Unless the win32/x86 emulation layer they've been talking about is pretty solid and works well(and nobody goes power-tripping and tries for a "The Windows Store is your only option" play(as Windows RT did; and "Windows S" started by doing before it became a special install option for Windows Pro SKUs) they likely aren't going to succeed at "make some qualcomm thing act just like you expect a wintel to"; but Microsoft arguably has all the ingredients they need for a perfectly serviceable "Edgebook"
The NT kernel itself, and the various other under-the-hood stuff is vastly less gruesome than the awful world of WinCE devices; they've got their pet browser that works fine(some galling limitations on the configurability side; but reports on speed and security for Edge are decent); they've got the supporting ecosystem("Microsoft accounts" on the consumer end and o365+AAD on the business end are at least approximately comparable to Google's 'gmail account' on the consumer side; 'Google Apps for Business/education' on the paid side); and assuming the x86 emulation is OK the collection of Windows software they'll be able to bring over will probably have he same potential to be useful as the Android app support Google has been tacking on to ChromeOS.
None of this is to say that they are an obvious improvement; or that theirs would be better than the equivalent Chromebook; but the success of Chromebooks clearly demonstrates that there is plenty of interest in cheap, idiot-proof, largely cloud-service backed, options; and if Microsoft wants an equivalent(as opposed to their current 'just try to cut a standard wintel down until it is price competitive' stopgap) I don't see why they couldn't deliver one.
It would not be a serious alternative to a standard wintel if you want a real windows system, with all the software support and on premises AD and whatnot; but Microsoft has what they need to deliver a "chromebook but with Microsoft technologies", if they choose to do so.
"Luckily" the Surface RT (which otherwise could have been an interesting bit of gear to salvage after Windows RT crashed and burned) 'fixed' that problem with mandatory secure boot(they strongly encourage it on the x86s; but there is the option to turn it off and, on some systems, mostly business class, the option to keep it on but provision your own trusted roots).
Unless MS has had a change of heart about the matter I wouldn't be too optimistic about the prospects for 3rd party development; even if the hardware is otherwise sufficiently well understood and supported for at least an Android port; if not necessarily a 'standard' Xorg and glibc Linux install.
That said, unless there is some really, really, harsh "OEM partner Must Not offer an equivalent non-Windows device as a condition of this agreement" agreement in place; I'd imagine that Dell, and any others who are doing similar gear, might well try to salvage the various engineering costs(potentially even actual hardware if it can be de-branded and reflashed economically) by also releasing pretty much the same thing in Android; but the odds that something purchased as Windows-on-ARM with Microsoft CA secure boot is going to get a post-sale vendor patch to Android option are...limited.
I suspect that the people who should be nervous here are Sonos; and perhaps to some extent the really expensive A/V integrator types:
Compared to any of the 'place unit in room, play audio' options the 'homepod' arrangement is pricey and proprietary. Compared to the pricey and proprietary multi-room-with-synchronization-and-stuff options(Sonos being the big name); the cost starts to look more reasonable and they are at least proprietary offshoots of a large, (generally) competent vendor who will likely continue to give them a prime position in a variety of media/service bundling schemes in the coming years; and treat them as a first class audio output for iOS and OSX.
Not meaningfully competitive with either just 'wiring' speakers for multiroom audio or using your preferred latter-day-boombox option; but probably bad news for the current vendors of fancy wireless multiroom systems that get rather costly rather quickly.
The "Conflict" bit is actually the really easy part. Though we don't usually phrase it that way it's a more or less ubiquitous feature of computers(indeed, getting anything else often requires clever rearrangement into this form):
In this case all the mentions of 'conflict' really just mean "rules are evaluated in numerical order; failure halts processing of subsequent rules". Basically the arrangement busily dropping packets and filtering spam in vast quantities all the time.
The hard, probably context, sensor, and input specific, bit is determining how to evaluate each of the rules. Not necessarily intractable; in the context of something like an industrial welding or assembly arm 'injury' and 'harm' are mostly collision avoidance matters, 'obey orders' is the translation of inputs from whatever UI the system has into movements of the device; and 'protect own existence' is more collision avoidance and some thermal, overcurrent; and strain limits.
None of this is to minimize the practical engineering difficulty of, say, distinguishing between 'human' objects within the movement area(which are rule 1 priority) and 'carelessly stored boxes' (which are only rule 3 priority); or of taking a couple of joystick inputs and getting nice, predictable, movement of a multi axis arm out of them; or of having the necessary safety features to avoid overcurrent damage, stripped gears, etc. but no abstract understanding of 'harm' or 'existence' is required.
Aside from the whole "remember all those books where Asimov basically poked at the limits of the three laws in various contexts because that was a useful plot device?" issue; this question seems to be founded on a pretty dire misunderstanding:
If "a robot" is a more or less humanoid embodied agent, or at least something on approximately the same scale(automated robot arm or the like) a formulation like "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." is comparatively straightforward(not necessarily to implement, object avoidance and the like can be tricky); basically just a 'though shall not kill' for bots. There are though experiments like the "trolley problem" that are designed to put an individual in a 'both action and inaction kill someone' bind; but those cases are fairly rare.
Cases where basically every possible action and inaction kills someone just keep getting more common as the scale gets larger. An automated vehicle might get to be the trolley in the trolley problem several times during its operational life. Something on the scale of an ERP system or traffic control network could easily be looking at a situation where there aren't any zero fatality outcomes; a diagnostic imaging expert system would just be an exercise of how many false positives(and attendant risky treatments) vs. how many false negatives(and attendant non-treatment and likely death) you want to tolerate.
Even in human scale cases; we only really make it work by constraining the context('inaction' in particular: failure to call 911 when you see a guy bleeding on the side of the road is likely to be viewed harshly, potentially as criminal negligence in some jurisdiction; failure to kick in the price of your fancy coffee to save children in droughtistan generally isn't even considered). If you are doing safety controls for a robot welder arm; which has an intrinsically constrained context, that's not a big deal: "don't kill anyone that wanders into your operating zone" is probably a good design goal. However, most of these 'AI' projects seem to be aimed at larger contexts; a scale of activity where inaction will kill people; and most or all available actions will probably kill at least a few people; at which point a "don't kill anyone" rule becomes both impossible to follow and useless for distinguishing between more and less bad outcomes.
Aside from people just fucking it up(downright ubiquitious in USB power delivery scenarios, sometimes of the 'likely hardware damage' flavor) the trouble is that the alt-modes move what a USB port might be capable of outside the realm of the USB implementation itself.
Alt mode support is a USB thing; so compliant USB chipsets Must correctly handle the relevant signalling and handing off; but the behavior of whatever is handed off to is outside the USB spec and often in the realm of parts that are expensive enough that there is no way the USB-IF could get any serious traction even if they tried to twist arms.
Even on expensive gear with substantial punch there typically aren't enough resources for the alt-modes to be supported without various compromises and non-obvious limitations (it isn't a 100% perfect match; because the Mac Pro predates USB-C connector thunderbolt; but it's a good example of the mismatch between various types of resources at the system's disposal: it's sorta plug and play; but "attach displays to different Thunderbolt busses when possible. Don't attach more than two displays to any bus"). It's quite typical for a computer to have 10 or more USB ports; Even if the Thunderbolt silicon were free, which it isn't, it's not so typical for a computer to have an extra 20 or 40 PCIe lanes; nor is it common to have more than two or three displayport outputs(unless you are loading up on GPUs or using classy workstation cards). Even if the extra expense and board space is provided so that any USB-C port can be used for any alt-mode for which system resources are available, that still means that "you can only plug monitors into two of them; unless you have two displayport monitors and one HDMI, in which case you can use three; but if you do that only Thunderbolt devices that use PCIe exclusively will work on the remaining ports, no Thunderbolt displays" is the order of the day.
Once you get down to realistically cheap devices; where things like not having a PCIe bus; or only having HDMI because you are a cheap SoC designed for set top boxes; or not wanted to put a fancy matrix switch in so that multi-Gb/s busses are available from any USB port are to be expected the limits of what any given USB port can do are just going to get tighter.
If(and it's a big if) some reasonably sane scheme is designed to make it clear what a device can or can't do it's still arguably a win over fixed function ports(if a laptop, say, can only actually charge via one of its ports and output video over one or two others; that's still a laptop that has USB ports where it would otherwise have a vendor barrel plug and an HDMI port, which is nice to have); but it's pretty much impossible to expect reasonably comprehensive support out of devices without making them mostly expensive and overqualified.
The fine imposed for his activity is disproportionate to his crime. I just suspect that he'd be begging to have the fine back if anyone proposed something actually proportionate.
That is why I'm more skeptical of the "Valve is still developing SteamOS, but I don't expect that to go on much longer." part of the claim.
Given that prebuilt console-size PCs are a bit of a niche; and ones running Linux are niche within a niche(especially now that various cheapo ARM-SoC-with-hardware-decode boxes have basically eliminated the need for a PC by the TV if you want either the streaming services of your choice or your giant NAS-o'-piracy); it probably doesn't make sense to keep them in stock; but abandoning the 'encourage game compatibility with Linux and Linux driver, especially GPU, support for what games need' effort is a somewhat different story: if PCs running SteamOS aren't selling the PC OEMs aren't going to be happy about making them(much less providing timely updates as new parts become available) without Valve outright paying them to do it; but reactivating production if circumstances change is trivially quick and cheap if a sutiable OS is still available.
What isn't quick or trivial is reviving the effort to improve GPU and other gaming-related Linux development and encourage game devs and engine/middleware vendors to support Linux. If you let that lapse you are likely to have a period where even more games than normal don't have Linux support and never get it; potentially engine releases that don't offer Linux support; and the need to rebuild cooperation with hardware vendors and the developers of kernel, Xorg, etc. br.
Maintaining that development effort certainly isn't free; but it is also something where it is difficult, if not impossible, to 'make up for' a period of no support by trying to rush later.
Given the vastly smaller pool of people who care about polishing the security of the SoC-in-Computer thing; vs. the numerous deep pocketed organizations who would really be concerned if escape from, or leakage between, VMs is doable; the VM approach might actually be safer.
If your combo-device doesn't share some hardware between the two systems it's pointless: much more costly than just buying two devices because it's an oddball and probably not much smaller or lighter. If it does share some hardware between the two systems it runs into the unpleasant problem that untrustworthy, often invisible, frequently protected only by obscure proprietary toolchains that can probably be trivially pirated by the people you are worried about, firmware (often with direct control of its own little CPU and RAM; and potentially DMA or a NIC or some combination of the above) is everywhere. In some cases it is just dangerously easy to ignore(did the developers of the giant, complex, blob of kernel driver that runs your GPU care enough to implement the boring little bit that reads EDID data over the i2c bus to be resistant to malicious inputs rather than just typical display manufacturer incompetence? Better hope so.) In other cases it occupies a privileged position that doesn't necessarily allow you to distinguish between 'malicious' and 'legitimate' inputs(How is the OS supposed to know if the keyboard controller is sending it keycodes because it's evil rather than because you are pressing those particular keys?)
If anything, most computers already have far too many substantially independent computers lurking inside them; doing who-knows-what subject only to the limitation that they avoid bluescreening the OS or failing to also perform whatever their legitimate function is too often. Adding an extra, special "what people with important data use to interact with sketchy things" SoC is practically suicide.
The surprising thing about Apple isn't their relative unwillingness to cut prices; that's what left them reaping most of the profit in laptops and mobile devices and something will really have to scare them to get them to try to compete on price with random plasticky Chromebooks. The surprising thing is how unconcerned they seem to be by the fact that managing the damn things is miserable, labor intensive, and relatively costly.
For device management, iOS MDM is somewhat less dismal than Android MDM(fewer OS versions; no vendor specific 'does this depend on Samsung Knox?' nonsense); but for account management Apple IDs have stubbornly remained close to their roots as something that individuals set up, for themselves and by themselves; and iOS devices remain close to their roots as either single-user devices or single-app kiosk widgets. They have slowly made incremental concessions to management over time; but mostly in a direction that suggests that BYOD is the preferred use case; which is very, very, not interchangeable with 'organization owned and operated'.
Managing a whole bunch of Google Apps (for business or for education, architecturally pretty much the same thing) is downright trivial by comparison; either through their interface or with AD synchronization if you are doing an implementation alongside some amount of Windows infrastructure. It is...not impressive...that Google plays better with Microsoft's directory infrastructure than iOS plays with OSX's(to the degree that that even exists anymore, with OSX 'server' being allowed to bleed out in a corner somewhere).
I know that smartphones and the App Economy(tm) change everything and stuff; but hasn't it been a ubiquitous article of common sense that trusting the client is for suckers since the days when using your phone to access the internet involved dialup?
Outside of some 'trusted computing' dystopian fantasy there isn't much they can do about people suppressing ads; but since they are the ones running the servers streaming the music one would think that they could quite easily do things like stopping the media stream during periods when ads are supposed to be playing; making periodic chunks of silence the best-possible modified client outcome.
I can see a Linux project wanting to stay the hell away from the 'cherry trail' era Atoms(PowerVR graphics and Intel's position is, essentially, 'these were made to go with Microsoft's attempt to sell Win8 as a tablet OS, not our problem'(so much so that even Win10 support is atrocious), plus 32 bit UEFI); and some of the Bay Trail boards were pretty dicey as well, depending on how much the vendor cared(same risk of 32 bit UEFI, SD slots you can't boot from, HID devices speaking slightly eccentric i2c rather than USB or PS/2(less common as an external connector; still pretty common for what things like laptop keyboards appear to be from the software perspective); but if you can get an Atom that doesn't make horrible design choices(and, despite the 'Celeron' branding, this thing is an Atom) it's the fairly obvious choice for something where you want x86 compatibility and you can't afford one of AMD's new designs.
The integrated GPU is a little better, though the FOSS drivers are a little worse; but Puma cores are seriously feeble; and unless you are saving a fair amount of money(not too likely given that Intel's production cost for equivalent bottom-feeding chips is likely lower; and the selling price constrained more by their desire to sell more i3s) it's hard to get excited about them. Rhyzen based CPUs and APUs are a whole different ballgame; but they don't fit here (either in price or thermally; not that Intel's actually-competent chips would either; with the possible exception of very spendy ULV parts).
I think the chip on your shoulder is warping your perspective. Amazon isn't interested in punishment or your sense of victimized moral superiority.
It's an economic commonplace that price discrimination is in the seller's interest if they can accurately assess the willingness to pay and demand elasticity of their various customers. Doing so perfectly is generally impossible; but more and less granular attempts market segmentation are ubiquitous.
Here, Amazon has a very convenient market segmentation signal neatly implemented for them: a collection of poor customers, presumably less likely to purchase Prime at full price, with eligibility standards and enforcement provided by the state or the feds; and (at least in the case of WIC EBT, not sure about medicaid) a purchasing mechanism built in that is quite similar to other payment cards in terms of processing. What's not to like, from Amazon's perspective?
Should we establish a Department of Virtuous Labor to enact regulations to prevent market actors from doing things, even voluntarily and in their economic interests, that might result in lower prices for filthy poors, to avoid this moral outrage?
I suspect that Amazon would be at a comparative disadvantage in playing black marketeer. You don't run an operation of their size without keeping accurate records, otherwise various flavors of fraud not in your favor or sheer inefficiency and confusion would cause things to grind to a halt; and they are a large, obvious, target with a lot to lose if caught.
Now, will their UI make it super easy(or just default to) auto-apply EBT to eligible items in the cart and use a presentation of the result very similar to what you would see if gift cards/rebates/etc. covered those items to give you a feeling of having 'saved' and encourage you to feel that you can afford to add an extra widget or two? That seems much more likely.
In part. Satellites are conveniently cheap(when amortized across the amount of area they cover; and how long they cover it; they are not 'cheap' in terms of sticker price); but don't fly any lower than earth orbit and are predictable against any vaguely competent adversary(tracking satellite launches is a hobbyist thing; and downloading their conclusions to know when you are being over-flown is easier still); and continuous coverage requires either lots of satellites to blanket one of the lower orbits; or satellites in geostationary orbits which are quite distant and have the accompanying challenges to getting good image quality.
If you really need a surprise inspection of a specific place at a specific time the gap isn't really filled; but having satellite sensors to work with keeps you from being in the dark; and you can use drones or less capable aircraft in places where adversary air defenses aren't all that interesting.
Nothing quite fills the niche; but filling the niche is an expensive specialty operation; and one that might become quite risky if anyone is capable of pumping out SAMs of similar tech level; since they don't have to support a pilot or a bunch of cameras; just have to hit you; which makes outrunning them without being substantially more advanced a bit nerve-wracking.
The one actually somewhat surprising aspect is that it is, apparently, a 3rd party ad machine.
Obviously, Amazon's little surveillance puck isn't in your house as a favor to you; but, unlike other advertising outfits, Amazon also sells a fairly gigantic amount of stuff, some house brand; all presumably more or less profitable for them based on the difference between the price they pay their vendor and the price you pay them.
Given that, it isn't necessarily to be expected that Amazon would offer the ability to buy 'promotional consideration' directly; rather than using the ad space to try to tilt purchases in whatever direction is most profitable in their capacity as a retailer(with vendors being able to buy ad space indirectly, by offering Amazon lower prices; but not to purchase it outright).
With something like Google; it's much less surprising because they have very little first-party demand for advertising: a bit of cross-promotion of the search engine by the browser and vice-versa; a few cellphones and chromebooks you can buy from them; but certainly nowhere near enough to consume all the advertising slots; so 3rd party ads are obvious. Amazon doesn't have too much house brand stuff; but one assumes that its margins on some of what it sells are higher than on the rest; so it could consume its own advertising space by promoting that; or encouraging purchases on Amazon rather than elsewhere.
Nobody except the admins care if it gets slower; but I suspect a somewhat broader circle of people will care if it gets more expensive.
A fair chunk of the internet is mostly profitable because VMs are cheap and low commitment; and shoveling out some database backed idiocy is relatively cheap and mature. That's about the worst place you could put an "we have to implement the fix because you could break the hypervisor otherwise; but it takes a nasty bite out of databases and I/O heavy stuff" announcement.
Whatever Intel's carefully curated 'average user' does on their desktop; odds are excellent that they spend their time online hammering on a bunch of moderately database heavy workloads that live in VMs.
Depends on the context: the tech is undeniably cool(I picked one up when I heard they were getting axed just to play with that); but Microsoft was uneven in exploiting those cool capabilities and the device gained a rather tarnished reputation back when it was a mandatory pack-in as part of Microsoft's "Um, Xbox becomes all-things living room dominance hub?" scheme at launch.
If you want what it does it was quite competitive indeed; but otherwise it was pretty much a $100 and mandatory microphone. Given the grim history of failure among optional console peripherals that never cracked the "our game won't support it because nobody owns one"/"why buy one when no games use it? problem it isn't hard to see Microsoft's incentive; but that doesn't change the fact that they failed; and until they backpedaled on the issue it was a pretty substantial increase in Xbox price without commensurate benefit.
Unless Qualcomm has had a real change of heart lately the most 'exciting' feature of the new chip will be the fact that, since they've abandoned suppport for their binary blobs on the old chip; it will reasonably soon be the only Qualcomm option that runs contemporary Android.
well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem
Quoted for truth. The Excel plus copious macros and hackjob Access monstrosities of the world are terrible, terrible, things; but they exist because Office is actually pretty good at letting people who have subject matter expertise and subject matter problems bang out something resembling a solution without much IT or software engineering getting involved. This is also one of the reasons why Office has been so persistent.
You can(and taste dictates that you should) dislike the results; they are usually awful; but those sorts of systems grow up when people are forced to build their own tools because yours are nonexistent and/or so atrocious as to be effectively unusable. If you don't build it; your users will be forced to, and while they may do a decent job given the constraints of their tools and knowledge, it won't be pretty or maintainable.
It seems useful to distinguish between "requires internet access because it relies on handy network capabilities" and "requires internet access because the DRM system says you haven't activated recently".
Yes, it is worth remembering how many "POTS" lines turn into VOIP a short distance from the customer, probably in a little widget with a handful of hours of battery backup at best; but "my phone doesn't work because telecommunications are disrupted" isn't terribly surprising or a conspiracy of deliberate crippling. Other cases are not so architecturally necessary; and the difference between "works" and "deliberately stops working" more dramatic.
Qualcomm is committed to 'the chip' as an abstract concept; in the sense that they will be happy to sell you another chip of some sort when you have to throw out your current chip because of lack of software support.
This seems a bit...dramatic...in its description. Yes, as of comparatively recently you can now get satellite launch services that are substantially private sector (both in who you buy them from and in the launch vehicle not being some defense contractor's ICBM work warmed over a bit); but to the degree that the private sector has found things worth doing in space(mostly communications satellites, some sensor ones) that predates the new launch options by a fair bit; and none of the asteroid mining/private colonies/etc. stuff seems to have changed much, particularly as of 2009.
This is not to dismiss the developments in launch systems; but 'space age' usually includes something to do in space, which hasn't shown up to nearly the same degree, and also existed under the prior launch model; it seems more accurate to limit the claim to launch systems.
I assume that people who commit suicide without doing some suicidal ideation first are relatively rare(and likely most common in 'never take me alive!' type scenarios, not standard mental health practice); but this thing seems totally useless if what it detects is mere suicidal ideation, rather than actually picking out the differences between people who think they would be better off dead and the ones who go through with it.
Especially given that depression tends to ruin your focus, motivation, and ability to execute a plan (even one you fully agree would be in your interests); people who would merely prefer to be dead are a larger group, likely by a fair margin, than ones who do something about it. If all your fancy brain scan can do is provide the same 'are you thinking about suicide?' data that a few minutes of sympathetic questioning by a vaguely competent counselor or psychologist can, it is a scientific curiosity. What would actually be interesting is telling us which of the suicidal ideators are justing fantasizing; and which ones are preparing.
(Now, if you really wanted to get futuristic, you could look into having a reasonably efficacious treatment option available for those you identify...)
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Unless the win32/x86 emulation layer they've been talking about is pretty solid and works well(and nobody goes power-tripping and tries for a "The Windows Store is your only option" play(as Windows RT did; and "Windows S" started by doing before it became a special install option for Windows Pro SKUs) they likely aren't going to succeed at "make some qualcomm thing act just like you expect a wintel to"; but Microsoft arguably has all the ingredients they need for a perfectly serviceable "Edgebook"
The NT kernel itself, and the various other under-the-hood stuff is vastly less gruesome than the awful world of WinCE devices; they've got their pet browser that works fine(some galling limitations on the configurability side; but reports on speed and security for Edge are decent); they've got the supporting ecosystem("Microsoft accounts" on the consumer end and o365+AAD on the business end are at least approximately comparable to Google's 'gmail account' on the consumer side; 'Google Apps for Business/education' on the paid side); and assuming the x86 emulation is OK the collection of Windows software they'll be able to bring over will probably have he same potential to be useful as the Android app support Google has been tacking on to ChromeOS. None of this is to say that they are an obvious improvement; or that theirs would be better than the equivalent Chromebook; but the success of Chromebooks clearly demonstrates that there is plenty of interest in cheap, idiot-proof, largely cloud-service backed, options; and if Microsoft wants an equivalent(as opposed to their current 'just try to cut a standard wintel down until it is price competitive' stopgap) I don't see why they couldn't deliver one.
It would not be a serious alternative to a standard wintel if you want a real windows system, with all the software support and on premises AD and whatnot; but Microsoft has what they need to deliver a "chromebook but with Microsoft technologies", if they choose to do so.
"Luckily" the Surface RT (which otherwise could have been an interesting bit of gear to salvage after Windows RT crashed and burned) 'fixed' that problem with mandatory secure boot(they strongly encourage it on the x86s; but there is the option to turn it off and, on some systems, mostly business class, the option to keep it on but provision your own trusted roots).
Unless MS has had a change of heart about the matter I wouldn't be too optimistic about the prospects for 3rd party development; even if the hardware is otherwise sufficiently well understood and supported for at least an Android port; if not necessarily a 'standard' Xorg and glibc Linux install.
That said, unless there is some really, really, harsh "OEM partner Must Not offer an equivalent non-Windows device as a condition of this agreement" agreement in place; I'd imagine that Dell, and any others who are doing similar gear, might well try to salvage the various engineering costs(potentially even actual hardware if it can be de-branded and reflashed economically) by also releasing pretty much the same thing in Android; but the odds that something purchased as Windows-on-ARM with Microsoft CA secure boot is going to get a post-sale vendor patch to Android option are...limited.
I suspect that the people who should be nervous here are Sonos; and perhaps to some extent the really expensive A/V integrator types:
Compared to any of the 'place unit in room, play audio' options the 'homepod' arrangement is pricey and proprietary. Compared to the pricey and proprietary multi-room-with-synchronization-and-stuff options(Sonos being the big name); the cost starts to look more reasonable and they are at least proprietary offshoots of a large, (generally) competent vendor who will likely continue to give them a prime position in a variety of media/service bundling schemes in the coming years; and treat them as a first class audio output for iOS and OSX.
Not meaningfully competitive with either just 'wiring' speakers for multiroom audio or using your preferred latter-day-boombox option; but probably bad news for the current vendors of fancy wireless multiroom systems that get rather costly rather quickly.
The "Conflict" bit is actually the really easy part. Though we don't usually phrase it that way it's a more or less ubiquitous feature of computers(indeed, getting anything else often requires clever rearrangement into this form):
In this case all the mentions of 'conflict' really just mean "rules are evaluated in numerical order; failure halts processing of subsequent rules". Basically the arrangement busily dropping packets and filtering spam in vast quantities all the time.
The hard, probably context, sensor, and input specific, bit is determining how to evaluate each of the rules. Not necessarily intractable; in the context of something like an industrial welding or assembly arm 'injury' and 'harm' are mostly collision avoidance matters, 'obey orders' is the translation of inputs from whatever UI the system has into movements of the device; and 'protect own existence' is more collision avoidance and some thermal, overcurrent; and strain limits.
None of this is to minimize the practical engineering difficulty of, say, distinguishing between 'human' objects within the movement area(which are rule 1 priority) and 'carelessly stored boxes' (which are only rule 3 priority); or of taking a couple of joystick inputs and getting nice, predictable, movement of a multi axis arm out of them; or of having the necessary safety features to avoid overcurrent damage, stripped gears, etc. but no abstract understanding of 'harm' or 'existence' is required.
Aside from the whole "remember all those books where Asimov basically poked at the limits of the three laws in various contexts because that was a useful plot device?" issue; this question seems to be founded on a pretty dire misunderstanding:
If "a robot" is a more or less humanoid embodied agent, or at least something on approximately the same scale(automated robot arm or the like) a formulation like "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." is comparatively straightforward(not necessarily to implement, object avoidance and the like can be tricky); basically just a 'though shall not kill' for bots. There are though experiments like the "trolley problem" that are designed to put an individual in a 'both action and inaction kill someone' bind; but those cases are fairly rare.
Cases where basically every possible action and inaction kills someone just keep getting more common as the scale gets larger. An automated vehicle might get to be the trolley in the trolley problem several times during its operational life. Something on the scale of an ERP system or traffic control network could easily be looking at a situation where there aren't any zero fatality outcomes; a diagnostic imaging expert system would just be an exercise of how many false positives(and attendant risky treatments) vs. how many false negatives(and attendant non-treatment and likely death) you want to tolerate.
Even in human scale cases; we only really make it work by constraining the context('inaction' in particular: failure to call 911 when you see a guy bleeding on the side of the road is likely to be viewed harshly, potentially as criminal negligence in some jurisdiction; failure to kick in the price of your fancy coffee to save children in droughtistan generally isn't even considered). If you are doing safety controls for a robot welder arm; which has an intrinsically constrained context, that's not a big deal: "don't kill anyone that wanders into your operating zone" is probably a good design goal. However, most of these 'AI' projects seem to be aimed at larger contexts; a scale of activity where inaction will kill people; and most or all available actions will probably kill at least a few people; at which point a "don't kill anyone" rule becomes both impossible to follow and useless for distinguishing between more and less bad outcomes.
Aside from people just fucking it up(downright ubiquitious in USB power delivery scenarios, sometimes of the 'likely hardware damage' flavor) the trouble is that the alt-modes move what a USB port might be capable of outside the realm of the USB implementation itself.
Alt mode support is a USB thing; so compliant USB chipsets Must correctly handle the relevant signalling and handing off; but the behavior of whatever is handed off to is outside the USB spec and often in the realm of parts that are expensive enough that there is no way the USB-IF could get any serious traction even if they tried to twist arms.
Even on expensive gear with substantial punch there typically aren't enough resources for the alt-modes to be supported without various compromises and non-obvious limitations (it isn't a 100% perfect match; because the Mac Pro predates USB-C connector thunderbolt; but it's a good example of the mismatch between various types of resources at the system's disposal: it's sorta plug and play; but "attach displays to different Thunderbolt busses when possible. Don't attach more than two displays to any bus"). It's quite typical for a computer to have 10 or more USB ports; Even if the Thunderbolt silicon were free, which it isn't, it's not so typical for a computer to have an extra 20 or 40 PCIe lanes; nor is it common to have more than two or three displayport outputs(unless you are loading up on GPUs or using classy workstation cards). Even if the extra expense and board space is provided so that any USB-C port can be used for any alt-mode for which system resources are available, that still means that "you can only plug monitors into two of them; unless you have two displayport monitors and one HDMI, in which case you can use three; but if you do that only Thunderbolt devices that use PCIe exclusively will work on the remaining ports, no Thunderbolt displays" is the order of the day.
Once you get down to realistically cheap devices; where things like not having a PCIe bus; or only having HDMI because you are a cheap SoC designed for set top boxes; or not wanted to put a fancy matrix switch in so that multi-Gb/s busses are available from any USB port are to be expected the limits of what any given USB port can do are just going to get tighter.
If(and it's a big if) some reasonably sane scheme is designed to make it clear what a device can or can't do it's still arguably a win over fixed function ports(if a laptop, say, can only actually charge via one of its ports and output video over one or two others; that's still a laptop that has USB ports where it would otherwise have a vendor barrel plug and an HDMI port, which is nice to have); but it's pretty much impossible to expect reasonably comprehensive support out of devices without making them mostly expensive and overqualified.
The fine imposed for his activity is disproportionate to his crime. I just suspect that he'd be begging to have the fine back if anyone proposed something actually proportionate.
That is why I'm more skeptical of the "Valve is still developing SteamOS, but I don't expect that to go on much longer." part of the claim.
Given that prebuilt console-size PCs are a bit of a niche; and ones running Linux are niche within a niche(especially now that various cheapo ARM-SoC-with-hardware-decode boxes have basically eliminated the need for a PC by the TV if you want either the streaming services of your choice or your giant NAS-o'-piracy); it probably doesn't make sense to keep them in stock; but abandoning the 'encourage game compatibility with Linux and Linux driver, especially GPU, support for what games need' effort is a somewhat different story: if PCs running SteamOS aren't selling the PC OEMs aren't going to be happy about making them(much less providing timely updates as new parts become available) without Valve outright paying them to do it; but reactivating production if circumstances change is trivially quick and cheap if a sutiable OS is still available.
What isn't quick or trivial is reviving the effort to improve GPU and other gaming-related Linux development and encourage game devs and engine/middleware vendors to support Linux. If you let that lapse you are likely to have a period where even more games than normal don't have Linux support and never get it; potentially engine releases that don't offer Linux support; and the need to rebuild cooperation with hardware vendors and the developers of kernel, Xorg, etc.
br. Maintaining that development effort certainly isn't free; but it is also something where it is difficult, if not impossible, to 'make up for' a period of no support by trying to rush later.
Given the vastly smaller pool of people who care about polishing the security of the SoC-in-Computer thing; vs. the numerous deep pocketed organizations who would really be concerned if escape from, or leakage between, VMs is doable; the VM approach might actually be safer.
If your combo-device doesn't share some hardware between the two systems it's pointless: much more costly than just buying two devices because it's an oddball and probably not much smaller or lighter. If it does share some hardware between the two systems it runs into the unpleasant problem that untrustworthy, often invisible, frequently protected only by obscure proprietary toolchains that can probably be trivially pirated by the people you are worried about, firmware (often with direct control of its own little CPU and RAM; and potentially DMA or a NIC or some combination of the above) is everywhere. In some cases it is just dangerously easy to ignore(did the developers of the giant, complex, blob of kernel driver that runs your GPU care enough to implement the boring little bit that reads EDID data over the i2c bus to be resistant to malicious inputs rather than just typical display manufacturer incompetence? Better hope so.) In other cases it occupies a privileged position that doesn't necessarily allow you to distinguish between 'malicious' and 'legitimate' inputs(How is the OS supposed to know if the keyboard controller is sending it keycodes because it's evil rather than because you are pressing those particular keys?)
If anything, most computers already have far too many substantially independent computers lurking inside them; doing who-knows-what subject only to the limitation that they avoid bluescreening the OS or failing to also perform whatever their legitimate function is too often. Adding an extra, special "what people with important data use to interact with sketchy things" SoC is practically suicide.
The surprising thing about Apple isn't their relative unwillingness to cut prices; that's what left them reaping most of the profit in laptops and mobile devices and something will really have to scare them to get them to try to compete on price with random plasticky Chromebooks. The surprising thing is how unconcerned they seem to be by the fact that managing the damn things is miserable, labor intensive, and relatively costly.
For device management, iOS MDM is somewhat less dismal than Android MDM(fewer OS versions; no vendor specific 'does this depend on Samsung Knox?' nonsense); but for account management Apple IDs have stubbornly remained close to their roots as something that individuals set up, for themselves and by themselves; and iOS devices remain close to their roots as either single-user devices or single-app kiosk widgets. They have slowly made incremental concessions to management over time; but mostly in a direction that suggests that BYOD is the preferred use case; which is very, very, not interchangeable with 'organization owned and operated'.
Managing a whole bunch of Google Apps (for business or for education, architecturally pretty much the same thing) is downright trivial by comparison; either through their interface or with AD synchronization if you are doing an implementation alongside some amount of Windows infrastructure. It is...not impressive...that Google plays better with Microsoft's directory infrastructure than iOS plays with OSX's(to the degree that that even exists anymore, with OSX 'server' being allowed to bleed out in a corner somewhere).
I know that smartphones and the App Economy(tm) change everything and stuff; but hasn't it been a ubiquitous article of common sense that trusting the client is for suckers since the days when using your phone to access the internet involved dialup?
Outside of some 'trusted computing' dystopian fantasy there isn't much they can do about people suppressing ads; but since they are the ones running the servers streaming the music one would think that they could quite easily do things like stopping the media stream during periods when ads are supposed to be playing; making periodic chunks of silence the best-possible modified client outcome.
I can see a Linux project wanting to stay the hell away from the 'cherry trail' era Atoms(PowerVR graphics and Intel's position is, essentially, 'these were made to go with Microsoft's attempt to sell Win8 as a tablet OS, not our problem'(so much so that even Win10 support is atrocious), plus 32 bit UEFI); and some of the Bay Trail boards were pretty dicey as well, depending on how much the vendor cared(same risk of 32 bit UEFI, SD slots you can't boot from, HID devices speaking slightly eccentric i2c rather than USB or PS/2(less common as an external connector; still pretty common for what things like laptop keyboards appear to be from the software perspective); but if you can get an Atom that doesn't make horrible design choices(and, despite the 'Celeron' branding, this thing is an Atom) it's the fairly obvious choice for something where you want x86 compatibility and you can't afford one of AMD's new designs.
The integrated GPU is a little better, though the FOSS drivers are a little worse; but Puma cores are seriously feeble; and unless you are saving a fair amount of money(not too likely given that Intel's production cost for equivalent bottom-feeding chips is likely lower; and the selling price constrained more by their desire to sell more i3s) it's hard to get excited about them. Rhyzen based CPUs and APUs are a whole different ballgame; but they don't fit here (either in price or thermally; not that Intel's actually-competent chips would either; with the possible exception of very spendy ULV parts).
I think the chip on your shoulder is warping your perspective. Amazon isn't interested in punishment or your sense of victimized moral superiority.
It's an economic commonplace that price discrimination is in the seller's interest if they can accurately assess the willingness to pay and demand elasticity of their various customers. Doing so perfectly is generally impossible; but more and less granular attempts market segmentation are ubiquitous.
Here, Amazon has a very convenient market segmentation signal neatly implemented for them: a collection of poor customers, presumably less likely to purchase Prime at full price, with eligibility standards and enforcement provided by the state or the feds; and (at least in the case of WIC EBT, not sure about medicaid) a purchasing mechanism built in that is quite similar to other payment cards in terms of processing. What's not to like, from Amazon's perspective?
Should we establish a Department of Virtuous Labor to enact regulations to prevent market actors from doing things, even voluntarily and in their economic interests, that might result in lower prices for filthy poors, to avoid this moral outrage?
I suspect that Amazon would be at a comparative disadvantage in playing black marketeer. You don't run an operation of their size without keeping accurate records, otherwise various flavors of fraud not in your favor or sheer inefficiency and confusion would cause things to grind to a halt; and they are a large, obvious, target with a lot to lose if caught.
Now, will their UI make it super easy(or just default to) auto-apply EBT to eligible items in the cart and use a presentation of the result very similar to what you would see if gift cards/rebates/etc. covered those items to give you a feeling of having 'saved' and encourage you to feel that you can afford to add an extra widget or two? That seems much more likely.
Almost: Sputnik included a radio beacon. They'll have to work up to that.
In part. Satellites are conveniently cheap(when amortized across the amount of area they cover; and how long they cover it; they are not 'cheap' in terms of sticker price); but don't fly any lower than earth orbit and are predictable against any vaguely competent adversary(tracking satellite launches is a hobbyist thing; and downloading their conclusions to know when you are being over-flown is easier still); and continuous coverage requires either lots of satellites to blanket one of the lower orbits; or satellites in geostationary orbits which are quite distant and have the accompanying challenges to getting good image quality.
If you really need a surprise inspection of a specific place at a specific time the gap isn't really filled; but having satellite sensors to work with keeps you from being in the dark; and you can use drones or less capable aircraft in places where adversary air defenses aren't all that interesting.
Nothing quite fills the niche; but filling the niche is an expensive specialty operation; and one that might become quite risky if anyone is capable of pumping out SAMs of similar tech level; since they don't have to support a pilot or a bunch of cameras; just have to hit you; which makes outrunning them without being substantially more advanced a bit nerve-wracking.
The one actually somewhat surprising aspect is that it is, apparently, a 3rd party ad machine.
Obviously, Amazon's little surveillance puck isn't in your house as a favor to you; but, unlike other advertising outfits, Amazon also sells a fairly gigantic amount of stuff, some house brand; all presumably more or less profitable for them based on the difference between the price they pay their vendor and the price you pay them.
Given that, it isn't necessarily to be expected that Amazon would offer the ability to buy 'promotional consideration' directly; rather than using the ad space to try to tilt purchases in whatever direction is most profitable in their capacity as a retailer(with vendors being able to buy ad space indirectly, by offering Amazon lower prices; but not to purchase it outright).
With something like Google; it's much less surprising because they have very little first-party demand for advertising: a bit of cross-promotion of the search engine by the browser and vice-versa; a few cellphones and chromebooks you can buy from them; but certainly nowhere near enough to consume all the advertising slots; so 3rd party ads are obvious. Amazon doesn't have too much house brand stuff; but one assumes that its margins on some of what it sells are higher than on the rest; so it could consume its own advertising space by promoting that; or encouraging purchases on Amazon rather than elsewhere.
Nobody except the admins care if it gets slower; but I suspect a somewhat broader circle of people will care if it gets more expensive.
A fair chunk of the internet is mostly profitable because VMs are cheap and low commitment; and shoveling out some database backed idiocy is relatively cheap and mature. That's about the worst place you could put an "we have to implement the fix because you could break the hypervisor otherwise; but it takes a nasty bite out of databases and I/O heavy stuff" announcement.
Whatever Intel's carefully curated 'average user' does on their desktop; odds are excellent that they spend their time online hammering on a bunch of moderately database heavy workloads that live in VMs.
Depends on the context: the tech is undeniably cool(I picked one up when I heard they were getting axed just to play with that); but Microsoft was uneven in exploiting those cool capabilities and the device gained a rather tarnished reputation back when it was a mandatory pack-in as part of Microsoft's "Um, Xbox becomes all-things living room dominance hub?" scheme at launch.
If you want what it does it was quite competitive indeed; but otherwise it was pretty much a $100 and mandatory microphone. Given the grim history of failure among optional console peripherals that never cracked the "our game won't support it because nobody owns one"/"why buy one when no games use it? problem it isn't hard to see Microsoft's incentive; but that doesn't change the fact that they failed; and until they backpedaled on the issue it was a pretty substantial increase in Xbox price without commensurate benefit.
Unless Qualcomm has had a real change of heart lately the most 'exciting' feature of the new chip will be the fact that, since they've abandoned suppport for their binary blobs on the old chip; it will reasonably soon be the only Qualcomm option that runs contemporary Android.
well, it doesnt have to be, sounds like you have an IT problem, not a spreadsheet problem
Quoted for truth. The Excel plus copious macros and hackjob Access monstrosities of the world are terrible, terrible, things; but they exist because Office is actually pretty good at letting people who have subject matter expertise and subject matter problems bang out something resembling a solution without much IT or software engineering getting involved. This is also one of the reasons why Office has been so persistent.
You can(and taste dictates that you should) dislike the results; they are usually awful; but those sorts of systems grow up when people are forced to build their own tools because yours are nonexistent and/or so atrocious as to be effectively unusable. If you don't build it; your users will be forced to, and while they may do a decent job given the constraints of their tools and knowledge, it won't be pretty or maintainable.
It seems useful to distinguish between "requires internet access because it relies on handy network capabilities" and "requires internet access because the DRM system says you haven't activated recently".
Yes, it is worth remembering how many "POTS" lines turn into VOIP a short distance from the customer, probably in a little widget with a handful of hours of battery backup at best; but "my phone doesn't work because telecommunications are disrupted" isn't terribly surprising or a conspiracy of deliberate crippling. Other cases are not so architecturally necessary; and the difference between "works" and "deliberately stops working" more dramatic.
Qualcomm is committed to 'the chip' as an abstract concept; in the sense that they will be happy to sell you another chip of some sort when you have to throw out your current chip because of lack of software support.
This seems a bit...dramatic...in its description. Yes, as of comparatively recently you can now get satellite launch services that are substantially private sector (both in who you buy them from and in the launch vehicle not being some defense contractor's ICBM work warmed over a bit); but to the degree that the private sector has found things worth doing in space(mostly communications satellites, some sensor ones) that predates the new launch options by a fair bit; and none of the asteroid mining/private colonies/etc. stuff seems to have changed much, particularly as of 2009.
This is not to dismiss the developments in launch systems; but 'space age' usually includes something to do in space, which hasn't shown up to nearly the same degree, and also existed under the prior launch model; it seems more accurate to limit the claim to launch systems.
I assume that people who commit suicide without doing some suicidal ideation first are relatively rare(and likely most common in 'never take me alive!' type scenarios, not standard mental health practice); but this thing seems totally useless if what it detects is mere suicidal ideation, rather than actually picking out the differences between people who think they would be better off dead and the ones who go through with it.
Especially given that depression tends to ruin your focus, motivation, and ability to execute a plan (even one you fully agree would be in your interests); people who would merely prefer to be dead are a larger group, likely by a fair margin, than ones who do something about it. If all your fancy brain scan can do is provide the same 'are you thinking about suicide?' data that a few minutes of sympathetic questioning by a vaguely competent counselor or psychologist can, it is a scientific curiosity. What would actually be interesting is telling us which of the suicidal ideators are justing fantasizing; and which ones are preparing.
(Now, if you really wanted to get futuristic, you could look into having a reasonably efficacious treatment option available for those you identify...)