How is this a dumb move? By making charging stations ubiquitous, Elon is paving the way for even more sales of their already popular electric cars.
Sometimes, it's really important to know what your *core competence* is, and what is not. With this move, it would seem that Tesla motors sees that it is in the business of selling cars, not fueling stations.
Nobody should ever put IPMI or AMT enabled systems on the public Internet deserves the hacks and system compromises that they deal with. At the *very least* it should be contained within a firewall/VPN on a private LAN or Intranet.
AT&T is the company that tried to bill me for $thousands of dollars for a few hours of international calls while on their "no worries" international calling plan, that should have cost about $25.
MetroPCS has a $5/month flat rate international call plan.
AT&T is the company that tried to get my son to pay $600 for a contract on a phone he never purchased. (He started to buy, then I declined to co-sign because of the $thousands of dollars AT&T had just tried to get me to pay)
AT&T is pretty much the definition of evil in my book.
Mostly agreed - but it *is* possible to overcome that. Take a good look at MetroPCS which started as a "budget" regional carrier in the Sacramento/Bay Area. Recently merged with T-Mobile in a multi-billion dollar deal.
The only thing really necessary to succeed is to have revenue higher than expenses. The difference between the two determines your growth rate and/or your ability to finance growth.
Computers are complicated. (most) Users are not. With computing, you basically have a trio of secure, easy, affordable - pick any two.
OpenPGP was right in all ways except one: you can't even explain what it does to your grandma, let alone get her to use it. Because of that, you can't get anybody to pay for it. So you really only have the choice of easy/affordable.
This is a good system if only because it gives you a bit of the secure leg without compromising the other two legs. It sucks, and propeller heads like you and me will snarl at the compromises involved.
There's no particularly good reason to believe that its bug count per line is any higher than any subsequent, later version of Windows. One million is pretty small, Did you mean 40 Million?
It's tough, going to work and doing boring stuff but the $250,000 pay scale overcomes an awful lot of developer resistance...
IOPs are anything but meaningless. For any kind of performance computing, they are one of the most commonly unrecognized bottleneck.
IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.
The "k of operations" is irrelevant when discussing IOPS.
How an idea so simple could be so commonly misunderstood is beyond me. It's true that IOPS won't matter if you are streaming a single, large media file. It's equally true that you can't serve more than about 120 random seeks in a second on a 7200 RPM drive. This is disguised a bit because your OS will try to minimize the seeks and aggregate seeks that are similar and/or close together.
SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.
Perhaps it's an ad, but it's one that interests me. I come here to find out the latest developments in tech, and the continuing advances of SSDs is something I find interesting.
HDDs have become so huge that the biggest problem isn't storage capacity, or even bandwidth: it's IOPS. It's pretty lame that I can store literally many millions of documents in a hard disk cluster that can only delivery a few hundred IOPS per second. Do the math. It takes forever to get your data out, especially if they are small documents!
SSDs don't have this problem. 50,000 IOPS is "no big deal" for an SSD, meaning that even if you have 40 million tiny 10k documents, you can still saturate your 6 Gbit SATA interface with sweet, sweet data.
We switched our DB servers to SSDs and saw over 90% reduction in average query latency. Next up is our file stores, which use ZFS. Our next step is an SSD cache for ZFS, and then as prices continue to tumble, we'll switch to all SSDs everywhere.
Microsoft doesn't want to produce a new version of Windows; they want to make money and selling new releases of Windows is how they accomplish this.
I truly do not understand why they are nixing Windows XP. The money making opportunity is tremendous: Take 1/10th of their O/S development team, and have them work on bug fixes for Windows XP. Pay them by charging subscriptions for XP support. It wouldn't have to be much: maybe $10 to $20 per year would be more than enough, and those still hanging on to Windows XP would very likely be completely happy to pay $12.95 per year to to have to mess with their obviously working system.
If you assume that the $25 or so that MS gets for a OS license from vendors covers 3 years, then $12.95 per year is at least 100% to 200% more per year, from customers that don't demand or want new features. It's like shooting fish in a barrel! If it's true that 30% of computers are still running Windows XP, this would easily become one of the most profitable divisions of MS in the near future.
Strange. To this day I've only had to search for things like how to hard power down a specific model of phone; I've been using Android since 2.0. I will admit that I found the icons in 4.x a bit confusing for a little while. (Is that the icon for copy? Paste? Delete?)
I partly agree. Windows 8.1 isn't as tragic as it seems at first. But they've forgotten one of the primary goals of a UI: discoverability.
I'm a Linux geek, so I'm used to typing arcane commands into shell prompts. I can find whatever I need in a Google search if I don't know it already. Command line interfaces require you to specify what you are looking for. It's expected that you should know in advance what you want and how to ask for it. This is somewhat less true for the double-tab interface in bash, but still, the basic idea is to specify.
What made Windows and MacOS such a big deal back in the day is that they were "discoverable" - you could figure out what options you had available by reading the menus and picking one, with the basic expectation that, if there was an option or command to run, there'd be a menu entry in a hopefully sensible place to allow it. Thus, anybody could "use" a computer by finding the obvious start button.
Windows 8.x tosses discoverability to the wind. You just have to know in advance which combination of swipes and from which side in order to get what you want. Because of this, it's not discoverable. What makes Windows 8 so damning and frustrating for the new user is that stuff happens and there's no obvious reason why.
With this recent statement, Microsoft has made clear that they're going to try to double down on the Metro Interface, and hope that by promising it at some distant, future date, the haters will shut up long enough for people to get used to the not-discoverable Windows 8 interface.
Processing power is going to be an issue in mobile devices which have the most to gain from this innovation.
I don't see this as a problem at all. This is the type of thing that screams for a dedicated processor, not a GP chip, and it's typical to see a 99% reduction in power consumption when you go this route.
I remember well when Honda was the butt of similar jokes in the Late 70's and/or early 80s. Nobody makes these jokes anymore.
Most times, market disruptions occur when previously expensive or inaccessible technology is provided at low cost. Sometimes, this happens when a high-end provider streamlines their processes and deliver their wares at new, lower cost. Far more often, however, it happens when a profitable, low-end provider moves upscale and discovers that they can deliver higher end wares at lower cost.
There are significant odds that your kids will drive Tata cars and love 'em, if they are, in fact, still driving them.
If I want to type srs bsns then I unfold the keyboard, which casually fits in my shirt pocket. Unfortunately, this model of keyboard is no longer manufactured and the price appears to have ballooned as a result. (When I bought mine a year or two ago, it was $40)
Even if they could review the source, there's no assurance that the binaries provided actually come from said sources. Further, there's no assurance that the "NSA bullshit" is in any way obvious. It could be as simple as an exploitable memory leak which can be tripped in certain, very rare conditions that would have no indication at all of being exploitable or "NSA bullshit".
My guess is that China wants to start pushing their "Red Flag Linux so that they can at least have a chance at knowing when their security is compromised.
I'm sitting in front of my $2500 laptop while a $50 TV stick smoothly plays Netflix on my bedroom TV. This "TV stick" is a fully functioning Android computer with all that implies. This is the "desktop equivalent" to the laptop, which in this case is a mobile phone device.
My point is that what "is a computer" is so cheap that the market is about to be tripped, completely. My phone now represents the majority of my interaction with the Internet in a personal context, and I do Internet development professionally.
That there are as many active mobile devices as there are people doesn't mean that everybody has a mobile device. And the reality is that mobile devices actually are ubiquitous, and the 7.1 billion number understates their ubiquity, since many devices are wifi only.
I type this on my Linux laptop that I use for work, but outside of some gaming, mobile devices have taken the crown for personal use. Mostly, I browse on my smart phone. I schedule on my smart phone. I email on my smart phone. My "TV" is actually a Google TV Stick running android. I frequently take a tablet with me when I travel, just so I can plug the hotel room HDMI into it and watch what I want, rather than "what's on".
Mobile devices are everywhere, and still growing fast, and have completely up-ended the computer marketplace. This trend will continue and even if you knock the number in half, it still stomps the every loving *!@#$* out of the classical desktop "computer".
Debt is debt. It's net benefits to society are zero sum, for all but the bankers.
Which is pretty much bollocks. Debt is one of the most powerful economic tools ever invented, rivaling money itself. Like any tool, it can be used well, or poorly. It's basically never a zero sum game.
On a larger level, debt is still tomorrow's demand, spent today.
Sorta, but not really. Debt is a type of mutual bet made by the investor/banker and the beneficiary that the value of the assets purchased by the debt will exceed the value of the money the debt reflects. And most of the time, it works out, and everybody wins!
Let's say I need $100,000 to buy new injection molds for my business in order to build a product. Without the $100k loan, the injection molds never get built, and at the end of a year, you have $100k in cash still sitting in the investor's hand.
But if the injection molds get built, and the product sells, you have:
A) The investor no longer has $100k in his/her hand, but they have the debt, now somewhat greater than $100k. (interest)
B) The borrower has $100k in debt, offset by the value of the new injection molds, AND the profits made from the product created with the injection molds.
This scenario is a positive sum game. Personal debt is an entirely different matter.
Like before, you are making a bet with an investor, and it does sometimes work out for the positive, but consumer debts are typically used for things to consume. If you spend it on a house, a house can be built that wouldn't exist otherwise, so it's probably a good deal. If you spend the money on hookers and blow, you truly consume the money and have no assets to "win" on. Now you have interest due on the money, which is economic activity that won't happen. Money spent on interest is then NOT spent on "real" goods, and everybody loses. Even the lender loses some, as the overall economy is damaged, even if this loss much less than they gain in personal interest money.
PS: BitTorrent already supports video streaming by pushing to have earlier packets downloaded before ones later in the movie. Netflix has the option to do something very similar. (I personally hope they do)
So, what makes BitTorrent traffic "lower" priority than other streaming protocols?
Slashdot Mirror
BTW: I'm a Comcast Internet-only customer. I ditched our AT&T landline years ago and replaced it with a MagicJack for $20/year/unlimited.
I get about 20 Mbit for $65/month. I'd pay $100 for Gb fiber in a flat second.
How is this a dumb move? By making charging stations ubiquitous, Elon is paving the way for even more sales of their already popular electric cars.
Sometimes, it's really important to know what your *core competence* is, and what is not. With this move, it would seem that Tesla motors sees that it is in the business of selling cars, not fueling stations.
Nobody should ever put IPMI or AMT enabled systems on the public Internet deserves the hacks and system compromises that they deal with. At the *very least* it should be contained within a firewall/VPN on a private LAN or Intranet.
AT&T is the company that tried to bill me for $thousands of dollars for a few hours of international calls while on their "no worries" international calling plan, that should have cost about $25.
MetroPCS has a $5/month flat rate international call plan.
AT&T is the company that tried to get my son to pay $600 for a contract on a phone he never purchased. (He started to buy, then I declined to co-sign because of the $thousands of dollars AT&T had just tried to get me to pay)
AT&T is pretty much the definition of evil in my book.
Scale is everything.
Mostly agreed - but it *is* possible to overcome that. Take a good look at MetroPCS which started as a "budget" regional carrier in the Sacramento/Bay Area. Recently merged with T-Mobile in a multi-billion dollar deal.
The only thing really necessary to succeed is to have revenue higher than expenses. The difference between the two determines your growth rate and/or your ability to finance growth.
Another case in point: OpenSSL, which had, until recently, only enough resources for 1 or 2 developers.
Computers are complicated. (most) Users are not. With computing, you basically have a trio of secure, easy, affordable - pick any two.
OpenPGP was right in all ways except one: you can't even explain what it does to your grandma, let alone get her to use it. Because of that, you can't get anybody to pay for it. So you really only have the choice of easy/affordable.
This is a good system if only because it gives you a bit of the secure leg without compromising the other two legs. It sucks, and propeller heads like you and me will snarl at the compromises involved.
Oh well!
Fair enough. You are still orders of magnitude worse off than a decent SSD, which is the relevant point.
There's no particularly good reason to believe that its bug count per line is any higher than any subsequent, later version of Windows. One million is pretty small, Did you mean 40 Million?
It's tough, going to work and doing boring stuff but the $250,000 pay scale overcomes an awful lot of developer resistance...
Yes Yes yes! SSDs are a God-send for performance issues!
Database servers? Check!
Caches? Check!
Session Managers? Check!
Load Balancers? Check!
As stated by Reddit: Think of SSDs as cheap RAM, not expensive disk.
IOPs are anything but meaningless. For any kind of performance computing, they are one of the most commonly unrecognized bottleneck.
IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.
The "k of operations" is irrelevant when discussing IOPS.
How an idea so simple could be so commonly misunderstood is beyond me. It's true that IOPS won't matter if you are streaming a single, large media file. It's equally true that you can't serve more than about 120 random seeks in a second on a 7200 RPM drive. This is disguised a bit because your OS will try to minimize the seeks and aggregate seeks that are similar and/or close together.
SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.
Perhaps it's an ad, but it's one that interests me. I come here to find out the latest developments in tech, and the continuing advances of SSDs is something I find interesting.
HDDs have become so huge that the biggest problem isn't storage capacity, or even bandwidth: it's IOPS. It's pretty lame that I can store literally many millions of documents in a hard disk cluster that can only delivery a few hundred IOPS per second. Do the math. It takes forever to get your data out, especially if they are small documents!
SSDs don't have this problem. 50,000 IOPS is "no big deal" for an SSD, meaning that even if you have 40 million tiny 10k documents, you can still saturate your 6 Gbit SATA interface with sweet, sweet data.
We switched our DB servers to SSDs and saw over 90% reduction in average query latency. Next up is our file stores, which use ZFS. Our next step is an SSD cache for ZFS, and then as prices continue to tumble, we'll switch to all SSDs everywhere.
Microsoft doesn't want to produce a new version of Windows; they want to make money and selling new releases of Windows is how they accomplish this.
I truly do not understand why they are nixing Windows XP. The money making opportunity is tremendous: Take 1/10th of their O/S development team, and have them work on bug fixes for Windows XP. Pay them by charging subscriptions for XP support. It wouldn't have to be much: maybe $10 to $20 per year would be more than enough, and those still hanging on to Windows XP would very likely be completely happy to pay $12.95 per year to to have to mess with their obviously working system.
If you assume that the $25 or so that MS gets for a OS license from vendors covers 3 years, then $12.95 per year is at least 100% to 200% more per year, from customers that don't demand or want new features. It's like shooting fish in a barrel! If it's true that 30% of computers are still running Windows XP, this would easily become one of the most profitable divisions of MS in the near future.
Strange. To this day I've only had to search for things like how to hard power down a specific model of phone; I've been using Android since 2.0. I will admit that I found the icons in 4.x a bit confusing for a little while. (Is that the icon for copy? Paste? Delete?)
I partly agree. Windows 8.1 isn't as tragic as it seems at first. But they've forgotten one of the primary goals of a UI: discoverability.
I'm a Linux geek, so I'm used to typing arcane commands into shell prompts. I can find whatever I need in a Google search if I don't know it already. Command line interfaces require you to specify what you are looking for. It's expected that you should know in advance what you want and how to ask for it. This is somewhat less true for the double-tab interface in bash, but still, the basic idea is to specify.
What made Windows and MacOS such a big deal back in the day is that they were "discoverable" - you could figure out what options you had available by reading the menus and picking one, with the basic expectation that, if there was an option or command to run, there'd be a menu entry in a hopefully sensible place to allow it. Thus, anybody could "use" a computer by finding the obvious start button.
Windows 8.x tosses discoverability to the wind. You just have to know in advance which combination of swipes and from which side in order to get what you want. Because of this, it's not discoverable. What makes Windows 8 so damning and frustrating for the new user is that stuff happens and there's no obvious reason why.
With this recent statement, Microsoft has made clear that they're going to try to double down on the Metro Interface, and hope that by promising it at some distant, future date, the haters will shut up long enough for people to get used to the not-discoverable Windows 8 interface.
I have mixed feelings about this.
Processing power is going to be an issue in mobile devices which have the most to gain from this innovation.
I don't see this as a problem at all. This is the type of thing that screams for a dedicated processor, not a GP chip, and it's typical to see a 99% reduction in power consumption when you go this route.
If you are going to cut cost, Bluetooth isn't a terrible place to start. Especially if you have 1 or 2 USB ports. (I didn't see that in the article)
GPS is also not so meaningful in a tablet; in a car you'll more likely use your phone.
I remember well when Honda was the butt of similar jokes in the Late 70's and/or early 80s. Nobody makes these jokes anymore.
Most times, market disruptions occur when previously expensive or inaccessible technology is provided at low cost. Sometimes, this happens when a high-end provider streamlines their processes and deliver their wares at new, lower cost. Far more often, however, it happens when a profitable, low-end provider moves upscale and discovers that they can deliver higher end wares at lower cost.
There are significant odds that your kids will drive Tata cars and love 'em, if they are, in fact, still driving them.
Stale thread is stale. But I bought a bluetooth keyboard for my phone and love it!
If I want to type srs bsns then I unfold the keyboard, which casually fits in my shirt pocket. Unfortunately, this model of keyboard is no longer manufactured and the price appears to have ballooned as a result. (When I bought mine a year or two ago, it was $40)
Even if they could review the source, there's no assurance that the binaries provided actually come from said sources. Further, there's no assurance that the "NSA bullshit" is in any way obvious. It could be as simple as an exploitable memory leak which can be tripped in certain, very rare conditions that would have no indication at all of being exploitable or "NSA bullshit".
My guess is that China wants to start pushing their "Red Flag Linux so that they can at least have a chance at knowing when their security is compromised.
I'm sitting in front of my $2500 laptop while a $50 TV stick smoothly plays Netflix on my bedroom TV. This "TV stick" is a fully functioning Android computer with all that implies. This is the "desktop equivalent" to the laptop, which in this case is a mobile phone device.
My point is that what "is a computer" is so cheap that the market is about to be tripped, completely. My phone now represents the majority of my interaction with the Internet in a personal context, and I do Internet development professionally.
That there are as many active mobile devices as there are people doesn't mean that everybody has a mobile device. And the reality is that mobile devices actually are ubiquitous, and the 7.1 billion number understates their ubiquity, since many devices are wifi only.
I type this on my Linux laptop that I use for work, but outside of some gaming, mobile devices have taken the crown for personal use. Mostly, I browse on my smart phone. I schedule on my smart phone. I email on my smart phone. My "TV" is actually a Google TV Stick running android. I frequently take a tablet with me when I travel, just so I can plug the hotel room HDMI into it and watch what I want, rather than "what's on".
Mobile devices are everywhere, and still growing fast, and have completely up-ended the computer marketplace. This trend will continue and even if you knock the number in half, it still stomps the every loving *!@#$* out of the classical desktop "computer".
Debt is debt. It's net benefits to society are zero sum, for all but the bankers.
Which is pretty much bollocks. Debt is one of the most powerful economic tools ever invented, rivaling money itself. Like any tool, it can be used well, or poorly. It's basically never a zero sum game.
On a larger level, debt is still tomorrow's demand, spent today.
Sorta, but not really. Debt is a type of mutual bet made by the investor/banker and the beneficiary that the value of the assets purchased by the debt will exceed the value of the money the debt reflects. And most of the time, it works out, and everybody wins!
Let's say I need $100,000 to buy new injection molds for my business in order to build a product. Without the $100k loan, the injection molds never get built, and at the end of a year, you have $100k in cash still sitting in the investor's hand.
But if the injection molds get built, and the product sells, you have:
A) The investor no longer has $100k in his/her hand, but they have the debt, now somewhat greater than $100k. (interest)
B) The borrower has $100k in debt, offset by the value of the new injection molds, AND the profits made from the product created with the injection molds.
This scenario is a positive sum game. Personal debt is an entirely different matter.
Like before, you are making a bet with an investor, and it does sometimes work out for the positive, but consumer debts are typically used for things to consume. If you spend it on a house, a house can be built that wouldn't exist otherwise, so it's probably a good deal. If you spend the money on hookers and blow, you truly consume the money and have no assets to "win" on. Now you have interest due on the money, which is economic activity that won't happen. Money spent on interest is then NOT spent on "real" goods, and everybody loses. Even the lender loses some, as the overall economy is damaged, even if this loss much less than they gain in personal interest money.
I have 8 GB of RAM. I would never notice 67 MB of RAM.
PS: BitTorrent already supports video streaming by pushing to have earlier packets downloaded before ones later in the movie. Netflix has the option to do something very similar. (I personally hope they do)
So, what makes BitTorrent traffic "lower" priority than other streaming protocols?