I've seen more commercials for Equifax consumer products in the last six months than I have in the last six years. Enron wasn't pitching their retirement accounts while they were under investigation and Martha Stewart wasn't taking out Super Bowl ads to pitch her new holiday pots-and-pans collection while she was under investigation.
A real investigation of Equifax would keep Equifax's name in the news in a bad way, and Equifax wouldn't be pitching their credit monitoring apps on primetime TV if their name was associated with being under investigation.
So yes, it's abundantly clear that Equifax isn't getting the probing they deserve.
I am arguing that the facts must be established, starting with the central fact...a killing occurred.
I understand what you're getting at, but you're proving his point. A death occurred. A gun caused that death. *Those* are central facts. "Killing" (in verb form) is not a legal term. Murder is. If the defendant shot an unarmed person on the street, it is a murder. If the defendant was a police officer, and the 'victim' was an active shooter in a high school, it is not murder.
Isn't it time to get some new laws on the books that recognize an individual's rights to be a superuser on their own equipment?
It should be illegal to manufacture, or offer for sale any device which has a privilege level technically feasible yet unattainable. There is literally no legitimate reason our society should allow non-rootable devices to exist. It's time for the practice to end.
"Your honor, this device was not sold to the customer. Apple retains full ownership of the device, as per the EULA he agreed to. The receipt provided is for a license to utilize the device, charged as a one-time fee."
And that's how that's done.
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree with you, but the OEM remaining the owner is the loophole used to get around this problem.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Bernie was a fantastic speaker but he had three big flaws. First, his ideas were far-left, even for the Democratic party, that really can scare off voters. Two, he was naive in the sense that he oversold how much he could get accomplished. Three, a lot of his policy was very hand-wavy, now some of that was Clinton denying him top-end advisors, but he didn't have the same policy chops.
Now Clinton was outrageously competent and was much closer policy-wise to the average voter, but she had her own flaws. Other than the email thing (which was massively overblown) she had a bad relationship with the media and she never figured out the art of coming up with a coherent campaign message. Oh, and "I'm with her" was a TERRIBLE campaign slogan.
Honestly, the one things that did give me pause about her executive abilities is how incompetent some aspects of her campaigns were.
I'll agree that Bernie's ideas were far left. Really, I think basically everyone heard "free healthcare; free college" and made their decisions based on that, either on the "we need that" side or the "we don't want to pay for that" side, but basically every discussion I had with someone about him early in the election boiled down to that message. I think Sanders' heart was ultimately in the right place, but as an example, I don't think he would have been much better dealing with North Korea than Trump, just in the polar opposite direction of his policy consisting entirely of asking nicely to cease using uranium in his missile tests, and if not that's totally fine too because we don't want to hurt his feelings.
If you have a chance to take a look at some of the archived Slashdot discussions about Hillary's e-mail server debacle, yes the news outlets took it in a ridiculous direction, but there was far more to it. First off, the fact that she individually selected e-mails for submission instead of turning over the server wholesale showed her as being 'above the law' - if you or I had an e-mail server that was the subject of an investigation, we'd never see it again. When asked if she wiped it, her response of "with a cloth?" showed either a problematic level of ignorance for someone in a position to be making policy on topics of net neutrality, cyber terrorism, right-to-repair, DMCA extensions, and whether Apple should be compelled to put a back door in iOS, or Hillary was being willfully dismissive of something that ultimately happened. Then, she has the e-mails printed and shipped, thus removing header information and other relevant data, and being obtuse about the investigation? As much as I loathe the "nothing to hide" argument, I'll give an exception for someone looking to be POTUS - it would have been in her best interest for her to hand over the server, have everyone see there was nothing there, and have that as ammo to use against the people performing the witch hunt...unless, of course, she wasn't as innocent as she claimed.
As for her bad relationship with the media, sure, some of it is playing the game , but a lot of it is self-inflicted. If you can't roll with the punches, you're only going to get airtime by people who love you and people who hate you. Hillary was never one to speak in interviews about areas where there was common ground with her opponents, except in the "we need to work together" context used by every politician, which frequently involved polarizing topics and never seemed to involve concessions to try and get even the moderates to try and get on board to get something done. This goes hand in hand with her inability to get the coherent message situation under control; most of her message was centered around identity politics. "First woman president" was an oft-touted thing that she brought to the table regardless of whether it was relevant. I would argue that this paradigm is what made the "I'm with her" slogan make sense - it was less about policy and more about identity. By extension, it made her a tough sell for those who didn't share that identity.
The point behind the currency was to be a way to transfer value without the regulations attached to fiat money. Somehow it turned into an investment strategy instead. People were buying them to take advantage of the price fluctuations. It kind of defeated the purpose behind them.
Well, yes. Those are basically the two options. The dollar has intrinsic value because I live in a country where it is how I pay taxes. There's mostly-nothing stopping me from performing my day-to-day transactions in painted rocks, but come April 15th, I'll need to pay Uncle Sam my dues in dollars, as will everyone with whom I exchange painted rocks for goods and services. The Federal Reserve, for good or for ill, decides how much a dollar is worth, so I know that exchanging my goods and services for dollars means I will likely to be able to agree with the other party in the transaction on the value of my goods and services for their dollars, and vice versa.
Without that regulation, the only thing backing up a cryptocurrency is a dude with non-cryptocurrency willing to exchange their goods and services for it. With no Federal Reserve deciding whether 1 Bitcoin was worth a mediocre indie game on Steam or a fully loaded Dell Poweredge R720 server, it was left up to the individuals trading Bitcoins for not-Bitcoins to determine what one was worth. No regulation meant no agreement on the actual value, which made it impossible to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.
When that happens, the only thing to do with them is to find someone who believes a Bitcoin is worth more to them than it is to you, and make an exchange. Rinse and repeat for enough iterations, and you've got exactly what happened - people cease to be willing to buy for more than what the owner bought it for, which in turn prevents the increase in worth. This generates instability, making it almost a gamble to be selling R720's for cryptocurrency.
tl;dr: you can't have it both ways. No regulation means there's no agreement on what a cryptocurrency is worth, making it nearly impossible to facilitate trade. Regulation means there can be stability, but the stability rests in someone making decisions who can be manipulative with those decisions. Bitcoin et al are the former. Dollars and Euros are the latter. There is no in between.
"Facebook wants to allow more people to create their own shows on Watch"
There are some incredibly talented Youtube content creators, for sure. Making long form, multi-episode stories, however, takes a LOT of people, a LOT of effort, and a LOT of resources. My buddy Rob did some work on Star Trek Phase II before Paramount got all lawyered up. They had a team of dozens of people who got together a few times a year for video shoots - lighting, staging, rigging, cameras, editors, actors, costume designers...and all of that was based on scripts written and storyboards exchanged over the internet. It was a massive undertaking for dozens of people to do 2-4 times a year, for some very dedicated fans with industry experience and a framework to build on.
If Facebook thinks they'll be able to have user-generated content of any meaningful quality and monetize it on ad revenue, they're either starting Facebook Studios and handling the production on their end with users basically submitting basic scripts and maybe starring roles, or they're grossly overselling the number of people who can put together content with any level of efficacy in their spare time.
The only obstacle to contributing to open source is not having an internet connection
I more or less get where you're going with that, but it is a bit more complex than internet vs. no internet. I have relatively quick internet and a good computer, but I'm not a very good contributor to OSS. I'm pretty technically literate, but my coding skills basically end at some basic batch/shell scripts and tweaking HTML. I simply don't have the mind to do it, and in college I got stuck in entry level classes for VB, Java, and assembler, with C++ in high school - and I hated every minute of every one of them. I would never do it optionally.
"But Voyager529, there are other ways to help! Donate to projects!" I know. I donate where I can; usually in the $10-$20 range per donation, but I do donate to at least one project a month that's provided some amount of usefulness. That's still a contribution, but requires more than an internet connection - it requires a Paypal account and money (gtfo with cryptocurrency mining as a contribution).
"We need testers and user feedback, Voyager529! That still requires nothing more than an internet connection, doesn't cost money, and you don't have to be a programmer to do it!" Not so fast. I do this for FreeNAS actually, or at least, I try to. As such, I need something to run FreeNAS *on* - it's not terribly helpful to run FreeNAS in a VM with no data to store. My 15TB NAS, a tiny little thing compared to the folks in/r/datahoarders, still cost about $900 for the initial build, though it's been a bit of a Ship-of-Thesseus situation such that only the PSU and the actual hard drives are original kit. Regardless, FreeNAS requires an actual NAS, and really if I were trying to be a hardcore tester, I'd have more than one of them so I could run nightly builds and stuff with no worry of data loss, but now we're talking about yet another investment. pfSense and other router distributions require hardware and a means to configure them as such (good luck with that for people with satellite internet or WISP connections), LAMP applications require web servers and domain knowledge of how to utilize them. A desktop Linux distribution big enough to be a daily driver is a Linux distribution big enough to not need my contributions - there are precisely zero people on the Debian mailing list who give a s!!t what I have to say, but RebornOS is a bit small for me to feel comfortable installing on my primary computer, meaning I'd need a secondary one - which of course is still additional hardware and additional expense. Even so, if I'm going to use it with any level of efficacy to be a good tester, I need to be using it at least half the time, which means I need to be able to replicate data from one machine to the other, which now adds to the complexity of how daily tasks are being performed...in summary, being a tester/feedback participant for an OSS project implies "bring your own QA environment" - which is still more than an internet connection.
"Okay fine...but you can still help with documentation! You're pretty well-written and can help spruce up documents which have not been the best-maintained...and THAT definitely requires nothing more than an internet connection, so stop whining!" True...except it's not completely true. As a technically savvy end user, the areas of documentation that generally need the most work are the areas where common problems are preempted. Even if I were given access to the documents to edit (and yes, some projects do take the Wiki approach), general usability documentation should mostly be unnecessary if a project is written even a little bit well. If it's not, then the contribution is "here's how to make this function more readily apparent for end users", which can be helpful and sometimes can be the way to implement positive changes, but it's just as common for such things to end up as "wontfix" because the UX developer knows best. FAQs and troubleshooting guides are good places to start, but they require a w
But even with open source, the average user (who is not a programmer) still has no idea what their systems are doing.
I think this is accurate to a large extent, but I'd similarly argue that licensing is less relevant to such users as well; free-as-in-beer matters more to such users than free-as-in-freedom. It's possible that Xenserver 7.2 will continue to live for quite some time; bare metal hypervisors generally need updating less often than guest OSes (well, except Hyper-V). Xenserver is, for the most part, in competition with Proxmox, the free version of ESXi, the free version of Hyper-V Server, and of late, Docker in many instances.
Now, admittedly these hypervisors are not at exact feature parity, but the reality of the situation is that most folks who are rolling out hypervisors to run VMs aren't also pouring through hundreds of megabytes of source code, meaning that at the end of the day, they have to trust someone. Whether it's a group of internet volunteers, or Citrix, or VMWare, or Microsoft, either one trusts, or one doesn't. Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but the fact that source code is available isn't itself a dealbreaker for the overwhelming majority of users.
It's data Equifax has collected from lenders and companies you did business with in the past. Should a restaurant be allowed to freeze Yelp, preventing the site from from publicizing reviews visitors have posted of that restaurant?
No, but Yelp doesn't publicly list the investors, current account balances and outstanding debts, or play a large part in whether or not they will be able to receive a small business loan. Also, Yelp hasn't exactly had a massive, high profile data breach that put millions of restaurants at risk of identity theft.
In the former case, Equifax is taking "reviews" of you that companies have given it, and sharing them with other companies. You are not the customer. You are a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about you.
Yelp is having issues of its own, but at least the information disclosed on the site is either publicly listed (business name and address, etc.), or individual anecdotes. My SSN isn't considered pubic information, but Equifax has it. If they got it from a company I do business with, they did so without my consent.
In the latter case, Yelp is taking reviews of the restaurant that visitors have given it, and sharing them with other visitors. The restaurant is not the customer. It is a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about it.
Businesses can post individual replies to dissatisfied customers on Yelp, and can do so for free, and future customers will see both. Resolving a credit dispute with Equifax requires hundreds of dollars (at least), massive amounts of paperwork, and if Equifax says "the event stands", it's not like American Express is going to take my dispute into account in the same way a good response to a bad review is ultimately left up to the customer to determine.
I agree with the other posters - Equifax should be legally compelled to comply with an individual's request to have their information deleted. If I only trust TransUnion, I should be able to choose to only let them have it. If a bank wants to take the fact that I have opted out of Equifax into account when I apply for a loan, they should either be able to charge me a premium to use TransUnion's credit report on me, or deny the loan entirely, at which point I go to another bank, rinse and repeat until either I find a bank that takes my preferred credit bureau or I cave and let Equifax start collecting data again. That is how the free market is supposed to work, but defending Equifax's use of information without recourse is far from a desirable situation for consumers and evidence that the industry is not self policing.
Good thing ebay listened to all those genius analysts back in 2015 when they told them to spin off paypal for $50B. If they hadn't listened, and kept hold of paypal instead they'd be able to spin it off today for $100B. Who would ever have wanted to double the value of something you're holding over a 3 year timespan?/sarcasm
Those analysts knew eBay wouldn't be able to get a hundred bil for Paypal - they don't even use blockchain!
Look, I'm on board with everyone else who believes that Win7 was the last truly good release of Windows. Similarly, I can understand Microsoft not supporting an OS that's going to have less than a year left of extended support upon release day. Not in favor of it, mind you, but it at least makes sense.
Windows 8.1's extended support is in effect until 2023, by which point there will be another Office waterfall release (unless it's subscription-only by that point). Not supporting an OS whose lifecycle indicates the existence of support in excess of the three year Office release cadence is far different than not supporting Win7; even Office 2010 ran on XP even though XP had less time left than 8.1 will have after the 2019 release. It's clear that this is adoption pressure rather than support pragmatism.
When contrasted with Windows 10's biggest gripes, 8.1 isn't that bad in comparison. Sure, the Start screen sucks and the 'charms' menu is stupid, but Classic Shell fixes both of those things effectively and permanently. The Pro version of Win 8.1 ships with full-blown Hyper-V, Edge doesn't constantly hijack PDF associations, Store apps don't randomly download without permission or intent, and it's possible to control update reboots and decline said updates entirely. The new task manager is helpful, Cortana is thankfully absent, and pretty much all of the appy-apps are removable. I hate to say it, but I'm keeping my Win8.1 key around depending on how bad Win10 gets (and it's almost there for me, held back only by W10 Privacy and a few other similar utilities).
Really, the big question is what new features MS is going to be adding to 2019 over 2016 that makes it genuinely worthwhile. Basically the only features that seem to have gotten improvement have been the ones involving Office365 integration, with everything else remaining more or less stagnant for some time. If they're going to use Office 2019 as leverage to pressure the Win7/Win8 people, it's going to have to have something pretty spectacular. Office has been mature since 2003 (though there have been a handful of useful improvements in Excel and Outlook in 2007 and 2010), LibreOffice has made solid improvements to the point where it's basically just lacking the Office ecosystem and a mail client, and G-Suite is quickly becoming the preferred browser-based office suite for the 'good enough' crowd and its massive base in education is not improving MS's standing. Office is no longer the undisputed productivity suite it once was.
An "only works on an OS we're not going to" is a sales pitch that may well encourage users to skip, or finally look for alternatives. Then again, the real question is when Nadella is going to be either bold or desperate enough to turn Windows into a subscription service.
A few searches leads me to believe that Dell, Lenovo, and LG have all put out devices with Wacom stylus technology. I wonder what this "universal stylus" technology will be based on? I wonder whose patents it will depend on?
Notably left out of your list are Fujitsu, who basically owns the tablet market in the medical field, where swivel-tablets with keyboards and Windows 7 still reign supreme, and Samsung, who use Wacom styli in their Galaxy Note series of phones and tablets.
To answer your question though...Wacom's, hopefully.
Look, I'm all about having competition, but this strikes me as one of those areas where the need for competition is not nearly as bad as others. Even though Wacom seems to license out to basically-everyone, Microsoft bought out N-Trig, and the Apple pencil is basically in-house. Wacom has its issues, but their seeming willingness to license to basically-everyone and driver stacks available for all the major platform as a result of that licensing seems to make them the natural choice.
I mean, if Google REALLY wanted to, they could probably buy Wacom in cash and incorporate the patents directly, end of story. However, with the other two major players being owned by direct competitors, I don't see how that's going to play out well. Really, if Google does this, then the sad reality is that we lose the abstraction layer that allows something like Wacom to be cross-platform, and with everyone having their own stylus digitizer technology, it's basically going to be an extension of the vertical market and little else. With all the patent land mines owned by the three of them, it'll be near impossible for a fourth company to rise until they expire.
Consider the difference in timing, both technically and societally. IRC gave you your first foray into tech support. You were amongst the sort of people who used technology in the late 80's and early 90's, back when distrust on the internet was the default. It was a great time to use the internet. Both IRC and DALnet were not dependent on a multibillion dollar company to access, and while those rooms may have been moderated, they were not curated. You had an e-mail account...where the spam filter was likely between your ears.
You saw the worst of the worst and identified it as such because you knew there wasn't a filter and it was your responsibility to act accordingly. Facebook Kids gives the parents the assumption that Facebook is doing some amount of curating, which means that everyone up the child's chain of trust says "it must be okay".
When you were an adolescent, there were no watchmen. Now, there are watchmen, and someone needs to watch the watchmen. And that is the difference.
First off, I submit that BSD is finding its home in appliances. FreeNAS and pfSense are both fairly popular, and both BSD based. Commercially, the Nintendo Switch is based on BSD, and Cisco, McAffee, and Juniper all have appliances using BSD at their core. Also, as others have pointed out, OSX.
That said, there are so many copy/paste tutorials for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian. With BSD lagging behind severely, for every person who prefers BSD and can successfully use it to do what they need, there are five more less-technical users who are able to fall into the pit of success with a Bitnami or Turnkey Linux distribution.
BSD may well be superior for certain tasks, especially networking, but the fact of the matter is that expecting BSD to simultaneously be competitive in the numbers game against Linux when Linux has an ecosystem which BSD lacks. That ecosystem encourages users looking to get something done to use that product, rather than adhere to principles which otherwise have little effect on them. I know systemd is hated in these parts, almost universally, but if I need to spin up a Wordpress instance, it takes me ten minutes to grab Turnkey Linux and start addding my content, rather than the half hour or more it would take to spin up BSD, manually install an AMP stack, figure out the BSD equivalent of/var/www, Google all the MySQL commands to create the database at the CLI since I don't have Adminer or phpMyAdmin to do it, and then add Wordpress. As a non-developer and non-distributor, the BSD vs. GPL vs. MIT license situation affects me very little, so the fact that both Debian and BSD are free-as-in-beer means that they compete on how much of my time they take to spin up.
This is why I use pfSense and FreeNAS. It's also why most of my appliances are Turnkey Linux based.
As for the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis flared up and down so fast, the Bulletin did not have time to react by moving the clock. It was like 23:59:59.750+0000, but they couldn't get together and debate it fast enough for the clock to actually reflect that.
You aren't kidding. At one point in 1962, the Russian submarine B-59, armed with nuclear torpedoes and part of a flotilla in the Atlantic near Cuba, was discovered and surrounded by American vessels. All three commanding officers had to agree to fire those nukes, and two of the three aboard were ready to go. Vasili Arkhipov was the only officer to disagree, preventing them from being launched. Literally, that one guy not being trigger happy prevented nuclear war in 1962...and Russia wasn't exactly thankful for his heroism.
If the Doomsday Clock is arguing that the current state of affairs puts us that close to total annihilation, either someone lost perspective by equating mean Tweets and the existence of SUVs to a powder keg standoff between two superpowers with armed and active nukes, someone didn't read their history books and never saw Fail Safe, or someone knows something we don't.
*I was amazed to see that Word Perfect is still lumbering along. I had no idea. Also Word Perfect supplanted things like Wordstar (of which I also have fond memories of running under CP/M)
WordPerfect is still in existence because they got bought out a few times and ultimately ended up at Corel, a company I affectionately call "the software retirement home". With titles like WinZip, WinDVD, CorelDraw, Paint Shop Pro, and WordPerfect (which itself contains Paradox), it seems as though the company's plan is to play law-of-large-numbers on acquisitions of software titles which were de facto standards in their day. But I digress.
WordPerfect survives primarily because they have a solid niche in law firms. Legal documents depend heavily on the "Reveal Codes" functionality, which is kinda-sorta like a middle-of-the-road between WYSIWYG editing and LaTeX, which allows for consistent document formatting without either the weirdness of Word rearranging everything when you move an image one pixel to the left, or the learning curve of LaTeX for those who "only know Word". Reveal Codes begat document libraries (keeping in mind that law firms also notoriously keep everything forever), and templates, and plugins, and enough of a cottage industry around a highly profitable sector that has enabled it to avoid utter irrelevance.
All of that being said, I completely agree with your assessment that no program is beyond being dethroned. Oracle used to be the platform for databases (unless you were using IBM or small enough to use Access or Paradox), but newer databases commonly end up being designed in MariaDB or Postgres; even MS SQL Server has more favorable licensing. MS Office is still the standard, but GDocs is making inroads, especially in the education market. Good ol' Internet Explorer was the standard until Firefox chipped away at a solid clip, themselves supplanted by Chrome for many. Adobe themselves supplanted Quark with Indesign, and didn't take long to do so. Software comes and software goes, and while Adobe's decline will be incredibly gradual, it's far from impossible.
Gotta start that tracking and data collection as early as possible.
I know the Microsoft haterade is abundant in these parts, but at this point, MS is playing catch-up. Apple had a hold in the educational markets in the late 80s and early 90's, then MS ate their lunch with virtually free licensing for schools with commodity hardware. Now, Google is all educationally trendy since they give away G-Suite Apps for Business or whatever the hell they call it, and a palette of Chromebooks are a whole lot cheaper than a palette of Optiplex workstations with the added bonus of being far simpler to lock down manage than Windows. Schools have been tripping over themselves to migrate to the Google ecosystem.
This leaves us with the same quandary we had when Microsoft owned the education market: why are we teaching products rather than principles? Students should be learning E-mail, not Gmail or Outlook. They should be learning Word Processing, not Word or GDocs. Basic HTML coding wouldn't be the worst thing either, especially since the basics can be taught for $0 in any text editor...but I digress.
The real issue is that no matter who is in the classroom, the lesson being taught at this point is "okayness with analytics", and "okayness with lockdown". It's safe in the walled garden, and whether it's Apple's, Google's, or Microsoft's, it is this lesson that worries me the most.
Let's assume for a moment we had a rousing speech from the ghost of John F. Kennedy saying that this community should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of creating an open processor, and installing it safely in a computer. And Jeff Bezos thought it was a good idea and committed to writing a blank check to make it happen.
And enough of the the few thousand people in the world who can ground-up design a processor have willingly donated their time to the effort, and have made a perfect, error-free processor with very little physical testing, and one or two of the few-dozen-at-best CPU fab plants in the world have committed their time to retool their assembly lines to decrease the output of Intel and AMD and ARM and Qualcomm chips to make a few hundred thousand of this OpenProc. Also, we're assuming that all of this is done such that there are zero patent infringements from the existing guys, and thus at no point are there any lawsuits from Intel or AMD.
We're already comfortably in 'not happening' territory, but let's keep going.
These CPUs need to fit into motherboards somewhere, right? I mean, the implication here is that we're looking for desktop and server chips. They're not going to work in standard Intel or AMD sockets, I'm assuming...so on the heels of designing an open processor, we need an open motherboard to fit it (which again, avoids any and all litigation as it's being designed). Somewhere in that process, we also end up with an OpenNIC and an OpenSoundBlaster and OpenSATA and FreeUSB and FreePCIe et al. Also, someone codes a ground-up open UEFI or BIOS or something that interacts with all of this hardware properly and without issue or conflict, because any issue faced in this scenario becomes the biggest possible nightmare to test. Also, Foxconn agrees to produce this MagicMobo alongside standard, more profitable units.
Now, we've got all that hardware and can get to a boot device. What are we booting? Linux successfully compiled for this barely tested hardware using a compiler that assumes all the specs are, in fact, working as intended? Okay, great! now let's get some more software on it, because a full Linux distro, even something as relatively-simple as DSL or Puppy is going to require all of its software to be recompiled, so it's yet another race to start porting over applications, with some applications never leaving x86 due to a lack of developer interest.
Everyone, everywhere, ever, has willingly done their part to support this new architecture. Now, to convince people to use it. Who, exactly, would that be? Some software developers and hobbyists, I mean sure, but then who? End users, even tech savvy ones, are going to be wary of an architecture where the best case scenario is a subset of standard Linux software, to say nothing about the countless Windows and OSX titles, niche hardware, and lack of laptop iterations.
Maybe if it were heavily optimized for database loads it might have a bit of a niche there, but now you have to have someone's name on it. Who is going to be the OEM to sell these machines? Companies aren't buying motherboards and rackmount cases to start using these as servers; Dell or HP or Lenovo will have to get on board, which is rough when Intel has been their poison of choice for so long.
So, in summary, even if everyone volunteers everything they need at every step of the way, what is the expectation? A niche market at best, which will always be treated as a second class citizen, and whose selling point is the great sacrifice made to bring it into existence.
I've been hoping for something like this for quite some time. Virally shared videos and news articles have their place, but the primary thing keeping me on Facebook is interacting with people. For every original post, I see a dozen random shared articles from the same two dozen people, and end up missing things I actually care about.
Really, I would love Facebook to allow me to very directly configure what I see, because the options are so limited - if I didn't 'subscribe' to certain people, I'd never see them. I can't prioritize original posts, or text-only posts, or images over videos...all of which should absolutely be available. This is at least a start. I'll take it.
Didn't OnLive and Sony both try streamed games, to no real success? What happened?
I think someone else on the thread called it - this is different because neither OnLive nor Sony could overcome the cost/hardware investment. Both companies tried to sell gaming, and only gaming. It's possible to do this with AWS because other components more readily subdivide. As a simple example, an 8TB drive can be sold to 8 people in 1TB slices, all of whom can use it at the same time and be generally-okay with performance. GPUs don't subdivide nearly as well, meaning there basically needs to be a 1:1 ratio between cards and subscribers. It's difficult to oversubscribe into profitability, just as much as it's difficult to make a decent profit off hardware that's sitting idle for 16 hours a day.
But that's probably not what nVidia is doing.
nVidia is, in all probability, making some sort of GPU specific variant of AWS or GCC. Gamers want to game for 90 minutes that day? Great, let them use the card for 90 minutes and then use the other 22.5 hours of the card to rent out as GPU time to Bitcoin miners or weather forecasters or machine learning algorithms, or whatever other task people are willing to pay to rent time to process. This way, heavy gaming days = lower general use, and lighter gaming days = heavier general use.
Wi-Fi's shorter range isn't necessarily a bug; it's usually a feature. Go to a high rise apartment building and *try* to use 2.4ghz Wi-Fi. Good luck with that. There's literally a hundred routers in range, all trying to talk over each other. 5ghz is at least somewhat better, half because of the higher channel quantity, but half because of the shorter range and reduced wall penetration. If wimax took off at a consumer level, it would be great for rural areas, but suburban and urban areas would find it useless.
"10Mbps allows two simultaneous HD streams, or one HD stream plus plenty of headroom for other normal activities"
And how often do you think you'll actually get 10Mbps, especially as the FCC continues to weaken itself for the benefit of ISPs?
I think that was the point the GP was making. Between "up to 25mbits/sec down" that never, ever is, and "10Mbits/sec down, a minimum of 98% uptime, with no more than 10% oversubscription", and have it enforced, the latter would be preferable.
Disclaimer, not an Xbox person (#PCMasterRace), but the hate is pretty easy to explain.
Mass Effect 3, even ending notwithstanding, had a rather notable response on a number of fronts. A whole lot of them had to do with the time constraints, difficult to achieve under normal circumstances, but far harder when EA and Microsoft were telling them they needed to add trendy stuff too, it took away development time from things that really could have used more development efforts. One of the things that fell squarely into this category was the Kinect integration - they even had a nifty promo video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?....
But let's focus on the Kinect aspects specifically. It boiled down to a number of voice commands to issue orders to squadmates and change weapons and similar functions that were otherwise performed through menu options. This sort of thing screamed 'forced mechanic' since the delay could be a problem during combat, but it gets even worse when we think through it a bit more. That sort of functionality could be readily accomplished with any Bluetooth headset, and would have allowed voice commands to be present on the PC, too. Plenty of gamers have such headsets for multiplayer, and 100% of the functionality the Kinect provides could be done just as well with non-Kinect hardware...but in order for those options to be available, the Kinect must be used. I'm still dealing with the damn Starchild in 2018 because a game that didn't need Kinect was forced to add it in a way that only needed Kinect to satisfy the requirement from Microsoft in 2012.
That's just one example of a game for which Kinect usage was a lateral move at best, and detrimental to the game as a whole at worst.
Now, I think there are games that lend themselves to the Kinect control paradigm. Others in this thread have excellent examples, from "the floor is lava" to dancing games to sports titles. It's a good mechanism that readily competes with the Wii remote and the Playstation Move controllers, exceeding them in a number of cases. However, the hate ultimately comes not from the demographic of those games, but the demographic of games which lend themselves to standard controllers. When those players were 'heavily incentivized' to use the Kinect for reasons of dubious benefit to the games being played, that is the source of the hate.
Not following your logic here. Unless you stretch the definitions to count some of the custom code that powers Gmail or whatever, Google isn't in the business of making creative works for consumption. Really, Google would make more money if Zootopia could be uploaded to Youtube by Joe Sixpack and Google could monetize it. These copyright detection algorithms exist because the MPAA and friends require it as a concession to prevent Bigger Lawyer Diplomacy, since the copyright holders understandably aren't too keen on that particular situation. Ultimately, no matter how you slice it, the only competitive advantage is "Google can address copyright claims more effectively than competitors", but since it their customers are advertisers rather than either the uploaders or the copyright holders, and the advertisers get more revenue from more popular uploads, I'd argue that it's a pretty big stretch to call their detection algorithms a competitive advantage in the classical sense of the term.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen more commercials for Equifax consumer products in the last six months than I have in the last six years. Enron wasn't pitching their retirement accounts while they were under investigation and Martha Stewart wasn't taking out Super Bowl ads to pitch her new holiday pots-and-pans collection while she was under investigation.
A real investigation of Equifax would keep Equifax's name in the news in a bad way, and Equifax wouldn't be pitching their credit monitoring apps on primetime TV if their name was associated with being under investigation.
So yes, it's abundantly clear that Equifax isn't getting the probing they deserve.
That is irrelevant to the question.
I am arguing that the facts must be established, starting with the central fact...a killing occurred.
I understand what you're getting at, but you're proving his point. A death occurred. A gun caused that death. *Those* are central facts. "Killing" (in verb form) is not a legal term. Murder is. If the defendant shot an unarmed person on the street, it is a murder. If the defendant was a police officer, and the 'victim' was an active shooter in a high school, it is not murder.
Isn't it time to get some new laws on the books that recognize an individual's rights to be a superuser on their own equipment?
It should be illegal to manufacture, or offer for sale any device which has a privilege level technically feasible yet unattainable. There is literally no legitimate reason our society should allow non-rootable devices to exist. It's time for the practice to end.
"Your honor, this device was not sold to the customer. Apple retains full ownership of the device, as per the EULA he agreed to. The receipt provided is for a license to utilize the device, charged as a one-time fee."
And that's how that's done.
Don't get me wrong, I fully agree with you, but the OEM remaining the owner is the loophole used to get around this problem.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Bernie was a fantastic speaker but he had three big flaws. First, his ideas were far-left, even for the Democratic party, that really can scare off voters. Two, he was naive in the sense that he oversold how much he could get accomplished. Three, a lot of his policy was very hand-wavy, now some of that was Clinton denying him top-end advisors, but he didn't have the same policy chops.
Now Clinton was outrageously competent and was much closer policy-wise to the average voter, but she had her own flaws. Other than the email thing (which was massively overblown) she had a bad relationship with the media and she never figured out the art of coming up with a coherent campaign message. Oh, and "I'm with her" was a TERRIBLE campaign slogan.
Honestly, the one things that did give me pause about her executive abilities is how incompetent some aspects of her campaigns were.
I'll agree that Bernie's ideas were far left. Really, I think basically everyone heard "free healthcare; free college" and made their decisions based on that, either on the "we need that" side or the "we don't want to pay for that" side, but basically every discussion I had with someone about him early in the election boiled down to that message. I think Sanders' heart was ultimately in the right place, but as an example, I don't think he would have been much better dealing with North Korea than Trump, just in the polar opposite direction of his policy consisting entirely of asking nicely to cease using uranium in his missile tests, and if not that's totally fine too because we don't want to hurt his feelings.
If you have a chance to take a look at some of the archived Slashdot discussions about Hillary's e-mail server debacle, yes the news outlets took it in a ridiculous direction, but there was far more to it. First off, the fact that she individually selected e-mails for submission instead of turning over the server wholesale showed her as being 'above the law' - if you or I had an e-mail server that was the subject of an investigation, we'd never see it again. When asked if she wiped it, her response of "with a cloth?" showed either a problematic level of ignorance for someone in a position to be making policy on topics of net neutrality, cyber terrorism, right-to-repair, DMCA extensions, and whether Apple should be compelled to put a back door in iOS, or Hillary was being willfully dismissive of something that ultimately happened. Then, she has the e-mails printed and shipped, thus removing header information and other relevant data, and being obtuse about the investigation? As much as I loathe the "nothing to hide" argument, I'll give an exception for someone looking to be POTUS - it would have been in her best interest for her to hand over the server, have everyone see there was nothing there, and have that as ammo to use against the people performing the witch hunt...unless, of course, she wasn't as innocent as she claimed.
As for her bad relationship with the media, sure, some of it is playing the game , but a lot of it is self-inflicted. If you can't roll with the punches, you're only going to get airtime by people who love you and people who hate you. Hillary was never one to speak in interviews about areas where there was common ground with her opponents, except in the "we need to work together" context used by every politician, which frequently involved polarizing topics and never seemed to involve concessions to try and get even the moderates to try and get on board to get something done. This goes hand in hand with her inability to get the coherent message situation under control; most of her message was centered around identity politics. "First woman president" was an oft-touted thing that she brought to the table regardless of whether it was relevant. I would argue that this paradigm is what made the "I'm with her" slogan make sense - it was less about policy and more about identity. By extension, it made her a tough sell for those who didn't share that identity.
The point behind the currency was to be a way to transfer value without the regulations attached to fiat money. Somehow it turned into an investment strategy instead. People were buying them to take advantage of the price fluctuations. It kind of defeated the purpose behind them.
Well, yes. Those are basically the two options. The dollar has intrinsic value because I live in a country where it is how I pay taxes. There's mostly-nothing stopping me from performing my day-to-day transactions in painted rocks, but come April 15th, I'll need to pay Uncle Sam my dues in dollars, as will everyone with whom I exchange painted rocks for goods and services. The Federal Reserve, for good or for ill, decides how much a dollar is worth, so I know that exchanging my goods and services for dollars means I will likely to be able to agree with the other party in the transaction on the value of my goods and services for their dollars, and vice versa.
Without that regulation, the only thing backing up a cryptocurrency is a dude with non-cryptocurrency willing to exchange their goods and services for it. With no Federal Reserve deciding whether 1 Bitcoin was worth a mediocre indie game on Steam or a fully loaded Dell Poweredge R720 server, it was left up to the individuals trading Bitcoins for not-Bitcoins to determine what one was worth. No regulation meant no agreement on the actual value, which made it impossible to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.
When that happens, the only thing to do with them is to find someone who believes a Bitcoin is worth more to them than it is to you, and make an exchange. Rinse and repeat for enough iterations, and you've got exactly what happened - people cease to be willing to buy for more than what the owner bought it for, which in turn prevents the increase in worth. This generates instability, making it almost a gamble to be selling R720's for cryptocurrency.
tl;dr: you can't have it both ways. No regulation means there's no agreement on what a cryptocurrency is worth, making it nearly impossible to facilitate trade. Regulation means there can be stability, but the stability rests in someone making decisions who can be manipulative with those decisions. Bitcoin et al are the former. Dollars and Euros are the latter. There is no in between.
"Facebook wants to allow more people to create their own shows on Watch"
There are some incredibly talented Youtube content creators, for sure. Making long form, multi-episode stories, however, takes a LOT of people, a LOT of effort, and a LOT of resources. My buddy Rob did some work on Star Trek Phase II before Paramount got all lawyered up. They had a team of dozens of people who got together a few times a year for video shoots - lighting, staging, rigging, cameras, editors, actors, costume designers...and all of that was based on scripts written and storyboards exchanged over the internet. It was a massive undertaking for dozens of people to do 2-4 times a year, for some very dedicated fans with industry experience and a framework to build on.
If Facebook thinks they'll be able to have user-generated content of any meaningful quality and monetize it on ad revenue, they're either starting Facebook Studios and handling the production on their end with users basically submitting basic scripts and maybe starring roles, or they're grossly overselling the number of people who can put together content with any level of efficacy in their spare time.
The only obstacle to contributing to open source is not having an internet connection
I more or less get where you're going with that, but it is a bit more complex than internet vs. no internet. I have relatively quick internet and a good computer, but I'm not a very good contributor to OSS. I'm pretty technically literate, but my coding skills basically end at some basic batch/shell scripts and tweaking HTML. I simply don't have the mind to do it, and in college I got stuck in entry level classes for VB, Java, and assembler, with C++ in high school - and I hated every minute of every one of them. I would never do it optionally.
"But Voyager529, there are other ways to help! Donate to projects!" I know. I donate where I can; usually in the $10-$20 range per donation, but I do donate to at least one project a month that's provided some amount of usefulness. That's still a contribution, but requires more than an internet connection - it requires a Paypal account and money (gtfo with cryptocurrency mining as a contribution).
"We need testers and user feedback, Voyager529! That still requires nothing more than an internet connection, doesn't cost money, and you don't have to be a programmer to do it!" Not so fast. I do this for FreeNAS actually, or at least, I try to. As such, I need something to run FreeNAS *on* - it's not terribly helpful to run FreeNAS in a VM with no data to store. My 15TB NAS, a tiny little thing compared to the folks in /r/datahoarders, still cost about $900 for the initial build, though it's been a bit of a Ship-of-Thesseus situation such that only the PSU and the actual hard drives are original kit. Regardless, FreeNAS requires an actual NAS, and really if I were trying to be a hardcore tester, I'd have more than one of them so I could run nightly builds and stuff with no worry of data loss, but now we're talking about yet another investment. pfSense and other router distributions require hardware and a means to configure them as such (good luck with that for people with satellite internet or WISP connections), LAMP applications require web servers and domain knowledge of how to utilize them.
A desktop Linux distribution big enough to be a daily driver is a Linux distribution big enough to not need my contributions - there are precisely zero people on the Debian mailing list who give a s!!t what I have to say, but RebornOS is a bit small for me to feel comfortable installing on my primary computer, meaning I'd need a secondary one - which of course is still additional hardware and additional expense. Even so, if I'm going to use it with any level of efficacy to be a good tester, I need to be using it at least half the time, which means I need to be able to replicate data from one machine to the other, which now adds to the complexity of how daily tasks are being performed...in summary, being a tester/feedback participant for an OSS project implies "bring your own QA environment" - which is still more than an internet connection.
"Okay fine...but you can still help with documentation! You're pretty well-written and can help spruce up documents which have not been the best-maintained...and THAT definitely requires nothing more than an internet connection, so stop whining!" True...except it's not completely true. As a technically savvy end user, the areas of documentation that generally need the most work are the areas where common problems are preempted. Even if I were given access to the documents to edit (and yes, some projects do take the Wiki approach), general usability documentation should mostly be unnecessary if a project is written even a little bit well. If it's not, then the contribution is "here's how to make this function more readily apparent for end users", which can be helpful and sometimes can be the way to implement positive changes, but it's just as common for such things to end up as "wontfix" because the UX developer knows best. FAQs and troubleshooting guides are good places to start, but they require a w
But even with open source, the average user (who is not a programmer) still has no idea what their systems are doing.
I think this is accurate to a large extent, but I'd similarly argue that licensing is less relevant to such users as well; free-as-in-beer matters more to such users than free-as-in-freedom. It's possible that Xenserver 7.2 will continue to live for quite some time; bare metal hypervisors generally need updating less often than guest OSes (well, except Hyper-V). Xenserver is, for the most part, in competition with Proxmox, the free version of ESXi, the free version of Hyper-V Server, and of late, Docker in many instances.
Now, admittedly these hypervisors are not at exact feature parity, but the reality of the situation is that most folks who are rolling out hypervisors to run VMs aren't also pouring through hundreds of megabytes of source code, meaning that at the end of the day, they have to trust someone. Whether it's a group of internet volunteers, or Citrix, or VMWare, or Microsoft, either one trusts, or one doesn't. Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but the fact that source code is available isn't itself a dealbreaker for the overwhelming majority of users.
It's data Equifax has collected from lenders and companies you did business with in the past. Should a restaurant be allowed to freeze Yelp, preventing the site from from publicizing reviews visitors have posted of that restaurant?
No, but Yelp doesn't publicly list the investors, current account balances and outstanding debts, or play a large part in whether or not they will be able to receive a small business loan. Also, Yelp hasn't exactly had a massive, high profile data breach that put millions of restaurants at risk of identity theft.
In the former case, Equifax is taking "reviews" of you that companies have given it, and sharing them with other companies. You are not the customer. You are a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about you.
Yelp is having issues of its own, but at least the information disclosed on the site is either publicly listed (business name and address, etc.), or individual anecdotes. My SSN isn't considered pubic information, but Equifax has it. If they got it from a company I do business with, they did so without my consent.
In the latter case, Yelp is taking reviews of the restaurant that visitors have given it, and sharing them with other visitors. The restaurant is not the customer. It is a third party to the transaction, even though the reviews are about it.
Businesses can post individual replies to dissatisfied customers on Yelp, and can do so for free, and future customers will see both. Resolving a credit dispute with Equifax requires hundreds of dollars (at least), massive amounts of paperwork, and if Equifax says "the event stands", it's not like American Express is going to take my dispute into account in the same way a good response to a bad review is ultimately left up to the customer to determine.
I agree with the other posters - Equifax should be legally compelled to comply with an individual's request to have their information deleted. If I only trust TransUnion, I should be able to choose to only let them have it. If a bank wants to take the fact that I have opted out of Equifax into account when I apply for a loan, they should either be able to charge me a premium to use TransUnion's credit report on me, or deny the loan entirely, at which point I go to another bank, rinse and repeat until either I find a bank that takes my preferred credit bureau or I cave and let Equifax start collecting data again. That is how the free market is supposed to work, but defending Equifax's use of information without recourse is far from a desirable situation for consumers and evidence that the industry is not self policing.
Good thing ebay listened to all those genius analysts back in 2015 when they told them to spin off paypal for $50B. If they hadn't listened, and kept hold of paypal instead they'd be able to spin it off today for $100B. Who would ever have wanted to double the value of something you're holding over a 3 year timespan? /sarcasm
Those analysts knew eBay wouldn't be able to get a hundred bil for Paypal - they don't even use blockchain!
Look, I'm on board with everyone else who believes that Win7 was the last truly good release of Windows. Similarly, I can understand Microsoft not supporting an OS that's going to have less than a year left of extended support upon release day. Not in favor of it, mind you, but it at least makes sense.
Windows 8.1's extended support is in effect until 2023, by which point there will be another Office waterfall release (unless it's subscription-only by that point). Not supporting an OS whose lifecycle indicates the existence of support in excess of the three year Office release cadence is far different than not supporting Win7; even Office 2010 ran on XP even though XP had less time left than 8.1 will have after the 2019 release. It's clear that this is adoption pressure rather than support pragmatism.
When contrasted with Windows 10's biggest gripes, 8.1 isn't that bad in comparison. Sure, the Start screen sucks and the 'charms' menu is stupid, but Classic Shell fixes both of those things effectively and permanently. The Pro version of Win 8.1 ships with full-blown Hyper-V, Edge doesn't constantly hijack PDF associations, Store apps don't randomly download without permission or intent, and it's possible to control update reboots and decline said updates entirely. The new task manager is helpful, Cortana is thankfully absent, and pretty much all of the appy-apps are removable. I hate to say it, but I'm keeping my Win8.1 key around depending on how bad Win10 gets (and it's almost there for me, held back only by W10 Privacy and a few other similar utilities).
Really, the big question is what new features MS is going to be adding to 2019 over 2016 that makes it genuinely worthwhile. Basically the only features that seem to have gotten improvement have been the ones involving Office365 integration, with everything else remaining more or less stagnant for some time. If they're going to use Office 2019 as leverage to pressure the Win7/Win8 people, it's going to have to have something pretty spectacular. Office has been mature since 2003 (though there have been a handful of useful improvements in Excel and Outlook in 2007 and 2010), LibreOffice has made solid improvements to the point where it's basically just lacking the Office ecosystem and a mail client, and G-Suite is quickly becoming the preferred browser-based office suite for the 'good enough' crowd and its massive base in education is not improving MS's standing. Office is no longer the undisputed productivity suite it once was.
An "only works on an OS we're not going to" is a sales pitch that may well encourage users to skip, or finally look for alternatives. Then again, the real question is when Nadella is going to be either bold or desperate enough to turn Windows into a subscription service.
A few searches leads me to believe that Dell, Lenovo, and LG have all put out devices with Wacom stylus technology. I wonder what this "universal stylus" technology will be based on? I wonder whose patents it will depend on?
Notably left out of your list are Fujitsu, who basically owns the tablet market in the medical field, where swivel-tablets with keyboards and Windows 7 still reign supreme, and Samsung, who use Wacom styli in their Galaxy Note series of phones and tablets.
To answer your question though...Wacom's, hopefully.
Look, I'm all about having competition, but this strikes me as one of those areas where the need for competition is not nearly as bad as others. Even though Wacom seems to license out to basically-everyone, Microsoft bought out N-Trig, and the Apple pencil is basically in-house. Wacom has its issues, but their seeming willingness to license to basically-everyone and driver stacks available for all the major platform as a result of that licensing seems to make them the natural choice.
I mean, if Google REALLY wanted to, they could probably buy Wacom in cash and incorporate the patents directly, end of story. However, with the other two major players being owned by direct competitors, I don't see how that's going to play out well. Really, if Google does this, then the sad reality is that we lose the abstraction layer that allows something like Wacom to be cross-platform, and with everyone having their own stylus digitizer technology, it's basically going to be an extension of the vertical market and little else. With all the patent land mines owned by the three of them, it'll be near impossible for a fourth company to rise until they expire.
Consider the difference in timing, both technically and societally. IRC gave you your first foray into tech support. You were amongst the sort of people who used technology in the late 80's and early 90's, back when distrust on the internet was the default. It was a great time to use the internet. Both IRC and DALnet were not dependent on a multibillion dollar company to access, and while those rooms may have been moderated, they were not curated. You had an e-mail account...where the spam filter was likely between your ears.
You saw the worst of the worst and identified it as such because you knew there wasn't a filter and it was your responsibility to act accordingly. Facebook Kids gives the parents the assumption that Facebook is doing some amount of curating, which means that everyone up the child's chain of trust says "it must be okay".
When you were an adolescent, there were no watchmen. Now, there are watchmen, and someone needs to watch the watchmen. And that is the difference.
First off, I submit that BSD is finding its home in appliances. FreeNAS and pfSense are both fairly popular, and both BSD based. Commercially, the Nintendo Switch is based on BSD, and Cisco, McAffee, and Juniper all have appliances using BSD at their core. Also, as others have pointed out, OSX.
That said, there are so many copy/paste tutorials for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu and Raspbian. With BSD lagging behind severely, for every person who prefers BSD and can successfully use it to do what they need, there are five more less-technical users who are able to fall into the pit of success with a Bitnami or Turnkey Linux distribution.
BSD may well be superior for certain tasks, especially networking, but the fact of the matter is that expecting BSD to simultaneously be competitive in the numbers game against Linux when Linux has an ecosystem which BSD lacks. That ecosystem encourages users looking to get something done to use that product, rather than adhere to principles which otherwise have little effect on them. I know systemd is hated in these parts, almost universally, but if I need to spin up a Wordpress instance, it takes me ten minutes to grab Turnkey Linux and start addding my content, rather than the half hour or more it would take to spin up BSD, manually install an AMP stack, figure out the BSD equivalent of /var/www, Google all the MySQL commands to create the database at the CLI since I don't have Adminer or phpMyAdmin to do it, and then add Wordpress. As a non-developer and non-distributor, the BSD vs. GPL vs. MIT license situation affects me very little, so the fact that both Debian and BSD are free-as-in-beer means that they compete on how much of my time they take to spin up.
This is why I use pfSense and FreeNAS. It's also why most of my appliances are Turnkey Linux based.
As for the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis flared up and down so fast, the Bulletin did not have time to react by moving the clock. It was like 23:59:59.750+0000, but they couldn't get together and debate it fast enough for the clock to actually reflect that.
You aren't kidding. At one point in 1962, the Russian submarine B-59, armed with nuclear torpedoes and part of a flotilla in the Atlantic near Cuba, was discovered and surrounded by American vessels. All three commanding officers had to agree to fire those nukes, and two of the three aboard were ready to go. Vasili Arkhipov was the only officer to disagree, preventing them from being launched. Literally, that one guy not being trigger happy prevented nuclear war in 1962...and Russia wasn't exactly thankful for his heroism.
If the Doomsday Clock is arguing that the current state of affairs puts us that close to total annihilation, either someone lost perspective by equating mean Tweets and the existence of SUVs to a powder keg standoff between two superpowers with armed and active nukes, someone didn't read their history books and never saw Fail Safe, or someone knows something we don't.
*I was amazed to see that Word Perfect is still lumbering along. I had no idea. Also Word Perfect supplanted things like Wordstar (of which I also have fond memories of running under CP/M)
WordPerfect is still in existence because they got bought out a few times and ultimately ended up at Corel, a company I affectionately call "the software retirement home". With titles like WinZip, WinDVD, CorelDraw, Paint Shop Pro, and WordPerfect (which itself contains Paradox), it seems as though the company's plan is to play law-of-large-numbers on acquisitions of software titles which were de facto standards in their day. But I digress.
WordPerfect survives primarily because they have a solid niche in law firms. Legal documents depend heavily on the "Reveal Codes" functionality, which is kinda-sorta like a middle-of-the-road between WYSIWYG editing and LaTeX, which allows for consistent document formatting without either the weirdness of Word rearranging everything when you move an image one pixel to the left, or the learning curve of LaTeX for those who "only know Word". Reveal Codes begat document libraries (keeping in mind that law firms also notoriously keep everything forever), and templates, and plugins, and enough of a cottage industry around a highly profitable sector that has enabled it to avoid utter irrelevance.
All of that being said, I completely agree with your assessment that no program is beyond being dethroned. Oracle used to be the platform for databases (unless you were using IBM or small enough to use Access or Paradox), but newer databases commonly end up being designed in MariaDB or Postgres; even MS SQL Server has more favorable licensing. MS Office is still the standard, but GDocs is making inroads, especially in the education market. Good ol' Internet Explorer was the standard until Firefox chipped away at a solid clip, themselves supplanted by Chrome for many. Adobe themselves supplanted Quark with Indesign, and didn't take long to do so. Software comes and software goes, and while Adobe's decline will be incredibly gradual, it's far from impossible.
Gotta start that tracking and data collection as early as possible.
I know the Microsoft haterade is abundant in these parts, but at this point, MS is playing catch-up. Apple had a hold in the educational markets in the late 80s and early 90's, then MS ate their lunch with virtually free licensing for schools with commodity hardware. Now, Google is all educationally trendy since they give away G-Suite Apps for Business or whatever the hell they call it, and a palette of Chromebooks are a whole lot cheaper than a palette of Optiplex workstations with the added bonus of being far simpler to lock down manage than Windows. Schools have been tripping over themselves to migrate to the Google ecosystem.
This leaves us with the same quandary we had when Microsoft owned the education market: why are we teaching products rather than principles? Students should be learning E-mail, not Gmail or Outlook. They should be learning Word Processing, not Word or GDocs. Basic HTML coding wouldn't be the worst thing either, especially since the basics can be taught for $0 in any text editor...but I digress.
The real issue is that no matter who is in the classroom, the lesson being taught at this point is "okayness with analytics", and "okayness with lockdown". It's safe in the walled garden, and whether it's Apple's, Google's, or Microsoft's, it is this lesson that worries me the most.
Let's assume for a moment we had a rousing speech from the ghost of John F. Kennedy saying that this community should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of creating an open processor, and installing it safely in a computer. And Jeff Bezos thought it was a good idea and committed to writing a blank check to make it happen.
And enough of the the few thousand people in the world who can ground-up design a processor have willingly donated their time to the effort, and have made a perfect, error-free processor with very little physical testing, and one or two of the few-dozen-at-best CPU fab plants in the world have committed their time to retool their assembly lines to decrease the output of Intel and AMD and ARM and Qualcomm chips to make a few hundred thousand of this OpenProc. Also, we're assuming that all of this is done such that there are zero patent infringements from the existing guys, and thus at no point are there any lawsuits from Intel or AMD.
We're already comfortably in 'not happening' territory, but let's keep going.
These CPUs need to fit into motherboards somewhere, right? I mean, the implication here is that we're looking for desktop and server chips. They're not going to work in standard Intel or AMD sockets, I'm assuming...so on the heels of designing an open processor, we need an open motherboard to fit it (which again, avoids any and all litigation as it's being designed). Somewhere in that process, we also end up with an OpenNIC and an OpenSoundBlaster and OpenSATA and FreeUSB and FreePCIe et al. Also, someone codes a ground-up open UEFI or BIOS or something that interacts with all of this hardware properly and without issue or conflict, because any issue faced in this scenario becomes the biggest possible nightmare to test. Also, Foxconn agrees to produce this MagicMobo alongside standard, more profitable units.
Now, we've got all that hardware and can get to a boot device. What are we booting? Linux successfully compiled for this barely tested hardware using a compiler that assumes all the specs are, in fact, working as intended? Okay, great! now let's get some more software on it, because a full Linux distro, even something as relatively-simple as DSL or Puppy is going to require all of its software to be recompiled, so it's yet another race to start porting over applications, with some applications never leaving x86 due to a lack of developer interest.
Everyone, everywhere, ever, has willingly done their part to support this new architecture. Now, to convince people to use it. Who, exactly, would that be? Some software developers and hobbyists, I mean sure, but then who? End users, even tech savvy ones, are going to be wary of an architecture where the best case scenario is a subset of standard Linux software, to say nothing about the countless Windows and OSX titles, niche hardware, and lack of laptop iterations.
Maybe if it were heavily optimized for database loads it might have a bit of a niche there, but now you have to have someone's name on it. Who is going to be the OEM to sell these machines? Companies aren't buying motherboards and rackmount cases to start using these as servers; Dell or HP or Lenovo will have to get on board, which is rough when Intel has been their poison of choice for so long.
So, in summary, even if everyone volunteers everything they need at every step of the way, what is the expectation? A niche market at best, which will always be treated as a second class citizen, and whose selling point is the great sacrifice made to bring it into existence.
I've been hoping for something like this for quite some time. Virally shared videos and news articles have their place, but the primary thing keeping me on Facebook is interacting with people. For every original post, I see a dozen random shared articles from the same two dozen people, and end up missing things I actually care about.
Really, I would love Facebook to allow me to very directly configure what I see, because the options are so limited - if I didn't 'subscribe' to certain people, I'd never see them. I can't prioritize original posts, or text-only posts, or images over videos...all of which should absolutely be available. This is at least a start. I'll take it.
Didn't OnLive and Sony both try streamed games, to no real success? What happened?
I think someone else on the thread called it - this is different because neither OnLive nor Sony could overcome the cost/hardware investment. Both companies tried to sell gaming, and only gaming. It's possible to do this with AWS because other components more readily subdivide. As a simple example, an 8TB drive can be sold to 8 people in 1TB slices, all of whom can use it at the same time and be generally-okay with performance. GPUs don't subdivide nearly as well, meaning there basically needs to be a 1:1 ratio between cards and subscribers. It's difficult to oversubscribe into profitability, just as much as it's difficult to make a decent profit off hardware that's sitting idle for 16 hours a day.
But that's probably not what nVidia is doing.
nVidia is, in all probability, making some sort of GPU specific variant of AWS or GCC. Gamers want to game for 90 minutes that day? Great, let them use the card for 90 minutes and then use the other 22.5 hours of the card to rent out as GPU time to Bitcoin miners or weather forecasters or machine learning algorithms, or whatever other task people are willing to pay to rent time to process. This way, heavy gaming days = lower general use, and lighter gaming days = heavier general use.
And that is how they will be successful.
Wi-Fi's shorter range isn't necessarily a bug; it's usually a feature. Go to a high rise apartment building and *try* to use 2.4ghz Wi-Fi. Good luck with that. There's literally a hundred routers in range, all trying to talk over each other. 5ghz is at least somewhat better, half because of the higher channel quantity, but half because of the shorter range and reduced wall penetration.
If wimax took off at a consumer level, it would be great for rural areas, but suburban and urban areas would find it useless.
"10Mbps allows two simultaneous HD streams, or one HD stream plus plenty of headroom for other normal activities"
And how often do you think you'll actually get 10Mbps, especially as the FCC continues to weaken itself for the benefit of ISPs?
I think that was the point the GP was making. Between "up to 25mbits/sec down" that never, ever is, and "10Mbits/sec down, a minimum of 98% uptime, with no more than 10% oversubscription", and have it enforced, the latter would be preferable.
A personal assistant isn't if he serves more than one master. In the real world, we call that treason and cut their heads off.
Alexa has always served only one master. It's just never been you.
Disclaimer, not an Xbox person (#PCMasterRace), but the hate is pretty easy to explain.
Mass Effect 3, even ending notwithstanding, had a rather notable response on a number of fronts. A whole lot of them had to do with the time constraints, difficult to achieve under normal circumstances, but far harder when EA and Microsoft were telling them they needed to add trendy stuff too, it took away development time from things that really could have used more development efforts. One of the things that fell squarely into this category was the Kinect integration - they even had a nifty promo video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?....
But let's focus on the Kinect aspects specifically. It boiled down to a number of voice commands to issue orders to squadmates and change weapons and similar functions that were otherwise performed through menu options. This sort of thing screamed 'forced mechanic' since the delay could be a problem during combat, but it gets even worse when we think through it a bit more. That sort of functionality could be readily accomplished with any Bluetooth headset, and would have allowed voice commands to be present on the PC, too. Plenty of gamers have such headsets for multiplayer, and 100% of the functionality the Kinect provides could be done just as well with non-Kinect hardware...but in order for those options to be available, the Kinect must be used. I'm still dealing with the damn Starchild in 2018 because a game that didn't need Kinect was forced to add it in a way that only needed Kinect to satisfy the requirement from Microsoft in 2012.
That's just one example of a game for which Kinect usage was a lateral move at best, and detrimental to the game as a whole at worst.
Now, I think there are games that lend themselves to the Kinect control paradigm. Others in this thread have excellent examples, from "the floor is lava" to dancing games to sports titles. It's a good mechanism that readily competes with the Wii remote and the Playstation Move controllers, exceeding them in a number of cases. However, the hate ultimately comes not from the demographic of those games, but the demographic of games which lend themselves to standard controllers. When those players were 'heavily incentivized' to use the Kinect for reasons of dubious benefit to the games being played, that is the source of the hate.
Not following your logic here. Unless you stretch the definitions to count some of the custom code that powers Gmail or whatever, Google isn't in the business of making creative works for consumption. Really, Google would make more money if Zootopia could be uploaded to Youtube by Joe Sixpack and Google could monetize it. These copyright detection algorithms exist because the MPAA and friends require it as a concession to prevent Bigger Lawyer Diplomacy, since the copyright holders understandably aren't too keen on that particular situation. Ultimately, no matter how you slice it, the only competitive advantage is "Google can address copyright claims more effectively than competitors", but since it their customers are advertisers rather than either the uploaders or the copyright holders, and the advertisers get more revenue from more popular uploads, I'd argue that it's a pretty big stretch to call their detection algorithms a competitive advantage in the classical sense of the term.