I'm not sure why 'mobile G-sync' would be a surprise. While laptops are a bit more of a niche(for gaming purposes, they might well have pulled ahead of desktops as a whole by now), and laptop GPUs are less likely than desktop ones to achieve truly heroic framerates; they still share most of their design and drivers with desktop parts and laptops have the advantage of having tight control over the display being used. Your laptop OEM isn't going to want to go too custom, for cost reasons; but most laptop models only ship with a few different panels across their entire production run, and the manufacturer isn't on the hook if swapping in a different panel doesn't work for you. If you are dealing with a desktop, or an external display on a laptop, you have to cope with anything that more or less complies with the spec for that video output, which doesn't make your life easier if you are trying to implement a nonstandard tweak on top of a standard interface without breaking compatibility(especially since EDID is notoriously accurate, well formed, and properly implemented).
Very likely not. I don't think that I've heard of any prior implementation specifically aimed at cabs; but its hardly uncommon for the first attempt to die more or less silently(and even if no dedicated service offered it, the various 'social' applications that allow your friends to view your location have surely been used to arrange rides/carpools/pick somebody up from time to time). Even if they were first for cabs, or first to use commodity smartphones rather than dedicated fleet-management-vendor GPS modules, we all know how wonderfully 'innovative' the 'Doing X; but over the internet!' and 'Doing Y; but on a smartphone!' school of patents aren't.
I went with the more traditional 'dedicated' dispatch systems, since those (while less visible and much more expensive) are nearly as old as civilian access to GPS, and thus very, very, reliably prior to Uber; but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are even more similar systems to point to.
Given the more-or-less-total legality of video surveillance in stores and other commercial settings(so long as there's no audio, that can be a major issue in some jurisdictions), and the willingness to accept clickwrap EULAs as being equivalent to real, contract-grade, 'consent', I suspect that 'privacy rights' won't know what hit them.
That said, it will be interesting to see if Google(or others) voluntarily agree to a less intrusive mechanism(eg. snapshot of car state before you board and snapshot of car state after you leave, in order to provide enough data for a damage 'diff'; but not filming you the entire time) some or all of the time out of commercial pragmatism. It isn't exactly news that (among numerous other, more boring, functions) cabs are sometimes called by people who would be much more comfortable with some privacy(business travellers...enjoying the opportunities...that being away from their families opens up, people who've been drinking a bit too hard to drive home and sometimes with similarly intoxicated company picked up during that process, that sort of thing). It would be tactless to be so overt as to build a service specifically for them and sell it in so many words (Google PrivateCab: your red light district transport solution! just doesn't look good on the credit card statement); but it would be leaving money on the table to scare such customers away by filming them at all times when all you want to do is test for interior damage.
The other possible variable would be the adoption of substantially damage-resistant interiors: it would be hard to build these and also preserve any charm; but if that isn't a problem I suspect that Team Engineering could put together a passenger cabin that could be swiftly and automatically washed out and dried(presumably by a mechanism similar to a standard car wash; but with the doors open at the time and waterproof interior materials) in the case of contamination. That still wouldn't resist deliberate vandalism, paints and markers would require more robust solvents and keeping glass from being scratched or etched is difficult; but it would make recovering from your basic inebriated vomiting incident substantially faster and cheaper. That would only be viable if the demand were great enough to justify the specialized and ugly design; but there might well be enough people who would otherwise be vomiting on upholstered seats to be worth it.
What ideas did they obviously steal? The basic concept of using a smartphone's location capabilities to make 'calling a taxi' effectively automatic is clever; but probably not patentably original given its similarity to things like emergency services dispatching systems and fleet management tools. Aside from that, it's all details of implementation(which Google has yet to unveil, unless you count the big chunk of their mapping technology and data that Uber depends on). I suspect that this will lead to some choice comments from Uber's famously tactful and emotionally stable management figures; but what can we point to as obviously stolen here?
I imagine that enough cameras to provide a thorough view of the interior, before and after, would be a fairly minimal part of the overall cost of an autonomous vehicle. Once you have that, it's your choice of attempting to assess damage/lost items/vomit/etc. with machine vision or just farming that out as piecework to cube slaves in a call center type environment.
At that point, unless they've been very clever about spoofing their details when the hailed the ride(or just stole somebody's phone), you could more or less automatically deliver the lost article(if they left something in the car and you want to score some customer service points), the bill, or the court summons(if you are less than pleased with how they treated the vehicle) to their place of residence.
Not immune to properly motivated destruction; but neither are human-controlled vehicles.
Simple, traditional diet that worked for your grandparents and their parents
Just be sure that your ancestors didn't come from an area with high incidence of nutritional deficiency diseases. You don't even need to go all that far back. Pellagra stacked up an impressive body count in the American south in the first half of the 20th century, and beri-beri had similar effects in more rice-heavy areas. Scurvy and cretinism were a bit more niche; but also pretty much sucked. In any of those cases, some modest supplemental modifications to simple traditional diet are strongly recommended.
Unfortunately, the Radio Shack you miss already bled to death and has been dead for some time. At this point the only nod to their heritage is that some locations might have a dusty selection of parts(often still 'Tandy' branded and yellowing with age) hidden behind the iphone cases and overpriced consumer electronics.
Obviously! Kids dying of disease is all just a natural part of robust biological competition. Allowing the weak and mentally defective to live, on the other hand, inevitably results in some tax-and-spend bleeding heart coming along and demanding to expropriate the wealth creators in order to provide 'humane treatment' to such parasites.
Really, since parents own their children, they should just be allowed to abandon them in the wilderness to die(as long as they aren't trespassing on somebody else's property, or supporting the socialist national parks by doing so) if they suspect that kiddo's ROI isn't favorable. They shouldn't be allowed to abort them, of course; but postnatal headcount reduction is how freedom works.
Are you, AC, implying that America has stooped so low as to resort to mass imports of cheap south american guns, and guns banged together from over-the-counter ingredients and household chemicals in clandestine workshops, to satisfy our craving for firepower?
You filthy communist. We do sometimes dabble in exotic european guns, just as we do with club drugs; but that's different.
I, for one, would raise my most skeptical of eyebrows at the 'since Obama was elected' part.
The feds have had something of a mutually acrimonious relationship with some of the more enthusiastic personalities you find at gun shows since at least the very early 90's, probably earlier. If, say, Timothy McVeigh wasn't enough to inspire a few zillion man-hours in stakeouts, I'm not entirely sure what would.
The claims of surveillance I find fairly credible; but for it to have started in 2008 would have required that our hysteria over scary terrorist muslims completely blind the various relevant agencies to their ongoing togetherness problems with domestic militia movements and the like. Those certainly took on a lower priority; but there must have been some feds whose pallor and utter lack of arabic language proficiency made them a poor fit for higher profile work.
If there is such a thing as 'the sound of the NRA deciding that maybe the can agree with the American Communist Lawyers Union on something', I suspect this is what it sounds like.
Anyone else get the sickening sense that 'lengthen your telomeres!!' pitches would be a nearly perfect successor to the historical deluge of penis-pill spam?
Birds heap shame upon their ancestors merely by existing. (Except maybe shrikes; their willingness to keep up a proud tradition of bloodthirsty carnivorous murder despite now being about the size of a sparrow is pretty honorable).
Those pesky disgruntled employees and contractors tend to be on a slightly shorter leash(or less abused, if HQ decides that it's easier to make them less disgruntled than it is to watch them all the time) if their activity relates to something the company cares about.
Obviously, comcast isn't directly in favor of random insulting name changes(no real payoff for them, which puts them even below "billing errors"); but their customer service is as glorious as it is because any aspect of customer interaction that isn't billing or upselling is treated like a cost center and abused accordingly.
IBM, like SAP, Oracle and the rest, are dinosaurs unable to adapt their businesses to changing markets. Why would they be able to do the same for your company?
Well, I'd say that fossil fuels, which are mostly composed of dinosaurs who were unable to adapt(along with plants who were unable to adapt, and various other organisms who were unable to adapt) revolutionized the hell out of our entire civilization...
Maybe if IBM were buried and subjected to a few million years of heat and pressure they too would become a highly coveted resource?
I'd be inclined to say 'amazing' for the price. I understand the use case for rPi, beaglebone black, cubieboard, etc. when you need video and actually good GPIO(even more so if you need proper PWM, i2c/SPI, etc. BBblack, especially, has some pretty powerful specialty I/O options); but routers are so aggressively priced that they are often a pretty good deal for adding network capabilities to assorted projects on the fast and cheap.
I'm always up for other suggestions, of course; but I'm currently a big fan of the little 'travel/portable' routers that the RT5350 seems to have spawned a bunch of. Ethernet, USB, 802.11B/G/N, typically a serial port(I got lucky with the ones I purchased, the pads were even labelled and everything), and a few GPIOs, all for $15 or less. Kind of weak (usually 32MB RAM and ~400MHz MIPS core); but feel the price.
A mixture of both. The AMT system includes a dedicated ARC cpu, which runs its own OS and functions independently of the host to a large degree; but also can see into, and sometimes make use of, some of the hardware visible to the host system(details depend on version). For communication, for instance, the AMT system has access to the wired NIC below the OS's view(wireless NICs are more complex, I think AMT can do a direct connection to a trusted AP if configured to do so; but can't do VPN without piggybacking on the host OS), and it also has enough hooks into the various peripherals that it can do remote KVM in hardware, by emulating HID devices and snooping the framebuffer, mount an.iso as though it were a connected SATA device, and access some storage and memory locations that are also accessible to the host OS or programs, in order to gather data on system health, software versions, etc.
I'm not exactly sure how the BIOS/UEFI flash and the flash that stores the AMT firmware are related to one another. On computers with AMT, a 'bios update' will often flash both; but I don't know if that's because they are just different areas of the same SPI flash chip, or whether it's just a convenience bundling of two nearly unrelated updaters.
They all tend to be fairly miserable(though thermal issues are often more a product of the desire to have more space for ugly branding and fewer vents, which can be fixed with a bit of applied violence); but I do have to give the hardware credit for often being rather amazing for the price. The firmware is shit more or less across the board; but it is astounding how much actual computer they can cram into a $20 router.
Any remote management tool would be a 'backdoor', except that it is put in place by the owner for their convenience and with their consent.
AMT is a particularly powerful, and somewhat opaque, management tool. Anyone who suspects the possibility that(deliberately, or by mistake) those very, very, useful capabilities might be available to others under some circumstances would naturally be suspicious of it.
And, for the FSF and those who share their concerns, the fact that it is a wholly proprietary(and tricky to remove or replace) blob embedded in the brainstem of their computer is not something that would make them happy.
That may differ between laptops and desktops, or between AMT versions. On the desktops I've seen the AMT stuff is active if the PC is plugged in, regardless of its power state. Some of the capabilities of the AMT system cannot be used if the host PC is off; but the system itself runs on a separate processor and only turns off if the PSU is unpowered. Laptops may need to be more conservative, for the sake of retaining battery life while inactive.
Speaking of Dell, failure, and lawyers, back during the 'capacitor plague' era the law firm that Dell retained to fight capacitor-plague related lawsuits was itself stuck with capacitor-plagued Dells. I can only imagine that their IT people saw the humor in the situation. True story.
If your machinist is good enough you can probably fit a V12 in a wristwatch. It's just that all those cylinders will be very, very, tiny and the actual power generated will be rather unimpressive.
If you wanted the same effect in a laptop, you could probably add a GTX980 (250watt TDP) to this laptop as long as it was clocked at maybe 50MHz, rather than the usual 1100.
The trouble is that the entire i5-5200u, CPU and GPU, is also 15 watt part. Unless Dell is somehow just throwing away usable space inside that case, I suspect that fan noise, battery life, or both are going to hurt if you double the demands of the core silicon.
I don't know exactly how much you save if you wholly disable the GPU portion of the intel part, probably a little less than half, so even in that case you are talking about a pretty substantial bump in thermal load.
I don't deny that the integrated graphics are feeble, merely note that you are unlikely to get anything exciting into hardware that size. Even if we assume 100% efficient disabling of the integrated GPU, and savings of ~50%, a discrete GPU arrangement would involve a 50% TDP increase. If the integrated graphics can't be cleanly disabled, it might creep closer to doubling. I doubt that that would be a pleasant machine to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure why 'mobile G-sync' would be a surprise. While laptops are a bit more of a niche(for gaming purposes, they might well have pulled ahead of desktops as a whole by now), and laptop GPUs are less likely than desktop ones to achieve truly heroic framerates; they still share most of their design and drivers with desktop parts and laptops have the advantage of having tight control over the display being used. Your laptop OEM isn't going to want to go too custom, for cost reasons; but most laptop models only ship with a few different panels across their entire production run, and the manufacturer isn't on the hook if swapping in a different panel doesn't work for you. If you are dealing with a desktop, or an external display on a laptop, you have to cope with anything that more or less complies with the spec for that video output, which doesn't make your life easier if you are trying to implement a nonstandard tweak on top of a standard interface without breaking compatibility(especially since EDID is notoriously accurate, well formed, and properly implemented).
Very likely not. I don't think that I've heard of any prior implementation specifically aimed at cabs; but its hardly uncommon for the first attempt to die more or less silently(and even if no dedicated service offered it, the various 'social' applications that allow your friends to view your location have surely been used to arrange rides/carpools/pick somebody up from time to time). Even if they were first for cabs, or first to use commodity smartphones rather than dedicated fleet-management-vendor GPS modules, we all know how wonderfully 'innovative' the 'Doing X; but over the internet!' and 'Doing Y; but on a smartphone!' school of patents aren't.
I went with the more traditional 'dedicated' dispatch systems, since those (while less visible and much more expensive) are nearly as old as civilian access to GPS, and thus very, very, reliably prior to Uber; but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are even more similar systems to point to.
Given the more-or-less-total legality of video surveillance in stores and other commercial settings(so long as there's no audio, that can be a major issue in some jurisdictions), and the willingness to accept clickwrap EULAs as being equivalent to real, contract-grade, 'consent', I suspect that 'privacy rights' won't know what hit them.
That said, it will be interesting to see if Google(or others) voluntarily agree to a less intrusive mechanism(eg. snapshot of car state before you board and snapshot of car state after you leave, in order to provide enough data for a damage 'diff'; but not filming you the entire time) some or all of the time out of commercial pragmatism. It isn't exactly news that (among numerous other, more boring, functions) cabs are sometimes called by people who would be much more comfortable with some privacy(business travellers...enjoying the opportunities...that being away from their families opens up, people who've been drinking a bit too hard to drive home and sometimes with similarly intoxicated company picked up during that process, that sort of thing). It would be tactless to be so overt as to build a service specifically for them and sell it in so many words (Google PrivateCab: your red light district transport solution! just doesn't look good on the credit card statement); but it would be leaving money on the table to scare such customers away by filming them at all times when all you want to do is test for interior damage.
The other possible variable would be the adoption of substantially damage-resistant interiors: it would be hard to build these and also preserve any charm; but if that isn't a problem I suspect that Team Engineering could put together a passenger cabin that could be swiftly and automatically washed out and dried(presumably by a mechanism similar to a standard car wash; but with the doors open at the time and waterproof interior materials) in the case of contamination. That still wouldn't resist deliberate vandalism, paints and markers would require more robust solvents and keeping glass from being scratched or etched is difficult; but it would make recovering from your basic inebriated vomiting incident substantially faster and cheaper. That would only be viable if the demand were great enough to justify the specialized and ugly design; but there might well be enough people who would otherwise be vomiting on upholstered seats to be worth it.
What ideas did they obviously steal? The basic concept of using a smartphone's location capabilities to make 'calling a taxi' effectively automatic is clever; but probably not patentably original given its similarity to things like emergency services dispatching systems and fleet management tools. Aside from that, it's all details of implementation(which Google has yet to unveil, unless you count the big chunk of their mapping technology and data that Uber depends on). I suspect that this will lead to some choice comments from Uber's famously tactful and emotionally stable management figures; but what can we point to as obviously stolen here?
I imagine that enough cameras to provide a thorough view of the interior, before and after, would be a fairly minimal part of the overall cost of an autonomous vehicle. Once you have that, it's your choice of attempting to assess damage/lost items/vomit/etc. with machine vision or just farming that out as piecework to cube slaves in a call center type environment.
At that point, unless they've been very clever about spoofing their details when the hailed the ride(or just stole somebody's phone), you could more or less automatically deliver the lost article(if they left something in the car and you want to score some customer service points), the bill, or the court summons(if you are less than pleased with how they treated the vehicle) to their place of residence.
Not immune to properly motivated destruction; but neither are human-controlled vehicles.
Simple, traditional diet that worked for your grandparents and their parents
Just be sure that your ancestors didn't come from an area with high incidence of nutritional deficiency diseases. You don't even need to go all that far back. Pellagra stacked up an impressive body count in the American south in the first half of the 20th century, and beri-beri had similar effects in more rice-heavy areas. Scurvy and cretinism were a bit more niche; but also pretty much sucked. In any of those cases, some modest supplemental modifications to simple traditional diet are strongly recommended.
Unfortunately, the Radio Shack you miss already bled to death and has been dead for some time. At this point the only nod to their heritage is that some locations might have a dusty selection of parts(often still 'Tandy' branded and yellowing with age) hidden behind the iphone cases and overpriced consumer electronics.
Obviously! Kids dying of disease is all just a natural part of robust biological competition. Allowing the weak and mentally defective to live, on the other hand, inevitably results in some tax-and-spend bleeding heart coming along and demanding to expropriate the wealth creators in order to provide 'humane treatment' to such parasites.
Really, since parents own their children, they should just be allowed to abandon them in the wilderness to die(as long as they aren't trespassing on somebody else's property, or supporting the socialist national parks by doing so) if they suspect that kiddo's ROI isn't favorable. They shouldn't be allowed to abort them, of course; but postnatal headcount reduction is how freedom works.
Are you, AC, implying that America has stooped so low as to resort to mass imports of cheap south american guns, and guns banged together from over-the-counter ingredients and household chemicals in clandestine workshops, to satisfy our craving for firepower?
You filthy communist. We do sometimes dabble in exotic european guns, just as we do with club drugs; but that's different.
I, for one, would raise my most skeptical of eyebrows at the 'since Obama was elected' part.
The feds have had something of a mutually acrimonious relationship with some of the more enthusiastic personalities you find at gun shows since at least the very early 90's, probably earlier. If, say, Timothy McVeigh wasn't enough to inspire a few zillion man-hours in stakeouts, I'm not entirely sure what would.
The claims of surveillance I find fairly credible; but for it to have started in 2008 would have required that our hysteria over scary terrorist muslims completely blind the various relevant agencies to their ongoing togetherness problems with domestic militia movements and the like. Those certainly took on a lower priority; but there must have been some feds whose pallor and utter lack of arabic language proficiency made them a poor fit for higher profile work.
If there is such a thing as 'the sound of the NRA deciding that maybe the can agree with the American Communist Lawyers Union on something', I suspect this is what it sounds like.
Anyone else get the sickening sense that 'lengthen your telomeres!!' pitches would be a nearly perfect successor to the historical deluge of penis-pill spam?
They learned the importance of cyber warfare in Afghanistan? My head hurts.
Sometimes differently-abled learners cope best in classrooms with a less demanding curriculum adapted to their needs...
They've tried; but all the enlistment paperwork just disappears when he walks out. Weirdest thing.
Birds heap shame upon their ancestors merely by existing. (Except maybe shrikes; their willingness to keep up a proud tradition of bloodthirsty carnivorous murder despite now being about the size of a sparrow is pretty honorable).
Those pesky disgruntled employees and contractors tend to be on a slightly shorter leash(or less abused, if HQ decides that it's easier to make them less disgruntled than it is to watch them all the time) if their activity relates to something the company cares about.
Obviously, comcast isn't directly in favor of random insulting name changes(no real payoff for them, which puts them even below "billing errors"); but their customer service is as glorious as it is because any aspect of customer interaction that isn't billing or upselling is treated like a cost center and abused accordingly.
IBM, like SAP, Oracle and the rest, are dinosaurs unable to adapt their businesses to changing markets. Why would they be able to do the same for your company?
Well, I'd say that fossil fuels, which are mostly composed of dinosaurs who were unable to adapt(along with plants who were unable to adapt, and various other organisms who were unable to adapt) revolutionized the hell out of our entire civilization...
Maybe if IBM were buried and subjected to a few million years of heat and pressure they too would become a highly coveted resource?
I'd be inclined to say 'amazing' for the price. I understand the use case for rPi, beaglebone black, cubieboard, etc. when you need video and actually good GPIO(even more so if you need proper PWM, i2c/SPI, etc. BBblack, especially, has some pretty powerful specialty I/O options); but routers are so aggressively priced that they are often a pretty good deal for adding network capabilities to assorted projects on the fast and cheap.
I'm always up for other suggestions, of course; but I'm currently a big fan of the little 'travel/portable' routers that the RT5350 seems to have spawned a bunch of. Ethernet, USB, 802.11B/G/N, typically a serial port(I got lucky with the ones I purchased, the pads were even labelled and everything), and a few GPIOs, all for $15 or less. Kind of weak (usually 32MB RAM and ~400MHz MIPS core); but feel the price.
A mixture of both. The AMT system includes a dedicated ARC cpu, which runs its own OS and functions independently of the host to a large degree; but also can see into, and sometimes make use of, some of the hardware visible to the host system(details depend on version). For communication, for instance, the AMT system has access to the wired NIC below the OS's view(wireless NICs are more complex, I think AMT can do a direct connection to a trusted AP if configured to do so; but can't do VPN without piggybacking on the host OS), and it also has enough hooks into the various peripherals that it can do remote KVM in hardware, by emulating HID devices and snooping the framebuffer, mount an .iso as though it were a connected SATA device, and access some storage and memory locations that are also accessible to the host OS or programs, in order to gather data on system health, software versions, etc.
I'm not exactly sure how the BIOS/UEFI flash and the flash that stores the AMT firmware are related to one another. On computers with AMT, a 'bios update' will often flash both; but I don't know if that's because they are just different areas of the same SPI flash chip, or whether it's just a convenience bundling of two nearly unrelated updaters.
They all tend to be fairly miserable(though thermal issues are often more a product of the desire to have more space for ugly branding and fewer vents, which can be fixed with a bit of applied violence); but I do have to give the hardware credit for often being rather amazing for the price. The firmware is shit more or less across the board; but it is astounding how much actual computer they can cram into a $20 router.
Any remote management tool would be a 'backdoor', except that it is put in place by the owner for their convenience and with their consent.
AMT is a particularly powerful, and somewhat opaque, management tool. Anyone who suspects the possibility that(deliberately, or by mistake) those very, very, useful capabilities might be available to others under some circumstances would naturally be suspicious of it.
And, for the FSF and those who share their concerns, the fact that it is a wholly proprietary(and tricky to remove or replace) blob embedded in the brainstem of their computer is not something that would make them happy.
That may differ between laptops and desktops, or between AMT versions. On the desktops I've seen the AMT stuff is active if the PC is plugged in, regardless of its power state. Some of the capabilities of the AMT system cannot be used if the host PC is off; but the system itself runs on a separate processor and only turns off if the PSU is unpowered. Laptops may need to be more conservative, for the sake of retaining battery life while inactive.
Speaking of Dell, failure, and lawyers, back during the 'capacitor plague' era the law firm that Dell retained to fight capacitor-plague related lawsuits was itself stuck with capacitor-plagued Dells. I can only imagine that their IT people saw the humor in the situation. True story.
If your machinist is good enough you can probably fit a V12 in a wristwatch. It's just that all those cylinders will be very, very, tiny and the actual power generated will be rather unimpressive.
If you wanted the same effect in a laptop, you could probably add a GTX980 (250watt TDP) to this laptop as long as it was clocked at maybe 50MHz, rather than the usual 1100.
The trouble is that the entire i5-5200u, CPU and GPU, is also 15 watt part. Unless Dell is somehow just throwing away usable space inside that case, I suspect that fan noise, battery life, or both are going to hurt if you double the demands of the core silicon.
I don't know exactly how much you save if you wholly disable the GPU portion of the intel part, probably a little less than half, so even in that case you are talking about a pretty substantial bump in thermal load.
I don't deny that the integrated graphics are feeble, merely note that you are unlikely to get anything exciting into hardware that size. Even if we assume 100% efficient disabling of the integrated GPU, and savings of ~50%, a discrete GPU arrangement would involve a 50% TDP increase. If the integrated graphics can't be cleanly disabled, it might creep closer to doubling. I doubt that that would be a pleasant machine to work with.