The best route is now called a GPS and many of these are able to deal with road works. Many cab companies have systems that monitor traffic flow and provide this information to their entire fleet. This way you can have the "Knowledge" that a black cabbie has 5 minutes after someone shows you how to enter your password into the system.
This is all about protectionism and lack of choice for the customer. Also this is the 21st century where people live by their cellphones.
And when you start buying 3 pages of ads in the local newspaper every day, 2 hours of commercials on every local TV station, 2 hours of radio commercials daily, and spread a few hundred grand in political donations then the politicians might take your call. Until then your only choice will be to pick a candidate from one of a few entrenched parties that have already made a zillion backroom deals that didn't include your desires.
About the only time a politician will listen to you is when he is making a list of empty election time promises.
Yup. You are one hundred percent correct. But this is not a cab problem but something fundamentally wrong with present day implementations of democracy. I can say with absolute certainty that in my area that any decisions made by government that have a large corporate or wealth family interest then the government will act to in the rich family's/corporation's interest. The only time the government acts in some form of public interest is when there is effectively no monied interest.
Personally I think this why in the US abortion is such a big issue. It is largely an issue that has no monied interest (beyond the interest groups themselves) so politicians are off the leash on that issue. But look at the morning after pill. There was a monied interest behind that abortion related aspect so whoosh it was approved in 2 seconds. I am not saying that it is good or bad, just that normally anything involving abortion is normally full on trench warfare.
So in this particular case it will be interesting to watch the fairly well monied Uber fighting with the zillion somewhat less monied cab companies.
This debate is not happening because the politicians said, "Hey look the voters are pissed off with crappy and overpriced transport." They are having this debate because they were told to.
Our interests will not be part of the equation in any way at all.
The key is that if a cabbie is naughty then he can have his license pulled. At this point it seems that Uber will effectively do the same thing. But if you have been with Ebay a long time they are letting more and more big sellers get really sleazy with all kinds of little things. Maybe Uber will do this or maybe they won't.
This is called regulatory capture when it is the government but as Ebay shows it can happen in the private sector as well. The key difference is that(in theory) we can vote on the politicians who make the rules for cabbies.
These are the sellers of horse feed trying to fight cars not eating oats. Quite simply the day unoccupied driverless cars become a reality this entire job description will be struck from the registry. Driver of car will be right beside shoveler of coal.
We might not see this for a number of years, but what will make me laugh out loud will be when on the eve of driverless cars these same cabbies will inform us that, "People will feel safer and prefer a human cabbie."
As for Uber, the key of any new regulations should not be to protect cabbies, but to protect customers. I suspect that some dark spots with Uber will show up and thus need solving. But one of those dark spots is not the providing of much needed competition in our city's streets.
I suspect that this will be easy. The key is that the formula is fair. For accidents where the computer is unable to comprehend who is at fault then it will simply pick the accident that appears to create the minimum amount of carnage. But where it might get vaguely interesting in the case of someone else causing an accident. That is when you ask how much damage should they absorb. So if a small child runs out into the highway from behind a bush should a car fling itself off a cliff to avoid a child who is 100% at fault?
Or the manual car that pulls out right in front of a highway full of high speed cars (from behind the same bush)? The key being that broadsiding the car may very well kill the stupid driver while leaving the driverless car driver to limp away.
I am going to go with the concept that if the other person is at fault that the driverless car should not take any minimization action that results in any extra injury to the driver of the not at fault car. So if avoiding an accident gets the driverless car into a fender bender then OK. But if it might brake their foot to save another life then that is off the table. Quite simply this is not only the right thing to do as the owner of the car should not pay for other's stupidity but this might force manual cars off the road even faster.
And the horrible thing with the small child is not so horrible as this will be such a small edge case as to not be terribly relavent. Driverless cars will not only have the reaction speed of a Ninja but will probably be communicating with other driverless cars so as to note the child from many angles. But in the end I would be far angrier if a driverless car drove my kid off a cliff to avoid another person's child who was left to run out into the highway (from behind a bush).
I don't think that any AV software out there (NOD32 excepted) can be told 100% to STFU. Minimally it will pop up when the subscription is running/ran out. The default is that it will tell you when something bad is happening. And shutting that off means that you have to be thorough in saying: don't tell me when something bad is happening, don't tell me when you are scanning, don't tell me when a scan is complete, don't tell me when a scan is complete and it didn't find anything, don't tell me when there is an update, don't tell me when you can't connect with the home server, don't tell me when the subscription is running low, don't tell me when the subscription has run out, don't tell me that the subscription ran out a long time ago, don't tell me that my computer AV library is so out of date that the world is going to end, don't tell me that you just installed an update, don't tell me that you don't like what I am doing,...... and last but not least, don't tell me that I am a bad person for turning all the warnings off.
I don't think that there is a single AV that I have seen that if left on a jumbo tron/kiosk/public screen, unattended for 18 months would not have many popups over that time period.
So if I were running a large screen there is only one OS that I would run and that is something Linux based where I can look into the cron config and say FU to any potential popups, not to mention easily administrate in a terminal window with no discernible public screen action (other than a reboot). Also keeping in mind that even fairly serious upgrades can often be performed without a reboot.
These are the things that keep me away from so many commercial products. Some MBA douche who thinks that their little stupid product should take over my machine as its sole purpose. (I'm looking at you HP all-in-one drivers).
The two bits of advice that I have given to a zillion beginning and intermediate programmers are games and ProjectEuler. First project euler is great because it will exercise your math abilities and problem solving abilities in any given language. Few CS people realize how powerful properly applied mathematics can be. PU will get you in tune with that ability.
Secondly I recommend making some games. Pacman, space invaders, something 3D. They don't have to be good. But ideally you move onto multi player.
Basically if you can make a multi-player multi-platform pacman in an isometric view in OpenGL driven 3D with a server(SQL/NoSQL) driven leaderboard with a distrubution/installer module for each platform then you are done. There isn't a whole lot of programming that you can't do.
Not to mention your friends will think that you are a whole lot cooler making a game than when you try to explain the challanges of problem 132 in Project Euler.
Many people here are mentioning Arduino (which I love) it is a cool thing to add to your resume but unless you do something fairly strange then it won't expand your programming skills much. Arduino programming is usually fairly straight forward act / react. Although dealing with crappy sensor data and having motors not do exactly what you meant and then having to compensate is both frustrating and oddly satisfying.
I wouldn't say useless but that it has become malware in its own right. A symptom in the past that someone's machine was infested were casino and porn ads relentlessly popping up. Now there are AV ads relentlessly popping up. Even if you have a subscription there are two pop ups. One telling you how smart the software was do detect a cookie or something; and as the end of your subscription comes near the death threats begin.
Not to mention that some AV software will begin to interfere with the smooth operation of the machine itself.
Sorry for the two replies. But by MBA games I find that many MBA schools teach the wrong half of Game Theory. It seems that most people who leave with an MBA find some metric of success and then beat it to death. Sales are an easy metric and often a good one. But in this case I think that they pushed sales so hard that people began to hate the entire PC experience, let alone the AV experience.
AVG is a good example. Basically you can instal the free version but if you click on the wrong thing( as probably intended) you end up installing a 30 day full trial which then royally amps up the hard sell.
It seems that the original business model of the free AV service was that the home user could get away with basic features for free and would either upgrade for a price. Or would learn to love their AV and then would want it in the enterprise where it was not free at all. But nope, I can see some MBA twat saying something like, "We must monetize these non-performing customers." This probably even worked well for the next few years as not only did they fool those customers into paying but they also would have been able to ride the laurels of their previously good reviews. But in the end the reviews would have long been turning against them and now their very future is in peril.
But I am willing to bet where NOD32 never took the low road that their sales are probably tracking right along with PC sales. But as for the game theory part. I am a firm believer that the abuse that most people suffered at the hands of bloatware is one of the present factors in the plummeting PC sales. I also think that it is a factor for people paying such massive premiums for Apple machines. No default bloatware (unless you include iTunes and iCloud which do piss me off with their in your face crap). But my Apple has never threatened me once.
You could throw in Linux as an option but I am not sure there is a single big box store that will sell you a Linux only machine and in all likelihood they will have found a bloatware version of Linux.
I can't say much about them as I haven't used them in years. My "were" was more my own subjective were. I don't hear much about them but I have never heard anyone in my circle ever complain about them.
Of all the problems that my relatives have called upon me to fix on their machines AV might be the number one complaint. They buy a machine from some big box store (against my recommendation) and the AV becomes more and more threatening as to the dire situation their machine is in and how only a subscription to their product will solve the problem.
Then to make it worse the AV infests the machine like a spreading cancer. The browsers work funny, the startup is longer, the thing periodically pigs out on the internet. But it might be the popups that are the worst. We have all see the public jumbotron/Kiosk with a big AV popup front and center.
Personally I blame AV bloatware for being one of the downfalls of the PC industry. People were buying their shiny new machines hoping that all their problems would go away and poof their new machine is effectively just as crappy as their old machine with these incomprehensible popups and threats.
My only happiness in this situation is that the AV products haven't managed to get much traction in the mobile device industry.
The key thing to keep in mind is that when you buy a basic PC from a manufacturer that they don't make much if any profit from the machine. It is the kickbacks they get from the crap AV, crap game, and crap music services that come as trialware. So if the AV industry has a business model based upon fooling people, kickbacks, and annoying people; then they can't die too soon.
The horrible thing is that some products like NOD32 were awesome and didn't play those MBA games.
A very simple problem opened up by making users rapidly change their passwords is that they will frequently forget what they just changed them to. They will change it last minute on Friday to something genius and on Monday scratch their heads and go, "Crap". So now they are going to call tech support who will walk them through some crude verifications and give them a new password.
A perfect example of this is a relative of mine who works for government. He was complaining about the frequent password changes he has to do. So I bet him that we could look under everyone's keyboard and find some passwords. Two of his people put them on post it notes under the keyboard, and another guy just had 30 passwords written on the bottom of his keyboard, which oddly provided some security as I couldn't guess which one was the newest.
But the best part was that I bet that with my relatives wallet and his most recent pay stub that I could talk IT into resetting his password. So I called them up and they promptly walked me through resetting his password; but they didn't ask me a single question. So in the end I asked them how they knew I was me (him) and they said, it was because of what phone I was calling from. I asked what they would have asked had I been home and they said, birthday, maybe the office's postal code.
So it wouldn't have mattered what genius password scheme they were using as the more genius it was the worse their social hacking problem would become.
A different relative who works for a different branch of government could even log in without her key fob as all she had to do was phone IT and whine until they let her in from home.
Now you might just wave your hand and say, no problem just bolster the security by telling them not to be nitwits. But those guys weren't being nitwits. In government or any large organization if you piss the wrong person off you will lose your job far faster than if someone hacks the system. So maybe for Sally secretary they might not be so persuaded but in the case of where I phoned in a forgotten password the person who should have been sitting at that desk could have an IT person's head very quickly. As could the other relative who whined past the need for a key fob.
I commented on a different site that their video was crappy. It was 1.5 minutes of self promoting douche bags showing nothing. Then a bunch of useless examples of the pen starting something and then poof done, just like a crappy 80s cooking show. Then in the end I saw no purpose for the stupid pen. Basically beyond some crappy 60's style art about the most useful thing they did was oddly repair a horribly torn shirt.
So to find out that these douchebags are not probably able to deliver surprises me not. I am also willing to bet that some MBA (who thinks he is smart) has a whole business plan where they will sell the consumable used by this pen for an absolute fortune.
All I can say is that my prediction is that with all the scummyness that I have seen so far that we actually haven't seen the worst yet.
I love templates when used in things like vectors, maps, sets, etc. Then combined with the new for loop iteration in C++11 it is great.
But the nightmare is that many people are putting templates into everything so as to accommodate "future" flexibility. But the simple reality is that unless you are programming a hard core library it is a disaster to program flexibility when it is not needed. The end result is code that might score well on a templates test, but will be basically unreadable or alterable by any normal human.
So there seem to be templates as used by programmers and templates as used by showoffs.
Did the concrete magnetically attract Huns? Did it make for a terrible system of selecting Emperors? They vaguely seem to be saying that because they could build more permanent things that they felt more kingly? It seems that Cesar was building things out of blood and mud when he decided to come back to Rome with an army in tow.
Unless there are some writings that say, "Wow Cesar just came back from the concrete factory and instead of doing a poetry reading he stabbed the masseuse."
I just don't think the connection is very good. All kinds of things were changing at the time. Also the Roman empire proceeded to get better and better at concrete for the next 400 years.
The best explanation I have heard for the fall of the Roman empire was that the climate was nice and warm during the rise of the empire and then it got cold and it collapsed. Part of the collapse was that hoards of people deeper in the continent were pressed for food resources and started marching to better cultivated roman lands; which themselves weren't doing all that well.
I'm thinking that with a nice stock of just the right set of capacitors and resistors that by playing little games with series and parallel that almost any value could be obtained. Then with some ICs that are arduino flexible, some FPGAs and whatnot that almost any device could be made. The idea would be that eventually the values available would be somewhat standardized (like a socket set or a screwdriver set). Then super specialized components would still be of a known design.
So you would tell your printer to print a new cellphone and it would say, you will need to get a GSM module 3. This would then be shelf available at say Staples. Ideally when you were looking at 3D things to print that the list would highlight those things that your printer was ready to print.
Almost no different than being out of toner.
But seeing that the first few generations of really capable printers will probably be found in a Kinko's type environment then having a stockpile of somewhat esoteric parts would not be an issue.
Plus as you said, the ability to print the most basic of components should get better and better. I just don't see a FPGA being printed anytime soon.
What would be great would be if this also had the ability to pull from a pile of stock parts, Atmega, arm chips, resistors, capacitors, etc. So that it could then put together a complete circuit, just squishing in the parts as needed during the printing process. To me the first real generation would be when I could print a new remote control.
The second generation would be when I could print a crappy cellphone. Or a game boy. Or a near perfect duplicate of a TI-89
And the third generation would be when I could print out a fairly good cellphone; say roughly an iphone 4.
I am not suggesting that it print out LCD screens but that it could insert electronics of that nature in while the printing process was underway.
But once you could do what I called the third generation there would be huge swaths of electronics items that could be printed. For instance right now I need another 4 port USB hub. I wouldn't mind building a new alarm system. I would love a keypad to start my car instead of keys or a fob.
I am not sure that I can count the ways I hate google plus. Normally in a slashdot comment I would make a long list of my favorites but I will sum it up as saying that my "circle" of friends call it Google Bully.
I hope that with the defenestration of this bozo that the beginning of the end is soon to be in site. Quite simply if Google had listened to their customers over a single login it would have centered around GMail. That is the main service that makes sense to log into. Then if they wanted this google plus crap they could have done one of these would you like to use your GMail login to get into Google plus?
I literally don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I have two teenage daughters who do all the snapchatting and whatnot and they didn't even know what WhatsApp even was. None of their cousins scattered around the western world and attending many different universities know what it is. So the only way that WhatsApp is able to have anything even close to 1 billion users is if it is predominant in non western countries.
And as proof of where these kids lay on the spectrum of being leaders of technology, nearly all of them have abandoned, or severely cut back on their Facebook.
Can you imagine if some company bought all the highways in your area and then started charging higher fees in order to go in the passing lane but then started really gouging all the food deliveries to certain grocery stores?
People might even try to defend this by saying that it was the free market but the reality would be just like the highways, the government gave these same companies nearly 100 years of subsidies to build these networks and the expertise to maintain them.
Quite simply this infrastructure is quite simply a public good, the companies that are allowed to run it should only be able to run it at our pleasure. The moment they start to get greedy they should be thrown out and a the public good handed to another company to run properly.
Net neutrality is a wonderfully level playing field which old zombie corporations hate and fast lanes are 100% anti consumer.
Think of a lumber mill that could buy a $100,000 machine that could turn out at least the second type of design by just selecting from a menu. The price differential from the same chair that had to go through the usual logistics chain would be massive. Plus if the robot is carving the thing then it could do it in the style of a technically difficult wood worker instead of the simplistic techniques of an assembly line. So for way less money you could get way more chair. The lumber mill could then sell way more wood. They don't care if it is a 2x4 or a bunch of chair parts, especially if they can charge a bit more for the chair parts.
Nothing is perfect. But this bug may have caused a leap in open source evolution. It seems that many (myself included) people have been complaining about the SSL project. But nobody did anything about it. But now it looks like at least 1 group has taken the reigns and is renovating the project. I don't know how much of the new project is going to include the people who were running the project a few weeks ago. But it seems that more people will be looking at the mega fork (as opposed to the usual dumb little fork) as an answer to any critical yet badly run open source projects.
My limited exposure to some open source projects is that once they start to be included as standard and somewhat critical in most Linux distributions then the inner circle becomes a priesthood tending to the mysteries of the shrine. This is not always a bad thing but isn't always a healthy thing.
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The best route is now called a GPS and many of these are able to deal with road works. Many cab companies have systems that monitor traffic flow and provide this information to their entire fleet. This way you can have the "Knowledge" that a black cabbie has 5 minutes after someone shows you how to enter your password into the system.
This is all about protectionism and lack of choice for the customer. Also this is the 21st century where people live by their cellphones.
And when you start buying 3 pages of ads in the local newspaper every day, 2 hours of commercials on every local TV station, 2 hours of radio commercials daily, and spread a few hundred grand in political donations then the politicians might take your call. Until then your only choice will be to pick a candidate from one of a few entrenched parties that have already made a zillion backroom deals that didn't include your desires.
About the only time a politician will listen to you is when he is making a list of empty election time promises.
Yup. You are one hundred percent correct. But this is not a cab problem but something fundamentally wrong with present day implementations of democracy. I can say with absolute certainty that in my area that any decisions made by government that have a large corporate or wealth family interest then the government will act to in the rich family's/corporation's interest. The only time the government acts in some form of public interest is when there is effectively no monied interest.
Personally I think this why in the US abortion is such a big issue. It is largely an issue that has no monied interest (beyond the interest groups themselves) so politicians are off the leash on that issue. But look at the morning after pill. There was a monied interest behind that abortion related aspect so whoosh it was approved in 2 seconds. I am not saying that it is good or bad, just that normally anything involving abortion is normally full on trench warfare.
So in this particular case it will be interesting to watch the fairly well monied Uber fighting with the zillion somewhat less monied cab companies.
This debate is not happening because the politicians said, "Hey look the voters are pissed off with crappy and overpriced transport." They are having this debate because they were told to.
Our interests will not be part of the equation in any way at all.
The key is that if a cabbie is naughty then he can have his license pulled. At this point it seems that Uber will effectively do the same thing. But if you have been with Ebay a long time they are letting more and more big sellers get really sleazy with all kinds of little things. Maybe Uber will do this or maybe they won't.
This is called regulatory capture when it is the government but as Ebay shows it can happen in the private sector as well. The key difference is that(in theory) we can vote on the politicians who make the rules for cabbies.
These are the sellers of horse feed trying to fight cars not eating oats. Quite simply the day unoccupied driverless cars become a reality this entire job description will be struck from the registry. Driver of car will be right beside shoveler of coal.
We might not see this for a number of years, but what will make me laugh out loud will be when on the eve of driverless cars these same cabbies will inform us that, "People will feel safer and prefer a human cabbie."
As for Uber, the key of any new regulations should not be to protect cabbies, but to protect customers. I suspect that some dark spots with Uber will show up and thus need solving. But one of those dark spots is not the providing of much needed competition in our city's streets.
I suspect that this will be easy. The key is that the formula is fair. For accidents where the computer is unable to comprehend who is at fault then it will simply pick the accident that appears to create the minimum amount of carnage. But where it might get vaguely interesting in the case of someone else causing an accident. That is when you ask how much damage should they absorb. So if a small child runs out into the highway from behind a bush should a car fling itself off a cliff to avoid a child who is 100% at fault?
Or the manual car that pulls out right in front of a highway full of high speed cars (from behind the same bush)? The key being that broadsiding the car may very well kill the stupid driver while leaving the driverless car driver to limp away.
I am going to go with the concept that if the other person is at fault that the driverless car should not take any minimization action that results in any extra injury to the driver of the not at fault car. So if avoiding an accident gets the driverless car into a fender bender then OK. But if it might brake their foot to save another life then that is off the table. Quite simply this is not only the right thing to do as the owner of the car should not pay for other's stupidity but this might force manual cars off the road even faster.
And the horrible thing with the small child is not so horrible as this will be such a small edge case as to not be terribly relavent. Driverless cars will not only have the reaction speed of a Ninja but will probably be communicating with other driverless cars so as to note the child from many angles. But in the end I would be far angrier if a driverless car drove my kid off a cliff to avoid another person's child who was left to run out into the highway (from behind a bush).
The carriers also put their stupid bloatware onto many phones. Again making their customers angry for some short term gains. Stupid MBAs.
I don't think that any AV software out there (NOD32 excepted) can be told 100% to STFU. Minimally it will pop up when the subscription is running/ran out. The default is that it will tell you when something bad is happening. And shutting that off means that you have to be thorough in saying: don't tell me when something bad is happening, don't tell me when you are scanning, don't tell me when a scan is complete, don't tell me when a scan is complete and it didn't find anything, don't tell me when there is an update, don't tell me when you can't connect with the home server, don't tell me when the subscription is running low, don't tell me when the subscription has run out, don't tell me that the subscription ran out a long time ago, don't tell me that my computer AV library is so out of date that the world is going to end, don't tell me that you just installed an update, don't tell me that you don't like what I am doing, ...... and last but not least, don't tell me that I am a bad person for turning all the warnings off.
I don't think that there is a single AV that I have seen that if left on a jumbo tron/kiosk/public screen, unattended for 18 months would not have many popups over that time period. So if I were running a large screen there is only one OS that I would run and that is something Linux based where I can look into the cron config and say FU to any potential popups, not to mention easily administrate in a terminal window with no discernible public screen action (other than a reboot). Also keeping in mind that even fairly serious upgrades can often be performed without a reboot.
These are the things that keep me away from so many commercial products. Some MBA douche who thinks that their little stupid product should take over my machine as its sole purpose. (I'm looking at you HP all-in-one drivers).
The two bits of advice that I have given to a zillion beginning and intermediate programmers are games and ProjectEuler. First project euler is great because it will exercise your math abilities and problem solving abilities in any given language. Few CS people realize how powerful properly applied mathematics can be. PU will get you in tune with that ability.
Secondly I recommend making some games. Pacman, space invaders, something 3D. They don't have to be good. But ideally you move onto multi player.
Basically if you can make a multi-player multi-platform pacman in an isometric view in OpenGL driven 3D with a server(SQL/NoSQL) driven leaderboard with a distrubution/installer module for each platform then you are done. There isn't a whole lot of programming that you can't do.
Not to mention your friends will think that you are a whole lot cooler making a game than when you try to explain the challanges of problem 132 in Project Euler.
Many people here are mentioning Arduino (which I love) it is a cool thing to add to your resume but unless you do something fairly strange then it won't expand your programming skills much. Arduino programming is usually fairly straight forward act / react. Although dealing with crappy sensor data and having motors not do exactly what you meant and then having to compensate is both frustrating and oddly satisfying.
I wouldn't say useless but that it has become malware in its own right. A symptom in the past that someone's machine was infested were casino and porn ads relentlessly popping up. Now there are AV ads relentlessly popping up. Even if you have a subscription there are two pop ups. One telling you how smart the software was do detect a cookie or something; and as the end of your subscription comes near the death threats begin.
Not to mention that some AV software will begin to interfere with the smooth operation of the machine itself.
Sorry for the two replies. But by MBA games I find that many MBA schools teach the wrong half of Game Theory. It seems that most people who leave with an MBA find some metric of success and then beat it to death. Sales are an easy metric and often a good one. But in this case I think that they pushed sales so hard that people began to hate the entire PC experience, let alone the AV experience.
AVG is a good example. Basically you can instal the free version but if you click on the wrong thing( as probably intended) you end up installing a 30 day full trial which then royally amps up the hard sell.
It seems that the original business model of the free AV service was that the home user could get away with basic features for free and would either upgrade for a price. Or would learn to love their AV and then would want it in the enterprise where it was not free at all. But nope, I can see some MBA twat saying something like, "We must monetize these non-performing customers." This probably even worked well for the next few years as not only did they fool those customers into paying but they also would have been able to ride the laurels of their previously good reviews. But in the end the reviews would have long been turning against them and now their very future is in peril.
But I am willing to bet where NOD32 never took the low road that their sales are probably tracking right along with PC sales. But as for the game theory part. I am a firm believer that the abuse that most people suffered at the hands of bloatware is one of the present factors in the plummeting PC sales. I also think that it is a factor for people paying such massive premiums for Apple machines. No default bloatware (unless you include iTunes and iCloud which do piss me off with their in your face crap). But my Apple has never threatened me once.
You could throw in Linux as an option but I am not sure there is a single big box store that will sell you a Linux only machine and in all likelihood they will have found a bloatware version of Linux.
I can't say much about them as I haven't used them in years. My "were" was more my own subjective were. I don't hear much about them but I have never heard anyone in my circle ever complain about them.
Of all the problems that my relatives have called upon me to fix on their machines AV might be the number one complaint. They buy a machine from some big box store (against my recommendation) and the AV becomes more and more threatening as to the dire situation their machine is in and how only a subscription to their product will solve the problem.
Then to make it worse the AV infests the machine like a spreading cancer. The browsers work funny, the startup is longer, the thing periodically pigs out on the internet. But it might be the popups that are the worst. We have all see the public jumbotron/Kiosk with a big AV popup front and center.
Personally I blame AV bloatware for being one of the downfalls of the PC industry. People were buying their shiny new machines hoping that all their problems would go away and poof their new machine is effectively just as crappy as their old machine with these incomprehensible popups and threats.
My only happiness in this situation is that the AV products haven't managed to get much traction in the mobile device industry.
The key thing to keep in mind is that when you buy a basic PC from a manufacturer that they don't make much if any profit from the machine. It is the kickbacks they get from the crap AV, crap game, and crap music services that come as trialware. So if the AV industry has a business model based upon fooling people, kickbacks, and annoying people; then they can't die too soon.
The horrible thing is that some products like NOD32 were awesome and didn't play those MBA games.
A very simple problem opened up by making users rapidly change their passwords is that they will frequently forget what they just changed them to. They will change it last minute on Friday to something genius and on Monday scratch their heads and go, "Crap". So now they are going to call tech support who will walk them through some crude verifications and give them a new password.
A perfect example of this is a relative of mine who works for government. He was complaining about the frequent password changes he has to do. So I bet him that we could look under everyone's keyboard and find some passwords. Two of his people put them on post it notes under the keyboard, and another guy just had 30 passwords written on the bottom of his keyboard, which oddly provided some security as I couldn't guess which one was the newest.
But the best part was that I bet that with my relatives wallet and his most recent pay stub that I could talk IT into resetting his password. So I called them up and they promptly walked me through resetting his password; but they didn't ask me a single question. So in the end I asked them how they knew I was me (him) and they said, it was because of what phone I was calling from. I asked what they would have asked had I been home and they said, birthday, maybe the office's postal code.
So it wouldn't have mattered what genius password scheme they were using as the more genius it was the worse their social hacking problem would become.
A different relative who works for a different branch of government could even log in without her key fob as all she had to do was phone IT and whine until they let her in from home.
Now you might just wave your hand and say, no problem just bolster the security by telling them not to be nitwits. But those guys weren't being nitwits. In government or any large organization if you piss the wrong person off you will lose your job far faster than if someone hacks the system. So maybe for Sally secretary they might not be so persuaded but in the case of where I phoned in a forgotten password the person who should have been sitting at that desk could have an IT person's head very quickly. As could the other relative who whined past the need for a key fob.
I commented on a different site that their video was crappy. It was 1.5 minutes of self promoting douche bags showing nothing. Then a bunch of useless examples of the pen starting something and then poof done, just like a crappy 80s cooking show. Then in the end I saw no purpose for the stupid pen. Basically beyond some crappy 60's style art about the most useful thing they did was oddly repair a horribly torn shirt.
So to find out that these douchebags are not probably able to deliver surprises me not. I am also willing to bet that some MBA (who thinks he is smart) has a whole business plan where they will sell the consumable used by this pen for an absolute fortune.
All I can say is that my prediction is that with all the scummyness that I have seen so far that we actually haven't seen the worst yet.
That is why I dumped Java around a decade ago. It was getting worse and worse.
I love templates when used in things like vectors, maps, sets, etc. Then combined with the new for loop iteration in C++11 it is great.
But the nightmare is that many people are putting templates into everything so as to accommodate "future" flexibility. But the simple reality is that unless you are programming a hard core library it is a disaster to program flexibility when it is not needed. The end result is code that might score well on a templates test, but will be basically unreadable or alterable by any normal human.
So there seem to be templates as used by programmers and templates as used by showoffs.
Did the concrete magnetically attract Huns? Did it make for a terrible system of selecting Emperors? They vaguely seem to be saying that because they could build more permanent things that they felt more kingly? It seems that Cesar was building things out of blood and mud when he decided to come back to Rome with an army in tow.
Unless there are some writings that say, "Wow Cesar just came back from the concrete factory and instead of doing a poetry reading he stabbed the masseuse." I just don't think the connection is very good. All kinds of things were changing at the time. Also the Roman empire proceeded to get better and better at concrete for the next 400 years.
The best explanation I have heard for the fall of the Roman empire was that the climate was nice and warm during the rise of the empire and then it got cold and it collapsed. Part of the collapse was that hoards of people deeper in the continent were pressed for food resources and started marching to better cultivated roman lands; which themselves weren't doing all that well.
I'm thinking that with a nice stock of just the right set of capacitors and resistors that by playing little games with series and parallel that almost any value could be obtained. Then with some ICs that are arduino flexible, some FPGAs and whatnot that almost any device could be made. The idea would be that eventually the values available would be somewhat standardized (like a socket set or a screwdriver set). Then super specialized components would still be of a known design.
So you would tell your printer to print a new cellphone and it would say, you will need to get a GSM module 3. This would then be shelf available at say Staples. Ideally when you were looking at 3D things to print that the list would highlight those things that your printer was ready to print.
Almost no different than being out of toner.
But seeing that the first few generations of really capable printers will probably be found in a Kinko's type environment then having a stockpile of somewhat esoteric parts would not be an issue.
Plus as you said, the ability to print the most basic of components should get better and better. I just don't see a FPGA being printed anytime soon.
What would be great would be if this also had the ability to pull from a pile of stock parts, Atmega, arm chips, resistors, capacitors, etc. So that it could then put together a complete circuit, just squishing in the parts as needed during the printing process. To me the first real generation would be when I could print a new remote control.
The second generation would be when I could print a crappy cellphone. Or a game boy. Or a near perfect duplicate of a TI-89
And the third generation would be when I could print out a fairly good cellphone; say roughly an iphone 4.
I am not suggesting that it print out LCD screens but that it could insert electronics of that nature in while the printing process was underway.
But once you could do what I called the third generation there would be huge swaths of electronics items that could be printed. For instance right now I need another 4 port USB hub. I wouldn't mind building a new alarm system. I would love a keypad to start my car instead of keys or a fob.
I am not sure that I can count the ways I hate google plus. Normally in a slashdot comment I would make a long list of my favorites but I will sum it up as saying that my "circle" of friends call it Google Bully.
I hope that with the defenestration of this bozo that the beginning of the end is soon to be in site. Quite simply if Google had listened to their customers over a single login it would have centered around GMail. That is the main service that makes sense to log into. Then if they wanted this google plus crap they could have done one of these would you like to use your GMail login to get into Google plus?
I literally don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I have two teenage daughters who do all the snapchatting and whatnot and they didn't even know what WhatsApp even was. None of their cousins scattered around the western world and attending many different universities know what it is. So the only way that WhatsApp is able to have anything even close to 1 billion users is if it is predominant in non western countries.
And as proof of where these kids lay on the spectrum of being leaders of technology, nearly all of them have abandoned, or severely cut back on their Facebook.
Can you imagine if some company bought all the highways in your area and then started charging higher fees in order to go in the passing lane but then started really gouging all the food deliveries to certain grocery stores?
People might even try to defend this by saying that it was the free market but the reality would be just like the highways, the government gave these same companies nearly 100 years of subsidies to build these networks and the expertise to maintain them.
Quite simply this infrastructure is quite simply a public good, the companies that are allowed to run it should only be able to run it at our pleasure. The moment they start to get greedy they should be thrown out and a the public good handed to another company to run properly.
Net neutrality is a wonderfully level playing field which old zombie corporations hate and fast lanes are 100% anti consumer.
You are correct. But what I was talking about was more than plywood.
Basically I was thinking that the 3D printer/carver is done when it can do this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
But more likely to be something like: http://www.alzohawoodwork.com/...
Think of a lumber mill that could buy a $100,000 machine that could turn out at least the second type of design by just selecting from a menu. The price differential from the same chair that had to go through the usual logistics chain would be massive. Plus if the robot is carving the thing then it could do it in the style of a technically difficult wood worker instead of the simplistic techniques of an assembly line. So for way less money you could get way more chair. The lumber mill could then sell way more wood. They don't care if it is a 2x4 or a bunch of chair parts, especially if they can charge a bit more for the chair parts.
Nothing is perfect. But this bug may have caused a leap in open source evolution. It seems that many (myself included) people have been complaining about the SSL project. But nobody did anything about it. But now it looks like at least 1 group has taken the reigns and is renovating the project. I don't know how much of the new project is going to include the people who were running the project a few weeks ago. But it seems that more people will be looking at the mega fork (as opposed to the usual dumb little fork) as an answer to any critical yet badly run open source projects.
My limited exposure to some open source projects is that once they start to be included as standard and somewhat critical in most Linux distributions then the inner circle becomes a priesthood tending to the mysteries of the shrine. This is not always a bad thing but isn't always a healthy thing.