It isn't a problem in a strictly technical sense; but rather in terms of a marketing/classification/consumer confusion one.
USB's universality has always been one of its great advantages. Virtually everything speaks it, devices that don't require specialized drivers work on a large number of hosts(and often charge even where they won't communicate). Back when running into USB1.1 was still a risk, most USB2 devices worked fine, just slower, and now most USB3 devices do the same in 2.0 ports.
This high-power standard, though, will necessarily fragment the populations of USB hosts and USB slaves. Because 100watts is a fairly large amount of power, it will be physically or economically impossible for many, perhaps most, devices to put out on any ports, and even desktops and DTRs will likely only manage one or two. On the device side, since powered ports will be comparatively rare, designers will face high returns and consumer angst if they rely on bus power, and offering both a power brick and bus power will raise costs, so they'll probably just go with the power brick. Worse, with the 100watt ceiling, there will probably be a much larger number of hosts that can supply some intermediate peak value, and a much larger number of devices that need some intermediate value, which will make the situation highly confusing. It'll work just fine in relatively closed ecosystems(ie. POS systems can now power their thermal printers from the bus in a 'standard' way as opposed to rolling their own, and Apple's computers will charge their iDevices nice and fast, and such); but unless some fairly clear and simple 'tier' system is put in place, people will have an ugly time determining whether a given device on the shelf will actually work with a given device they want it to work with. Will that USB monitor work with my PC? Yes; but only on the 4 rear motherboard ports, not on any ports supplied by headers, and not with your laptop unless the laptop is plugged in.
Barring gross abuses of the standard, I don't see anything getting destroyed, it's just that by specifying a "standard" that will be impractical for most devices to ever support, or to support on more than a single, specially blessed, port, a world of confusion is likely to be opened up.
Aside from the obvious: "Why, yes indeed, a few million in property damage that our entire city worth of riot cops, grown fat on years of kettling peaceful protesters, are too feckless to stop is more than enough to make me do arbitrarily draconian things! It is my pleasure to offer ammunition to enemies of human rights everywhere!" aspect, this just seems enormously tactically idiotic. Social networks are only the most powerful development in the history of western civilization when it comes to suppressing the activities of dumb kids...
Why would you possibly want to shut down social networks or other electronic messaging systems? They are all run by relatively supine corporations, willing or eager to cooperate with police in turning over user data, and almost none of them(certainly none in common use) offer any security to users against operators(some, like BBM, offer pretty good security against 3rd parties, and even basic cellphones offer some; but all common electronic communication mechanisms are essentially transparent to their operators).
Why would you want to drive people away from the highly transparent, easily logged-for-evidence-purposes, often comes with realtime location data and strong correlation with unique ID, electronic communications and back to informal, somewhat inefficient to use; but damned difficult and time consuming to use for evidence, face-to-face or other informal systems?
In the moment, electronic communication is a boon to rioters, offering swift coordination that the cops seem incapable of matching. In the medium term, though, the state can simply sort through the records, systematically compiling compelling evidence of guilt, attached to timestamps, locations, and IDs, and then bag your ass at their leisure, any time before the statute of limitations, if any, runs out. Ma Bell and Mark Zuckerberg don't forget, and that "private" checkbox is pretty much cosmetic. You are Fucked if you coordinate your unlawful activity electronically.
Why does Cameron want to discourage this spontaneously constructed Benthamite paradise and encourage a return to coordination that will require enormous humint efforts on the part of the police(and I'm sure the Met cops have no shortage of agents who blend right in with disaffected minority youth...) to unravel, or (less probably; but even worse for the cops) some of the yobs actually learning something about communication security?
Sure, China can copy apple products(along with manufacturing the official ones); but could they, through the bold adoption of a "One Child, but as many as you want if the first one looks like Steve Jobs" policy, conceivably create a Counterfeit Steve Jobs? Complete with a melamine turtleneck?
The "Oh, our Predators are using unencrypted video feeds over transmission hardware sufficiently similar that dirt-cheap satellite-TV piracy gear is enough to grab their feeds in real time" incident was sort of an ominous sign...
Good job citizen: The absolutely insufferable 'language' and graphic design of that website is designed to keep dangerous, potentially pedophilic, adults away from vulnerable children. It is part of a broader campaign to make parts of the internet used by children utterly insufferable for those over the age of 12 for the safety of our children.
By "very few" you mean "Only the really smart and dangerous ones, and any of the ones who imported an dubiously legal P25 scanner, labelled as a "toy/gift", from a drop-shipper in Hong Kong", right?
Apparently, aside from user interface failings, the system is based on manual keyfill and pre-shared keys...
And I'm not talking "Man, I hate trusting CA certs" pre-shared keys, I'm talking "Apparently, news of assymetric key cryptography hasn't made it to P25 land yet, and we have no option but to talk in the clear unless everybody we are talking to has been keyfilled ahead of time. Oh, also, none of our radios provide any warning when receiving a cleartext signal, they just decode and play exactly the same as if it were encrypted... We are deliberately ignoring everything that has been learned about maintaining encrypted channels under real world conditions here, apparently!"
Obviously, any RF device can be jammed(if nothing else, a correctly crafted jamming signal could cause destructive interference resulting in zero signal at the receiver site; but good luck with that one...); but the difficulty of doing so can vary widely. If a spark-gap that blacks out the east coast and draws complaints from the FCC-analogs of 6 nearby countries jams something, the designer gets a pass. If some FCC approved kiddie toy can jam it, the system is likely being attacked in a manner significantly more sophisticated than brute force...
From TFA: "
But, as we will see below, the situation is actually far
more favorable to the jammer than analysis of its modulation scheme alone might suggest. In fact, the aggregate
power level required to jam P25 trafc is actually much
lower than that required to jam analog FM. This is because an adversary can disrupt P25 trafc very efciently
by targeting only specific small portions of frames to jam
and turning off its transmitter at other times... It is therefore unnecessary for an adversary to jam the
entire transmitted data stream in order to prevent a receiver from receiving it. It is sufcient for an attacker to
prevent the reception merely of those portions of a frame
that are needed for the receiver to make sense of the rest
of the frame.
Unfortunately, the P25 frame encoding makes it particularly easy and efcient for a jammer to attack these
subelds in isolation."
Oops: A sophisticated digital RF transmission mechanism substantially more vulnerable to jamming than analog narrowband...
Bizarre coinages aside, Wall Street wasn't making a comparative pronouncement on the value of software and oil(pro-tip: without oil, the market for shiny consumer goods would skew heavily toward the 'canned' variety...); but on the relative value of a company with substantial ability to pull margins that its peers cannot, vs. a company with a smaller ability to do that.
Now, carry on. It's the "information age" or somesuch...
Unless the results I received for trace width are grossly off(20A 5V, 10C temp rise over 25C ambient gives ~2.5cm wide trace on internal layers ~1cm wide trace on exposed layers, and that for 2oz/ft^2 copper-clad and a 1inch trace...) they definitely aren't going to get away with pushing 100watts at anything like 5v.
The trouble you then run into is that entire class of little USB-master set top boxes, routers, thin clients, etc, etc. that run off a 5v supply themselves, and save on BOM by simply passing a chunk of that through to their USB ports... Having variable or stepped voltage is going to be an issue there, and not free anywhere(in dollars or board space, on either the host or device side).
Pushing 100watts is perfectly doable in itself, it just isn't realistic for a large number of USB-master devices, which makes it hard to see how you could make it a useful "standard", when it will necessarily be uncommon and poorly backwards compatible...
The tools aren't really the problem. As you say, they are fairly easy to come by, and not that expensive to buy(which is fair enough, the interface they connect to is relatively simple, not terribly demanding in terms of speed, voltage, etc. and basic USB HID or USB-UART capabilities aren't exactly big-ticket items). It's the proprietary codes that bite you...
Perhaps they could get really crazy and just make sure that you don't need to be a dealership or a dedicated warez expert with a cracked interface cable to get to all the OBD and CAN-bus data available.(And in a usable format, mind, proprietary codes aren't too useful...)
I'm assuming that disk space won't really be the arbiter, in a world where you can solder a few gigs of flash to an embedded board for peanuts. And, if it comes right down to it, MS could always suck it up and port real IE to WinCE, or whittle down their embedded NT derivative a little further.
The big kicker will be licensing costs and administration. On the first, I don't see how MS can possibly win, since they rely on desktop licensing revenue. On the second, MS has a slightly better shot(AD, while it has some seriously annoying points, is quite useful); but chromebook-style linux appliance+ SSO webapps aren't fundamentally rocket surgery, so there could easily be competition from such players...
So, let me get this straight: "Linux On the Desktop" is doomed because, when 'cloud applications' come into the fore, there will still be nerds with strong opinions about native applications?
Isn't that exactly backward?
If "The Cloud" rises up and devours natives software, nobody will give a fuck about any application on the Linux desktop, except for the browser(the state of which is fine) and none of the suits will care about the raging emacs/vi crusades, so long as they can get their almost-thin-clients booted into gmail as cheaply as possible...
The hypothetical rise of in-browser stuff renders battles about the relative value of assorted linux-native applications irrelevant, that's sort of the whole point.
So now, I can hook my computer to my car to jump-start it!
You can't jump a car without some serious amps; but virtually anything that can put out 12-14volts for a while without keeling over dead will allow you to trickle-charge your car's own starter battery and then start normally. Doing the math for how long a trickle charge will take to shove enough amp-hours into an automotive lead-acid for it to start your engine(particularly on the bitter, freezing, late evening in the sleet when this is inevitably occurring) will tell you that this isn't a method for the impatient; but any 12v wall-wart classy enough to run at rated amperage without dying, or a DC-DC step-up converter feeding on your USB port can work, if given time... If jumping is an option, it is usually the better one; but if you have a 12v supply, a dead car, and a night in the garage, it can be handy.
The IBM patent(Umm, a patent for putting a USB jack and 2 DC pins in the same connector?) probably doesn't help...
From the beginning that sucker was basically just a nominally-not-quite-proprietary connector for IBM and partner POS system peripherals. Now that you need an IBM patent license...
Incidentally, if you ever come by a quantity of UPSes that you don't love very much, do as follows:
Turn them all off.
Connecting in a ring, each one powering the one next to it, and powered by the one behind.
Turn them on.
Observe the frantic beeping and relay clicking.
The mess doesn't end there: distribution of current flow within the conductor depends on frequency(Hence Litz wire for comparatively high-frequency power applications). Humans don't even pretend to be ideal, cylindrical, uniformly conductive objects; so I don't have a clue exactly how the skin effect effects high-frequency flow in the human body; but the very fast current spike you get with a lightning strike might well affect the cooking pattern in some agonizing-but-survival-friendly way...
Even with USB2, there was the persistent problem that certain applications(notably 2.5 inch external drives) were right on the edge of what the spec allowed. Some machines played fast and loose, and everything worked fine, some played to spec, and the device wouldn't spin up, or the bus would freak out, or whatever. Despite USB's formalized, standardized, power-request mechanism(100ma on connect, negotiate in units of 100ma for up to 400 more...), the, er... 'inventive'... nature of the peripheral ecosystem always created some uncertainty: Some devices just requested 500ma at all times, to avoid possible brownouts, leading to more spec-compliant busses freaking out about lack of power even when actual draw was well within safe limits, some devices (fans, LED goosenecks, humping dogs) just grabbed the +5 and ground rails and hoped for the best, without any negotiations. Some hubs report themselves as self-powered(and thus good for 500ma per-port) even when they were bus powered(and thus only good for 400ma across however many ports they had). Some others were self-powered; but with wall-warts that could only deliver 500ma to a number of ports smaller than the number available(7-port hubs with 1amp adapters, I'm looking at you...)
This new standard seems like it would simply be a polite codification of this confusion. Particularly at low voltage, 100watts is nontrivial current(and nontrivial power generally, most non-DTR laptop bricks are less than that...) Many PCB layouts would burn a trace trying to deliver that, and you can bet that your garden-variety 10-USB-ports boring desktop isn't going to ship with 1000watts of PSU headroom...
This will mean that, in effect, devices will be able to demand up to 100 watts in a 'compliant' way; but the capabilities of USB ports on the market will vary enormously by device. A laptop with an 85 watt power brick is hardly going to be good for 100watts out of a port. Worse, it might be good for 50 when lightly loaded and fully charged; but only 5 when charging its battery and flogging its CPU... Having a device that only intermittently functions is near worthless, even if it is all entirely standard... A desktop might ship with the ability to push a single port to 100; but then it will either have to beef up its traces significantly, or have the always-confusing-to-dumb-users-and-people-fumbling-behind-desks '1 special blessed "high power" port, and 9 identical-feeling-but-low-power ones' configuration. Fan-fucking-tastic...
While a bit more power on the bus certainly would expand the number of viable, bus-powered use cases, I'm just not sure that such a high 'standard' number can ever be usefully 'standard'. Hooray, it is now officially standard for specialized devices to shove 100watts across a USB bus. Doesn't change the fact that it won't work in 90+% of ports, and will probably burn a fair percentage of cheaper cables. Unless they come up with some sensible set of "tiers", so that people actually know what works with what, this seems like it is going to end in a mess of nominally-USB powered docking stations with wall warts and mini-B connectors, at best.
While its comparative obscurity, and the general lack of bus-powered devices made it less of an issue, Firewire flirted with this problem in its early days: Both available power and available voltage on a given 6-pin port were widely variable: A desktop could, if it so chose, be pumping out 24 volts and reasonably credible wattage. One of the(almost exclusively Apple) laptops with a 6-pin port might be limited to a handful of watts at whatever voltage its battery was set to provide. In practice, much firewire gear just skipped bus power entirely(despite the fact that charging over firewire would have been a very popular consumer camcorder feature, if today's flip-likes are anything to go by), the mixture of widely variable power availability, and the 'i.link' or just 'IEEE1394' connectors entirely without bus power pretty much doomed the widespread availability of bus-powered peripherals. USB's pitiful 2.5watts was rather limiting; but at least you could reasonably assume that it would be there...
PoE, for whatever reason, is absolutely dead in the consumer space; but it is alive and kicking in corporate gear. Not quite 100%, of course, because a PoE switch necessarily costs more than a non-PoE one, and wasting PoE ports on desktops and docking stations doesn't make any sense; but some gigantic portion of the corporate world's APs, IP cameras, access control devices, and similar low-power-and-networked junk are PoE powered...
So, about the RAND modelling mentioned in TFS... Is there any evidence that their model failed to produce the desired outcome(as opposed to merely being deeply callous and perhaps a bit tactless, two RAND traits that anybody familiar with their game-theory work during the Cold War should hardly be surprised by...)?
Apparently, the "planned shrinkage" policies were part of a broader 'Urban Renewal'/cost reduction planning strategy by the city of New York. "Stop providing police or fire service to the slums and let the poor bastards burn themselves out so that developers can have a crack at the area" certainly isn't a very pleasant notion, and I can understand why one would want a nice, shiny, 'objective', analysis justifying it in gentle and scientific terms; but it isn't as though those poor country bumpkins at the mayor's office were snookered into the idea by RAND's slick big-city gents...
If anything, that particular scenario is not so much a demonstration of how models can fuck up; but how models can end up being constructed to to provide the desired answer, something at which the more customer-service oriented modelers are very good.(The situation is arguably analogous to the absurd and self-serving 'blame those damn quants for the financial meltdown!' narrative that started circulating after the credit-default-swaps really started going south... Yeah, of course a tightly linked set of casinos where people play with other people's money fell apart because a few CS weenies made some math mistakes...)
In vernacular usage SC2000, one of the brave exceptions to the law that the sequel is always shit compared to the original, is sufficiently canonical that it may be referred to simply as 'SimCity'. The same is not generally true of the subsequent sequels.
While I think that your dismissal of models is a bit excessive(in a sense, all of mathematics doesn't tell you anything you didn't assume in your axioms: it just so happens that there is a lot of interesting stuff that you didn't know you were assuming...); but one should certainly be cautious about them.
Both an accurate model and a shitty model are, in the hands of a suitably skilled consultant's graphic design team, essentially identical in their ability to provide a dense veneer of scientific rationality, 3D-rendered near-future utopias attractively large-format-printed on posters suitable for display at planning meetings, and other charming props to hang on your existing plans and prejudices...
Things can get particularly ugly if there are large fudge factors in your initial dataset: modeling material stresses, or aerodynamics or such is hard because it is easy to be wrong about difficult stuff, and easy for slight mistakes to cascade(at least, though, there are correct answers that you can hopefully find, even if you don't know them just yet); doing societal cost/benefit analysis is hard because there are lots of factors that don't have quantified costs or benefits, so you can shove the model around just by slapping different price tags on unquantified things.
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It isn't a problem in a strictly technical sense; but rather in terms of a marketing/classification/consumer confusion one.
USB's universality has always been one of its great advantages. Virtually everything speaks it, devices that don't require specialized drivers work on a large number of hosts(and often charge even where they won't communicate). Back when running into USB1.1 was still a risk, most USB2 devices worked fine, just slower, and now most USB3 devices do the same in 2.0 ports.
This high-power standard, though, will necessarily fragment the populations of USB hosts and USB slaves. Because 100watts is a fairly large amount of power, it will be physically or economically impossible for many, perhaps most, devices to put out on any ports, and even desktops and DTRs will likely only manage one or two. On the device side, since powered ports will be comparatively rare, designers will face high returns and consumer angst if they rely on bus power, and offering both a power brick and bus power will raise costs, so they'll probably just go with the power brick. Worse, with the 100watt ceiling, there will probably be a much larger number of hosts that can supply some intermediate peak value, and a much larger number of devices that need some intermediate value, which will make the situation highly confusing. It'll work just fine in relatively closed ecosystems(ie. POS systems can now power their thermal printers from the bus in a 'standard' way as opposed to rolling their own, and Apple's computers will charge their iDevices nice and fast, and such); but unless some fairly clear and simple 'tier' system is put in place, people will have an ugly time determining whether a given device on the shelf will actually work with a given device they want it to work with. Will that USB monitor work with my PC? Yes; but only on the 4 rear motherboard ports, not on any ports supplied by headers, and not with your laptop unless the laptop is plugged in.
Barring gross abuses of the standard, I don't see anything getting destroyed, it's just that by specifying a "standard" that will be impractical for most devices to ever support, or to support on more than a single, specially blessed, port, a world of confusion is likely to be opened up.
Aside from the obvious: "Why, yes indeed, a few million in property damage that our entire city worth of riot cops, grown fat on years of kettling peaceful protesters, are too feckless to stop is more than enough to make me do arbitrarily draconian things! It is my pleasure to offer ammunition to enemies of human rights everywhere!" aspect, this just seems enormously tactically idiotic. Social networks are only the most powerful development in the history of western civilization when it comes to suppressing the activities of dumb kids...
Why would you possibly want to shut down social networks or other electronic messaging systems? They are all run by relatively supine corporations, willing or eager to cooperate with police in turning over user data, and almost none of them(certainly none in common use) offer any security to users against operators(some, like BBM, offer pretty good security against 3rd parties, and even basic cellphones offer some; but all common electronic communication mechanisms are essentially transparent to their operators).
Why would you want to drive people away from the highly transparent, easily logged-for-evidence-purposes, often comes with realtime location data and strong correlation with unique ID, electronic communications and back to informal, somewhat inefficient to use; but damned difficult and time consuming to use for evidence, face-to-face or other informal systems?
In the moment, electronic communication is a boon to rioters, offering swift coordination that the cops seem incapable of matching. In the medium term, though, the state can simply sort through the records, systematically compiling compelling evidence of guilt, attached to timestamps, locations, and IDs, and then bag your ass at their leisure, any time before the statute of limitations, if any, runs out. Ma Bell and Mark Zuckerberg don't forget, and that "private" checkbox is pretty much cosmetic. You are Fucked if you coordinate your unlawful activity electronically.
Why does Cameron want to discourage this spontaneously constructed Benthamite paradise and encourage a return to coordination that will require enormous humint efforts on the part of the police(and I'm sure the Met cops have no shortage of agents who blend right in with disaffected minority youth...) to unravel, or (less probably; but even worse for the cops) some of the yobs actually learning something about communication security?
Sure, China can copy apple products(along with manufacturing the official ones); but could they, through the bold adoption of a "One Child, but as many as you want if the first one looks like Steve Jobs" policy, conceivably create a Counterfeit Steve Jobs? Complete with a melamine turtleneck?
Might want to be careful...
The "Oh, our Predators are using unencrypted video feeds over transmission hardware sufficiently similar that dirt-cheap satellite-TV piracy gear is enough to grab their feeds in real time" incident was sort of an ominous sign...
Good job citizen: The absolutely insufferable 'language' and graphic design of that website is designed to keep dangerous, potentially pedophilic, adults away from vulnerable children. It is part of a broader campaign to make parts of the internet used by children utterly insufferable for those over the age of 12 for the safety of our children.
The program is already beginning to see considerable success...
By "very few" you mean "Only the really smart and dangerous ones, and any of the ones who imported an dubiously legal P25 scanner, labelled as a "toy/gift", from a drop-shipper in Hong Kong", right?
Apparently, aside from user interface failings, the system is based on manual keyfill and pre-shared keys...
And I'm not talking "Man, I hate trusting CA certs" pre-shared keys, I'm talking "Apparently, news of assymetric key cryptography hasn't made it to P25 land yet, and we have no option but to talk in the clear unless everybody we are talking to has been keyfilled ahead of time. Oh, also, none of our radios provide any warning when receiving a cleartext signal, they just decode and play exactly the same as if it were encrypted... We are deliberately ignoring everything that has been learned about maintaining encrypted channels under real world conditions here, apparently!"
We kind of do... It just isn't all that toothy and appears to apply more seriously to smalltime operators, not to Big Respectable Contractors...
Obviously, any RF device can be jammed(if nothing else, a correctly crafted jamming signal could cause destructive interference resulting in zero signal at the receiver site; but good luck with that one...); but the difficulty of doing so can vary widely. If a spark-gap that blacks out the east coast and draws complaints from the FCC-analogs of 6 nearby countries jams something, the designer gets a pass. If some FCC approved kiddie toy can jam it, the system is likely being attacked in a manner significantly more sophisticated than brute force...
From TFA: " But, as we will see below, the situation is actually far more favorable to the jammer than analysis of its modulation scheme alone might suggest. In fact, the aggregate power level required to jam P25 trafc is actually much lower than that required to jam analog FM. This is because an adversary can disrupt P25 trafc very efciently by targeting only specific small portions of frames to jam and turning off its transmitter at other times... It is therefore unnecessary for an adversary to jam the entire transmitted data stream in order to prevent a receiver from receiving it. It is sufcient for an attacker to prevent the reception merely of those portions of a frame that are needed for the receiver to make sense of the rest of the frame. Unfortunately, the P25 frame encoding makes it particularly easy and efcient for a jammer to attack these subelds in isolation."
Oops: A sophisticated digital RF transmission mechanism substantially more vulnerable to jamming than analog narrowband...
Bizarre coinages aside, Wall Street wasn't making a comparative pronouncement on the value of software and oil(pro-tip: without oil, the market for shiny consumer goods would skew heavily toward the 'canned' variety...); but on the relative value of a company with substantial ability to pull margins that its peers cannot, vs. a company with a smaller ability to do that.
Now, carry on. It's the "information age" or somesuch...
Unless the results I received for trace width are grossly off(20A 5V, 10C temp rise over 25C ambient gives ~2.5cm wide trace on internal layers ~1cm wide trace on exposed layers, and that for 2oz/ft^2 copper-clad and a 1inch trace...) they definitely aren't going to get away with pushing 100watts at anything like 5v.
The trouble you then run into is that entire class of little USB-master set top boxes, routers, thin clients, etc, etc. that run off a 5v supply themselves, and save on BOM by simply passing a chunk of that through to their USB ports... Having variable or stepped voltage is going to be an issue there, and not free anywhere(in dollars or board space, on either the host or device side).
Pushing 100watts is perfectly doable in itself, it just isn't realistic for a large number of USB-master devices, which makes it hard to see how you could make it a useful "standard", when it will necessarily be uncommon and poorly backwards compatible...
The tools aren't really the problem. As you say, they are fairly easy to come by, and not that expensive to buy(which is fair enough, the interface they connect to is relatively simple, not terribly demanding in terms of speed, voltage, etc. and basic USB HID or USB-UART capabilities aren't exactly big-ticket items). It's the proprietary codes that bite you...
Perhaps they could get really crazy and just make sure that you don't need to be a dealership or a dedicated warez expert with a cracked interface cable to get to all the OBD and CAN-bus data available.(And in a usable format, mind, proprietary codes aren't too useful...)
I'm assuming that disk space won't really be the arbiter, in a world where you can solder a few gigs of flash to an embedded board for peanuts. And, if it comes right down to it, MS could always suck it up and port real IE to WinCE, or whittle down their embedded NT derivative a little further.
The big kicker will be licensing costs and administration. On the first, I don't see how MS can possibly win, since they rely on desktop licensing revenue. On the second, MS has a slightly better shot(AD, while it has some seriously annoying points, is quite useful); but chromebook-style linux appliance+ SSO webapps aren't fundamentally rocket surgery, so there could easily be competition from such players...
So, let me get this straight: "Linux On the Desktop" is doomed because, when 'cloud applications' come into the fore, there will still be nerds with strong opinions about native applications?
Isn't that exactly backward?
If "The Cloud" rises up and devours natives software, nobody will give a fuck about any application on the Linux desktop, except for the browser(the state of which is fine) and none of the suits will care about the raging emacs/vi crusades, so long as they can get their almost-thin-clients booted into gmail as cheaply as possible...
The hypothetical rise of in-browser stuff renders battles about the relative value of assorted linux-native applications irrelevant, that's sort of the whole point.
Veneers are only required by definition to be thin and decorative, density is simply a function of choice of material...
So now, I can hook my computer to my car to jump-start it!
You can't jump a car without some serious amps; but virtually anything that can put out 12-14volts for a while without keeling over dead will allow you to trickle-charge your car's own starter battery and then start normally. Doing the math for how long a trickle charge will take to shove enough amp-hours into an automotive lead-acid for it to start your engine(particularly on the bitter, freezing, late evening in the sleet when this is inevitably occurring) will tell you that this isn't a method for the impatient; but any 12v wall-wart classy enough to run at rated amperage without dying, or a DC-DC step-up converter feeding on your USB port can work, if given time... If jumping is an option, it is usually the better one; but if you have a 12v supply, a dead car, and a night in the garage, it can be handy.
The IBM patent(Umm, a patent for putting a USB jack and 2 DC pins in the same connector?) probably doesn't help...
From the beginning that sucker was basically just a nominally-not-quite-proprietary connector for IBM and partner POS system peripherals. Now that you need an IBM patent license...
Incidentally, if you ever come by a quantity of UPSes that you don't love very much, do as follows:
Turn them all off.
Connecting in a ring, each one powering the one next to it, and powered by the one behind.
Turn them on.
Observe the frantic beeping and relay clicking.
The mess doesn't end there: distribution of current flow within the conductor depends on frequency(Hence Litz wire for comparatively high-frequency power applications). Humans don't even pretend to be ideal, cylindrical, uniformly conductive objects; so I don't have a clue exactly how the skin effect effects high-frequency flow in the human body; but the very fast current spike you get with a lightning strike might well affect the cooking pattern in some agonizing-but-survival-friendly way...
Even with USB2, there was the persistent problem that certain applications(notably 2.5 inch external drives) were right on the edge of what the spec allowed. Some machines played fast and loose, and everything worked fine, some played to spec, and the device wouldn't spin up, or the bus would freak out, or whatever. Despite USB's formalized, standardized, power-request mechanism(100ma on connect, negotiate in units of 100ma for up to 400 more...), the, er... 'inventive'... nature of the peripheral ecosystem always created some uncertainty: Some devices just requested 500ma at all times, to avoid possible brownouts, leading to more spec-compliant busses freaking out about lack of power even when actual draw was well within safe limits, some devices (fans, LED goosenecks, humping dogs) just grabbed the +5 and ground rails and hoped for the best, without any negotiations. Some hubs report themselves as self-powered(and thus good for 500ma per-port) even when they were bus powered(and thus only good for 400ma across however many ports they had). Some others were self-powered; but with wall-warts that could only deliver 500ma to a number of ports smaller than the number available(7-port hubs with 1amp adapters, I'm looking at you...)
This new standard seems like it would simply be a polite codification of this confusion. Particularly at low voltage, 100watts is nontrivial current(and nontrivial power generally, most non-DTR laptop bricks are less than that...) Many PCB layouts would burn a trace trying to deliver that, and you can bet that your garden-variety 10-USB-ports boring desktop isn't going to ship with 1000watts of PSU headroom...
This will mean that, in effect, devices will be able to demand up to 100 watts in a 'compliant' way; but the capabilities of USB ports on the market will vary enormously by device. A laptop with an 85 watt power brick is hardly going to be good for 100watts out of a port. Worse, it might be good for 50 when lightly loaded and fully charged; but only 5 when charging its battery and flogging its CPU... Having a device that only intermittently functions is near worthless, even if it is all entirely standard... A desktop might ship with the ability to push a single port to 100; but then it will either have to beef up its traces significantly, or have the always-confusing-to-dumb-users-and-people-fumbling-behind-desks '1 special blessed "high power" port, and 9 identical-feeling-but-low-power ones' configuration. Fan-fucking-tastic...
While a bit more power on the bus certainly would expand the number of viable, bus-powered use cases, I'm just not sure that such a high 'standard' number can ever be usefully 'standard'. Hooray, it is now officially standard for specialized devices to shove 100watts across a USB bus. Doesn't change the fact that it won't work in 90+% of ports, and will probably burn a fair percentage of cheaper cables. Unless they come up with some sensible set of "tiers", so that people actually know what works with what, this seems like it is going to end in a mess of nominally-USB powered docking stations with wall warts and mini-B connectors, at best.
While its comparative obscurity, and the general lack of bus-powered devices made it less of an issue, Firewire flirted with this problem in its early days: Both available power and available voltage on a given 6-pin port were widely variable: A desktop could, if it so chose, be pumping out 24 volts and reasonably credible wattage. One of the(almost exclusively Apple) laptops with a 6-pin port might be limited to a handful of watts at whatever voltage its battery was set to provide. In practice, much firewire gear just skipped bus power entirely(despite the fact that charging over firewire would have been a very popular consumer camcorder feature, if today's flip-likes are anything to go by), the mixture of widely variable power availability, and the 'i.link' or just 'IEEE1394' connectors entirely without bus power pretty much doomed the widespread availability of bus-powered peripherals. USB's pitiful 2.5watts was rather limiting; but at least you could reasonably assume that it would be there...
PoE, for whatever reason, is absolutely dead in the consumer space; but it is alive and kicking in corporate gear. Not quite 100%, of course, because a PoE switch necessarily costs more than a non-PoE one, and wasting PoE ports on desktops and docking stations doesn't make any sense; but some gigantic portion of the corporate world's APs, IP cameras, access control devices, and similar low-power-and-networked junk are PoE powered...
So, about the RAND modelling mentioned in TFS... Is there any evidence that their model failed to produce the desired outcome(as opposed to merely being deeply callous and perhaps a bit tactless, two RAND traits that anybody familiar with their game-theory work during the Cold War should hardly be surprised by...)?
Apparently, the "planned shrinkage" policies were part of a broader 'Urban Renewal'/cost reduction planning strategy by the city of New York. "Stop providing police or fire service to the slums and let the poor bastards burn themselves out so that developers can have a crack at the area" certainly isn't a very pleasant notion, and I can understand why one would want a nice, shiny, 'objective', analysis justifying it in gentle and scientific terms; but it isn't as though those poor country bumpkins at the mayor's office were snookered into the idea by RAND's slick big-city gents...
If anything, that particular scenario is not so much a demonstration of how models can fuck up; but how models can end up being constructed to to provide the desired answer, something at which the more customer-service oriented modelers are very good.(The situation is arguably analogous to the absurd and self-serving 'blame those damn quants for the financial meltdown!' narrative that started circulating after the credit-default-swaps really started going south... Yeah, of course a tightly linked set of casinos where people play with other people's money fell apart because a few CS weenies made some math mistakes...)
In vernacular usage SC2000, one of the brave exceptions to the law that the sequel is always shit compared to the original, is sufficiently canonical that it may be referred to simply as 'SimCity'. The same is not generally true of the subsequent sequels.
While I think that your dismissal of models is a bit excessive(in a sense, all of mathematics doesn't tell you anything you didn't assume in your axioms: it just so happens that there is a lot of interesting stuff that you didn't know you were assuming...); but one should certainly be cautious about them.
Both an accurate model and a shitty model are, in the hands of a suitably skilled consultant's graphic design team, essentially identical in their ability to provide a dense veneer of scientific rationality, 3D-rendered near-future utopias attractively large-format-printed on posters suitable for display at planning meetings, and other charming props to hang on your existing plans and prejudices...
Things can get particularly ugly if there are large fudge factors in your initial dataset: modeling material stresses, or aerodynamics or such is hard because it is easy to be wrong about difficult stuff, and easy for slight mistakes to cascade(at least, though, there are correct answers that you can hopefully find, even if you don't know them just yet); doing societal cost/benefit analysis is hard because there are lots of factors that don't have quantified costs or benefits, so you can shove the model around just by slapping different price tags on unquantified things.