I imagine that getting the firmware that handles some of the new-hotness RF stuff that allows breathlessly advertised high data rates from those vendors would be like pulling teeth; but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the vendors who put the 'router' together and build the firmware image would be, in part, pleased by a "we have to share ours; but so do all our competitors" situation.
Clever wireless NIC tricks can be an actual competitive advantage; but the "Outdated kernel, busybox, and lighthttpd" side of the equation is mostly one pointless, half-assed, reinvention of the wheel after another. Something you have to do in order to ship; but hardly a selling point.
The two functions get shoved into one box for consumer purposes(often with a DSL or cable modem as well, maybe even a SIP ATA for some 'triple play' nonsense); but logically speaking there usually is a router, though an anemic one, present inside something you'd call a "Wifi router" with an AP connected internally to it. There isn't quite the same neat logical separation that you'd see with enterprise APs, the AP and the router usually share an OS, lousy HTTP configuration interface, etc. but both functions are included.
Dedicated APs are pretty thin on the ground in cheap-consumer-shit land, even compared to discrete DSL and cable modems.
I think that some really nasty devices interpret 'resettable' protection rather loosely, and you may need to replace some teeny fuse to get +5v on that port at anything like 500ma again; but mere shorting definitely shouldn't damage anything else.
This attack is hardly high on my list of concerns(since, as you say, there are more unpleasant things to do if you have access); but it might be an issue for 'kiosk' type systems.
If you go into a CVS or other place that does photo printing, they usually have a couple of computers so you can plug in your camera or flash drive and self-serve, maybe do a few cheesy edits. Kinkos and the like do the same thing for printing from or scanning to flash drives. Those are the sorts of places where you can't really get out a hammer or just plug one end of a cord into the wall and the other end into the USB port; but plugging in a flash drive and playing the hapless technophobic customer who doesn't understand why it isn't working if anyone confronts you would be doable.
Still a lot of trouble for a little petty destruction; but we are talking about humans here.
Given the absurdly tiny USB peripherals you can get(typically circuit board and all components occupy the place where there is a plastic spacer under the 4 connectors; and have 4 pads on top where the connectors would be, so the entire device fits inside the connector); this seems like it would be quite doable.
The current design appears to start hitting the host as soon as it has had enough time to charge; but presumably one could have the 'legitimate' peripheral switch the killer's access to V+ on and off; so it could lie in wait, doing whatever legitimate thing, until some condition is met. Probably not enough room to build GPS in, so 'geofencing with extreme prejudice' might not be an option; but any NIC could listen for signals from the wire/in RF broadcast; and any peripheral could be triggered by a signal from the host computer.
Ugh, why does the US get to force other countries to extradite people who violate US laws? They pressured Sweden into charging Julian Assange with sexual assault because of the leaked cables and then pushed the UK to keep him trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy under guard. Now they're forcing countries to extradite their own citizens for breaking US laws. There's no reason why other countries should be forced to follow US laws.
The US certainly has a...distinctly mixed...history when it comes to shoving around countries that it thinks it can get away with; but this guy is being extradited for breaking US law within US jurisdiction, just using the internet to telecommute to the crime site.
Since many crimes can only be properly committed in person, it's probably more common for extradition treaties to get called in when somebody flees from Country A to Country B; but if you can commit a crime in Country A from the comfort of Country B(whether because you are doing computer intrusions and have internet access, or are hiring a hit man the old fashioned way), the principle is exactly the same.
It'd be pretty dodgy if the US wanted a Ukrainian guy grabbed for crimes not committed within American jurisdiction; but in this case the allegation is that he committed a fair few in the US, among other places.
It also might not help that Ukrainian authorities may have recently reevaluated the intensity of their interest in getting more cooperation from Washington.
If you are, in fact, secure in a country half a planet away, flaunting your impunity isn't as elegant as working silently; but has its virtues as an intimidation tactic: "You can't touch me, I can touch you; and even if you foil me this round I only have to get lucky once."
If you are in a country half a planet away that is just fine with stuffing you into the next plane headed for the US, of course, this is a lousy plan.
What I don't know, in this case, is whether he screwed up enough to get caught, or whether there used to be very little domestic interest in doing anything about him and then the political winds shifted.
The problem here is fairly clearly people making inappropriate choices about guns; perhaps because they take the 'small' in 'small arms' a bit too seriously.
Toddlers don't understand firearm risks; but they also aren't that strong. Some peashooter little handgun left around where they can find it? Terrible plan. A nice squad automatic weapon or anti material rifle? Is the kid going to operate something that weighs more than he does?
So many of these tragedies could have been averted if people had just chosen bigger guns.
It never really took off(outside of 'Choose Your Own Adventure" books for kids and a few '80s futurists who thought that hypertext was going to inaugurate a new form of literature); but I don't think that there is any particularly strict requirement that writing needs to be intended to be read back in a linear and deterministic order in order to potentially qualify as 'literature' and 'art', so even text based games arguably have a shot.
That said, though, the fact that there's an argument for almost anything to be 'art' suggests that you'd be better off asking a more interesting question.
I find it hard to understand why "are games art?" strikes anyone as enough of a question to even be asked. Unless you hew to a far narrower definition of 'art' than even most critics and artists do; it seems pretty obvious that they have the potential to qualify.
This doesn't mean that most of them are anything but sophomoric schlock produced entirely for mercenary purposes; but the same is true of music, film, photography, etc. and nobody seriously advances the "Music can't be art; because boy bands and pop tarts!" position or argues that Uwe Boll refutes the artistic status of film.
It's sad. People expect the video game, social media, mobile app experience from everything. It's like fast food.
You do remember that the 'symphony orchestra' was, once upon a time, a filthy innovation ruining real culture? It's certainly far from impossible to make value judgments about cultural phenomena; but just equating age with highbrow respectability is a lazy way to do it.
Speaking of 'generally against patents'; is there anyone around who knows enough about CPU architectures to tell us if the patent in question is basically a 'restate idea painfully obvious to one skilled in the art and/or articulated in 1960 but not actually used because there weren't enough relays on earth to implement it' type patent, or whether it is actually something clever, non-obvious, etc?
The grim world of software patents doesn't fill me with optimism about them; but if this is actually a decent patent on something non-obvious, useful; and not so broad as to give veto power over basically all CPUs ever; then it would be the patent system working more or less by design.
I suspect that this is also one of those situations where the fact that 'law' tends to have ways of bending to practicality is showing up.
The activities of the street vendors are illegal, and some of them probably have pretty dubious immigration status; but the fact that they remain active, are quite numerous, and are visible enough to form a union suggests that the local authorities lack the will or ability to suppress their vending; and the national authorities the will or ability to process them all as vigorously as the law theoretically allows.
Under those circumstances, it isn't terribly illogical for the mayor of Barcelona to be open to negotiations aimed at reducing the nuisances caused by street vendors in exchange for potential loosening of restrictions that are mostly theoretical or haphazardly and unevenly enforced at present.
It always upsets people who cherish the idea that 'law' is somehow a matter of pure principle and above the sordid world of pragmatism and political horse-trading; but that doesn't make it any less true. Even when the ability of the state to enforce the law is relatively strong, pressure is applied by lobbying the political apparatus. When it is weak or partial, pragmatism can, and often does, result in the state(or its agents) reaching a compromise with the illegal sector that aims to give the less noxious elements some of what they want in exchange for cooperation, or at least non-resistance, in going after higher-value targets.
I can't speak for khallow; but my impression was that the bunker leader was the one who has an incentive to double-cross his clients, in favor of people who will be more useful to him should the shit actually hit the fan; not that those useful people would self-organize and head for the bunker.
If nothing else, during the course of constructing an emergency bunker, stocking it with necessary supplies and equipment, making provisions for its security, etc. one would presumably make contact with a variety of people with relevant skills. You'll be overseeing construction, food and medical supply, security, and so on. If you really wanted to improve your chances, you'd presumably do additional research; but 'the people who built and furnished the bunker' are a practically ready-made group of better-than-average candidates.
It is true that screwing over anyone you allow into the bunker would be a dangerous plan, so you'd likely have to put up with some less-useful friends and family; but screwing over someone without connections to those allowed inside, and who isn't allowed inside, has fewer obvious risks.
The existence of the bunker isn't the issue; it's being let in when crunch-time hits. If management cant' control access, it's a sucky bunker that will be at considerable risk of attack in a disaster scenario. If they can control access, you are depending on them to honor an agreement enforced by a legal structure that is, presumably, currently dealing with bigger problems right now, if it remains functional at all.
I don't mean to allege that this guy specifically is planning on doing so; but those circumstances would make 'overbooking' a very tempting strategy. If disaster fails to occur, you merely need to conceal exactly how many spots you've sold. If disaster does occur, the people you do admit are unlikely to give up their spots to let in the ones you don't, and the ones that don't won't exactly have much recourse.
It doesn't help that, pre-disaster, the people with the most money are the most valuable potential-bunker-dwellers, since they can pay the most for spots; but during a disaster, and after, people with assorted useful skills are the most valuable potential-bunker-dwellers. There could well be some overlap, if some doctor who has made good in his practice can afford a space, he's also a useful guy to have around; but the post-apocalypse's demand for investment bankers is probably fairly low.
This seems like it could well be a viable thing; but 'AI-based' is serious weasel-word territory: is a Baysian spam filter an "AI-based anti-spam solution"? It's hard to argue with the notion that identifying anomalous activity in large volumes of traffic is a problem that might be amenable to statistical methods and assorted heuristics; but what exactly qualifies or disqualifies something for 'AI-based', 'deep learning', and similar buzzwords?
Insurance against calamities on a larger scale than your underwriter is prepared to cope with, or sufficiently large to eliminate the legal and economic framework under which the policy was purchased would be pretty worthless.
Just look at the truly impressive work that AIG and friends managed to do in selling impossible amounts of insurance, and remember that that didn't even require an external catastrophe of any particular magnitude, they just fucked it up during the course of business. You think that they'd do better under circumstances that have people running for the bunkers and executing continuity-of-government directives?
I suspect that it depends on the attitude as well. At least in IT, there seem to be two basic flavors(in varying levels of competence, there are some commendably diligent but not terribly sharp ones; and there are some total slackers with the annoying ability to pull off something brilliant just when it looks like their slacking might catch up with them; then go back to slacking): There are the people who say "The problem is that you are bothering me about some 'problem', so now I have to go look at it." and the ones who say "The problem is that there might be a problem I don't know about yet."
The former is...unlikely... to welcome better reporting systems. The latter is likely to be delighted that they can spend less time hunting for problems and more time fixing them.
Fundamentally? Not at all. In terms of convenience? The fancy tech toys presumably make it fairly trivial to construct a nice machine-readable trouble ticket, with GPS coordinates, user submitted text, pictures, etc. that drops right into the trouble ticket without needing anyone to man the phone; or depending on their ability to reliably interpret and record what the caller is reporting, write it up, and send it to the appropriate person.
Given that the input is still coming from people, I suspect that you can't automate all the labor out of cleaning it up(if there is a way for data you attempt to collect about the world to be messy and intractable, it will find it; and even if you think that there isn't, it might just invent one...); but there's a lot to be said for cutting out tedious, error-prone, steps, especially once you are dealing with a system large enough that providing 'the personal touch' simply isn't possible. These sorts of systems can be somewhat prone to being impersonal or inflexible(especially if the implementation tries to use a bunch of drop-down options to shove you through the decision tree and your problem is some flavor of 'other' that they don't provide for); but if the userbase is large enough that you'd need a call center to do it with humans, you don't really have the option of interpersonal familiarity; so you might as well go for efficiency.
If this were Ye Olde Smalle Towne, where you could just ring up the mayor's office and the kindly secretary who has been there forever and knows everybody would pick up and you could tell her about it, the 'app' thing would be a pointless gimmick; but that's not exactly the scope of the problem here.
So, 3.6 Gb/s is cool and all; but I did a quick check and Verizon is calling 18GB/month the 'XXL' plan, so this appears to be largely an exercise in accruing overage fees even faster.
It seems like what will matter much more(unless somebody is planning to use the same tech for highly directional point-to-point wireless links, in which case raw speed is pretty useful); is how well these '5G' arrangements handle congestion; and how efficiently the amazing-fancy-theoretical-peak-throughput can be divided across a large number of users. Unless you are made of money, the problem with wireless data isn't so much how slow it is; but how costly it is(in part because of scarcity, which more efficient RF technology might actually alleviate, the 'because we can' part is a separate issue); and how it has a habit of just collapsing in a screaming heap under heavy load.
If the impressive peak bandwidth numbers indicate a larger pool of usable transmission capacity extracted from a given chunk of spectrum, fantastic, that is progress. If they simply represent what you could do if a single client used every doesn't-play-well-with-others trick in the book to get better speeds, that's utterly useless.
You don't get the "Browbeat your rep" option; but I'm pretty sure that Dell will sell you Optiplex and Latitude systems in quantity 1, if you have a credit card. I think even Precisions and at least the more boring Poweredge stuff should be available as well.
You obviously don't have to go with Dell; but unless they've changed something recently; buying small quantities of business class machines should be no more difficult than buying consumer grade.
There have been several different flavors of Intel Integrated/Nvidia combinations on the market; with slightly different requirements and options depending on the details of how they are implemented.
My memory is a little fuzzy; but I think that the earliest implementations had actual 'video out' from both the IGP and the GPU, with switching silicon on the motherboard that sent one or the other to the LCD. Those offered the most visible control over which graphics device was in use(the one that wasn't was more or less fully shut down); but I think you had to at least log out, possibly reboot, to switch between them; that era definitely had BIOS options for permanently setting one or the other.
OEMs didn't like the cost of the added switching silicon, and users didn't like the clunkiness of switching between GPUs, so subsequent generations refined the process, with increasingly seamless cooperation(I think that the standard now has only the intel IGP connected to the LCD and any video outs; but the Nvidia GPU can write to its framebuffer if it is taking care of a given graphical task, so it isn't actually possible for the IGP to ever be fully idle, though the Nvidia GPU can be); but a corresponding increase in unhelpfulness if you are trying to force a configuration that non Optimus aware drivers can recognize and work with.
My Linux and BSD systems don't do much in the way of graphics, so I don't know what the current state of support is.
I have yet to hear any clear explanation for why Intel appears less than cooperative about the idea of Thunderbolt being used for GPU purposes. There have been a few, heavily integrated and close to model-specific, releases; but the "Here is a box with an x16(mechanical) PCIe slot inside, and a thunderbolt port" market is pretty slim, with the exception of some very, very, expensive cardcages from outfits like Magma, clearly aimed at audiences with expansion cards that make gamer toys look disposably cheap.
Most of the tinkering you see skips Thunderbolt entirely and uses the PCIe 1x->16x adapters that became popular when GPU cryptocurrency mining became a craze; and connect those either to the 1x PCIe lane provided by an Expresscard slot; or the one provided by a mini-PCIe slot.
What he told you was true. From a certain point of view: Dell's 'consumer' support has traditionally been somewhere between 'as empty and pitiless as the dark spaces between the stars' and 'actively insulting'; but they've always recognized the value of treating enterprise customers properly(and the warranties cost more, to compensate). There have been some ignoble incidents(their handling of Optiplex GX270 capacitor-plague failures was so egregious it resulted in litigation; ironically the IT guys at the law firm defending Dell were fighting to get their own GX270s replaced with ones that worked at the same time the lawyers were making the case that Dell's handling of the matter was just fine...); but in general their Poweredge, Optiplex, Latitude, and Vostro lines all have pretty decent support; and offer excellent support as an option if you are willing to pay for it.
The 'Inspiron' line, for home peons, has traditionally been pretty atrocious. XPS tacks somewhere between the two; it's a bit more annoying if you are trying to operate at scale(unlike the business/enterprise support guys, they tend not to let you do the "I've already run the diagnostics, here are the error codes, now send me a new whatever" thing); but unlike the low-end home user guys, they don't treat you like a filthy cost center who should fuck off and die.
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I imagine that getting the firmware that handles some of the new-hotness RF stuff that allows breathlessly advertised high data rates from those vendors would be like pulling teeth; but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the vendors who put the 'router' together and build the firmware image would be, in part, pleased by a "we have to share ours; but so do all our competitors" situation.
Clever wireless NIC tricks can be an actual competitive advantage; but the "Outdated kernel, busybox, and lighthttpd" side of the equation is mostly one pointless, half-assed, reinvention of the wheel after another. Something you have to do in order to ship; but hardly a selling point.
The two functions get shoved into one box for consumer purposes(often with a DSL or cable modem as well, maybe even a SIP ATA for some 'triple play' nonsense); but logically speaking there usually is a router, though an anemic one, present inside something you'd call a "Wifi router" with an AP connected internally to it. There isn't quite the same neat logical separation that you'd see with enterprise APs, the AP and the router usually share an OS, lousy HTTP configuration interface, etc. but both functions are included.
Dedicated APs are pretty thin on the ground in cheap-consumer-shit land, even compared to discrete DSL and cable modems.
I think that some really nasty devices interpret 'resettable' protection rather loosely, and you may need to replace some teeny fuse to get +5v on that port at anything like 500ma again; but mere shorting definitely shouldn't damage anything else.
This attack is hardly high on my list of concerns(since, as you say, there are more unpleasant things to do if you have access); but it might be an issue for 'kiosk' type systems.
If you go into a CVS or other place that does photo printing, they usually have a couple of computers so you can plug in your camera or flash drive and self-serve, maybe do a few cheesy edits. Kinkos and the like do the same thing for printing from or scanning to flash drives. Those are the sorts of places where you can't really get out a hammer or just plug one end of a cord into the wall and the other end into the USB port; but plugging in a flash drive and playing the hapless technophobic customer who doesn't understand why it isn't working if anyone confronts you would be doable.
Still a lot of trouble for a little petty destruction; but we are talking about humans here.
Given the absurdly tiny USB peripherals you can get(typically circuit board and all components occupy the place where there is a plastic spacer under the 4 connectors; and have 4 pads on top where the connectors would be, so the entire device fits inside the connector); this seems like it would be quite doable.
The current design appears to start hitting the host as soon as it has had enough time to charge; but presumably one could have the 'legitimate' peripheral switch the killer's access to V+ on and off; so it could lie in wait, doing whatever legitimate thing, until some condition is met. Probably not enough room to build GPS in, so 'geofencing with extreme prejudice' might not be an option; but any NIC could listen for signals from the wire/in RF broadcast; and any peripheral could be triggered by a signal from the host computer.
Ugh, why does the US get to force other countries to extradite people who violate US laws? They pressured Sweden into charging Julian Assange with sexual assault because of the leaked cables and then pushed the UK to keep him trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy under guard. Now they're forcing countries to extradite their own citizens for breaking US laws. There's no reason why other countries should be forced to follow US laws.
The US certainly has a...distinctly mixed...history when it comes to shoving around countries that it thinks it can get away with; but this guy is being extradited for breaking US law within US jurisdiction, just using the internet to telecommute to the crime site.
Since many crimes can only be properly committed in person, it's probably more common for extradition treaties to get called in when somebody flees from Country A to Country B; but if you can commit a crime in Country A from the comfort of Country B(whether because you are doing computer intrusions and have internet access, or are hiring a hit man the old fashioned way), the principle is exactly the same.
It'd be pretty dodgy if the US wanted a Ukrainian guy grabbed for crimes not committed within American jurisdiction; but in this case the allegation is that he committed a fair few in the US, among other places.
It also might not help that Ukrainian authorities may have recently reevaluated the intensity of their interest in getting more cooperation from Washington.
If you are, in fact, secure in a country half a planet away, flaunting your impunity isn't as elegant as working silently; but has its virtues as an intimidation tactic: "You can't touch me, I can touch you; and even if you foil me this round I only have to get lucky once."
If you are in a country half a planet away that is just fine with stuffing you into the next plane headed for the US, of course, this is a lousy plan.
What I don't know, in this case, is whether he screwed up enough to get caught, or whether there used to be very little domestic interest in doing anything about him and then the political winds shifted.
The problem here is fairly clearly people making inappropriate choices about guns; perhaps because they take the 'small' in 'small arms' a bit too seriously.
Toddlers don't understand firearm risks; but they also aren't that strong. Some peashooter little handgun left around where they can find it? Terrible plan. A nice squad automatic weapon or anti material rifle? Is the kid going to operate something that weighs more than he does?
So many of these tragedies could have been averted if people had just chosen bigger guns.
It never really took off(outside of 'Choose Your Own Adventure" books for kids and a few '80s futurists who thought that hypertext was going to inaugurate a new form of literature); but I don't think that there is any particularly strict requirement that writing needs to be intended to be read back in a linear and deterministic order in order to potentially qualify as 'literature' and 'art', so even text based games arguably have a shot.
That said, though, the fact that there's an argument for almost anything to be 'art' suggests that you'd be better off asking a more interesting question.
I find it hard to understand why "are games art?" strikes anyone as enough of a question to even be asked. Unless you hew to a far narrower definition of 'art' than even most critics and artists do; it seems pretty obvious that they have the potential to qualify.
This doesn't mean that most of them are anything but sophomoric schlock produced entirely for mercenary purposes; but the same is true of music, film, photography, etc. and nobody seriously advances the "Music can't be art; because boy bands and pop tarts!" position or argues that Uwe Boll refutes the artistic status of film.
It's sad. People expect the video game, social media, mobile app experience from everything. It's like fast food.
You do remember that the 'symphony orchestra' was, once upon a time, a filthy innovation ruining real culture? It's certainly far from impossible to make value judgments about cultural phenomena; but just equating age with highbrow respectability is a lazy way to do it.
Speaking of 'generally against patents'; is there anyone around who knows enough about CPU architectures to tell us if the patent in question is basically a 'restate idea painfully obvious to one skilled in the art and/or articulated in 1960 but not actually used because there weren't enough relays on earth to implement it' type patent, or whether it is actually something clever, non-obvious, etc?
The grim world of software patents doesn't fill me with optimism about them; but if this is actually a decent patent on something non-obvious, useful; and not so broad as to give veto power over basically all CPUs ever; then it would be the patent system working more or less by design.
Good artists copy; great artists steal.
I suspect that this is also one of those situations where the fact that 'law' tends to have ways of bending to practicality is showing up.
The activities of the street vendors are illegal, and some of them probably have pretty dubious immigration status; but the fact that they remain active, are quite numerous, and are visible enough to form a union suggests that the local authorities lack the will or ability to suppress their vending; and the national authorities the will or ability to process them all as vigorously as the law theoretically allows.
Under those circumstances, it isn't terribly illogical for the mayor of Barcelona to be open to negotiations aimed at reducing the nuisances caused by street vendors in exchange for potential loosening of restrictions that are mostly theoretical or haphazardly and unevenly enforced at present.
It always upsets people who cherish the idea that 'law' is somehow a matter of pure principle and above the sordid world of pragmatism and political horse-trading; but that doesn't make it any less true. Even when the ability of the state to enforce the law is relatively strong, pressure is applied by lobbying the political apparatus. When it is weak or partial, pragmatism can, and often does, result in the state(or its agents) reaching a compromise with the illegal sector that aims to give the less noxious elements some of what they want in exchange for cooperation, or at least non-resistance, in going after higher-value targets.
I can't speak for khallow; but my impression was that the bunker leader was the one who has an incentive to double-cross his clients, in favor of people who will be more useful to him should the shit actually hit the fan; not that those useful people would self-organize and head for the bunker.
If nothing else, during the course of constructing an emergency bunker, stocking it with necessary supplies and equipment, making provisions for its security, etc. one would presumably make contact with a variety of people with relevant skills. You'll be overseeing construction, food and medical supply, security, and so on. If you really wanted to improve your chances, you'd presumably do additional research; but 'the people who built and furnished the bunker' are a practically ready-made group of better-than-average candidates.
It is true that screwing over anyone you allow into the bunker would be a dangerous plan, so you'd likely have to put up with some less-useful friends and family; but screwing over someone without connections to those allowed inside, and who isn't allowed inside, has fewer obvious risks.
The existence of the bunker isn't the issue; it's being let in when crunch-time hits. If management cant' control access, it's a sucky bunker that will be at considerable risk of attack in a disaster scenario. If they can control access, you are depending on them to honor an agreement enforced by a legal structure that is, presumably, currently dealing with bigger problems right now, if it remains functional at all.
I don't mean to allege that this guy specifically is planning on doing so; but those circumstances would make 'overbooking' a very tempting strategy. If disaster fails to occur, you merely need to conceal exactly how many spots you've sold. If disaster does occur, the people you do admit are unlikely to give up their spots to let in the ones you don't, and the ones that don't won't exactly have much recourse.
It doesn't help that, pre-disaster, the people with the most money are the most valuable potential-bunker-dwellers, since they can pay the most for spots; but during a disaster, and after, people with assorted useful skills are the most valuable potential-bunker-dwellers. There could well be some overlap, if some doctor who has made good in his practice can afford a space, he's also a useful guy to have around; but the post-apocalypse's demand for investment bankers is probably fairly low.
This seems like it could well be a viable thing; but 'AI-based' is serious weasel-word territory: is a Baysian spam filter an "AI-based anti-spam solution"? It's hard to argue with the notion that identifying anomalous activity in large volumes of traffic is a problem that might be amenable to statistical methods and assorted heuristics; but what exactly qualifies or disqualifies something for 'AI-based', 'deep learning', and similar buzzwords?
Insurance against calamities on a larger scale than your underwriter is prepared to cope with, or sufficiently large to eliminate the legal and economic framework under which the policy was purchased would be pretty worthless.
Just look at the truly impressive work that AIG and friends managed to do in selling impossible amounts of insurance, and remember that that didn't even require an external catastrophe of any particular magnitude, they just fucked it up during the course of business. You think that they'd do better under circumstances that have people running for the bunkers and executing continuity-of-government directives?
I suspect that it depends on the attitude as well. At least in IT, there seem to be two basic flavors(in varying levels of competence, there are some commendably diligent but not terribly sharp ones; and there are some total slackers with the annoying ability to pull off something brilliant just when it looks like their slacking might catch up with them; then go back to slacking): There are the people who say "The problem is that you are bothering me about some 'problem', so now I have to go look at it." and the ones who say "The problem is that there might be a problem I don't know about yet."
The former is...unlikely... to welcome better reporting systems. The latter is likely to be delighted that they can spend less time hunting for problems and more time fixing them.
Fundamentally? Not at all. In terms of convenience? The fancy tech toys presumably make it fairly trivial to construct a nice machine-readable trouble ticket, with GPS coordinates, user submitted text, pictures, etc. that drops right into the trouble ticket without needing anyone to man the phone; or depending on their ability to reliably interpret and record what the caller is reporting, write it up, and send it to the appropriate person.
Given that the input is still coming from people, I suspect that you can't automate all the labor out of cleaning it up(if there is a way for data you attempt to collect about the world to be messy and intractable, it will find it; and even if you think that there isn't, it might just invent one...); but there's a lot to be said for cutting out tedious, error-prone, steps, especially once you are dealing with a system large enough that providing 'the personal touch' simply isn't possible. These sorts of systems can be somewhat prone to being impersonal or inflexible(especially if the implementation tries to use a bunch of drop-down options to shove you through the decision tree and your problem is some flavor of 'other' that they don't provide for); but if the userbase is large enough that you'd need a call center to do it with humans, you don't really have the option of interpersonal familiarity; so you might as well go for efficiency.
If this were Ye Olde Smalle Towne, where you could just ring up the mayor's office and the kindly secretary who has been there forever and knows everybody would pick up and you could tell her about it, the 'app' thing would be a pointless gimmick; but that's not exactly the scope of the problem here.
So, 3.6 Gb/s is cool and all; but I did a quick check and Verizon is calling 18GB/month the 'XXL' plan, so this appears to be largely an exercise in accruing overage fees even faster.
It seems like what will matter much more(unless somebody is planning to use the same tech for highly directional point-to-point wireless links, in which case raw speed is pretty useful); is how well these '5G' arrangements handle congestion; and how efficiently the amazing-fancy-theoretical-peak-throughput can be divided across a large number of users. Unless you are made of money, the problem with wireless data isn't so much how slow it is; but how costly it is(in part because of scarcity, which more efficient RF technology might actually alleviate, the 'because we can' part is a separate issue); and how it has a habit of just collapsing in a screaming heap under heavy load.
If the impressive peak bandwidth numbers indicate a larger pool of usable transmission capacity extracted from a given chunk of spectrum, fantastic, that is progress. If they simply represent what you could do if a single client used every doesn't-play-well-with-others trick in the book to get better speeds, that's utterly useless.
You don't get the "Browbeat your rep" option; but I'm pretty sure that Dell will sell you Optiplex and Latitude systems in quantity 1, if you have a credit card. I think even Precisions and at least the more boring Poweredge stuff should be available as well.
You obviously don't have to go with Dell; but unless they've changed something recently; buying small quantities of business class machines should be no more difficult than buying consumer grade.
There have been several different flavors of Intel Integrated/Nvidia combinations on the market; with slightly different requirements and options depending on the details of how they are implemented.
My memory is a little fuzzy; but I think that the earliest implementations had actual 'video out' from both the IGP and the GPU, with switching silicon on the motherboard that sent one or the other to the LCD. Those offered the most visible control over which graphics device was in use(the one that wasn't was more or less fully shut down); but I think you had to at least log out, possibly reboot, to switch between them; that era definitely had BIOS options for permanently setting one or the other.
OEMs didn't like the cost of the added switching silicon, and users didn't like the clunkiness of switching between GPUs, so subsequent generations refined the process, with increasingly seamless cooperation(I think that the standard now has only the intel IGP connected to the LCD and any video outs; but the Nvidia GPU can write to its framebuffer if it is taking care of a given graphical task, so it isn't actually possible for the IGP to ever be fully idle, though the Nvidia GPU can be); but a corresponding increase in unhelpfulness if you are trying to force a configuration that non Optimus aware drivers can recognize and work with.
My Linux and BSD systems don't do much in the way of graphics, so I don't know what the current state of support is.
I have yet to hear any clear explanation for why Intel appears less than cooperative about the idea of Thunderbolt being used for GPU purposes. There have been a few, heavily integrated and close to model-specific, releases; but the "Here is a box with an x16(mechanical) PCIe slot inside, and a thunderbolt port" market is pretty slim, with the exception of some very, very, expensive cardcages from outfits like Magma, clearly aimed at audiences with expansion cards that make gamer toys look disposably cheap.
Most of the tinkering you see skips Thunderbolt entirely and uses the PCIe 1x->16x adapters that became popular when GPU cryptocurrency mining became a craze; and connect those either to the 1x PCIe lane provided by an Expresscard slot; or the one provided by a mini-PCIe slot.
What he told you was true. From a certain point of view: Dell's 'consumer' support has traditionally been somewhere between 'as empty and pitiless as the dark spaces between the stars' and 'actively insulting'; but they've always recognized the value of treating enterprise customers properly(and the warranties cost more, to compensate). There have been some ignoble incidents(their handling of Optiplex GX270 capacitor-plague failures was so egregious it resulted in litigation; ironically the IT guys at the law firm defending Dell were fighting to get their own GX270s replaced with ones that worked at the same time the lawyers were making the case that Dell's handling of the matter was just fine...); but in general their Poweredge, Optiplex, Latitude, and Vostro lines all have pretty decent support; and offer excellent support as an option if you are willing to pay for it.
The 'Inspiron' line, for home peons, has traditionally been pretty atrocious. XPS tacks somewhere between the two; it's a bit more annoying if you are trying to operate at scale(unlike the business/enterprise support guys, they tend not to let you do the "I've already run the diagnostics, here are the error codes, now send me a new whatever" thing); but unlike the low-end home user guys, they don't treat you like a filthy cost center who should fuck off and die.