Facebook is going to have a pretty hard time moving forward with its own brand.
Like Windows users, Facebook users seldom use it because they like it, so much as it's just the de facto standard that everyone else uses, and the network effect is tough to overcome. Instagram and Whatsapp were good acquisitions for them because they don't (yet?) have the stigma Facebook does.
The question will be whether Facebook tries to sell their personal assistant using its own brand, or if it will attempt to leverage known data in order to stand out from Alexa and Siri. I see that as being a catch-22 though - if they do, I think many people might think it's too far. If not, there's no advantage over the more popular solutions.
I have good karma on slashdot, and because of this, I have the choice to disable ads. Maybe twitter could employ some sort of "karma" like slashdot did, and use it to enable or disable certain aspects of twitter.
The problem is that Karma on Slashdot is generally capped, and the reach of Slashdot is relatively low. It's entirely possible for me to have a similar level of karma to Wil Wheaton on Slashdot (if he's still around). Both Wil and I have had comments modded +5, the highest available. On Twitter, it would require some bizarre viral share situation for a tweet of mine to have the same number of likes and retweets that Wil gets on a bad day. I will never have the same reach as Cardi B on Twitter, but if she were to join Slashdot, we would likely reach similar levels of karma.
Twitter would be betting the farm on the sort of shift that allows for the sort of egalitarianism which Slashdot's system is intended to provide. Moreover, there's no way Twitter is allowing anyone to disable ads, except maybe if they're some sort of influencer like Katy Perry or Ellen Degeneres...and by time you get to that level, ads aren't seen by the individual because those Twitter accounts are managed by social media teams. Also, if the threshold is set to even 500 followers, that would make that option unavailable for 96% of Twitter users.
Even if somehow that problem was solved, what would be able to be changed? Besides ad removal, the addition of extra filters? Accounts that can only be followed once you have a certain amount of reach? Even if they came up with a dozen different achievements that allowed customization of the experience, wouldn't that make the issue that much worse as people on the cusp of that sort of popularity would start begging for followers to reach it, making Twitter worse for lower level users?
Slashdot has its issues, but it's clear that preventing the existence of a 0.01% of accounts and limiting the reward of groupthink has been a fundamental component from the get-go, which has helped it avoid some of the pitfalls of Reddit and other straight upvote/like ranking systems. Such a system would alienate the Twitter audience, and Twitter knows it.
I'm with you that government regulation needs to be an avenue of last resort because of how generally terrible it ends up being in practice. My go-to example is all the Parkland kids making noise about wanting gun control to feel safe, but the government regulation they got was a mandate of clear backpacks in their school. More directly related, my local municipality makes it very difficult to get permits to run cables for ISPs...little startups like Verizon would have had to pay about half a million dollars to get a *hearing* about whether they could be candidates to get the permits.
I very much understand the concern about adding regulations by groups like that...it's begging for the worst possible implementation.
The problem is that I don't see anything better. I'm a fan of the free market wherever it can work, but there comes a point where the market is too distorted to function correctly. Can we really persuade Google to act more responsibly using only free market forces at this point? Will companies be willing to migrate from G-Suite to Office365 or some on-prem solution based solely on principle? Will enough people move from Gmail to ProtonMail or similar? Will web developers be willing to eschew AMP and Fonts and Analytics and all their other things? Would advertisers be willing to freeze their Google AdWords campaigns? Even if somehow we got 30% of people to do all of this, would it be possible for Google to really see that it's being done because the court of public opinion has ruled them irresponsible, and will they change their ways accordingly?
Probably not; it would require far too many people to launch a coordinated effort while also directly telling Google what they're doing wrong, and Google would have to believe their bottom line would yield a net increase as a result of the changes; even a 30% difference might be more survivable than making their data collection truly opt-in on a mass scale.
This leaves us with government regulation, but there are still too many factions with conflicting goals. Some have issues solely with the AI ethics boards. Others are principally opposed to AI development at all. Still others have issues with their willingness to use their algorithms to limit free speech, and others still are opposed to their data mining. Meanwhile, advertisers would probably be happy with even more insight into particular user demographics, and some desire outright illegal options for ad targeting.
Put it all together and you've got a company that simply can't please everyone at once, and to invite regulation is to ask the government to pick sides on each of these issues, and many more, and then codify them into law. It sounds good, until you get laws that start to look like the DMCA, which has kept ripping DVDs illegal for decades in the process of trying to address more legitimate problems of copyright enforcement during the emerging years of the commercial internet.
Finally, even if we were to attempt government regulation anyway, we'd still be dealing with the fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem we already see with ISPs and Ajit Pai running the FCC. Even if we miraculously had a regulatory body headed by someone who understands tech well enough to be effective while also not being in Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Oracle's pockets, the next guy almost definitely will be.
Which leaves us with...what option exactly? For real, I'm open to suggestions. Self-regulating gives us these self-appointed governing bodies that can't seem to outlast a Google Beta project. Government oversight over companies as large and powerful as Google and friends are too susceptible to bigger money diplomacy, and free market is demonstrably too difficult to make happen with the amount of coordination it would require. If you have any idea how to solve this problem, by all means, I'm open to it.
I've thought about this recently, and it goes something like this: I think there are some rings which help categorize whether using Linux makes sense...
Ring 1: Development Applications. IDEs Text editors Compilers
Ring 2: Server Applications. Web Servers Routers/Firewalls Storage/Data Transfer Databases
Ring 3: Lowest-Common-Denominator Desktop Applications. Desktop Window Environments Productivity/Office Suites Web Browsers Mail Clients IM Clients Audio/Video Players
Ring 4: High Level Desktop Applications. Audio/Video Editing Architecture Finance Software Legal Software Medical Software Point of Sale Software etc....
Rings 1 and 2 are things that software developers tend to know a lot about, making it very easy to code them well. In most cases, software fitting into those categories are superior to Windows-only applications. The LAMP stack is basically the default for web hosting at this point, and plenty of software-based routers run on Linux or BSD while doing that on Windows is almost comical to suggest.
Ring 3 is pretty mature in general at this point, but it's pretty easy to need a particular function in Excel that isn't available in Calc or some such. The more complex the needs are for a particular application, the more likely the Linux equivalent is going to be a bit of a problem. Even if it can handle it, the learning curve makes it undesirable without an even bigger reason to do it.
Ring 4 is hit-or-miss. Content creation creeps along on Linux, but it's far from mature, and lots of plugins aren't available for the platform. Plenty of line-of-business software *needs* some sort of commercial support, and it's the chicken-and-egg problem that everyone runs Windows because their vendors require it, but none of the vendors make Linux software because virtually none of their clients are running Linux on the desktop. Lots of high profile use cases simply require Windows (or possibly OSX) because there's no reason to develop for what will likely be a support nightmare, and even if one vendor tries to standardize support on Ubuntu, everyone's SoL if the next vendor standardizes on CentOS.
On the dubiously-good side for Linux adoption, the everything-in-a-web-browser trend makes the number of software titles requiring support to decrease as time marches on, making it easier to switch. However, anybody arguing that it's easy to switch has clearly never worked in tier 1 tech support.
I'm a fan of the $0.05 surcharge on plastic bags. Prior to that, people would put 2-3 items in a bag, and sometimes double bag them. Now, it's far more common for bags to be filled to capacity, so an order that would have used eight bags two years ago has reduced it to three or four bags. It's also far more common to see people bringing reusable bags to the store, or even the plastic bags from their last order. The amount of these bags rolling down the road has reduced drastically; it's been over a month since I've seen one (used to be a daily occurance)
Overall, the amount of plastic bags being used has been reduced significantly, and in my mind, it's basically a solved problem. People with reusable bags have an incentive to use them, and people who opt for convenience can cover the cost of their manufacture and disposal.
I don't see how removing the choice of plastic bags is going to solve anything. New York has plenty of other issues to worry about.
Yes, they paid MONEY so their lives take priority. Because money.
Not simply "because money". It would be patently absurd to go to a restaurant and pay for a meal, only to find out that the restaurant gave the food to someone else because the restaurant felt the other person needed it more. It would be ridiculous to hire someone to clean my house, only for that person to go to someone else's house and clean it because they decided it was dirtier.
If I buy a car, I expect its safety features to keep me safe.Yes, ideally, it would absolutely keep both of us safe...but if their safety features are keeping them safe in an accident, and my safety features are also keeping them safe, then other people have decided I am more expendable than the other person.
I paid for the car. I expect it to protect my life first.
This sounds like the standard sort of entitlement of your average car driver:
I decided to take the risk of driving a high owered lump of metal around to save a bit of time and I exect it to have consequences for other people if something goes wrong.
Well, yes. The owner is the one who paid for the car. It is a reasonable expectation that a priority be given to ensuring the safety of the owner. The second car has airbags and crumple zones and other functions which help limit the damage, because that's what they paid for.
Obviously, the underlying assumption is that overall damage be minimized, but self-preservation is expected on both sides. Though it may be "most ethical" to follow Spock's "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", there are very few people who would be in the market for a car whose directive may potentially be to allow additional injury to its own user in order to minimize injury to another user.
Google wasn't letting products launch whenever their employees called it 'done'. The level of fanfare to announcements was certainly uneven, but the net result is a bit of an oversimplification since that $40 billion is primarily from ads.
Postini already had a business model when they were acquired. So did Picasa. So did Orkut. If these weren't money makers, why did they buy them? If they were, why not let them make money? It's entirely possible for Google to have products that are pay-with-money rather than pay-with-privacy, yet they seem allergic to the possibility.
Yes, they are doing very well if the bottom line is the only line that matters. If that's the case, then 'good will' and 'customer confidence' are not directly reflected in that line, so it's of no surprise when those lines start to suffer.
Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
Heck, Gmail has been more persistent than any other email provider I ever had.
AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Erols, Earthlink, and email.com are still running. Prodigy is defunct now, but it was around for 27 years so Gmail can take their crown in 2031.
If we're allowed to count hosting providers, 1and1, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, InMotion, and Verio all still exist, and have all offered e-mail longer than Google has.
If universities count, MIT is where e-mail started in the 1960's, and to this day if you were a student there, you can keep your MIT e-mail address for life. Many universities have similar policies....so if your e-mail host didn't outlast Gmail, there were plenty that didn't. They've still got a decade to go before they start turning heads for longetivity, though.
I do like that they put things out there. They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work. I do think that they can do a better job of doing the old-school beta approach. I loved Inbox. Having to move back to Gmail in the past couple of months has been frustrating.
Herein lies the rub of Google's method of deploy-and-depreciate, in conjunction with "as little software running on the client machine as possible, with as little data remaining there as practical."
Microsoft released Windows Home Server 2011 in, well, 2011. It had all the appeal of administering an SBS2008 server, but without AD, IIS, DNS, DHCP, or...pretty much any other role of an actual-server, and only HP released machines for it with a maximum of four HDD bays, and banked on a Windows Media Player lock-in and didn't support iTunes, and it took them forever to release a System Builder version rather than relying on OEM-only distribution, and....and...ultimately was inferior in virtually every way to FreeNAS or UnRAID or a dozen other software titles for actual-enthusiasts, and its few strengths were only realized if you had a *full* MS stack at home - WMP, WMC, Xbox, Live OneCare, Windows Vista/7...which even then was basically nobody....but for the handful of people who had them, they got five years of support, and if they're still running, continue to perform their core functions despite being EoL. People who had them and wanted to move to an alternative platform were able to do so at their own pace, and on their own time, without a deadline looming overhead.
99 of the 148 products/services/applications on the Killed By Google site were five years old or less when discontinued, and that number is even higher if you count acquired products that Google didn't keep for five years after acquisition. Some of the products which were discontinued were notable for their corporate following; Postini and Urchin were my anecdotally-most-prolific examples.
2/3 of the things Google has killed over the years got less support than a niche-within-a-niche server release from Microsoft. There are no saints in Redmond, and MS has killed their own projects as well (Microsoft MyPhone and pretty-much-every-music-product-they-tried spring to mind), but the difference is that Google isn't very good with providing a migration path. They generally provide a means to download the raw data in a CSV or whatever, but if that CSV can't be turned back into usable data, even in the case of a paid product without the help of some software developer somewhere writing some custom code, that's not a great means of instilling confidence that the product has a future, or that it's safe to adopt and begin reliance on it.
Since the Windows 10 data collection system doesn't run on Macs, is Microsoft using Microsoft Defender as a foot in the door to get data collection installed on Macs?
I absolutely wouldn't put it past them...but the math isn't exactly bulletproof, either.
I don't know the exact requirements for sandboxing when it comes to apps in the OSX App Store, but I can't imagine Apple letting MS run free with root privileges from their walled garden without at least giving it far greater scrutiny. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's also the sort of entry that is simply incapable of flying under the radar. If MS isn't going to go the App Store method, that creates plenty of problems. With MS trying to push its own app store on the Windows side, MS relying on sideloading isn't going to resonate with OSX users, and it won't reflect well on their own efforts to funnel software through the app store. It behooves them to play by the rules.
Next, uploading questionable samples has been standard practice for *decades*. Everyone has done it, from Symantec and McAfee to Avast and AVG. If it's suddenly a problem with MS doing it, then it's not a problem with the principle, but the actor. That's understandable to a good extent, but let's at least start from a baseline that MS performing a common industry practice *and holding to that practice under the same standards and expectations as everyone else* isn't necessarily cause for alarm. Now, perhaps MS will be the first one to try and do mass data uploading...but it would be incredibly foolish because Apple has enough bigger lawyer diplomacy that they went up against the federal government and won. If Apple was willing to face off against the FBI on behalf of a dead terrorist, and they were willing to go against their own parts supplier, I can't imagine them giving MS a pass for exfiltrating data like that.
Even if there was a whiff of foul play, odds are good that the OSX folks would either say 'screw it', or use Sophos or Bitdefender, both of whom have free OSX antivirus applications available and aren't Microsoft.
Finally, MS can get plenty of data from OSX users. MS Office is still very popular on OSX, and defaults to saving to OneDrive on their consumer offerings. The-Office-365-that-is-hosted-Exchange, and its personal variant Outlook.com, both work on OSX both in a browser and through the Mail app. Sure, it's not the juicyness that is Safari's browsing history or Windows 10's "upload-everything-to-OneDrive persuasion"...but it is still some useful data if they were going down that road.
Maybe this is MS's trojan horse, maybe it isn't...but I'm having a bit of trouble believing Microsoft is spending so much of its time evading Apple's radar to surreptitiously upload data through the back door when they're already getting massive amounts of data through the front door.
The problem with using NAS/SAN drives is pure economics. A lot of people who require high end workstations will be doing work on consumer OS's. With GIS, it's Windows (ArcGIS).
The GP was talking about photos and videos, not GIS datasets, so the goalposts just got shifted. To address it though, at $16,000 for the Mac in TFA, A Poweredge with plenty of storage and an Optiplex or two to access it are entirely practical alternatives.
The setup for an iSCSI over Ethernet connection requires a separate network (well it should if you're doing it properly) and If for any reason the drives are disconnected which is a problem on Windows desktop operating systems it costs a lot of money.
We're already quite far away from 'storing lots of photos and videos', and iSCSI seems like a weird protocol to implement in this context, and I really don't understand what you're getting at with respect to Windows losing access to network storage vs. another OS.
So it becomes trivial to just say "throw a bunch of SSD's in there and RAID/JBOD them, then tell the GIS analyst to move the finished work SAN/NAS after they're done" which will be much smaller than the multitudes of datasets they're working with. Any roadblocks cost huge sums of money.
Pretty much everything referenced here has very little to do with either the GP or TFA. If you're dealing with that sort of data, you're not in the market for the $16,000 iMac, you're not in the market for a Thunderbolt enclosure like the GP referenced, and apparently downtime is so expensive that you're probably better off having a server in a server room somewhere and RDPing into it, either using local storage or a SAN...which is clearly affordable giving how expensive downtime apparently is in your situation.
So in the economic sense, you'll have both because the amount of money you'll lose by being cheap isn't worth the potential savings. The simplicity of local storage is simply worth the additional cost. Given the low cost of SSD's these days, it can even be cheaper than remote storage.
In your case, no...but you weren't tacitly eyeballing a $2,000 diskless Thunderbolt enclosure, either. The use case you describe is only similar to the GP in that it involves computers and data which needs to store somewhere. ArcGIS and Lightroom clearly have vastly different requirements as to how data is stored and accessed. That's fine, but I wouldn't recommend a DIY FreeNAS or a QNAP to someone whose primary concern is downtime *and* can apparently back it up with a check big enough to make that problem go away.
To maintain a really high end gaming PC takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to invest - this service is a way to experience high-end graphics with none of the hardware pains that comes with owning and maintaining a gaming PC.
You're trying to make both sides of the argument simultaneously. The people who aren't willing to invest time and effort into a highly optimized experience are the target demographic of game consoles. It's not a dig, it's a reality - they offer a solid experience with virtually no configuration required. Many have exclusive titles and franchises that make them even more appealing to that demographic. This group is already a solved problem.
The #PCMasterRace that doesn't want to spend a massive amount of time or money can go to my local Microcenter. They can pick up a Powerspec with an 8th gen i5, 16GB RAM, and GTX1060 for $800. It's not earth shattering, but it'll play most games at a quality commensurate with what this service can provide, and again, doesn't require a massive investment of time, effort, or money.
If graphics quality is a big enough draw that the aforementioned $800 machine isn't enough, we're dealing with enthusiasts. To that end, that's where tinkering and modding starts to become a part of the experience, but if one is intent on avoiding cracking open the case, then that's where Alienware / Origin / Falcon Northwest / Sager come into play with their four figure price tags.
Streaming doesn't meaningfully address any of these better than the existing solutions. About the only market for this is one where paying $20/month which covers both hardware and games is seen as superior to a few one-off purchases. There is one, but I'd argue that it's even smaller than the enthusiast community who's willing to drop $500 on a graphics card. Really, this primarily benefits the companies behind the streaming more than it benefits the end users who play them.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You're looking for a NAS. If an article regarding a $15,000 workstation is at all appealing whatsoever, then having a dedicated storage array is entirely practical for 1/4 of the price.
"But Voyager, they're expensive!" Let's assume you're a DIY tinkerer. A quick Newegg build on a Ryzen3 with 32GB of ECC RAM, a case, and 5x4TB drives is about $1,350 soup to nuts; in RAIDz2 (RAID6), that's still 12TB of storage with two drives fault tolerance, and I only limited it to 5 because that's the maximum number of drives I could buy at a clip (the build supports three more on the case and the mobo). Do two drive orders and you can hit 24TB before you hit physical limits.
Let's assume you're not a tinkerer and basically want a thing in a box. $1,500 will get you the aforementioned 5 drives and an 8-bay QNAP.
"But network connectivity is slow!" Add about $400 to the QNAP and $600 to the DIY build and you've got 10-gigabit connectivity, possibly a bit more if you're on a Mac and need a thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter.
"But then I can't access my data when I'm not home!" The $15,000 Mac won't let you do that. However, all of these systems have some form of remote access, bit it the more arcane SFTP on the DIY build, or the shiny WebUIs and dropbox-like mobile apps of QNAP and Synology.
"But Thunderbolt has lower latency!" Possibly, but 10GbE over Fiber is pretty damn quick, especially if you do a direct connect to your machine. An 8-bay TB enclosure will cost you $2,000 before you put drives in it, and you get zero options for multi-user or remote access.
"But it's ugly!" Both Cat6 and fiber cables support long enough runs to put the storage appliance wherever you'd like to hide it. Thunderbolt doesn't. If you're willing to go a bit higher on the DIY front, Lian Li makes some beautiful cases with a price tag to reflect them.
There are countless combinations out there; if storage is your only concern and you've got somewhere to put an 8U rack, QNAP has a rack mounted NAS with a companion storage expander that you could fill with 4TB drives, landing you with 80TB of storage (assuming 4 disk fault tolerance) and *still* spend less than this $15,000 Mac.
1.) Internal documentation. Some people know Acrobat well enough to help others trying to do an uncommon process. Any training documents can reference a single piece of software and will be accurate for all of those people. You and I and the rest of Slashdot can probably figure out PDF Architect or PowerPDF or whatever-command-line-soup-is-required-for-Ghostscript, but there are still people in 2019 who don't know how to use Excel beyond typing things into rows and columns and are just waiting to have their minds blown by "sum", "average", and "fill down". Documentation needs to be written for these people.
2.) Preview is solid on OSX. Edge on Windows 10...not so much. Expensive as Acrobat is, it's far less expensive than replacing Windows machines in corporate environments...but I too would be thrilled to have Preview ported to Windows =).
3.) Using multiple freeware/shareware titles in succession can do the job well enough for a one-off case, but as a workflow used by several people in an office setting, the money for Acrobat quickly pays for itself.
4.) It's the ecosystem. A user might not need Photoshop, but they do need to run a Photoshop plugin. They might not need After Effects, but they need to use an AE template that involves changing the text on one composition and then rendering. They might not need everything in Acrobat, but they may need to redact.
Sometimes, this is just how stuff works. I'm still clinging to my plastic-disc release of CS6 and will never subscribe, but I also understand why the software is used as frequently as it is, in spite of the business model, not because of it.
I don't know about keeping track of files on disconnected external drives (I'd recommend moving up to a NAS anyway), but I'm pretty sure it's 95% of what you're looking for, and costs $80 once.
Or are GNU/Linux users instead expected to either A. lease a VPS on which to run NextCloud or B. pay the ISP to upgrade to a plan that allows forwarding ports and leave a PC at home turned on all the time?
Privacy comes at a cost. This shouldn't be news. That being said, while I can't speak for every ISP, the consumer ISPs in my area only block 80 and 25; 443 is open even on consumer connections. You should be able to get it working that way. If not, Nextcloud does work over a custom port; I can speak from personal experience on that one.
As for leaving a storage server at home turned on, I mean...if it's that much of an imposition, both Synology and QNAP have appliances which can handle this, and either run Nextcloud or their own first party plugins and applications which have Dropbox-like functions. If that's still too much and you're willing to put up with a performance dip, Nextcloud works on a Raspberry Pi; the DietPi distro has an auto installer for it. Or, Resilio Sync is pretty good and simply requires devices to be on at the same time to replicate data.
Or, you could simply pony up for a paid Dropbox subscription, or pick which three devices you actually-need to have syncing regularly and use the WebUI to download/upload on subsequent ones.
Or, there's Seafile, Pydio, S3/Wasabi buckets with rsync, or for the price of the higher tier Dropbox individual plan, seedboxes.cc will do a one-click install of Nextcloud with 2TB of storage *and* a VPN *and*...y'know...a seedbox.
This is a solved problem, in several ways. Don't sit there being pedantic about calling it "GNU/Linux" twice in a one-line post and then try to argue that web-based folder syncing is so hard to do that you're reliant on a free service to do it for you.
If everyone really just accepts the status quo, then streaming television would never have gotten off the ground and the cord cutters would be a very tiny minority.
Not quite the same thing. People didn't shift to streaming because of its technological superiority, they moved to it because it allowed them to watch their desired content on their own timetable, and on mobile devices without making an additional expenditure. DVRs helped bridge the gap, but streaming gave that specific experience which regular cable TV did not...and aside from a monthly fee that costs less than most value meals at McDonald's, there was virtually no tradeoff to be had.
The issues with targeted advertising are far less directly beneficial. The options aren't 'targeted ads' or 'no ads', it's ads either way and the question is whether those ads are for products from Microsoft or Maybelline, and that's purely a matter of principle - relatively few people will make even a single purchasing decision based on the presence or absence of a targeted ad system.
So, MS has had this since Windows 7...but every time it tried pulling out a failed update, it would either fail to remove (leaving the machine in an unbootable state), or pull it out, then reinstall it on the next reboot, then fail, then revert, and so on...also leaving a machine basically unusable.
This isn't what Windows 10 needs.
What Windows 10 needs is simple: security-only updates with a 10MB maximum per update, references to actual KB articles that explicitly state the exploit they mitigate, and a return to 'service packs', released annually. Want to call them 'feature updates'? fine. Support security updates on service packs N, N-1, and N-2, and allow users to permanently opt out of service packs and have manual installers available for those service packs, so users can do the major updates on their own terms.
Even the handful of people who actually care about the new features being added to Win10 are either in the Insider program (where they opt into this-might-break-stuff updates), or else they consider those new features secondary to existing functionality.
Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
Because they've been doing it for years.
Look, you and I and plenty of the Slashdot crowd know how to fix our own computers and run our own servers. How many people have depended on you / the IT guy at work / the Geek Squad to keep their computers running? Most of them. To them, 'trusting someone else with their data' is, ultimately, all they've ever done. To top it off, in most cases they end up paying less and getting better services in the process. If they've been burned in one form or another over the years, that effect is even more pronounced.
You and me and the rest of the people who prefer self-hosted solutions are in the extreme minority because we see services come and services go, and we invest our time and our data into them. The Snapchat crowd sees data as transient, and backups too complicated and generally unnecessary. I mean, they'll realize in 20 years that they have no photos of their lives to show their children, but 'long term thinking' is not a favored mindset at this point in time.
With everything disposable and transient, 'everything-as-a-rental' and no concept of the value of ownership, the fact that few consumers insist on self-hosted solutions is completely unsurprising to me.
1. Sound booths in performance venues where there is already a rack mount for amplifiers. 2. Home theater installations (though to be fair that might be more Apple TV territory). 3. OSX Server was pretty damn simple to set up in its heydey; it was great for centralized management of Macs. 4. Computing clusters. 5. Some media production houses have custom desks that can fit a 2U rackmount computer in them (or at least, they did) 6. Because it's definitely more serviceable than the current soldered/glued/fused together options. 7. Because some people might prefer it for literally no reason other than that they prefer it.
Ultimately, I don't think the GP is arguing that it would be the Mac's dominant form factor. However, the lack of one shows hubris which assumes that people are willing to do workarounds in order to keep a Mac in an environment. Now, to be fair, that's at least partially deserved...but a nontrivial part of the enmity comes from the professional community who relied heavily on Macs during the 90s and 2000s when they were fit for purpose...and are quickly finding out that Tim is increasingly relegating Macs to "iOS App Compiling Devices" at the expense of basically everything else.
'Making sure things are correct' isn't the problem.
Indeed, that's why the thread I started was concerned with a different subject.
Not whatever nonsense you tried to talk about. Seriously, I cannot go figure it out.
The problem is with the people aghast at the idea of correcting false and misleading ideas to the point of absolute solipsism.
I'll be happy to spell out the sequence for you:
Article: 'Taiwanese chat-bot is enabling real-time fact checking in message groups' You: 'Inb4 the "muh first amendment" crowd who takes exception to having to deal with actual-facts' Me: 'The issue isn't the fact-checking, but the fact that such a technology is exactly the same as a wrongthink correction system' You: 'I can't figure out your nonsense'
Fact checking is fine, but it's the existence of a system that allows an AI to interject when something is said which triggers a condition where such an interjection is required is concerning.
But really, the issue is the principle that one's private message threads are no longer private.
No, this is a public thread and here you are inserting whatever confused idea you think is important.
Or, I made the assumption you read the damn summary which literally says: "The technology, created by Taiwanese developers, is a step ahead of most fact-checking apps, including versions offered in Brazil and Indonesia, which don't jump into conversations." I am not talking about this Slashdot thread. A 'conversation' a discussion between a defined group of individuals. The article mentions its use in Line, a BBM derivative like Whatsapp and Viber.
At worst, it's the next step in stifling free speech - the government may not be doing it, but the chilling effects will be instilled just the same.
Finally you get on topic.
I've been on topic.
By opposing the ability to criticize speech, you are chilling free speech yourself. Why do you get go be a hypocrite?
Even if you didn't read the summary, the HEADLINE states "know it all ROBOT". The technology at the heart of this discussion is an incrementally advanced chat-bot that deals in fact checking. How is it 'opposing the ability to criticize speech' to say that there might be a reason to be concerned about group chats being uploaded to an unknown server, analyzed, and responded to by a chat-bot without a request from a user? Users can criticize each other's speech all the live long day and I am 100% in favor of it.
There is nothing hypocritical about being pro-1A and anti-chatbot. I mean, I guess you could make the case if you do a whole lot of stretching to say that I'm against the 'code-as-speech' of the developers who create such a system, but I can be principally opposed to such a program without also calling for its forcible decommission. To say that such a stance is hypocritical means that one can't be pro-1A and also anti-DRM or anti-weapons-targeting-software. You could stretch a bit further and call the AI a 'person' in the legal sense, but I'll still give enough of the benefit of the doubt to assume you're not making that sort of suggestion; we're still many, many steps away from Data or HAL9000 or Frankie, where legal personhood might apply.
I am against a computer system interjecting into a discussion between a defined set of individuals without the request of one or more of those individuals, primarily because such a system depends on its existence remaining in the right hands.Would you want flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, or neo-nazis in charge of deciding which inputs trigger a response, and also deciding what those responses are?
From the "free speech" advocates who go all fluttering concern when the idea of correcting false speech and alternative facts is broached.
'Making sure things are correct' isn't the problem. The concern is the implementation:
1. send text to fact checking group. 2. parse text as to whether it contains information requiring response. 3. formulate response and decide whether it needs to be sent. 4. actually send the response. 5. (probably) keep copy of text for aggregate data mining. 6 (probably) GOTO 1 until 2 = FALSE.
This is literally the infrastructure required to correct 'wrongthink'. While sure, we might agree with the immediate implementation of pointing an anti-vaxxer to an actually-scientific study, let's involve a statement using 'male' and 'female' into the mix and let the tool try to figure out whether it's referring to a person's chosen gender identity or the biological sex of a pet bird...knowing that such a response will probably cause an issue with somebody, and if it doesn't, a lack of one eventually will.
But really, the issue is the principle that one's private message threads are no longer private. Yes, at some level even nontechnical people know that Zuck keeps copies and will probably share them with the NSA with a 'pretty please', but that's very different from a system designed to read, parse, decide to respond, and then actually-respond to a message in real time. At best, it's inaccurate and as annoying as Clippy and Cortana. At worst, it's the next step in stifling free speech - the government may not be doing it, but the chilling effects will be instilled just the same.
I think the difference between the MS whose battle cry was 'Windows ain't done til Lotus won't run' and the MS of today is that there actually is that they don't corner the market on bigger lawyer diplomacy anymore.
If MS wanted to muscle in and make the PC a gaming platform where they got more revenue, all they have to do is finalize the components that make it possible to play Xbox games on a Win10 computer. Done and done. They don't *have* to disadvantage anyone else; once that's in place, Xbox games become PC games where they get a greater cut because the developer still has to pay Xbox licensing, along with XBL subscriptions for PC users.
On the flip side, breaking third party game stores will rile up other evil lawyers - EA and Activision both have one, and it's basically impossible for me to believe that these companies will pass up an opportunity to sue Microsoft for making their products unusable. I can't imagine MS wanting to invoke the wrath of either of them; there's far more money to lose in a lawsuit (even if they win) than they'll gain in sales.
It's a sad day when my faith in EA and Activision's evilness are my source of optimism.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook is going to have a pretty hard time moving forward with its own brand.
Like Windows users, Facebook users seldom use it because they like it, so much as it's just the de facto standard that everyone else uses, and the network effect is tough to overcome. Instagram and Whatsapp were good acquisitions for them because they don't (yet?) have the stigma Facebook does.
The question will be whether Facebook tries to sell their personal assistant using its own brand, or if it will attempt to leverage known data in order to stand out from Alexa and Siri. I see that as being a catch-22 though - if they do, I think many people might think it's too far. If not, there's no advantage over the more popular solutions.
I have good karma on slashdot, and because of this, I have the choice to disable ads. Maybe twitter could employ some sort of "karma" like slashdot did, and use it to enable or disable certain aspects of twitter.
The problem is that Karma on Slashdot is generally capped, and the reach of Slashdot is relatively low. It's entirely possible for me to have a similar level of karma to Wil Wheaton on Slashdot (if he's still around). Both Wil and I have had comments modded +5, the highest available. On Twitter, it would require some bizarre viral share situation for a tweet of mine to have the same number of likes and retweets that Wil gets on a bad day. I will never have the same reach as Cardi B on Twitter, but if she were to join Slashdot, we would likely reach similar levels of karma.
Twitter would be betting the farm on the sort of shift that allows for the sort of egalitarianism which Slashdot's system is intended to provide. Moreover, there's no way Twitter is allowing anyone to disable ads, except maybe if they're some sort of influencer like Katy Perry or Ellen Degeneres...and by time you get to that level, ads aren't seen by the individual because those Twitter accounts are managed by social media teams. Also, if the threshold is set to even 500 followers, that would make that option unavailable for 96% of Twitter users.
Even if somehow that problem was solved, what would be able to be changed? Besides ad removal, the addition of extra filters? Accounts that can only be followed once you have a certain amount of reach? Even if they came up with a dozen different achievements that allowed customization of the experience, wouldn't that make the issue that much worse as people on the cusp of that sort of popularity would start begging for followers to reach it, making Twitter worse for lower level users?
Slashdot has its issues, but it's clear that preventing the existence of a 0.01% of accounts and limiting the reward of groupthink has been a fundamental component from the get-go, which has helped it avoid some of the pitfalls of Reddit and other straight upvote/like ranking systems. Such a system would alienate the Twitter audience, and Twitter knows it.
I'm with you that government regulation needs to be an avenue of last resort because of how generally terrible it ends up being in practice. My go-to example is all the Parkland kids making noise about wanting gun control to feel safe, but the government regulation they got was a mandate of clear backpacks in their school. More directly related, my local municipality makes it very difficult to get permits to run cables for ISPs...little startups like Verizon would have had to pay about half a million dollars to get a *hearing* about whether they could be candidates to get the permits.
I very much understand the concern about adding regulations by groups like that...it's begging for the worst possible implementation.
The problem is that I don't see anything better. I'm a fan of the free market wherever it can work, but there comes a point where the market is too distorted to function correctly. Can we really persuade Google to act more responsibly using only free market forces at this point? Will companies be willing to migrate from G-Suite to Office365 or some on-prem solution based solely on principle? Will enough people move from Gmail to ProtonMail or similar? Will web developers be willing to eschew AMP and Fonts and Analytics and all their other things? Would advertisers be willing to freeze their Google AdWords campaigns? Even if somehow we got 30% of people to do all of this, would it be possible for Google to really see that it's being done because the court of public opinion has ruled them irresponsible, and will they change their ways accordingly?
Probably not; it would require far too many people to launch a coordinated effort while also directly telling Google what they're doing wrong, and Google would have to believe their bottom line would yield a net increase as a result of the changes; even a 30% difference might be more survivable than making their data collection truly opt-in on a mass scale.
This leaves us with government regulation, but there are still too many factions with conflicting goals. Some have issues solely with the AI ethics boards. Others are principally opposed to AI development at all. Still others have issues with their willingness to use their algorithms to limit free speech, and others still are opposed to their data mining. Meanwhile, advertisers would probably be happy with even more insight into particular user demographics, and some desire outright illegal options for ad targeting.
Put it all together and you've got a company that simply can't please everyone at once, and to invite regulation is to ask the government to pick sides on each of these issues, and many more, and then codify them into law. It sounds good, until you get laws that start to look like the DMCA, which has kept ripping DVDs illegal for decades in the process of trying to address more legitimate problems of copyright enforcement during the emerging years of the commercial internet.
Finally, even if we were to attempt government regulation anyway, we'd still be dealing with the fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem we already see with ISPs and Ajit Pai running the FCC. Even if we miraculously had a regulatory body headed by someone who understands tech well enough to be effective while also not being in Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Oracle's pockets, the next guy almost definitely will be.
Which leaves us with...what option exactly? For real, I'm open to suggestions. Self-regulating gives us these self-appointed governing bodies that can't seem to outlast a Google Beta project. Government oversight over companies as large and powerful as Google and friends are too susceptible to bigger money diplomacy, and free market is demonstrably too difficult to make happen with the amount of coordination it would require. If you have any idea how to solve this problem, by all means, I'm open to it.
I've thought about this recently, and it goes something like this: I think there are some rings which help categorize whether using Linux makes sense...
Ring 1: Development Applications.
IDEs
Text editors
Compilers
Ring 2: Server Applications.
Web Servers
Routers/Firewalls
Storage/Data Transfer
Databases
Ring 3: Lowest-Common-Denominator Desktop Applications.
Desktop Window Environments
Productivity/Office Suites
Web Browsers
Mail Clients
IM Clients
Audio/Video Players
Ring 4: High Level Desktop Applications.
Audio/Video Editing
Architecture
Finance Software
Legal Software
Medical Software
Point of Sale Software
etc....
Rings 1 and 2 are things that software developers tend to know a lot about, making it very easy to code them well. In most cases, software fitting into those categories are superior to Windows-only applications. The LAMP stack is basically the default for web hosting at this point, and plenty of software-based routers run on Linux or BSD while doing that on Windows is almost comical to suggest.
Ring 3 is pretty mature in general at this point, but it's pretty easy to need a particular function in Excel that isn't available in Calc or some such. The more complex the needs are for a particular application, the more likely the Linux equivalent is going to be a bit of a problem. Even if it can handle it, the learning curve makes it undesirable without an even bigger reason to do it.
Ring 4 is hit-or-miss. Content creation creeps along on Linux, but it's far from mature, and lots of plugins aren't available for the platform. Plenty of line-of-business software *needs* some sort of commercial support, and it's the chicken-and-egg problem that everyone runs Windows because their vendors require it, but none of the vendors make Linux software because virtually none of their clients are running Linux on the desktop. Lots of high profile use cases simply require Windows (or possibly OSX) because there's no reason to develop for what will likely be a support nightmare, and even if one vendor tries to standardize support on Ubuntu, everyone's SoL if the next vendor standardizes on CentOS.
On the dubiously-good side for Linux adoption, the everything-in-a-web-browser trend makes the number of software titles requiring support to decrease as time marches on, making it easier to switch. However, anybody arguing that it's easy to switch has clearly never worked in tier 1 tech support.
New Yorker here.
I'm a fan of the $0.05 surcharge on plastic bags. Prior to that, people would put 2-3 items in a bag, and sometimes double bag them. Now, it's far more common for bags to be filled to capacity, so an order that would have used eight bags two years ago has reduced it to three or four bags. It's also far more common to see people bringing reusable bags to the store, or even the plastic bags from their last order. The amount of these bags rolling down the road has reduced drastically; it's been over a month since I've seen one (used to be a daily occurance)
Overall, the amount of plastic bags being used has been reduced significantly, and in my mind, it's basically a solved problem. People with reusable bags have an incentive to use them, and people who opt for convenience can cover the cost of their manufacture and disposal.
I don't see how removing the choice of plastic bags is going to solve anything. New York has plenty of other issues to worry about.
Yes, they paid MONEY so their lives take priority. Because money.
Not simply "because money". It would be patently absurd to go to a restaurant and pay for a meal, only to find out that the restaurant gave the food to someone else because the restaurant felt the other person needed it more. It would be ridiculous to hire someone to clean my house, only for that person to go to someone else's house and clean it because they decided it was dirtier.
If I buy a car, I expect its safety features to keep me safe.Yes, ideally, it would absolutely keep both of us safe...but if their safety features are keeping them safe in an accident, and my safety features are also keeping them safe, then other people have decided I am more expendable than the other person.
Nobody is opting into such a system.
I paid for the car. I expect it to protect my life first.
This sounds like the standard sort of entitlement of your average car driver:
I decided to take the risk of driving a high owered lump of metal around to save a bit of time and I exect it to have consequences for other people if something goes wrong.
Well, yes. The owner is the one who paid for the car. It is a reasonable expectation that a priority be given to ensuring the safety of the owner. The second car has airbags and crumple zones and other functions which help limit the damage, because that's what they paid for.
Obviously, the underlying assumption is that overall damage be minimized, but self-preservation is expected on both sides. Though it may be "most ethical" to follow Spock's "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", there are very few people who would be in the market for a car whose directive may potentially be to allow additional injury to its own user in order to minimize injury to another user.
Google wasn't letting products launch whenever their employees called it 'done'. The level of fanfare to announcements was certainly uneven, but the net result is a bit of an oversimplification since that $40 billion is primarily from ads.
Postini already had a business model when they were acquired. So did Picasa. So did Orkut. If these weren't money makers, why did they buy them? If they were, why not let them make money? It's entirely possible for Google to have products that are pay-with-money rather than pay-with-privacy, yet they seem allergic to the possibility.
Yes, they are doing very well if the bottom line is the only line that matters. If that's the case, then 'good will' and 'customer confidence' are not directly reflected in that line, so it's of no surprise when those lines start to suffer.
Don't become too dependent on any Google product because they could yank it at any time.
Heck, Gmail has been more persistent than any other email provider I ever had.
AOL, Yahoo, Excite, Erols, Earthlink, and email.com are still running. Prodigy is defunct now, but it was around for 27 years so Gmail can take their crown in 2031.
If we're allowed to count hosting providers, 1and1, GoDaddy, Hostgator, Bluehost, InMotion, and Verio all still exist, and have all offered e-mail longer than Google has.
If universities count, MIT is where e-mail started in the 1960's, and to this day if you were a student there, you can keep your MIT e-mail address for life. Many universities have similar policies. ...so if your e-mail host didn't outlast Gmail, there were plenty that didn't. They've still got a decade to go before they start turning heads for longetivity, though.
I do like that they put things out there. They are too slow to remove the ones that don't work. I do think that they can do a better job of doing the old-school beta approach. I loved Inbox. Having to move back to Gmail in the past couple of months has been frustrating.
Herein lies the rub of Google's method of deploy-and-depreciate, in conjunction with "as little software running on the client machine as possible, with as little data remaining there as practical."
Microsoft released Windows Home Server 2011 in, well, 2011. It had all the appeal of administering an SBS2008 server, but without AD, IIS, DNS, DHCP, or...pretty much any other role of an actual-server, and only HP released machines for it with a maximum of four HDD bays, and banked on a Windows Media Player lock-in and didn't support iTunes, and it took them forever to release a System Builder version rather than relying on OEM-only distribution, and....and...ultimately was inferior in virtually every way to FreeNAS or UnRAID or a dozen other software titles for actual-enthusiasts, and its few strengths were only realized if you had a *full* MS stack at home - WMP, WMC, Xbox, Live OneCare, Windows Vista/7...which even then was basically nobody. ...but for the handful of people who had them, they got five years of support, and if they're still running, continue to perform their core functions despite being EoL. People who had them and wanted to move to an alternative platform were able to do so at their own pace, and on their own time, without a deadline looming overhead.
99 of the 148 products/services/applications on the Killed By Google site were five years old or less when discontinued, and that number is even higher if you count acquired products that Google didn't keep for five years after acquisition. Some of the products which were discontinued were notable for their corporate following; Postini and Urchin were my anecdotally-most-prolific examples.
2/3 of the things Google has killed over the years got less support than a niche-within-a-niche server release from Microsoft. There are no saints in Redmond, and MS has killed their own projects as well (Microsoft MyPhone and pretty-much-every-music-product-they-tried spring to mind), but the difference is that Google isn't very good with providing a migration path. They generally provide a means to download the raw data in a CSV or whatever, but if that CSV can't be turned back into usable data, even in the case of a paid product without the help of some software developer somewhere writing some custom code, that's not a great means of instilling confidence that the product has a future, or that it's safe to adopt and begin reliance on it.
Since the Windows 10 data collection system doesn't run on Macs, is Microsoft using Microsoft Defender as a foot in the door to get data collection installed on Macs?
I absolutely wouldn't put it past them...but the math isn't exactly bulletproof, either.
I don't know the exact requirements for sandboxing when it comes to apps in the OSX App Store, but I can't imagine Apple letting MS run free with root privileges from their walled garden without at least giving it far greater scrutiny. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's also the sort of entry that is simply incapable of flying under the radar.
If MS isn't going to go the App Store method, that creates plenty of problems. With MS trying to push its own app store on the Windows side, MS relying on sideloading isn't going to resonate with OSX users, and it won't reflect well on their own efforts to funnel software through the app store. It behooves them to play by the rules.
Next, uploading questionable samples has been standard practice for *decades*. Everyone has done it, from Symantec and McAfee to Avast and AVG. If it's suddenly a problem with MS doing it, then it's not a problem with the principle, but the actor. That's understandable to a good extent, but let's at least start from a baseline that MS performing a common industry practice *and holding to that practice under the same standards and expectations as everyone else* isn't necessarily cause for alarm.
Now, perhaps MS will be the first one to try and do mass data uploading...but it would be incredibly foolish because Apple has enough bigger lawyer diplomacy that they went up against the federal government and won. If Apple was willing to face off against the FBI on behalf of a dead terrorist, and they were willing to go against their own parts supplier, I can't imagine them giving MS a pass for exfiltrating data like that.
Even if there was a whiff of foul play, odds are good that the OSX folks would either say 'screw it', or use Sophos or Bitdefender, both of whom have free OSX antivirus applications available and aren't Microsoft.
Finally, MS can get plenty of data from OSX users. MS Office is still very popular on OSX, and defaults to saving to OneDrive on their consumer offerings. The-Office-365-that-is-hosted-Exchange, and its personal variant Outlook.com, both work on OSX both in a browser and through the Mail app. Sure, it's not the juicyness that is Safari's browsing history or Windows 10's "upload-everything-to-OneDrive persuasion"...but it is still some useful data if they were going down that road.
Maybe this is MS's trojan horse, maybe it isn't...but I'm having a bit of trouble believing Microsoft is spending so much of its time evading Apple's radar to surreptitiously upload data through the back door when they're already getting massive amounts of data through the front door.
The problem with using NAS/SAN drives is pure economics.
A lot of people who require high end workstations will be doing work on consumer OS's. With GIS, it's Windows (ArcGIS).
The GP was talking about photos and videos, not GIS datasets, so the goalposts just got shifted. To address it though, at $16,000 for the Mac in TFA, A Poweredge with plenty of storage and an Optiplex or two to access it are entirely practical alternatives.
The setup for an iSCSI over Ethernet connection requires a separate network (well it should if you're doing it properly) and If for any reason the drives are disconnected which is a problem on Windows desktop operating systems it costs a lot of money.
We're already quite far away from 'storing lots of photos and videos', and iSCSI seems like a weird protocol to implement in this context, and I really don't understand what you're getting at with respect to Windows losing access to network storage vs. another OS.
So it becomes trivial to just say "throw a bunch of SSD's in there and RAID/JBOD them, then tell the GIS analyst to move the finished work SAN/NAS after they're done" which will be much smaller than the multitudes of datasets they're working with. Any roadblocks cost huge sums of money.
Pretty much everything referenced here has very little to do with either the GP or TFA. If you're dealing with that sort of data, you're not in the market for the $16,000 iMac, you're not in the market for a Thunderbolt enclosure like the GP referenced, and apparently downtime is so expensive that you're probably better off having a server in a server room somewhere and RDPing into it, either using local storage or a SAN...which is clearly affordable giving how expensive downtime apparently is in your situation.
So in the economic sense, you'll have both because the amount of money you'll lose by being cheap isn't worth the potential savings. The simplicity of local storage is simply worth the additional cost. Given the low cost of SSD's these days, it can even be cheaper than remote storage.
In your case, no...but you weren't tacitly eyeballing a $2,000 diskless Thunderbolt enclosure, either. The use case you describe is only similar to the GP in that it involves computers and data which needs to store somewhere. ArcGIS and Lightroom clearly have vastly different requirements as to how data is stored and accessed. That's fine, but I wouldn't recommend a DIY FreeNAS or a QNAP to someone whose primary concern is downtime *and* can apparently back it up with a check big enough to make that problem go away.
To maintain a really high end gaming PC takes a lot of time and effort, more than most people are willing to invest - this service is a way to experience high-end graphics with none of the hardware pains that comes with owning and maintaining a gaming PC.
You're trying to make both sides of the argument simultaneously. The people who aren't willing to invest time and effort into a highly optimized experience are the target demographic of game consoles. It's not a dig, it's a reality - they offer a solid experience with virtually no configuration required. Many have exclusive titles and franchises that make them even more appealing to that demographic. This group is already a solved problem.
The #PCMasterRace that doesn't want to spend a massive amount of time or money can go to my local Microcenter. They can pick up a Powerspec with an 8th gen i5, 16GB RAM, and GTX1060 for $800. It's not earth shattering, but it'll play most games at a quality commensurate with what this service can provide, and again, doesn't require a massive investment of time, effort, or money.
If graphics quality is a big enough draw that the aforementioned $800 machine isn't enough, we're dealing with enthusiasts. To that end, that's where tinkering and modding starts to become a part of the experience, but if one is intent on avoiding cracking open the case, then that's where Alienware / Origin / Falcon Northwest / Sager come into play with their four figure price tags.
Streaming doesn't meaningfully address any of these better than the existing solutions. About the only market for this is one where paying $20/month which covers both hardware and games is seen as superior to a few one-off purchases. There is one, but I'd argue that it's even smaller than the enthusiast community who's willing to drop $500 on a graphics card. Really, this primarily benefits the companies behind the streaming more than it benefits the end users who play them.
I work with a lot go photo and video stuff, it's really nice to have internal storage be as large as possible to hold large projects, then when I'm done I can save them off to traditional larger external spinning discs.
Every now and then I look into faster external RAID arrays but that itself is a very expensive option and can be kind of fragile.
Having a lot of internal storage also saves you time in that you don't have to be as picky in cleaning out your system from time to time. I fought for way too long with a laptop that was always too close to the edge of available hard drive space, which was really annoying.
You're looking for a NAS. If an article regarding a $15,000 workstation is at all appealing whatsoever, then having a dedicated storage array is entirely practical for 1/4 of the price.
"But Voyager, they're expensive!"
Let's assume you're a DIY tinkerer. A quick Newegg build on a Ryzen3 with 32GB of ECC RAM, a case, and 5x4TB drives is about $1,350 soup to nuts; in RAIDz2 (RAID6), that's still 12TB of storage with two drives fault tolerance, and I only limited it to 5 because that's the maximum number of drives I could buy at a clip (the build supports three more on the case and the mobo). Do two drive orders and you can hit 24TB before you hit physical limits.
Let's assume you're not a tinkerer and basically want a thing in a box. $1,500 will get you the aforementioned 5 drives and an 8-bay QNAP.
"But network connectivity is slow!"
Add about $400 to the QNAP and $600 to the DIY build and you've got 10-gigabit connectivity, possibly a bit more if you're on a Mac and need a thunderbolt-to-10GbE adapter.
"But then I can't access my data when I'm not home!"
The $15,000 Mac won't let you do that. However, all of these systems have some form of remote access, bit it the more arcane SFTP on the DIY build, or the shiny WebUIs and dropbox-like mobile apps of QNAP and Synology.
"But Thunderbolt has lower latency!"
Possibly, but 10GbE over Fiber is pretty damn quick, especially if you do a direct connect to your machine. An 8-bay TB enclosure will cost you $2,000 before you put drives in it, and you get zero options for multi-user or remote access.
"But it's ugly!"
Both Cat6 and fiber cables support long enough runs to put the storage appliance wherever you'd like to hide it. Thunderbolt doesn't. If you're willing to go a bit higher on the DIY front, Lian Li makes some beautiful cases with a price tag to reflect them.
There are countless combinations out there; if storage is your only concern and you've got somewhere to put an 8U rack, QNAP has a rack mounted NAS with a companion storage expander that you could fill with 4TB drives, landing you with 80TB of storage (assuming 4 disk fault tolerance) and *still* spend less than this $15,000 Mac.
Mostly this, but there are a few other reasons...
1.) Internal documentation. Some people know Acrobat well enough to help others trying to do an uncommon process. Any training documents can reference a single piece of software and will be accurate for all of those people. You and I and the rest of Slashdot can probably figure out PDF Architect or PowerPDF or whatever-command-line-soup-is-required-for-Ghostscript, but there are still people in 2019 who don't know how to use Excel beyond typing things into rows and columns and are just waiting to have their minds blown by "sum", "average", and "fill down". Documentation needs to be written for these people.
2.) Preview is solid on OSX. Edge on Windows 10...not so much. Expensive as Acrobat is, it's far less expensive than replacing Windows machines in corporate environments...but I too would be thrilled to have Preview ported to Windows =).
3.) Using multiple freeware/shareware titles in succession can do the job well enough for a one-off case, but as a workflow used by several people in an office setting, the money for Acrobat quickly pays for itself.
4.) It's the ecosystem. A user might not need Photoshop, but they do need to run a Photoshop plugin. They might not need After Effects, but they need to use an AE template that involves changing the text on one composition and then rendering. They might not need everything in Acrobat, but they may need to redact.
Sometimes, this is just how stuff works. I'm still clinging to my plastic-disc release of CS6 and will never subscribe, but I also understand why the software is used as frequently as it is, in spite of the business model, not because of it.
https://www.aftershotpro.com/e...
I don't know about keeping track of files on disconnected external drives (I'd recommend moving up to a NAS anyway), but I'm pretty sure it's 95% of what you're looking for, and costs $80 once.
Or are GNU/Linux users instead expected to either A. lease a VPS on which to run NextCloud or B. pay the ISP to upgrade to a plan that allows forwarding ports and leave a PC at home turned on all the time?
Privacy comes at a cost. This shouldn't be news. That being said, while I can't speak for every ISP, the consumer ISPs in my area only block 80 and 25; 443 is open even on consumer connections. You should be able to get it working that way. If not, Nextcloud does work over a custom port; I can speak from personal experience on that one.
As for leaving a storage server at home turned on, I mean...if it's that much of an imposition, both Synology and QNAP have appliances which can handle this, and either run Nextcloud or their own first party plugins and applications which have Dropbox-like functions. If that's still too much and you're willing to put up with a performance dip, Nextcloud works on a Raspberry Pi; the DietPi distro has an auto installer for it. Or, Resilio Sync is pretty good and simply requires devices to be on at the same time to replicate data.
Or, you could simply pony up for a paid Dropbox subscription, or pick which three devices you actually-need to have syncing regularly and use the WebUI to download/upload on subsequent ones.
Or, there's Seafile, Pydio, S3/Wasabi buckets with rsync, or for the price of the higher tier Dropbox individual plan, seedboxes.cc will do a one-click install of Nextcloud with 2TB of storage *and* a VPN *and*...y'know...a seedbox.
This is a solved problem, in several ways. Don't sit there being pedantic about calling it "GNU/Linux" twice in a one-line post and then try to argue that web-based folder syncing is so hard to do that you're reliant on a free service to do it for you.
If everyone really just accepts the status quo, then streaming television would never have gotten off the ground and the cord cutters would be a very tiny minority.
Not quite the same thing. People didn't shift to streaming because of its technological superiority, they moved to it because it allowed them to watch their desired content on their own timetable, and on mobile devices without making an additional expenditure. DVRs helped bridge the gap, but streaming gave that specific experience which regular cable TV did not...and aside from a monthly fee that costs less than most value meals at McDonald's, there was virtually no tradeoff to be had.
The issues with targeted advertising are far less directly beneficial. The options aren't 'targeted ads' or 'no ads', it's ads either way and the question is whether those ads are for products from Microsoft or Maybelline, and that's purely a matter of principle - relatively few people will make even a single purchasing decision based on the presence or absence of a targeted ad system.
So, MS has had this since Windows 7...but every time it tried pulling out a failed update, it would either fail to remove (leaving the machine in an unbootable state), or pull it out, then reinstall it on the next reboot, then fail, then revert, and so on...also leaving a machine basically unusable.
This isn't what Windows 10 needs.
What Windows 10 needs is simple: security-only updates with a 10MB maximum per update, references to actual KB articles that explicitly state the exploit they mitigate, and a return to 'service packs', released annually. Want to call them 'feature updates'? fine. Support security updates on service packs N, N-1, and N-2, and allow users to permanently opt out of service packs and have manual installers available for those service packs, so users can do the major updates on their own terms.
Even the handful of people who actually care about the new features being added to Win10 are either in the Insider program (where they opt into this-might-break-stuff updates), or else they consider those new features secondary to existing functionality.
It's really that simple.
Can't believe I'm saying this, but: check your privilege.
Cash might be approaching an inflection point, but even the Boomers haven't paid with a check at retail since the Clinton administration.
Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
Because they've been doing it for years.
Look, you and I and plenty of the Slashdot crowd know how to fix our own computers and run our own servers. How many people have depended on you / the IT guy at work / the Geek Squad to keep their computers running? Most of them. To them, 'trusting someone else with their data' is, ultimately, all they've ever done. To top it off, in most cases they end up paying less and getting better services in the process. If they've been burned in one form or another over the years, that effect is even more pronounced.
You and me and the rest of the people who prefer self-hosted solutions are in the extreme minority because we see services come and services go, and we invest our time and our data into them. The Snapchat crowd sees data as transient, and backups too complicated and generally unnecessary. I mean, they'll realize in 20 years that they have no photos of their lives to show their children, but 'long term thinking' is not a favored mindset at this point in time.
With everything disposable and transient, 'everything-as-a-rental' and no concept of the value of ownership, the fact that few consumers insist on self-hosted solutions is completely unsurprising to me.
1. Sound booths in performance venues where there is already a rack mount for amplifiers.
2. Home theater installations (though to be fair that might be more Apple TV territory).
3. OSX Server was pretty damn simple to set up in its heydey; it was great for centralized management of Macs.
4. Computing clusters.
5. Some media production houses have custom desks that can fit a 2U rackmount computer in them (or at least, they did)
6. Because it's definitely more serviceable than the current soldered/glued/fused together options.
7. Because some people might prefer it for literally no reason other than that they prefer it.
Ultimately, I don't think the GP is arguing that it would be the Mac's dominant form factor. However, the lack of one shows hubris which assumes that people are willing to do workarounds in order to keep a Mac in an environment. Now, to be fair, that's at least partially deserved...but a nontrivial part of the enmity comes from the professional community who relied heavily on Macs during the 90s and 2000s when they were fit for purpose...and are quickly finding out that Tim is increasingly relegating Macs to "iOS App Compiling Devices" at the expense of basically everything else.
'Making sure things are correct' isn't the problem.
Indeed, that's why the thread I started was concerned with a different subject.
Not whatever nonsense you tried to talk about. Seriously, I cannot go figure it out.
The problem is with the people aghast at the idea of correcting false and misleading ideas to the point of absolute solipsism.
I'll be happy to spell out the sequence for you:
Article: 'Taiwanese chat-bot is enabling real-time fact checking in message groups'
You: 'Inb4 the "muh first amendment" crowd who takes exception to having to deal with actual-facts'
Me: 'The issue isn't the fact-checking, but the fact that such a technology is exactly the same as a wrongthink correction system'
You: 'I can't figure out your nonsense'
Fact checking is fine, but it's the existence of a system that allows an AI to interject when something is said which triggers a condition where such an interjection is required is concerning.
But really, the issue is the principle that one's private message threads are no longer private.
No, this is a public thread and here you are inserting whatever confused idea you think is important.
Or, I made the assumption you read the damn summary which literally says: "The technology, created by Taiwanese developers, is a step ahead of most fact-checking apps, including versions offered in Brazil and Indonesia, which don't jump into conversations."
I am not talking about this Slashdot thread. A 'conversation' a discussion between a defined group of individuals. The article mentions its use in Line, a BBM derivative like Whatsapp and Viber.
At worst, it's the next step in stifling free speech - the government may not be doing it, but the chilling effects will be instilled just the same.
Finally you get on topic.
I've been on topic.
By opposing the ability to criticize speech, you are chilling free speech yourself. Why do you get go be a hypocrite?
Even if you didn't read the summary, the HEADLINE states "know it all ROBOT". The technology at the heart of this discussion is an incrementally advanced chat-bot that deals in fact checking. How is it 'opposing the ability to criticize speech' to say that there might be a reason to be concerned about group chats being uploaded to an unknown server, analyzed, and responded to by a chat-bot without a request from a user? Users can criticize each other's speech all the live long day and I am 100% in favor of it.
There is nothing hypocritical about being pro-1A and anti-chatbot. I mean, I guess you could make the case if you do a whole lot of stretching to say that I'm against the 'code-as-speech' of the developers who create such a system, but I can be principally opposed to such a program without also calling for its forcible decommission. To say that such a stance is hypocritical means that one can't be pro-1A and also anti-DRM or anti-weapons-targeting-software. You could stretch a bit further and call the AI a 'person' in the legal sense, but I'll still give enough of the benefit of the doubt to assume you're not making that sort of suggestion; we're still many, many steps away from Data or HAL9000 or Frankie, where legal personhood might apply.
I am against a computer system interjecting into a discussion between a defined set of individuals without the request of one or more of those individuals, primarily because such a system depends on its existence remaining in the right hands.Would you want flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, or neo-nazis in charge of deciding which inputs trigger a response, and also deciding what those responses are?
From the "free speech" advocates who go all fluttering concern when the idea of correcting false speech and alternative facts is broached.
'Making sure things are correct' isn't the problem. The concern is the implementation:
1. send text to fact checking group.
2. parse text as to whether it contains information requiring response.
3. formulate response and decide whether it needs to be sent.
4. actually send the response.
5. (probably) keep copy of text for aggregate data mining.
6 (probably) GOTO 1 until 2 = FALSE.
This is literally the infrastructure required to correct 'wrongthink'. While sure, we might agree with the immediate implementation of pointing an anti-vaxxer to an actually-scientific study, let's involve a statement using 'male' and 'female' into the mix and let the tool try to figure out whether it's referring to a person's chosen gender identity or the biological sex of a pet bird...knowing that such a response will probably cause an issue with somebody, and if it doesn't, a lack of one eventually will.
But really, the issue is the principle that one's private message threads are no longer private. Yes, at some level even nontechnical people know that Zuck keeps copies and will probably share them with the NSA with a 'pretty please', but that's very different from a system designed to read, parse, decide to respond, and then actually-respond to a message in real time. At best, it's inaccurate and as annoying as Clippy and Cortana. At worst, it's the next step in stifling free speech - the government may not be doing it, but the chilling effects will be instilled just the same.
I think the difference between the MS whose battle cry was 'Windows ain't done til Lotus won't run' and the MS of today is that there actually is that they don't corner the market on bigger lawyer diplomacy anymore.
If MS wanted to muscle in and make the PC a gaming platform where they got more revenue, all they have to do is finalize the components that make it possible to play Xbox games on a Win10 computer. Done and done. They don't *have* to disadvantage anyone else; once that's in place, Xbox games become PC games where they get a greater cut because the developer still has to pay Xbox licensing, along with XBL subscriptions for PC users.
On the flip side, breaking third party game stores will rile up other evil lawyers - EA and Activision both have one, and it's basically impossible for me to believe that these companies will pass up an opportunity to sue Microsoft for making their products unusable. I can't imagine MS wanting to invoke the wrath of either of them; there's far more money to lose in a lawsuit (even if they win) than they'll gain in sales.
It's a sad day when my faith in EA and Activision's evilness are my source of optimism.