We probably should start over at some point soon, not so much because of the x86 instruction set, but because the architecture of modern PCs is convoluted, hard to support, and insecure due to layers and layers of backwards compatibility.
... we already did? Android + ARM is now the dominant platform. Apple's ARM variants are already performing better than some "laptop" CPUs.
Google Fiber, Project Fi - I've always looked at things like these as basically Google telling the telcos that, if they really had to, they could compete directly against them.
A problem for Google (exacerbated with the end of net neutrality) is that the telcos etc. who have the "last mile" to the actual people that Google depends on to survive, could choke off Google's air (this is the same reason why Google decided they needed their own mobile OS and bought Android and causing a break with their previously-happy relationship with Apple).
It's a matter of survival for Google that, if they had to, if all the telcos suddenly imposed fees on Google/advertisers since, hey, "you're making money off OUR customers", they could pour some of the money they have into making Google Fiber, Fi a full-blown competitor, as opposed to a "project".
It's a signal to the telcos "I could kill you if you make me need to, so let's just carry on with the status quo shall we?". Their very existence and the visible ability to scale up if they have to, is all Google really wants - all other benefits (improving internet access overall etc.) are bonuses.
"vote back to you" - no it doesn't. it gives the vote to the existing whales, which for the hoi poloi entering the field, means "not you". it's like people trumpeting how the right to bear arms keeps them safe from "tyranny", when they have no chance to fight against an entity that can field APCs and drones.
Agreed, even though the Office "lock in" has been weakened... it's still there. Given the choice between having continual compatibility worries with clients/customers, vs. just paying the MS tax... companies will just pay it.
The ecosystem is rather different now, though. One wonders how much power MS can wield against Chromebooks. They've been helpless to stop Android or iOS (now markets that completely dwarf their old Windows monopoly). About the only thing I can think of where they could sabotage the rise of things like Chromebooks would be their still-extant stranglehold over Office file formats, but that's definitely less important than it used to be.
If Chromebooks really do take over, even MacOS will have to get worried. Anyone has access to the Google campus? What's the ratio of MacBooks vs. Pixelbooks now?
Cloud, network computing, "dumb" terminals... it's like how there's a push towards game streaming as well. If the network bandwidth and latency gets good enough, you don't actually need to have a GTX1080 class GPU in your machine... computing history just seems to oscillate between local computing power vs. "do it on the mainframe and use a terminal"
(1) Oil pipelines do not have to maintain a vacuum internally. Maintaining a vacuum is non-trivial (for example, see large hadron collider).
(2) Oil pipelines are much smaller than what a hyper loop will need to be, unless part of the plan involves figuring out how to liquefy the passengers and then reassemble them later. The Alaska pipeline diameter is IIRC about 4 feet in diameter. Engineering-wise, would scaling up involve only linear increases in stresses and requirements?
(3) When an oil pipeline is breached, other than the oil that is spilled, does the oil behind the point of the breach suddenly become no longer unusable as oil? Because the concern would be that if there is a breach in the hyper loop, all the people behind the point of the breach will no longer operate as people.
(4) the existence of fines etc. is a separate issue from whether the pipeline itself is destroyed by a puncture/breach. there are parts of the world where leaks in pipes do not incur the same sort of penalty because of differing legislation. I do not see how people dying from a breach in the hyper loop can be legislated away similarly.
(5) are handguns the only thing that a hyper loop needs to be defended against? if an airport is sufficiently well secured, aircraft designers do not need to worry about people driving oil/fertilizer trucks into the pipes or the support (or for that matter handguns). there may need to be changes to the security zone around an airport to deal with man-portable missiles if they become more common in the future, but well before a plane reaches cruising altitude, it is basically safe from all external non-military threats. a hyper loop will essentially be vulnerable, and need security, for its entire route.
Does anyone remember the "elevated bus" project, which was supposed to drive on existing roads "over" existing traffic? That turned out to be an investment scam ( https://www.wired.co.uk/articl... ). The key element is something "futuristic/high technology" that (and this is the main element here) involves raising a lot of money. Once that is done it's already a success, they don't actually have to do more than make some kind of show of building something.
I don't think hyper loops are real-world feasible. Even if the technology works, any aggrieved destructive fool - and these exist everywhere in the world, China included - can put the entire system at risk in a way that aircraft are not threatened by. It's easier to guard an airport in such a way that man-portable missiles are out of range of aircraft taking off/landing, than it is to guard the entire length of some long-distance piped network that basically needs to maintain vacuum sealing in its entirety. "Normal" high speed rail is going to be less dangerous/easier to guard than hyper loops, unless they are going to bury the entire thing underground, which will drive costs up, which makes aircraft more competitive.
One thing about design that gets overlooked is, you don't just look at "is it good if it works?", you also need to look at "what happens when something goes wrong?". There are more failure modes for hyper loops where "everybody dies" than there are for aircraft and trains. Even if it exists, you're going to be taking a much greater risk getting in one than alternative transportation methods.
What exactly is the advantage over digitally signed digital diplomas?
So it may be harder to spoof, since verification is done by more than one entity..
This can't be right? The school that issued you a diploma would be the only entity that can verify/authenticate it, what would other entities would have to do with it? Your resume could have multiple references that would need verification/authentication by separate entities, but each particular one would only be verifiable by one specific entity.
what I find myself owndering is, is there something internally known that they can't talk about that is causing this exodus? or is it based all on what's already publicly known?
Elements within Google itself think there should be a third - hence Fuchsia.
Android (*bought* by Google, not home grown) was essentially a quick-and-dirty rollout for time-to-market reasons, and there will certainly be benefits if some deep-pocketed sponsor can roll out something built from the ground up for mobile and not desktop requirements.
Although I guess the question is essentially asking if "Blackberry should die"?
The greatest "what might have been" I think of is Palm/WebOS. Whatever you may think of his shenanigans, Mark Hurd was absolutely right when he ran HP and made the move to buy Palm - that could have been the start of something new. HP may not have much mindshare now but I think a lot of people underestimate how many units it can put out into the market, and get adopted simply because they're pushing it.
Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he fended off all those people arguing (during the "beleaguered" days) that Apple should licence MacOS out (or even just give up and switch to Windows) - an operating system is a core *asset*. Without it you're just an indentured servant to "other people's technology", at the mercy of the true power.
Buying Palm was a bold move to attempt to break HP out of that rut but it got shafted before it got started. I think it could have been done. Instead HP was stuck trying to peddle Windows phones, and ended up getting shafted by MS yet again https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
If you plug a display into it, it should say 'the other device does not support video' or something, and conversely the charge indicator on the mower should stay off or blink error or something.
But that's exactly my point!
think about it.
It's not mandated that all lawnmowers be able to produce video output. But if all lawnmowers have the same port type, you can't tell without additional effort that would've been unnecessary if not for every port being the same.
How is finding out it doesn't work AFTER you've plugged the thing in first better - than immediately knowing the two things don't work together because they don't fit together?
in fact, you now have TWO failure modes - either the device you plug the device into does not have the capability, or the cable you plug into it does not have the capability, and there's no way to know until you've gone and plugged it in (that's assuming that the device is set up to tell you that it CAN do it but there's something wrong with the cable). is that really better than just being able to eyeball the port and know it does or does not work?
I think I need to point out something here - there's a distinction between "nice to have" and "practically unfeasible".
there is a functional issue I think you're overlooking - you're complaining about things not fitting together with all sorts of different plug types (microUSB, mini-USB etc.) - things "should" be electrically and functionality/feature-compatible, but which you cannot connect together, therefore you're unhappy about it.
You're actually looking at a subset of the entire space, because remember: in the real world, not everything is supposed to plug into everything else.
It's not like if I can plug my handphone into my lawnmower it will automagically allow me to remotely mow my lawn from the office (actually, wait... somebody kickstarter this, quick). Making them plug-compatible achieves... what?
Not everything can work together with everything else. that's the point of having different plug types
having a "universal" plug type is something that would be VERY nice, just as it would be nice for unicorns to show up and make it rain cake (hey, they're my conception of unicorns so their powers are what I want it to be), but as a real world issue, you cannot build in sufficient forwards compatibility to make up for whatever may come up in the future, so even a "do everything" cable today will become "insufficient" in the future, and you're back to square one. Perhaps you can guarantee that every cable ever made now will always be useful in the future for at least plugging in your mouse and keyboard, but I really doubt there will be a shortage of mouse and keyboard cables in the future - the problem with Type C isn't at the "lowest common denominator" side of the market
again, not everything is supposed to plug into everything else, at least not at today's technology level (and arguably this will never be appropriate).
Let's say that in the future all lawnmowers use USB Type C plugs for power (so you could use the same cable to power your lawnmower as you use to charge your laptop). It then becomes physically possible to plug anything with a USB Type C port into your lawnmower.
Does that achieve anything if they simply don't do the same things?
Does plugging in your video projector into your lawnmower mean that you can have video recordings of you mowing the grass projected out onto a screen? Maybe, maybe not - let's say there's a niche demand for this, well, if video output was something your super duper special lawnmower is supposed to do, then having a VGA port, say, on your lawnmower makes sense, and you can tell video output is something it can do. However, your neighbour's lawnmower, which doesn't do video output, won't need that. But if they have a Type C port... is everything in the future to have stencilled/printed on the underside a full list of capabilities? Is that what we're supposed to do? I don't understand why it's such a problem that, if two things aren't supposed to work together, their ports physically don't match.
The problem now with a Type C port is, what it REALLY says, is that it MAY OR MAY NOT work with something else that has a Type C port. That's NOT an improvement.
Exactly. There will always be "optional extensions". You can never know visually (let's say there's any rule in colour coding to indicate capability, for example, well, can you trust the manufacturer put in the right colour?)
That means that upon encountering a Type C cable, you can never know what it actually does (except some lower baseline of capability which may or may not be sufficient for you).
This really matters because of the problem of time.
A cable manufactured today cannot be expected to support standards that may crop up somewhere down the line, but that cable - if manufactured well, and we're not going to start proposing time-limited self-destructing cables are we? - is going to be around well past the time when whatever spec it was built to support was "complete".
Even if "damage" is no longer a problem with some future improvements in self-protection in ports, we won't know capability visually, so are we supposed to sit down and plug in cables one by one to find out what they really do (remember - mere labelling cannot be trusted)? as opposed to the old days, when I can immediately know that a cable is a video cable because it won't fit otherwise
that's the problem! in the real world (remember - "lowest cost bidding" is the iron law of business, random manufacturers out there who basically have profit margins of a penny per cable etc.) you can't be sure of the quality and provenance of cables that you encounter - of $x used in the manufacture of the cable, the vast majority of it will be spent on making the cable look good, not whether the internal circuitry is good.
I've had situations where people hand me a Type C cable and the emotion I feel is fear. I don't know how good or bad that cable is and I don't know if I should plug it into my machine. What do I do? are we now supposed to travel everywhere with our own cables?
the "one plug for everything" trend that began with USB Type C is a step in the wrong direction.
having "unique" plug types for particular purposes is a *feature*, not a bug - simply by looking at the plug, we know what the cable and the port does.
Replacing all the legacy ports is necessary (if only because the old plugs are simply just too big for modern hardware), but replacing EVERYTHING with one plug, when everything now looks the same, you end up with a situation where you simply do not know if a cable or port can do what you need it to do.
So you see a Type C plug - is it Thunderbolt or not? Is it a DisplayPort? What voltages/amps can it provide? nobody knows (where "nobody" can include the person whose hardware it is, much less someone else who has to work with it). just look at e.g. the many forum posts of people who connected "the wrong type" of USB-C-to-HDMI connectors because they didn't know their USB C wasn't the USB C that they thought USB C was supposed to be.
this is made even worse considering that there's active circuitry involved, where you need to worry about whether the cable itself is built right (see e.g. Benson Leung's long list of cables that can fry your hardware). in the old days, a crap cable just means crap performance or no connection. not any more.
I think this is one of the things where the vector/altivec units for the PPCs come into play and make a big difference - look at the relative differences between Mac and x86 machines for QT7/HD playback:
There's no way a single 1.8GHz G5 can beat a *dual* 2.8GHz Xeon for general compute tasks, but on my iMac, 720p plays fine (while it stutters like mad on my 2.8GHz P4).
this is one of the things I wonder about re: the intel transition for Macs - are the Intel chips showing up in 2 years that apple is going to deploy on *that* much of an improvement? (dual xeons! ).
We should stop buying goods from China right now and only start again after the second multi-party election in a row {just to prove they are serious}
this won't work. in any totalitarian regime, the leader can *always* live well, and they are *always* willing to let the common populace suffer. case in point: myanmar/burma - major sanctions, the country is on its way back to the pre-industrialisation age, the way the people are living, but theres no end in sight.
what you propose would simply deny those who aren't the leaders but ARE profiting from the modicum of advancement etc the little improvements they have. farming in china IS worse than a smokey, terrible factory. it wont be until the economy there is humming so well that the factory owners have to treat their staff well (or someone else will hire them) that conditions improve.
it wasnt legislation that improved the lot of the English in the workhouses
If Europe retains and evolves an even more OSS amd GPL-friendly software environment, it could become an increasingly clear test-case for the advantages they can bring in terms of technological development.
If e.g. European companies adopt OSS in greater amounts, while US ones are increasingly hobbled by restrictions - patents, lobbying, and otherwise - any clear successes on their part, economic (in spite of their often touted inferior labour mobility etc.), technological and so forth, will be increasingly difficult for the pro-patent lobby in the US to explain.
If the anti-GPL menagerie wins the political fight in the US, one can imagine all the more talented hackers in the US *emigrating* in large numbers to Europe, which I believe would be unique in history and a loss of one of the US's major advantages - one can point to the scientists etc. from all over the world who have fled their homelands to the US due to ideological constraints there, for a better life (many countries complain of the "brain drain" as the "best and brightest" leave for the US).
But what happens when the "best and brightest" who choose to develop on and for GPL-ed software find living in the US intolerable?
Slashdot Mirror
speaking of "fans"... I'd always thought that people who said Mac people were "fanatics" had never met any Amiga people
We probably should start over at some point soon, not so much because of the x86 instruction set, but because the architecture of modern PCs is convoluted, hard to support, and insecure due to layers and layers of backwards compatibility.
... we already did? Android + ARM is now the dominant platform. Apple's ARM variants are already performing better than some "laptop" CPUs.
Pearl Jam tried to go after them a long time back, and lost
http://ultimateclassicrock.com...
Google Fiber, Project Fi - I've always looked at things like these as basically Google telling the telcos that, if they really had to, they could compete directly against them.
A problem for Google (exacerbated with the end of net neutrality) is that the telcos etc. who have the "last mile" to the actual people that Google depends on to survive, could choke off Google's air (this is the same reason why Google decided they needed their own mobile OS and bought Android and causing a break with their previously-happy relationship with Apple).
It's a matter of survival for Google that, if they had to, if all the telcos suddenly imposed fees on Google/advertisers since, hey, "you're making money off OUR customers", they could pour some of the money they have into making Google Fiber, Fi a full-blown competitor, as opposed to a "project".
It's a signal to the telcos "I could kill you if you make me need to, so let's just carry on with the status quo shall we?". Their very existence and the visible ability to scale up if they have to, is all Google really wants - all other benefits (improving internet access overall etc.) are bonuses.
"vote back to you" - no it doesn't. it gives the vote to the existing whales, which for the hoi poloi entering the field, means "not you". it's like people trumpeting how the right to bear arms keeps them safe from "tyranny", when they have no chance to fight against an entity that can field APCs and drones.
Agreed, even though the Office "lock in" has been weakened... it's still there. Given the choice between having continual compatibility worries with clients/customers, vs. just paying the MS tax... companies will just pay it.
The ecosystem is rather different now, though. One wonders how much power MS can wield against Chromebooks. They've been helpless to stop Android or iOS (now markets that completely dwarf their old Windows monopoly). About the only thing I can think of where they could sabotage the rise of things like Chromebooks would be their still-extant stranglehold over Office file formats, but that's definitely less important than it used to be.
If Chromebooks really do take over, even MacOS will have to get worried. Anyone has access to the Google campus? What's the ratio of MacBooks vs. Pixelbooks now?
"The Network Is The Computer"
everything old is new again
Cloud, network computing, "dumb" terminals... it's like how there's a push towards game streaming as well. If the network bandwidth and latency gets good enough, you don't actually need to have a GTX1080 class GPU in your machine... computing history just seems to oscillate between local computing power vs. "do it on the mainframe and use a terminal"
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/16/...
(1) Oil pipelines do not have to maintain a vacuum internally. Maintaining a vacuum is non-trivial (for example, see large hadron collider).
(2) Oil pipelines are much smaller than what a hyper loop will need to be, unless part of the plan involves figuring out how to liquefy the passengers and then reassemble them later. The Alaska pipeline diameter is IIRC about 4 feet in diameter. Engineering-wise, would scaling up involve only linear increases in stresses and requirements?
(3) When an oil pipeline is breached, other than the oil that is spilled, does the oil behind the point of the breach suddenly become no longer unusable as oil? Because the concern would be that if there is a breach in the hyper loop, all the people behind the point of the breach will no longer operate as people.
(4) the existence of fines etc. is a separate issue from whether the pipeline itself is destroyed by a puncture/breach. there are parts of the world where leaks in pipes do not incur the same sort of penalty because of differing legislation. I do not see how people dying from a breach in the hyper loop can be legislated away similarly.
(5) are handguns the only thing that a hyper loop needs to be defended against? if an airport is sufficiently well secured, aircraft designers do not need to worry about people driving oil/fertilizer trucks into the pipes or the support (or for that matter handguns). there may need to be changes to the security zone around an airport to deal with man-portable missiles if they become more common in the future, but well before a plane reaches cruising altitude, it is basically safe from all external non-military threats. a hyper loop will essentially be vulnerable, and need security, for its entire route.
Does anyone remember the "elevated bus" project, which was supposed to drive on existing roads "over" existing traffic? That turned out to be an investment scam ( https://www.wired.co.uk/articl... ). The key element is something "futuristic/high technology" that (and this is the main element here) involves raising a lot of money. Once that is done it's already a success, they don't actually have to do more than make some kind of show of building something.
I don't think hyper loops are real-world feasible. Even if the technology works, any aggrieved destructive fool - and these exist everywhere in the world, China included - can put the entire system at risk in a way that aircraft are not threatened by. It's easier to guard an airport in such a way that man-portable missiles are out of range of aircraft taking off/landing, than it is to guard the entire length of some long-distance piped network that basically needs to maintain vacuum sealing in its entirety. "Normal" high speed rail is going to be less dangerous/easier to guard than hyper loops, unless they are going to bury the entire thing underground, which will drive costs up, which makes aircraft more competitive.
One thing about design that gets overlooked is, you don't just look at "is it good if it works?", you also need to look at "what happens when something goes wrong?". There are more failure modes for hyper loops where "everybody dies" than there are for aircraft and trains. Even if it exists, you're going to be taking a much greater risk getting in one than alternative transportation methods.
What exactly is the advantage over digitally signed digital diplomas?
So it may be harder to spoof, since verification is done by more than one entity. .
This can't be right? The school that issued you a diploma would be the only entity that can verify/authenticate it, what would other entities would have to do with it? Your resume could have multiple references that would need verification/authentication by separate entities, but each particular one would only be verifiable by one specific entity.
what I find myself owndering is, is there something internally known that they can't talk about that is causing this exodus? or is it based all on what's already publicly known?
Can anyone provide (or link to) comprehensive reviews/analysis of Purism's "PureOS" (as I understand it a debian variant)?
Just the hardware alone isn't enough, we need to look at the software/OS as well if we're gonna talk about something being "secure"
Elements within Google itself think there should be a third - hence Fuchsia.
Android (*bought* by Google, not home grown) was essentially a quick-and-dirty rollout for time-to-market reasons, and there will certainly be benefits if some deep-pocketed sponsor can roll out something built from the ground up for mobile and not desktop requirements.
Although I guess the question is essentially asking if "Blackberry should die"?
The greatest "what might have been" I think of is Palm/WebOS. Whatever you may think of his shenanigans, Mark Hurd was absolutely right when he ran HP and made the move to buy Palm - that could have been the start of something new. HP may not have much mindshare now but I think a lot of people underestimate how many units it can put out into the market, and get adopted simply because they're pushing it.
Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he fended off all those people arguing (during the "beleaguered" days) that Apple should licence MacOS out (or even just give up and switch to Windows) - an operating system is a core *asset*. Without it you're just an indentured servant to "other people's technology", at the mercy of the true power.
Buying Palm was a bold move to attempt to break HP out of that rut but it got shafted before it got started. I think it could have been done. Instead HP was stuck trying to peddle Windows phones, and ended up getting shafted by MS yet again https://www.theverge.com/2017/...
If you plug a display into it, it should say 'the other device does not support video' or something, and conversely the charge indicator on the mower should stay off or blink error or something.
But that's exactly my point!
think about it.
It's not mandated that all lawnmowers be able to produce video output. But if all lawnmowers have the same port type, you can't tell without additional effort that would've been unnecessary if not for every port being the same.
How is finding out it doesn't work AFTER you've plugged the thing in first better - than immediately knowing the two things don't work together because they don't fit together?
in fact, you now have TWO failure modes - either the device you plug the device into does not have the capability, or the cable you plug into it does not have the capability, and there's no way to know until you've gone and plugged it in (that's assuming that the device is set up to tell you that it CAN do it but there's something wrong with the cable). is that really better than just being able to eyeball the port and know it does or does not work?
I think I need to point out something here - there's a distinction between "nice to have" and "practically unfeasible".
there is a functional issue I think you're overlooking - you're complaining about things not fitting together with all sorts of different plug types (microUSB, mini-USB etc.) - things "should" be electrically and functionality/feature-compatible, but which you cannot connect together, therefore you're unhappy about it.
You're actually looking at a subset of the entire space, because remember: in the real world, not everything is supposed to plug into everything else.
It's not like if I can plug my handphone into my lawnmower it will automagically allow me to remotely mow my lawn from the office (actually, wait... somebody kickstarter this, quick). Making them plug-compatible achieves... what?
Not everything can work together with everything else. that's the point of having different plug types
having a "universal" plug type is something that would be VERY nice, just as it would be nice for unicorns to show up and make it rain cake (hey, they're my conception of unicorns so their powers are what I want it to be), but as a real world issue, you cannot build in sufficient forwards compatibility to make up for whatever may come up in the future, so even a "do everything" cable today will become "insufficient" in the future, and you're back to square one. Perhaps you can guarantee that every cable ever made now will always be useful in the future for at least plugging in your mouse and keyboard, but I really doubt there will be a shortage of mouse and keyboard cables in the future - the problem with Type C isn't at the "lowest common denominator" side of the market
again, not everything is supposed to plug into everything else, at least not at today's technology level (and arguably this will never be appropriate).
Let's say that in the future all lawnmowers use USB Type C plugs for power (so you could use the same cable to power your lawnmower as you use to charge your laptop). It then becomes physically possible to plug anything with a USB Type C port into your lawnmower.
Does that achieve anything if they simply don't do the same things?
Does plugging in your video projector into your lawnmower mean that you can have video recordings of you mowing the grass projected out onto a screen? Maybe, maybe not - let's say there's a niche demand for this, well, if video output was something your super duper special lawnmower is supposed to do, then having a VGA port, say, on your lawnmower makes sense, and you can tell video output is something it can do. However, your neighbour's lawnmower, which doesn't do video output, won't need that. But if they have a Type C port... is everything in the future to have stencilled/printed on the underside a full list of capabilities? Is that what we're supposed to do? I don't understand why it's such a problem that, if two things aren't supposed to work together, their ports physically don't match.
The problem now with a Type C port is, what it REALLY says, is that it MAY OR MAY NOT work with something else that has a Type C port. That's NOT an improvement.
Exactly. There will always be "optional extensions". You can never know visually (let's say there's any rule in colour coding to indicate capability, for example, well, can you trust the manufacturer put in the right colour?)
That means that upon encountering a Type C cable, you can never know what it actually does (except some lower baseline of capability which may or may not be sufficient for you).
This really matters because of the problem of time.
A cable manufactured today cannot be expected to support standards that may crop up somewhere down the line, but that cable - if manufactured well, and we're not going to start proposing time-limited self-destructing cables are we? - is going to be around well past the time when whatever spec it was built to support was "complete".
Even if "damage" is no longer a problem with some future improvements in self-protection in ports, we won't know capability visually, so are we supposed to sit down and plug in cables one by one to find out what they really do (remember - mere labelling cannot be trusted)? as opposed to the old days, when I can immediately know that a cable is a video cable because it won't fit otherwise
that's the problem! in the real world (remember - "lowest cost bidding" is the iron law of business, random manufacturers out there who basically have profit margins of a penny per cable etc.) you can't be sure of the quality and provenance of cables that you encounter - of $x used in the manufacture of the cable, the vast majority of it will be spent on making the cable look good, not whether the internal circuitry is good.
I've had situations where people hand me a Type C cable and the emotion I feel is fear. I don't know how good or bad that cable is and I don't know if I should plug it into my machine. What do I do? are we now supposed to travel everywhere with our own cables?
the "one plug for everything" trend that began with USB Type C is a step in the wrong direction.
having "unique" plug types for particular purposes is a *feature*, not a bug - simply by looking at the plug, we know what the cable and the port does.
Replacing all the legacy ports is necessary (if only because the old plugs are simply just too big for modern hardware), but replacing EVERYTHING with one plug, when everything now looks the same, you end up with a situation where you simply do not know if a cable or port can do what you need it to do.
So you see a Type C plug - is it Thunderbolt or not? Is it a DisplayPort? What voltages/amps can it provide? nobody knows (where "nobody" can include the person whose hardware it is, much less someone else who has to work with it). just look at e.g. the many forum posts of people who connected "the wrong type" of USB-C-to-HDMI connectors because they didn't know their USB C wasn't the USB C that they thought USB C was supposed to be.
this is made even worse considering that there's active circuitry involved, where you need to worry about whether the cable itself is built right (see e.g. Benson Leung's long list of cables that can fry your hardware). in the old days, a crap cable just means crap performance or no connection. not any more.
The FCC later specified that they were not trying to block Open Source firmware modifications
considering the current person in appointed to the FCC, I don't think statements such as these should be taken at face value
I think this is one of the things where the vector/altivec units for the PPCs come into play and make a big difference - look at the relative differences between Mac and x86 machines for QT7/HD playback:
d ations.html
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/recommen
There's no way a single 1.8GHz G5 can beat a *dual* 2.8GHz Xeon for general compute tasks, but on my iMac, 720p plays fine (while it stutters like mad on my 2.8GHz P4).
this is one of the things I wonder about re: the intel transition for Macs - are the Intel chips showing up in 2 years that apple is going to deploy on *that* much of an improvement? (dual xeons! ).
We should stop buying goods from China right now and only start again after the second multi-party election in a row {just to prove they are serious}
this won't work. in any totalitarian regime, the leader can *always* live well, and they are *always* willing to let the common populace suffer. case in point: myanmar/burma - major sanctions, the country is on its way back to the pre-industrialisation age, the way the people are living, but theres no end in sight.
what you propose would simply deny those who aren't the leaders but ARE profiting from the modicum of advancement etc the little improvements they have. farming in china IS worse than a smokey, terrible factory. it wont be until the economy there is humming so well that the factory owners have to treat their staff well (or someone else will hire them) that conditions improve.
it wasnt legislation that improved the lot of the English in the workhouses
If Europe retains and evolves an even more OSS amd GPL-friendly software environment, it could become an increasingly clear test-case for the advantages they can bring in terms of technological development.
If e.g. European companies adopt OSS in greater amounts, while US ones are increasingly hobbled by restrictions - patents, lobbying, and otherwise - any clear successes on their part, economic (in spite of their often touted inferior labour mobility etc.), technological and so forth, will be increasingly difficult for the pro-patent lobby in the US to explain.
If the anti-GPL menagerie wins the political fight in the US, one can imagine all the more talented hackers in the US *emigrating* in large numbers to Europe, which I believe would be unique in history and a loss of one of the US's major advantages - one can point to the scientists etc. from all over the world who have fled their homelands to the US due to ideological constraints there, for a better life (many countries complain of the "brain drain" as the "best and brightest" leave for the US).
But what happens when the "best and brightest" who choose to develop on and for GPL-ed software find living in the US intolerable?
I have a question, does anybody know the answer - does the vitamin D production begin *instantly* the minute you're out in the sun?
i mean, do you have to be in the sun for x minutes before your body starts building vitamin D? what's the threshold/lag?
speaking of thresholds, is there a minimum amount of sunlight?