They only have "genuinely interesting technology" if you take their bullshit videos at face value. But if you step back and look at the state of the art in VR / AR, display technology, image / signal processing, motion / gesture recognition, CPU / GPU processing, battery life etc. you have to wonder how anyone would take them that seriously. It is not credible that they could produce anything even remotely like the videos.
Look at Microsoft's Hololens (or Kinect before that) as other overhyped projects in a similar vein. Things that look interesting in a vacuum of hype but turned out to be seriously compromised devices. Nothing much has really happened to the state of the art to make me think things have changed here.
Aside from that, just think about AR for a moment and ask yourself what it's useful for in a practical every day sense. In VR, I can be in a spaceship, or fighting on the beaches of Normandy, or playing tennis, or zooming around the new bridge / building / sculpture / car. Even VR has limits but at least I can change my entire environment. In AR I'm confined to what can be overlaid on my surroundings. So my bridge sits as a puny model on the desktop, my games must incorporate my boring surroundings and so on. And that doesn't even get into the dork-factor / outright hostility that publicly using headset / glass would provoke. Look at google glass to see how that turned out last time it was tried.
So no I wouldn't trust this investment. At best it's wildly optimistic and whatever appears will be a pale imitation of the hype. Perhaps it's sufficient to sustain sales and it will take off. More likely it will crash and burn like so many other AR/VR endeavours.
Have you ever thought of owning a bridge? I'm the exclusive agent contracted to facilitate the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge. Contact me in complete confidence and you could own this valuable artery into New York! Who needs augmented reality when you can have actual reality!
I'm sure it will be a felony but robbery is already a felony. If you can rob an autonomous car just by throwing a box in the road and causing it to halt so you can rob the occupants, then that's exactly what will happen. If kids on your street discover sticking gum, rubbing dog shit or whatever onto a sensor on your car incapacitates it then you can bet that'll happen too.
That may be but unless you account for (changing) human behaviour in your design then you're going to get a nasty surprise. All this sort of thing is completely forseeable so there is no excuse. People will grief vehicles, robbers will cause cars to halt automatically. Even the behaviour of driver/passengers, other road users and pedestrians may adversely change in ways that counteract or negate some of the supposed safety of these cars.
Many earlier distributions, I'm thinking of Mandrake and SUSE mainly, used to install the kitchen sink. It meant the default install had a larger attack surface and was therefore more vulnerable to attack. Aside from that, your dist wastes a lot more diskspace and you have all these packages that you're not entirely sure if you need or not.
I think dists like Fedora almost have it right, offering a functioning desktop out of the box but not going crazy installing crap someone may not want. Even so, I think their store / software app is awful and doesn't exactly make it easy to install additional software if someone wants it. It'd be nice to have a postinstall wizard that lets a user answer a bunch of questions - do they mind closed source drivers, do they play multimedia, do they like games, development, want cloud storage etc. and then offers to do some additional set up based on their install and their answers.
A house brick, stick, bag of straw or something similar in its path would be sufficient to grief the thing. Maybe a wad of gum over a sensor or a plastic bag. All of which will be a foretaste of what will happen if autonomous vehicles ever become a thing.
Microsoft produced a version of Windows NT for DEC Alpha and threw in x86 emulation layer called FX!32 so it could run existing software. It worked but it ran like a dog, far slower than native x86 instructions. And not for want of trying because it did machine translate instructions to try and execute code natively.
I really don't expect the picture to be any different with x86 over ARM. I expect they'll machine translate x86 instructions into native ARM instructions in some way and cache them somewhere, but the results won't get anywhere close to x86 performance and there'll be a whole bunch of caveats about software it will or won't run. It'll probably be fine for running more sedentary apps.
I very much doubt anybody will be playing Crysis 2 on it. In fact I'd be surprised if any remotely demanding game played on it. Not just just because of the emulation but because no game would be tested with the GPU so they are liable to break hard for one reason or another.
I don't know if they have the rights or not to say it's a dick move, but I don't blame them for Pebble's problems. Pebble almost got the idea right - their watch lasted longer than others, had an always on screen and was relatively phone platform neutral. Probably what ultimately did them in is that their watches were damned ugly and they gained a whole lot of competition from some very rich companies. All the fitness devices converged on one side with the Apple / Android Wear devices on the other. It's not exactly a huge market to start with and they were squeezed out.
Because the platform's dead. Assuming Fitbit have the rights to the platform, what have they to lose from such a move? Do you think any Pebble owner is going to upgrade to Fitbit if the company just lobotomized their old watch? Of course not. If they have the rights it would make sense to generate some good will by turning over the platform to the community in some way.
I'm not sure I see the logic of blaming Fitbit that Pebble sucked at business. Or that people keep buying technological dead ends.
However, it would be a very good gesture if Fitbit had the rights to the platform and unlocked it for the community. Personally I think the best course of action would be to avoid smart watches altogether in their present form.
If Fitbit are going to dump the platform they should just throw it open to generate some goodwill. At least the APIs and any publishing keys necessary to install apps. I don't see Fitbit garnering much loyalty from Pebble owners otherwise, nor commercial advantage from not doing it.
And on a general point this just demonstrates why "smart" watches suck. They're closed platforms and when the platform is discontinued you're left with a bitrotten brain dead piece of crap. Just one more reason to buy a dumb watch.
3D printing is still fiddly, complex, error-prone, expensive and slow.
FDM style printers (the cheapest kind) require wrapping your head around calibration, nozzle diameters, temperatures, slices, alignments, supports, bed heating, the properties of PLA / ABS and all the rest. If you're lucky you'll set the printer going and hours later your efforts will yield some crudely finished single colour part. If you're unlucky you'll come back to discover something that has skewed left, warped on its base, or turned into some dante-esque spider's web that has stuck to everything.
Maybe SLA is better? Well it certainly yields better parts for sure (assuming it cured properly, but then you also must have space for a wash station. And all the sticky, smelly gunk resins to work with that get on EVERYTHING. Beyond that you've got stuff like SLS, SLM etc where things get more interesting. But now we're talking industrial equipment with the costs and power consumption to match.
I think the most likely form of 3D printing to take off is one which hasn't gotten much press - laminate printers. The price has to come down much more than where it is to be consumer attractive but I think that's viable.
Only one responded, the others didn't. That could have as much to do with who asked the question to who as it could to the question itself.
Anyway I expect that if this administration-to-be were to go down this path of fuckwittery they sure as hell wouldn't get any cooperation from any tech company. I expect their efforts wouldn't get much cooperation from anybody for that matter.
Exactly. Maintaining phone firmware is an enormous drain on resources and generally a pain in the ass. Cyanogen had the capacity to streamline the process and do it cheaper and better than any in-house team and still make a profit. Instead they declared they would "destroy" Google. I bet interest in their business model virtually dried up over night after that - Google putting the screws on mobos or the mobos themselves choosing not to associate with such hubris.
The easiest way to turn CM into profit is to sign some contracts with phone manufacturers or network operators and produce versions of CM under a support contract. Cyanogen Inc actually did that with the OnePlus but almost immediately fell into a dispute with them because they'd also signed some exclusivity contract with a no-name phone maker for the Indian market. This dispute ended up with OnePlus rolling their own firmware. So Cyanogen simultaneously proved they had the technical prowess to produce commercial grade firmware and absolutely no business acumen to go with it causing the whole thing to collapse. After that little disaster they declared war on Google. They lost.
Ubuntu's revenue comes from support and licensing. The free dist seeds their market, creating a community, demand, mindshare etc. These feeds back into support contracts and other revenue streams.
While the model isn't analogous for a phone firmware, I think Cyanogen Inc. could have made a go of it by taking the open source CyanogenMod and producing and supporting custom firmwares for phone manufacturers. They started doing that with the OnePlus, proving they were capable of it but almost instantly then proving how volatile they were by immediately entering into a contract dispute.
Then Cyanogen Inc made some disastrously fuckwitted statements about "destroying" Google by producing some kind of alternate services layer. They may as well have just tied scrap metal to their legs and jumped into the ocean at that point. It would have been cheaper.
Meanwhile CM has chugged along. It's working on CM 14.1 at the moment. If there is any doubt about its financing or branding I'm sure the community as a whole can just take themselves over to a new site. It might mean a month's worth of disruption but other projects did it.
The Palm Pilot sold extremely well, in part because it was significantly cheaper than the Newton but also because as a PDA it was a very good device. If this is in doubt, look how many models came out over more than a decade.
It might not have been as mass market as smart phones but it still sold well enough to sustain a line of devices until 2011. It might even have made the leap to mainstream with smart phone devices powered by Palm's replacement OS, webOS, but HP (who acquired Palm) made a hash of the platform and it flopped. Yet I should add that an open sourced webOS still lives on in a number of smart TVs and other devices.
That was sarcasm, by the way. I know nothing about Amazon's employee improvement plan, but the general idea of giving extra assistance to employees who aren't performing as well as their peers is absolutely a good idea.
That depends one what "improve" actually means in Amazon compared to other workplaces. Amazon is well known for micromanaging its workers and treating certain employees (e.g. those in warehouses) extremely badly. It's not hard to see how they could abuse employees - making them work beyond what is reasonable, or pushing them out the door - under the guise of an "improvement plan".
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Look at Microsoft's Hololens (or Kinect before that) as other overhyped projects in a similar vein. Things that look interesting in a vacuum of hype but turned out to be seriously compromised devices. Nothing much has really happened to the state of the art to make me think things have changed here.
Aside from that, just think about AR for a moment and ask yourself what it's useful for in a practical every day sense. In VR, I can be in a spaceship, or fighting on the beaches of Normandy, or playing tennis, or zooming around the new bridge / building / sculpture / car. Even VR has limits but at least I can change my entire environment. In AR I'm confined to what can be overlaid on my surroundings. So my bridge sits as a puny model on the desktop, my games must incorporate my boring surroundings and so on. And that doesn't even get into the dork-factor / outright hostility that publicly using headset / glass would provoke. Look at google glass to see how that turned out last time it was tried.
So no I wouldn't trust this investment. At best it's wildly optimistic and whatever appears will be a pale imitation of the hype. Perhaps it's sufficient to sustain sales and it will take off. More likely it will crash and burn like so many other AR/VR endeavours.
Have you ever thought of owning a bridge? I'm the exclusive agent contracted to facilitate the sale of the Brooklyn Bridge. Contact me in complete confidence and you could own this valuable artery into New York! Who needs augmented reality when you can have actual reality!
I'm sure it will be a felony but robbery is already a felony. If you can rob an autonomous car just by throwing a box in the road and causing it to halt so you can rob the occupants, then that's exactly what will happen. If kids on your street discover sticking gum, rubbing dog shit or whatever onto a sensor on your car incapacitates it then you can bet that'll happen too.
That may be but unless you account for (changing) human behaviour in your design then you're going to get a nasty surprise. All this sort of thing is completely forseeable so there is no excuse. People will grief vehicles, robbers will cause cars to halt automatically. Even the behaviour of driver/passengers, other road users and pedestrians may adversely change in ways that counteract or negate some of the supposed safety of these cars.
I think dists like Fedora almost have it right, offering a functioning desktop out of the box but not going crazy installing crap someone may not want. Even so, I think their store / software app is awful and doesn't exactly make it easy to install additional software if someone wants it. It'd be nice to have a postinstall wizard that lets a user answer a bunch of questions - do they mind closed source drivers, do they play multimedia, do they like games, development, want cloud storage etc. and then offers to do some additional set up based on their install and their answers.
A house brick, stick, bag of straw or something similar in its path would be sufficient to grief the thing. Maybe a wad of gum over a sensor or a plastic bag. All of which will be a foretaste of what will happen if autonomous vehicles ever become a thing.
I really don't expect the picture to be any different with x86 over ARM. I expect they'll machine translate x86 instructions into native ARM instructions in some way and cache them somewhere, but the results won't get anywhere close to x86 performance and there'll be a whole bunch of caveats about software it will or won't run. It'll probably be fine for running more sedentary apps.
I very much doubt anybody will be playing Crysis 2 on it. In fact I'd be surprised if any remotely demanding game played on it. Not just just because of the emulation but because no game would be tested with the GPU so they are liable to break hard for one reason or another.
I don't know if they have the rights or not to say it's a dick move, but I don't blame them for Pebble's problems. Pebble almost got the idea right - their watch lasted longer than others, had an always on screen and was relatively phone platform neutral. Probably what ultimately did them in is that their watches were damned ugly and they gained a whole lot of competition from some very rich companies. All the fitness devices converged on one side with the Apple / Android Wear devices on the other. It's not exactly a huge market to start with and they were squeezed out.
Because the platform's dead. Assuming Fitbit have the rights to the platform, what have they to lose from such a move? Do you think any Pebble owner is going to upgrade to Fitbit if the company just lobotomized their old watch? Of course not. If they have the rights it would make sense to generate some good will by turning over the platform to the community in some way.
However, it would be a very good gesture if Fitbit had the rights to the platform and unlocked it for the community. Personally I think the best course of action would be to avoid smart watches altogether in their present form.
And on a general point this just demonstrates why "smart" watches suck. They're closed platforms and when the platform is discontinued you're left with a bitrotten brain dead piece of crap. Just one more reason to buy a dumb watch.
That's one less nutcase out on the streets
All schools will receive a $50 discount for entry to the Ark Encounter.
You're not alone. Most Linux users are entirely happy with systemd.
FDM style printers (the cheapest kind) require wrapping your head around calibration, nozzle diameters, temperatures, slices, alignments, supports, bed heating, the properties of PLA / ABS and all the rest. If you're lucky you'll set the printer going and hours later your efforts will yield some crudely finished single colour part. If you're unlucky you'll come back to discover something that has skewed left, warped on its base, or turned into some dante-esque spider's web that has stuck to everything.
Maybe SLA is better? Well it certainly yields better parts for sure (assuming it cured properly, but then you also must have space for a wash station. And all the sticky, smelly gunk resins to work with that get on EVERYTHING. Beyond that you've got stuff like SLS, SLM etc where things get more interesting. But now we're talking industrial equipment with the costs and power consumption to match.
I think the most likely form of 3D printing to take off is one which hasn't gotten much press - laminate printers. The price has to come down much more than where it is to be consumer attractive but I think that's viable.
Anyway I expect that if this administration-to-be were to go down this path of fuckwittery they sure as hell wouldn't get any cooperation from any tech company. I expect their efforts wouldn't get much cooperation from anybody for that matter.
Mobo - mobile operator.
Exactly. Maintaining phone firmware is an enormous drain on resources and generally a pain in the ass. Cyanogen had the capacity to streamline the process and do it cheaper and better than any in-house team and still make a profit. Instead they declared they would "destroy" Google. I bet interest in their business model virtually dried up over night after that - Google putting the screws on mobos or the mobos themselves choosing not to associate with such hubris.
The easiest way to turn CM into profit is to sign some contracts with phone manufacturers or network operators and produce versions of CM under a support contract. Cyanogen Inc actually did that with the OnePlus but almost immediately fell into a dispute with them because they'd also signed some exclusivity contract with a no-name phone maker for the Indian market. This dispute ended up with OnePlus rolling their own firmware. So Cyanogen simultaneously proved they had the technical prowess to produce commercial grade firmware and absolutely no business acumen to go with it causing the whole thing to collapse. After that little disaster they declared war on Google. They lost.
While the model isn't analogous for a phone firmware, I think Cyanogen Inc. could have made a go of it by taking the open source CyanogenMod and producing and supporting custom firmwares for phone manufacturers. They started doing that with the OnePlus, proving they were capable of it but almost instantly then proving how volatile they were by immediately entering into a contract dispute.
Then Cyanogen Inc made some disastrously fuckwitted statements about "destroying" Google by producing some kind of alternate services layer. They may as well have just tied scrap metal to their legs and jumped into the ocean at that point. It would have been cheaper.
Meanwhile CM has chugged along. It's working on CM 14.1 at the moment. If there is any doubt about its financing or branding I'm sure the community as a whole can just take themselves over to a new site. It might mean a month's worth of disruption but other projects did it.
It wouldn't be the first time that a community decamped from a project by forking it and picking off from a new website.
It might not have been as mass market as smart phones but it still sold well enough to sustain a line of devices until 2011. It might even have made the leap to mainstream with smart phone devices powered by Palm's replacement OS, webOS, but HP (who acquired Palm) made a hash of the platform and it flopped. Yet I should add that an open sourced webOS still lives on in a number of smart TVs and other devices.
Should have sold themselves in 2015 when the hype for smart watches was at its greatest and the buyers remorse was at its lowest.
I just hope that Seagate had the sense to implement encryption on their device and its backup storage.
That was sarcasm, by the way. I know nothing about Amazon's employee improvement plan, but the general idea of giving extra assistance to employees who aren't performing as well as their peers is absolutely a good idea.
That depends one what "improve" actually means in Amazon compared to other workplaces. Amazon is well known for micromanaging its workers and treating certain employees (e.g. those in warehouses) extremely badly. It's not hard to see how they could abuse employees - making them work beyond what is reasonable, or pushing them out the door - under the guise of an "improvement plan".