It should also keep WP8 out of the running(apparently does surprisingly well in only 512; but that's not going to be good enough). I'm assuming that this sucker runs something directly inherited from Nokia's dumbphone/feature-phone line. Has anybody managed to dig up an article that actually says what it does run?
I think that you underestimate the role of the private sector in the process.
The crowning genius of free-market surveillance states is how much of the (otherwise expensive, arduous, and likely to be resented) work of surveillance can be left to private sector self interest to implement and market, with the state needing only to subpoena up the results and do relatively small amounts of supplementary spying(even this often accomplished in no small part just by buying the access).
Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!
Never forget, 'Internet of things' and 'Smart Home' are nothing but polite synonyms for 'Consumer SCADA'. And we know how well that stuff handles security.
It's an obnoxious habit; but I think that they are using 'operating system' in the relatively-weak-analogy sense of 'the bunch of software that sits on top of the nightmare hell-world of your hardware and presents a vaguely sane set of abstractions and standardized interfaces'.
The actual implementation will, as you suggest, be a combination of mostly already common OSes baked into the device firmware, along with a bunch of applications that attempt to present some sort of coherent and usable interface to the whole mess; but using 'operating system' to describe the mechanism that performs hardware abstraction and standardization isn't totally insane, just gratuitously obnoxious.
I mean, who cares if birds get drunk from alcohol? It has very little use in the real world.
Can you think of no applications in the study of neurology arising from the fact that animals with fairly complex 'speech', and which the IRB will allow us to dissect, show interesting similarities to humans in their response to alcohol? Nothing, really?
Isn't arguing with a WSJ editorial writer roughly the equivalent of racing a team of thalidomide babies, or beating a crack team of retards at Jeopardy? Easy, sure, and likely even an indication of your superior aptitude. Just... Somehow unseemly.
There is also the much trickier; but potentially really unpleasant, matter of firmware. GPU cards have at least some flash onboard, not certain exactly how much probably varies by model; and they are a peripheral in a position of a great deal of power(big fat kernel driver, all the DMA they can eat, enough onboard RAM and computational capacity to really do interesting things with that). Certainly wouldn't want any bugged firmware sneaking around.
Given that I have no particular personal stake in Nvidia's problems, I would hope, in the spirit of general benevolence, that they take actually effective action; but I would much, much, much more strongly hope, in my own interests and those of computer users generally, that they've taken effective measures surrounding control of their signing keys.
Aside from a few *nixes that are actively hostile to proprietary drivers or simply don't do any integration work for Nvidia's, Nvidia is one of the hardware companies whose signature is pretty much universally trusted, without much question or notification, on a driver. If their signing infrastructure were to have been compromised, some very, very, interesting 'GPU drivers' might make it out into the wild and raise some hell.
Unfortunately, this is true of other hardware outfits as well. I don't much care how they run things, though friendly advice would be to pay attention to the security geeks; but anyone who has a signing key that will get a driver right into the kernel of any windows system without comment(extra credit for getting it on Windows Update) is an active menace if they lose control of that.
Depends on the context. Industry-wide, everyone either is or soon will be. In individual smaller setups, there are...complications.
Most notably, Windows doesn't support it very well. Yeah, you can manually 'cache' data by installing application X on the SSD and storing the porn torrents on the HDD; but that gets to be a pain in the ass, quickly, for everything except the 'SSD large enough for all programs, HDD for media library' arrangement. From time to time a vendor will bodge something on(Intel's 'Smart Response Technology' or whatever they call it this generation, some of the HDD outfits' 'hybrid' drives, probably a few other cludges that have slipped my mind. Not necessarily terrible; but very hit or miss. There's also the 'superfetch' cache; but that's a bit of an oddball aimed at USB devices, not a proper filesystem level abstraction of multiple physical devices )
OSX does support this reasonably well(for the macs that still have room for two storage devices) and apparently the results are good. Once you start to stretch the budget a bit, all the SAN guys have been forced to implement it (whatever they might charge you extra for the privilege), so you are OK there.
It chills me that any other possibility would not be ruled out automatically; but thankfully, I am. Unfortunately, that apparently makes me saner than parts of congress, never mind talk radio, and I'm a guy who impersonates a fungus on the internet for fun, FFS.
It's a bit further than that: Tyson's tweet was entirely orthogonal to Jesus and Christianity: The fact that Newton was born on the 25th of December, and that he'd revolutionized physics with extreme prejudice(among a variety of other interesting jobs, apparently he was a brutally efficient administrator of the royal mint for a while in there) before he hit middle age are true independent of the truth or falsity of any tenet of Christianity. There simply isn't any relation between Tyson's tweet and any theological position.
Whoever was offended apparently wants their beliefs to not only be the universal truth; but to get all the airtime, when they want it.
On the other hand, sometimes a strategically applied barb can be pedagogically useful:
In this case, Tyson tweeted something that was orthogonal to Jesus(not that he is actually suspected by scholars of even the distinctly pious persuasion of having been born conveniently on a pagan holiday that needed assimilating; but that's another matter). It didn't denigrate him, question his existence, use the phrase 'purportedly magic jew', laugh at the peasants who were putting up their nativity idols, none of that. It just wasn't about him, it was about Isaac Newton, who was born on that day, and who was a pretty damn titanic figure in the history of science(although also intensely pious, though his religious works are not of much broader interest).
It is, arguably, rather interesting that he provoked a minor firestorm just by talking about someone else. It's a commonplace that some anti-jesus flamebait spread in the right areas would have caused a moderate shitstorm, and so nothing would be proven except one's own somewhat juvenile sense of humor by doing so; but that isn't what he did: he just celebrated a different guy(and pretty damn arguably a worthy one) who shared the same birthday. The fact that that caused a ruckus is frankly interesting, informative, and perhaps even food for thought for those offended. Is Jesus really incapable of gracefully sharing a birthday with one of history's more remarkable physicists? He certainly manages to share it with a load of consumerist gluttony without much comment.
I (mostly) grew out of baiting people purely for sport years ago; but I still think that there is room for discomfort, even unrest, in the context of discourse; and this seems like a good example. Not just flamebait, which would be trivial; but prove nothing; but willing to risk kicking up a fuss. Hopefully a least a few people asked themselves why it was so necessary that exclusivity be defended(especially when other 'meanings of Christmas' like family, presents, pagan conifers, assorted ritualized meals, etc. are handled in parallel without issue. If Jesus can share a birthday with the Jones' traditional honey glazed ham, surely he can share one with Isaac Newton?).
I was assured by numerous talking heads that this particular network intrusion against a Japanese multinational was not only state-sponsored; but an act of Cyber-terror-war against America and the Homeland, and something that could only be answered in a suitably apocalyptic fashion, lest our nation's honor be soiled!
How could it possibly be something as pedestrian as upset employees?
Were they having trouble getting warrants for those sorts of investigations? Even a judiciary that isn't effectively a rubber stamp usually pays attention to that kind of thing.
True; but it's all in the same state of free-fall, so the gravity is effectively irrelevant for the purposes of stress on the structure. The amount of atmosphere that it is travelling through, on the other hand, might be enough to make itself felt.
I don't know what barges think of 'blue water navy' work; but that's the sort of thing I had in mind: skip classy, skip seriously intimidating looking, stick a bunch of standardized modules together into a big floating airfield, with the aim of providing a lot of flight deck and very, very, deep stores of fuel and munitions for the 'yeah, we want another strike going out every half hour or so until further notice' style of air support/pounding that seems to crop up.
I imagine the DOD would be a little peeved if it turned up in a Chinese shipyard.
We've probably outsourced worse( at least assuming that any more modernized systems, ECM, radar, etc. are stripped from the hulk first); but yeah, I'm guessing that the breakers offering the best rates don't exactly have security clearances, in addition to their atrocious environmental record, nonexistent occupational safety, and so on.
I don't actually know, and so would be interested to, is there anything considered 'sensitive' about something as old as a (presumably modernized here and there) Forrestal class? I assume that, for economic as well as security reasons, you'd rip out all the modern electronics, CIWS, radar, air-traffic-control systems, etc.; but is the remainder of the ship itself still considered a bit touchy, or old news?
On the plus side, space construction probably doesn't demand a whole lot of really heroic fastener work(but the gloves make 'finger tight' pretty clumsy if you are outside). In absence of gravity, all sorts of comparatively feeble joints become acceptable, so long as you don't damage things trying to put them together("Yeah, I um, stripped the mounting hole for the habitat module...") and the assembly keeps things from floating away.
If anything, I'd imagine that space tools are more likely to emphasize being able to set maximum torque, to keep people from screwing up delicate, lightweight, functionally irreplaceable, parts, rather than emphasizing the sort of power you want when fighting with a rusted assembly or something binding under stress.
Yeah but now you can pay out the ass for a 3d printer and download a wrench and wait 4 hours to get your wrench.
I'd be the first to make snide comments about some of the 3d printing hype (some of it, the sort that fails to answer "and we wouldn't do this with machine tools why exactly?", there are a number of genuinely impressive applications, albeit mostly involve additional finishing steps or the really expensive printers); but 'earth orbit' is one of those places where I can imagine being willing to wait for printing rather than ordering from harbor freight and waiting for shipping.
A problem better solved by standardizing fasteners, of course; but if somebody has already opened that can of worms for you, and you need an oddball tool in a space and shipping constrained environment, I can think of worse fates than using a plastic one.
I suspect that a ~60 year old ship is probably a horrible mess in a number of respects, and might well not be the best starting point for the job; but given what we actually send aircraft carriers out to do at present(and to a substantial degree, have since WWII), it would be interesting to know if there's any room for a variant carrier design that emphasizes sheer capacity per unit cost, for all our aerial bombardment of stuff that can't really do much about it needs.
I understand the navy's enthusiasm for aircraft carriers that might not immediately become the involuntary flagships of the submarine navy upon contact with actual opposition; but they sure are expensive for situations where we are just beating on people with minimal retaliatory capabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
It should also keep WP8 out of the running(apparently does surprisingly well in only 512; but that's not going to be good enough). I'm assuming that this sucker runs something directly inherited from Nokia's dumbphone/feature-phone line. Has anybody managed to dig up an article that actually says what it does run?
I think that you underestimate the role of the private sector in the process.
The crowning genius of free-market surveillance states is how much of the (otherwise expensive, arduous, and likely to be resented) work of surveillance can be left to private sector self interest to implement and market, with the state needing only to subpoena up the results and do relatively small amounts of supplementary spying(even this often accomplished in no small part just by buying the access).
Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!
Never forget, 'Internet of things' and 'Smart Home' are nothing but polite synonyms for 'Consumer SCADA'. And we know how well that stuff handles security.
It's an obnoxious habit; but I think that they are using 'operating system' in the relatively-weak-analogy sense of 'the bunch of software that sits on top of the nightmare hell-world of your hardware and presents a vaguely sane set of abstractions and standardized interfaces'.
The actual implementation will, as you suggest, be a combination of mostly already common OSes baked into the device firmware, along with a bunch of applications that attempt to present some sort of coherent and usable interface to the whole mess; but using 'operating system' to describe the mechanism that performs hardware abstraction and standardization isn't totally insane, just gratuitously obnoxious.
We wouldn't want the next .torrent dump or barely-coherent pastebin screed to be a mushroom cloud, would we?
I mean, who cares if birds get drunk from alcohol? It has very little use in the real world.
Can you think of no applications in the study of neurology arising from the fact that animals with fairly complex 'speech', and which the IRB will allow us to dissect, show interesting similarities to humans in their response to alcohol? Nothing, really?
Isn't arguing with a WSJ editorial writer roughly the equivalent of racing a team of thalidomide babies, or beating a crack team of retards at Jeopardy? Easy, sure, and likely even an indication of your superior aptitude. Just... Somehow unseemly.
There is also the much trickier; but potentially really unpleasant, matter of firmware. GPU cards have at least some flash onboard, not certain exactly how much probably varies by model; and they are a peripheral in a position of a great deal of power(big fat kernel driver, all the DMA they can eat, enough onboard RAM and computational capacity to really do interesting things with that). Certainly wouldn't want any bugged firmware sneaking around.
Given that I have no particular personal stake in Nvidia's problems, I would hope, in the spirit of general benevolence, that they take actually effective action; but I would much, much, much more strongly hope, in my own interests and those of computer users generally, that they've taken effective measures surrounding control of their signing keys.
Aside from a few *nixes that are actively hostile to proprietary drivers or simply don't do any integration work for Nvidia's, Nvidia is one of the hardware companies whose signature is pretty much universally trusted, without much question or notification, on a driver. If their signing infrastructure were to have been compromised, some very, very, interesting 'GPU drivers' might make it out into the wild and raise some hell.
Unfortunately, this is true of other hardware outfits as well. I don't much care how they run things, though friendly advice would be to pay attention to the security geeks; but anyone who has a signing key that will get a driver right into the kernel of any windows system without comment(extra credit for getting it on Windows Update) is an active menace if they lose control of that.
Depends on the context. Industry-wide, everyone either is or soon will be. In individual smaller setups, there are...complications.
Most notably, Windows doesn't support it very well. Yeah, you can manually 'cache' data by installing application X on the SSD and storing the porn torrents on the HDD; but that gets to be a pain in the ass, quickly, for everything except the 'SSD large enough for all programs, HDD for media library' arrangement. From time to time a vendor will bodge something on(Intel's 'Smart Response Technology' or whatever they call it this generation, some of the HDD outfits' 'hybrid' drives, probably a few other cludges that have slipped my mind. Not necessarily terrible; but very hit or miss. There's also the 'superfetch' cache; but that's a bit of an oddball aimed at USB devices, not a proper filesystem level abstraction of multiple physical devices )
OSX does support this reasonably well(for the macs that still have room for two storage devices) and apparently the results are good. Once you start to stretch the budget a bit, all the SAN guys have been forced to implement it (whatever they might charge you extra for the privilege), so you are OK there.
It chills me that any other possibility would not be ruled out automatically; but thankfully, I am. Unfortunately, that apparently makes me saner than parts of congress, never mind talk radio, and I'm a guy who impersonates a fungus on the internet for fun, FFS.
Given Kim's alleged approach to celebrity controversy, they would probably be well advised not to...
It's a bit further than that: Tyson's tweet was entirely orthogonal to Jesus and Christianity: The fact that Newton was born on the 25th of December, and that he'd revolutionized physics with extreme prejudice(among a variety of other interesting jobs, apparently he was a brutally efficient administrator of the royal mint for a while in there) before he hit middle age are true independent of the truth or falsity of any tenet of Christianity. There simply isn't any relation between Tyson's tweet and any theological position.
Whoever was offended apparently wants their beliefs to not only be the universal truth; but to get all the airtime, when they want it.
On the other hand, sometimes a strategically applied barb can be pedagogically useful:
In this case, Tyson tweeted something that was orthogonal to Jesus(not that he is actually suspected by scholars of even the distinctly pious persuasion of having been born conveniently on a pagan holiday that needed assimilating; but that's another matter). It didn't denigrate him, question his existence, use the phrase 'purportedly magic jew', laugh at the peasants who were putting up their nativity idols, none of that. It just wasn't about him, it was about Isaac Newton, who was born on that day, and who was a pretty damn titanic figure in the history of science(although also intensely pious, though his religious works are not of much broader interest).
It is, arguably, rather interesting that he provoked a minor firestorm just by talking about someone else. It's a commonplace that some anti-jesus flamebait spread in the right areas would have caused a moderate shitstorm, and so nothing would be proven except one's own somewhat juvenile sense of humor by doing so; but that isn't what he did: he just celebrated a different guy(and pretty damn arguably a worthy one) who shared the same birthday. The fact that that caused a ruckus is frankly interesting, informative, and perhaps even food for thought for those offended. Is Jesus really incapable of gracefully sharing a birthday with one of history's more remarkable physicists? He certainly manages to share it with a load of consumerist gluttony without much comment.
I (mostly) grew out of baiting people purely for sport years ago; but I still think that there is room for discomfort, even unrest, in the context of discourse; and this seems like a good example. Not just flamebait, which would be trivial; but prove nothing; but willing to risk kicking up a fuss. Hopefully a least a few people asked themselves why it was so necessary that exclusivity be defended(especially when other 'meanings of Christmas' like family, presents, pagan conifers, assorted ritualized meals, etc. are handled in parallel without issue. If Jesus can share a birthday with the Jones' traditional honey glazed ham, surely he can share one with Isaac Newton?).
I was assured by numerous talking heads that this particular network intrusion against a Japanese multinational was not only state-sponsored; but an act of Cyber-terror-war against America and the Homeland, and something that could only be answered in a suitably apocalyptic fashion, lest our nation's honor be soiled!
How could it possibly be something as pedestrian as upset employees?
Ah, you need VPN? Our 'Business Connectivity' package is right over here. I'm sure you'll find it to be an attractive value...
Were they having trouble getting warrants for those sorts of investigations? Even a judiciary that isn't effectively a rubber stamp usually pays attention to that kind of thing.
I wonder how the law treats having all your cheap Romanian labor work via thin clients, so the data never actually reside in Romania?
True; but it's all in the same state of free-fall, so the gravity is effectively irrelevant for the purposes of stress on the structure. The amount of atmosphere that it is travelling through, on the other hand, might be enough to make itself felt.
Pretty much identical to what happened to 'Polaroid'. Every corpse has its maggots, I suppose.
I don't know what barges think of 'blue water navy' work; but that's the sort of thing I had in mind: skip classy, skip seriously intimidating looking, stick a bunch of standardized modules together into a big floating airfield, with the aim of providing a lot of flight deck and very, very, deep stores of fuel and munitions for the 'yeah, we want another strike going out every half hour or so until further notice' style of air support/pounding that seems to crop up.
I imagine the DOD would be a little peeved if it turned up in a Chinese shipyard.
We've probably outsourced worse( at least assuming that any more modernized systems, ECM, radar, etc. are stripped from the hulk first); but yeah, I'm guessing that the breakers offering the best rates don't exactly have security clearances, in addition to their atrocious environmental record, nonexistent occupational safety, and so on.
I don't actually know, and so would be interested to, is there anything considered 'sensitive' about something as old as a (presumably modernized here and there) Forrestal class? I assume that, for economic as well as security reasons, you'd rip out all the modern electronics, CIWS, radar, air-traffic-control systems, etc.; but is the remainder of the ship itself still considered a bit touchy, or old news?
On the plus side, space construction probably doesn't demand a whole lot of really heroic fastener work(but the gloves make 'finger tight' pretty clumsy if you are outside). In absence of gravity, all sorts of comparatively feeble joints become acceptable, so long as you don't damage things trying to put them together("Yeah, I um, stripped the mounting hole for the habitat module...") and the assembly keeps things from floating away.
If anything, I'd imagine that space tools are more likely to emphasize being able to set maximum torque, to keep people from screwing up delicate, lightweight, functionally irreplaceable, parts, rather than emphasizing the sort of power you want when fighting with a rusted assembly or something binding under stress.
Yeah but now you can pay out the ass for a 3d printer and download a wrench and wait 4 hours to get your wrench.
I'd be the first to make snide comments about some of the 3d printing hype (some of it, the sort that fails to answer "and we wouldn't do this with machine tools why exactly?", there are a number of genuinely impressive applications, albeit mostly involve additional finishing steps or the really expensive printers); but 'earth orbit' is one of those places where I can imagine being willing to wait for printing rather than ordering from harbor freight and waiting for shipping.
A problem better solved by standardizing fasteners, of course; but if somebody has already opened that can of worms for you, and you need an oddball tool in a space and shipping constrained environment, I can think of worse fates than using a plastic one.
I suspect that a ~60 year old ship is probably a horrible mess in a number of respects, and might well not be the best starting point for the job; but given what we actually send aircraft carriers out to do at present(and to a substantial degree, have since WWII), it would be interesting to know if there's any room for a variant carrier design that emphasizes sheer capacity per unit cost, for all our aerial bombardment of stuff that can't really do much about it needs.
I understand the navy's enthusiasm for aircraft carriers that might not immediately become the involuntary flagships of the submarine navy upon contact with actual opposition; but they sure are expensive for situations where we are just beating on people with minimal retaliatory capabilities.