I'd take it more seriously if they were to directly power their data centers from renewables 24/7 only instead of some of the funny math of just spending more money to "buy" renewable energy from grid producers at a large enough volume to say they run on 100% renewable (or worse, carbon credits).
Because on the back end, they're still dependent in terms of actual consumption on grid baseload generation even if they have a balance sheet that says otherwise.
Further, trying to run full-time off wind+solar would require a substantial investment in energy storage to balance night/still air and storage is where we need the investment. And build-anywhere storage, not pumped hydro or other geographically dependent storage, either.
Worse than that, you still need a Windows server running Update Manager components and the Windows client to install updates.
I think the switch from a heavyweight thick management ESX to ESXi was a good idea, but the problem is that it leaves all management capability needing a VM or external server with all the associated availability problems a single point of failure.
Frankly, I'd like to see ESXi re-thickened a bit to include vCenter management into the base install with master/slave clustering and a distributed database. This would improve vCenter availability and reduce the dependence on a separate VM.
Every new host would then be a potential vCenter cluster management participant. Upgrading a node across version boundary would upgrade vCenter, so as the cluster was upgraded the vCenter upgrade came with the package.
The downside would be that it would require more storage for the base image, breaking more than a few tiny SD/USB installs. The write rate of vCenter may be a bit much for the media used in these flash installs, but not by much and if server motherboards start shipping with M.2 slots the capacity and write durability shouldn't be issues.
They have some lame and limited HTML5 front end for vCenter now. 6.5 or 7 or whatever the new version is supposed to be called will supposedly have a HTML5 client. I don't know if its been released or not.
I seem to run across a fair number of places with AS/400 stuff. What's kind of interesting is the AS/400 stuff and people seem to run in this parallel universe IT department with their own staff somehow immune from the other pressures of the rest of the IT department.
Once in a blue moon I'll hear mention that some kind of AS/400 update or installation is happening, so it's not like they're strictly legacy systems. And at longer term clients with AS/400 I occasionally see something new/different in the "AS/400 rack".
I don't know what IBM's growth potential is or how at risk their active businesses like AS/400 are from being eaten by Wintel/Lintel systems are, but they sure seem to have carved out a niche that seems nearly immovable.
This is not a Democrat thing, it's an anyone with an education thing. It's why even senior Republicans are distancing themselves
"Trump will ruin the country" is *mostly* a Democratic thing as an article of actual belief. Among Republicans, I'd argue it's more like "Trump will destroy party" and a dislike for his influence on political standing, not necessarily a wholesale disagreement with policy with the exception of where policy overlaps with Republican economic policies, which are mostly rubber stamps of corporate interests.
and pretty much anyone outside the US that is aware of international diplomacy is fearful of the consequences he could bring. As you say you have Congress to protect your domestic policy, but a couple of stupid comments can ignite tensions globally that can start wars.
During the Cold War, when the US faced a military opponent of near parity and the chance of a nuclear war of near extinction, anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric was extremely heated. The majority of US politicians vented relentlessly against communism and the Soviets without a war starting. And none of this takes into account the reality that we fight wars all the time anyway, without any attached rhetoric.
This is not a Democrat thing, it's an anyone with an education thing. [...]This not just FUD, there is a real risk that everyone can see except a minority percentage of redneck Americans.
This is my other problem with this meme, it's usually stated in the most derogatory of terms. People that don't believe in the most hyperbolic and extreme outcomes of a Trump presidency are uneducated rednecks.
I'm willing to go along with the idea that Trump would make a *bad* President -- clumsy diplomacy, domestic political gridlock, divisive leadership. But the rest of the doom and gloom prophesy seems vastly overblown and tied to a sales technique designed to make anyone who doesn't accept it feel as if they're somehow stupid or uneducated.
NNTP was pretty decentralized, one of the challenges with it in the later days of NNTP was the relative ease of newgroup injection and crapflooding.
IIRC, NNTP server software on the hardware of the early 2000s scaled poorly and the traffic volumes were growing fast so you started to see ISPs get much more control oriented when it came to retention periods and which newgroup messages they would honor and from whom.
It's the way the left has been since the 1920s. Usually it was confined to doctrinal infighting among Leninists, Trotskyites, and other socialist factions. Usually once one faction had established dominance they simply became authoritarians, rejecting any punishing all dissent.
One of the best party amusements has always been exposing conflicting elements among leftists. Years ago when AIDS was peaking, you'd find a leftist, usually a vegan, who favored animal rights, and then an AIDS activist and then introduce the topic of animal testing of AIDS drugs. If you got lucky, the animal rights advocate was straight and the AIDS advocate was not and you sat back and watched the fur fly, so to speak. I've seen vegans screamed at, accused of supporting anti-gay genocide, and pacifist gays accused of being bloodthirsty monsters who back the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
I'm struggling to understand what "one large wifi network" actually is.
In enterprise gear this roughly translates into broadcasting the same SSID and some back channel communication of interference, channel selection, etc, to avoid stepping on each AP too much in addition to some of the newer "roaming" extensions that speed up the process of moving between radios.
You usually can fake this by just using the same SSID on multiple standalone APs and if their channel selection process is any good you generally end up with mostly the same thing.
A persistent threat that can't be effectively eliminated in a cost effective manner and the easiest way to deal with it is to just make it sort of hard and pass the remaining costs onto consumers?
I used to think like this. However, I realized Executive Orders have a lot of affect.
So do articles of impeachment.
My point isn't that Donald Trump could be a low-quality President, but that the promoted level of doom and gloom and disaster is greatly overstated and fails to consider the balance of powers among the branches of government at a minimum and further fails to consider other potential problems associated with policy implementation.
Trump may throw a tantrum wanting some policy or other, but that doesn't make it so on the spot. There's a whole apparatus of bureaucracy that has to implement it, and truly loony ideas won't get implemented or at least not before they can be challenged in court.
I think the "disaster" argument also fails to consider Trump as even rational at all, as if he were really an irrational and unstable person. I also don't buy that, either. He may have a big mouth, but you don't get to where he is in life right now (fabulously wealthy, still in control of his company, and on the Republican ticket for President) if you are actually incapable of making rational decisions. Nor does it consider the persuasive ability of career people -- diplomats, advisers, military people, etc, who would counsel him against truly dangerous actions.
None of this is meant to advocate for him -- he's obviously a boorish loudmouth, but the notion that he can single-handedly "destroy America" is a bill of goods promoted by his opponents as a scare tactic because positive selling of Hillary is so difficult given her lack of likability and dissembling on so many issued.
The one big idea Democrats have really succeeded with (at least among Democrats) is the "Trump will ruin the country" meme.
Assuming he were to get elected, he has no party structure behind him which means near zero leverage with Congressional Republicans. Congressional Republicans will (rightly, I'd wager) see him as a one-term phenomenon and begin immediately jockeying/campaigning for the 2020 Presidency.
With no Congressional support, he's a straw man. Anything controversial he would do with any executive power would likely be challenged and held up in endless court battles.
How could Trump be worse for the country than Bush II? Bush II had near complete party support, a team of long-term political insiders in his administration and significant control of Congress.
Michigan is the land of car makers and there's still enough people employed in the automotive industry there that many of them will vote to protect the traditional automotive industry because it feels like voting for their own interests.
Michigan also has enough weirdness that politicians can easily play politics with the electorate -- there's the upper peninsula which is almost a separate state, the train wreck of Detroit, and then the suburban areas around Detroit. Ladle on a thick helping of racial politics, and you have an interesting stew.
FTL may wind up being possible due to some unknown property of physics but it may only be useful for movement through spacetime and not necessarily for the production of useful energy.
I'd wager an FTL capable but also not a free energy civilization is also a civilization that is resource hungry and would likely be exploiting sources of easy to obtain resources. It could also turn out that the atomic elements aren't well-distributed in the galaxy and that one all the min-maxing of options is done ends up being the easiest place to get them.
The challenge for Earth is that any civilization capable of easy space flight only needs to drop a couple of rocks into our gravity well to neutralize our civilization. They don't need a massive energy surplus or a lot of advanced technology beyond a useful FTL to get to us and wipe us out.
Whatever happened to those? Maybe I'm suffering from good-old-day-ism or simply misremembering, but I seem to remember a point where videos could be put in their own floating, resizable window.
Now they're either a much-too-small region on a web page window or the entire thing fills the screen.
IMHO, when streaming started I'd say it had about a B grade in terms of content (quality + quantity).
Over time, it seemed to go down to about C grade.
Lately it strikes me that it's gotten marginally better, maybe B-.
The question is whether they expand their original content significantly without shrinking licensed content to achieve a 50/50 mix, or whether they will expand moderately and shrink moderately to get there, or worse, expand slightly and shrink more greatly.
The expansion of their original content could actually help expand their licensed content if it makes licensed content cheaper. I would mostly guess it would, long-term, if only because Netflix would have more bargaining power.
Maybe I'm misremembering this, but wasn't there a similar but more scandalous Amazon pricing technique where they were actually tracking customers and jacking up prices to repeat buyers?
Maybe they gave that up due to bad press or maybe they weren't doing it all.
I'm pretty sure airlines have done this -- I've looked at flights a couple of times and when I was ready to book, bam, price had gone up. Checked from another device where I hadn't looked at flights (using a different browser) and I had the original price.
I know Dell did something like this years ago, too -- logged into their site with some corporate credentials and priced a server, did the same thing from another computer/browser which had never used them and the price was a lot lower.
The situation I was thinking of was, say you own a store that sells European consumer specialties in Washington or NYC. Both places have a ton of Europeans living there -- diplomats and so forth, and they come in to buy stuff they can't live without.
Maybe to create a sense of "home" or merely as a convenience to visitors you're willing to accept Euros as payment.
What happens after that, who knows. Maybe you make periodic buying trips to Europe to stock up and you bring accumulated cash with you. Nice little tax dodge and totally illegal. Maybe you convert it all back to dollars in the US to keep your books square and stay legal.
I'm not sure what the fiat part has to do with this. I doubt any country in the world still has commodity currency, ie money whose intrinsic value derives from the material its made of.
What I'd be curious about is whether it's somehow technically illegal to use foreign currency for transactions in the United States. I can pretty easily see a business in DC or NYC accepting Euros as payment if they have a lot of European customers.
There seems to be no restriction on pre-paid gift cards, which while not a physical currency, have a fiat quantity -- they're valuable because the issuer says they're valuable, the money denomination of them is purely convenience and accounting. There's even exchanges where people buy and sell them, too.
I can definitely see banks not liking bitcoin because of its ability to avoid monopolies on currency exchange or other reasons which ultimately derive from their ability to get new money cheaply from the Fed and sell it at a profit. Bitcoin breaks that model because they can't arbitrage the Fed's ability to create money.
Is it a currency or not? It seems to be both and neither. Now that we have conflicting rulings it will be interesting to see if this gets appealed and how the appellate courts sort out the rulings and if they manage to define as money in certain situations or whether they decide they have to rule yea or nay on the question for clarity.
We used to have a theater nearby that was a palace to early 1960s filmgoing and featured a super wide screen and 70mm projection. It's been torn down 20 years now but that's where you went for big deal movies.
Anyway, the problem with 70mm was how little was shot in 70mm. Most of the 70mm projection was 35mm blown up. It made for a dramatic picture on that wide screen, but it wasn't true 70mm resolution.
I think the optical drive is an example of Apple following, not leading. I think the broad base of consumers moved off optical media before Apple removed the drive -- software as ISO downloads (loopback mounted, not written), downloaded music, streaming or downloaded video and so on.
Apple removing it was just a response to lack of consumer interest in it.
I work as an IT contractor and I haven't used an optical drive in literally years -- I'm on my second disc-less laptop now. Ironically, most operating systems and major applications are still distributed as ISO images but either installed via loopback mounts or written as bootable USB sticks.
Given the number of other things Apple's done like this I'll side on this becoming a trend.
The problem is that the other switches Apple made were to alternatives that were actually better -- USB is more useful than other keyboard/mouse ports, other portable storage devices were better than floppies, and lightning is better than the 30 pin port.
It's not clear to me that bluetooth is superior to a 3.5mm headphone jack, or even nearly equal. The only thing it does better is not have a cord.
My experience with a dozen or so miscellaneous BT devices has been that while they mostly work, they can be prone to problems -- pairing can be anything from totally reliable to totally unreliable, depending on device, plus the problems associated with moving a BT device to another device often involves clearing and re-pairing. I've had occasional problems with RF noise in certain environments, resulting in dropouts or distortion. BT devices need charging and don't generally last more than a 6 hours without recharging. I've had numerous laptops that lose the BT paired mouse for no apparent reason, requiring anything from power cycling the mouse to rebooting the computer to resolve.
For bluetooth to really fit the previous examples of Apple "improvements", IMHO bluetooth needs major and significant improvement, all of which probably works against it from a physics perspective. 24 hour continuous use without recharging. Far more intelligent pairing setup, including active pairing and audio mixing of multiple devices simultaneously. Battery life cycles equivalent to the physical life of the device. In other words, it needs to have so many advantages corded headphones can't offer that its actually more useful. It's not like that now.
It sounds like Apple have baked in some of this in their proprietary new earbud setup, but it's proprietary -- and it doesn't actually solve much of the problems with bluetooth, really.
Totally autonomous cars will have to be part of this for it to succeed, otherwise there won't be enough car owners and drivers to drive around the people who don't own a car.
I feel like automakers have been talking about this like Elon Musk is talking about going to Mars. I don't doubt that self-driving cars will be a reality, but I'm really wondering if they will be a reality in my lifetime (I'm 50).
I hate these new series where they develop an elaborate concept but the dumb thing gets cancelled after one season and you never really get to the bottom of anything.
We need a second season to find out who the girl is, what's really happening in that cave, why the senior detective is so circumspect about the details of the disappearances and what really happened to the junior detective.
I hope he's developing some parallel plans. First, how to head off the Belter/Earth war? The Belter fringe made a real mess dropping some rocks into Earth's gravity well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd take it more seriously if they were to directly power their data centers from renewables 24/7 only instead of some of the funny math of just spending more money to "buy" renewable energy from grid producers at a large enough volume to say they run on 100% renewable (or worse, carbon credits).
Because on the back end, they're still dependent in terms of actual consumption on grid baseload generation even if they have a balance sheet that says otherwise.
Further, trying to run full-time off wind+solar would require a substantial investment in energy storage to balance night/still air and storage is where we need the investment. And build-anywhere storage, not pumped hydro or other geographically dependent storage, either.
Worse than that, you still need a Windows server running Update Manager components and the Windows client to install updates.
I think the switch from a heavyweight thick management ESX to ESXi was a good idea, but the problem is that it leaves all management capability needing a VM or external server with all the associated availability problems a single point of failure.
Frankly, I'd like to see ESXi re-thickened a bit to include vCenter management into the base install with master/slave clustering and a distributed database. This would improve vCenter availability and reduce the dependence on a separate VM.
Every new host would then be a potential vCenter cluster management participant. Upgrading a node across version boundary would upgrade vCenter, so as the cluster was upgraded the vCenter upgrade came with the package.
The downside would be that it would require more storage for the base image, breaking more than a few tiny SD/USB installs. The write rate of vCenter may be a bit much for the media used in these flash installs, but not by much and if server motherboards start shipping with M.2 slots the capacity and write durability shouldn't be issues.
They have some lame and limited HTML5 front end for vCenter now. 6.5 or 7 or whatever the new version is supposed to be called will supposedly have a HTML5 client. I don't know if its been released or not.
I seem to run across a fair number of places with AS/400 stuff. What's kind of interesting is the AS/400 stuff and people seem to run in this parallel universe IT department with their own staff somehow immune from the other pressures of the rest of the IT department.
Once in a blue moon I'll hear mention that some kind of AS/400 update or installation is happening, so it's not like they're strictly legacy systems. And at longer term clients with AS/400 I occasionally see something new/different in the "AS/400 rack".
I don't know what IBM's growth potential is or how at risk their active businesses like AS/400 are from being eaten by Wintel/Lintel systems are, but they sure seem to have carved out a niche that seems nearly immovable.
This is not a Democrat thing, it's an anyone with an education thing. It's why even senior Republicans are distancing themselves
"Trump will ruin the country" is *mostly* a Democratic thing as an article of actual belief. Among Republicans, I'd argue it's more like "Trump will destroy party" and a dislike for his influence on political standing, not necessarily a wholesale disagreement with policy with the exception of where policy overlaps with Republican economic policies, which are mostly rubber stamps of corporate interests.
and pretty much anyone outside the US that is aware of international diplomacy is fearful of the consequences he could bring. As you say you have Congress to protect your domestic policy, but a couple of stupid comments can ignite tensions globally that can start wars.
During the Cold War, when the US faced a military opponent of near parity and the chance of a nuclear war of near extinction, anti-communist and anti-Soviet rhetoric was extremely heated. The majority of US politicians vented relentlessly against communism and the Soviets without a war starting. And none of this takes into account the reality that we fight wars all the time anyway, without any attached rhetoric.
This is not a Democrat thing, it's an anyone with an education thing. [...]This not just FUD, there is a real risk that everyone can see except a minority percentage of redneck Americans.
This is my other problem with this meme, it's usually stated in the most derogatory of terms. People that don't believe in the most hyperbolic and extreme outcomes of a Trump presidency are uneducated rednecks.
I'm willing to go along with the idea that Trump would make a *bad* President -- clumsy diplomacy, domestic political gridlock, divisive leadership. But the rest of the doom and gloom prophesy seems vastly overblown and tied to a sales technique designed to make anyone who doesn't accept it feel as if they're somehow stupid or uneducated.
NNTP was pretty decentralized, one of the challenges with it in the later days of NNTP was the relative ease of newgroup injection and crapflooding.
IIRC, NNTP server software on the hardware of the early 2000s scaled poorly and the traffic volumes were growing fast so you started to see ISPs get much more control oriented when it came to retention periods and which newgroup messages they would honor and from whom.
It's the way the left has been since the 1920s. Usually it was confined to doctrinal infighting among Leninists, Trotskyites, and other socialist factions. Usually once one faction had established dominance they simply became authoritarians, rejecting any punishing all dissent.
One of the best party amusements has always been exposing conflicting elements among leftists. Years ago when AIDS was peaking, you'd find a leftist, usually a vegan, who favored animal rights, and then an AIDS activist and then introduce the topic of animal testing of AIDS drugs. If you got lucky, the animal rights advocate was straight and the AIDS advocate was not and you sat back and watched the fur fly, so to speak. I've seen vegans screamed at, accused of supporting anti-gay genocide, and pacifist gays accused of being bloodthirsty monsters who back the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
I'm struggling to understand what "one large wifi network" actually is.
In enterprise gear this roughly translates into broadcasting the same SSID and some back channel communication of interference, channel selection, etc, to avoid stepping on each AP too much in addition to some of the newer "roaming" extensions that speed up the process of moving between radios.
You usually can fake this by just using the same SSID on multiple standalone APs and if their channel selection process is any good you generally end up with mostly the same thing.
The HBO Now service has a better selection of movies than Netflix does.
A persistent threat that can't be effectively eliminated in a cost effective manner and the easiest way to deal with it is to just make it sort of hard and pass the remaining costs onto consumers?
I used to think like this. However, I realized Executive Orders have a lot of affect.
So do articles of impeachment.
My point isn't that Donald Trump could be a low-quality President, but that the promoted level of doom and gloom and disaster is greatly overstated and fails to consider the balance of powers among the branches of government at a minimum and further fails to consider other potential problems associated with policy implementation.
Trump may throw a tantrum wanting some policy or other, but that doesn't make it so on the spot. There's a whole apparatus of bureaucracy that has to implement it, and truly loony ideas won't get implemented or at least not before they can be challenged in court.
I think the "disaster" argument also fails to consider Trump as even rational at all, as if he were really an irrational and unstable person. I also don't buy that, either. He may have a big mouth, but you don't get to where he is in life right now (fabulously wealthy, still in control of his company, and on the Republican ticket for President) if you are actually incapable of making rational decisions. Nor does it consider the persuasive ability of career people -- diplomats, advisers, military people, etc, who would counsel him against truly dangerous actions.
None of this is meant to advocate for him -- he's obviously a boorish loudmouth, but the notion that he can single-handedly "destroy America" is a bill of goods promoted by his opponents as a scare tactic because positive selling of Hillary is so difficult given her lack of likability and dissembling on so many issued.
The one big idea Democrats have really succeeded with (at least among Democrats) is the "Trump will ruin the country" meme.
Assuming he were to get elected, he has no party structure behind him which means near zero leverage with Congressional Republicans. Congressional Republicans will (rightly, I'd wager) see him as a one-term phenomenon and begin immediately jockeying/campaigning for the 2020 Presidency.
With no Congressional support, he's a straw man. Anything controversial he would do with any executive power would likely be challenged and held up in endless court battles.
How could Trump be worse for the country than Bush II? Bush II had near complete party support, a team of long-term political insiders in his administration and significant control of Congress.
Michigan is the land of car makers and there's still enough people employed in the automotive industry there that many of them will vote to protect the traditional automotive industry because it feels like voting for their own interests.
Michigan also has enough weirdness that politicians can easily play politics with the electorate -- there's the upper peninsula which is almost a separate state, the train wreck of Detroit, and then the suburban areas around Detroit. Ladle on a thick helping of racial politics, and you have an interesting stew.
That's probably true, but we don't know.
FTL may wind up being possible due to some unknown property of physics but it may only be useful for movement through spacetime and not necessarily for the production of useful energy.
I'd wager an FTL capable but also not a free energy civilization is also a civilization that is resource hungry and would likely be exploiting sources of easy to obtain resources. It could also turn out that the atomic elements aren't well-distributed in the galaxy and that one all the min-maxing of options is done ends up being the easiest place to get them.
The challenge for Earth is that any civilization capable of easy space flight only needs to drop a couple of rocks into our gravity well to neutralize our civilization. They don't need a massive energy surplus or a lot of advanced technology beyond a useful FTL to get to us and wipe us out.
Whatever happened to those? Maybe I'm suffering from good-old-day-ism or simply misremembering, but I seem to remember a point where videos could be put in their own floating, resizable window.
Now they're either a much-too-small region on a web page window or the entire thing fills the screen.
IMHO, when streaming started I'd say it had about a B grade in terms of content (quality + quantity).
Over time, it seemed to go down to about C grade.
Lately it strikes me that it's gotten marginally better, maybe B-.
The question is whether they expand their original content significantly without shrinking licensed content to achieve a 50/50 mix, or whether they will expand moderately and shrink moderately to get there, or worse, expand slightly and shrink more greatly.
The expansion of their original content could actually help expand their licensed content if it makes licensed content cheaper. I would mostly guess it would, long-term, if only because Netflix would have more bargaining power.
...to repeat customers.
Maybe I'm misremembering this, but wasn't there a similar but more scandalous Amazon pricing technique where they were actually tracking customers and jacking up prices to repeat buyers?
Maybe they gave that up due to bad press or maybe they weren't doing it all.
I'm pretty sure airlines have done this -- I've looked at flights a couple of times and when I was ready to book, bam, price had gone up. Checked from another device where I hadn't looked at flights (using a different browser) and I had the original price.
I know Dell did something like this years ago, too -- logged into their site with some corporate credentials and priced a server, did the same thing from another computer/browser which had never used them and the price was a lot lower.
The situation I was thinking of was, say you own a store that sells European consumer specialties in Washington or NYC. Both places have a ton of Europeans living there -- diplomats and so forth, and they come in to buy stuff they can't live without.
Maybe to create a sense of "home" or merely as a convenience to visitors you're willing to accept Euros as payment.
What happens after that, who knows. Maybe you make periodic buying trips to Europe to stock up and you bring accumulated cash with you. Nice little tax dodge and totally illegal. Maybe you convert it all back to dollars in the US to keep your books square and stay legal.
I'm not sure what the fiat part has to do with this. I doubt any country in the world still has commodity currency, ie money whose intrinsic value derives from the material its made of.
What I'd be curious about is whether it's somehow technically illegal to use foreign currency for transactions in the United States. I can pretty easily see a business in DC or NYC accepting Euros as payment if they have a lot of European customers.
There seems to be no restriction on pre-paid gift cards, which while not a physical currency, have a fiat quantity -- they're valuable because the issuer says they're valuable, the money denomination of them is purely convenience and accounting. There's even exchanges where people buy and sell them, too.
I can definitely see banks not liking bitcoin because of its ability to avoid monopolies on currency exchange or other reasons which ultimately derive from their ability to get new money cheaply from the Fed and sell it at a profit. Bitcoin breaks that model because they can't arbitrage the Fed's ability to create money.
Is it a currency or not? It seems to be both and neither. Now that we have conflicting rulings it will be interesting to see if this gets appealed and how the appellate courts sort out the rulings and if they manage to define as money in certain situations or whether they decide they have to rule yea or nay on the question for clarity.
We used to have a theater nearby that was a palace to early 1960s filmgoing and featured a super wide screen and 70mm projection. It's been torn down 20 years now but that's where you went for big deal movies.
Anyway, the problem with 70mm was how little was shot in 70mm. Most of the 70mm projection was 35mm blown up. It made for a dramatic picture on that wide screen, but it wasn't true 70mm resolution.
I think the optical drive is an example of Apple following, not leading. I think the broad base of consumers moved off optical media before Apple removed the drive -- software as ISO downloads (loopback mounted, not written), downloaded music, streaming or downloaded video and so on.
Apple removing it was just a response to lack of consumer interest in it.
I work as an IT contractor and I haven't used an optical drive in literally years -- I'm on my second disc-less laptop now. Ironically, most operating systems and major applications are still distributed as ISO images but either installed via loopback mounts or written as bootable USB sticks.
Given the number of other things Apple's done like this I'll side on this becoming a trend.
The problem is that the other switches Apple made were to alternatives that were actually better -- USB is more useful than other keyboard/mouse ports, other portable storage devices were better than floppies, and lightning is better than the 30 pin port.
It's not clear to me that bluetooth is superior to a 3.5mm headphone jack, or even nearly equal. The only thing it does better is not have a cord.
My experience with a dozen or so miscellaneous BT devices has been that while they mostly work, they can be prone to problems -- pairing can be anything from totally reliable to totally unreliable, depending on device, plus the problems associated with moving a BT device to another device often involves clearing and re-pairing. I've had occasional problems with RF noise in certain environments, resulting in dropouts or distortion. BT devices need charging and don't generally last more than a 6 hours without recharging. I've had numerous laptops that lose the BT paired mouse for no apparent reason, requiring anything from power cycling the mouse to rebooting the computer to resolve.
For bluetooth to really fit the previous examples of Apple "improvements", IMHO bluetooth needs major and significant improvement, all of which probably works against it from a physics perspective. 24 hour continuous use without recharging. Far more intelligent pairing setup, including active pairing and audio mixing of multiple devices simultaneously. Battery life cycles equivalent to the physical life of the device. In other words, it needs to have so many advantages corded headphones can't offer that its actually more useful. It's not like that now.
It sounds like Apple have baked in some of this in their proprietary new earbud setup, but it's proprietary -- and it doesn't actually solve much of the problems with bluetooth, really.
Totally autonomous cars will have to be part of this for it to succeed, otherwise there won't be enough car owners and drivers to drive around the people who don't own a car.
I feel like automakers have been talking about this like Elon Musk is talking about going to Mars. I don't doubt that self-driving cars will be a reality, but I'm really wondering if they will be a reality in my lifetime (I'm 50).
I hate these new series where they develop an elaborate concept but the dumb thing gets cancelled after one season and you never really get to the bottom of anything.
We need a second season to find out who the girl is, what's really happening in that cave, why the senior detective is so circumspect about the details of the disappearances and what really happened to the junior detective.
I hope he's developing some parallel plans. First, how to head off the Belter/Earth war? The Belter fringe made a real mess dropping some rocks into Earth's gravity well.
What's his plan for spin-stabilizing Ceres?