TFS does list a handful of the issues with commercial supersonic flight, and I do think that there may be room for those smaller planes. However, supersonic flights have increased competition...
1.) "The cost of three hours". NY to Heathrow is a 7-8 hour flight using standard jets. NY to Heathrow at mach 1.4 is 3-4 hours. If the cost of a ticket is triple, then those three hours have to be worth thousands of dollars *and* there has to be a reason why "fly the day before and book a hotel" isn't practical.
2.) First Class. For the cost of a supersonic flight where every seat is basically a coach seat, passengers can get posh seats that go completely horizontal and get good food and entertainment. A better flight experience can make the 3 hour difference far more tolerable. Concorde didn't have that, and the cost of a first class seat on a supersonic flight would be so exorbitant that it could only be afforded by people who probably have their own private jet anyway.
3.) Telecommuting. Some things still need to be done in person, but Zoom and WebEx have made it possible to have multi-continent, real-time teleconferences. A meeting that would cost a company tens of thousands of dollars to arrange to get everyone in the same room in such a tight timetable that a three hour difference is worth the cost *might* happen once or twice a year, but dozens of teleconferences in between make those cases exceptional at best.
4.) Fuel costs. It takes a LOT more fuel to run a plane at supersonic speeds. Even a small change in fuel costs will drastically impact per-passenger profitability for a flight that's as fuel hungry as supersonic. Yes, planes are lighter now, and yes, this is less of a deal on the smaller planes, but it's still a big deal to airlines, and the tightrope walk between "keeping it profitable" and "keeping the costs low enough to justify using this service over the other options" may very well mean that even a modest bump in fuel costs turns a 1% profit into a 1% deficit.
Commercial supersonic flight is very, very difficult to do profitably.
I don't see this being a long term success for Microsoft. Let's take a look at this bundle...
Office - MS would be foolish to not keep this a separate subscription. Besides, kids are coming up with Google Docs and Gmail is a de facto standard, Office can be easily avoided for anyone who wishes to. Skype - I know some people still use it, but for those users where FaceTime or Hangouts isn't practical, there are a dozen other options for IM and video chat. Windows - making an OS dependent on a subscription payment to run third party software is going to come back to haunt Microsoft. Even if they avoid spending a ton of time in court, they're going to end up receiving the ire of every third party software vendor who writes for Windows...and even if the thought is that so many people are doing everything in a browser that it doesn't matter, that's an argument for OSX or Chromebooks, and also summarily dismisses lots of VERY expensive line of business software for niche industries...and also most of Adobe's bread and butter. Now, if the argument is "no updates if you don't subscribe", the response from a whole lot of people will be, "do you mean it?!". Microsoft's updates are seen by most as a necessary evil, not something to be anticipated. Cortana - first off, f'k that b'ch. Second, virtual assistants tend to be associated with mobile devices. People who want one are generally already used to saying "hey Alexa" or "OK Google", and they're already used to not-paying for it. MSN - has literally anybody, ever, since the release of Mosaic, subscribed to a general purpose search engine? Not AltaVista, not Lycos or Excite, not Dogpile or Duck Duck Go, and certainly not Google. Hotmail/Outlook.com email - they're a minority player to begin with, folks who are paying for personal mail are likely paying for Yahoo or AOL or something else entirely based on inertia. Convincing users to switch from Gmail or not switch *to* gmail isn't the easiest selling point.
Bonus: the MS Appy App store and its UWP apps aren't adopting well as it is. If they have to tell the developers they have that their audience will suddenly be limited to MS subscribers, that's going to make things even harder on both sides, while making Android development that much safer of a bet.
So really, MS doesn't really offer a product that seems like a candidate for subscription that can't either be readily replaced, except the one that's so entrenched that requiring a subscription would either royally backfire from a user revolt, sell so poorly that it would clearly be a fool's errand, or ultimately dare the courts to step in and start regulating them.
I wish I had mod points right now, because I 100% agree.
Even if the locked bootloaders were a thing for the first few months and then an unlocking tool was provided so LineageOS and other aftermarket ROMs were able to be installed for those who wished to do so, it certainly should be possible to utilize hardware until it simply can't function anymore, rather than because OEMs stopped caring.
There was a guy who, just because he could, got Windows XP running on a Pentium 1, clocked down to 8MHz (https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini.htm.en). It wasn't of much practical use, obviously, but it was only possible because there were no artificial limitations preventing it. It would be nice if mobile device OEMs would start thinking like that, but the disposable mentality seems to make the answer, "meh, just replace it" the way to deal with these issues.
I'm not sure if you're arguing that a company shouldn't employ designers until after the code fundamentals are all of a uniformly high quality, or that anyone trained as a designer should stop their work on their specialty and retool as an engineer/tester, or...?
I'm trying to argue that Microsoft's priorities are a mess. Do I have an intrinsic issue with a new set of icons? Not particularly, if it was "one or two dudes in Illustrator coming up with a dozen concepts and putting a poll up for the rest of the office to vote on until they decided on them". I'm more inclined to believe, however, that it is the work of dozens of people with plenty of meetings, e-mail chains, and Slack arguments, encompassing hundreds of hours that could have been used more effectively literally anywhere else. However, the underlying tone of the article was that they're trying to do better with integrating the Windows and Office teams, but from the outside, that hasn't seemed to be much of a problem in comparison to some of the more fundamental shortcomings of their more recent - and self-inflicted - problems throughout their product offerings.
As for retraining designers, let's put it this way: the designers gave us the Windows 8 Charms Bar, Live Tiles, the Settings panel that's prettier but no less convoluted than the Control Panel it's replacing, the super-flat and difficult to read ribbons in Office 2013++, and have been working tirelessly to reduce information density throughout Windows and Office. If that's the fruit of their design specialty, then either train them or retrain them. If they all became QA testers, at least MS would *have* a QA department again - and I'd argue that's a better use of their human resources than changing icons.
Having fixed issues with deleting user data, excessive CPU and disk I/O during updates, poor-to-nonexistent control of installing updates, user preferences regarding information density and screen resolutions, Outlook handling large mailboxes gracefully (especially with non-o365 servers), Access being super picky about version compatibilities, Sharepoint being an utter disaster, most of the newer Exchange server controls being exclusively Powershell applets, Hyper-V shadow copies being temperamental, convoluted licensing models, and coming to terms with the fact that consumers simply don't want to be locked into a vertical Microsoft ecosystem like Google or Apple...I'm glad they're finally able to spend development time on making prettier icons.
The gaming industry is getting a bad as the movie industry. Each own company want to launch their own client. With shitty interfaces.
Steam is tolerable because of the details view.
I mean, it kinda already is. EA has Origin. Activision/Blizzard has Battle.net. Epic has EGL. Valve (and basically everyone else) has Steam.
The core difference between the movie industry and the games industry with the 101 client situation is that the movie industry is trying to get everyone to see movies as opex, while games are still capex. I have all four of those download clients installed on my laptop, and I load up the one that, in turn, launches the game I want to play. If I want to buy a new game, I generally know which one to open based on the publisher, and I make a one time* purchase on that particular client. The movie industry wants me to subscribe to 101 different services, each requiring $X per month. Subscribing to one or two is viable for many people, but when getting half a dozen in combination with the required internet bill can easily eclipse the cable bill it replaced, it's not something that solves anything from the client's perspective.
To be fair, buying one-off movies and TV episodes/seasons has been a thing on iTunes and Amazon for a over a decade now, arguably with the most cross-service content available (Star Trek Discovery and Game of Thrones are both available on it, though Netflix titles are absent). The trouble with the per-movie or per-episode model is that it's not easy to know what to buy, and at $20-30 a pop for TV seasons and $10 a pop on movies**, they too can add up very quickly unless the viewer intends to rewatch, which is tough to know from the outset. The subscription model trades the guesswork for a larger bill if several subscription services are utilized.
*Yes, In-Game purchases are becoming a thing in PC releases. Even so, they aren't required, regularly-recurring payment requirements, without which your already-purchased games stop working. Also, I know EA is working to fix this; we'll see how well that works for them - I'm sure Activision is watching closely.
**Yes, many movies and TV series can be gotten on sale for less money if it's timed right, but even at $10/season and $3/movie, it's still more expensive than a month of Netflix. I'm no fan of the MPAA, but I can understand that selling movies for a one-off $3 a pop expenditure in order to make purchases compete more favorably with Netflix is likely to be a losing proposition even if they *weren't* the sort of infinitely greedy, terrible people that they are. Moreover, Netflix makes it easier for them to have regular income, making the bean counters far happier than the spikes and valleys that come with capex purchases.
The start menu is still a crap way to organize apps.
They tried to get rid of it, but that went over so well with the users.
Functionally the current start menu isn't really better or worse than in the past, only different...
Amongst the things that the Win7 start menu did well was to give a number of options. Preferred applications can be pinned, the entries can be searched, and the complete index can be browsed if needed.
The single biggest issue with the newer iterations of the start menu is the lack of information density. 48 entries per column, and six columns, fit on a 1920x1080 screen. That's nearly 300 entries before a scroll mechanism would be required. The Win8 start menu could fit 48 entries on the same screen size...but for what? I'm not touching my screen, and I'm not sitting ten feet away that I need the large type, and there's no way to increase that density. There is zero improvement to be had from the tile paradigm. Even live tiles with their whole "at a glance" defense means that tiles don't look the same when you're looking at them. If a dashboard was something worth pursuing, then developing widgets and the sidebar was really what MS needed to do.
Moving on from sheer information density, admittedly not the most intuitive means of doing so, but a whole lot of the common control panel applets are two clicks away. Network connections, system information, drive mapping, and printer adding were all very simple to access. Perhaps there's a case to be made for right clicking the start menu to get to several of them, but the appy-app Settings options are still not at 100% feature parity from the Control Panel, even ignoring third party entries like nVidia or M-Audio or Rane.
Finally, let's talk about search. There's no cue to enter text; I cannot count how many times I've been on a support call when I've been like "just type...I know it doesn't look like you can, but trust me, you can...just type...I promise it will work...JUST. TYPE." The search bar in the taskbar is dumb because it takes up space for running program entries. But anyway, the biggest issue is that searching for applications means the machine also searches the file system for things, and Bing for internet searches. Sorry, zero defense on that one, either. Bing searches on the start menu? That make application searches take longer?
There is not a single change to the Win10 start menu that is an objective improvement over Classic Shell. Not once has anyone been able to say "this function is better". If you like it, and I mean this 100% sincerely, I am happy for you. I simply haven't been able to share in your affinity for the changes.
the telemetry *should not be in there*. It is slowing things down and invading my privacy.
The alternative to telemetry is Microsoft ceasing to maintain features on which you rely and subsequently removing them because Microsoft can't tell that you or anyone else relies on them.
So, you're arguing that Microsoft would have kept Windows Media Center for all the people like me using it as a DVR if only telemetry was enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft would have kept the Windows Photo Viewer instead of forcing the appy-app version if only telemetry was enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft would have kept Paint and Solitaire instead of forcing the appy-app version if only telemetry was enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft would have let me keep my Synaptics control panel applet rather than forcing the generic 'Settings' touchpad config area that is missing half the functions I need if only telemetry was enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft would have kept Aero themes if only telemetry was enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft is going to stop auto-downloading appy-apps because they can see I uninstall as many as I can if telemetry is enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft is going to make all the OOBE options opt-in if enough people disable them all anyway if telemetry is enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft is going to leave Acrobat Pro as the default PDF reader if enough people undo its switching back to Edge if telemetry is enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft is going to stop nagging Chrome users to use Edge instead if telemetry is enabled? You're arguing that Microsoft is going to stop advertising OneDrive in File Explorer by default if telemetry is enabled?
And that is important, because if they can move away from Oracle so can anybody.
Uhm, no. I mean, yes, Oracle isn't increasing their customer base, but saying "if Amazon can do it, anybody can do it" misses the three big reasons why Amazon can do it. First, Amazon has billions of dollars at their disposal. Even if Oracle was letting them run their database for zero dollars and it was nothing more than a dick waving competition between Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison just so Jeff could show Larry that he could, Amazon can financially afford to do that. Second, Amazon has the coding talent to do it. A whole lot of people using Oracle are still doing so because they don't have the specialists required to do that sort of migration. Even if they did, most Oracle customers run Oracle because an upstream piece of software relies on it, so even if they wanted to retool *and* they had a sufficiently skilled DBA to move the data over, they probably don't have the ability to do the same for their upstream software. Pursuant to the prior point, Amazon can either fix it themselves (because they wrote it), demand the upstream vendor retools for DynamoDB (because they can afford it), or they can write a replacement that fits well enough to route around it. Finally, unlike most Oracle customers, Amazon can easily recoup their expenses for writing DynamoDB - not just in the money they save by not-paying Oracle, but by selling the use of the database on AWS. That's fairly unique to Amazon; most other Oracle customers aren't selling database-aaS such that rolling their own will pay dividends.
Because let's be honest, a wireless light switch does not cost more than 3 bucks to produce. It just doesn't.
Sure, if you don't count the R & D and engineers' salaries. And setup costs with the off-shore manufacturer. And any licensing fees for protocols like Z-Wave / Zigbee. And cost of getting it UL-certified. And the cost of shipping it from China (or wherever it's being made) to the US. And the % the retailer will charge you to sell it on Amazon, eBay, or in a brink and morter like Lowe's or Home Depot. And any post-sale support / handling returns and exchanges when a customer can't figure out how to get it to work with their network or is just unlucky enough to receive a bad one. And oh yeah, some type of profit margin after all of this.
Yeah, 3 bucks sounds right. You should totally do it!
Let's assume you're correct, that the GP's math is off, and with all of the R&D/admin/retail markup, it's closer to $15/switch. That still means that $50/switch is more than triple the production cost. Moreover, if you're doing light switches, ten packs should help to amortize that far better...but they're not much of a savings even if it is possible to get that sort of a quantity back without going to a wholesaler.
Moreover, the underlying issue is not *only* cost, but the fiefdoms. I've got a bunch of the TP-Link Wi-Fi bulbs in my apartment, with the ultimate goal of controlling them with some OSS application, but anything I have found thus far either hasn't been updated in years, or requires me to do all of my configs in a text editor, or has bizarre idiosyncrasies that make it difficult to work with. But, once at least one of them is up to par, I'll be limited to their hardware compatibility list, which I'll have to check *before* I buy anything else.
Now, for those who are looking for something simple rather than an open standard, there's Philips Hue, and also Samsung has a thing, and the pro installers seem to like Crestron, and I think another poster said GE has some stuff...and about the closest thing to interoperability any of these things have is that they all have an Alexa skill that allows the owner to turn the lights on and off...but much beyond that and it's all about the vertical integration, making it pretty expensive to bet on the loser, or in the case of Iris, deemed insufficiently unprofitable that the line is discontinued, leaving those who *did* pick Iris with a bunch of expensive stuff that is unlikely to be useful in a different system.
Are you forced to rent the modem? I think you can buy one.
You can buy a modem and use your own if you have residential service, or business service with dynamic IP. Citing "security of their network" (yes, really), they do not allow business users with static IP services to bring their own modem.
Also, if you are a business subscriber with a plan over 60Mbits/sec and voice service, they will not let you use only one modem, since their voice modems don't support more than that. Even if you explicitly state you are fine being limited to 60Mbits/sec, they will refuse to only provision a single modem.
Also, they won't give you "just a modem", you get one of those crappy modem/router combos...which do have a bridge mode available, but they're not always careful about keeping that setting when they roll out firmware updates.
Also, you'll probably find yourself with yet another modem and access point for their CableWiFi service - not the worst thing, but still makes the install take longer and competes with your own WiFi network.
you're right; SSL certs are not ironclad proof of identity. For a while though, they *were* a barrier. Sure, $20 a domain wasn't the biggest hurdle, but spinning up 10,000 variations of googkle.com *and* giving them all $20 SSL certs got costly...and also involved a paper trail. The padlock was never a barrier to a spear phishing attempt, but it made playing with big numbers far less profitable, meaning a site with a cert was generally more trustworthy than HTTP. Aunt Google wanted to de facto mandate SSL, even for sites that really didn't need it, so we got let's encrypt. I'm appreciative to the EFF for it, but it became a whole lot easier to get The Padlock.
As far as it being cheap and easy to get an LLC, it's not cheap or easy to register 10,000 of them...and once again, there is a paper trail. Even if it doesn't take the same amount of validation to get an EV cert as a passport or military ID, EV's at least prove that the entity who has one either doesn't have 10,000 of them, or if they do, they're probably an entity with a lawyer on retainer to handle trademark infringement by the phishing sites looking to emulate them.
Depends on how you look at it. Red Hat's subscription is to get support with an SLA, 10-year product lifecycles with assistance for migrations to new versions if needed, checkbox-compliance for industries that have compliance requirements, and explicit hardware testing and certification. Sure, Red Hat does this through paywalling their OS and letting Cent and Fedora handle folks who want to roll the dice, but it's not like Red Hat is only providing the functional equivalent of getting a new version of Windows Server as an ISO download every release and that's the end of it, or an OS that requires a metric ton of neutering to prevent inconvenient downtime in order to prevent the addition of otherwise-undesired functionality.
It is always hilarious that the most illegible, easily manipulated transmission vector is the gold standard for authenticity. Photoshop away, print it out, and FAX it to someone and it is valid.
*sigh*
A Photoshopped document, whether uploaded to Imgur, e-mailed, faxed, mailed, or sent via carrier pigeon, is still the same document. If there is a signature on it, then the signature is still binding to whatever the photoshopped document says, unless the contents of the document itself are in dispute. I don't see how that applies uniquely to faxes.
Fax is considered a secure method of transmission for a number of reasons. First, in a court case, theoretically each side has their copy of the document, which can be compared. Second, a nontrivial part of it is the timestamp - if prompted, both the sender and recipient have a record of when the fax was sent and received. E-mail has this too, to an extent, but for the moment, a timestamp of a fax is legally admissible; an e-mail...might be. Third, fax is a very good lowest common denominator - have a state of the art VoIP PBX with SIP trunks? Great! you can successfully transmit a fax to a 25-year-old fax machine still using film-based toner rolls. E-mail? we're still dealing with file format discrepancies, junk mail filters, encryption standards, and plenty of other areas where agreement is far from a given. Sure, ASCII text on port 25 is basically universal, but anything above that is basically "Whatever enough people agree upon". That's not even getting started on file transfer options; basically none of the even-kinda-legally-okay ones are possible to self-host.
Finally, you say it's "easily manipulated"...how? I mean, is there really such a thing as an MITM attack for a fax? Short of something bizarre like making an audio recording of the acoustic transmission or eavesdropping both of which require foreknowledge of when a fax will take place AND access to the transmission lines...how exactly is a fax hacked?
It's not a matter of legibility, it's a matter of reliability and veracity.
the US government doesn't have that kind of contralized control and people would never stand for it.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I think what Amimojo was getting at was that there is no American analogue to the Great Firewall of China. Japanese internment camps or Bay of Pigs or Area 51 can be searched without consequence in America; Tienanmen Square in China...less so.
Yes, the federal government has enough tentacles that there's a decent amount of centralized control in an abstract sense, but when Net Neutrality was on the table for response, Americans flooded the DC switchboard and told them where to shove it. Americans aren't going to vote in favor of a Great Firewall of America, and even if the response is, "well, the elites will implement one anyway", it's not completely outrageous, but the moment it goes into effect, the consequences will be very difficult to predict and may well backfire.
The $200 price point is for parents whose kids keep begging for an Xbox, but the price is just a bit out of reach.
As far as fast broadband not being a requirement for downloading games, I used to have 3Mbit/sec DSL, which was closer to 2Mbit/sec most of the time. Destiny 2 is a bit over 80GB, meaning that it would take nearly four days to download if I did literally nothing else with my bandwidth during that time. Fast broadband not being a requirement is, as CGP Grey would put it, "technically correct, in the most pointless kind of way". A four day delta between "buying game" and "playing game" is not exactly preferable to a 30-minute game install from a plastic disc. Even for those who are okay with it would then be left out of multiplayer, and while I personally am all too happy to limit my library to single player titles, the trend for the proportion of games for which multiplayer is either a primary focus or a sole focus rather than a single player campaign is not a source of hope.
On the topic of Steam for the PC, I submit that owning games is sadly a lost cause at this point. A handful of indie titles notwithstanding, what larger titles use standalone installers anymore? EA delivers all their games through Origin, Activision/Blizzard through Battle.Net, Stardock through Impulse (until the Gamestop situation went left), and Steam for basically everybody else. Meanwhile, finding plastic disc releases of PC games is rare anymore...so while I agree with you that games are impossible to have any meaningful level of ownership anymore, it's been a long time coming.
They were the first to remove the floppy drive - and certainly weren't the last. Everyone else has followed. This is nothing new for Apple. They don't follow trends, they set them - even if they turn out dumb.
Oh, this chestnut! Yes, Apple got rid of the floppy drive, but the floppy was starting to get cramped, and exchanging files with PC users was a nonstarter because the disk formats weren't cross-platform. The floppy disk's problems made it clear it wasn't a long term solution, and it's wasn't an iterative media - there were a few proprietary attempts to keep the form factor and some backwards compatibility, but there wasn't a standard 120MB storage medium, for example, in the same way floppy disks were. Nobody but Iomega made ZIP drives, and nobody but Sony made the Superdisk, so Apple picking a successor to the floppy would have been a matter of them picking a winner that they would then be dependent upon.
USB type A ports are *not* a fair comparison. USB 3.0 ports are backwards compatible with the billions of devices that use USB 2.0. USB2 is fast enough for plenty of things (no mouse or keyboard is shuffling data faster than 480Mbits/sec), and USB 3.0 is faster than most single drive storage media can shuffle data out the door. Adding USB-C connectors isn't the point of contention. Removing the USB-A connectors is the problem. It's not like USB-C would have had its adoption meaningfully delayed if Apple still included a USB-A port or two for this generation as a transition.
Maintaining the status quo for decades gets you IBM. To stay alive you have to shake things up and at least try to innovate.
Yes, but innovation is not giving loyal customers with workflows and very expensive equipment the finger. IBM had plenty of its own issues, not the least of which was its trouble with software - OS/2 was ahead of its time in many respects but didn't capture the desktop market, Domino was a great web server but depended on DB2 which wasn't a big hit except for firms that were on the full IBM stack...including Lotus Notes, a piece of software whose groans are only rivaled by Oracle. IBM had nothing to lose by trying to do a ground-up rewrite of Notes, but they instead ceded that market to Microsoft with Exchange. IBM was not-innovating because they were basically the first to shift to a rent seeking model off their well-entrenched mainframes and other customers, rather than writing x86 software.
Even if it means favoring wireless communication over wired before the world catches up.
Try using Wi-Fi in a Manhattan high-rise, where there are probably 100 SSIDs in range of any given apartment, meaning that wired network connections are about the only way to get an internet connection worth a damn. Wires will always be faster, simpler, and more reliable than radio signals in one form or another. For iPads that's fine, but wireless transfers have plenty of shortcomings that are solved with a wire. Not having them as an option isn't trendsetting, at least in a truly positive direction.
I no longer use my phone as a music device (except in the car via USB-C), and my phone is not an iPhone. It has no headphone jack either. At home, I cast to speakers. With Chromecast Audio, at least, I don't think there is any transcoding before transmitting. And in the end, a mobile device doesn't have much room for a decent DAC, so better to let the big device with the speakers do the job.
And literally none of that is impossible to do with an 1/8" headphone jack.
...and I've used Sleepyhead. I certainly appreciate it, but nobody "relies" on it - all the machine settings are available on the unit and Sleepyhead basically just displays info. It's very cool.
So for data nerds like me I like to dig into it, but the fact that I slept 7 hours 3 minutes last night with 4 wakeups vs 6 hours 52 minutes the night before with 6 wakeups really isn't critical information in any way.
And let's be honest: as much as I'm a tech-head, me "using the data" to fuck around with the settings on my machine is about as likely to kill me as NOT 'using the data" to fuck around with the settings on the machine.
It's not relied upon in the same way that a pacemaker is. However, if the CPAP is logging medical data generated by the user, and the user cannot access that data purely because of artificial means that benefits anybody other than the patient, and Sleepyhead helps to give those patients access to their data, then yes, I would argue that it's "relied upon". Either Sleepyhead is relied upon to get the data, the company's software which end users can't access is relied upon for that same data, or the data the CPAP collects cannot be read at all, defeating the purpose of the CPAP.
The combination of original and advertising has long been the standard in radio, and is just accepted as the cost of keeping the lights on. What's so special about podcasts?
Because it's backwards from the radio side of things.
Broadcast radio had clear - and large - upfront costs. One needed a broadcast tower, radio transmission equipment, a microphone, and a place to put it. One also needed frequency on which to broadcast...which meant an FCC license, which also had compliance rules that needed to be observed. Those things needed to be maintained and managed, so engineers were needed. All of that stuff cost a massive amount of money, meaning that one either needed a pile of money or an investor with a pile of money before broadcast could begin. I don't recall Carnegie or Rockefeller having enough interest to go into broadcast, so pretty much everyone who wasn't a university or a massive corporation depended on advertisers to help pay the costs of broadcasting.
Podcasting can be done for peanuts. Libsyn will host for $15/month, but an industrious person can use Wordpress and a shared web hosting account to do it for half that. I've occasionally spent more than that on lunch. Apple and Google will list your podcast in their respective directories for free, or people can subscribe by clicking a link on an RSS feed. Add in $250 in up front costs for a Shure microphone and a Presonus audio interface if you're feeling fancy, and anybody can start podcasting for literally thousands of times less money than it cost to start a broadcast radio station.
It was impossible to be a hobbyist AM radio broadcaster*. It is very possible to be a hobbyist podcaster. Earlier podcasts seldom had advertisements because those broadcasts were either straight up hobbyists doing it for the love of whatever-their-topic, or extensions of something else (e.g. churches distributing Sunday sermons). The audience was largely incidental, and the costs were fixed.
As podcasts grew in popularity, sea level rose, meaning people were looking to get money in exchange for a higher quality product. Podcasts needed money to help make that happen, meaning episodes started to end with donation requests, or advertisers started to offer money in exchange for airtime.
It's not that podcasts are special, it's that making money off of them was ex post facto to their surge in popularity, while broadcast needed it from the outset.
*Yes, pirate radio and similar low powered transmissions for hobbies are a thing. However, the reach was never going to get big enough for advertising to even be on the table. It's entirely possible for a small, home-based podcaster to get a sponsorship deal, which is a further extension of the point being made.
Many people think that for really big databases you need Oracle, for handling lots and lots of transactions. MySQL and Postgres are great for smaller businesses, but our business needs Oracle, they think.
That’s only a part of the story. Amazon has an unfathomable amount of resources at their disposal. They can afford to say “we are ditching Oracle”, and write checks and hire developers until those Oracle instances are gone. They don’t need support because they can develop in house until it works.
Most businesses don’t have that. What they do have, are upstream vendors, and what that vendor wants, that vendor gets. Even if Postgres provided true drop-in support, the upstream vendor demands Oracle and getting support is a losing battle on anything else.
Given Amazon’s deep pockets, that’s all but an expectation that they would roll their own. Not everyone can do that.
People neither want to feel nickel-and-dimed, paying $10/month for half a dozen services, nor do they want to feel taken advantage of by a $200/mo Comcast bill.
Each content provider wants to make the most money, and is using their content as leverage for their streaming subscriptions. The only thing that aggregates them all right now is The Pirate Bay. Roku does this to a certain extent, but having a middleman to aggregate billing and to give users a single, consistent UI with which to stream whatever content is desired.
To which everybody says, "Congratulations Voyager, you just invented the cable company."
I get it. However, the issues with Comcast and Time Warner were never their existence in the abstract, it's that they are inconsistent with delivering their service and that they charge a whole lot of money. If the average cable bill was $50/month and cable only went out during an actual-hurricane, I think there would be far less cord cutting, because there is still value from an end user perspective in the existence of an aggregator.
However, the content companies don't want to be 'just another option', and they're having to play the game because of the issues with the aggregators that people are leaving, so we're stuck with a dozen different smaller libraries and an equitable amount of bills to pay as a result.
It's truly amazing how much abuse some users are willing to take just to use Windows. The only explanation that makes any sense at this point is that they like the abuse.
Because, apparently, I have to explain this regularly to the Slashdot crowd...
First off, there is a whole lot of dependency not on Windows, but on Windows applications. I depend on Serato to DJ weddings. I depend on Adobe Production Studio to edit videos. I depend on CompuShow to run my intelligent lights. I depend on Sound Forge and Acronis and Active@ and the fact that if I run into a bizarre corner case I can find a random application on Softpedia, like when I used Remo Repair AVI to, well, repair an AVI file.
"Well Voyager529, you can't possibly be arguing that everyone needs the ability to run DJ software and render compositions in After Effects...and at least 80% of your Start Menu is open source stuff or has perfectly viable alternatives." That's true. However, plenty of people still use iTunes. Plenty of people still use some sort of photo management software, be it Photoshop Elements or ACDSee or similar. My aunt has a Cricut machine. A number of friends have Neat scanners to organize their paperwork. Still others have a workflow which integrates scanner software by Epson or Brother. Even if my applications are different than other people's, it's only folks who live in Google World that believe that believe Chrome is a fully functional operating system.
But let's assume for a moment that we limit ourselves to people whose software needs can be comprehensively met with what Mint provides, either out of the box, or its App-Store-by-any-other-name. We're dealing with all sorts of hardware. Let's talk printer/scanners. Sure, they'll probably spit documents on paper (though I'm sure some low-end ones will be a mess even at that), but which subset of features will still function is a toss-up. Duplex printing? Paper profiles? Draft/BW/HQ/Photo printing profiles? Double sided scanning from the ADF? Auto detecting multiple photos on the glass and saving each of them as individual JPEGs? Triggering a scan from the touch screen panel? That's just one example of functionality that might have to be given up to move to Linux, but hardware support often is somewhere between research-prior-to-purchasing, or outright luck of the draw from an end user's perspective. Linux has indeed gotten Wi-Fi chipsets down, but audio can sometimes still be hit-or-miss on some laptops, suspend modes and function keys aren't a given, integrated webcams are guesswork...and just to be clear, this is not a dig at Linux developers, who I know do a whole lot of work to do as much as they can for a constantly moving target. The problem is that, from an end user's perspective, if one of these things doesn't work, there's nobody they can call. HP isn't going to support anything but the version of Windows the machine ships with, what's the OEM who even makes a webcam that shows up in Device Manager as BisonCam (who is going to say 'call HP' anyway), and it's not like calling 1-800-PENGUIN is going to get them phone support for Ubuntu.
But, let's assume we're talking about an end user who is still rocking an HP Laserjet 4050 at home, and has been given a System76 laptop so there is no hardware incompatibilities and what they do can be adequately handled with LibreOffice and Firefox on Mint. Best case scenario, right? You're still dealing with end users.
End users don't understand how the magical boxes do the things. Some are a bit better than others, but a whole lot of people know how to perform the handful of tasks they need to perform, and that's about it. The files-and-folders paradigm doesn't always make sense to them. Window focus doesn't always make sense to them. Command line utilization is outright wizardry. That's not a dig at these people, either - most of them have talents in other areas where I am hopelessly incompetent. To move these users to Linux, even to Mint, is going to require retraining...i
I assumed that it would be an electric scale + gravity measurement and not a balance that would ultimately determine the Kilogram.
The kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. Mass is constant regardless of gravity (same number of molecules on earth as on the moon or on Jupiter), so although every day "close enough" measurements do measure against gravity to ensure you're getting a kilo of avocados at the grocery store, doing so as a part of defining a measurement of mass defeats half the purpose.
A balance allows the ability to ensure the amount of molecules on the left has the same mass as the right side; a kilo weight on the left with a kilo of sand on the right would remain in balance on the moon and on Jupiter.
I mean, I don't know if dual GTX 1080's are close enough to RTX series cards, though I do know that the 2080's are coming in the next month or two. Also, I don't think an 802.11ad laptop chipset is an option at the moment, though I'm sure retrofitting one into an m.2 slot in a year or two will be a trivial upgrade. I don't know if the 3840x2160 screen is 144Hz, but it does do G-Sync. The i9 option is sustained 3.6GHz with a 5GHz turbo mode, a bit shy of your 4GHz requirement. Finally, I hope your wallet isn't a factor; a quick-and-dirty build assuming 32GB of RAM, a pair of 500GB M.2 SSDs, and a one year warranty is north of $5,700; hitting $10K is well within the realm of possibility....But it's about 90% of the way to what you were looking for.
Or do like the rest of us and buy a USB battery pack. You can get one for under $20 that fits in your pocket and can provide a full charge to a phone 4+ times. No need to turn your phone off and take it apart, and it works with all your USB devices.
Let us count the ways that this is inferior to removable batteries...
1.) Rotating them over a single day isn't a terribly common use case. Getting a new battery 18 months in because you're eyeballing a charger by lunch time, is quite common. It's an easy way to help extend the lifetime of a phone.
2.) For those looking to get from one end of the day to the other without needing a charger, battery rotation was only one such use case. Powerbear and ZeroLemon make some excellent extended batteries, with custom battery backs to fit them. Yes, my Note 3 and Note 4 with a ZeroLemon battery were massive...but when people heard I could charge once every three days, suddenly, the "it's huge!" went away.
3.) Toward the end of the lifespan of the built-in battery, it will require near constant charging. This may well require having the phone tethered to the battery pack during use, which in turn puts more stress on the USB/Lightning connector. By contrast, extended batteries minimize the wear on the charging port, again improving the lifespan of the device. For users who have already broken their connector, external chargers can cost as little as $10 and help buy a bit of time before having the connector repaired.
4.) The Note7 debacle could have been solved quickly and easily with a box of batteries (or battery backs, depending on what ultimately would have solved it) shipped to carrier stores, with a quick swap out that took 3 minutes - 2:45 of which being spent documenting the inventory change. Instead, otherwise-perfectly-good phones needed to be scrapped.
5.) From users' perspective, there is no downside. The Galaxy S5 had a removable battery and was still IP68 waterproof. External battery packs and battery cases can still be manufactured and utilized. I once saw removable batteries which themselves were enabled for wireless charging, even if the rest of the phone wasn't. Glass backs are the closest possibility, but they are so commonly either shattered or covered with a case as to be invisible that the number of users demanding them is a relative minority - one I'm not saying need not be catered to, but the lack of options on this front is troubling.
Slashdot Mirror
TFS does list a handful of the issues with commercial supersonic flight, and I do think that there may be room for those smaller planes. However, supersonic flights have increased competition...
1.) "The cost of three hours". NY to Heathrow is a 7-8 hour flight using standard jets. NY to Heathrow at mach 1.4 is 3-4 hours. If the cost of a ticket is triple, then those three hours have to be worth thousands of dollars *and* there has to be a reason why "fly the day before and book a hotel" isn't practical.
2.) First Class. For the cost of a supersonic flight where every seat is basically a coach seat, passengers can get posh seats that go completely horizontal and get good food and entertainment. A better flight experience can make the 3 hour difference far more tolerable. Concorde didn't have that, and the cost of a first class seat on a supersonic flight would be so exorbitant that it could only be afforded by people who probably have their own private jet anyway.
3.) Telecommuting. Some things still need to be done in person, but Zoom and WebEx have made it possible to have multi-continent, real-time teleconferences. A meeting that would cost a company tens of thousands of dollars to arrange to get everyone in the same room in such a tight timetable that a three hour difference is worth the cost *might* happen once or twice a year, but dozens of teleconferences in between make those cases exceptional at best.
4.) Fuel costs. It takes a LOT more fuel to run a plane at supersonic speeds. Even a small change in fuel costs will drastically impact per-passenger profitability for a flight that's as fuel hungry as supersonic. Yes, planes are lighter now, and yes, this is less of a deal on the smaller planes, but it's still a big deal to airlines, and the tightrope walk between "keeping it profitable" and "keeping the costs low enough to justify using this service over the other options" may very well mean that even a modest bump in fuel costs turns a 1% profit into a 1% deficit.
Commercial supersonic flight is very, very difficult to do profitably.
I don't see this being a long term success for Microsoft. Let's take a look at this bundle...
Office - MS would be foolish to not keep this a separate subscription. Besides, kids are coming up with Google Docs and Gmail is a de facto standard, Office can be easily avoided for anyone who wishes to.
Skype - I know some people still use it, but for those users where FaceTime or Hangouts isn't practical, there are a dozen other options for IM and video chat.
Windows - making an OS dependent on a subscription payment to run third party software is going to come back to haunt Microsoft. Even if they avoid spending a ton of time in court, they're going to end up receiving the ire of every third party software vendor who writes for Windows...and even if the thought is that so many people are doing everything in a browser that it doesn't matter, that's an argument for OSX or Chromebooks, and also summarily dismisses lots of VERY expensive line of business software for niche industries...and also most of Adobe's bread and butter. Now, if the argument is "no updates if you don't subscribe", the response from a whole lot of people will be, "do you mean it?!". Microsoft's updates are seen by most as a necessary evil, not something to be anticipated.
Cortana - first off, f'k that b'ch. Second, virtual assistants tend to be associated with mobile devices. People who want one are generally already used to saying "hey Alexa" or "OK Google", and they're already used to not-paying for it.
MSN - has literally anybody, ever, since the release of Mosaic, subscribed to a general purpose search engine? Not AltaVista, not Lycos or Excite, not Dogpile or Duck Duck Go, and certainly not Google.
Hotmail/Outlook.com email - they're a minority player to begin with, folks who are paying for personal mail are likely paying for Yahoo or AOL or something else entirely based on inertia. Convincing users to switch from Gmail or not switch *to* gmail isn't the easiest selling point.
Bonus: the MS Appy App store and its UWP apps aren't adopting well as it is. If they have to tell the developers they have that their audience will suddenly be limited to MS subscribers, that's going to make things even harder on both sides, while making Android development that much safer of a bet.
So really, MS doesn't really offer a product that seems like a candidate for subscription that can't either be readily replaced, except the one that's so entrenched that requiring a subscription would either royally backfire from a user revolt, sell so poorly that it would clearly be a fool's errand, or ultimately dare the courts to step in and start regulating them.
I wish I had mod points right now, because I 100% agree.
Even if the locked bootloaders were a thing for the first few months and then an unlocking tool was provided so LineageOS and other aftermarket ROMs were able to be installed for those who wished to do so, it certainly should be possible to utilize hardware until it simply can't function anymore, rather than because OEMs stopped caring.
There was a guy who, just because he could, got Windows XP running on a Pentium 1, clocked down to 8MHz (https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini.htm.en). It wasn't of much practical use, obviously, but it was only possible because there were no artificial limitations preventing it. It would be nice if mobile device OEMs would start thinking like that, but the disposable mentality seems to make the answer, "meh, just replace it" the way to deal with these issues.
I'm not sure if you're arguing that a company shouldn't employ designers until after the code fundamentals are all of a uniformly high quality, or that anyone trained as a designer should stop their work on their specialty and retool as an engineer/tester, or ...?
I'm trying to argue that Microsoft's priorities are a mess. Do I have an intrinsic issue with a new set of icons? Not particularly, if it was "one or two dudes in Illustrator coming up with a dozen concepts and putting a poll up for the rest of the office to vote on until they decided on them". I'm more inclined to believe, however, that it is the work of dozens of people with plenty of meetings, e-mail chains, and Slack arguments, encompassing hundreds of hours that could have been used more effectively literally anywhere else. However, the underlying tone of the article was that they're trying to do better with integrating the Windows and Office teams, but from the outside, that hasn't seemed to be much of a problem in comparison to some of the more fundamental shortcomings of their more recent - and self-inflicted - problems throughout their product offerings.
As for retraining designers, let's put it this way: the designers gave us the Windows 8 Charms Bar, Live Tiles, the Settings panel that's prettier but no less convoluted than the Control Panel it's replacing, the super-flat and difficult to read ribbons in Office 2013++, and have been working tirelessly to reduce information density throughout Windows and Office. If that's the fruit of their design specialty, then either train them or retrain them. If they all became QA testers, at least MS would *have* a QA department again - and I'd argue that's a better use of their human resources than changing icons.
Having fixed issues with deleting user data, excessive CPU and disk I/O during updates, poor-to-nonexistent control of installing updates, user preferences regarding information density and screen resolutions, Outlook handling large mailboxes gracefully (especially with non-o365 servers), Access being super picky about version compatibilities, Sharepoint being an utter disaster, most of the newer Exchange server controls being exclusively Powershell applets, Hyper-V shadow copies being temperamental, convoluted licensing models, and coming to terms with the fact that consumers simply don't want to be locked into a vertical Microsoft ecosystem like Google or Apple...I'm glad they're finally able to spend development time on making prettier icons.
This better not become a thing.
The gaming industry is getting a bad as the movie industry. Each own company want to launch their own client. With shitty interfaces.
Steam is tolerable because of the details view.
I mean, it kinda already is. EA has Origin. Activision/Blizzard has Battle.net. Epic has EGL. Valve (and basically everyone else) has Steam.
The core difference between the movie industry and the games industry with the 101 client situation is that the movie industry is trying to get everyone to see movies as opex, while games are still capex. I have all four of those download clients installed on my laptop, and I load up the one that, in turn, launches the game I want to play. If I want to buy a new game, I generally know which one to open based on the publisher, and I make a one time* purchase on that particular client. The movie industry wants me to subscribe to 101 different services, each requiring $X per month. Subscribing to one or two is viable for many people, but when getting half a dozen in combination with the required internet bill can easily eclipse the cable bill it replaced, it's not something that solves anything from the client's perspective.
To be fair, buying one-off movies and TV episodes/seasons has been a thing on iTunes and Amazon for a over a decade now, arguably with the most cross-service content available (Star Trek Discovery and Game of Thrones are both available on it, though Netflix titles are absent). The trouble with the per-movie or per-episode model is that it's not easy to know what to buy, and at $20-30 a pop for TV seasons and $10 a pop on movies**, they too can add up very quickly unless the viewer intends to rewatch, which is tough to know from the outset. The subscription model trades the guesswork for a larger bill if several subscription services are utilized.
*Yes, In-Game purchases are becoming a thing in PC releases. Even so, they aren't required, regularly-recurring payment requirements, without which your already-purchased games stop working. Also, I know EA is working to fix this; we'll see how well that works for them - I'm sure Activision is watching closely.
**Yes, many movies and TV series can be gotten on sale for less money if it's timed right, but even at $10/season and $3/movie, it's still more expensive than a month of Netflix. I'm no fan of the MPAA, but I can understand that selling movies for a one-off $3 a pop expenditure in order to make purchases compete more favorably with Netflix is likely to be a losing proposition even if they *weren't* the sort of infinitely greedy, terrible people that they are. Moreover, Netflix makes it easier for them to have regular income, making the bean counters far happier than the spikes and valleys that come with capex purchases.
The start menu is still a crap way to organize apps.
They tried to get rid of it, but that went over so well with the users.
Functionally the current start menu isn't really better or worse than in the past, only different...
Amongst the things that the Win7 start menu did well was to give a number of options. Preferred applications can be pinned, the entries can be searched, and the complete index can be browsed if needed.
The single biggest issue with the newer iterations of the start menu is the lack of information density. 48 entries per column, and six columns, fit on a 1920x1080 screen. That's nearly 300 entries before a scroll mechanism would be required. The Win8 start menu could fit 48 entries on the same screen size...but for what? I'm not touching my screen, and I'm not sitting ten feet away that I need the large type, and there's no way to increase that density. There is zero improvement to be had from the tile paradigm. Even live tiles with their whole "at a glance" defense means that tiles don't look the same when you're looking at them. If a dashboard was something worth pursuing, then developing widgets and the sidebar was really what MS needed to do.
Moving on from sheer information density, admittedly not the most intuitive means of doing so, but a whole lot of the common control panel applets are two clicks away. Network connections, system information, drive mapping, and printer adding were all very simple to access. Perhaps there's a case to be made for right clicking the start menu to get to several of them, but the appy-app Settings options are still not at 100% feature parity from the Control Panel, even ignoring third party entries like nVidia or M-Audio or Rane.
Finally, let's talk about search. There's no cue to enter text; I cannot count how many times I've been on a support call when I've been like "just type...I know it doesn't look like you can, but trust me, you can...just type...I promise it will work...JUST. TYPE." The search bar in the taskbar is dumb because it takes up space for running program entries. But anyway, the biggest issue is that searching for applications means the machine also searches the file system for things, and Bing for internet searches. Sorry, zero defense on that one, either. Bing searches on the start menu? That make application searches take longer?
There is not a single change to the Win10 start menu that is an objective improvement over Classic Shell. Not once has anyone been able to say "this function is better". If you like it, and I mean this 100% sincerely, I am happy for you. I simply haven't been able to share in your affinity for the changes.
the telemetry *should not be in there*. It is slowing things down and invading my privacy.
The alternative to telemetry is Microsoft ceasing to maintain features on which you rely and subsequently removing them because Microsoft can't tell that you or anyone else relies on them.
So, you're arguing that Microsoft would have kept Windows Media Center for all the people like me using it as a DVR if only telemetry was enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft would have kept the Windows Photo Viewer instead of forcing the appy-app version if only telemetry was enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft would have kept Paint and Solitaire instead of forcing the appy-app version if only telemetry was enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft would have let me keep my Synaptics control panel applet rather than forcing the generic 'Settings' touchpad config area that is missing half the functions I need if only telemetry was enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft would have kept Aero themes if only telemetry was enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft is going to stop auto-downloading appy-apps because they can see I uninstall as many as I can if telemetry is enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft is going to make all the OOBE options opt-in if enough people disable them all anyway if telemetry is enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft is going to leave Acrobat Pro as the default PDF reader if enough people undo its switching back to Edge if telemetry is enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft is going to stop nagging Chrome users to use Edge instead if telemetry is enabled?
You're arguing that Microsoft is going to stop advertising OneDrive in File Explorer by default if telemetry is enabled?
Forgive my skepticism.
And that is important, because if they can move away from Oracle so can anybody.
Uhm, no. I mean, yes, Oracle isn't increasing their customer base, but saying "if Amazon can do it, anybody can do it" misses the three big reasons why Amazon can do it.
First, Amazon has billions of dollars at their disposal. Even if Oracle was letting them run their database for zero dollars and it was nothing more than a dick waving competition between Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison just so Jeff could show Larry that he could, Amazon can financially afford to do that.
Second, Amazon has the coding talent to do it. A whole lot of people using Oracle are still doing so because they don't have the specialists required to do that sort of migration. Even if they did, most Oracle customers run Oracle because an upstream piece of software relies on it, so even if they wanted to retool *and* they had a sufficiently skilled DBA to move the data over, they probably don't have the ability to do the same for their upstream software. Pursuant to the prior point, Amazon can either fix it themselves (because they wrote it), demand the upstream vendor retools for DynamoDB (because they can afford it), or they can write a replacement that fits well enough to route around it.
Finally, unlike most Oracle customers, Amazon can easily recoup their expenses for writing DynamoDB - not just in the money they save by not-paying Oracle, but by selling the use of the database on AWS. That's fairly unique to Amazon; most other Oracle customers aren't selling database-aaS such that rolling their own will pay dividends.
Because let's be honest, a wireless light switch does not cost more than 3 bucks to produce. It just doesn't.
Sure, if you don't count the R & D and engineers' salaries. And setup costs with the off-shore manufacturer. And any licensing fees for protocols like Z-Wave / Zigbee. And cost of getting it UL-certified. And the cost of shipping it from China (or wherever it's being made) to the US. And the % the retailer will charge you to sell it on Amazon, eBay, or in a brink and morter like Lowe's or Home Depot. And any post-sale support / handling returns and exchanges when a customer can't figure out how to get it to work with their network or is just unlucky enough to receive a bad one. And oh yeah, some type of profit margin after all of this.
Yeah, 3 bucks sounds right. You should totally do it!
Let's assume you're correct, that the GP's math is off, and with all of the R&D/admin/retail markup, it's closer to $15/switch. That still means that $50/switch is more than triple the production cost. Moreover, if you're doing light switches, ten packs should help to amortize that far better...but they're not much of a savings even if it is possible to get that sort of a quantity back without going to a wholesaler.
Moreover, the underlying issue is not *only* cost, but the fiefdoms. I've got a bunch of the TP-Link Wi-Fi bulbs in my apartment, with the ultimate goal of controlling them with some OSS application, but anything I have found thus far either hasn't been updated in years, or requires me to do all of my configs in a text editor, or has bizarre idiosyncrasies that make it difficult to work with. But, once at least one of them is up to par, I'll be limited to their hardware compatibility list, which I'll have to check *before* I buy anything else.
Now, for those who are looking for something simple rather than an open standard, there's Philips Hue, and also Samsung has a thing, and the pro installers seem to like Crestron, and I think another poster said GE has some stuff...and about the closest thing to interoperability any of these things have is that they all have an Alexa skill that allows the owner to turn the lights on and off...but much beyond that and it's all about the vertical integration, making it pretty expensive to bet on the loser, or in the case of Iris, deemed insufficiently unprofitable that the line is discontinued, leaving those who *did* pick Iris with a bunch of expensive stuff that is unlikely to be useful in a different system.
Are you forced to rent the modem? I think you can buy one.
You can buy a modem and use your own if you have residential service, or business service with dynamic IP. Citing "security of their network" (yes, really), they do not allow business users with static IP services to bring their own modem.
Also, if you are a business subscriber with a plan over 60Mbits/sec and voice service, they will not let you use only one modem, since their voice modems don't support more than that. Even if you explicitly state you are fine being limited to 60Mbits/sec, they will refuse to only provision a single modem.
Also, they won't give you "just a modem", you get one of those crappy modem/router combos...which do have a bridge mode available, but they're not always careful about keeping that setting when they roll out firmware updates.
Also, you'll probably find yourself with yet another modem and access point for their CableWiFi service - not the worst thing, but still makes the install take longer and competes with your own WiFi network.
you're right; SSL certs are not ironclad proof of identity. For a while though, they *were* a barrier. Sure, $20 a domain wasn't the biggest hurdle, but spinning up 10,000 variations of googkle.com *and* giving them all $20 SSL certs got costly...and also involved a paper trail. The padlock was never a barrier to a spear phishing attempt, but it made playing with big numbers far less profitable, meaning a site with a cert was generally more trustworthy than HTTP. Aunt Google wanted to de facto mandate SSL, even for sites that really didn't need it, so we got let's encrypt. I'm appreciative to the EFF for it, but it became a whole lot easier to get The Padlock.
As far as it being cheap and easy to get an LLC, it's not cheap or easy to register 10,000 of them...and once again, there is a paper trail. Even if it doesn't take the same amount of validation to get an EV cert as a passport or military ID, EV's at least prove that the entity who has one either doesn't have 10,000 of them, or if they do, they're probably an entity with a lawyer on retainer to handle trademark infringement by the phishing sites looking to emulate them.
Red Hat disagrees with you.
Depends on how you look at it. Red Hat's subscription is to get support with an SLA, 10-year product lifecycles with assistance for migrations to new versions if needed, checkbox-compliance for industries that have compliance requirements, and explicit hardware testing and certification. Sure, Red Hat does this through paywalling their OS and letting Cent and Fedora handle folks who want to roll the dice, but it's not like Red Hat is only providing the functional equivalent of getting a new version of Windows Server as an ISO download every release and that's the end of it, or an OS that requires a metric ton of neutering to prevent inconvenient downtime in order to prevent the addition of otherwise-undesired functionality.
Scott Adam's Dilbert strip on this:
https://dilbert.com/strip/1992...
It is always hilarious that the most illegible, easily manipulated transmission vector is the gold standard for authenticity. Photoshop away, print it out, and FAX it to someone and it is valid.
*sigh*
A Photoshopped document, whether uploaded to Imgur, e-mailed, faxed, mailed, or sent via carrier pigeon, is still the same document. If there is a signature on it, then the signature is still binding to whatever the photoshopped document says, unless the contents of the document itself are in dispute. I don't see how that applies uniquely to faxes.
Fax is considered a secure method of transmission for a number of reasons. First, in a court case, theoretically each side has their copy of the document, which can be compared. Second, a nontrivial part of it is the timestamp - if prompted, both the sender and recipient have a record of when the fax was sent and received. E-mail has this too, to an extent, but for the moment, a timestamp of a fax is legally admissible; an e-mail...might be. Third, fax is a very good lowest common denominator - have a state of the art VoIP PBX with SIP trunks? Great! you can successfully transmit a fax to a 25-year-old fax machine still using film-based toner rolls. E-mail? we're still dealing with file format discrepancies, junk mail filters, encryption standards, and plenty of other areas where agreement is far from a given. Sure, ASCII text on port 25 is basically universal, but anything above that is basically "Whatever enough people agree upon". That's not even getting started on file transfer options; basically none of the even-kinda-legally-okay ones are possible to self-host.
Finally, you say it's "easily manipulated"...how? I mean, is there really such a thing as an MITM attack for a fax? Short of something bizarre like making an audio recording of the acoustic transmission or eavesdropping both of which require foreknowledge of when a fax will take place AND access to the transmission lines...how exactly is a fax hacked?
It's not a matter of legibility, it's a matter of reliability and veracity.
the US government doesn't have that kind of contralized control and people would never stand for it.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I think what Amimojo was getting at was that there is no American analogue to the Great Firewall of China. Japanese internment camps or Bay of Pigs or Area 51 can be searched without consequence in America; Tienanmen Square in China...less so.
Yes, the federal government has enough tentacles that there's a decent amount of centralized control in an abstract sense, but when Net Neutrality was on the table for response, Americans flooded the DC switchboard and told them where to shove it. Americans aren't going to vote in favor of a Great Firewall of America, and even if the response is, "well, the elites will implement one anyway", it's not completely outrageous, but the moment it goes into effect, the consequences will be very difficult to predict and may well backfire.
The $200 price point is for parents whose kids keep begging for an Xbox, but the price is just a bit out of reach.
As far as fast broadband not being a requirement for downloading games, I used to have 3Mbit/sec DSL, which was closer to 2Mbit/sec most of the time. Destiny 2 is a bit over 80GB, meaning that it would take nearly four days to download if I did literally nothing else with my bandwidth during that time. Fast broadband not being a requirement is, as CGP Grey would put it, "technically correct, in the most pointless kind of way". A four day delta between "buying game" and "playing game" is not exactly preferable to a 30-minute game install from a plastic disc. Even for those who are okay with it would then be left out of multiplayer, and while I personally am all too happy to limit my library to single player titles, the trend for the proportion of games for which multiplayer is either a primary focus or a sole focus rather than a single player campaign is not a source of hope.
On the topic of Steam for the PC, I submit that owning games is sadly a lost cause at this point. A handful of indie titles notwithstanding, what larger titles use standalone installers anymore? EA delivers all their games through Origin, Activision/Blizzard through Battle.Net, Stardock through Impulse (until the Gamestop situation went left), and Steam for basically everybody else. Meanwhile, finding plastic disc releases of PC games is rare anymore...so while I agree with you that games are impossible to have any meaningful level of ownership anymore, it's been a long time coming.
Removing ports that people still use today,
They were the first to remove the floppy drive - and certainly weren't the last. Everyone else has followed. This is nothing new for Apple. They don't follow trends, they set them - even if they turn out dumb.
Oh, this chestnut! Yes, Apple got rid of the floppy drive, but the floppy was starting to get cramped, and exchanging files with PC users was a nonstarter because the disk formats weren't cross-platform. The floppy disk's problems made it clear it wasn't a long term solution, and it's wasn't an iterative media - there were a few proprietary attempts to keep the form factor and some backwards compatibility, but there wasn't a standard 120MB storage medium, for example, in the same way floppy disks were. Nobody but Iomega made ZIP drives, and nobody but Sony made the Superdisk, so Apple picking a successor to the floppy would have been a matter of them picking a winner that they would then be dependent upon.
USB type A ports are *not* a fair comparison. USB 3.0 ports are backwards compatible with the billions of devices that use USB 2.0. USB2 is fast enough for plenty of things (no mouse or keyboard is shuffling data faster than 480Mbits/sec), and USB 3.0 is faster than most single drive storage media can shuffle data out the door. Adding USB-C connectors isn't the point of contention. Removing the USB-A connectors is the problem. It's not like USB-C would have had its adoption meaningfully delayed if Apple still included a USB-A port or two for this generation as a transition.
Maintaining the status quo for decades gets you IBM. To stay alive you have to shake things up and at least try to innovate.
Yes, but innovation is not giving loyal customers with workflows and very expensive equipment the finger. IBM had plenty of its own issues, not the least of which was its trouble with software - OS/2 was ahead of its time in many respects but didn't capture the desktop market, Domino was a great web server but depended on DB2 which wasn't a big hit except for firms that were on the full IBM stack...including Lotus Notes, a piece of software whose groans are only rivaled by Oracle. IBM had nothing to lose by trying to do a ground-up rewrite of Notes, but they instead ceded that market to Microsoft with Exchange. IBM was not-innovating because they were basically the first to shift to a rent seeking model off their well-entrenched mainframes and other customers, rather than writing x86 software.
Even if it means favoring wireless communication over wired before the world catches up.
Try using Wi-Fi in a Manhattan high-rise, where there are probably 100 SSIDs in range of any given apartment, meaning that wired network connections are about the only way to get an internet connection worth a damn. Wires will always be faster, simpler, and more reliable than radio signals in one form or another. For iPads that's fine, but wireless transfers have plenty of shortcomings that are solved with a wire. Not having them as an option isn't trendsetting, at least in a truly positive direction.
I no longer use my phone as a music device (except in the car via USB-C), and my phone is not an iPhone. It has no headphone jack either. At home, I cast to speakers. With Chromecast Audio, at least, I don't think there is any transcoding before transmitting. And in the end, a mobile device doesn't have much room for a decent DAC, so better to let the big device with the speakers do the job.
And literally none of that is impossible to do with an 1/8" headphone jack.
...and I've used Sleepyhead. I certainly appreciate it, but nobody "relies" on it - all the machine settings are available on the unit and Sleepyhead basically just displays info. It's very cool.
So for data nerds like me I like to dig into it, but the fact that I slept 7 hours 3 minutes last night with 4 wakeups vs 6 hours 52 minutes the night before with 6 wakeups really isn't critical information in any way.
And let's be honest: as much as I'm a tech-head, me "using the data" to fuck around with the settings on my machine is about as likely to kill me as NOT 'using the data" to fuck around with the settings on the machine.
It's not relied upon in the same way that a pacemaker is. However, if the CPAP is logging medical data generated by the user, and the user cannot access that data purely because of artificial means that benefits anybody other than the patient, and Sleepyhead helps to give those patients access to their data, then yes, I would argue that it's "relied upon". Either Sleepyhead is relied upon to get the data, the company's software which end users can't access is relied upon for that same data, or the data the CPAP collects cannot be read at all, defeating the purpose of the CPAP.
The combination of original and advertising has long been the standard in radio, and is just accepted as the cost of keeping the lights on. What's so special about podcasts?
Because it's backwards from the radio side of things.
Broadcast radio had clear - and large - upfront costs. One needed a broadcast tower, radio transmission equipment, a microphone, and a place to put it. One also needed frequency on which to broadcast...which meant an FCC license, which also had compliance rules that needed to be observed. Those things needed to be maintained and managed, so engineers were needed. All of that stuff cost a massive amount of money, meaning that one either needed a pile of money or an investor with a pile of money before broadcast could begin. I don't recall Carnegie or Rockefeller having enough interest to go into broadcast, so pretty much everyone who wasn't a university or a massive corporation depended on advertisers to help pay the costs of broadcasting.
Podcasting can be done for peanuts. Libsyn will host for $15/month, but an industrious person can use Wordpress and a shared web hosting account to do it for half that. I've occasionally spent more than that on lunch. Apple and Google will list your podcast in their respective directories for free, or people can subscribe by clicking a link on an RSS feed. Add in $250 in up front costs for a Shure microphone and a Presonus audio interface if you're feeling fancy, and anybody can start podcasting for literally thousands of times less money than it cost to start a broadcast radio station.
It was impossible to be a hobbyist AM radio broadcaster*. It is very possible to be a hobbyist podcaster. Earlier podcasts seldom had advertisements because those broadcasts were either straight up hobbyists doing it for the love of whatever-their-topic, or extensions of something else (e.g. churches distributing Sunday sermons). The audience was largely incidental, and the costs were fixed.
As podcasts grew in popularity, sea level rose, meaning people were looking to get money in exchange for a higher quality product. Podcasts needed money to help make that happen, meaning episodes started to end with donation requests, or advertisers started to offer money in exchange for airtime.
It's not that podcasts are special, it's that making money off of them was ex post facto to their surge in popularity, while broadcast needed it from the outset.
*Yes, pirate radio and similar low powered transmissions for hobbies are a thing. However, the reach was never going to get big enough for advertising to even be on the table. It's entirely possible for a small, home-based podcaster to get a sponsorship deal, which is a further extension of the point being made.
Many people think that for really big databases you need Oracle, for handling lots and lots of transactions. MySQL and Postgres are great for smaller businesses, but our business needs Oracle, they think.
That’s only a part of the story. Amazon has an unfathomable amount of resources at their disposal. They can afford to say “we are ditching Oracle”, and write checks and hire developers until those Oracle instances are gone. They don’t need support because they can develop in house until it works.
Most businesses don’t have that. What they do have, are upstream vendors, and what that vendor wants, that vendor gets. Even if Postgres provided true drop-in support, the upstream vendor demands Oracle and getting support is a losing battle on anything else.
Given Amazon’s deep pockets, that’s all but an expectation that they would roll their own. Not everyone can do that.
People neither want to feel nickel-and-dimed, paying $10/month for half a dozen services, nor do they want to feel taken advantage of by a $200/mo Comcast bill.
Each content provider wants to make the most money, and is using their content as leverage for their streaming subscriptions. The only thing that aggregates them all right now is The Pirate Bay. Roku does this to a certain extent, but having a middleman to aggregate billing and to give users a single, consistent UI with which to stream whatever content is desired.
To which everybody says, "Congratulations Voyager, you just invented the cable company."
I get it. However, the issues with Comcast and Time Warner were never their existence in the abstract, it's that they are inconsistent with delivering their service and that they charge a whole lot of money. If the average cable bill was $50/month and cable only went out during an actual-hurricane, I think there would be far less cord cutting, because there is still value from an end user perspective in the existence of an aggregator.
However, the content companies don't want to be 'just another option', and they're having to play the game because of the issues with the aggregators that people are leaving, so we're stuck with a dozen different smaller libraries and an equitable amount of bills to pay as a result.
It's truly amazing how much abuse some users are willing to take just to use Windows. The only explanation that makes any sense at this point is that they like the abuse.
Because, apparently, I have to explain this regularly to the Slashdot crowd...
First off, there is a whole lot of dependency not on Windows, but on Windows applications. I depend on Serato to DJ weddings. I depend on Adobe Production Studio to edit videos. I depend on CompuShow to run my intelligent lights. I depend on Sound Forge and Acronis and Active@ and the fact that if I run into a bizarre corner case I can find a random application on Softpedia, like when I used Remo Repair AVI to, well, repair an AVI file.
"Well Voyager529, you can't possibly be arguing that everyone needs the ability to run DJ software and render compositions in After Effects...and at least 80% of your Start Menu is open source stuff or has perfectly viable alternatives."
That's true. However, plenty of people still use iTunes. Plenty of people still use some sort of photo management software, be it Photoshop Elements or ACDSee or similar. My aunt has a Cricut machine. A number of friends have Neat scanners to organize their paperwork. Still others have a workflow which integrates scanner software by Epson or Brother. Even if my applications are different than other people's, it's only folks who live in Google World that believe that believe Chrome is a fully functional operating system.
But let's assume for a moment that we limit ourselves to people whose software needs can be comprehensively met with what Mint provides, either out of the box, or its App-Store-by-any-other-name. We're dealing with all sorts of hardware. Let's talk printer/scanners. Sure, they'll probably spit documents on paper (though I'm sure some low-end ones will be a mess even at that), but which subset of features will still function is a toss-up. Duplex printing? Paper profiles? Draft/BW/HQ/Photo printing profiles? Double sided scanning from the ADF? Auto detecting multiple photos on the glass and saving each of them as individual JPEGs? Triggering a scan from the touch screen panel? That's just one example of functionality that might have to be given up to move to Linux, but hardware support often is somewhere between research-prior-to-purchasing, or outright luck of the draw from an end user's perspective. Linux has indeed gotten Wi-Fi chipsets down, but audio can sometimes still be hit-or-miss on some laptops, suspend modes and function keys aren't a given, integrated webcams are guesswork...and just to be clear, this is not a dig at Linux developers, who I know do a whole lot of work to do as much as they can for a constantly moving target. The problem is that, from an end user's perspective, if one of these things doesn't work, there's nobody they can call. HP isn't going to support anything but the version of Windows the machine ships with, what's the OEM who even makes a webcam that shows up in Device Manager as BisonCam (who is going to say 'call HP' anyway), and it's not like calling 1-800-PENGUIN is going to get them phone support for Ubuntu.
But, let's assume we're talking about an end user who is still rocking an HP Laserjet 4050 at home, and has been given a System76 laptop so there is no hardware incompatibilities and what they do can be adequately handled with LibreOffice and Firefox on Mint. Best case scenario, right? You're still dealing with end users.
End users don't understand how the magical boxes do the things. Some are a bit better than others, but a whole lot of people know how to perform the handful of tasks they need to perform, and that's about it. The files-and-folders paradigm doesn't always make sense to them. Window focus doesn't always make sense to them. Command line utilization is outright wizardry. That's not a dig at these people, either - most of them have talents in other areas where I am hopelessly incompetent. To move these users to Linux, even to Mint, is going to require retraining...i
I assumed that it would be an electric scale + gravity measurement and not a balance that would ultimately determine the Kilogram.
The kilogram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. Mass is constant regardless of gravity (same number of molecules on earth as on the moon or on Jupiter), so although every day "close enough" measurements do measure against gravity to ensure you're getting a kilo of avocados at the grocery store, doing so as a part of defining a measurement of mass defeats half the purpose.
A balance allows the ability to ensure the amount of molecules on the left has the same mass as the right side; a kilo weight on the left with a kilo of sand on the right would remain in balance on the moon and on Jupiter.
https://www.originpc.com/gamin...
There you go!
I mean, I don't know if dual GTX 1080's are close enough to RTX series cards, though I do know that the 2080's are coming in the next month or two. Also, I don't think an 802.11ad laptop chipset is an option at the moment, though I'm sure retrofitting one into an m.2 slot in a year or two will be a trivial upgrade. I don't know if the 3840x2160 screen is 144Hz, but it does do G-Sync. The i9 option is sustained 3.6GHz with a 5GHz turbo mode, a bit shy of your 4GHz requirement. Finally, I hope your wallet isn't a factor; a quick-and-dirty build assuming 32GB of RAM, a pair of 500GB M.2 SSDs, and a one year warranty is north of $5,700; hitting $10K is well within the realm of possibility. ...But it's about 90% of the way to what you were looking for.
Or do like the rest of us and buy a USB battery pack. You can get one for under $20 that fits in your pocket and can provide a full charge to a phone 4+ times. No need to turn your phone off and take it apart, and it works with all your USB devices.
Let us count the ways that this is inferior to removable batteries...
1.) Rotating them over a single day isn't a terribly common use case. Getting a new battery 18 months in because you're eyeballing a charger by lunch time, is quite common. It's an easy way to help extend the lifetime of a phone.
2.) For those looking to get from one end of the day to the other without needing a charger, battery rotation was only one such use case. Powerbear and ZeroLemon make some excellent extended batteries, with custom battery backs to fit them. Yes, my Note 3 and Note 4 with a ZeroLemon battery were massive...but when people heard I could charge once every three days, suddenly, the "it's huge!" went away.
3.) Toward the end of the lifespan of the built-in battery, it will require near constant charging. This may well require having the phone tethered to the battery pack during use, which in turn puts more stress on the USB/Lightning connector. By contrast, extended batteries minimize the wear on the charging port, again improving the lifespan of the device. For users who have already broken their connector, external chargers can cost as little as $10 and help buy a bit of time before having the connector repaired.
4.) The Note7 debacle could have been solved quickly and easily with a box of batteries (or battery backs, depending on what ultimately would have solved it) shipped to carrier stores, with a quick swap out that took 3 minutes - 2:45 of which being spent documenting the inventory change. Instead, otherwise-perfectly-good phones needed to be scrapped.
5.) From users' perspective, there is no downside. The Galaxy S5 had a removable battery and was still IP68 waterproof. External battery packs and battery cases can still be manufactured and utilized. I once saw removable batteries which themselves were enabled for wireless charging, even if the rest of the phone wasn't. Glass backs are the closest possibility, but they are so commonly either shattered or covered with a case as to be invisible that the number of users demanding them is a relative minority - one I'm not saying need not be catered to, but the lack of options on this front is troubling.