I'll sign up too, but of course none of the ISPs are selling what I'm buying. Or they are, but I have to move my entire life, quit my job, and completely change the way I live just to get decent Internet.
Get ready for the exodus to the next startup platform that begins by "playing nice" and offering a good user experience. Goodbye Facebook, it was nice knowing you.
This is an interesting point. However, when most people say "population growth", what they really mean is GEOMETRIC growth -- meaning that the population is growing by an exponential function.
The late, great Professor Al Bartlett's arguments in Arithmetic, Population and Energy -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?... -- are assuming that population grows at an exponential rate, not something slower.
If it could be shown that the population was growing linearly, or even polynomially, over a long period of time, we would have significantly less cause for concern. However, if the population growth's fastest term is still exponential, it doesn't matter whether it's "decelerating", we still have the problem.
Consider three different population growth functions where each whole number of `x` is 1 year:
C = 100000 (starting pool of people = 100,000)
L(x) = 1000x + C// Linear growth
Q(x) = 400x^2 + C// Quadratic growth
E(x) = C*(1 + 0.0113)^x// Exponential growth -- let's set r = 0.0113, the current estimated world population growth rate, 1.13% per year
So if x = 1 (10 years from now):
L(1) = 1000 + 100000 = 101000.
Q(1) = 400 + 100000 = 100400.
E(1) = 100000 * 1.0113 = 101130.
So far these are relatively close, but let's look at 50 years...
x = 50:
L(50) = 50000 + 100000 = 150000.
Q(50) = 1000000 + 100000 = 1,100,000.
E(50) = 100000 * (1.0113)^50 = 175388.
Quadratic jumps way ahead here, but even though I set a fairly aggressive coefficient for the quadratic, the exponential wins out in the end...
Let's say x = 500...
L(500) = 500000 + 100000 = 600000.
Q(500) = 100,000,000 + 100000 = 100,100,000.
E(500) = 100000 * (1.0113)^500 = 27,542,516.
Nope, quadratic still wins.
x = 1000?
L(1000) = 1,000,000 + 100000 = 1,100,000.
Q(1000) = 400,000,000 + 100000 = 400,100,000.
E(1000) = 100000 * (1.0113)^1000 = 7,585,902,222.
So yeah, after just 1000 years of a very slow exponential growth, it completely trounces the extremely fast-growing quadratic.
So we need to stop looking at population figures in terms of derivatives and acceleration in the traditional sense, because historically the growth has always best been described by an exponential function, not by a polynomial. Unless we have somehow fundamentally changed our ways to stop the exponential growth, everything Al Bartlett says in his video is 100% true, even if the rate, r, in the growth function is decreasing (hint: it's not decreasing fast enough to matter).
Unless you have more RAM than you have persistent storage, you *always* max out your RAM after only a few minutes of the machine being on. All "extra" RAM that isn't allocated to processes, is used as page cache for the storage layer, which dramatically improves read performance because DRAM is much faster than even the fastest SSD (and hundreds of times faster than HDDs).
My point wasn't whether or not you "max out" your RAM using programs. My point was that the core operating system and "plumbing" stuff uses a lot less memory on OS X than it does on Windows. Plus, on Windows, you have to wear a digital condom (run a resource-hungry virus and firewall suite) to avoid getting owned by every other malicious ad on the Internet, which artificially increases the absolute amount of mapped RAM that has to be dedicated to processes just to keep your system running well.
So, OS X is more RAM efficient. Hardware-wise, it's also got a much faster SSD (on the Macbook Pro, at least) than is available to the vast majority of PCs. This SSD matches up favorably with the best SSDs that Samsung and Intel have to offer. It is significantly faster than the Samsung 850 Pro. So even if this Macbook Pro system starts to experience some memory pressure, it's a lot less obvious on a Mac that the system is swapping than it is on a PC.
The OS X kernel and driver stack is also very well-designed for low latency input and display functions. Windows is significantly improved with WDDM and recent kernel improvements in Windows 10, but I can still feel the input latency difference in basic things like typing text in a textbox on a webpage, comparing OS X and my high-end Windows 10 desktop.
I've got a GTX 1080, 64 gigs of RAM and an i7-6700K in my desktop, with two SSDs in RAID. Even with Windows 10 and a fuckton of bloated services and hundreds of processes running just about everything that exists, the responsiveness is pretty good, and I rarely experience any kind of performance problem, even if I'm playing *multiple games* simultaneously. But look at how much I had to invest in that hardware to reach that point. Would I be able to do the same with Macbook Pro specs (8 gigs of RAM) running Windows? No, absolutely not. But OS X manages to handle whatever I throw at it.
Anyway, here's a summary of my experience with Apple hardware. The current-gen Macbook Pro and iPhone have a much faster *storage layer* (SSD / NAND) than the vast majority of PCs and Android phones, and yet the Apple products are not hideously more expensive than their competitors. In fact, if you were to buy a PC or an Android phone with comparable storage layer performance to what Apple offers as "standard", you'd almost certainly pay a lot more.
My thesis is that, even though they skimp a little on the RAM, their focus on supplying excellent, high-end solid state storage that far exceeds the SATA 6 Gb/s performance ceiling, is a wise investment technically-speaking, as it allows them a great amount of flexibility with their memory management. And their well-designed, efficient software manages the user experience extremely well, even if resources are under high demand.
That's the 2016 Apple technology landscape in a nutshell: Use "good-enough" CPUs, with "good-enough" GPUs on x86 and top-notch GPUs on mobile. Be very battery efficient to keep weight down. Provide just enough RAM but not excessive amounts. Go all-out on solid state storage performance and blow away all but the most expensive enterprise SSDs. And produce the most optimized OS in the world and use that to reduce the need to procure expensive, high-end hardware.
Not saying you can't get a good experience on Windows or even GNU/Linux; I own and run boxes with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04. But you usually need to invest significantly more for the same result. Ditto for Android vs. iOS. Hey Samsung, when are you going to offer 128 GB internal storage on your phones? Oh, what's that? We're supposed to use a dog-slow MicroSD card instead? That's what I thought. Peace out.
I am so sick of Slashdot posting bold-faced lies and FUD on their front page. You can buy Macbooks with Skylake, which is a CPU architecture that wasn't even released until about a year ago, and Macbook Pros with Broadwell, an architecture released in early 2015.
If you buy a 13" Macbook Pro (latest generation) on apple.com right now, it will come with a CPU and chipset released to market by Intel about a year and a half ago, not four years ago.
And if you're complaining about the physical chassis, well, maybe it's just that Apple has reached what they consider to be the optimal layout and dimensions for their chassis. I mean, IBM/Lenovo hardly ever changed their ThinkPad physical design characteristics for a number of years in the mid to late 2000s, until Lenovo started messing with a good thing, and ended up utterly ruining the ThinkPad brand and stopped providing the features that people who bought them wanted/needed.
I am not an Apple fanboy; I think the company is pretentious, greedy, anti-competitive, and significantly less visionary with the loss of Steve Jobs. The very little they do for open source is overshadowed by their aggressive litigiousness and the walled garden platform they created.
BUT -- and this is a big thing for me -- Apple can do *more* with 4 or 8 GB of RAM than Microsoft can do with 16 GB of RAM. Their software is extremely well-designed, optimized for fast, high-fidelity displays, and the font rendering is beautiful and second to none. They don't have a ton of old legacy code like Windows does; the legacy that does exist has easily been swept under the rug in favor of new designs. And being based on BSD is a huge plus for software dev.
The efficiency and responsiveness of Macbook Pro and iPhone has made me appreciate and admire these *products* that I own, even though I only started buying Apple products in 2015 after spending decades swearing I never would and preferring GNU/Linux or Windows-if-absolutely-necessary.
I'm tired of having to grossly over-spec my machines (and often end up paying even more than I paid for my Apple products) for trash software like Microsoft Windows and Android, two great examples of over-engineering plus bloat plus the worst parts of an open or semi-open platform (security vulnerabilities, malware, etc.)... A $1800 MBP with a year-old processor and 8 gigs of RAM is faster, more enjoyable to use, lighter, and has better battery life than a $3000 13" Windows 10 "ultrabook". And my $1000 iPhone 6S Plus with 2 gigs of RAM is faster, far less buggy, completely free of bloat, and easier to use than any Android phone on the market.
Again, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I don't love the company and I have zero loyalty to them. I dare someone else to do better. For years I thought everyone else *did* do better, but it's clear to me now that I was actually deluding myself into thinking that having 4 gigs of memory wasted by background service bloat on Windows was "necessary".
I'm very satisfied with their products right now and extremely dissatisfied with their competition. I'd actually recommend to those in the market for a laptop to seriously consider the Macbook Pro. It's not ideal for gaming, of course, but it's great for anything from content creation to heavy web surfing to flash games and even does VMs extremely well in VirtualBox or VMware. And I also do some heavy C++ and Java dev on this box. It just never slows down no matter what I do. Love it.
Nobody has ever said that the threshold is 100 GB! Verizon reps specifically danced around saying the exact number in every statement they've made.
The article claims the 100 GB figure as fact, which is extremely intellectually disingenuous.
In fact, there are compelling rumors (but still not facts, so please don't update the article claiming this as the truth) that only users with 500 GB or more data usage per month (on average, per-line) will be disconnected or forced to go metered. The original guy who leaked the info on Reddit is now saying he heard from Verizon management that the threshold is 500 GB.
But until people start getting letters and we can collect a representative sample of who did and did not get letters and chart that against their monthly usage, STOP claiming that you know any number to be true and accurate. This is the first step in being an ethical journalist and Slashdot can't even do this.
I forgot to mention that the next "step" in the cat and mouse circumvention / anti-circumvention arms race is to ban encryption as well as any traffic that the DPI firewall can't "understand". This is the Brave New World of universal surveillance that we are headed towards. Countries like China, Australia and the UK are leading the way, and the US is going there too, just perhaps a little bit slower because organizations like the EFF and ACLU exist to try and gum up the works of the process.
It may take a few decades, but it will be within the lifetime of millennials that you will see encryption banned, and any traffic you try to send over the Internet that isn't fully understood by your ISP (regardless of whether you're on a home, work, or free hotspot connection) will be automatically rejected. So no VPNs or anything of the sort.
The protocol negotiation and setup routines of a VPN are extremely easy to detect. When it's your "ISP" -- the network gateway providing your uplink -- that is trying to prevent you from getting on a VPN, it is extremely trivial for the gateway to block most VPNs because they have such well-known, "overt" setup/negotiation protocols.
Even OpenVPN on TCP port 443, which by all counts looks a helluva lot like a standard HTTPS connection, has just enough of a "tell" that it can be blocked while the gateway still allows normal HTTPS connections over the web.
While it's true that *endpoints* on an already established VPN tunnel cannot tell that the traffic is being handed to another client over a VPN, it is very easy for a *gateway* to detect all but the most stealthy VPNs.
That's why I said that specific mitigations (in terms of traffic shape and protocol "appearance", using steganography if required) are required if you want to bypass this kind of "anti-VPN" restriction on the gateway you are connected to (for instance, a free WiFi hotspot that's trying to block porn, and then tries to block VPNs to prevent people from using them to circumvent the block).
It's not even about setting up your own server. I could give you a description of a certain sequence of packets that will identify OpenVPN connections (even over TCP) 100% of the time, and never false positive on anything else. You could safely implement that rule on *all* remote IP addresses on a stateful firewall gateway and prevent people from using OpenVPN, regardless of the port.
That's why you just need to make your VPN traffic look like normal web traffic. There are various protocols out there that are so obfuscated that even a deep packet inspection firewall couldn't tell that it's not ordinary web traffic.
It adds overhead and latency, but it's really not that difficult to do. Somewhat ironically, it is based on the exact same principle as terrorists use to infiltrate countries they want to blow up: you become really, really good at looking exactly like the sheeple. You don't stand out. You look perfectly ordinary just like the rest of the law-abiding citizens. Except that the *semantics* of the data you're transferring -- which no firewall or DPI could possibly understand -- are such that porn content (or whatever) is being delivered to your computer.
Blocking is for deterring casual use, not for actually preventing something from being done. See: Great Firewall of China.
They're not selling what we're buying, though. That's how American industry works. It's not "free market"; it's not "capitalism"; it's plutocratic oligarchy. They don't care what you want, as long as you want what they're selling enough to buy it.
In absolute terms of the cost per teraflop of GPU compute performance, prices have taken a nosedive this year. The release of the GTX 1080 and 1070 drove down the price of the 980 Ti, 980 and 970 which are still more than adequate for all gaming at 1080p (even on very high settings). The AMD Radeon RX480 has given a huge boost to the $200 price point as well, providing 5-6 TFLOPS at a price point that could net you *maybe* 3 TFLOPS if you shopped sales, before around Q2 2016 (with the release of the 16nm FinFET TSMC process cards).
There are extremely few games that will really bottleneck on the GPU if you have an RX480 or similar level of performance (with max or nearly maxed settings and 1080p60). In 5 years, even AAA games will still run smoothly on Low-Medium detail on the same card.
The only reason you'd need a beefier card, or SLI/CF, is if you go above 1080p60 (which is distinctly in enthusiast territory at this time, not because of the cost of the monitor but because of the additional load that imposes on the GPU(s)) or if you want to keep playing the latest AAA titles on the highest possible graphics settings over the next half-decade.
The only game I can think of right now that gives these cards a run for their money is a 150-million-dollar, crowd-funded, tech demo.
Trying to solve a data integrity and security problem by implementing the solution based on the blockchain is like trying to go to space by digging a hole in the ground.
Unless those libraries are shipped by Ubuntu, though, you'd have to either use a prior release or run a non-Ubuntu OS in your container in order to handle this. A lot of people would like to use the versions of libs shipped by Ubuntu on their 64-bit system, but compiled for 32-bit, to do their 32-bit work (e.g. Wine).
So yeah, it would do a lot of harm to many use cases and workloads if they stopped providing 32-bit libraries at the very least. If they want to drop 32-bit kernel support, it would affect way fewer people, because there aren't many systems still in use today that only run x86 and not x86_64.
True, but the pilots of the plane taking off could have, hypothetically, possibly taken off and avoided the collision by flying over the top of the other aircraft, if they were able to near-instantaneously dump most of their mass. Certainly the V1 for any aircraft is a lot lower if it's lightly loaded vs. fully loaded.
However -- I think what the "Funny" post above was referring to (facetiously) was that just jettisoning the cargo and economy passenger mass would be enough to reduce the V1 to the point that the plane trying to take off could do so before slamming into the other plane.
This isn't actually possible, though, because most of what makes a loaded aircraft heavy is its fuel, especially if it's going any significant distance. You'd have to have a way to safely jettison all but a few minutes worth of fuel, *and* the cargo, in basically a second or two, in order to successfully climb over the top of the plane directly in your path, in fog, with a very large jet like a 747 (and those older generation 747s had significantly less powerful engines relative to the aircraft mass compared to today, so it would be harder due to the engine technology as well).
Of course, modern radar, communications, computers and human vigilance are designed to prevent the type of runway incursions and collisions that occurred in Tenerife. The best solution to this problem is to control the situation, such that the one plane never incurs on the runway takeoff path of the other in the first place. Then things like ability to jettison cargo/fuel or take off suddenly become de-emphasized, the more certain you become that runway incursions won't happen.
Sadly, airports like LAX continue to have frequent runway incursions and quite a few near misses. There are a few airports that really make me nervous because they are simply too busy, and the sheer number of moving planes, ground vehicles and people makes it very risky as an operating environment for commercial aviation, even though the planes themselves would be perfectly fine when they're up in the sky, and perfectly fine taking off or landing at less busy airports.
We at least need enough 32-bit packages available in the 64-bit distro (whether by dpkg --add-architecture i386, or by installing "lib32" packages like we used to do) to install and run Wine.
You see, to run Win32 programs, your Wine emulator binary needs to be a 32-bit Linux/ELF application. I suppose it could emulate cross-architecture, but wine prides itself on *not* emulating native code generation (for performance). Otherwise it would be as slow as a software virtualization solution like Bochs or (non-KVM) qemu.
Wine, in turn, depends on a number of system libraries for core services. It then implements common Windows APIs "in terms of" available platform libraries. Direct3D in terms of OpenGL; DirectSound in terms of libasound2 or libpulse; etc. These libraries, linked into a 32-bit binary, must also be 32-bit.
I agree that there's no point in testing 32-bit *hardware* any longer, but I hope they continue to ship 32-bit *builds* (even if they stop making 32-bit installation CDs). There's just too much software on the Win32 platform that needs to run on Linux (desktop OR server; see game servers) to abandon this segment of the market.
1. Shielding - Never had any problems in any phone I've ever owned. If shielding is an issue in the "new & improved iphone", then add a damn 1/10th of a mm and put some shielding back in. I'll trade a bit of imaginary interference for bluetooth
drops & pairing difficulties any day.
I guess you never sit your headphones on a busy desk with cables, laptops, etc. then. I had Sennheiser HD-25 II wired studio monitoring headphones with one of the best-shielded cables made for headphones (steel and very thick) and the EM emissions from the IGP on my laptop (a Westmere i5; this was years ago) would be very audible over the music streaming from my MP3 player (this was before I got a smartphone with enough storage and CPU to play music). Newer Intel procs are better at reducing EM, but cheap headphone cables will still pick up emissions several inches away from a desktop with a Skylake i7 in my limited testing. These CPUs will happily spew harmless electromagnetic emissions that get converted into arbitrary sounds by your headphones when the conductor in your cable picks them up.
Also, the only bluetooth drops and pairing problems I've had in recent years were all on Android. I moved from buying Android phones (numerous, from 3 different manufacturers, all had the same problems with BT) to an iPhone 6S Plus, and I have not had a single BT dropout, not a single one in like 9 months. And pairing always succeeds immediately.
For my desktop and Windows laptop I use an Imperial BART 1 bluetooth transceiver (with aptX Low Latency) as an intermediary, with the sound being sent to the BART 1 from the motherboard's S/PDIF digital (TOSLINK) port. So the entire audio path is digital. 24-bit 48 kHz, too, which is better than the 16-bit 44.1 kHz that 99.9% of the people are using, and not audibly distinguishable from even higher bitrates and sample rates in most studies (the law of diminishing returns).
This allows me to have two pair of headphones, total -- one I keep at work and one I keep at home -- for all my headphone needs across desktop, laptop and smartphone. And both headsets double as a serviceable mic to take phone calls, either over Skype or the cellular network. And I never have to tangle with cables.
2. Finicky jacks - this is perhaps one of only two points that I think has some credence. I've had a couple of finicky jacks myself but you know what--a quick squirt of contact cleaner solved the problem perfectly. Want to talk about finicky? Bluetooth
pairing on some devices. You know what's even more finicky? When your BT headset battery starts to wear out and you can't replace it. Wired headsets have a much longer lifetime than BT headsets.
I only buy BT headsets with user-replaceable batteries. What kind of junk are you buying that doesn't? Beats? People actually think Beats BT headsets are good, you know? It's embarrassing and a disgrace to actually good bluetooth headsets, like the BeoPlay H8.
BT pairing issues are basically non-existent if both devices support BT version >= 4.0. Latency is not a problem if both ends support aptX Low Latency (it sits around 30-ish ms with very low jitter, and it's not detectable by most users, even when gaming, even while focused on it.) Not all BT versions and not all BT equipment is created equal, though. Android is an absolute cesspool of crappy BT stacks. Avoid it like t
It looks like you stated you have 10 years experience in IT, but I could only find five years on your LinkedIn account. I've updated your resume for you to reflect this data.
In the case of Google Updater, the reason for it to exist is that users *ought to* want regular security updates for products that are extremely networked by design. Not updating your web browser is idiotic and will get you owned fairly reliably, even if you only visit mainstream sites (a CSRF or XSS vulnerability in one of these sites could lead to your browser loading arbitrary content, which better not be able to exploit your browser if you value your data).
However, the fact that Google forces the bundling of any security updates with new browser features -- whether you want them or not -- is unfortunate. It would be great if they maintained a long term support release of Chrome and such that would remain feature-frozen but delivering new security updates as vulnerabilities are found and fixed.
Still, if using Chrome at all is bad for your data and privacy, using it without updates is digital suicide.
Keep in mind that only dedicated chipsets made by CSR (now part of Qualcomm) actually implement aptX. And also there is a difference of about 80-100 ms between "regular" aptX, and aptX Low Latency.
I have a pair of headphones that supports aptX but not Low Latency. The sound quality is at least as good as 256 kbps MP3, but the latency is almost as bad as regular SBC (the horrific default "required" codec in A2DP spec). The Low Latency cans I have are *noticeably* more responsive and lower latency; the difference is striking.
Also keep in mind that the following do not support aptX at all:
- Any device produced by Apple (Mac OS X computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Apple Watch) only supports two Bluetooth codecs: SBC (horrible, as I mentioned), and AAC. The quality of AAC is much better than SBC and on-par with aptX, but the latency is as bad as SBC. Many high-end headphones/headsets support SBC, AAC, *and* some variation of aptX (either regular aptX or aptX Low Latency), so if you want to use the same speakers/headphones with Apple and non-Apple devices, make sure they support AAC *and* aptX.
- Windows' default bluetooth stack on desktop/laptop Windows. Most Windows Phone smartphones support aptX just fine, but *computers* running Windows with a built-in bluetooth chipset or USB chipset, do not support aptX. I am not certain if you can get aptX support with a CSR-branded USB bluetooth dongle; that would be a good question to ask CSR.
- BlueZ on GNU/Linux doesn't support anything but SBC (possibly AAC, I'm not sure), and definitely not aptX because it's a proprietary and patent-encumbered format.
- Many low-end Android smartphones, and even some high-end ones. You have to look at the detailed specs. If they don't list codecs, assume they only support SBC unless you find compelling evidence to the contrary. gsmarena is known to be wrong on this occasionally as well, so be careful.
*BOTH* the headphones/speakers and the Bluetooth transmitting device have to support the codec for it to work. If they can't agree on an advanced codec that both ends support, they'll fall back to SBC. At that point you're better off plugging in a wire and dealing with the annoyance of being physically attached.
Also, the above restrictions about Windows not supporting aptX can be worked around by using a full-stack Bluetooth transceiver (like the aforementioned Imperial BART 1; there are a few others on the market too) to basically "convert" standard audio out over optical or 3.5mm analog (from your computer or smartphone) into bluetooth signals. The best in breed of these devices have an all-digital path, meaning you go from digital PCM data on the computer directly to the Bluetooth speakers/headphones, with no analog path in between. USB or toslink optical would be the most popular options for all-digital.
apt-X Low Latency has a round trip time of around 40 ms and extremely low jitter, compared to the default Bluetooth A2DP latency of around 150 ms with significant jitter. Audio buffering on video, MP3 players and even games is usually around this figure, sometimes even higher. They do a lot of buffering because, the bigger your buffer, the more power you save and the fewer context switches you have to make. Constantly waking up the CPU for lots and lots of little writes is less efficient than doing a big batch of audio processing in one go, then going to sleep for a good solid fraction of a second.
Of course interactive applications like games and VoIP will have lowER latency than video or audio playback, because the content constantly changes depending on input from the user. But you can't get much faster than 6 ms, because many sound cards these days have a minimum buffer size of around that number.
Sure, Bluetooth is not good for professional audio production, but that only covers about 1% or less of the total audio hardware market. Even audiophiles can get into the Bluetooth scene (and it's good enough for gaming in my tests) by buying an aptX Low Latency full-stack receiver like the Imperial BART 1 and connecting it to high-end headphones like B&O BeoPlay H8 or Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Wireless.
Even while completely focusing my eyes on reading the lips of a speaker in a video, it's extremely difficult for me to perceive the latency when using a receiver and headphones that both support aptX Low Latency.
I have the Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 On-ear Wireless and the B&O BeoPlay H8. Expensive but worth every penny. I use them with all my devices from laptop to smartphone to computer. For my computer, because Windows' BT stack is embarrassingly bad, I use an "Imperial BART (Bluetooth Audio Receiver/Transmitter) 1" imported from Telestar in Germany. Works like a charm with Bluetooth 4.0 w/ aptX Low Latency:)
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I'll sign up too, but of course none of the ISPs are selling what I'm buying. Or they are, but I have to move my entire life, quit my job, and completely change the way I live just to get decent Internet.
Get ready for the exodus to the next startup platform that begins by "playing nice" and offering a good user experience. Goodbye Facebook, it was nice knowing you.
This is an interesting point. However, when most people say "population growth", what they really mean is GEOMETRIC growth -- meaning that the population is growing by an exponential function.
The late, great Professor Al Bartlett's arguments in Arithmetic, Population and Energy -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?... -- are assuming that population grows at an exponential rate, not something slower.
If it could be shown that the population was growing linearly, or even polynomially, over a long period of time, we would have significantly less cause for concern. However, if the population growth's fastest term is still exponential, it doesn't matter whether it's "decelerating", we still have the problem.
Consider three different population growth functions where each whole number of `x` is 1 year:
C = 100000 (starting pool of people = 100,000)
L(x) = 1000x + C // Linear growth
Q(x) = 400x^2 + C // Quadratic growth
E(x) = C*(1 + 0.0113)^x // Exponential growth -- let's set r = 0.0113, the current estimated world population growth rate, 1.13% per year
So if x = 1 (10 years from now):
L(1) = 1000 + 100000 = 101000.
Q(1) = 400 + 100000 = 100400.
E(1) = 100000 * 1.0113 = 101130.
So far these are relatively close, but let's look at 50 years...
x = 50:
L(50) = 50000 + 100000 = 150000.
Q(50) = 1000000 + 100000 = 1,100,000.
E(50) = 100000 * (1.0113)^50 = 175388.
Quadratic jumps way ahead here, but even though I set a fairly aggressive coefficient for the quadratic, the exponential wins out in the end...
Let's say x = 500...
L(500) = 500000 + 100000 = 600000.
Q(500) = 100,000,000 + 100000 = 100,100,000.
E(500) = 100000 * (1.0113)^500 = 27,542,516.
Nope, quadratic still wins.
x = 1000?
L(1000) = 1,000,000 + 100000 = 1,100,000.
Q(1000) = 400,000,000 + 100000 = 400,100,000.
E(1000) = 100000 * (1.0113)^1000 = 7,585,902,222.
So yeah, after just 1000 years of a very slow exponential growth, it completely trounces the extremely fast-growing quadratic.
So we need to stop looking at population figures in terms of derivatives and acceleration in the traditional sense, because historically the growth has always best been described by an exponential function, not by a polynomial. Unless we have somehow fundamentally changed our ways to stop the exponential growth, everything Al Bartlett says in his video is 100% true, even if the rate, r, in the growth function is decreasing (hint: it's not decreasing fast enough to matter).
Unless you have more RAM than you have persistent storage, you *always* max out your RAM after only a few minutes of the machine being on. All "extra" RAM that isn't allocated to processes, is used as page cache for the storage layer, which dramatically improves read performance because DRAM is much faster than even the fastest SSD (and hundreds of times faster than HDDs).
My point wasn't whether or not you "max out" your RAM using programs. My point was that the core operating system and "plumbing" stuff uses a lot less memory on OS X than it does on Windows. Plus, on Windows, you have to wear a digital condom (run a resource-hungry virus and firewall suite) to avoid getting owned by every other malicious ad on the Internet, which artificially increases the absolute amount of mapped RAM that has to be dedicated to processes just to keep your system running well.
So, OS X is more RAM efficient. Hardware-wise, it's also got a much faster SSD (on the Macbook Pro, at least) than is available to the vast majority of PCs. This SSD matches up favorably with the best SSDs that Samsung and Intel have to offer. It is significantly faster than the Samsung 850 Pro. So even if this Macbook Pro system starts to experience some memory pressure, it's a lot less obvious on a Mac that the system is swapping than it is on a PC.
The OS X kernel and driver stack is also very well-designed for low latency input and display functions. Windows is significantly improved with WDDM and recent kernel improvements in Windows 10, but I can still feel the input latency difference in basic things like typing text in a textbox on a webpage, comparing OS X and my high-end Windows 10 desktop.
I've got a GTX 1080, 64 gigs of RAM and an i7-6700K in my desktop, with two SSDs in RAID. Even with Windows 10 and a fuckton of bloated services and hundreds of processes running just about everything that exists, the responsiveness is pretty good, and I rarely experience any kind of performance problem, even if I'm playing *multiple games* simultaneously. But look at how much I had to invest in that hardware to reach that point. Would I be able to do the same with Macbook Pro specs (8 gigs of RAM) running Windows? No, absolutely not. But OS X manages to handle whatever I throw at it.
Anyway, here's a summary of my experience with Apple hardware. The current-gen Macbook Pro and iPhone have a much faster *storage layer* (SSD / NAND) than the vast majority of PCs and Android phones, and yet the Apple products are not hideously more expensive than their competitors. In fact, if you were to buy a PC or an Android phone with comparable storage layer performance to what Apple offers as "standard", you'd almost certainly pay a lot more.
My thesis is that, even though they skimp a little on the RAM, their focus on supplying excellent, high-end solid state storage that far exceeds the SATA 6 Gb/s performance ceiling, is a wise investment technically-speaking, as it allows them a great amount of flexibility with their memory management. And their well-designed, efficient software manages the user experience extremely well, even if resources are under high demand.
That's the 2016 Apple technology landscape in a nutshell: Use "good-enough" CPUs, with "good-enough" GPUs on x86 and top-notch GPUs on mobile. Be very battery efficient to keep weight down. Provide just enough RAM but not excessive amounts. Go all-out on solid state storage performance and blow away all but the most expensive enterprise SSDs. And produce the most optimized OS in the world and use that to reduce the need to procure expensive, high-end hardware.
Not saying you can't get a good experience on Windows or even GNU/Linux; I own and run boxes with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04. But you usually need to invest significantly more for the same result. Ditto for Android vs. iOS. Hey Samsung, when are you going to offer 128 GB internal storage on your phones? Oh, what's that? We're supposed to use a dog-slow MicroSD card instead? That's what I thought. Peace out.
I am so sick of Slashdot posting bold-faced lies and FUD on their front page. You can buy Macbooks with Skylake, which is a CPU architecture that wasn't even released until about a year ago, and Macbook Pros with Broadwell, an architecture released in early 2015.
If you buy a 13" Macbook Pro (latest generation) on apple.com right now, it will come with a CPU and chipset released to market by Intel about a year and a half ago, not four years ago.
And if you're complaining about the physical chassis, well, maybe it's just that Apple has reached what they consider to be the optimal layout and dimensions for their chassis. I mean, IBM/Lenovo hardly ever changed their ThinkPad physical design characteristics for a number of years in the mid to late 2000s, until Lenovo started messing with a good thing, and ended up utterly ruining the ThinkPad brand and stopped providing the features that people who bought them wanted/needed.
I am not an Apple fanboy; I think the company is pretentious, greedy, anti-competitive, and significantly less visionary with the loss of Steve Jobs. The very little they do for open source is overshadowed by their aggressive litigiousness and the walled garden platform they created.
BUT -- and this is a big thing for me -- Apple can do *more* with 4 or 8 GB of RAM than Microsoft can do with 16 GB of RAM. Their software is extremely well-designed, optimized for fast, high-fidelity displays, and the font rendering is beautiful and second to none. They don't have a ton of old legacy code like Windows does; the legacy that does exist has easily been swept under the rug in favor of new designs. And being based on BSD is a huge plus for software dev.
The efficiency and responsiveness of Macbook Pro and iPhone has made me appreciate and admire these *products* that I own, even though I only started buying Apple products in 2015 after spending decades swearing I never would and preferring GNU/Linux or Windows-if-absolutely-necessary.
I'm tired of having to grossly over-spec my machines (and often end up paying even more than I paid for my Apple products) for trash software like Microsoft Windows and Android, two great examples of over-engineering plus bloat plus the worst parts of an open or semi-open platform (security vulnerabilities, malware, etc.) ... A $1800 MBP with a year-old processor and 8 gigs of RAM is faster, more enjoyable to use, lighter, and has better battery life than a $3000 13" Windows 10 "ultrabook". And my $1000 iPhone 6S Plus with 2 gigs of RAM is faster, far less buggy, completely free of bloat, and easier to use than any Android phone on the market.
Again, I'm not an Apple fanboy. I don't love the company and I have zero loyalty to them. I dare someone else to do better. For years I thought everyone else *did* do better, but it's clear to me now that I was actually deluding myself into thinking that having 4 gigs of memory wasted by background service bloat on Windows was "necessary".
I'm very satisfied with their products right now and extremely dissatisfied with their competition. I'd actually recommend to those in the market for a laptop to seriously consider the Macbook Pro. It's not ideal for gaming, of course, but it's great for anything from content creation to heavy web surfing to flash games and even does VMs extremely well in VirtualBox or VMware. And I also do some heavy C++ and Java dev on this box. It just never slows down no matter what I do. Love it.
Nobody has ever said that the threshold is 100 GB! Verizon reps specifically danced around saying the exact number in every statement they've made.
The article claims the 100 GB figure as fact, which is extremely intellectually disingenuous.
In fact, there are compelling rumors (but still not facts, so please don't update the article claiming this as the truth) that only users with 500 GB or more data usage per month (on average, per-line) will be disconnected or forced to go metered. The original guy who leaked the info on Reddit is now saying he heard from Verizon management that the threshold is 500 GB.
But until people start getting letters and we can collect a representative sample of who did and did not get letters and chart that against their monthly usage, STOP claiming that you know any number to be true and accurate. This is the first step in being an ethical journalist and Slashdot can't even do this.
Redgate.
Why worry about gaming on a Chromebook? The hardware, especially the GPU, is too weak to care. Unless you want to play a clicker game or something...
I forgot to mention that the next "step" in the cat and mouse circumvention / anti-circumvention arms race is to ban encryption as well as any traffic that the DPI firewall can't "understand". This is the Brave New World of universal surveillance that we are headed towards. Countries like China, Australia and the UK are leading the way, and the US is going there too, just perhaps a little bit slower because organizations like the EFF and ACLU exist to try and gum up the works of the process.
It may take a few decades, but it will be within the lifetime of millennials that you will see encryption banned, and any traffic you try to send over the Internet that isn't fully understood by your ISP (regardless of whether you're on a home, work, or free hotspot connection) will be automatically rejected. So no VPNs or anything of the sort.
The protocol negotiation and setup routines of a VPN are extremely easy to detect. When it's your "ISP" -- the network gateway providing your uplink -- that is trying to prevent you from getting on a VPN, it is extremely trivial for the gateway to block most VPNs because they have such well-known, "overt" setup/negotiation protocols.
Even OpenVPN on TCP port 443, which by all counts looks a helluva lot like a standard HTTPS connection, has just enough of a "tell" that it can be blocked while the gateway still allows normal HTTPS connections over the web.
While it's true that *endpoints* on an already established VPN tunnel cannot tell that the traffic is being handed to another client over a VPN, it is very easy for a *gateway* to detect all but the most stealthy VPNs.
That's why I said that specific mitigations (in terms of traffic shape and protocol "appearance", using steganography if required) are required if you want to bypass this kind of "anti-VPN" restriction on the gateway you are connected to (for instance, a free WiFi hotspot that's trying to block porn, and then tries to block VPNs to prevent people from using them to circumvent the block).
It's not even about setting up your own server. I could give you a description of a certain sequence of packets that will identify OpenVPN connections (even over TCP) 100% of the time, and never false positive on anything else. You could safely implement that rule on *all* remote IP addresses on a stateful firewall gateway and prevent people from using OpenVPN, regardless of the port.
That's why you just need to make your VPN traffic look like normal web traffic. There are various protocols out there that are so obfuscated that even a deep packet inspection firewall couldn't tell that it's not ordinary web traffic.
It adds overhead and latency, but it's really not that difficult to do. Somewhat ironically, it is based on the exact same principle as terrorists use to infiltrate countries they want to blow up: you become really, really good at looking exactly like the sheeple. You don't stand out. You look perfectly ordinary just like the rest of the law-abiding citizens. Except that the *semantics* of the data you're transferring -- which no firewall or DPI could possibly understand -- are such that porn content (or whatever) is being delivered to your computer.
Blocking is for deterring casual use, not for actually preventing something from being done. See: Great Firewall of China.
They're not selling what we're buying, though. That's how American industry works. It's not "free market"; it's not "capitalism"; it's plutocratic oligarchy. They don't care what you want, as long as you want what they're selling enough to buy it.
So a program named literally "Lepton under an Apache" that happens to also, confusingly, be an open source license (*and* a program)?
Okaaaaaaay.... ...Took me like a minute to figure out it was saying
"...dubbed 'Lepton,' under an Apache open-source license..."
In absolute terms of the cost per teraflop of GPU compute performance, prices have taken a nosedive this year. The release of the GTX 1080 and 1070 drove down the price of the 980 Ti, 980 and 970 which are still more than adequate for all gaming at 1080p (even on very high settings). The AMD Radeon RX480 has given a huge boost to the $200 price point as well, providing 5-6 TFLOPS at a price point that could net you *maybe* 3 TFLOPS if you shopped sales, before around Q2 2016 (with the release of the 16nm FinFET TSMC process cards).
There are extremely few games that will really bottleneck on the GPU if you have an RX480 or similar level of performance (with max or nearly maxed settings and 1080p60). In 5 years, even AAA games will still run smoothly on Low-Medium detail on the same card.
The only reason you'd need a beefier card, or SLI/CF, is if you go above 1080p60 (which is distinctly in enthusiast territory at this time, not because of the cost of the monitor but because of the additional load that imposes on the GPU(s)) or if you want to keep playing the latest AAA titles on the highest possible graphics settings over the next half-decade.
The only game I can think of right now that gives these cards a run for their money is a 150-million-dollar, crowd-funded, tech demo.
Trying to solve a data integrity and security problem by implementing the solution based on the blockchain is like trying to go to space by digging a hole in the ground.
Unless those libraries are shipped by Ubuntu, though, you'd have to either use a prior release or run a non-Ubuntu OS in your container in order to handle this. A lot of people would like to use the versions of libs shipped by Ubuntu on their 64-bit system, but compiled for 32-bit, to do their 32-bit work (e.g. Wine).
So yeah, it would do a lot of harm to many use cases and workloads if they stopped providing 32-bit libraries at the very least. If they want to drop 32-bit kernel support, it would affect way fewer people, because there aren't many systems still in use today that only run x86 and not x86_64.
True, but the pilots of the plane taking off could have, hypothetically, possibly taken off and avoided the collision by flying over the top of the other aircraft, if they were able to near-instantaneously dump most of their mass. Certainly the V1 for any aircraft is a lot lower if it's lightly loaded vs. fully loaded.
However -- I think what the "Funny" post above was referring to (facetiously) was that just jettisoning the cargo and economy passenger mass would be enough to reduce the V1 to the point that the plane trying to take off could do so before slamming into the other plane.
This isn't actually possible, though, because most of what makes a loaded aircraft heavy is its fuel, especially if it's going any significant distance. You'd have to have a way to safely jettison all but a few minutes worth of fuel, *and* the cargo, in basically a second or two, in order to successfully climb over the top of the plane directly in your path, in fog, with a very large jet like a 747 (and those older generation 747s had significantly less powerful engines relative to the aircraft mass compared to today, so it would be harder due to the engine technology as well).
Of course, modern radar, communications, computers and human vigilance are designed to prevent the type of runway incursions and collisions that occurred in Tenerife. The best solution to this problem is to control the situation, such that the one plane never incurs on the runway takeoff path of the other in the first place. Then things like ability to jettison cargo/fuel or take off suddenly become de-emphasized, the more certain you become that runway incursions won't happen.
Sadly, airports like LAX continue to have frequent runway incursions and quite a few near misses. There are a few airports that really make me nervous because they are simply too busy, and the sheer number of moving planes, ground vehicles and people makes it very risky as an operating environment for commercial aviation, even though the planes themselves would be perfectly fine when they're up in the sky, and perfectly fine taking off or landing at less busy airports.
We at least need enough 32-bit packages available in the 64-bit distro (whether by dpkg --add-architecture i386, or by installing "lib32" packages like we used to do) to install and run Wine.
You see, to run Win32 programs, your Wine emulator binary needs to be a 32-bit Linux/ELF application. I suppose it could emulate cross-architecture, but wine prides itself on *not* emulating native code generation (for performance). Otherwise it would be as slow as a software virtualization solution like Bochs or (non-KVM) qemu.
Wine, in turn, depends on a number of system libraries for core services. It then implements common Windows APIs "in terms of" available platform libraries. Direct3D in terms of OpenGL; DirectSound in terms of libasound2 or libpulse; etc. These libraries, linked into a 32-bit binary, must also be 32-bit.
I agree that there's no point in testing 32-bit *hardware* any longer, but I hope they continue to ship 32-bit *builds* (even if they stop making 32-bit installation CDs). There's just too much software on the Win32 platform that needs to run on Linux (desktop OR server; see game servers) to abandon this segment of the market.
1. Shielding - Never had any problems in any phone I've ever owned. If shielding is an issue in the "new & improved iphone", then add a damn 1/10th of a mm and put some shielding back in. I'll trade a bit of imaginary interference for bluetooth
drops & pairing difficulties any day.
I guess you never sit your headphones on a busy desk with cables, laptops, etc. then. I had Sennheiser HD-25 II wired studio monitoring headphones with one of the best-shielded cables made for headphones (steel and very thick) and the EM emissions from the IGP on my laptop (a Westmere i5; this was years ago) would be very audible over the music streaming from my MP3 player (this was before I got a smartphone with enough storage and CPU to play music). Newer Intel procs are better at reducing EM, but cheap headphone cables will still pick up emissions several inches away from a desktop with a Skylake i7 in my limited testing. These CPUs will happily spew harmless electromagnetic emissions that get converted into arbitrary sounds by your headphones when the conductor in your cable picks them up.
Also, the only bluetooth drops and pairing problems I've had in recent years were all on Android. I moved from buying Android phones (numerous, from 3 different manufacturers, all had the same problems with BT) to an iPhone 6S Plus, and I have not had a single BT dropout, not a single one in like 9 months. And pairing always succeeds immediately.
For my desktop and Windows laptop I use an Imperial BART 1 bluetooth transceiver (with aptX Low Latency) as an intermediary, with the sound being sent to the BART 1 from the motherboard's S/PDIF digital (TOSLINK) port. So the entire audio path is digital. 24-bit 48 kHz, too, which is better than the 16-bit 44.1 kHz that 99.9% of the people are using, and not audibly distinguishable from even higher bitrates and sample rates in most studies (the law of diminishing returns).
This allows me to have two pair of headphones, total -- one I keep at work and one I keep at home -- for all my headphone needs across desktop, laptop and smartphone. And both headsets double as a serviceable mic to take phone calls, either over Skype or the cellular network. And I never have to tangle with cables.
2. Finicky jacks - this is perhaps one of only two points that I think has some credence. I've had a couple of finicky jacks myself but you know what--a quick squirt of contact cleaner solved the problem perfectly. Want to talk about finicky? Bluetooth
pairing on some devices. You know what's even more finicky? When your BT headset battery starts to wear out and you can't replace it. Wired headsets have a much longer lifetime than BT headsets.
I only buy BT headsets with user-replaceable batteries. What kind of junk are you buying that doesn't? Beats? People actually think Beats BT headsets are good, you know? It's embarrassing and a disgrace to actually good bluetooth headsets, like the BeoPlay H8.
BT pairing issues are basically non-existent if both devices support BT version >= 4.0. Latency is not a problem if both ends support aptX Low Latency (it sits around 30-ish ms with very low jitter, and it's not detectable by most users, even when gaming, even while focused on it.) Not all BT versions and not all BT equipment is created equal, though. Android is an absolute cesspool of crappy BT stacks. Avoid it like t
It looks like you stated you have 10 years experience in IT, but I could only find five years on your LinkedIn account. I've updated your resume for you to reflect this data.
In the case of Google Updater, the reason for it to exist is that users *ought to* want regular security updates for products that are extremely networked by design. Not updating your web browser is idiotic and will get you owned fairly reliably, even if you only visit mainstream sites (a CSRF or XSS vulnerability in one of these sites could lead to your browser loading arbitrary content, which better not be able to exploit your browser if you value your data).
However, the fact that Google forces the bundling of any security updates with new browser features -- whether you want them or not -- is unfortunate. It would be great if they maintained a long term support release of Chrome and such that would remain feature-frozen but delivering new security updates as vulnerabilities are found and fixed.
Still, if using Chrome at all is bad for your data and privacy, using it without updates is digital suicide.
Keep in mind that only dedicated chipsets made by CSR (now part of Qualcomm) actually implement aptX. And also there is a difference of about 80-100 ms between "regular" aptX, and aptX Low Latency.
I have a pair of headphones that supports aptX but not Low Latency. The sound quality is at least as good as 256 kbps MP3, but the latency is almost as bad as regular SBC (the horrific default "required" codec in A2DP spec). The Low Latency cans I have are *noticeably* more responsive and lower latency; the difference is striking.
Also keep in mind that the following do not support aptX at all:
- Any device produced by Apple (Mac OS X computers, iPhones, iPads, iPods, and Apple Watch) only supports two Bluetooth codecs: SBC (horrible, as I mentioned), and AAC. The quality of AAC is much better than SBC and on-par with aptX, but the latency is as bad as SBC. Many high-end headphones/headsets support SBC, AAC, *and* some variation of aptX (either regular aptX or aptX Low Latency), so if you want to use the same speakers/headphones with Apple and non-Apple devices, make sure they support AAC *and* aptX.
- Windows' default bluetooth stack on desktop/laptop Windows. Most Windows Phone smartphones support aptX just fine, but *computers* running Windows with a built-in bluetooth chipset or USB chipset, do not support aptX. I am not certain if you can get aptX support with a CSR-branded USB bluetooth dongle; that would be a good question to ask CSR.
- BlueZ on GNU/Linux doesn't support anything but SBC (possibly AAC, I'm not sure), and definitely not aptX because it's a proprietary and patent-encumbered format.
- Many low-end Android smartphones, and even some high-end ones. You have to look at the detailed specs. If they don't list codecs, assume they only support SBC unless you find compelling evidence to the contrary. gsmarena is known to be wrong on this occasionally as well, so be careful.
*BOTH* the headphones/speakers and the Bluetooth transmitting device have to support the codec for it to work. If they can't agree on an advanced codec that both ends support, they'll fall back to SBC. At that point you're better off plugging in a wire and dealing with the annoyance of being physically attached.
Also, the above restrictions about Windows not supporting aptX can be worked around by using a full-stack Bluetooth transceiver (like the aforementioned Imperial BART 1; there are a few others on the market too) to basically "convert" standard audio out over optical or 3.5mm analog (from your computer or smartphone) into bluetooth signals. The best in breed of these devices have an all-digital path, meaning you go from digital PCM data on the computer directly to the Bluetooth speakers/headphones, with no analog path in between. USB or toslink optical would be the most popular options for all-digital.
apt-X Low Latency has a round trip time of around 40 ms and extremely low jitter, compared to the default Bluetooth A2DP latency of around 150 ms with significant jitter. Audio buffering on video, MP3 players and even games is usually around this figure, sometimes even higher. They do a lot of buffering because, the bigger your buffer, the more power you save and the fewer context switches you have to make. Constantly waking up the CPU for lots and lots of little writes is less efficient than doing a big batch of audio processing in one go, then going to sleep for a good solid fraction of a second.
Of course interactive applications like games and VoIP will have lowER latency than video or audio playback, because the content constantly changes depending on input from the user. But you can't get much faster than 6 ms, because many sound cards these days have a minimum buffer size of around that number.
Sure, Bluetooth is not good for professional audio production, but that only covers about 1% or less of the total audio hardware market. Even audiophiles can get into the Bluetooth scene (and it's good enough for gaming in my tests) by buying an aptX Low Latency full-stack receiver like the Imperial BART 1 and connecting it to high-end headphones like B&O BeoPlay H8 or Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Wireless.
Even while completely focusing my eyes on reading the lips of a speaker in a video, it's extremely difficult for me to perceive the latency when using a receiver and headphones that both support aptX Low Latency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"I'm activating your killswitch."
Preach it brother! :) What kind of headphones?
I have the Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 On-ear Wireless and the B&O BeoPlay H8. Expensive but worth every penny. I use them with all my devices from laptop to smartphone to computer. For my computer, because Windows' BT stack is embarrassingly bad, I use an "Imperial BART (Bluetooth Audio Receiver/Transmitter) 1" imported from Telestar in Germany. Works like a charm with Bluetooth 4.0 w/ aptX Low Latency :)