Exactly. A computer might be fine at measuring their distance from the car in front but they can't interpret some guy waving his arms to direct a lane of traffic, let alone know the guy is legally authorised to be directing traffic in the first place. Self driving vehicles is snake oil. Anyone who has any experience programming safety systems or even computers in general would recognise this.
The answer to all your questions is that in the vast number of intractable analogue scenarios that drivers face, yes a human can do better than a computer. There is no use pretending that they can't. Drinking the koolaid from the likes of Tesla and Google doesn't make these problems disappear.
What humans are terrible at are reaction speeds and behaving to abnormal emergency events such as a skid or a tyre blowing out. A car equipped with monitoring and emergency collision avoidance would be a far more worthy and achievable goal than self driving vehicles.
"operate ably and safely in any kind of environment"?
Can it to tell that the man in front is a cop giving hand signals (and obey those signals) as opposed to some crazy person? Can it know not to stop for a potential carjacker? Can it read road diversion signs? Can it read temporary speed restrictions and roadwork signs? Can it negotiate a crossroads where the lights are out in a way that gives priority and due consideration to other drivers? Can it navigate in a long tunnel, double decker road, multi story carpark or other areas that have no GPS signal? Can it tell the difference between a bus which has stopped to pick up passengers, as opposed to a bus which has broken down and needs to be passed? Can it operate when rain or snow are impeding its sensors? Can it tell the difference between a pothole and a puddle? Can it tell the difference between a plastic bag blowing by and a child running across the street and react appropriately? Can it tell the difference between pedestrians waiting to cross vs those standing with no intention of crossing?
I bet there are a LOT of situation that neither Tesla vehicles or any others can be trusted to operate properly. I expect they'll do fine on motorways and certain predictable lengths of urban road. I expect they'll be so annoyingly bad in cities and towns that they'll be turned off or they'll be the cause of accidents.
Git will heuristically pack files using deltas so providing two versions of a binary are substantially similar it will only store the difference and is quite efficient.
The issue comes if the files are not similar in which case you store multiple copies. The problem is compounded if these files are committed frequently (e.g. some nightly build action) in which case the repo bloats out of control. This happens with all source control systems but ordinarily the bloat is confined to the server where people don't see it.
I suggest if you have to store lots of binaries that it might be stuff them into a distributed database / repository and only hold a reference to them in Git. The build system can fetch the object by its reference rather than its entire change history.
Are sites which say enter your email address twice, but won't let me cut and paste the value from the one field to the other by trapping keyboard events. Yeah I get it, you're trying to stop email typos, but there are other, less annoying ways to deal with this problem - a confirmation email for example - and the chances are the site has one of those too.
So instead you get Microsoft. Massive difference. If you were that concerned about your privacy you wouldn't be using a smart phone, or if you did you'd at least control what firmware was on it down the last app.
I've had two Lumias. Both justify the label "smart phone" and have been usable devices. Windows Phone has steadily acquired the features that put it on parity with iOS or Android.
But I wouldn't see any reason for someone to wish to use these in preference to an Android phone. They're not cheaper and they don't do anything special that can't be found on other devices. The most serious flaw is still the relative lack of apps.
So instead you advocate installing an app with cloud based authentication and DRM which "phones home" onto Linux instead. At least be consistent in your argument. If you object to data gathering then don't install Steam.
And let's lightly address your other arguments. Performance - nope there is no substantial difference between Windows and Linux on the same hardware. They're both mature operating systems and unsurprisingly they're both very efficient. The place you most likely see a difference is in things like graphics drivers and more often than not it is Windows that enjoys the performance advantage as this comparison demonstrates.
Backwards compatibility. Oh please. Windows is not perfect by any means but chances are extremely high that any 32-bit application / game software you have will work, even if you have to run it with some compatibility flags. Even when you have 64-bit Windows. If you want to run older software on Linux you'd better have the source code and hope it recompiles because chances are you're going to suffer badly otherwise. To bring it around to games I suggest you dig out some old Loki game ports and see how you get on installing them. Maybe you'll be lucky, but I doubt it and will be scrabbling around making fake roots with the deps it wants to make it happy.
User base. And here's the rub. Windows does have the user base and it looks on continuing to be that way. Developers chase the biggest platforms to recoup their investment and that means consoles and PCs. They may think of porting to SteamOS / Mac, assuming the money's there to make it worthwhile but they may not. Perhaps SteamOS will take off but I rather suspect Valve are just doing it to seed the market a bit for some streaming / cloud initiative and have little interest in fat clients let alone other Linux dists.
And just because SteamOS is Linux based doesn't mean some random game will work on some random Linux - I threw about 6 games onto an old laptop running Fedora Core 23 recently - 4 ran okay, one printed up a bunch of diagnostic bullshit about stream controllers and one (Goat Simulator) managed to hardcrash the PC. Not very promising. It points to some devs lacking the inclination or resources to test their games on Linux to the extent that they should.
Murder all the people queued up waiting to go through security screening.
Not saying extra security is a bad idea per se but if you replace one juicy target with another then it's not really solving the problem. If some crazy detonates their bomb in the queue for screening then they still achieve the same purpose as if they got inside.
That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.
I have some pills that can manage your schadenfreude. Unfortunately as it's an orphan drug so I've decided to jack the price up to $5000 if you want to avail of them.
Lettuce requires warmth, light and water to grow, it can't be frozen, it can't be preserved and there is a constant demand for it all year round. And it has virtually no calories and few nutrients to speak of. So even in the depths of winter there are mile upon mile of polytunnels with lighting growing lettuce, and trucks transporting fresh lettuce for miles. And most of which just ends up as dressing for a plate or in a burger.
So I can sympathise with the sentiment. It doesn't make pig rearing eco friendly but pigs are quite hardy animals and they're omnivorous so their diet can be feed made from some common crop like barley plus whatever seasonal foods are grown locally such as beet, apples, acorns etc. They'll even eat bugs and earthworms that they root for.
I'm sure governments could formulate a tax on meat and veg that shifted consumer demand onto locally grown, seasonal produce but whether they have the balls to do it is another matter.
I expect most add-ons will work, the way they do already across different versions of Firefox running on different operating systems. Sounds like plugins won't work though I wonder why Firefox-64 doesn't just ship with a 32-bit x86 plugin-container executable. Maybe something about the Wow64 / thunking stops them from doing it or maybe there is no point if they're getting rid of plugins entirely.
There is nothing acceptable about it at all. Maybe should get some practice in by sticking some earplugs in, blindfolding yourself and dancing around like a maniac. See how you get on.
All these VR headsets have a trail of wires sticking out from them. Even if you have free movement around a space, how's that going to work when you could potentially twist yourself around or trip over your own wires? Not to mention the danger of tripping over other hazards that enter that zone without your knowledge.
At the least it'd be useful if tracking tech was able to detect other people or animals entering the zone and by default pause the game to mitigate against the chances of the user colliding or tripping over them.
21 billion is Philip's total revenues, not what they make from selling lightbulbs. And ambient lighting is a niche regardless of how large Philips are.
There are other large lighting manufacturers in the world (e.g. Osram and GE) plus many smaller ones and if there was a desire I'm sure they could form a consortium with their own standard which achieves the same without being under Philip's thumb.
As opposed to playing pirated games? It is quite obvious that the main attraction and main use of custom firmware is to facilitate piracy.
I expect Sony will crack down on this as hard as they can - expect PSN bans for anyone using CFW for example. And FW integrity checks embedded into games etc. This hacked had better get himself lawyered up too. I'm sure we can also expect the usual whining from idiots on Slashdot that Sony is somehow wrong to protect its multi billion dollar investment.
Even the GPs suggestions could be objectionable. A solar plant could be onerous if the panels caused blinding dazzle on nearby property. And raising cows - they shit everywhere, contaminate the ground water, breed flies and damage boundaries. Even a lake could cause issues if it were a breeding ground for mosquitoes or its formation / filling disrupted ground water levels and nearby wells. So potentially neighbours might have reason to take issue with all these things. Hence the reason most places have planning laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. A computer might be fine at measuring their distance from the car in front but they can't interpret some guy waving his arms to direct a lane of traffic, let alone know the guy is legally authorised to be directing traffic in the first place. Self driving vehicles is snake oil. Anyone who has any experience programming safety systems or even computers in general would recognise this.
What humans are terrible at are reaction speeds and behaving to abnormal emergency events such as a skid or a tyre blowing out. A car equipped with monitoring and emergency collision avoidance would be a far more worthy and achievable goal than self driving vehicles.
Can it to tell that the man in front is a cop giving hand signals (and obey those signals) as opposed to some crazy person? Can it know not to stop for a potential carjacker? Can it read road diversion signs? Can it read temporary speed restrictions and roadwork signs? Can it negotiate a crossroads where the lights are out in a way that gives priority and due consideration to other drivers? Can it navigate in a long tunnel, double decker road, multi story carpark or other areas that have no GPS signal? Can it tell the difference between a bus which has stopped to pick up passengers, as opposed to a bus which has broken down and needs to be passed? Can it operate when rain or snow are impeding its sensors? Can it tell the difference between a pothole and a puddle? Can it tell the difference between a plastic bag blowing by and a child running across the street and react appropriately? Can it tell the difference between pedestrians waiting to cross vs those standing with no intention of crossing?
I bet there are a LOT of situation that neither Tesla vehicles or any others can be trusted to operate properly. I expect they'll do fine on motorways and certain predictable lengths of urban road. I expect they'll be so annoyingly bad in cities and towns that they'll be turned off or they'll be the cause of accidents.
The issue comes if the files are not similar in which case you store multiple copies. The problem is compounded if these files are committed frequently (e.g. some nightly build action) in which case the repo bloats out of control. This happens with all source control systems but ordinarily the bloat is confined to the server where people don't see it.
I suggest if you have to store lots of binaries that it might be stuff them into a distributed database / repository and only hold a reference to them in Git. The build system can fetch the object by its reference rather than its entire change history.
Are sites which say enter your email address twice, but won't let me cut and paste the value from the one field to the other by trapping keyboard events. Yeah I get it, you're trying to stop email typos, but there are other, less annoying ways to deal with this problem - a confirmation email for example - and the chances are the site has one of those too.
It's a real aircraft with a real utility and purpose. I don't see how the rules would apply in most situations.
So instead you get Microsoft. Massive difference. If you were that concerned about your privacy you wouldn't be using a smart phone, or if you did you'd at least control what firmware was on it down the last app.
The fact that the microscope has a picture of clownfish stuck to its lens is purely coincidental.
But I wouldn't see any reason for someone to wish to use these in preference to an Android phone. They're not cheaper and they don't do anything special that can't be found on other devices. The most serious flaw is still the relative lack of apps.
"You pay us enough money"
And let's lightly address your other arguments. Performance - nope there is no substantial difference between Windows and Linux on the same hardware. They're both mature operating systems and unsurprisingly they're both very efficient. The place you most likely see a difference is in things like graphics drivers and more often than not it is Windows that enjoys the performance advantage as this comparison demonstrates.
Backwards compatibility. Oh please. Windows is not perfect by any means but chances are extremely high that any 32-bit application / game software you have will work, even if you have to run it with some compatibility flags. Even when you have 64-bit Windows. If you want to run older software on Linux you'd better have the source code and hope it recompiles because chances are you're going to suffer badly otherwise. To bring it around to games I suggest you dig out some old Loki game ports and see how you get on installing them. Maybe you'll be lucky, but I doubt it and will be scrabbling around making fake roots with the deps it wants to make it happy.
User base. And here's the rub. Windows does have the user base and it looks on continuing to be that way. Developers chase the biggest platforms to recoup their investment and that means consoles and PCs. They may think of porting to SteamOS / Mac, assuming the money's there to make it worthwhile but they may not. Perhaps SteamOS will take off but I rather suspect Valve are just doing it to seed the market a bit for some streaming / cloud initiative and have little interest in fat clients let alone other Linux dists.
And just because SteamOS is Linux based doesn't mean some random game will work on some random Linux - I threw about 6 games onto an old laptop running Fedora Core 23 recently - 4 ran okay, one printed up a bunch of diagnostic bullshit about stream controllers and one (Goat Simulator) managed to hardcrash the PC. Not very promising. It points to some devs lacking the inclination or resources to test their games on Linux to the extent that they should.
Not saying extra security is a bad idea per se but if you replace one juicy target with another then it's not really solving the problem. If some crazy detonates their bomb in the queue for screening then they still achieve the same purpose as if they got inside.
That said, I'm feeling some nice warm fuzzy schadenfreude about this, after what he did with Daraprim.
I have some pills that can manage your schadenfreude. Unfortunately as it's an orphan drug so I've decided to jack the price up to $5000 if you want to avail of them.
Most likely they're not making as much money as they thought and so they're turning it off.
Glory be to the Bomb and the Holy fallout. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen.
Sadly it's happened in the UK with televised "debates" becoming a thing in recent years.
So I can sympathise with the sentiment. It doesn't make pig rearing eco friendly but pigs are quite hardy animals and they're omnivorous so their diet can be feed made from some common crop like barley plus whatever seasonal foods are grown locally such as beet, apples, acorns etc. They'll even eat bugs and earthworms that they root for.
I'm sure governments could formulate a tax on meat and veg that shifted consumer demand onto locally grown, seasonal produce but whether they have the balls to do it is another matter.
Because you're stupid or willfully ignorant?
Netscape was just fine
Seamonkey still exists so use that. The more people who support it, the more likely it will continue to be maintained.
Web browser as an application platform is the dumb idea
Demonstrably false.
DRM in browsers is a dumb idea.
Demonstrably false.
I expect most add-ons will work, the way they do already across different versions of Firefox running on different operating systems. Sounds like plugins won't work though I wonder why Firefox-64 doesn't just ship with a 32-bit x86 plugin-container executable. Maybe something about the Wow64 / thunking stops them from doing it or maybe there is no point if they're getting rid of plugins entirely.
There is nothing acceptable about it at all. Maybe should get some practice in by sticking some earplugs in, blindfolding yourself and dancing around like a maniac. See how you get on.
At the least it'd be useful if tracking tech was able to detect other people or animals entering the zone and by default pause the game to mitigate against the chances of the user colliding or tripping over them.
There are other large lighting manufacturers in the world (e.g. Osram and GE) plus many smaller ones and if there was a desire I'm sure they could form a consortium with their own standard which achieves the same without being under Philip's thumb.
I expect Sony will crack down on this as hard as they can - expect PSN bans for anyone using CFW for example. And FW integrity checks embedded into games etc. This hacked had better get himself lawyered up too. I'm sure we can also expect the usual whining from idiots on Slashdot that Sony is somehow wrong to protect its multi billion dollar investment.
Even the GPs suggestions could be objectionable. A solar plant could be onerous if the panels caused blinding dazzle on nearby property. And raising cows - they shit everywhere, contaminate the ground water, breed flies and damage boundaries. Even a lake could cause issues if it were a breeding ground for mosquitoes or its formation / filling disrupted ground water levels and nearby wells. So potentially neighbours might have reason to take issue with all these things. Hence the reason most places have planning laws.