that they could do better; but (from the rough numbers I've been able to dig up) it looks like a bluetooth low energy chip just sleeping and waiting for something to happen draws at least as much power as the timekeeping mechanism in your basic cheap-and-practically-immortal quartz oscillator watch. Actually transferring some data now and again will cost you extra.
What I don't know is how much extra a full bitmapped monochrome LCD costs you, in energy, vs. the fixed-function multisegment ones that they use in low end digital watches. Color definitely blows your power budget; but B/W transreflective can be very low power indeed, though certainly more pixels will mean more transistors and a more complex driver IC; I just don't know how much more energy that requires.
I speak as one with distinctly limited experience in low-power electronics design; but (aside from pure technophilia and spec lust) it wouldn't surprise me if the advantages of a screen that can actually display at least a few words/some numbers/a contact name are considered to be a significant win over a more basic optical or tactile "Something is happening" notification; and might not actually be as much more power intensive as one would expect.
I have no idea what the glowing backlit color screens and slightly underclocked smartphone processors brigade is up to; that will take ages to mature to reasonable battery life; but once you add an RF link and some kind of microcontroller/microprocessor you've already blown the power budget compared to a basic quartz RTC, so perhaps the thinking is that, since the battery life will unavoidably be substantially worse the best bet is to cram in enough functions to compensate.
It wasn't a very big bubble; but the hype-to-substance ratio was arguably large enough to qualify as a small one. It didn't survive contact with reality for long; but there was a brief period of delusional hope among the manufacturers and some of the talking heads that 'smartwatch' was going to be the must-have accessory and temporary reprieve from the pressure on profits caused by the fact that everyone who wants a smartphone and a tablet either already has one or is poor enough that their desire for one isn't too helpful.
Definitely not at the level of "zOMG 3D TV! It will surely cause everyone to re-buy their television!"; but same basic hopeful delusion that a new gimmick could save them from an increasingly saturated and commodified market.
I would certainly expect Pebble to be less insulated from any downturn/loss of confidence than the internal teams doing 'smartwatch' at Apple, Google, or any of the Android OEMs, since they neither have a large host organism to quietly hide losses in, nor any claims to some sort of 'product synergy' nonsense; but my impression(if anyone has actual data, either for or against this, I'd be interested to know) was that Pebble had been atypically successful given the rather narrow appeal of the 'smartwatch' concept with their size and battery life friendly keep-it-simple-stupid design and relatively broad compatibility.
Is my impression wrong; and Pebble is actually starting to suffer as competing products with tighter 'ecosystem' tie-ins have gotten vaguely more competent and less in need of being nearly cellphone sized to get even a day's battery life? Is my impression correct; but either Pebble or their backers, or both, can't really think of too many additional incremental improvements to the KISS-based design that would be worth the cost of keeping the extra staff? Was the market simply so tiny that the few people who wanted one are already saturated and everybody is having issues moving product?
I'd certainly like to know; but my impressions haven't been terribly positive. At work we were handed the fancy 'n expensive video surveillance system after the contractors finished poking at it; and while the quality of the sensors, optics, weatherproof housings, etc. is certainly much nicer in the classy systems; the software was...not inspiring. The newcomers(either new companies or ground-up new product lines) approach the problem with the same enthusiasm that goes into writing horrific home router firmware, just with a camera and a video streaming service in addition to the http server. The Old 'n Respectable aren't quite as overtly shoddy; but are still barely waking up to the fact that this isn't the good old days when every camera had a point-to-point coax link for video and RS-422 or 485 for PTZ and similar command chatter, and 'just trust the link layer' wasn't actually terrible advice.
We ended up doing much the same thing, since finding a better vendor or getting the issues fixed seemed like an intractable problem(especially since the budget had already been spent by the time we were handed the issue).
Honestly, while this would spoil the 'neat, integrated, and PoE powered' options provided by the all in one IP cameras; if I actually had to provide a vaguely trustworthy camera that was intended to share a network with other devices; I'd probably resort to a NUC or similar small PC with a framegrabber or USB camera and a real operating system. Overkill; but 'embedded' just means 'total shit, just nonstandard enough that replacing the firmware with something that doesn't suck isn't always practical' so often that it would be the less painful option.
These DVRs are utterly boring devices; but they are really pretty obvious high value targets(high value in terms of their position within a target's infrastructure; I imagine that cheap, shit, cameras aren't as likely to show up in the highest value target organizations).
Aside from the benefits of owning a basic embedded linux box that is probably inside whatever pitiful perimeter security their network has, you get access to the video feeds from the security cameras and can both case the target from the comfort of your own computer and disable or wipe the DVR when occasion suits.
I realize that the GPU can access main memory(the cheap and lousy ones have been doing it to save money for ages; and Nvidia has made the process a bit nicer for their compute users when they need access to lots of RAM); but the memory is 'non-unified' in the sense that a GPU accessing system RAM is (relatively speaking, it's still pretty fast in absolute terms) a second class citizen compared to a CPU accessing system RAM(there is an unavoidable increase in latency if the RAM is connected to a different CPU than the one accessing it and you add a Hypertransport/QPI hop in there); while even if you have heroic amounts of money to wave around you just don't have the option of GDDR5-or-equivalent speeds for system RAM.
There is no 'zero overhead' option when you are talking about multiple memory controllers, hence NUMA; but my naive expectation would have been that CUDA-oriented systems would have moved more aggressively in the direction of resembling multi-socket CPU arrangements; but with GPUs in most of the sockets and GDDR-speed RAM across the board, rather than these cards with their increasingly enormous onboard RAM supply, connected (comparatively) slowly to the CPU and system RAM. I'm sure that they have their reasons, probably better than mine; but it seems surprising from my naive position.
Honestly, if you aren't doing some sort of HPC, the main reason why older memory standards are inadequate is that they tend to either sharply constrain maximum RAM, or involve seriously heroic costs(either in terms of digging up no-longer-produced specimens of whatever DIMM was the biggest ever made for a given spec, or whatever buffering or similar tricks workstations and servers of the era used to increase maximum capacity, like FBDIMMs in the DDR2 days) if you want to get even modestly close to the maximum. Especially since GPUs come with their own, fast, memory; it's not so much the speed as it is the quantity of RAM that usually bites you.
LGA-1366 got sort of screwed on selection, especially on the low end; but there were some very, very, nice CPUs available for that socket. It was also before Intel realized that there wasn't a damn thing anyone could or would do about it if they decided to build a wall between anything 'xeon' and even high end desktop parts.
What surprises me(especially since AMD is clearly capable of it, since the PS4 does it, and it'd be a bit of a shock if Nvidia and Intel were incapable of following suit or already have something ready to go) is that CUDA(or OpenCL)-targeted systems still haven't made any moves(at least not commercially visible ones) toward unified memory architecture; and/or allowing the relatively expansive supply of motherboard memory expansion to use GDDR and connecting the GPU via a faster interface than PCIe if needed.
As much as it would probably involve selling more Nvidia GPUs than they would like, AMD seems like the one that might actually be particularly interested in this, since it would at least get opterons into servers: They've been pushing HyperTransport as a multi-vendor high speed interconnect(first under 'Torrenza', now under the 'Heterogenous System Architecture Foundation', with some fancy FPGAs available that can interact with Opterons in multi-socket boards.
If GPU compute cards are shipping with increasingly monstrous amounts of RAM, that seems like an opportunity for HSA to move the GPU closer to being a first-class citizen along with the CPU; and allowing RAM expansion.
I'm pretty sure that they've always had a five year plan(the 13th five-year-plan implies 65 years of five year plans; so somewhere between 1951 and 1956 depending on where we are in the 13th five year plan) and the PRC's nominal start date is ~1949, with the nationalists mostly out of action by that time; so this is not exactly a new thing.
That said, the degree to which the 5 year plan, rather than operationally 'private sector'(yes, often heavily state or politician owned in various ways; but they certainly act like capitalists or crony capitalists rather than commies) developments, has certainly dwindled over time.
The air pollution might actually be one driver for solar deployment: yes, it will definitely reduce effectiveness in the short to medium term; but the quality-of-life costs of some of the nastier power plants make them desirable targets for retirement in order to improve public health and reduce dissatisfaction.
If a given city is so polluted that it's cutting solar efficiency; that's a good sign that the people there probably aren't happy about it. It'll involve a bunch of shuffling around of the grid; but you would likely make people considerably happier if you can shut down the worst pollution sources, tide yourself over with power from elsewhere on the grid, and then get increasing amounts of local solar as the worst of the smog eventually settles out or blows away.
It probably doesn't hurt that a lot of China's existing load is served by some really nasty coal plants; mostly burning fairly low-grade coal('ideal' coal still makes the global warming types nervous, since burning pure carbon in an oxygen atmosphere puts out more CO2 than does burning hydrocarbons, which put out a mixture of CO2 and water vapor; but real-world coal tends to come with goodies like sulfur and mercury; and unless you have suitable enforcement of scrubber user and the like, they show up quite merrily in the stack output). Even if the economics alone don't necessarily add up; the percentage of the Chinese population that is now wealthy enough for 'breathable air' to rise above 'adequate food' as a demand is much higher than it used to be; and the CCP can only afford so much discontent. Unless Chinese solar is abhorrently expensive compared to the estimates I've seen for US installs(which seems unlikely); there would be a strong case to be made for government subsidy/regulation aimed at, at least, shutting down some of the coal units upwind of major population centers.
Is this guy saying that the NSA used to be effective? I do remember them doing good work back when they emphasized playing defense; and they have probably assisted with some really juicy targeted attacks on specific people of interest(whether criminals or well-placed figures in governments we are interested in getting to know better); but has the Total Information Awareness/dragnet-all-the-data stuff ever shown the slightest evidence of providing useful data?
I'd certainly be interested to know what, if any, agreements were made between the two; but it seems like one could(albeit with the risk of wikipedia choosing to play whack-a-mole and try to block you) implement the arrangement that Facebook has set up without any specific agreement with wikipedia. The local telcos obviously need to be explicitly included, they are carrying a bunch of additional data traffic that isn't being paid for by their subscribers; but once that is set up, those subscribers could just access wikipedia in the same way that everyone else with an IP address does, or through some sort of facebook-proxy-thing that accesses wikipedia the same way everyone else with an IP address does. If it is the facebook-proxy-thing arrangement, you could probably make it more efficient with the direct cooperation of wikipedia; but unless they started trying to block you, you wouldn't need any more consent than is implied by running a publicly accessible web service.
I think that it is great that the locals are taking facebooks "altruistic" 'hey, let's lock down the emerging markets on an awful walled garden non-internet before anyone else does!' plan and getting actual use out of it. Good for them, and hopefully throwing a spanner in facebook's plan(or at least inflating its costs a bit, I'm assuming that the local telcos want to get paid by someone for the extra traffic).
It does seem somewhat unfortunate that wikipedia, rather than facebook, is the one whose relative openness is being exploited to serve as an improvised transfer mechanism for assorted blobs. Allowing themselves to be included as the 'altruistic' face of the plan was a dubiously principled move; but they are still eating the additional costs of hosting a bunch of stuff that doesn't advance their mission at all because a blatant market distortion makes anything you can squeeze into their system effectively 'free' in certain cost-sensitive markets. I'd be much happier if they'd figured out how to use facebook's systems for the purpose.
Given how Intel's attention has shifted to a combination of GPU bumps and energy efficiency improvements, with improvements in absolute performance, rather than performance/watt, being pretty tepid; laptops have at least benefited from getting somewhat slimmer and lighter for the same amount of power. For desktops, the next big reason to upgrade will be when DDR3 starts to get scarce and expensive because of the move to DDR4. Unless you absolutely must be able to boot from an NVMe SSD or something, there just isn't much to inspire interest.
I do a trifle more gaming than is probably good for me; and I'm using a 5 year old system(with a more recent GPU of course). Sure, LGA-1155 is 'ancient'; but it remains nice and fast, supports 32GB of RAM, motherboards of the era usually threw in at least a couple of USB3 and SATA 6Gb/s connectors; and what else can you really ask of a desktop board?
It is vaguely unusual for someone to say it so plainly; but I'm not sure why this position would be even slightly surprising. Apple mostly sells hardware. If you sell hardware, people who are using 5+ year old PCs are lousy customers(regardless of cause: maybe they are too poor to buy the new and shiny stuff that they do want, maybe their needs just haven't changed enough to make an upgrade worth it, though they could afford whatever new and shiny stuff they felt like, the effect is the same). Why wouldn't your marketing message be anything other than encouragement to the people who do buy new stuff frequently; with a secondary focus on encouraging people with old stuff to feel that they are missing out?
Slashdot Mirror
In an ideal world, antibiotics, a good working knowledge of haemostasis, aseptic technique, and sanitary practices to prevent contamination of food and water and infestation of people and clothing by disease carrying parasites.
In a less ideal world, you can get away with less at the cost of higher mortality rates.
The archeological record is never as good as we'd want it to be; but it is there and it can definitely tell you a fair bit about what people were growing, how long they were living and what sorts of things they were dying of; what sort of structures they were building, and so on. Aside from written records being one of the specific technologies that tends to show up when agricultural surpluses allow a bureaucracy/priesthood/whatever to dedicate themselves to pushing paper(obviously, logistics on a small scale can be done by the wholly illiterate; but the more you are doing the more likely it is that you'll at least have some sort of accounting system and some pictographs of common commodities).
You don't need a written record to know approximately how densely populated an area was, what sorts of things they died of, and whether they constructed granaries and similar storage structures.
The 'bloody scrum of europeans killing each other over something cryptic' bit isn't exactly news; but TFA describes a relatively massive number of combatants, with isotopic signatures suggesting they came a considerable distance to reach the site and with equipment and healed wounds suggesting that they were comparatively experienced rather than just the local peasant militia(which, given the low population density of the place at the time, wouldn't have amounted to much).
I have to wonder how this all worked logistically: ~1,200BC wasn't exactly renowned for its medical technology, regular agricultural surpluses, or food storage capabilities. Aside from motivating this many guys to slog all the way to this site, simply keeping them healthy and fed long enough so they could kill one another before disease or starvation got them must have been a real trick.
Users with unacceptably deviant names will be assigned GUIDs for standardized interaction with all systems. Thank you for your compliance with this exciting and mandatory efficiency initiative.
The FTC is pitifully hopeless for a job like this. If we have to put up with the downsides of living in a militant surveillance state, why can't we at least enjoy the benefits of putting the NSA on the job? With the world's largest telecommunications surveillance system, they certainly know much more about spammers and telemarketers than the FTC does; and are probably more comfortable than the FTC is with forwarding information to whoever is handling the executions and extraordinary renditions today.
Man, Now I have to dig out my Visor Edge and see if the battery is still any good... Palm's sync software was absolutely atrocious(the 'conduits' concept was elegant; but the software itself was utter garbage); but it's amazing how good the experience was on practically no computing power at all.
I suspect that this would have to be balanced against the energy costs of higher bluetooth data rates; but you might actually be able to get fairly impressive lifespan/longevity out of a 'smartwatch' by making it dumber.
Consider the humble serial terminal: your odds of finding genuine RS-232 voltages have fallen dramatically; but with the appropriate level converter all sorts of even new gear can talk to basically anything that postdates the old 60ma and 20ma loop interfaces. You want to dial in to the serial debug port on some modern widget with a ~35 year old Smartmodem 300? Not a problem. Similarly, 'pretend to be a VT-100' will probably still be a widely available lowest-common-denominator pseudostandard when I'm succumbing to senility in a retirement facility.
If the 'smartwatch' tries to get clever, and have onboard apps and vendor-specific SDKs and APIs and so on, yeah, it'll be finicky legacy gear or wholly unsupported relatively quickly. If the 'smartwatch' offers(either exclusively, or in addition to the fancy-and-ephemeral stuff) some way for the master device to just treat it as a dumb terminal over the bluetooth link, that could easily be viable decades from now. There will probably be better options; but supporting legacy BTLE will likely be vanishingly cheap and unless the command set for scribbling on the smartwatch's screen is horrifically baroque or deliberately broken, it will take only a fairly thin translation layer to format whatever you want on whatever device of the future you are using and paint it on the screen.
This isn't exactly a feel-good story; but it's hard to say that it's a bad plan. If you've already got a serious 'brownfield' site, using it to deal with other unpleasant industrial matters rather than letting it sit idle or attempting some wildly uneconomic remediation seems sensible. Hopefully the new facilities will not inherit the legacy of...competent and safety oriented...nuclear engineering that caused the trouble originally.
One thing I'd be curious about, though: I assume that the exclusion zone is because of a combination of nasty isotopes in the soil that make subsistence activities, kids eating dirt, and various other aspects of human habitation problematic, along with the generally low tolerance of radiation risks for civilians not working in nuclear energy/related industries; but are there any areas(outside of the interior and immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus) where the radiation exposure you would receive just by standing around is still intense enough to be an occupational safety issue?
Isotope contamination can mostly be dealt with as though it were a mere chemical hazard, since you won't take much exposure unless you ingest/inhale/whatever the stuff and end up with it in your body somewhere; but your options are a lot more limited if you are being bathed in ionizing radiation just standing there. Chemical protective gear isn't a pleasure to wear; but it's doable. Radiation shielding tends to be mass prohibitive unless you are going full power armor or something.
I'm sure that they could do better; but (from the rough numbers I've been able to dig up) it looks like a bluetooth low energy chip just sleeping and waiting for something to happen draws at least as much power as the timekeeping mechanism in your basic cheap-and-practically-immortal quartz oscillator watch. Actually transferring some data now and again will cost you extra.
What I don't know is how much extra a full bitmapped monochrome LCD costs you, in energy, vs. the fixed-function multisegment ones that they use in low end digital watches. Color definitely blows your power budget; but B/W transreflective can be very low power indeed, though certainly more pixels will mean more transistors and a more complex driver IC; I just don't know how much more energy that requires.
I speak as one with distinctly limited experience in low-power electronics design; but (aside from pure technophilia and spec lust) it wouldn't surprise me if the advantages of a screen that can actually display at least a few words/some numbers/a contact name are considered to be a significant win over a more basic optical or tactile "Something is happening" notification; and might not actually be as much more power intensive as one would expect.
I have no idea what the glowing backlit color screens and slightly underclocked smartphone processors brigade is up to; that will take ages to mature to reasonable battery life; but once you add an RF link and some kind of microcontroller/microprocessor you've already blown the power budget compared to a basic quartz RTC, so perhaps the thinking is that, since the battery life will unavoidably be substantially worse the best bet is to cram in enough functions to compensate.
It wasn't a very big bubble; but the hype-to-substance ratio was arguably large enough to qualify as a small one. It didn't survive contact with reality for long; but there was a brief period of delusional hope among the manufacturers and some of the talking heads that 'smartwatch' was going to be the must-have accessory and temporary reprieve from the pressure on profits caused by the fact that everyone who wants a smartphone and a tablet either already has one or is poor enough that their desire for one isn't too helpful.
Definitely not at the level of "zOMG 3D TV! It will surely cause everyone to re-buy their television!"; but same basic hopeful delusion that a new gimmick could save them from an increasingly saturated and commodified market.
I would certainly expect Pebble to be less insulated from any downturn/loss of confidence than the internal teams doing 'smartwatch' at Apple, Google, or any of the Android OEMs, since they neither have a large host organism to quietly hide losses in, nor any claims to some sort of 'product synergy' nonsense; but my impression(if anyone has actual data, either for or against this, I'd be interested to know) was that Pebble had been atypically successful given the rather narrow appeal of the 'smartwatch' concept with their size and battery life friendly keep-it-simple-stupid design and relatively broad compatibility.
Is my impression wrong; and Pebble is actually starting to suffer as competing products with tighter 'ecosystem' tie-ins have gotten vaguely more competent and less in need of being nearly cellphone sized to get even a day's battery life? Is my impression correct; but either Pebble or their backers, or both, can't really think of too many additional incremental improvements to the KISS-based design that would be worth the cost of keeping the extra staff? Was the market simply so tiny that the few people who wanted one are already saturated and everybody is having issues moving product?
I'd certainly like to know; but my impressions haven't been terribly positive. At work we were handed the fancy 'n expensive video surveillance system after the contractors finished poking at it; and while the quality of the sensors, optics, weatherproof housings, etc. is certainly much nicer in the classy systems; the software was...not inspiring. The newcomers(either new companies or ground-up new product lines) approach the problem with the same enthusiasm that goes into writing horrific home router firmware, just with a camera and a video streaming service in addition to the http server. The Old 'n Respectable aren't quite as overtly shoddy; but are still barely waking up to the fact that this isn't the good old days when every camera had a point-to-point coax link for video and RS-422 or 485 for PTZ and similar command chatter, and 'just trust the link layer' wasn't actually terrible advice.
We ended up doing much the same thing, since finding a better vendor or getting the issues fixed seemed like an intractable problem(especially since the budget had already been spent by the time we were handed the issue).
Honestly, while this would spoil the 'neat, integrated, and PoE powered' options provided by the all in one IP cameras; if I actually had to provide a vaguely trustworthy camera that was intended to share a network with other devices; I'd probably resort to a NUC or similar small PC with a framegrabber or USB camera and a real operating system. Overkill; but 'embedded' just means 'total shit, just nonstandard enough that replacing the firmware with something that doesn't suck isn't always practical' so often that it would be the less painful option.
These DVRs are utterly boring devices; but they are really pretty obvious high value targets(high value in terms of their position within a target's infrastructure; I imagine that cheap, shit, cameras aren't as likely to show up in the highest value target organizations).
Aside from the benefits of owning a basic embedded linux box that is probably inside whatever pitiful perimeter security their network has, you get access to the video feeds from the security cameras and can both case the target from the comfort of your own computer and disable or wipe the DVR when occasion suits.
I realize that the GPU can access main memory(the cheap and lousy ones have been doing it to save money for ages; and Nvidia has made the process a bit nicer for their compute users when they need access to lots of RAM); but the memory is 'non-unified' in the sense that a GPU accessing system RAM is (relatively speaking, it's still pretty fast in absolute terms) a second class citizen compared to a CPU accessing system RAM(there is an unavoidable increase in latency if the RAM is connected to a different CPU than the one accessing it and you add a Hypertransport/QPI hop in there); while even if you have heroic amounts of money to wave around you just don't have the option of GDDR5-or-equivalent speeds for system RAM.
There is no 'zero overhead' option when you are talking about multiple memory controllers, hence NUMA; but my naive expectation would have been that CUDA-oriented systems would have moved more aggressively in the direction of resembling multi-socket CPU arrangements; but with GPUs in most of the sockets and GDDR-speed RAM across the board, rather than these cards with their increasingly enormous onboard RAM supply, connected (comparatively) slowly to the CPU and system RAM. I'm sure that they have their reasons, probably better than mine; but it seems surprising from my naive position.
Honestly, if you aren't doing some sort of HPC, the main reason why older memory standards are inadequate is that they tend to either sharply constrain maximum RAM, or involve seriously heroic costs(either in terms of digging up no-longer-produced specimens of whatever DIMM was the biggest ever made for a given spec, or whatever buffering or similar tricks workstations and servers of the era used to increase maximum capacity, like FBDIMMs in the DDR2 days) if you want to get even modestly close to the maximum. Especially since GPUs come with their own, fast, memory; it's not so much the speed as it is the quantity of RAM that usually bites you.
LGA-1366 got sort of screwed on selection, especially on the low end; but there were some very, very, nice CPUs available for that socket. It was also before Intel realized that there wasn't a damn thing anyone could or would do about it if they decided to build a wall between anything 'xeon' and even high end desktop parts.
What surprises me(especially since AMD is clearly capable of it, since the PS4 does it, and it'd be a bit of a shock if Nvidia and Intel were incapable of following suit or already have something ready to go) is that CUDA(or OpenCL)-targeted systems still haven't made any moves(at least not commercially visible ones) toward unified memory architecture; and/or allowing the relatively expansive supply of motherboard memory expansion to use GDDR and connecting the GPU via a faster interface than PCIe if needed.
As much as it would probably involve selling more Nvidia GPUs than they would like, AMD seems like the one that might actually be particularly interested in this, since it would at least get opterons into servers: They've been pushing HyperTransport as a multi-vendor high speed interconnect(first under 'Torrenza', now under the 'Heterogenous System Architecture Foundation', with some fancy FPGAs available that can interact with Opterons in multi-socket boards.
If GPU compute cards are shipping with increasingly monstrous amounts of RAM, that seems like an opportunity for HSA to move the GPU closer to being a first-class citizen along with the CPU; and allowing RAM expansion.
I'm pretty sure that they've always had a five year plan(the 13th five-year-plan implies 65 years of five year plans; so somewhere between 1951 and 1956 depending on where we are in the 13th five year plan) and the PRC's nominal start date is ~1949, with the nationalists mostly out of action by that time; so this is not exactly a new thing.
That said, the degree to which the 5 year plan, rather than operationally 'private sector'(yes, often heavily state or politician owned in various ways; but they certainly act like capitalists or crony capitalists rather than commies) developments, has certainly dwindled over time.
The air pollution might actually be one driver for solar deployment: yes, it will definitely reduce effectiveness in the short to medium term; but the quality-of-life costs of some of the nastier power plants make them desirable targets for retirement in order to improve public health and reduce dissatisfaction.
If a given city is so polluted that it's cutting solar efficiency; that's a good sign that the people there probably aren't happy about it. It'll involve a bunch of shuffling around of the grid; but you would likely make people considerably happier if you can shut down the worst pollution sources, tide yourself over with power from elsewhere on the grid, and then get increasing amounts of local solar as the worst of the smog eventually settles out or blows away.
It probably doesn't hurt that a lot of China's existing load is served by some really nasty coal plants; mostly burning fairly low-grade coal('ideal' coal still makes the global warming types nervous, since burning pure carbon in an oxygen atmosphere puts out more CO2 than does burning hydrocarbons, which put out a mixture of CO2 and water vapor; but real-world coal tends to come with goodies like sulfur and mercury; and unless you have suitable enforcement of scrubber user and the like, they show up quite merrily in the stack output). Even if the economics alone don't necessarily add up; the percentage of the Chinese population that is now wealthy enough for 'breathable air' to rise above 'adequate food' as a demand is much higher than it used to be; and the CCP can only afford so much discontent. Unless Chinese solar is abhorrently expensive compared to the estimates I've seen for US installs(which seems unlikely); there would be a strong case to be made for government subsidy/regulation aimed at, at least, shutting down some of the coal units upwind of major population centers.
Is this guy saying that the NSA used to be effective? I do remember them doing good work back when they emphasized playing defense; and they have probably assisted with some really juicy targeted attacks on specific people of interest(whether criminals or well-placed figures in governments we are interested in getting to know better); but has the Total Information Awareness/dragnet-all-the-data stuff ever shown the slightest evidence of providing useful data?
I'd certainly be interested to know what, if any, agreements were made between the two; but it seems like one could(albeit with the risk of wikipedia choosing to play whack-a-mole and try to block you) implement the arrangement that Facebook has set up without any specific agreement with wikipedia. The local telcos obviously need to be explicitly included, they are carrying a bunch of additional data traffic that isn't being paid for by their subscribers; but once that is set up, those subscribers could just access wikipedia in the same way that everyone else with an IP address does, or through some sort of facebook-proxy-thing that accesses wikipedia the same way everyone else with an IP address does. If it is the facebook-proxy-thing arrangement, you could probably make it more efficient with the direct cooperation of wikipedia; but unless they started trying to block you, you wouldn't need any more consent than is implied by running a publicly accessible web service.
I think that it is great that the locals are taking facebooks "altruistic" 'hey, let's lock down the emerging markets on an awful walled garden non-internet before anyone else does!' plan and getting actual use out of it. Good for them, and hopefully throwing a spanner in facebook's plan(or at least inflating its costs a bit, I'm assuming that the local telcos want to get paid by someone for the extra traffic).
It does seem somewhat unfortunate that wikipedia, rather than facebook, is the one whose relative openness is being exploited to serve as an improvised transfer mechanism for assorted blobs. Allowing themselves to be included as the 'altruistic' face of the plan was a dubiously principled move; but they are still eating the additional costs of hosting a bunch of stuff that doesn't advance their mission at all because a blatant market distortion makes anything you can squeeze into their system effectively 'free' in certain cost-sensitive markets. I'd be much happier if they'd figured out how to use facebook's systems for the purpose.
Given how Intel's attention has shifted to a combination of GPU bumps and energy efficiency improvements, with improvements in absolute performance, rather than performance/watt, being pretty tepid; laptops have at least benefited from getting somewhat slimmer and lighter for the same amount of power. For desktops, the next big reason to upgrade will be when DDR3 starts to get scarce and expensive because of the move to DDR4. Unless you absolutely must be able to boot from an NVMe SSD or something, there just isn't much to inspire interest.
I do a trifle more gaming than is probably good for me; and I'm using a 5 year old system(with a more recent GPU of course). Sure, LGA-1155 is 'ancient'; but it remains nice and fast, supports 32GB of RAM, motherboards of the era usually threw in at least a couple of USB3 and SATA 6Gb/s connectors; and what else can you really ask of a desktop board?
It is vaguely unusual for someone to say it so plainly; but I'm not sure why this position would be even slightly surprising. Apple mostly sells hardware. If you sell hardware, people who are using 5+ year old PCs are lousy customers(regardless of cause: maybe they are too poor to buy the new and shiny stuff that they do want, maybe their needs just haven't changed enough to make an upgrade worth it, though they could afford whatever new and shiny stuff they felt like, the effect is the same). Why wouldn't your marketing message be anything other than encouragement to the people who do buy new stuff frequently; with a secondary focus on encouraging people with old stuff to feel that they are missing out?