You can't ignore physical appearance(though evolution hasn't quite caught up to the appearance of the 'myspace angle', so false signalling is a risk; but the trick is the phrase "basing mating choices on"...
If this site is, largely, just for apply comp-sci efficiency to arranging hookups, it should work just fine. If people expect to form stable relationships long enough to accrue a white picket fence, golden retriever, and 2.5 children, they are going to have to examine the matter more closely...
I sense the emergence of some job openings for programmers and software engineers skilled in the art of swiftly building, and iterating as needed, scraper agents to aggregate numerical and geographic data from multiple multi-step forms driven websites...
Shallow, yes; but also refreshingly honest about it. Arguably giving such people an efficient clearinghouse in which to practice their assortative mating is a net win for everybody: If they have a clearly superior option, they will flock to it, and the people who aren't don't have to worry about the possibility of dealing with one of them who is emulating an interest in nonvisual qualities. Everybody wins.
I suspect that the only reason that Apple hasn't strangled the classic in its sleep is that people who need HDD-capacity PMPs are probably good ITMs customers... It certainly gets the least love out of any product in the line.
The touch, on the other hand, serves a very valuable(if purely marketing/business, rather than engineering, driven) role in Apple's strategy: Because of their lead with iPhones, they are generally in the position to negotiate lucrative contracts with carriers, which means that iDevices with cellular capabilities tend to end up sold locked to those carriers, with fat data plans and long contract terms. The upfront hardware cost isn't bad; but the term-of-contract cost can hit 2-3 thousand dollars.
The touch, on the other hand, shares most of the R&D that goes into the phone, so is comparatively cheap to design, and acts as a very convenient 'gateway' product for the (large) market that, through savings or holidays, can afford the occasional one-time outlay of some hundreds; but does not have a stable enough income to maintain an expensive cell plan. I'm sure Apple isn't losing money on those things; but they exist largely to get kids who can't afford smartphones and adults who don't think that they need/want them to pick up an iPhone on their next upgrade cycle...
That does make the alarm clock app more likely; but not entirely certain.(given the huge number of devices with embedded RTCs that require some sort of "alarm" function to occur even when the system CPU is off or running at very, very low power, I would tend to assume that many contemporary RTCs have the ability to track one or more alarm targets internally, and poke a wakeup line at the appropriate time, so the system can take appropriate action. Many cellphones and PDAs can be turned on by a set alarm even when turned as "off" as they can get without pulling the battery. Most PCs have, buried in the BIOS, an option to schedule wake-from-off at certain times on certain days, and so forth. This leads me to suspect that RTCs aren't merely dumb clocks, which would allow a driver issue or a userspace app issue to be at work.)
From what poking around I've done, apparently the SIM does some sort of custom(or at least unusual) IMEI verification before talking to the phone. I don't really understand the business case for doing this; but maybe it has something with the various buy-able 'features' baked into the (lousy) custom firmware on the phone provided....
I suspect that cracking it would probably be quite doable for somebody skilled in the art and, if Tracphone wasn't a synonym for 'Either doesn't care, or lives in a cardboard box, or needs a 1-time-use phone for that big drug deal' you could probably buy little spoofer devices that slip between the SIM and the phone, the same way you can for iPhones. As it is, though, Tracphones themselves are barely worth unlocking, and Tracphone customers are probably not a terribly attractive market.
Thinking back to the Zune clock bug error, that one affected only a single model because the bug was in the interface between a particular brand and model of RTC hardware and the kernel.
Is this a similar error, confined to a driver issue with one platform's RTC, or is it an error in logic somewhere higher up the stack, and thus going to occur on all iDevices of a given firmware level?
Tracphone happened to be cheapest at the time, per minute, and their interpretation of SIM related standards is, shall we say, 'creative with a side of control freak'. My attempts to make the SIM work in other, unlocked, handsets were not wildly successful...
At least in the US, the main reason to suspect that Android based PMP/non-phone devices have a chance is factoring in cellular costs:
The cell modem hardware isn't free; but the overwhelming majority of phone hardware is picked up, mildly subsidized, as the hook to get somebody onto a contract(or at least our month-to-month plan, rather than somebody else's).
There is a good sized market that doesn't really want to pay $80 a month for two years; but has frequent wifi access(most homes, many businesses and places of public congregation, many schools and most college campuses). Loads of kids who have occasional bursts of spending money(their own or holiday/relative); but basically no steady month-to-month income to maintain a full data plan. Plenty of students whose, again, aren't made of money; but whose entire campus is blanketed with wifi.
Were the US cellular market more accessible and dynamic, with doing things like "getting a spartan voice only plan for a bells and whistles smartphone" easy, rather than possible but obscure, it would be much harder to make the case for something that includes everything but the cell modem: the option to drop in a SIM at some point and do some calling would likely be worth the cost. As it is, though, while that isn't actually impossible in the US, it is so far from being the default that it is fairly rarely considered. Thus, selling a pure "PMP", at a price point available because you ditched that extra radio(and either slimmed the device or added more battery...), has a potential to be reasonably attractive.
I know that I would strongly consider one: My home has wifi, my workplace has wifi, if I need wifi on the go there are always coffee shops and snack places willing to oblige me for as long as it takes to nurse my cup of coffee(particularly if, unlike That Laptop Guy, I'm just using something indistinguishable from a phone, and not taking up a multi-person table doing it). I don't make that many phone calls or texts, so I have a dirt-cheap prepaid plan. Now, in an ideal world, I'd carry one less device and(as noted above) use my prepaid SIM in a full phone. That isn't supported, so I suck it up and carry a $20 Motorola dumbphone when I need it. I have virtually no need, and no desire to pay for, particularly on a long term contract, cellular data when I'm within wifi range during virtually all the times that I would want internet access...
That runs into the convenience problem: Downloading pictures, files, executables, etc. and printing stuff are ridiculously common use cases for browsers. So to is the old 'opening a link in some other program in a browser'. Thus, any sort of security mechanism that makes those more of a pain will run into user resistance. Any sort of security mechanism that initially blocks those and then introduces a bunch of workarounds(shared filesystem location between VM and computer, virtual printer in VM mapping to real spooler, some sort of local process that catches URLs and passes them into the sandbox, etc. also raises the possibility of serious bugs in those workaround mechanisms...
If browsers were exclusively used for reading web pages, securing them would be so much simpler...
Home users, no idea. Ignorance and apathy I suppose.
Corporate? ActiveX controls, trivial to keep up to date with WSUS, even when the user is non-admin and a firewall is blocking most outside downloads, accepts loads of configuration options from Active Directory Group Policies, etc.
We have a very similar phenomenon in the US: With the exception of a few genuine, self-consistent libertarians(who are usually kept safely away from any of the levers and buttons that actually do stuff) Our politics are absolutely infested with people who think that a 3% delta in the tax rate on a given income bracket is the difference between freedom and slavery; but consider the executive branch's claim of the right to abduct and torture whoever they want to be irrelevant to national freedom metrics.
As good old Machiavelli, titan of the realist school of politics, remarked "A man will sooner forgive the loss of his father than the loss of his patrimony"...
In sufficiently dense areas, you basically face the choice between building "mass transit" for cars or mass transit for people. (Obviously, the cars don't literally get put onto trains or anything; but bridges, tunnels, overpasses, underpasses, specialized high-density parking garages, and the like are, in terms of capital expenditure, urban planning, use of eminent domain, and so forth, more similiar to 'mass transit' than they are to your ordinary suburban road system).
In lower density areas, cars are much more natural(if potentially problematic in the longer term).
The compromise that somtimes works, for the standard "urban area with lots of suburbanites commuting in" setup is to have a few rail lines going in to the city, with combination parking lot/train stations set up in the suburbs at locations that offer the right combination of 'near commuters' and 'relatively low land value'. Since the land is cheap, you can economically offer parking for peanuts, and the trains can dump people right into the core mass transit system, keeping their cars out of the city; but not requiring the expensive(and often not terribly efficient) expansion of higher density public transit coverage into the suburbs and exurbs...
While I like your future better, I'm guessing that the real one will look more like "A solid ball of hyper-computronium wrapped around the NYSE, tended by robots and powered by a Dyson sphere capturing the entire output of the sun"...
Sure, the only surviving life forms will be extremophilic bacteria in the wastelands and investment bankers in the Suburbidomes(tm); but think of how high the GDP per capita will be!
That one wasn't even intentional, unfortunately. My love of puns has, apparently, seeped directly into whatever part of my brain is responsible for day-to-day verbal and written work...
Shh... The continuing gains of the top 1% or so of the population are magically making us all richer, the GDP proves it! Silence with your commie "median income' nonsense...
Oh, RAM isn't even close to HDDs, no is there any reason to expect that it will ever be, if you care about storage space. Only if latency and IOPs are at issue does RAM become a relevant competitor. When it comes to I/O operations, particularly highly random ones scattered across the storage area, RAM will(unsurprisingly, given what its name stands for) absolutely wipe the floor with anything with moving parts. To even touch the I/O performance, you would probably be talking multiple racks jammed full of top of the line 15kRPM monsters(a proposition unlikely to be achieved for $40k...)
Plus, while the actual hardware is of pretty niche interest, it is pretty impressive(looking at the history of component costs and sizes in computing) that you can now get a half-terabyte of RAM, in a package that a single person of average strength can move, that will run from reasonably ordinary household wiring, for approximately the US per-capita GDP.
How(if at all) they are factoring in all the trucks delivering the stuff that I would historically have had to drive a car to the store to obtain...
A shift in the US from suburban material culture, where car transport is essentially necessary, and that necessity is self-perpetuating through the cultural and infrastructure spending priorities it creates, would be big news.
A shift from buying at bestbuy to buying at bestbuy.com might well drive down the number of car-hours/year; but would be fairly uninteresting. Ditto with things like Netflix and Amazon and pay-per-view cable movies and whatnot...
You'd better just bring the whole bottle. Somebody just used the world "merely" in front of the phrase "backup and recover for critical real-time apps".
The remainder of the bottle will, depending on whether you work for that somebody or not, either enable a heartwarming humanitarian gesture, or be your only friend during the days of hair-raising stress and thankless toil that could strike at any second...
1TB is still in the realm of rather specialized; but 512GB systems(while not inexpensive) are actually pretty available. A quick glance at Dell shows that(even without the benefits of a rep, volume pricing, or any sort of negotiation), a 2U R815 with 512GB of RAM can be yours for a hair under $40,000. Kitted out with the specs you actually want, of course, it might run you another $20k above that. If AMD isn't your flavor, the intel-based but otherwise similar R810 will run five to ten thousand more than the R815 with otherwise similar options...
At those prices, I'd venture to say that Flash still has a reasonably bright future ahead of it in the high-speed/low-latency storage market(not to mention the volatility issue); but(especially if your problem can handle being broken up across multiple systems with only modestly fast interconnects) the cost of enormous amounts of RAM has dropped pretty significantly.
Now, if you can't deal with the limitations of commodity cluster interconnects, and have to have more than a half terabyte of RAM in a single memory space, I get the impression that your options get more expensive pretty fast. Phrases like "up to 16TB shared global memory" and "single system image", are generally your cue to hold on to your wallet and run... If that is what you want, though, you can buy it.
Also, it isn't really all that earthshattering. The fact that RAM is faster and offers lower latency than just about anything else in the system has been true more or less forever. Essentially all OSes of remotely recent vintage already opportunistically use RAM caching to make the apparent speed of disk access suck less(nicer RAID controllers will often have another block of RAM for the same purpsoe). Programs, at the individual discretion of their creators, already hold on to the stuff that they will need to chew over most often in RAM, and only dump to disk as often as prudence requires.
The idea that, as advances in semiconductor fabrication make gargantuan amounts of RAM cheaper, high-end users will do more of their work in RAM just doesn't seem like a very bold prediction...
Slashdot Mirror
I would be perversely curious to see what tactics they would use in the attempt to evade the precedent of Feist v. Rural...
You can't ignore physical appearance(though evolution hasn't quite caught up to the appearance of the 'myspace angle', so false signalling is a risk; but the trick is the phrase "basing mating choices on"...
If this site is, largely, just for apply comp-sci efficiency to arranging hookups, it should work just fine. If people expect to form stable relationships long enough to accrue a white picket fence, golden retriever, and 2.5 children, they are going to have to examine the matter more closely...
I sense the emergence of some job openings for programmers and software engineers skilled in the art of swiftly building, and iterating as needed, scraper agents to aggregate numerical and geographic data from multiple multi-step forms driven websites...
Shallow, yes; but also refreshingly honest about it. Arguably giving such people an efficient clearinghouse in which to practice their assortative mating is a net win for everybody: If they have a clearly superior option, they will flock to it, and the people who aren't don't have to worry about the possibility of dealing with one of them who is emulating an interest in nonvisual qualities. Everybody wins.
I suspect that the only reason that Apple hasn't strangled the classic in its sleep is that people who need HDD-capacity PMPs are probably good ITMs customers... It certainly gets the least love out of any product in the line.
The touch, on the other hand, serves a very valuable(if purely marketing/business, rather than engineering, driven) role in Apple's strategy: Because of their lead with iPhones, they are generally in the position to negotiate lucrative contracts with carriers, which means that iDevices with cellular capabilities tend to end up sold locked to those carriers, with fat data plans and long contract terms. The upfront hardware cost isn't bad; but the term-of-contract cost can hit 2-3 thousand dollars.
The touch, on the other hand, shares most of the R&D that goes into the phone, so is comparatively cheap to design, and acts as a very convenient 'gateway' product for the (large) market that, through savings or holidays, can afford the occasional one-time outlay of some hundreds; but does not have a stable enough income to maintain an expensive cell plan. I'm sure Apple isn't losing money on those things; but they exist largely to get kids who can't afford smartphones and adults who don't think that they need/want them to pick up an iPhone on their next upgrade cycle...
That does make the alarm clock app more likely; but not entirely certain.(given the huge number of devices with embedded RTCs that require some sort of "alarm" function to occur even when the system CPU is off or running at very, very low power, I would tend to assume that many contemporary RTCs have the ability to track one or more alarm targets internally, and poke a wakeup line at the appropriate time, so the system can take appropriate action. Many cellphones and PDAs can be turned on by a set alarm even when turned as "off" as they can get without pulling the battery. Most PCs have, buried in the BIOS, an option to schedule wake-from-off at certain times on certain days, and so forth. This leads me to suspect that RTCs aren't merely dumb clocks, which would allow a driver issue or a userspace app issue to be at work.)
From what poking around I've done, apparently the SIM does some sort of custom(or at least unusual) IMEI verification before talking to the phone. I don't really understand the business case for doing this; but maybe it has something with the various buy-able 'features' baked into the (lousy) custom firmware on the phone provided....
I suspect that cracking it would probably be quite doable for somebody skilled in the art and, if Tracphone wasn't a synonym for 'Either doesn't care, or lives in a cardboard box, or needs a 1-time-use phone for that big drug deal' you could probably buy little spoofer devices that slip between the SIM and the phone, the same way you can for iPhones. As it is, though, Tracphones themselves are barely worth unlocking, and Tracphone customers are probably not a terribly attractive market.
Thinking back to the Zune clock bug error, that one affected only a single model because the bug was in the interface between a particular brand and model of RTC hardware and the kernel.
Is this a similar error, confined to a driver issue with one platform's RTC, or is it an error in logic somewhere higher up the stack, and thus going to occur on all iDevices of a given firmware level?
Tracphone happened to be cheapest at the time, per minute, and their interpretation of SIM related standards is, shall we say, 'creative with a side of control freak'. My attempts to make the SIM work in other, unlocked, handsets were not wildly successful...
At least in the US, the main reason to suspect that Android based PMP/non-phone devices have a chance is factoring in cellular costs:
The cell modem hardware isn't free; but the overwhelming majority of phone hardware is picked up, mildly subsidized, as the hook to get somebody onto a contract(or at least our month-to-month plan, rather than somebody else's).
There is a good sized market that doesn't really want to pay $80 a month for two years; but has frequent wifi access(most homes, many businesses and places of public congregation, many schools and most college campuses). Loads of kids who have occasional bursts of spending money(their own or holiday/relative); but basically no steady month-to-month income to maintain a full data plan. Plenty of students whose, again, aren't made of money; but whose entire campus is blanketed with wifi.
Were the US cellular market more accessible and dynamic, with doing things like "getting a spartan voice only plan for a bells and whistles smartphone" easy, rather than possible but obscure, it would be much harder to make the case for something that includes everything but the cell modem: the option to drop in a SIM at some point and do some calling would likely be worth the cost. As it is, though, while that isn't actually impossible in the US, it is so far from being the default that it is fairly rarely considered. Thus, selling a pure "PMP", at a price point available because you ditched that extra radio(and either slimmed the device or added more battery...), has a potential to be reasonably attractive.
I know that I would strongly consider one: My home has wifi, my workplace has wifi, if I need wifi on the go there are always coffee shops and snack places willing to oblige me for as long as it takes to nurse my cup of coffee(particularly if, unlike That Laptop Guy, I'm just using something indistinguishable from a phone, and not taking up a multi-person table doing it). I don't make that many phone calls or texts, so I have a dirt-cheap prepaid plan. Now, in an ideal world, I'd carry one less device and(as noted above) use my prepaid SIM in a full phone. That isn't supported, so I suck it up and carry a $20 Motorola dumbphone when I need it. I have virtually no need, and no desire to pay for, particularly on a long term contract, cellular data when I'm within wifi range during virtually all the times that I would want internet access...
At a population level, the behavior of idiots is one of the most vital factors to consider...
That runs into the convenience problem: Downloading pictures, files, executables, etc. and printing stuff are ridiculously common use cases for browsers. So to is the old 'opening a link in some other program in a browser'. Thus, any sort of security mechanism that makes those more of a pain will run into user resistance. Any sort of security mechanism that initially blocks those and then introduces a bunch of workarounds(shared filesystem location between VM and computer, virtual printer in VM mapping to real spooler, some sort of local process that catches URLs and passes them into the sandbox, etc. also raises the possibility of serious bugs in those workaround mechanisms...
If browsers were exclusively used for reading web pages, securing them would be so much simpler...
Home users, no idea. Ignorance and apathy I suppose.
Corporate? ActiveX controls, trivial to keep up to date with WSUS, even when the user is non-admin and a firewall is blocking most outside downloads, accepts loads of configuration options from Active Directory Group Policies, etc.
We have a very similar phenomenon in the US: With the exception of a few genuine, self-consistent libertarians(who are usually kept safely away from any of the levers and buttons that actually do stuff) Our politics are absolutely infested with people who think that a 3% delta in the tax rate on a given income bracket is the difference between freedom and slavery; but consider the executive branch's claim of the right to abduct and torture whoever they want to be irrelevant to national freedom metrics.
As good old Machiavelli, titan of the realist school of politics, remarked "A man will sooner forgive the loss of his father than the loss of his patrimony"...
Strength through purity. Purity through faith!
In sufficiently dense areas, you basically face the choice between building "mass transit" for cars or mass transit for people. (Obviously, the cars don't literally get put onto trains or anything; but bridges, tunnels, overpasses, underpasses, specialized high-density parking garages, and the like are, in terms of capital expenditure, urban planning, use of eminent domain, and so forth, more similiar to 'mass transit' than they are to your ordinary suburban road system).
In lower density areas, cars are much more natural(if potentially problematic in the longer term).
The compromise that somtimes works, for the standard "urban area with lots of suburbanites commuting in" setup is to have a few rail lines going in to the city, with combination parking lot/train stations set up in the suburbs at locations that offer the right combination of 'near commuters' and 'relatively low land value'. Since the land is cheap, you can economically offer parking for peanuts, and the trains can dump people right into the core mass transit system, keeping their cars out of the city; but not requiring the expensive(and often not terribly efficient) expansion of higher density public transit coverage into the suburbs and exurbs...
While I like your future better, I'm guessing that the real one will look more like "A solid ball of hyper-computronium wrapped around the NYSE, tended by robots and powered by a Dyson sphere capturing the entire output of the sun"...
Sure, the only surviving life forms will be extremophilic bacteria in the wastelands and investment bankers in the Suburbidomes(tm); but think of how high the GDP per capita will be!
That one wasn't even intentional, unfortunately. My love of puns has, apparently, seeped directly into whatever part of my brain is responsible for day-to-day verbal and written work...
Shh... The continuing gains of the top 1% or so of the population are magically making us all richer, the GDP proves it! Silence with your commie "median income' nonsense...
Oh, RAM isn't even close to HDDs, no is there any reason to expect that it will ever be, if you care about storage space. Only if latency and IOPs are at issue does RAM become a relevant competitor. When it comes to I/O operations, particularly highly random ones scattered across the storage area, RAM will(unsurprisingly, given what its name stands for) absolutely wipe the floor with anything with moving parts. To even touch the I/O performance, you would probably be talking multiple racks jammed full of top of the line 15kRPM monsters(a proposition unlikely to be achieved for $40k...)
Plus, while the actual hardware is of pretty niche interest, it is pretty impressive(looking at the history of component costs and sizes in computing) that you can now get a half-terabyte of RAM, in a package that a single person of average strength can move, that will run from reasonably ordinary household wiring, for approximately the US per-capita GDP.
How(if at all) they are factoring in all the trucks delivering the stuff that I would historically have had to drive a car to the store to obtain...
A shift in the US from suburban material culture, where car transport is essentially necessary, and that necessity is self-perpetuating through the cultural and infrastructure spending priorities it creates, would be big news.
A shift from buying at bestbuy to buying at bestbuy.com might well drive down the number of car-hours/year; but would be fairly uninteresting. Ditto with things like Netflix and Amazon and pay-per-view cable movies and whatnot...
You'd better just bring the whole bottle. Somebody just used the world "merely" in front of the phrase "backup and recover for critical real-time apps".
The remainder of the bottle will, depending on whether you work for that somebody or not, either enable a heartwarming humanitarian gesture, or be your only friend during the days of hair-raising stress and thankless toil that could strike at any second...
Dear internet: Set your photoshops to "Goatse Tron Guy" and you will glimpse mankind's unutterably horrible future!
1TB is still in the realm of rather specialized; but 512GB systems(while not inexpensive) are actually pretty available. A quick glance at Dell shows that(even without the benefits of a rep, volume pricing, or any sort of negotiation), a 2U R815 with 512GB of RAM can be yours for a hair under $40,000. Kitted out with the specs you actually want, of course, it might run you another $20k above that. If AMD isn't your flavor, the intel-based but otherwise similar R810 will run five to ten thousand more than the R815 with otherwise similar options...
At those prices, I'd venture to say that Flash still has a reasonably bright future ahead of it in the high-speed/low-latency storage market(not to mention the volatility issue); but(especially if your problem can handle being broken up across multiple systems with only modestly fast interconnects) the cost of enormous amounts of RAM has dropped pretty significantly.
Now, if you can't deal with the limitations of commodity cluster interconnects, and have to have more than a half terabyte of RAM in a single memory space, I get the impression that your options get more expensive pretty fast. Phrases like "up to 16TB shared global memory" and "single system image", are generally your cue to hold on to your wallet and run... If that is what you want, though, you can buy it.
Also, it isn't really all that earthshattering. The fact that RAM is faster and offers lower latency than just about anything else in the system has been true more or less forever. Essentially all OSes of remotely recent vintage already opportunistically use RAM caching to make the apparent speed of disk access suck less(nicer RAID controllers will often have another block of RAM for the same purpsoe). Programs, at the individual discretion of their creators, already hold on to the stuff that they will need to chew over most often in RAM, and only dump to disk as often as prudence requires.
The idea that, as advances in semiconductor fabrication make gargantuan amounts of RAM cheaper, high-end users will do more of their work in RAM just doesn't seem like a very bold prediction...