certain things are essential to continued existence. Those are genuine needs.
Things like shelter, food, and protection from predators. (which in the modern world, includes financial/legal ones, which have replaced the natural ones.)
Wanting something that is not essential to continued existence is a genuine want, not a need. Things like "better" housing, or "better" food.
When nobody is working, they do not get the universal exchange medium (Money, because their only real commodity worth value, labor, now is worth precisely 0$), and thus cannot even secure for themselves the essential required materials needed for continued existence.
Their neighbors will likewise not have access to the required materials needed for continued existence. The eventual reality will dawn on them, that rather than procure those needed materials from the people who can produce it for free, (using robotic labor), they can procure it from each other, by treating each other's labor as valuable, and assigning a new currency system that respects this. (Or even, trading things with each other in exchange for the risk/action of stealing it from those that can produce it for free, which is then still a labor that has real value, just not to those who own the machines, and have all the money-- and applying an exchange system based on that risk.)
Either way, it will end up with the same eventuality.
Those able to produce it for free, who refuse to provide for free (post scarcity), or allow free access to the exchange medium (Basic income), will only end up without a market to distribute to or produce product for. The value of owning the robots vanishes.
The reality that humans need a place to live, food to eat, water to drink, etc-- will not go away after human labor becomes obsolete. Thus, the humans in question will continue to have those needs, without a viable way to obtain them from the economic system, because they have NOTHING of value to exchange for them.
Nope, you are thinking about that entirely wrongly.
It is not that everyone has so much money that it becomes worthless through deflation--
It is that nobody has any to spend, but still have outstanding needs. It becomes about as useful a commodity to facilitate trade as refined uranium is. Which is to say, not at all, because nobody except a very few have any refined uranium. The same will be true for money.
Instead of money, people will trade something else. Fuck, it could be damn bottle caps for all I know. Just not money as investors consider it.
To be useful in the process of securing goods or services, ordinary people need to have that commodity to trade. This is not devaluation due to deflation, it is devaluation due to lack of liquidity in the market.
If your working contribution costs more to automate than it takes to pay your wage, you will be safe from automation (at least until automation drives down the costs of further automation sufficiently to resolve this case).
If your wages are on par with, or greater (amortized over time) than the costs of replacing you with automation, your job is at high risk of being eliminated to automation as a cost saving measure.
Combined, the only "safe" class of workers are those in a situation where automation is, for some reason other than cost, unable to replace them, which is a category that gets eroded quickly due to increasingly capable robot and software designs.
Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works, and the only people who "Make money", are those who OWN robots, or have a share in companies, and milk their investments.
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Either money has to be distributed for no labor expended by a governing body (basic income strategy), or true post-scarcity future economic models need to be created. There are no alternatives where really rich people get everything and everyone else just dies. (Sorry plutocrats, but that is how you destroy the human race, not live immortal, pampered lives.)
I recall reading about some experimental cryptography schemas that create purposeful decryption collisions between two different filesystems. One that is a dummy filesystem that contains nothing interesting, and another that is the active filesystem you want to hide.
Depending on the key provided to the decryption system, it returns one or the other data stream from the encrypted data.
Something like that would work very well even against disk imaging attacks, since you could provide a valid key, and the cops would succeed in decrypting the data, only to find nothing of interest.
Picked up a Samsung Chromebook 3 at Walmart for around 90$. Cheap. Super duper cheap.
It has a paltry 32gb internal storage, but I dont use it. Instead, I installed crouton, and set up a chroot on a big microSD card. By default, crouton wants to use a very old revision of ubuntu. (Trusty, I think...) It has no problems setting up a Xenial or newer one though. It just complains at you something terrible when you tell it to install anything other than trusty, and after that shuts the hell up and works as expected.
Regardless, this is an Intel based chromebook, so the chroot can drive WINE like a champ.
It is a 1.6ghz dual core Intel system with 2gb of RAM, with ZRAM enabled. Has wifi, bluetooth, HDMI out, and the like.
No physical HDD, so dropping isn't an issue. The CPU is actually a 2ghz chip that is downthrottled for heat dissipation reasons, so it has no fan inside. Internal battery lasts 8 hours in active use.
It weighs less than a pound.
It works just fine for me as a netbook. I can run some limited office productivity software on it (Office works in WINE if you know what you are doing-- and OpenOffice works native, due to linux) I have a choice of browser, I can multitask, and do local saving. Works great. Just a little inconvenient, because I have to start the chroot every boot. (there ARE ways to make it boot automatically when chrome starts, but meh.)
Really, if it werent for the chromebooks using some bizzarro ACPI based keyboard and sound hardware that normal Linux does not know how to handle, it would be the go-to hardware for linux chromebooks to turn them into inexpensive netbooks.
Nobody seems to have been willing to make an actual project (and it would take a whole team and actual project leadership!) to create free industrial CAD/CAM on the level of Solidworks/CATIA.
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
"But the menu based metaphor systems are so... OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for not respecting user feedback about your choices as the dev team/designer.
The same same is true for things like Pottering's systemd. "Script based inits, like found in sysv init, are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal.
If you are a developer/designer, and you disagree with my attestation that just because something is old does not mean you should remove it (or replace it with something else), take this to heart:
The air you breathe now is several MILLION years old. Why not replace that old, ancient air with something new, and edgy-- like ionized plasma freshly born from inside a star!? No, you don't like that idea, because your lungs aren't able to handle highly energetic plasma? Fancy that-- your end users have systems that are not able to handle having the init system changed willy-nilly either.
Those things Google mentions-- like "Permissionless innovation" and the like-- those frighten the shit out of businesses who revolve around gatekeeping.
You see, to stay relevant in such an atmosphere, one has to actually be innovative, stay innovative, and be among the most innovative. That costs money and effort. Innovating early, then stagnating the market with gatekeeping and patent abuse allows them to reap big financial rewards for years while doing nothing but placating shareholders. (See, EG, the likes of Oracle.)
Google is *really* telling them that their market abuse strategy is doomed to failure, because innovators will not be discouraged by their heavy handed attempts to stop them, and the internet amplifies that innovation.
Expect lots of denial, gnashing of teeth, and doubled-down litigation in the near future.
USB2.0 is faster than many optical disc drives, AC.
For reference, the max bandwidth of USB2.0 is 480mbit, or about 60MB/sec.
A typical DVD drive (we will even say that this is a fancy 12x drive, just to give it the benefit of the doubt), such as found in an xbox360, has a max potential bandwidth of 132mbits. (16.5MB/sec)
So YES, AC. A "Fast" USB2.0 device is one that favors the top possible speed allowable by the bus, which mechanical disk drives have no problems whatsoever providing.
The drives in question were capable of sustained sequential reads in excess of 40MB/sec, and arbitrary random reads of about 20mb/sec.
The Microsoft branded flash module? about half that.
Say they are responsible for disposal of the unit.
If the end user is NOT the owner, they do not have legal right to destroy or dispose of the product after it reaches end of life, because they are only renting.
That means that in order to be responsible with their product lifecycle, they have to plan for disposition, and provide a mechanism for the end user to return old product for proper disposal.
That is more expensive than you realize, because it basically doubles the costs of shipping on a product's life cycle, *AND*, it introduces a whole other branch of regulatory issues that the company must then conform with to meet necessary EPA (or other regulatory agency) requirements to assure that toxic heavy metals, and other potentially hazardous materials contained in the hardware are disposed of PROPERLY.
Want to know the actual difference between a "legitimate" HDD, and a not-legitimate one?
A small PNG image file loaded onto some magic sectors, and an 8 byte magic number written directly afterward. The drive's firmware was default factory, but only a small handful of drives were supported.
That image was of the microsoft logo.
Yes. The presence or absence of that little png file is SO TOTALLY going to change how a game is played online./s
No-- Microsoft KNEW that they were vastly overcharging for a COTS component that was not special in any way except for the data stored on the platter, which is very inexpensive to replicate. They did not care. They were the gatekeepers, and were milking people dry by purposefully selling base systems without HDDs, or with very tiny ones, while pushing digital downloads.
Know what else? When it came to the "USB" storage options, I put various very high speed USB2.0 devices that I had PERSONALLY TESTED the raw performance of and verified that they were bitching fast, on my 360 to see if MS was full of shit when the console did its own testing-- Sure enough, it was premium bullshit. It would consistently say the device did not meet recommended speed requirements. Know what I did? I went out and bought one of the shitty USB memory sticks MS was hawking, and tested it myself. It underperformed compared to the units I had been attaching. The magic? The USB string-- For real.
Bullshit. Premium bullshit all around, and people just ignore it, because there is no alternative. Fuck that noise.
Dont be retarded. It can be serviced by something like u-boot and a functioning uart, or jtag interface. Things that are usually there, just without pins soldered on. I think the cost increase is about.01$ to populate those pins. The software in the device is ALREADY THERE to flash the firmware initially at the factory. Documenting how to connect, what the cable pinout is, the voltage, and providing a rescue firmware image online would meet the requirements.
This is not some crazy thing where they would have to add missing functionality. It is a situation where they just need to provide some docs, an online download, and populate some pins they already have pads for on their device, in 90+% of cases.
Much of that "difficulty" is artificially introduced by the console developer, to discourage experimentation and reverse engineering attempts, in order to keep the console "secure."
EG, things like the E-Fuses in the 360 preventing the flashing of older firmwares over the top of newer ones, etc.
They ONLY reason they exist, *IS TO BRICK CONSOLES*, when people attempt to gain control of the console.
An industry that makes bank on people buying replacement consoles and software titles to replace "damaged" product, fighting to prevent end users plugging that revenue stream!?
SAY IT AIN'T SO!/s
For those that dont understand how software can be an issue: Suppose that Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony decide that they want to not tie software downloads to a user account, but instead to a hardware unique key. Now when your console dies, that's all she wrote.
Another possibility is that they fear that tools to recover data (which would naturally develop from open standards and tools to 'repair' a console, such as from a failed firmware update semi-brick) will allow users to back up their downloads, and or, share pirated content.
Nevermind that at least in Nintendo's case, the ability to fake an install ticket on Wii-U allows users to download directly from Nintendo's NUS service, and install titles on their wii-u free of charge. This outstanding, existing, channel for piracy takes second fiddle to trying to plug a hypothetical future one. (because that makes total sense!/s)
In reality, Nintendo and pals are worried that people will keep obsolete consoles well past their expected service lifes, and that this will impact the residual revenue stream of re-released titles later. (Like all the times they have released the zelda titles. 3 times each now for Twilight princess, twice for WindWaker, more than 5 times now for the original NES zelda titles, etc.) They are worried that these old consoles will develop cult follower status, that indie developers will continue to develop for those consoles without paying developer licenses or royalties, due to their being past end of life-- (much like say, Tepples who posts here does for NES and SNES) heaven forbid if any of those are better than what Nintendo/MS/Sony/etc, are currently offering-- or worse, game houses decide to target an obsolete platform just to avoid platform license fees using open SDKs.
They fear losing the privilege of being the gatekeepers, and becoming less relevant in the face of very powerful obsolete consoles remaining in the market.
That they would be terrified of right to repair is a no-brainer. The reality that the public requires this right is also a no-brainer.
One of those has to win out, and consequences will follow.
After the snowden reveal, I switched to it exclusively when communicating with a friend of mine. I use a really strong set of ECDSA keys I generated for us, and physically exchanged in person.
I laugh at the idea of the NSA wasting the CPU cycles needed to decode our harmless exchanges of adorable kitten pics.
a message that can be read by somebody other than the intended recipient, is not worthy of being called secure.
A message that can have the key derived from the data stream is a message that fails to prevent somebody other than the intended recipient from reading it.
It doesn't matter anyway-- the statement is absurd. Humans will never be able to match a machine's pace, even with wires going into their heads. Organic neurons are PAINFULLY slow, with cycle times measured in milliseconds. By comparison, computers are measured in multiples of giga-ops per second.
A human will never be able to adapt to the real output pace of a well written program. Even WITH borg implants.
Ahh... Back when the platter in the drive did not have defined sector markings, and all drive seeking was done with step motors instead of voice coils...
If you were clever, and knew what the ACTUAL limits of your platter's magnetic density were, you could tweak the sector layout to get more total sectors than was advertised. (not by much, but back then every kilobyte mattered.)
of course, even then most people did not know what they were doing...
That was the Microsoft Distribution Format, or MDF.
There was another, less frequently used one that went to 1.62mb, instead of 1.72, but I forget what it was called.
Not all media was created equally though. Some disks were just total garbage if not formatted at the intended 1.44mb. I strongly suspect that they had uneven distribution of magnetic particles in the mylar, so that sector marking areas (when formatted to 1.44) were more reliable than data areas. When formatted with unusual sector and track layouts, these did not align anymore, and the disks behaved unpredictably. Others were just fine at even the strangest geometries. It was often a crapshoot to try formatting diskettes to MDF.
Thankfully the AOL install floppies were of the really nice, easy to format, and good at data retention type.:P Just put some tape over the hole, and peel off the label. You could get hundreds of them in the mail for free! Those were simpler times!
Slashdot Mirror
certain things are essential to continued existence. Those are genuine needs.
Things like shelter, food, and protection from predators. (which in the modern world, includes financial/legal ones, which have replaced the natural ones.)
Wanting something that is not essential to continued existence is a genuine want, not a need. Things like "better" housing, or "better" food.
When nobody is working, they do not get the universal exchange medium (Money, because their only real commodity worth value, labor, now is worth precisely 0$), and thus cannot even secure for themselves the essential required materials needed for continued existence.
Their neighbors will likewise not have access to the required materials needed for continued existence. The eventual reality will dawn on them, that rather than procure those needed materials from the people who can produce it for free, (using robotic labor), they can procure it from each other, by treating each other's labor as valuable, and assigning a new currency system that respects this. (Or even, trading things with each other in exchange for the risk/action of stealing it from those that can produce it for free, which is then still a labor that has real value, just not to those who own the machines, and have all the money-- and applying an exchange system based on that risk.)
Either way, it will end up with the same eventuality.
Those able to produce it for free, who refuse to provide for free (post scarcity), or allow free access to the exchange medium (Basic income), will only end up without a market to distribute to or produce product for. The value of owning the robots vanishes.
The reality that humans need a place to live, food to eat, water to drink, etc-- will not go away after human labor becomes obsolete. Thus, the humans in question will continue to have those needs, without a viable way to obtain them from the economic system, because they have NOTHING of value to exchange for them.
Nope, you are thinking about that entirely wrongly.
It is not that everyone has so much money that it becomes worthless through deflation--
It is that nobody has any to spend, but still have outstanding needs. It becomes about as useful a commodity to facilitate trade as refined uranium is. Which is to say, not at all, because nobody except a very few have any refined uranium. The same will be true for money.
Instead of money, people will trade something else. Fuck, it could be damn bottle caps for all I know. Just not money as investors consider it.
To be useful in the process of securing goods or services, ordinary people need to have that commodity to trade. This is not devaluation due to deflation, it is devaluation due to lack of liquidity in the market.
It makes perfect sense.
If your working contribution costs more to automate than it takes to pay your wage, you will be safe from automation (at least until automation drives down the costs of further automation sufficiently to resolve this case).
If your wages are on par with, or greater (amortized over time) than the costs of replacing you with automation, your job is at high risk of being eliminated to automation as a cost saving measure.
Combined, the only "safe" class of workers are those in a situation where automation is, for some reason other than cost, unable to replace them, which is a category that gets eroded quickly due to increasingly capable robot and software designs.
Human society NEEDS to be ready for the inevitable reality where NOBODY works, and the only people who "Make money", are those who OWN robots, or have a share in companies, and milk their investments.
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Either money has to be distributed for no labor expended by a governing body (basic income strategy), or true post-scarcity future economic models need to be created. There are no alternatives where really rich people get everything and everyone else just dies. (Sorry plutocrats, but that is how you destroy the human race, not live immortal, pampered lives.)
I recall reading about some experimental cryptography schemas that create purposeful decryption collisions between two different filesystems. One that is a dummy filesystem that contains nothing interesting, and another that is the active filesystem you want to hide.
Depending on the key provided to the decryption system, it returns one or the other data stream from the encrypted data.
Something like that would work very well even against disk imaging attacks, since you could provide a valid key, and the cops would succeed in decrypting the data, only to find nothing of interest.
Picked up a Samsung Chromebook 3 at Walmart for around 90$. Cheap. Super duper cheap.
It has a paltry 32gb internal storage, but I dont use it. Instead, I installed crouton, and set up a chroot on a big microSD card. By default, crouton wants to use a very old revision of ubuntu. (Trusty, I think...) It has no problems setting up a Xenial or newer one though. It just complains at you something terrible when you tell it to install anything other than trusty, and after that shuts the hell up and works as expected.
Regardless, this is an Intel based chromebook, so the chroot can drive WINE like a champ.
It is a 1.6ghz dual core Intel system with 2gb of RAM, with ZRAM enabled. Has wifi, bluetooth, HDMI out, and the like.
No physical HDD, so dropping isn't an issue. The CPU is actually a 2ghz chip that is downthrottled for heat dissipation reasons, so it has no fan inside. Internal battery lasts 8 hours in active use.
It weighs less than a pound.
It works just fine for me as a netbook. I can run some limited office productivity software on it (Office works in WINE if you know what you are doing-- and OpenOffice works native, due to linux) I have a choice of browser, I can multitask, and do local saving. Works great. Just a little inconvenient, because I have to start the chroot every boot. (there ARE ways to make it boot automatically when chrome starts, but meh.)
Really, if it werent for the chromebooks using some bizzarro ACPI based keyboard and sound hardware that normal Linux does not know how to handle, it would be the go-to hardware for linux chromebooks to turn them into inexpensive netbooks.
Nobody seems to have been willing to make an actual project (and it would take a whole team and actual project leadership!) to create free industrial CAD/CAM on the level of Solidworks/CATIA.
Gnome3 and its ilk, are the result of developers (and especially designers) not listening to their userbase.
"But the menu based metaphor systems are so... OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for not respecting user feedback about your choices as the dev team/designer.
The same same is true for things like Pottering's systemd.
"Script based inits, like found in sysv init, are just so OLD!" is not a justifiable excuse for its removal.
If you are a developer/designer, and you disagree with my attestation that just because something is old does not mean you should remove it (or replace it with something else), take this to heart:
The air you breathe now is several MILLION years old. Why not replace that old, ancient air with something new, and edgy-- like ionized plasma freshly born from inside a star!? No, you don't like that idea, because your lungs aren't able to handle highly energetic plasma? Fancy that-- your end users have systems that are not able to handle having the init system changed willy-nilly either.
Those things Google mentions-- like "Permissionless innovation" and the like-- those frighten the shit out of businesses who revolve around gatekeeping.
You see, to stay relevant in such an atmosphere, one has to actually be innovative, stay innovative, and be among the most innovative. That costs money and effort. Innovating early, then stagnating the market with gatekeeping and patent abuse allows them to reap big financial rewards for years while doing nothing but placating shareholders. (See, EG, the likes of Oracle.)
Google is *really* telling them that their market abuse strategy is doomed to failure, because innovators will not be discouraged by their heavy handed attempts to stop them, and the internet amplifies that innovation.
Expect lots of denial, gnashing of teeth, and doubled-down litigation in the near future.
Nono, sucking cock is how your bosses GET HEAD, not get AHEAD.
You can graft tomatoes to potato roots. If you can grow potato, you can grow tomato, if you use the graft technique.
Google "Amazing potato tomato". It's pre-grafted plants for your garden.
What you really want is a "destroy adopted storage decryption key + zerofill SD card" option on the recovery menu.
At least for Android devices anyway.
USB2.0 is faster than many optical disc drives, AC.
For reference, the max bandwidth of USB2.0 is 480mbit, or about 60MB/sec.
A typical DVD drive (we will even say that this is a fancy 12x drive, just to give it the benefit of the doubt), such as found in an xbox360, has a max potential bandwidth of 132mbits. (16.5MB/sec)
So YES, AC. A "Fast" USB2.0 device is one that favors the top possible speed allowable by the bus, which mechanical disk drives have no problems whatsoever providing.
The drives in question were capable of sustained sequential reads in excess of 40MB/sec, and arbitrary random reads of about 20mb/sec.
The Microsoft branded flash module? about half that.
No--
Say they are responsible for disposal of the unit.
If the end user is NOT the owner, they do not have legal right to destroy or dispose of the product after it reaches end of life, because they are only renting.
That means that in order to be responsible with their product lifecycle, they have to plan for disposition, and provide a mechanism for the end user to return old product for proper disposal.
That is more expensive than you realize, because it basically doubles the costs of shipping on a product's life cycle, *AND*, it introduces a whole other branch of regulatory issues that the company must then conform with to meet necessary EPA (or other regulatory agency) requirements to assure that toxic heavy metals, and other potentially hazardous materials contained in the hardware are disposed of PROPERLY.
Watch that shit vanish FAST.
Want to know the actual difference between a "legitimate" HDD, and a not-legitimate one?
A small PNG image file loaded onto some magic sectors, and an 8 byte magic number written directly afterward. The drive's firmware was default factory, but only a small handful of drives were supported.
That image was of the microsoft logo.
Yes. The presence or absence of that little png file is SO TOTALLY going to change how a game is played online. /s
No-- Microsoft KNEW that they were vastly overcharging for a COTS component that was not special in any way except for the data stored on the platter, which is very inexpensive to replicate. They did not care. They were the gatekeepers, and were milking people dry by purposefully selling base systems without HDDs, or with very tiny ones, while pushing digital downloads.
Know what else? When it came to the "USB" storage options, I put various very high speed USB2.0 devices that I had PERSONALLY TESTED the raw performance of and verified that they were bitching fast, on my 360 to see if MS was full of shit when the console did its own testing-- Sure enough, it was premium bullshit. It would consistently say the device did not meet recommended speed requirements. Know what I did? I went out and bought one of the shitty USB memory sticks MS was hawking, and tested it myself. It underperformed compared to the units I had been attaching. The magic? The USB string-- For real.
Bullshit. Premium bullshit all around, and people just ignore it, because there is no alternative. Fuck that noise.
Dont be retarded. It can be serviced by something like u-boot and a functioning uart, or jtag interface. Things that are usually there, just without pins soldered on. I think the cost increase is about .01$ to populate those pins. The software in the device is ALREADY THERE to flash the firmware initially at the factory. Documenting how to connect, what the cable pinout is, the voltage, and providing a rescue firmware image online would meet the requirements.
This is not some crazy thing where they would have to add missing functionality. It is a situation where they just need to provide some docs, an online download, and populate some pins they already have pads for on their device, in 90+% of cases.
Sure they can. Just not as *MUCH* money.
Much of that "difficulty" is artificially introduced by the console developer, to discourage experimentation and reverse engineering attempts, in order to keep the console "secure."
EG, things like the E-Fuses in the 360 preventing the flashing of older firmwares over the top of newer ones, etc.
They ONLY reason they exist, *IS TO BRICK CONSOLES*, when people attempt to gain control of the console.
An industry that makes bank on people buying replacement consoles and software titles to replace "damaged" product, fighting to prevent end users plugging that revenue stream!?
SAY IT AIN'T SO! /s
For those that dont understand how software can be an issue:
Suppose that Nintendo or Microsoft or Sony decide that they want to not tie software downloads to a user account, but instead to a hardware unique key. Now when your console dies, that's all she wrote.
Another possibility is that they fear that tools to recover data (which would naturally develop from open standards and tools to 'repair' a console, such as from a failed firmware update semi-brick) will allow users to back up their downloads, and or, share pirated content.
Nevermind that at least in Nintendo's case, the ability to fake an install ticket on Wii-U allows users to download directly from Nintendo's NUS service, and install titles on their wii-u free of charge. This outstanding, existing, channel for piracy takes second fiddle to trying to plug a hypothetical future one. (because that makes total sense! /s)
In reality, Nintendo and pals are worried that people will keep obsolete consoles well past their expected service lifes, and that this will impact the residual revenue stream of re-released titles later. (Like all the times they have released the zelda titles. 3 times each now for Twilight princess, twice for WindWaker, more than 5 times now for the original NES zelda titles, etc.) They are worried that these old consoles will develop cult follower status, that indie developers will continue to develop for those consoles without paying developer licenses or royalties, due to their being past end of life-- (much like say, Tepples who posts here does for NES and SNES) heaven forbid if any of those are better than what Nintendo/MS/Sony/etc, are currently offering-- or worse, game houses decide to target an obsolete platform just to avoid platform license fees using open SDKs.
They fear losing the privilege of being the gatekeepers, and becoming less relevant in the face of very powerful obsolete consoles remaining in the market.
That they would be terrified of right to repair is a no-brainer.
The reality that the public requires this right is also a no-brainer.
One of those has to win out, and consequences will follow.
After the snowden reveal, I switched to it exclusively when communicating with a friend of mine. I use a really strong set of ECDSA keys I generated for us, and physically exchanged in person.
I laugh at the idea of the NSA wasting the CPU cycles needed to decode our harmless exchanges of adorable kitten pics.
a message that can be read by somebody other than the intended recipient, is not worthy of being called secure.
A message that can have the key derived from the data stream is a message that fails to prevent somebody other than the intended recipient from reading it.
The two are mutually exclusive.
No. Really.
The average user has difficulty clicking on a UI element that says "Generate key" and figuring out what it does.
Let alone understanding the differences between key types, and why some are better than others. (like why you shouldn't trust the RSA algo.)
It doesn't matter anyway-- the statement is absurd. Humans will never be able to match a machine's pace, even with wires going into their heads. Organic neurons are PAINFULLY slow, with cycle times measured in milliseconds. By comparison, computers are measured in multiples of giga-ops per second.
A human will never be able to adapt to the real output pace of a well written program. Even WITH borg implants.
No. Meat will never be able to match silicon. Neurons have a refractory period that is painfully slow compared to CURRENT silicon.
http://www.physiologyweb.com/l...
At most, a connected human brain would be a novel input source on a slow but wide bandwidth bus. There is only so much cortex you can put sensors on.
A true AI would be hobbled by adding a human brain.
Ahh... Back when the platter in the drive did not have defined sector markings, and all drive seeking was done with step motors instead of voice coils...
If you were clever, and knew what the ACTUAL limits of your platter's magnetic density were, you could tweak the sector layout to get more total sectors than was advertised. (not by much, but back then every kilobyte mattered.)
of course, even then most people did not know what they were doing...
That was the Microsoft Distribution Format, or MDF.
There was another, less frequently used one that went to 1.62mb, instead of 1.72, but I forget what it was called.
Not all media was created equally though. Some disks were just total garbage if not formatted at the intended 1.44mb. I strongly suspect that they had uneven distribution of magnetic particles in the mylar, so that sector marking areas (when formatted to 1.44) were more reliable than data areas. When formatted with unusual sector and track layouts, these did not align anymore, and the disks behaved unpredictably. Others were just fine at even the strangest geometries. It was often a crapshoot to try formatting diskettes to MDF.
Thankfully the AOL install floppies were of the really nice, easy to format, and good at data retention type. :P Just put some tape over the hole, and peel off the label. You could get hundreds of them in the mail for free! Those were simpler times!