Not only that, but get rid of all the security theater nonsense, the general paranoia and fear of the unknown, and make the central IT accountable if they are unable to deliver a solution to satisfy a business need within the expected time frame.
Companies that don't hold IT accountable for failing to serve their customers (i.e., the people who get actual work done and make sales for the company) have no right to complain about shadow IT cropping up here and there. If central IT won't do it, and shadow IT isn't allowed, then things simply won't get done. The existing staff will get fired, and their replacements will come in, and after realizing that they need to do something to keep their job, will go shadow IT *anyway* as a means of getting shit done. Then they'll get major kudos and pats on the back from their managers because they were the only people who had enough backbone to actually solve a problem.
If Central IT then wants to step in and say "you can't do that", fuck them. Having an organization within a company whose primary job function is to tell other people what they can't do, without actually enabling them to do anything that will help them accomplish their work, does a lot more harm than good.
And, no, Central IT "program managers", the best solution is *not* to always spend multiple millions of dollars on an all-encompassing software system that implements the entire world, just to enable one teensy tiny little piece of workflow. That's like asking for a driveway and getting the Hoover Dam. That's the other problem with Central IT. They never have any concept of what it means to deliver only what was asked, and no more. They'd rather spend 5 years and millions of dollars to "roll out" a huge, organization-changing system that solves the original problem plus a thousand others, but creates ten thousand more questions and problems in its wake, like: how do you integrate this into other systems the organization is already using? When should you use one system or the other? What about those people in Colorado who aren't connected to our network? Oh, and if you're looking to spend another few million dollars and a couple more years to dig an interstate highway under the city, we'd like you to fix the leaky faucet in the bathroom, thanks.
Switched from Android to iOS because Google won't fix their Bluetooth stack. I'll have to try my VPN on Friday and see if iOS 9 broke it. If so, I'll have to have two phones just so I can use two of the most important OS features that have been around for years but nobody can seem to get right (all at once, within one device, that is).
Since access to the Internet is more-or-less something which can be done via a wide variety of devices and operating systems and browsers, a significant subset of which are free and open source software and are extremely, explicitly customizable, you *cannot* be the odd man out by being a platform that is deliberately less flexible and less usable than the others.
If you do, the thing that happens is exactly what Apple has seen happen: you end up losing sales (of your OS, hardware, etc.) to competitors whose platform is more open.
On the free Internet, we route around the damage and barely notice that we were stuck at a roadblock in the first place.
I think Apple has wizened up to this fact, which is why they now allow adblockers. The only possible effect this could have is to increase their market share or keep it fixed. It can't hurt them. Apple doesn't make their money on ads.
Hopefully, if an alternative non-free Internet becomes a thing at some point, nobody will adopt it, and it will die. Hopefully, the free Internet will continue to be supported by the big companies that operate the major hubs. As long as we're connected by a system that's open at its core, where the client software is under the user's control for at least *some* clients, we have a way to avoid the insanity of things like ads being forced upon you, and so on.
The clients that choose to deliberately be restrictive will simply not be used as much, even if they have extremely compelling upsides like performance or ease of use. There will always be a real and measurable drain on their market share and profits that comes from the growing percentage of people who want to be in control of their Internet experience. It's this drain at the bottom of the pool that has forced Apple's hand to do something pro-consumer for once.
Why does it have to be an either-or? There are enough people in this country to pursue every progressive initiative we can imagine, and then some. It's just a matter of getting the right people with the right resources focused on the right tasks. Basically, it's a logistics and optimization problem; we have more than enough capability and more than enough resources to go around. It's mainly political and economic forces that make the system extremely resistant to positive change, no matter how obviously beneficial it might be.
OK, but other people are working on those problems. Just because they have 1000 problems doesn't mean that everyone should drop everything and go into an entirely new field they're unfamiliar with to solve the problem that you deem to be the highest priority. This guy and his company have know-how, capital, employees, and hardware all invested in the process of building out Internet infrastructure. To scrap their existing plans and redirect their capital to medicine, plumbing or personal safety, would basically drain their capital, while accomplishing practically nothing.
Feel free to be an angel investor in companies or non-profits that are providing the things you think are high priority to the needy, but don't feel like you can tell other people what they should do with their money.
After all, you can make an argument that the Internet can be very useful for educating people with some of the ideas that might lead them to pursue a more civilized way of life. It also leads to 411 scams, but you have to take the bad with the good.
Or perhaps the light delivering information to us that they are a Type III civilization hasn't reached us yet, but might in a few hundred/thousand/million years.
The elections are rigged, anyway. The preponderance of the masses are too busy, sick, or lazy (or all of the above) to vote, and those who do are told who to vote for by the mass media. Even if an unprecedentedly huge 5% of the population were actually informed on the issues and voted for a candidate who'd actually make things better (or die trying), it wouldn't make enough of a difference in the election to tip the scales.
We don't like to admit it because we think we're "freer" than other countries that run faux democracies like Russia and India, but in reality, we're no freer than they are, and our elections are just as rigged, if not moreso.
Every system of this nature is going to be fundamentally divisive, arbitrary, incomplete, and inaccurate. It's not possible to design a "fine-grained credentialism" system without requiring the full dedication of one person's attention to the activities of another, for every waking hour of the observed person.
Divisive: Where today coworkers have no qualms about sending interesting/educational links to their coworkers, like interesting reads in a technology journal or a tutorial on a new feature of some software (for example), if these things will be counted as "credentials" that improve hireability, job security, and/or compensation, then individuals will be motivated NOT to share anything they learn or read with coworkers, since their coworkers could use this to advance their own credentials, and get a leg up on the person who shared it with them. The people who succeed would thus be recipients of well-intentioned coworkers' educational resources and information, without sharing anything back to their coworkers.
Arbitrary: What counts "for (micro)credit", and what doesn't? Where do you draw the line? If you draw the line at some arbitrary place, there are going to be educational resources that people use, which are extremely relevant to someone's job that actually enhanced their suitability to do their work, but don't count for credit. If you don't draw a line at all, or set the bar so low that just about anything can be accepted, then a lot of people could arguably gain "credit" just by watching CNN and claiming credit for the random sound bytes that sound off information that pertains in some general way to the field the worker is in. Microsoft stock went up? Well, I'll claim a credit for Technology! Because Microsoft is Technology! Oy vey...
Incomplete: There are many experiences that can be very educational for someone, but don't have any authenticity, quantifiability or verifiability to them. For example, if you are on a 3-hour bus ride and strike up a random conversation with a passenger who happens to be in the same field as you, and you learn something entirely new from them that opens your eyes and enables you to do your job better, can you claim credit for that? How would the organization know whether you're lying or not? How many of these little nuggets can you squeeze into their system in a day without being flagged for possible forgery? If there's a limit and you can find it, you better believe the min-maxers will find a way to fill up their daily quota, every day, without fail, on their way up the corporate ladder -- walking on the heads of honest people who probably are more competent than they are.
Inaccurate: This is really the biggest problem with the whole idea of "credentialism" from life experience or gaining "micro-credits" for every little thing you do or learn: you cannot implement a system, short of Orwellian 24/7 total surveillance and constant manual, human monitoring, that *fairly* and *accurately* captures exactly what each person has learned every day, and what kind of merit that learning deserves. Those are actually two separate problems: actually capturing all of the distinct learning events, and coming up with some kind of a system to determine how useful, educational, or meritorious those events were with respect to the individual's suitability to fill a certain role in a job.
If the system is too rigid, you miss out on things like open source projects, reading/responding to mailing lists, the aforementioned "bus conversation", etc. If it's too open, people will gamify their careers through lying or taking the easiest course toward getting an advantage over people who are vying for similar jobs, all so they can make more money.
Now granted, the de facto education system is basically an extreme example of a system like this that is simply too rigid and too coarse-grained to be fair, but making it fine-grained doesn't actually solve any problem: you're just shifting the problems to another set of equally severe problems, without making the hiring an
think Hillary! is on "their team", whatever team that may be.
Their team means someone in Hillary's administration, directly or indirectly, is going to help them advance their career and make more money if they support her.
Who's willing to bet that, *after* the security measures are in place up to Congress's "standards" (they have no clue, they're just going on what other people tell them), Senator Wyden would be completely in-line with the mass surveillance camp?
The cellular radio thing is a power struggle between the everyman and the ruling class (corps and big government). Plain and simple. But because it's a very simple software system that has few features exposed to the user (and intentionally so), historically there's been very little room for middle ground when it comes to sharing that power. And since most of their customers/users/subjects/victims are uninformed about technology altogether, the ruling class has been content to allow these baseband processors to continue under complete corporate control.
A more responsible model would not be a "laissez-faire", "you can do absolutely anything and control the frequency and strength of your transmissions via Python" type of deal. That is almost equally bad, because you end up with a tragedy of the commons type situation, exactly as in the unlicensed bands (2.4 and 5 GHz).
What a more responsible model for the baseband would be, however, would at a bare minimum consist of open source, human readable code for the basebands, which is available to anyone who purchases a product with that baseband, for a nominal fee or for free, and licensed with a free/libre license. Then, you would need to have reproducible builds, where you could read out the built binaries from the baseband, and confirm that those exact binaries are the ones you just built from source code, to ensure that the code you're looking at is the code running on the baseband processor.
Then, you'd need some sort of process whereby everyday people, corporate competitors, or anyone at all, could submit their own code for approval by a regulatory agency to run on the baseband processor, again for a nominal, minimal fee that only just represents the level of human effort required to vet the code for any malicious activity that might actively harm the cellular network's reliability or security. If approved, the built binaries would be authorized to run on the baseband processor.
Of course, for a baseband processor to maintain a list of trusted binaries, it would have to connect to a server, get an updated list, and check any flashed object code against that list. This "lower level" executive would be permanently burned into a read-only chip on the BBP die, but its object code would again be readable to users, and its source code would also be available to the public for a nominal fee under a free/libre license.
So, if you wanted to be absolutely sure the government were not spying on you using backdoors in your BBP, you would obtain copies of all the code; build the code using free software tools; verify the built output matches bit for bit the code on the BBP (both in the read-only executive and the read/write firmware); and then -- if you didn't need to change the (benign) built-in code, you could simply continue running it; or if you needed to make (benign) technical enhancements to it, you could make your changes and submit them for approval by the regulatory agency.
Even if manufacturers started shipping free/libre malicious code in the firmware with their devices, it wouldn't be a problem for security-conscious users, because once you get *one single* approved alternative binary through the regulatory process, you'd be squared away.
If they started shipping malicious code in the executive? Well... you just couldn't use a phone containing that baseband, period, end of story. You simply would have to give up using it, just like we do today for all phones. However, with this process being as transparent as I described, there would exist at least a few high-end manufacturers that would have a vested interest in not doing anything malicious, because it would be so obvious that they did once people started inspecting their source code; and you could buy their phones and "free them" even if the firmware had draconian malware in it.
But this process depends on the regulatory agency to not be captive to either the corporate or the citizens' side, because if they are unduly bias to either side, the process doesn't work.
Depends on exactly which type of "Wireless" you have. Not all bands are created equal. The lower the frequency, the more likely it is to not be disturbed by rain. I've been in a building that was connected to a larger network via 20 GHz, and 80 GHz frequencies are not unheard of. The 20 GHz network was easily interrupted by heavy rain (though not light rain).
A standard pipe for *whom*? The few, the lucky, the elite? People living in small countries with a high standard of living and high median income? Here in the US of A, the vast majority of the population can't get access to a 100 Mbps pipe no matter how badly they wanted it, and they can't even afford to move to a place that would offer it.
You are either among the lucky elite in the US, or you're in one of those countries that's actually forward-looking. In backwards countries like the US, we have to actually consider half-measures like wireless as a replacement for fiber: partly because of the incredible distances that have to be covered -- the U.S. is 29.74 times larger than Norway by area, and has zounds of people living in very sparsely populated areas where it's uneconomical to dig up the ground for miles for 2 people -- and partly because our government is ridiculously anti-consumer and pro-corporation, so ISPs only answer to the almighty dollar and nothing else.
Calling 100 Mbps a "standard pipe" in 2015 is as obtuse and short-sighted as saying that having a top-of-the-line automobile was a standard item that every household owned in 1916.
I don't disagree with you. I'm one of those people suffering under Verizon's monopolistic thumb, and my only recourse is to hold on to unlimited LTE for dear life. However, this is the reality of our situation. We are powerless -- completely and utterly powerless -- to effect change in any meaningful way on these issues.
BTW, I was promised by a high-level rep at Verizon that I'd be able to get FiOS in "weeks" in 2007. It's been a few hundred weeks, and I'm still waiting.
It's the classical "iron triangle" (aka constraint triangle): you have three sides to a triangle; performance, power consumption, and cost. Pick any two that you want to be favorable, and the more favorable you make them, the more unfavorable the third will be.
Nvidia and AMD discrete cards for desktops are designed to tug on the performance and cost sides as much as possible, leaving only a passing thought for power savings. Granted, it's reasonably efficient when in standby and not that bad at idle, but it's horrendous under load.
If you want a GPU that's less horrendous under load, without compromising on performance, expect to pay a LOT more for it. And in most cases, because of market forces, you're also going to take at least a slight performance hit.
For instance, the GTX 980M is way more power efficient than the GTX 980 desktop card, because of the design constraints of laptops. It's effectively power efficient by design because of the form factor. But the performance is notably worse, and buying a laptop that has one is way more expensive than buying a desktop with "good enough" components (some kind of recent i7 and 8GB or more memory) and a GTX 980 or even 980 Ti.
We're not going to see chips that maintain the desired performance level (the one constraint that most people are unwilling to compromise on if they're owning a "real" gaming PC) while saving on energy, unless the cost goes so high that only the most elite can afford it.
We see similar problems in the car market, too. The Prius and Prius C are relatively inexpensive (the C is very inexpensive), great fuel efficiency - though not as good as an EV or PHEV - but the performance is terrible. The Tesla Model S achieves amazing performance, range, and efficiency in a pure EV package, but no "commoner" can afford it, only the upper crust. Then there are loads and loads of cars that are not particularly efficient, very cheap, and have serviceable performance.
Who's paying for the more expensive chips that give us the same performance we're already getting but with less energy consumption? The gamer? Why would they do that?
P.S. - Before you accuse me of not thinking of "the greater good", I *drive* a Prius C. I bet the same scientists who wrote this paper drive conventional SUVs.
It all depends on how much bandwidth and how much of a data allowance each customer wants/needs.
If they expect to suck down a dedicated 100 Mbps pipe per household 24/7, then no, wireless anything won't do that, even if you expand outside the scope of WiFi to other tech like 4G.
If, on the other hand, either their desired bandwidth, desired data allowance, or both, are sufficiently low, or the population density is sufficiently sparse, or any combination of these factors that turns out to be "enough", then you could substitute some kind of wireless technology for FTTP, whether it be LTE, WiFi, or something more pedestrian, like HSDPA/HSUPA.
You could also go with high-freq (5 GHz and up) directional microwave from an office or a tower to specific receivers. If you don't want to install a receiver on each house (very expensive), you can shoot a beam to a street-corner box and then run copper or fiber to the premises. Saves you having to dig up the streets from the source to the street corner, at least. Fiber to the node. Kind of a hybrid. Sucks when it rains, though; sufficiently dense rain will diffract and/or block high freq microwave signals and make it useless.
That's great, but unless society can get used to having electricity only when the sun is shining, we require at least one of three things (or a combination of them):
- Ultra long-range power transmission lines with low enough loss as to be economical, so we can transmit power from an illuminated part of the earth to a part currently experiencing night time (or very thick cloud cover, which is pretty close to the same thing). These, of course, will require large investments in infrastructure for power transmission across continents in extremely large quantities, and I'm not sure we have the technology to do so without losing the majority of the energy during transit. What kind of voltage would you need to, say, transmit power from New York to London while keeping at least 66% of it on the receiving end? Not to mention the political and economic complexities of managing this, and the security risks as well. We'd need backup plants (probably of a more traditional variety) ready to fire up at a moment's notice if something were to happen to the supply coming from another country.
- Enormous amounts of energy storage. This is currently a major issue for us. Batteries are expensive, and all the *good* batteries actually DO require a tremendous amount of rare materials like platinum. Supercapacitors have been talked about as a potential replacement for batteries for a very long time, but no one has been able to get all the desirable characteristics into one device (low cost / easy to manufacture, high energy density, minimal loss over a storage time of at least 12 hours, and large number of charge cycles before replacement).
- Other sources of power to cover the times when the local/regional solar output can't cover demand. If those other sources end up not being wind or hydro or geothermal (due to geological or meteorological conditions), it's probably going to be nuclear fission (nasty waste) or fossil fuels (doesn't solve the problem we're trying to solve). Having to run nuclear 50% of the time means you may as well run it 100% of the time, because of the high cost and time investment required to start up a nuclear plant. Fossil fuel plants are more flexible, so we could actually cut our fossil fuel use by 50% using this scheme, but that still leaves the other 50% on the table, which isn't so great and sends the wrong message.
An effective system would probably use a combination of all three of these measures to try and deal with the many logistical problems of solar, but the unfortunate fact is that we're very deficient on the materials science, manufacturing technology, political will, and raw materials that would be required to comprehensively cover up solar's limitations by strategically employing all three of these methods.
Without being able to solve these problems at a national and eventually global level, you will end up with an extremely inefficient system, and the inefficiencies in it will cause a "death by a thousand cuts" type problem, where your resulting solution provides intermittent blackouts to most customers (or alternatively, no blackouts but a large percentage of the time running off of other energy sources); costs way more than their old fossil-based power; and requires a significant amount of traditional power plants to still run to cover up for the worst of its problems.
Oh, and you also seem to have based your math on the assumption that per capita power demands won't increase. Unfortunately, in order to comprehensively eliminate fossil fuels, we'd need to convert the vehicle fleet to EV (or at least plugin hybrid), which means per capita electricity demands are going to skyrocket.
At the very least, we're going to need even more nuclear power plants to provide a strong base load in the future. Solar might enable us to shut down numerous coal power plants at least some of the time, but you'd have to over-engineer your effort to satisfy the world's energy demands by a factor of eight or ten in order to compensate for: increasing demand per ca
Vala translates syntax very similar to C# into idiomatic C using GLib for object-based programming (inheritance, encapsulation, events, etc. are all supported). Hundreds of lines of Vala spits out thousands of lines of boilerplate C. You get native code that's nice and fast (reference counting is faster than GC, and you have no intermediary language like.NET/Java since it compiles to C which compiles to native). A couple of programs on popular Linux distros use Vala.
It's a great language for plugin development, too. Unlike languages such as Python, bindings to C/GLib libraries do not require any compiled native code or runtime integration, since Vala has no special runtime outside of GLib.
And, if for some reason Vala's development stalls and you find yourself unable to compile changes made in your Vala code, you can always take your completed project's generated C code and switch over to that being your main source code. It's less maintainable due to the increased amount of boilerplate stuff, but there are plenty of large projects that contain manually hacked idiomatic C/GLib code that's functionally equivalent to what Vala's compiler generates anyway, for all kinds of patterns, like inheritance, signals, properties, etc.
Worst case, it saves you some time instead of having to write all that boilerplate code by hand. Best case, it saves you *A LOT* of time, by being able to write code that reads like C#.NET code, but without the runtime bindings (which constitute both a deployment headache and a source of inefficiency).
It's there, but we have to put an absurd amount of relatively rare resources into photovoltaic cells to make *use* of that energy. Otherwise, it performs a very useful function in that it gives us this thing called heat, so we don't all freeze to death and die (and so we can have an ecosystem of animals and plants that we don't have to keep in climate-controlled environments that also won't freeze and die).
No, I'm sorry, but the primary purpose of the sun is to give us energy in the form of light for plants and heat for everything else (including plants). With current technology we can't make use of the sun well enough to meet more than a fraction of our energy demands.
Now, if we had a steadily shrinking worldwide population, we might be able to do it, since we'd have more and more surplus energy every year without even doing anything -- which means if we continue to increase production of renewables like solar and wind year over year, and population decreases, it's mathematically certain that at a point not too far in the future the two will intersect and we can shut down the last coal/diesel/natural gas/nuclear plants.
But unless you can find a way to cause the population to shrink worldwide year over year in a controlled, preferably non-violent manner, I don't see a way that renewables will ever become dominant. It's not economically feasible. We can't divert enough resources to making solar panels and wind farms to meet energy demands, even if we cut worldwide energy demands per capita by 25% immediately and cut the energy use of the most energy-intensive top 5% by 75%. Even with such unrealistic and aggressive cuts in per capita consumption, an exponentially increasing population will ultimately make the exercise pointless.
As a Democrat who's more liberal than nearly all the running Democratic candidates, I could see myself being content to let the country be run by most of the Republican presidential candidates or elects from about Eisenhower up until and not including Dubya. Eisenhower is my favorite Republican of all time; Nixon did a few things right and many things wrong; we could've done a lot worse than George H. W. Bush; Reagan was okay because most of his crazier ideas didn't get implemented, and the ones that did were beneficial or not very harmful; and Dubya was disastrous.
I wouldn't have voted for them, but they wielded the responsibility of the Presidency pretty well overall, and occasionally supported more liberal initiatives like government-funded space exploration, social programs, and civil liberties. In fact, defending civil liberties was the marching order for the Republican party for a long time.
I also believe that the way our President would swing between being Democrat and Republican every couple of years was a big contributor to making the country a better place overall. Each party and each President would have something on their agenda and would address a severe problem, which meant that as long as we kept switching parties, we'd be okay - and each party, each President, would bring their own, net-beneficial changes to the table. We'd "be okay" as long as this kept going.
The problem today is that there is an extremely small and nitpicky difference in policy between the most popular (i.e. most likely to be elected) candidates on both sides. Since popularity is more or less a positive feedback loop, this all but guarantees that, even this early in the election season, we have a good sense of either Hillary or Trump being our next POTUS. And their views are close enough that, in the past, you could've roped them together into one party.
Now, in BOTH parties, anyone in favor of civil liberties and against big government and mass surveillance is marginalized into the fringes and will almost certainly not get past the primaries. We live in a fear society. Promoting fear and "big government will protect you" gets you votes. A warmongering foreign policy is popular. The military-industrial complex is popular because of all the useless bureaucratic desk jobs it opens up. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave.
Better yet, they can collude with each other to make this an "industry standard" with some bullshit justification for why they need it; then, with 100% of the mass-producing printer/scanner manufacturers doing it, customers will have no recourse.
The second-best thing after a monopoly is an oligopoly, and in an industry that's shrinking because it's being replaced by something faster and cheaper (namely, using computers and the Internet instead of paper), they'll do anything possible to cut costs or raise revenue. They do it in growing industries that have a bright future ahead, too, but the losers are even more strongly motivated to do it in a last-ditch attempt to stay open for longer.
This is what happens when you give personhood to faceless entities that have no sense of morality and their only loyalty is to the almighty dollar, and then let those entities run society.
Don't forget, politicians will say anything to get someone to vote for them, and then do an about-face later and happily screw them over once they are in office.
Vote for Trump on this issue, and once he's President, he'll let the Indians come in and take over the country by issuing unlimited work visas.
With all due to respect to Harlan Stenn, and working under the assumption that he will choose to continue to maintain NTP for the good of everyone who uses it, the biggest donation that could possibly be given to the NTP project would be to increase its bus factor. Basically, we need at least another small handful of people -- ideally distributed throughout the world -- who have the same level of knowledge and expertise as Harlan in the area of network time, and can thus take his place if, for any reason whatsoever Harlan can't continue to work on the NTP project.
Getting Harlan to continue working on it is a short-term solution, but the sustainable future is to ensure that we have maintainers who can take his place -- ideally, paid ones.
So what we need is for a company like Red Hat or IBM or Microsoft or Canonical to bankroll a developer who has at least strong fundamentals that would enable them to quickly pick up advanced knowledge of network time, and then spend most of their working hours acquiring more knowledge about it so that it can be maintained going forward. This would probably involve a lot of ML posts with Harlan (or reading his previous ones), as well as any other developers/maintainers working on pieces of the code.
If Harlan is absolutely instrumental to the project as it stands now, the solution is to have a backup or two, who ideally are being paid a living wage to ensure the continuity of knowledge and expertise if Harlan willingly or unwillingly stopped contributing.
Projects with a bus factor of 1 that are widely relied upon need to be identified and highlighted every now and again -- not to make a case to shower the developer in money, but to get other developers to work in the same space and increase the bus factor to at least 3.
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Not only that, but get rid of all the security theater nonsense, the general paranoia and fear of the unknown, and make the central IT accountable if they are unable to deliver a solution to satisfy a business need within the expected time frame.
Companies that don't hold IT accountable for failing to serve their customers (i.e., the people who get actual work done and make sales for the company) have no right to complain about shadow IT cropping up here and there. If central IT won't do it, and shadow IT isn't allowed, then things simply won't get done. The existing staff will get fired, and their replacements will come in, and after realizing that they need to do something to keep their job, will go shadow IT *anyway* as a means of getting shit done. Then they'll get major kudos and pats on the back from their managers because they were the only people who had enough backbone to actually solve a problem.
If Central IT then wants to step in and say "you can't do that", fuck them. Having an organization within a company whose primary job function is to tell other people what they can't do, without actually enabling them to do anything that will help them accomplish their work, does a lot more harm than good.
And, no, Central IT "program managers", the best solution is *not* to always spend multiple millions of dollars on an all-encompassing software system that implements the entire world, just to enable one teensy tiny little piece of workflow. That's like asking for a driveway and getting the Hoover Dam. That's the other problem with Central IT. They never have any concept of what it means to deliver only what was asked, and no more. They'd rather spend 5 years and millions of dollars to "roll out" a huge, organization-changing system that solves the original problem plus a thousand others, but creates ten thousand more questions and problems in its wake, like: how do you integrate this into other systems the organization is already using? When should you use one system or the other? What about those people in Colorado who aren't connected to our network? Oh, and if you're looking to spend another few million dollars and a couple more years to dig an interstate highway under the city, we'd like you to fix the leaky faucet in the bathroom, thanks.
No. We will use the most common ten hundred words instead.
Switched from Android to iOS because Google won't fix their Bluetooth stack. I'll have to try my VPN on Friday and see if iOS 9 broke it. If so, I'll have to have two phones just so I can use two of the most important OS features that have been around for years but nobody can seem to get right (all at once, within one device, that is).
Since access to the Internet is more-or-less something which can be done via a wide variety of devices and operating systems and browsers, a significant subset of which are free and open source software and are extremely, explicitly customizable, you *cannot* be the odd man out by being a platform that is deliberately less flexible and less usable than the others.
If you do, the thing that happens is exactly what Apple has seen happen: you end up losing sales (of your OS, hardware, etc.) to competitors whose platform is more open.
On the free Internet, we route around the damage and barely notice that we were stuck at a roadblock in the first place.
I think Apple has wizened up to this fact, which is why they now allow adblockers. The only possible effect this could have is to increase their market share or keep it fixed. It can't hurt them. Apple doesn't make their money on ads.
Hopefully, if an alternative non-free Internet becomes a thing at some point, nobody will adopt it, and it will die. Hopefully, the free Internet will continue to be supported by the big companies that operate the major hubs. As long as we're connected by a system that's open at its core, where the client software is under the user's control for at least *some* clients, we have a way to avoid the insanity of things like ads being forced upon you, and so on.
The clients that choose to deliberately be restrictive will simply not be used as much, even if they have extremely compelling upsides like performance or ease of use. There will always be a real and measurable drain on their market share and profits that comes from the growing percentage of people who want to be in control of their Internet experience. It's this drain at the bottom of the pool that has forced Apple's hand to do something pro-consumer for once.
Why does it have to be an either-or? There are enough people in this country to pursue every progressive initiative we can imagine, and then some. It's just a matter of getting the right people with the right resources focused on the right tasks. Basically, it's a logistics and optimization problem; we have more than enough capability and more than enough resources to go around. It's mainly political and economic forces that make the system extremely resistant to positive change, no matter how obviously beneficial it might be.
OK, but other people are working on those problems. Just because they have 1000 problems doesn't mean that everyone should drop everything and go into an entirely new field they're unfamiliar with to solve the problem that you deem to be the highest priority. This guy and his company have know-how, capital, employees, and hardware all invested in the process of building out Internet infrastructure. To scrap their existing plans and redirect their capital to medicine, plumbing or personal safety, would basically drain their capital, while accomplishing practically nothing.
Feel free to be an angel investor in companies or non-profits that are providing the things you think are high priority to the needy, but don't feel like you can tell other people what they should do with their money.
After all, you can make an argument that the Internet can be very useful for educating people with some of the ideas that might lead them to pursue a more civilized way of life. It also leads to 411 scams, but you have to take the bad with the good.
Or perhaps the light delivering information to us that they are a Type III civilization hasn't reached us yet, but might in a few hundred/thousand/million years.
The elections are rigged, anyway. The preponderance of the masses are too busy, sick, or lazy (or all of the above) to vote, and those who do are told who to vote for by the mass media. Even if an unprecedentedly huge 5% of the population were actually informed on the issues and voted for a candidate who'd actually make things better (or die trying), it wouldn't make enough of a difference in the election to tip the scales.
We don't like to admit it because we think we're "freer" than other countries that run faux democracies like Russia and India, but in reality, we're no freer than they are, and our elections are just as rigged, if not moreso.
Every system of this nature is going to be fundamentally divisive, arbitrary, incomplete, and inaccurate. It's not possible to design a "fine-grained credentialism" system without requiring the full dedication of one person's attention to the activities of another, for every waking hour of the observed person.
Divisive: Where today coworkers have no qualms about sending interesting/educational links to their coworkers, like interesting reads in a technology journal or a tutorial on a new feature of some software (for example), if these things will be counted as "credentials" that improve hireability, job security, and/or compensation, then individuals will be motivated NOT to share anything they learn or read with coworkers, since their coworkers could use this to advance their own credentials, and get a leg up on the person who shared it with them. The people who succeed would thus be recipients of well-intentioned coworkers' educational resources and information, without sharing anything back to their coworkers.
Arbitrary: What counts "for (micro)credit", and what doesn't? Where do you draw the line? If you draw the line at some arbitrary place, there are going to be educational resources that people use, which are extremely relevant to someone's job that actually enhanced their suitability to do their work, but don't count for credit. If you don't draw a line at all, or set the bar so low that just about anything can be accepted, then a lot of people could arguably gain "credit" just by watching CNN and claiming credit for the random sound bytes that sound off information that pertains in some general way to the field the worker is in. Microsoft stock went up? Well, I'll claim a credit for Technology! Because Microsoft is Technology! Oy vey...
Incomplete: There are many experiences that can be very educational for someone, but don't have any authenticity, quantifiability or verifiability to them. For example, if you are on a 3-hour bus ride and strike up a random conversation with a passenger who happens to be in the same field as you, and you learn something entirely new from them that opens your eyes and enables you to do your job better, can you claim credit for that? How would the organization know whether you're lying or not? How many of these little nuggets can you squeeze into their system in a day without being flagged for possible forgery? If there's a limit and you can find it, you better believe the min-maxers will find a way to fill up their daily quota, every day, without fail, on their way up the corporate ladder -- walking on the heads of honest people who probably are more competent than they are.
Inaccurate: This is really the biggest problem with the whole idea of "credentialism" from life experience or gaining "micro-credits" for every little thing you do or learn: you cannot implement a system, short of Orwellian 24/7 total surveillance and constant manual, human monitoring, that *fairly* and *accurately* captures exactly what each person has learned every day, and what kind of merit that learning deserves. Those are actually two separate problems: actually capturing all of the distinct learning events, and coming up with some kind of a system to determine how useful, educational, or meritorious those events were with respect to the individual's suitability to fill a certain role in a job.
If the system is too rigid, you miss out on things like open source projects, reading/responding to mailing lists, the aforementioned "bus conversation", etc. If it's too open, people will gamify their careers through lying or taking the easiest course toward getting an advantage over people who are vying for similar jobs, all so they can make more money.
Now granted, the de facto education system is basically an extreme example of a system like this that is simply too rigid and too coarse-grained to be fair, but making it fine-grained doesn't actually solve any problem: you're just shifting the problems to another set of equally severe problems, without making the hiring an
think Hillary! is on "their team", whatever team that may be.
Their team means someone in Hillary's administration, directly or indirectly, is going to help them advance their career and make more money if they support her.
Good old fashioned graft.
Who's willing to bet that, *after* the security measures are in place up to Congress's "standards" (they have no clue, they're just going on what other people tell them), Senator Wyden would be completely in-line with the mass surveillance camp?
The cellular radio thing is a power struggle between the everyman and the ruling class (corps and big government). Plain and simple. But because it's a very simple software system that has few features exposed to the user (and intentionally so), historically there's been very little room for middle ground when it comes to sharing that power. And since most of their customers/users/subjects/victims are uninformed about technology altogether, the ruling class has been content to allow these baseband processors to continue under complete corporate control.
A more responsible model would not be a "laissez-faire", "you can do absolutely anything and control the frequency and strength of your transmissions via Python" type of deal. That is almost equally bad, because you end up with a tragedy of the commons type situation, exactly as in the unlicensed bands (2.4 and 5 GHz).
What a more responsible model for the baseband would be, however, would at a bare minimum consist of open source, human readable code for the basebands, which is available to anyone who purchases a product with that baseband, for a nominal fee or for free, and licensed with a free/libre license. Then, you would need to have reproducible builds, where you could read out the built binaries from the baseband, and confirm that those exact binaries are the ones you just built from source code, to ensure that the code you're looking at is the code running on the baseband processor.
Then, you'd need some sort of process whereby everyday people, corporate competitors, or anyone at all, could submit their own code for approval by a regulatory agency to run on the baseband processor, again for a nominal, minimal fee that only just represents the level of human effort required to vet the code for any malicious activity that might actively harm the cellular network's reliability or security. If approved, the built binaries would be authorized to run on the baseband processor.
Of course, for a baseband processor to maintain a list of trusted binaries, it would have to connect to a server, get an updated list, and check any flashed object code against that list. This "lower level" executive would be permanently burned into a read-only chip on the BBP die, but its object code would again be readable to users, and its source code would also be available to the public for a nominal fee under a free/libre license.
So, if you wanted to be absolutely sure the government were not spying on you using backdoors in your BBP, you would obtain copies of all the code; build the code using free software tools; verify the built output matches bit for bit the code on the BBP (both in the read-only executive and the read/write firmware); and then -- if you didn't need to change the (benign) built-in code, you could simply continue running it; or if you needed to make (benign) technical enhancements to it, you could make your changes and submit them for approval by the regulatory agency.
Even if manufacturers started shipping free/libre malicious code in the firmware with their devices, it wouldn't be a problem for security-conscious users, because once you get *one single* approved alternative binary through the regulatory process, you'd be squared away.
If they started shipping malicious code in the executive? Well... you just couldn't use a phone containing that baseband, period, end of story. You simply would have to give up using it, just like we do today for all phones. However, with this process being as transparent as I described, there would exist at least a few high-end manufacturers that would have a vested interest in not doing anything malicious, because it would be so obvious that they did once people started inspecting their source code; and you could buy their phones and "free them" even if the firmware had draconian malware in it.
But this process depends on the regulatory agency to not be captive to either the corporate or the citizens' side, because if they are unduly bias to either side, the process doesn't work.
Depends on exactly which type of "Wireless" you have. Not all bands are created equal. The lower the frequency, the more likely it is to not be disturbed by rain. I've been in a building that was connected to a larger network via 20 GHz, and 80 GHz frequencies are not unheard of. The 20 GHz network was easily interrupted by heavy rain (though not light rain).
A standard pipe for *whom*? The few, the lucky, the elite? People living in small countries with a high standard of living and high median income? Here in the US of A, the vast majority of the population can't get access to a 100 Mbps pipe no matter how badly they wanted it, and they can't even afford to move to a place that would offer it.
You are either among the lucky elite in the US, or you're in one of those countries that's actually forward-looking. In backwards countries like the US, we have to actually consider half-measures like wireless as a replacement for fiber: partly because of the incredible distances that have to be covered -- the U.S. is 29.74 times larger than Norway by area, and has zounds of people living in very sparsely populated areas where it's uneconomical to dig up the ground for miles for 2 people -- and partly because our government is ridiculously anti-consumer and pro-corporation, so ISPs only answer to the almighty dollar and nothing else.
Calling 100 Mbps a "standard pipe" in 2015 is as obtuse and short-sighted as saying that having a top-of-the-line automobile was a standard item that every household owned in 1916.
I don't disagree with you. I'm one of those people suffering under Verizon's monopolistic thumb, and my only recourse is to hold on to unlimited LTE for dear life. However, this is the reality of our situation. We are powerless -- completely and utterly powerless -- to effect change in any meaningful way on these issues.
BTW, I was promised by a high-level rep at Verizon that I'd be able to get FiOS in "weeks" in 2007. It's been a few hundred weeks, and I'm still waiting.
It's the classical "iron triangle" (aka constraint triangle): you have three sides to a triangle; performance, power consumption, and cost. Pick any two that you want to be favorable, and the more favorable you make them, the more unfavorable the third will be.
Nvidia and AMD discrete cards for desktops are designed to tug on the performance and cost sides as much as possible, leaving only a passing thought for power savings. Granted, it's reasonably efficient when in standby and not that bad at idle, but it's horrendous under load.
If you want a GPU that's less horrendous under load, without compromising on performance, expect to pay a LOT more for it. And in most cases, because of market forces, you're also going to take at least a slight performance hit.
For instance, the GTX 980M is way more power efficient than the GTX 980 desktop card, because of the design constraints of laptops. It's effectively power efficient by design because of the form factor. But the performance is notably worse, and buying a laptop that has one is way more expensive than buying a desktop with "good enough" components (some kind of recent i7 and 8GB or more memory) and a GTX 980 or even 980 Ti.
We're not going to see chips that maintain the desired performance level (the one constraint that most people are unwilling to compromise on if they're owning a "real" gaming PC) while saving on energy, unless the cost goes so high that only the most elite can afford it.
We see similar problems in the car market, too. The Prius and Prius C are relatively inexpensive (the C is very inexpensive), great fuel efficiency - though not as good as an EV or PHEV - but the performance is terrible. The Tesla Model S achieves amazing performance, range, and efficiency in a pure EV package, but no "commoner" can afford it, only the upper crust. Then there are loads and loads of cars that are not particularly efficient, very cheap, and have serviceable performance.
Who's paying for the more expensive chips that give us the same performance we're already getting but with less energy consumption? The gamer? Why would they do that?
P.S. - Before you accuse me of not thinking of "the greater good", I *drive* a Prius C. I bet the same scientists who wrote this paper drive conventional SUVs.
It all depends on how much bandwidth and how much of a data allowance each customer wants/needs.
If they expect to suck down a dedicated 100 Mbps pipe per household 24/7, then no, wireless anything won't do that, even if you expand outside the scope of WiFi to other tech like 4G.
If, on the other hand, either their desired bandwidth, desired data allowance, or both, are sufficiently low, or the population density is sufficiently sparse, or any combination of these factors that turns out to be "enough", then you could substitute some kind of wireless technology for FTTP, whether it be LTE, WiFi, or something more pedestrian, like HSDPA/HSUPA.
You could also go with high-freq (5 GHz and up) directional microwave from an office or a tower to specific receivers. If you don't want to install a receiver on each house (very expensive), you can shoot a beam to a street-corner box and then run copper or fiber to the premises. Saves you having to dig up the streets from the source to the street corner, at least. Fiber to the node. Kind of a hybrid. Sucks when it rains, though; sufficiently dense rain will diffract and/or block high freq microwave signals and make it useless.
That's great, but unless society can get used to having electricity only when the sun is shining, we require at least one of three things (or a combination of them):
- Ultra long-range power transmission lines with low enough loss as to be economical, so we can transmit power from an illuminated part of the earth to a part currently experiencing night time (or very thick cloud cover, which is pretty close to the same thing). These, of course, will require large investments in infrastructure for power transmission across continents in extremely large quantities, and I'm not sure we have the technology to do so without losing the majority of the energy during transit. What kind of voltage would you need to, say, transmit power from New York to London while keeping at least 66% of it on the receiving end? Not to mention the political and economic complexities of managing this, and the security risks as well. We'd need backup plants (probably of a more traditional variety) ready to fire up at a moment's notice if something were to happen to the supply coming from another country.
- Enormous amounts of energy storage. This is currently a major issue for us. Batteries are expensive, and all the *good* batteries actually DO require a tremendous amount of rare materials like platinum. Supercapacitors have been talked about as a potential replacement for batteries for a very long time, but no one has been able to get all the desirable characteristics into one device (low cost / easy to manufacture, high energy density, minimal loss over a storage time of at least 12 hours, and large number of charge cycles before replacement).
- Other sources of power to cover the times when the local/regional solar output can't cover demand. If those other sources end up not being wind or hydro or geothermal (due to geological or meteorological conditions), it's probably going to be nuclear fission (nasty waste) or fossil fuels (doesn't solve the problem we're trying to solve). Having to run nuclear 50% of the time means you may as well run it 100% of the time, because of the high cost and time investment required to start up a nuclear plant. Fossil fuel plants are more flexible, so we could actually cut our fossil fuel use by 50% using this scheme, but that still leaves the other 50% on the table, which isn't so great and sends the wrong message.
An effective system would probably use a combination of all three of these measures to try and deal with the many logistical problems of solar, but the unfortunate fact is that we're very deficient on the materials science, manufacturing technology, political will, and raw materials that would be required to comprehensively cover up solar's limitations by strategically employing all three of these methods.
Without being able to solve these problems at a national and eventually global level, you will end up with an extremely inefficient system, and the inefficiencies in it will cause a "death by a thousand cuts" type problem, where your resulting solution provides intermittent blackouts to most customers (or alternatively, no blackouts but a large percentage of the time running off of other energy sources); costs way more than their old fossil-based power; and requires a significant amount of traditional power plants to still run to cover up for the worst of its problems.
Oh, and you also seem to have based your math on the assumption that per capita power demands won't increase. Unfortunately, in order to comprehensively eliminate fossil fuels, we'd need to convert the vehicle fleet to EV (or at least plugin hybrid), which means per capita electricity demands are going to skyrocket.
At the very least, we're going to need even more nuclear power plants to provide a strong base load in the future. Solar might enable us to shut down numerous coal power plants at least some of the time, but you'd have to over-engineer your effort to satisfy the world's energy demands by a factor of eight or ten in order to compensate for: increasing demand per ca
Vala translates syntax very similar to C# into idiomatic C using GLib for object-based programming (inheritance, encapsulation, events, etc. are all supported). Hundreds of lines of Vala spits out thousands of lines of boilerplate C. You get native code that's nice and fast (reference counting is faster than GC, and you have no intermediary language like .NET/Java since it compiles to C which compiles to native). A couple of programs on popular Linux distros use Vala.
It's a great language for plugin development, too. Unlike languages such as Python, bindings to C/GLib libraries do not require any compiled native code or runtime integration, since Vala has no special runtime outside of GLib.
And, if for some reason Vala's development stalls and you find yourself unable to compile changes made in your Vala code, you can always take your completed project's generated C code and switch over to that being your main source code. It's less maintainable due to the increased amount of boilerplate stuff, but there are plenty of large projects that contain manually hacked idiomatic C/GLib code that's functionally equivalent to what Vala's compiler generates anyway, for all kinds of patterns, like inheritance, signals, properties, etc.
Worst case, it saves you some time instead of having to write all that boilerplate code by hand. Best case, it saves you *A LOT* of time, by being able to write code that reads like C#.NET code, but without the runtime bindings (which constitute both a deployment headache and a source of inefficiency).
It's there, but we have to put an absurd amount of relatively rare resources into photovoltaic cells to make *use* of that energy. Otherwise, it performs a very useful function in that it gives us this thing called heat, so we don't all freeze to death and die (and so we can have an ecosystem of animals and plants that we don't have to keep in climate-controlled environments that also won't freeze and die).
No, I'm sorry, but the primary purpose of the sun is to give us energy in the form of light for plants and heat for everything else (including plants). With current technology we can't make use of the sun well enough to meet more than a fraction of our energy demands.
Now, if we had a steadily shrinking worldwide population, we might be able to do it, since we'd have more and more surplus energy every year without even doing anything -- which means if we continue to increase production of renewables like solar and wind year over year, and population decreases, it's mathematically certain that at a point not too far in the future the two will intersect and we can shut down the last coal/diesel/natural gas/nuclear plants.
But unless you can find a way to cause the population to shrink worldwide year over year in a controlled, preferably non-violent manner, I don't see a way that renewables will ever become dominant. It's not economically feasible. We can't divert enough resources to making solar panels and wind farms to meet energy demands, even if we cut worldwide energy demands per capita by 25% immediately and cut the energy use of the most energy-intensive top 5% by 75%. Even with such unrealistic and aggressive cuts in per capita consumption, an exponentially increasing population will ultimately make the exercise pointless.
As a Democrat who's more liberal than nearly all the running Democratic candidates, I could see myself being content to let the country be run by most of the Republican presidential candidates or elects from about Eisenhower up until and not including Dubya. Eisenhower is my favorite Republican of all time; Nixon did a few things right and many things wrong; we could've done a lot worse than George H. W. Bush; Reagan was okay because most of his crazier ideas didn't get implemented, and the ones that did were beneficial or not very harmful; and Dubya was disastrous.
I wouldn't have voted for them, but they wielded the responsibility of the Presidency pretty well overall, and occasionally supported more liberal initiatives like government-funded space exploration, social programs, and civil liberties. In fact, defending civil liberties was the marching order for the Republican party for a long time.
I also believe that the way our President would swing between being Democrat and Republican every couple of years was a big contributor to making the country a better place overall. Each party and each President would have something on their agenda and would address a severe problem, which meant that as long as we kept switching parties, we'd be okay - and each party, each President, would bring their own, net-beneficial changes to the table. We'd "be okay" as long as this kept going.
The problem today is that there is an extremely small and nitpicky difference in policy between the most popular (i.e. most likely to be elected) candidates on both sides. Since popularity is more or less a positive feedback loop, this all but guarantees that, even this early in the election season, we have a good sense of either Hillary or Trump being our next POTUS. And their views are close enough that, in the past, you could've roped them together into one party.
Now, in BOTH parties, anyone in favor of civil liberties and against big government and mass surveillance is marginalized into the fringes and will almost certainly not get past the primaries. We live in a fear society. Promoting fear and "big government will protect you" gets you votes. A warmongering foreign policy is popular. The military-industrial complex is popular because of all the useless bureaucratic desk jobs it opens up. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave.
Better yet, they can collude with each other to make this an "industry standard" with some bullshit justification for why they need it; then, with 100% of the mass-producing printer/scanner manufacturers doing it, customers will have no recourse.
The second-best thing after a monopoly is an oligopoly, and in an industry that's shrinking because it's being replaced by something faster and cheaper (namely, using computers and the Internet instead of paper), they'll do anything possible to cut costs or raise revenue. They do it in growing industries that have a bright future ahead, too, but the losers are even more strongly motivated to do it in a last-ditch attempt to stay open for longer.
This is what happens when you give personhood to faceless entities that have no sense of morality and their only loyalty is to the almighty dollar, and then let those entities run society.
And which brand would that be, exactly?
Don't forget, politicians will say anything to get someone to vote for them, and then do an about-face later and happily screw them over once they are in office.
Vote for Trump on this issue, and once he's President, he'll let the Indians come in and take over the country by issuing unlimited work visas.
With all due to respect to Harlan Stenn, and working under the assumption that he will choose to continue to maintain NTP for the good of everyone who uses it, the biggest donation that could possibly be given to the NTP project would be to increase its bus factor. Basically, we need at least another small handful of people -- ideally distributed throughout the world -- who have the same level of knowledge and expertise as Harlan in the area of network time, and can thus take his place if, for any reason whatsoever Harlan can't continue to work on the NTP project.
Getting Harlan to continue working on it is a short-term solution, but the sustainable future is to ensure that we have maintainers who can take his place -- ideally, paid ones.
So what we need is for a company like Red Hat or IBM or Microsoft or Canonical to bankroll a developer who has at least strong fundamentals that would enable them to quickly pick up advanced knowledge of network time, and then spend most of their working hours acquiring more knowledge about it so that it can be maintained going forward. This would probably involve a lot of ML posts with Harlan (or reading his previous ones), as well as any other developers/maintainers working on pieces of the code.
If Harlan is absolutely instrumental to the project as it stands now, the solution is to have a backup or two, who ideally are being paid a living wage to ensure the continuity of knowledge and expertise if Harlan willingly or unwillingly stopped contributing.
Projects with a bus factor of 1 that are widely relied upon need to be identified and highlighted every now and again -- not to make a case to shower the developer in money, but to get other developers to work in the same space and increase the bus factor to at least 3.